Tag: finance

Authored by Jack McKerrigan via ProgressivesForImmigrationReform.org,

Last month, Foreign Policy  ran an article, “Open Borders Are a Trillion-Dollar Idea,” which advocated for Open Borders. So for all those who say, “Oh, no one supports Open Borders,” here it is in writing! Every point made by author Bryan Caplan, an economics professor, is refutable, and, while the piece is long, we believe it’s important “for the record” to counter all of his points.

As I first read Bryan Caplan’s “Open Borders Are a Trillion-Dollar Idea” in Foreign Policy, besides disbelief, my thoughts were that this person must not get out much or must not read much. A quote from writer Upton Sinclair came to mind as well: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

What is Just?

“Open borders are not only just but the most promising shortcut to global prosperity,” writes Caplan. This raises the question of who determines what “just” is? Just is not a defined term that someone can easily review (as Caplan seems to imply) and determine whether a particular policy is just or unjust. In fact, each individual probably has a different definition of what just is.

But in the United States, I believe the vast majority of citizens see Open Borders as a totally unjust policy. It is unjust because it is generally accepted that the population of a country has entered into a social contract with the leaders and government of a country. Under this contract, the population will follow the rule of law, and the government will pass and enforce policies that have beneficial impact upon the population of the country. There is no social contract between the leaders and government of one country and people who live in another country.

As an example from across the pond, the new Italian government recently released figures showing that the state will allocate €50 million next year, €200 million in 2021 and €300 million in 2022 to the Disability and Self-Reliance Fund of Italy. Some 2 million disabled in Italy rely on these state benefits, which work out to just 54 cents per day in welfare – insufficient for even a subsistence diet. In contrast, Italy is providing migrants €20 euros a day. Most Italians are likely to see this policy as unjust. Similar per capita spending differentials exist in funds furnished to needy citizens and migrants in the United States. That is also unjust!

What Missed Opportunity?

Caplan writes:

“To see the massive missed opportunity of which I speak, consider the migration of a low-skilled Haitian from Port-au-Prince to Miami. In Haiti, he would earn about $1,000 per year. In Miami, he could easily earn $25,000 per year. How is such upward mobility possible? Simply put: Human beings are much more productive in Florida than in Haiti – thanks to better government policies, better management, better technology, and much more.”

He continues:

“The central function of existing immigration laws is to prevent this wealth creation from happening – to trap human talent in low-productivity countries. Out of all the destructive economic policies known to man, nothing on Earth is worse. I’m not joking. Standard estimates say open borders would ultimately double humanity’s wealth production. How is this possible? Because immigration sharply increases workers’ productivity – and the world contains many hundreds of millions of would-be immigrants. Multiply a massive gain per person by a massive number of people and you end up with what the economist Michael Clemens calls ‘trillion-dollar bills on the sidewalk.’”

The real problem with this statement is that if you move a person from Port-au-Prince to Miami, you may be more likely to get a street person than you are to get a person earning $25,000. One of the policy suggestions in the U.S. and the world that is being floated by some U.S. presidential candidates and others is Universal Basic Income. This idea has arisen with technology leaving large groups unemployed (usually the most undereducated and unskilled of the population), among other reasons. If it is so easy for people to become and stay productive members of the U.S. workforce, then why would such a policy be proposed? Would it not be more likely that our Haitian immigrant would just accept this handout?

Another element missing from this argument is the need for capital both at the individual level and at the work level. An individual coming to this country requires capital to set up a residence, obtain transportation, put food on the table and pay for health care until he can get a job and start, if ever, producing. Those the writer would welcome to the U.S. would come to this country with barely the shirts on their backs.

Just as the individual needs capital, capital is required to put a person to work. This is true of even the most basic position – a ditch digger requires a shovel. But the U.S. does not generate many ditch digger positions. Instead, capital is required to establish a place for an employee to work, equipment for the person to use (be it a personal computer, a cash register, a harvester or a forklift) and training. This could run into tens of thousands of dollars per worker. During the last 10 years, there has been very little capital spending to expand capacity in the U.S. Accordingly, Caplan’s basic assertion is ridiculous. Any new immigrant who just crossed the border would require tens of thousands of dollars to get started. Without this, s/he will just become another street person wandering the streets of America.

Another issue overlooked by the author is that an individual earning $25,000 in Miami would not even be living at subsistence level. According to the Miami New Times, to simply pay for necessities, an average Miamian should make $38,529 a year; to live comfortably, a resident would need to make $77,057 a year. Thus, in actuality, Caplan either is advocating to dramatically increase the level of homelessness or the welfare rolls in this country.

We can look to Sweden as a good example of how migration has increased unemployment. Even though Sweden has thrown substantial monetary support to migrants, unemployment is among the highest in the European Union. In some towns, upwards of 80 percent of migrants taken in have remained on welfare. Instead of large positive economic impacts, Sweden has encountered significant financial costs and negative impacts creating financial crises in some municipalities.

Unification Compared to Migration – There is a Significant Difference

In a rather confusing manner, Caplan attempts to equate current migration to the unification of Germany.

“Many European countries – most notably West Germany during the Cold War – have swiftly absorbed much larger inflows in the past.”

German unification was not a mass migration, but instead was the combining of two separate countries which 45 years earlier had been a single country.

Unification is not equivalent to the migration issue. In addition, understand that people from Eastern Germany did not show up without assets. They brought a whole country with them, which included farmland, schools, universities, homes, factories, roads and infrastructure. Certainly investments needed to be made to upgrade these assets, but it was not as though East Germans showed up with only the clothes on their backs.

Further, the people of East and West Germany shared the same language, the same culture and a few thousand years of history. Many people in West Germany were related to people in East Germany, and the people of East Germany were highly educated.

All that said, the unification was extremely difficult and expensive. And today a large rift is growing in Germany, with the Grand Coalition run by Angela Merkel and the two centralist parties bifurcating into the left led by Die Linke, the remnant of the East German Communist Party, and the right led by AfD, the new face of anti-immigration and fiscally responsible Germans.

Crime

Caplan next downplays the amount of crime due to migrants, stating:

“Native-born citizens also frequently worry that immigrants, supposedly lacking Western culture’s deep respect for law and order, will be criminally inclined. At least in the United States, however, this is the reverse of the truth. The incarceration rate of the foreign-born is about a third less than that of the native-born.”

This is an untrue statement. For example, in Arizona, according to a study by the Federation for American Immigration Reform, an illegal alien is four times more likely to be incarcerated for a crime than a legal resident or a citizen. In New Jersey, illegal immigrants are incarcerated five times more often than legal residents and citizens, and rates of incarceration of illegal aliens on the West Coast are triple that of legal residents and citizens.

According to a 2004 article in City Journal, in Los Angeles (a city where illegal aliens represent approximately 23 percent of the population), illegal aliens accounted for 95 percent of all outstanding warrants for homicide (which totaled 1,200 to 1,500). Up to two-thirds of all fugitive felony warrants (17,000) were for illegal aliens. Can the situation be better now in 2019, in what is now officially a sanctuary city in a sanctuary state?

Again, looking abroad, in Sweden, the last government report that collected statistics on immigration and crime was a 2005 study by the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention (Brå). It found that people of foreign background were 2.5 times more likely to be suspected of crimes than people with a Swedish background; immigrants were four times more likely to be suspected of lethal violence and robbery, five times more likely to be investigated for sex crimes, and three times more likely to be investigated for violent assault. The report was based on statistics for those “suspected” of offenses. The Brå said that there was “little difference” in the statistics for those suspected of crimes and those actually convicted.

Further:

“According to Dagens Nyheter in 2017, at least 90 percent of all murders and attempted murders through gun violence in Sweden were performed by either immigrants or those with at least one immigrant parent and according to Expressen, 94.5 percent of all members of career criminal gangs in Stockholm, Sweden, are either immigrants or have at least one immigrant parent. The share of foreigners admitted to the Swedish Prison and Probation Service increased from 26 percent in 2003 to 33 percent in 2013 according to its statistics. In its 2017 report on organized crime in Sweden, police stated that in most areas of Sweden with the highest crime rates (sv: särskilt utsatta områden) population share of immigrants is around 50 to 60 percent. In recent years some of these areas have experienced riots such as 2008 Malmö mosque riots, 2010 Rinkeby riots, 2016 riots in Sweden and 2017 Rinkeby riots. Immigrants have also been associated with a series of highly publicized crimes, including the 2015 Ikea stabbing attack, 2016 Sweden asylum centre stabbing and the 2017 Stockholm attack.”

Politics

Caplan then goes on to discuss how migrants impact the politics of a country:

“Native-born citizens of developed countries have a long track record of voting for the policies that made their industries thrive and their countries rich. Who knows how vast numbers of new immigrants would vote? Indeed, shouldn’t we expect people from dysfunctional polities to bring dysfunctional politics with them?

“These are fine questions, but the answers are not alarming. At least in the U.S., the main political division between the native- and foreign-born is engagement. Even immigrants legally able to vote are markedly less likely than native-born citizens to exercise this right. In the 2012 U.S. presidential election, for example, 72 percent of eligible native-born citizens voted versus just 48 percent of eligible immigrants. Wherever they politically stand, then, immigrants’ opinions are relatively inert.”

This is really a nonargument. What has been true in the past about the percentage of eligible immigrants voting is not necessarily going to be true in the future. In addition, this is a case of lies, damn lies and statistics. If the above referenced 48 percent of eligible immigrants vote mostly one way, which they probably do, then it can tip the scale significantly away from the long-term voting track record of native-born citizens of developed countries which made their industries thrive and their countries rich.

Do No Harm

Caplan wraps up his article by referencing his book:

“In Open Borders, I have the space to address many more concerns about immigration in more detail. What I can’t do, I confess, is address the unmeasured and the unmeasurable. In real life, however, everyone routinely copes with ambiguous dangers – ‘unknown unknowns.’ How do we cope?”

It is difficult to understand exactly what Caplan’s point is here. Is he trying to say, “Well, we really do not know what the impact would be from Open Borders, but, what the hell, let’s do it and see what happens!”

If that is what he is saying, that is a reckless approach considering it could impact the lives of more than 300 million people in the U.S. alone. This is an issue that should be studied to death before any decisions are taken. The ramifications of failure are just too catastrophic to consider.

In the petri dish of life there are several real world examples of failure of these ideas. In Sweden, the ex-CEO of a major company recently said the country is on the edge of civil war over its immigration policy. Neighboring Norway has put its military on the Swedish border to prevent incursion from immigrants located in Sweden. Other countries experiencing unrest over immigration issues are Germany, Italy and the Netherlands. One country which is not having problems is Switzerland which is taking a measured approach to immigration.

Looking back in time, Argentina provides lessons to the negative impact of mass immigration. Argentina is a country gifted with a large amount of natural resources. Prior to WWI, Argentina was looked upon as a superior place to emigrate to over the U.S., with Buenos Aires earning the moniker of the Paris of South America. During the 1870s and up until WW1, Argentina experienced an economic boom.

“The scarcity of labor and abundance of land induced a high marginal product of labor,” per Wikipedia.  European immigrants  (chiefly Italians, Spaniards, French and Germans), tempted by the high wages, arrived in droves. The government subsidized European immigration for a short time in the late 1880s, but immigrants arrived in massive numbers even with no subsidy.”

In general these immigrants were low skilled and poorly educated. The population grew from 1.9 million in 1870 to 15.9 million in 1947. During the same period, Argentina allowed in 6.6 million immigrants, with most of these people settling in the cities, even though the country had an economy driven largely by agriculture. A side effect of the high immigration levels was the importing of ideas such as labor unionism, anarchism and other forms of popular organization.

The Great Depression caused the economy to turn down, and within a few years there was high unemployment which resulted in labor unrest. This led to political instability, and a military junta began running the country in 1943.

In 1946, Juan Perón came to power on the backs of the descamisados, or “shirtless ones.” Perón basically ran on a socialist program leaning towards corporatism (similar to Mussolini fascism) with several five-year programs implemented (similar to communist USSR).

Per Wikipedia, “Beginning in 1947, Perón took a leftward shift after breaking up with the ‘Catholic nationalism’ movement, which led to gradual state control of the economy, reflected in the increase in state-owned property, interventionism (including control of rents and prices) and higher levels of public inversion, mainly financed by the inflationary tax. The expansive macroeconomic policy, which aimed at the redistribution of wealth and the increase of spending to finance populist policies, led to inflation.”

It should be recognized that the translated name of the Peronist party, or Justicialist Party, is the Social Justice Party. It has governed Argentina most of the time since Perón  assumed power in 1947. The backbone of the Social Justice Party was the millions of poor and uneducated immigrants who settled largely in Argentina’s cities from the mid-1800s through 1943.

Open Borders is not the only reason that Argentina has experienced continuous financial crises since the 1940. However, it was a major contributor and indirectly contributed to bringing in the ideas of socialism and corporatism to Argentina which severely damaged Argentina’s economy. To date, Argentina has defaulted on its debt eight times, more than any other country. The IMF is preparing for a ninth default in the near future since the Peronists returned to power late in 2019. Argentina has been an economic basket case for the last 70 years. In a discussion with an executive living in Argentina a few years ago I mentioned that I was worried that the United States might go the way of Argentina. His response was, “May God have mercy on you!”

Authored by Eric Zuesse via The Saker blog,

Readers at the international-news site South Front tend to be technologically far more knowledgeable about the internet than most people (including myself) are, and so their responses to a news-report that I did on December 17th, titled “Former NSA Tech Chief Says Mueller Report Was Based on CIA-Fabricated ‘Evidence’”, explaining some technological details which enable a deeper understanding of how the CIA had perpetrated the ‘Russiagate’ hoax that Robert Mueller in his report as the U.S. Special Counsel had asserted to be a “Russiagate” fact (i.e., Mueller’s allegations that the Russian Government had hacked computers of the Democratic National Committee). Especially informative there was this reader-comment, which comes from one of the world’s leading experts on cyber technology, Luke Herbert-Hansen:

Luke Herbert-Hansen  Peter Jennings

Well FAT may not [be] a common OS file system anymore, but it is still widely used on various removable media such as a USB sticks.

As everyone knows who has been closely following the most-reliable evidence regarding the question of how DNC emails had been copied and supplied to Wikileaks, there has been much credible, soundly-sourced, speculation that the DNC employee Seth Rich had physically copied the data from a computer there onto a thumb drive (or “USB stick”), which then was picked up in the U.S. by a Wikileaks agent, who physically delivered it to Julian Assange at London’s Ecuadorean Embassy.

The great independent investigative journalist (virtually barred since 2007 from being published in the U.S. anymore), Seymour Hersh, personally investigated the records of the murder of Seth Rich, both at the Washington DC police and at the FBI, and this is from the transcript I had made of his statement in a Web-posted phone-call [my boldfaces for emphasis]:

(2:50-) At some time in late spring, which we’re talking about in June 21st, I don’t know, just late spring early summer, he makes contact with Wikileaks, that’s in his computer, and he makes contact. Now, I have to be careful because I met Julian [Assange] in Europe ten twelve years [ago], I stay the fuck away from people like that. He has invited me and when I am in London, I always get a message, ‘come see me at the Ecuadorean’ [Embassy], and I am fucking not going there. I have enough trouble without getting photographed. He’s under total surveillance by everybody.

They found, what he had done, he [Seth Rich] had submitted a series of documents, emails from DNC — and, by the way, all this shit about the DNC, you know, was it a ‘hack’ or wasn’t it a ‘hack’ — whatever happened, it was the Democrats themselves wrote this shit, you know what I mean? All I know is that, he offered a sample, he sends a sample, you know, I am sure dozens of emails, and said ‘I want money’. Later Wikileaks did get the password [SETH RICH DID SELL WIKILEAKS ACCESS INTO HIS COMPUTER.] He had a drop-box, a [password-]protected drop-box, which isn’t hard to do. I mean you don’t have to be a whiz at IT [information technology], he was not a dumb kid. They got access to the drop-box. This is all from the FBI report. He also let people know with whom he was dealing, I don’t know how he dealt, I’ll tell you all about Wikileaks in a second, with Wikileaks the mechanism, but according to the FBI report, he shared his box with a couple of friends, so ‘If anything happens to me, it’s not going to solve your problem’, okay? I don’t know what that means. But, anyway, Wikileaks got access. And, before he was killed, I can tell you right now, [Obama’s CIA Director John] Brennan’s an asshole. I’ve known all these people for years, Clapper is sort of a better guy but no rocket-scientist, the NSA guys are fuckin’ morons, and the trouble with all those guys is, the only way they’ll get hired by SAIC, is if they’ll deliver some [government] contracts, it’s the only reason they stayed in. With Trump, they’re gone, they’re going to live on their pension, they’re not going to make it [to great wealth]. I’ve gotta to tell you, guys in that job, they don’t want to live on their pension. They want to be on [corporate] boards like their [mumble] thousand bucks [cut]. 

I have somebody on the inside, you know I’ve been around a long time, somebody who will go and read a file for me, who, this person is unbelievably accurate and careful, he’s a very high-level guy, he’ll do a favor, you’re just going to have to trust me, I have what they call in my business, long-form journalism, I have a narrative, of how that whole fucking thing began.

(5:50-) It’s a Brennan operation. It was an American disinformation, and the fucking President, at one point when they even started telling the press — they were back[ground]-briefing the press, the head of the NSA was going and telling the press, the fucking cocksucker Rogers, telling the press that we [they] even know who in the Russian military intelligence service leaked it. All bullshit.

In other words, besides the information from Bill Binney, who was an NSA whistleblower who took early retirement so he wouldn’t have to continue doing what people such as John Brennan demanded, Seymour Hersh there provided yet additional confirmation to this account from the also-early-retired whistleblowing UK Ambassador Craig Murray — a close friend of Assange — who claimed that he had “met” the person in DC who supplied the thumb drive (USB stick), which then was delivered (he didn’t say how) to Assange:

Here is from my news-report on 6 January 2017 which confirms and documents that:

Murray received the Hillary-campaign information on September 24th. Little over a week later, on October 7th, Wikileaks published documents from the computer of Hillary’s Campaign Chairman John Podesta, and politico announced it headlining “The most revealing Clinton campaign emails in WikiLeaks release”. That same day, Politico also bannered “Podesta: ‘I’m not happy about being hacked by the Russians’,” and the legend that ‘Russia hacked the Clinton campaign’ started immediately to compete in the day’s ‘news’ stories, and diminish focus on, the contents of that information which had been ‘hacked’.

However, the information from the DNC itself had been published much earlier, on July 22nd, and so this could not have come from the September 24th leak. Whether it came from the same person, or through the same courier (i.e., Murray), isn’t yet known. [But it is now, from what Binney has just said, and the answer is “yes.”] The Obama Administration has made no distinctions between those two data-dumps, but charges that all of the leaks from the Obama-Clinton-DNC conspiracy — both the anti-Sanders campaign during the primaries, and the anti-Trump campaign during the general-election contest — came from ‘Russian hacking’. The reason why the emphasis is upon the anti-Trump portion is that the conspirators now are trying to smear Trump, not Sanders, and so to make this a national issue, instead of only an internal Democratic-Party issue. They are trying to de-legitimize Trump’s Presidency — and, at the same time, to advance Obama’s aim for the U.S. ultimately to conquer Russia. The mutual hostility between Obama and Trump is intense, but Obama’s hatred of Russia gives had Russia in his gunsights well before he, as a cunning politician, made political hay out of Mitt Romney’s statement that “Russia, this is, without question America’s number one geopolitical foe.”added impetus to his post-Presidential campaign here. This Nobel Peace Prize winner

Only a fool trusts the U.S. government (and the U.S. ‘news’media) after ‘Saddam’s WMD’ (which despite all the lies to the contrary, didn’t exist). Like Craig Murray said, “I used to be the head of the FCO unit that monitored Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, and I know for certain, I can tell you, they knew there weren’t any.”

In my records, the politically progressive Craig Murray was the first individual to post to the Web a clear case that Russiagate was a U.S. Deep-State hoax: He headlined, on 31 December 2016, “Exit Obama in a Cloud of Disillusion, Delusion and Deceit”, and discussed the case which now is commonly called “Russiagate.” In fact, I had never found any evidence that anything he has said was false, and — especially considering the sheer number of his postings at his blog — this was a remarkable record of truthfulness (100%), which is attained by very few journalists, none of whom are publishable in the United States. These reporters are too honest, and too careful about the quality of the documentation they cite, to be publishable in the United States. They refuse to intentionally deceive their readers; and, to the exact contrary, they take great care never to deceive them. (However, I unfortunately did finally see a posting from him that included some false allegations.)

Incidentally, my December 15th news-report, “Two Huge Suppressed News-Reports in a 3-Day Period Display Corrupt U.S.-&-Allied Mainstream Press”, shows how pervasive and deeply systemic this outright lying by the U.S.-and-allied press is.

As to whom the individuals are who are America’s Deep State, that’s discussed here. In other words: the operatives (such as mainstream American journalists) are only agents for those individuals — they are not the Deep State itself. They can easily be replaced, but the Deep State is a far more deep-seated infection, in the American body-politic, and maybe cannot be removed, at all, without replacing the entire system. More-drastic measures than “reform” would therefore be needed, in order to eradicate the Deep State and restore whatever degree of democracy the United States formerly did have. (It’s now a dictatorship. In fact, that’s even been scientifically proven.) My research indicates that the Deep State took control of America starting on 26 July 1945.

*  *  *

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

Having blasted the liberal elites earlier in the week for “not giving a f**k” about the average joe in America:

“Look, this is what drives me nuts about the left. All immigration is to flood the zone with cheap labour, and the reason is because the elites don’t give a fuck about African Americans and the Hispanic working class. They don’t care about the white working class either. You’re just a commodity”.

Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon pulled no punches in an interview with Fox Business Network’s Trish Regan saying that the Senate impeachment trial of President Donald Trump will be the “trial of the century.”

“I think this trial is going to be the trial of the century, and the mainstream media is going to be all over it,” Bannon said.

“That’s why I think it’s so important not just for his legacy, but for his presidency and his second term. He’s got to engage in this. He’s got to take them on. He’s got to have the whistleblower; we have to have the Bidens in front of the nation and the world. They’re going to have to stand and deliver under oath. And we’re going to get to the bottom of this. And I think that’s going to lead to an exoneration, not just an acquittal, but an exoneration of President Trump.”

Bannon said Republicans ought to “turn the tables” on Democrats and demand a full trial that will force it to go into the Democratic presidential primary.

“I think you ought to demand a full trial, where to get witnesses — and, hey, if it takes too long, it’s the Democrats to force this constitutional crisis over the Christmas holidays. If this trial goes on for a month or two into the Democratic primary, that’s a tough break for them. They’re the ones that forced this. One of the reasons they forced it is their field is so weak going in there. Nobody cares. Like I said, witness protection program. Nobody cares about their debate. They’re the ones that force this.“

Bannon went on to reiterate his belief that Hillary Clinton will “inevitably” be the Democratic Presidential nominee… but will lose… again:

“Hillary Clinton comes in at the moment that she feels that she can step in to save the Democratic Party and try to convince people that a rematch with President Trump is the best way that they have to try to defeat President Trump,” Bannon said.

“They won’t beat him. Right now, there’s nobody, including Hillary Clinton out there, that can beat Donald Trump. But they’re going to get desperate here because look at tonight. Nobody cares about this debate, this debate’s in Los Angeles.”

Finally, the former strategist raged against “the Washington Consensus”:

“…this is the managed decline of the United States. This is about the Washington consensus. The Washington Post published the Afghanistan papers last week. Two trillion dollars. 2,400 dead. Tens of thousands wounded. What’s that? That’s the inter-agency consensus in 18 years that betrayed our country. That’s what betrayed our countries. With Brennan, that’s what betrayed our country, not Donald Trump. Donald Trump has stood up. The reasons people cheer for him, it’s their sons and daughters that have died in Afghanistan. It’s their lives, their kids’ lives being thrown away, and their tax dollars.“

And that, Bannon exclaimed, is why we need a trial in the Senate to expose the swamp.

“And they understand that Donald Trump is fighting that. That’s why we need a trial, a real trial and Senate with witnesses. So, before the world, Donald Trump could get his day in court.“

Full Transcript:

Trish Regan: I do believe the president heard that she wants to run again from this show, from none other than Mr. Stephen Bannon here on set with me, who talked about Hillary Clinton getting back in potentially again. And also, you called Bloomberg as well. So, Bloomberg’s in, is Hillary going to join?

Steve Bannon: I think it’s inevitable. They had a poll out today that showed Biden at like 28, Bernie 21, Elizabeth Warren in the high teens. It looks like something that’s going to get to a — particularly with Super Tuesday, when Biden drops the nuclear weapon of his money on these in these big states. It’s going to lead to a brokered convention. Hillary Clinton, I think, is going to come in when it’s evident that none of the radical left of the Democratic Party can beat the President Trump —

[cross talk]

Steve Bannon: — A brokered convention. I think Hillary Clinton comes in at the moment that she feels that she can step in to save the Democratic Party and try to convince people that a rematch with President Trump is the best way that they have to try to defeat President Trump. They won’t beat him. Right now, there’s nobody, including Hillary Clinton out there, that can beat Donald Trump. But they’re going to get desperate here because look at tonight. Nobody cares about this debate, this debate’s in Los Angeles.

Trish Regan: They should be watching you.

Steve Bannon: Well, I’m talking about on MSNBC and CNN and their networks. They’re not they’re not running around saying, this thing is great. They understand these people, not just are boring, it’s not just about their star quality, it’s what they’re talking about is so off the mainstream, it’s not connecting with people. And they’re going to start getting desperate. Remember, their number one thing is that Donald Trump is an existential threat to the Democratic Party, to the established order and to the mainstream media, and they will do anything to take him down and destroy him. In particular, you saw last night what he’s talking about to the people; hey, they’re trying to come after you, they’re trying to come after me to get to you. We are in this together. And he saw people respond to that. That response of that audience last night for two hours, that stood out for hours in, what, 15- or 17-degree cold is quite remarkable.

Trish Regan: What I find remarkable and, you know, we can say this is a couple Irishmen — or Irishman and an Irishwoman. You think about traditional Democrats, right? And I think about my family and how my dad’s family was, historically, big Irish Catholic family and you were a Democrat like you’re Catholic. Like, it was part of your religion, right? And, you know, my — and if you were lucky enough, you got a job in the union. And so, there was a feeling that you always voted blue, and that has changed.

Steve Bannon: Last night you saw that. He’s connected with working class — listen to this. It’s the reason he won Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Iowa. States they never thought we’d win again. And altogether because he went and he got, you know, Democrats, blue collar Democrats to vote for it and they believe in it. And they’re seeing — here’s the thing they’re seeing, the manifestation of his actions are making their lives better. You know, the Zogby poll today said that 53 percent of Democrats think that their party is spending too much time on impeachment instead of getting things done legislatively. It is so —

Trish Regan: And they got that right. And it’s not just, you know, we talk about Irish Americans. I mean, I look at the African American population right now and you look at some of the poll numbers there. And he’s doing extremely well in a way that you wouldn’t really think he would with that particular population, given the media.

Steve Bannon: Well that’s what the immigration policy — remember everything was to make sure that wasn’t more labor pressure on African Americans and Hispanics. That’s why you seen the approval rate — I think it’s 34 percent of African Americans approve now by Pew, and 36 percent of Hispanics. Because you’re seeing wages starting to rise. People — unemployment’s at historic lows, wages starting to rise. That’s why I think it’s so important, since they’ve smeared him in this process. He didn’t get to call any witnesses in this trial. And I think this trial will be — it’s going to be the trial of the century, and the mainstream media is going to be all over it. That’s why I think it’s so important not just for his legacy, but for his presidency and his second term. He’s got to engage in this. He’s got to take them on. He’s got to have the whistleblower; we have to have the Bidens in front of the nation and the world. They’re going to have to stand and deliver under oath. And we’re going to get to the bottom of this. And I think that’s going to lead to an exoneration, not just an acquittal, but an exoneration of President Trump.

Trish Regan: The trial of the century. Wow. You know, a lot of people are worried, well, you get John Bolton. What is he going to do? What is John Bolton going to say? And what is this one going to say? What is that one going to say? What do you say to those concerns?

Steve Bannon: The president — the call was perfect. He looked at everything that led up to it. This is why the American people heard him. And you just saw the bureaucrats that were in it that were testified. This is because that is the managed decline of the United States. This is about the Washington consensus. The Washington Post published the Afghanistan papers last week. Two trillion dollars. 2,400 dead. Tens of thousands wounded. What’s that? That’s the inter-agency consensus in 18 years that betrayed our country. That’s what betrayed our countries. With Brennan, that’s what betrayed our country, not Donald Trump. Donald Trump has stood up. The reasons people cheer for him, it’s their sons and daughters that have died in Afghanistan. It’s their lives, their kids’ lives being thrown away, and their tax dollars. And they understand that Donald Trump is fighting that. That’s why we need a trial, a real trial and Senate with witnesses. So, before the world, Donald Trump could get his day in court.

Trish Regan: And you call them all. Disruption, right? It is the decade of disruption, and you’re one of the main disruptors there, according to The Wall Street Journal. In fact, one of the most powerful people here in Washington, the power players. Can we see that? So, you’re in some pretty significant company, there Mr. Bannon.

Steve Bannon: Well, I got the disrupt look on President Trump. As President Trump says, I’m his top student and that’s where the top student got for being the top student. I got my slot.

Trish Regan: Well, listen, we appreciate you being here tonight for that.

Steve Bannon: Thank you for having me, Trish.

Trish Regan: Very interesting insight, as always, Steve Bannon. I do want to point out to everyone they can listen to you every day. You can tune into a syndicated radio show and podcast on iTunes, War Room: Impeachment. Well, that’s aptly named. It airs seven days a week. Forgive me, I was thinking weekdays. Seven days a week, you’re on the case.

Steve Bannon: Got to do it. Thank you so much for having me.

Authored by Manuel Garcia Aguilar via TheMindUnleashed.com,

By September of 2013, there were already more than 500,000 pieces of debris, or “space junk” orbiting Earth and that number is still increasing.

The bits of junk travel at speeds up to 17,500 mph—fast enough for a relatively small piece of orbital debris to damage a satellite or a spacecraft. This is also potential danger to space vehicles, but especially to the International Space Station, space shuttles, and other spacecraft with humans aboard.

Pixabay.

“The greatest risk to space missions comes from non-trackable debris,” said Nicholas Johnson, NASA chief scientist for orbital debris.

As a result of this risk, the European Space Agency signed a debris-removal contract with Swiss startup ClearSpace tasking the company with de-orbiting a substantial piece of a Vega rocket left in orbit in 2013.

This mission, planned for launch in 2025, will be the first of its kind planned with the sole purpose of cleaning rather than exploring space.

The spacecraft is still unnamed and will be designed to have a “high level of autonomy.” The entire craft should weigh less than 400 kilograms.

Chemical propulsion appears to be the choice of the engineers for the first spacecraft, but future models could employ a mix of chemical and electrical thrusters.

As mentioned before, there is one main target here and it is called Vespa, the leftover remnant from ESA’s Vega rocket launch in 2013. This piece of junk weighs roughly the same as a small satellite and has a simple shape. This would make it easy for the robotic arms to grab. Once it’s in the arms of the collector, it will be dragged out of orbit and allowed to burn up in the atmosphere.

Unfortunately, this will also destroy the collector, but in the future, the agency hopes to improve this technology with future plans to de-orbit multiple objects without also destroying themselves.

“And in the coming years, the number of satellites will increase by an order of magnitude, with multiple mega-constellations made up of hundreds or even thousands of satellites planned for low Earth orbit to deliver wide-coverage, low-latency telecommunications, and monitoring services. The need is clear for a ‘tow truck’ to remove failed satellites from this highly trafficked region,” says Luc Piguet, founder, and CEO of ClearSpace.

So far ClearSpace has raised close to 2.3 million Swiss francs (close to $2.3 million USD) through a mix of investors and grants. The ClearSpace mission is set to cost $129 million.

When Colleen Graham heard a story of investigators looking into Credit Suisse for spying on its recently departed head of wealth management, something sounded familiar.

She had recalled, years prior, when she was working on a JV between the bank and Palantir Technologies, a “striking tall blonde” had followed her in Manhattan after she refused to sign off on how revenue from the JV would be booked. She filed a complaint in 2017 alleging the bank had taken retaliatory measures against her, including the surveillance, according to Bloomberg. 

Credit Suisse had “expressed strong frustration” about her stance on the revenue recognition, she claimed. 

So she reached out to CEO Tidjane Thiam and Chairman Urs Rohner, offering up the details of her story. She also reached out to the law firm the bank hired to investigate. 

However, on October 1, the lawyers came out and said they had “not identified any evidence that Credit Suisse had ordered observations of other employees.” Instead, it was COO Pierre-Olivier Bouee who had acted alone in ordering the former employee be followed. Rohner said that staff surveillance was not “part of our toolbox.”

The bank said it’s “examining the new information.”

Graham’s report didn’t make it into the lawyer’s findings. Additionally, Swiss newspaper NZZ reported on December 16 that the bank’s HR chief, Peter Goerke, was also followed for 3 days in February. 

The events continue to act as a headwind for Thiam, who is focused on trying to shift the narrative to Credit Suisse’s performance – and away from the scandal that has dented the bank’s reputation. Questions continue to be raised about who was “in the know” about the behavior at the bank.

Credit Suisse said the results of its own investigation will be published on Monday. 

Preliminary results show no evidence of Thiam having knowledge of the surveillance. Swiss financial regulators are also stepping up their investigation into the bank. Finma appointed an independent auditor to look into the spying allegations, according to a statement late on Friday. The activities raise “various compliance issues,” according to the regulator. 

In an email to Thiam and Rohner in September, Graham says she was followed from the “lobby of my lawyer’s office into a pharmacy several blocks away and to the building where I was interviewing” at BlackRock. She also says she saw the same woman in a black Range Rover following her on Long Island. She said “the woman wanted me to know she was following me.”

She heard nothing in response to her email, so she also wrote to the law firm, Homburger. A lawyer responded, suggesting they speak by phone on September 30, one day prior to the firm releasing their report.

Graham worked as senior compliance executive at Credit Suisse before being hired to head Signac, a venture that used Palantir software to detect unauthorized trading by employees. Department of Labor investigators also looked at her allegations and dismissed the claims in April. Credit Suisse has called them “baseless”.

Recall, this is hardly the first time “business intelligence firms” or spies have been used in the world of finance. Critics of the company Wirecard were recently targeted by spies, according to the FT. Well known short seller Carson Block even caught one spy on camera after he claimed to be a WSJ reporter while digging for information. 

In 2017, another “gorgeous blonde” spy was famously outed after apparently seeking counterintelligence on a controversial insurance company. She was later found to be the woman who tried to coerce information out of Rose McGowan on behalf of Harvey Weinstein and in 2019, later outed herself officially in an embarrassing apology tour. 

Authored by David Stockman via LewRockwell.com,

If bringing one’s country to fiscal ruin were an impeachable offense, you’d have to impeach the entire city of Washington.

On December 16 the gross Federal debt breached a new level to $23.1 trillion, while the net debt after $401 billion of cash weighed in at $22.71 trillion. The latter monstrous figure is notable because on June 30, 2019 it stood at $21.76 trillion.

So what has happened in the last 167 days is a $948 billion increase in the Uncle Sam’s net debt, which amounts to a gain of $5.7 billionper day – including, as we like to say, weekends, holidays and snow days.

Worse still, not a single dollar of that gain got absorbed in government trust funds. The Treasury float held by the public actually rose by $953 billion.

So why in the world do the knuckleheads on bubblevision not understand where the spiking rates and ructions in the repo market came from?

The law of supply and demand is still operative, and the US Treasury is literally flooding the bond pits with new supply. Even at the bottom of the Great Recession, Uncle Sam did not drain $5.7 billion per day from the bond market.

But nary a soul down in the Imperial City has noticed this borrowing eruption at the tippy-top of the business cycle, which now teeters on borrowed time at a record 127 months of age. Instead, this very day the Congress is busily engaged in what is a fair approximation of abolishing the election process at the heart of American democracy.

We will address today’s hideous impeachment Gong Show below. But here we note that every talking head showing up on the screen today is claiming that the market can keep on bubbling higher because the pending impeachment of the nation’s 45th president is a great big nothingburger.

Au contraire!

It’s real, deeper meaning is that the Washington end of the Acela Corridor is now morphing into a disruptive missile aimed right at the canyons of Wall Street.

Of course, the Donald won’t be “convicted” by the Republican Senate. Indeed, the House impeachment resolution my never even be sent to the Senate if Nancy and her ship of fools conclude there won’t be a real “trial” in the Senate and therefore leave the resolutions sitting on the parliamentarian’s desk as camera ready campaign fodder for 2020.

But, hey, a government which can treat the supposedly solemn and extraordinary process of impeachment as a mere exercise in campaign theatrics is a government that has given the term “dysfunctional” an altogether new definition. It means that the conduct of the actual business of the people’s government has virtually ceased.

To be sure, we would ordinarily consider a government that does absolutely nothing to be praiseworthy. After all, the route to prosperity does not extend through the halls of Congress or the vast departments inside the beltway, but stems from the genius of free enterprise and the exertions and inspiration of workers, employers, savers, investors and inventors. They require neither help nor superintendence from an activist Federal government.

Likewise, a reticent government is all we really need for national defense. The latter has been more than taken care of by the god-created ocean moats which secure our shores and our already paid for nuclear deterrent which keeps distant foes at bay. All the rest of the $900 billion of so-called national security spending and the vast and unremitting Washington machinations it funds are in behalf of Empire, not the safety and liberty of the homeland.

But the fly in the ointment is that several generations of Washington politicians have turned the Federal budget into a Fiscal Doomsday Machine. Spending for both automatic entitlements and so-called discretionary programs alike gushes higher, pulling the public debt upwards as it goes, with virtually no meaningful legislative action.

Consequently, the fractured and inflamed partisanship evident in today’s demented proceedings has become the handmaid of the nation’s impending fiscal catastrophe. That is, government must take positive and sweeping legislative action to brake the Doomsday Machine, but James Madison’s checks and balances have always made large-scale statutory enactments difficult, while today’s metastasized partisanship have made them well nigh impossible.

It is generally understood that the giant entitlements – Social Security, Federal retirement, Medicare, Medicaid, Food Stamps and the lesser income security programs – are automatic, permanently authorized payments that currently flow to upwards of 160 million Americans and will continue to do so, whether Congress does its job or not.

But what needs emphasis is that the rate of growth is accelerating – in effect, it is busting loose from the growth rate of the faltering national economy which must finance these massive entitlements.

Thus, between 1987 and 2000, total Federal entitlement spending soared from $358 billion to $778 billion or by 117%. But during those first 13 years of Greenspan’s reign, the Fed’s easy money was able to goose nominal GDP by 115%, meaning that the entitlement claim on GDP remained constant at about 7.5%.

Since then, it has been off to the races as shown in the graph below. During the last 19 years, nominal GDP (brown line) doubled again, but Federal entitlement spending (purple line) tripled, and it’s claim on GDP rose from 7.5% to 11.0%.

What this means is that every year the legislative stalemate and inaction persists is another year in which the Fiscal Doomsday Machine gathers even more momentum.

Moreover, the surge of beneficiaries behind the above divergence is by no means over. The 80-million strong Baby Boom will continue to clamber on to the Social Security/Medicare welcome wagon at a rate of 11,000 per day until the end of the 2020s.

The graph below is dispositive. The 39.7 million Medicare (and social security retirement, too) beneficiaries at the turn of the century are already more than 60 million, which total will rise to 81.5 million by 2030 and 92.4 million by 2050.

Needless to say, the rate of entitlement spending growth, which has already broken loose from GDP, will diverge to an even greater degree during the decades ahead. Quite simply, the already baked-in-the cake demographics of American society guarantee that work force and GDP growth will continue to weaken, even as the exploding retirement population gets ever older (on average) and therefore more costly to support.

Nor is the automatic entitlement the only aspect of the budget threatening a further breakout in the Turbulent Twenties ahead. Mandatory interest on the debt is fixing to soar at quadruple the rate of the last 19 years owing to the math of debt and interest rates.

To wit, the first 19 years of this century witnessed the full fury of central bank interest rate repression. The 10-year U.S. Treasury (UST) yield fell from 6.5% to a recent sub-basement level of just 1.75%.

Accordingly, even as the Federal debt erupted from $5.7 trillion to nearly $23 trillion, or 300%, during that period, the interest expense of the US Treasury crept up at a far more moderate pace.

Thus, interest outlays during Q3 2000 posted at a $353 billion annual rate, representing 6.2% of the $5.67 trillion of public debt then outstanding. But during the next 19 years of explosively growing Federal debt, interest expense crept up to just $584 billion at an annual rate during Q3 2019, representing but a 65% gain since the turn of the century.

Here’s the thing. Annualized interest expense in Q3 2019 amounted to just 2.6% of the debt outstanding – or barely one-third of the 6.2% level registered in Q3 2000.

It goes without saying that this disconnect between the debt and its cost of carry was a one-time fiscal windfall that has actually functioned to obfuscate the magnitude of the budget crisis gestating down below the top line. Yet according to the sheer math of the thing, it can’t happen again in the decades ahead because interest rates have already been pushed to sub-economic and unsustainable levels by the Fed and other central banks.

At minimum, therefore, interest expense will grow just as fast as the baked-in-the-cake growth of the Federal debt, which is heading toward well in excess of $40 trillion by the end of the 2020s. Accordingly, even at today’s average yield Federal interest expense will surge to $1.1 trillion per year during the next 10 years, and a lot more when interest rates finally normalize.

Growth of Federal Debt Versus Interest Expense, 2000-2019

Finally, even the so-called discretionary part of the budget – annual appropriations for defense and domestic programs – has succumbed to a form of de facto automaticity.

To wit, the Imperial City has been so fiscally euthanized by the Fed’s gift of unending cheap money and massive monetization of the public debt that both parties are on the same side of the budgetary boat. That is, in favor of more spending – with the GOP neocons and hawks pushing defense spending skyward in trade for equivalent levitation of domestic appropriations, as especially favored by the Dems.

Moreover, the Trumpified GOP has developed a deathly fear of being blamed for another government shutdown, which it falsely blames for its wipeout at the polls in 2018. So the GOP has essentially joined a bipartisan conspiracy in favor of a rolling suspension of the Federal debt limit and annual omnibus appropriations bills that are loaded with budget busting pork.

Crazily, the talking heads on bubblevision this AM were making the absurd argument that there is smooth sailing ahead because Congress just passed a 2300 page $1.4 trillionomnibus appropriations bill for the balance of FY 2020, even as it is in the midst of a partisan donnybrook on impeachment.

Supposedly, this means the government is still functioning. No sweat!

Well, yes, it is functioning, but to literally blow the top off from even the tiny discretionary spending corner of the Federal budget that until the Donald came along was exhibiting a modicum of restraint.

No more. The two-year budget deal being sent to the White House will blow the budget caps for FY2020-2021 by $320 billion, but even that isn’t the half of it.

Due to Congress’ crooked, self-serving scoring rules, budgetary caps become the basis for the outyear current policy baseline in subsequent years. Accordingly, for FY 2020 the existing caps were supposed to cause total defense and non-defense appropriations to drop by $125 billion – from $1.244 trillion in FY 2019 to $1.119 trillion in FY 2020.

This is shown in the solid black line in the chart below, and also shown by the dotted black line is the convention for projecting 10-year baseline spending from the old FY2020 and FY2021 caps.

Thanks to Congress’ alleged ability to “function” in the midst of partisan madness, however, those caps have now been blown away and none have been enacted for subsequent years. Hence the baseline for discretionary spending in the outyears is now plotted by the dotted blue line.

The difference over 10-year? A cool $1.7 trillion, and you can believe that the bipartisan duopoly on Capital Hill will drive every dime of this increase right into Uncle Sam’s trillion+ per year borrowing requirement.

Even then they were not done as they honed today’s impeachment brickbats. While they were at it, they repealed $375 billion of health care taxes that the one and same Pelosi-led Dem majority rammed through in 2010 in order to prove that Obamacare would not add to the public debt!

We have no particular brief for the medical taxes and are not surprised at all by the blatant Dem hypocrisy. After all, for the most part these massive taxes have never actually gone into effect because implementation has been deferred time and time again just before the effective dates.

Still, if you can’t repeal ObamaCare spending as the GOP miserably failed to do in 2017 and 2018, why do you get to repeal these financing means and brag you have made a blow for America’s taxpayers?

Not only do these actions bury taxpayers deeper in debt, they also guarantee that some day down the road even higher taxes will be imposed in order to finally stem the flood of red ink.

Besides that, $200 billion of the revenue loss buried in the Omnibus appropriations bill is attributable to permanent repeal of the so-called Cadillac Tax on ultra-high cost, gold-plated – mainly union – health care plans, which have a total cost of more than $30,000 per year.

That’s right. The bipartisan duopoly has now agreed to keep spending trillions over the next decade for ObamaCare but can’t even see its way clear to tax the excess value of health care plans which cost about the same as the average annual wage among the 170 million payroll tax filers in the US.

Nevertheless, when you add $70 billion of other tax loopholes which were extended and the associated debt service cost, the very “functional” Congress at work this week blew a $500 billion hole in the revenue collections over the next decade to fit on top of the $1.7 trillion of added discretionary spending.

So the Federal budget has indeed become a full-bore Doomsday Machine. There is not a scintilla of capacity or will on either side of the partisan divide to even brake its trajectory. As shown below, the publicly-held debt is heading toward 150% of GDP – a level which would crush what remains of US economic growth or encourage the Fed to print so much money monetizing this exploding public debt as to virtually destroy the financial system in the process.

Yet this gets us back to today’s contretemps.

Obviously, the Dem impeachment case is absurd. The meddling in the 2016 election was done by the Deep State intelligence agencies with the encouragement of partisan Obama officials, not the Russians; and Ukraine’s cesspool of corruption would not have smeared American politics in the slightest had Washington not fomented a coup in February 2014 against a government it didn’t like for being too friendly with its historic Russian neighbor and suzerain.

So the Donald had every reason of state to want the Ukraine corruption investigated. For crying out loud, the prosecutor fired by Biden has told exactly why it happened.

In early 2106, he had seized the property of the corrupt Ukrainian oligarch and owner of Burisma, who had hired Hunter Biden and the son-in-law and chief of staff to the Secretary of State, John Kerry. Then out of the blue, wham! He was removed from office at Biden’s command in exactly the quid pro quo manner Uncle Joe famously bragged about before an audience at the Council on Foreign Relations.

So how much stench do you really need in your nostrils to recognize that the Hunter Biden led crew of fortune hunters in Ukraine after February 2014 weren’t on the up and up?

But actually, the threadbare articles of impeachment arising from the stench of Ukraine are not really about the Donald’s 25 minute phone call and purported quid pro quo at all. The Dems have adopted the posture that the American election process itself is imperiled by the nefarious meddling of Russkies and other fureners, and are focused not on governance, but on this alleged threat to their ability to win office and hold power.

At the same time, the GOP has lost all sense of its fundamental missions in behalf of sound money, fiscal rectitude, free markers and homeland defense. Instead, it’s going full retard on its own fatuous version of the supposedly imperiled U.S. election process.

That’s what the Donald’s insane Wall on the Mexican border and the GOP’s increasingly shrill anti-immigration policy is all about. It opposes more immigrants and brown people because it believes they will vote Democrat and thereby deprive the GOP of its rightful claim on political power.

Needless to say, two parties fighting over alleged existential threats to the very essence of American democracy is the very opposite of the nothingburger ballyhooed by bubble vision this AM.

What the Trump impeachment is really about is a brutal, raw struggle for power that threatens the very survival of American democracy, and which could end up in a hung 2020 election that would make the hanging-chad ordeal of 2000 look like a walk in the park.

Even then, the Fiscal Doomsday Machine will power forward unrestrained.

And these fools on bubble vision want you to buy-the-dip.

Don’t you dare!

“They have started to win in a number of cities and they have, in my view, not given the proper support to the police.“

That is the warning that Attorney General William Barr has for Americans, as he told Fox News’ Martha MacCallum in a recent interview that liberal billionaire George Soros has been bankrolling radical prosecutor candidates in cities across the country.

“There’s this recent development [where] George Soros has been coming in, in largely Democratic primaries where there has not been much voter turnout and putting in a lot of money to elect people who are not very supportive of law enforcement and don’t view the office as bringing to trial and prosecuting criminals but pursuing other social agendas,” Barr told Martha MacCallum.

Specifically, Barr warned that if the trend continues, it will lead to more violent crime, ading that the process of electing these prosecutors will likely cause law enforcement officers to consider whether the leadership in their municipality “has their back.”

“They can either stop policing or they can move to a jurisdiction more hospitable,” he said.

“We could find ourselves in a position that communities that are not supporting the police may not get the police protection they need.”

The Washington Post recently reported that while two Virginia prosecutorial candidates – funded by Soros’ Justice and Public Safety PAC – have never prosecuted a case in a state court, they beat candidates with more than 60 years of experience between them.

Authored by Daisy Luther via The Organic Prepper blog,

The Attorney General of Virginia stepped into the fray yesterday with an opinion on the validity of Second Amendment Sanctuaries that have sprung up across the state in response to draconian gun control legislation. He said that the Second Amendment Sanctuary resolutions have no legal force and that municipalities will have no choice but to enforce the unconstitutional laws, should the bill be turned into law in January.

But is this actually true? Or is it just a statement meant to discourage dissent? Digging into this, it seems that it’s certainly not as cut and dried as the AG would have us all believe.

This article will be filled with lots of quotes from pertinent legal documents. I’m not an attorney so I’m just laying out my findings. The emphasis throughout is mine.

You can draw your own conclusions.

The Official Statement

Let’s start out with what AG Mark Herring had to say.

The Virginia Constitution, the Code of Virginia, and established common law doctrines all bear on these questions.

First, the Constitution of Virginia provides that all local authority is subject to the control of the General Assembly. For example, Article V Il, Section 2 of the Constitution provides that “[t]he General Assembly shall provide by general law for the . powers . of counties, cities, towns, and regional governments.”[1]

Second, the Code of Virginia establishes the supremacy of state law over local ordinances and policies. Section 1-248 provides:

The Constitution and laws of the United States and of the Commonwealth shall be supreme. Any ordinance, resolution, bylaw, rule, regulation, or order of any governing body or any corporation, board, or number of persons shall not be inconsistent with the Constitution and laws of the United States or of the Commonwealth.[[2][3][4])

As the Virginia Supreme Court has explained, because local authority is subordinate to state law, “local ordinances must conform to and not be in conflict with the public policy of the State as embodied in its statutes.

Third, established common law doctrines specifically limit the authority of local governments. Virginia follows the Dillon Rule, which provides that local governments may exercise “only those powers expressly granted by the General Assembly, those necessarily or fairly implied therefrom, and those that are essential and indispensable. The Dillon Rule is one of strict construction: “[I]f there is a reasonable doubt whether legislative power exists, the doubt must be resolved against the local governing body. Thus, when a Virginia locality seeks to take any action, the Dillon Rule applies “to determine in the first instance, from express words or by implication, whether a power exists at all. If a locality cannot identify a reasonably specific source of delegated authority, “the inquiry is at an end” and the act in question is unauthorized.

These constitutional, statutory, and common law doctrines establish that these resolutions neither have the force of law nor authorize localities or local constitutional officials to refuse to follow or decline to enforce gun violence prevention measures enacted by the General Assembly.

l . By their own terms, these resolutions have no legal effect. Although the resolutions typically contain several “Whereas” clauses, the “be it resolved” clauses generally do not purport to take any concrete action. 15 Instead, the operative clauses: (a) “express[]” the “intent” of the locality’s Board of Supervisors “to uphold the Second Amendment rights of [the county’s] citizens,” (b) “express[]” the Board’s “intent that public funds of the [clounty not be used to restrict the Second Amendment rights of the [county’s] citizens,” and (c) “declare[]” the Board’s “intent to oppose” any “infringement” or “restrictions” of their residents’ Second Amendment rights using “such legal means [as] may be expedient, including without limitation, court action. These general statements do not direct or require any specific result, and any suggestion of potential future action is entirely speculative.

It also bears emphasis that neither local governments nor local constitutional officers have the authority to declare state statutes unconstitutional or decline to follow them on that basis. “All actions of the General Assembly are presumed to be constitutional. Furthermore, it has long “been the indisputable and clear function of the courts, federal and state, to pass upon the constitutionality of legislative acts. It follows from these well-established principles that all localities and local constitutional officers are required to comply with all laws enacted by the General Assembly unless and until those laws are repealed by the legislature or invalidated by the judiciary.

Nor may localities or local constitutional officers decline to enforce laws enacted by the General Assembly on the theory that requiring them to do so would “commandeer” local resources. Although the United States Supreme Court has held that “the Federal Government may not compel the States to implement . . . federal regulatory programs, that doctrine derives from the specific limitations on Congress’s legislative powers and the “residuary and inviolable sovereignty” retained by the states in our federal system. 25 In contrast, “the Constitution of Virginia is not a grant of legislative power to the General Assembly,„ 26 and, unlike Congress, [tlhe authority of the General Assembly shall extend to all subjects of legislation” not specifically “forbidden or restricted” by the State Constitution. 27 And neither the Federal Constitution nor Virginia law recognizes any “anti-commandeering” principle that allows localities or local constitutional officers to refuse to participate in the enforcement of state law.28

Conclusion

It is my opinion that these resolutions have no legal effect. It is my further opinion that localities and local constitutional officers cannot nullify state laws and must comply with gun violence prevention measures that the General Assembly may enact. (source)

You can read Herring’s entire opinion and get the citations here.

What is the Dillon Rule?

This is a rule of government embraced by 39 states.

Dillon’s Rule is derived from written decision by Judge John F. Dillon of Iowa in 1868. It is a cornerstone of American municipal law. It maintains that a political subdivision of a state is connected to the state as a child is connected to a parent. Dillon’s Rule is used in interpreting state law when there is a question of whether or not a local government has a certain power. Dillon’s Rule narrowly defines the power of local governments.

The first part of Dillon’s Rule states that local governments have only three types of powers:

-those granted in express words,
-those necessarily or fairly implied in or incident to the powers expressly granted, and
-those essential to the declared objects and purposes of the corporation, not simply convenient, but indispensable.

The second part of Dillon’s Rule states that if there is any reasonable doubt whether a power has been conferred on a local government, then the power has NOT been conferred. This is the rule of strict construction of local government powers. (source)

Virginia set a precedent with Dillon’s Rule back in 1896 and is considered one of the strictest states for the rule. It has been applied consistently ever since, taking power from local governments and centralizing it at a state level.

However…

It’s important to note that Dillon’s Rule is no more a law than Second Amendment Sanctuary resolutions. It’s a philosophy, albeit one that has consistently been applied in the Virginia Supreme Court for 125 years.

The Dillon Rule was adopted by the Virginia Supreme Court 120 years after Virginia declared its independence and created its first constitution. The rule is not a law passed by the General Assembly, and it was not based on a specific section in the 1869 state constitution that was in effect when the court ruled on the Winchester arson reward lawsuit.

The Virginia Supreme Court did not violate the separation of powers and somehow create a new law when adopting the Dillon Rule. Instead, when the court cited the Iowa justice’s rulings, it created the legal framework for interpreting the legality of many laws passed by state and local governments.

The framework has empowered the General Assembly and limited the authority of local governments. Judge Dillon’s legal philosophy was based on the assumption that local government was less competent and more corrupt than state government. However, that ignores the professionalization of local government since 1896. (source)

Dillon’s Rule can be federally preempted, too.

The American University Law Review published a paper regarding the Dillon Law in regard to sanctuary states and cities that were acting in defiance of federal immigration laws.

The issue of federal preemption of state law is a complex and prevalent topic in the immigration debate today,and the issue is relevant to Dillon’s Rule because it could be argued that preempts the outcome of a Dillon analysis in this context.

Furthermore, the issue of preemption is particularly tricky here because Dillon’s Rule deals with what the law does not say, rather than an express provision of state law in conflict with federal law. Under preemption principles, where state and federal law conflict, federal law governs. However, where there is no conflict, state law applies. (source)

The question here is whether federal law would conflict with state law enough to preempt Dillon’s rule.

Does the Dillon Rule override the power of County Sheriffs?

County sheriffs are often considered the last against unconstitutional legislation, with the authority to defy even federal law.

Historically, some sheriffs have not only enforced the laws; they have also decided which laws not to enforce. They view this as protecting the people from the intrusions of the federal government.

The “constitutional sheriff” movement is comprised of current and former members of law enforcement who believe that sheriffs are the ultimate authority in their jurisdiction—even above federal law enforcement…

…While it may seem like a fringe movement, it is prevalent enough to be taken seriously. In 2013, 500 sheriffs agreed not to enforce any gun laws created by the federal government. In Utah, almost all elected sheriffs signed an agreement to protect the Bill of Rights—and fight any federal officials who tried to limit them. [Robert Tsai / Politico] (source)

In 2013, Sheriff John D’Agostini of El Dorado County, California, famously kicked a federal agency out of his county.

“The U.S. Forest Service, after many attempts and given many opportunities, has failed to meet that standard.”

The sheriff has sent a letter to the US Forestry Service stating officers will no longer be able to enforce state law in his county.

“The U.S. Forest Service, after many attempts and given many opportunities, has failed to meet that standard.”

CBS 13 in Sacramento contacted a law professor to ask him if the sheriff’s actions are legal.

“Looks to me as though the sheriff can do this,” he said. “They don’t have state powers in the first place, but essentially the sheriff can deputize individuals to have authority in his or her jurisdiction.”

Fact: federal agencies do not have state powers. Due to the Constitution’s structure of dual sovereignty, the feds have no authority to enforce state laws. Furthermore, states cannot be compelled to enforce federal laws. (source)

So does that mean that Dillon’s Rule does or does not apply to county sheriffs? It’s complicated.

This Comment argues that Dillon’s Rule, a doctrine which limits the authority of cities, towns, and other localities to act unilaterally without authorization from the state legislature, creates a barrier to the enforcement of the 287(g) agreements currently in place between sheriffs’ offices and the federal government. Specifically, Dillon’s Rule precludes sheriffs from entering 287(g) agreements without authorization from the state legislature, rendering these agreements invalid in most cases. Accordingly, when an individual is detained or otherwise deprived of liberty or due process under an invalid 287(g) agreement, constitutional protections should apply. (source)

Wouldn’t depriving gun owners of their Second Amendment rights fall under the category of something constitutionally protected?

AG Herring’s statement contradicts a 2014 opinion.

Attorney General Herring’s current opinion seems politically biased since he has previously rendered more than one opinion at odds with this statement. House Majority Leader C. Todd Gilbert (R) said:

“Attorney General Herring’s opinion is interesting, as it directly contradicts his own statements and actions regarding the supremacy of state law over the preferences of the officials who must enforce them,” Gilbert states in a news release. “In 2014, Herring declined to defend Virginia law in state court, despite a statutory duty to do so.”

Gilbert adds that Herring told the Richmond Times-Dispatch: “…If I think the laws are adopted and constitutional, (then) I will defend them…”

“His opinion today notes that ‘it has long been the indisputable and clear function of the courts … to pass upon the constitutionality of legislative acts,’” Gilbert states. “This not only conflicts with his previous statement about his own conduct, but also the position of a number of Democratic commonwealth’s attorneys regarding (the) prosecution of marijuana possession. 

“I look forward to the Attorney General following up with the Commonwealth’s Attorneys and Commonwealth’s Attorneys-elect in Arlington, Fairfax, Loudoun, Portsmouth, and Norfolk about the supremacy of state law over the policy preferences of local elected officials,” Gilbert adds. (source)

Gilbert also provided another example of inconsistency.

Todd Gilbert, R-Shenandoah, the current majority leader in the House of Delegates who will serve as minority leader in the next legislative session, issued a statement Friday afternoon drawing attention to what he sees as a contradiction between the sanctuaries opinion and Herring’s previous decision to not defend Virginia’s ban on same-sex marriages when Herring concluded the prohibition was unconstitutional, despite what Gilbert argues was a statutory requirement to do so. (source)

That certainly does seem inconsistent with a “rule of strict construction.”

Virginians are unlikely to back down over the AG’s opinion.

Virginians are outraged at the prospective new laws and many gun owners are openly defiant. Counties, cities, and municipalities across the state are decrying the unconstitutional new laws and they are getting organized.

When gun owners were threatened with the National Guard to enforce compliance, it only seemed to accelerate the Second Amendment Sanctuary movement.  One county officially established a militia and more sure to follow, either officially or unofficially.

This is a battle of wills that’s being watched closely around the country. Where Virginia goes, the nation will follow, whether that’s compliance or outright refusal.

Gun control advocates may have chosen the wrong state as a testing ground. The state government seems to have underestimated the unflinching resolve of rural residents. So far, despite the state government’s threats and posturing, Virginians seem unbowed and gun owners across the nation are supporting them.

Last week we reported that something strange was going on at the same time that central banks are injecting $100 billion each month in electronic money to crush volatility and ramp markets: a similar amount in physical currency and precious metals was literally disappearing.

The mystery, in a nutshell, was as follows: while banks are printing more bank notes than ever, these seem to be “disappearing off the face of the earth” and nobody knows where or why, or as the WSJ notes, “central banks don’t know where they have gone, or why, and are playing detective, trying to crack the same mystery.”

And while readers can read up much more on the topic of disappearing hard assets here, a few days after, Fox Business picked up on this thread, writing that almost $1.5 trillion of the world’s physical cash, with $100 dollar bills making up the vast majority, was reportedly unaccounted for.

So what happened to the money?

To get to the bottom of this mystery, this was the question FOX Business anchor Lou Dobbs asked the man who literally signs every single US dollar bill, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. The response” “Literally, a lot of these $100 bills are sitting in bank vaults all over the world,” Mnuchin said.

Mnuchin pointed to the negative interest rates causing people to turn to American dollars as a solid investment.

The dollar is the reserve currency of the world, and everybody wants to hold dollars,” Mnuchin said on “Lou Dobbs Tonight.” “And the reason why they want to hold dollars is because the U.S. is a safe place to have your money, to invest and to hold your assets.”

Mnuchin said it’s interesting that, in a increasingly digital world, “the demand for U.S. currency continues to go up.” adding that “there’s a lot of Benjamins all over the world.”

Actually, it’s not that interesting: the world’s growing appetite for physical assets such as paper dollars and gold, coupled with the continued interest in cryptocurrencies and other traditional currency alternatives, merely confirms that faith in artificially levitated markets is approaching a tipping point. Meanwhile the world’s “top 0.001%ers” continue to quietly cash out, literally, and put their Benjamins in secret vaults in the middle of somewhere, even as central banks do everything in their power to reduce the amount of physical currency in circulation and replace it with easily trackable digital alternatives.

As we reported back in August, there are now more $100 bills in circulation than $1 bills, according to data from the Federal Reserve, which found there are more $100s than any other denomination of U.S. currency. And as an indication of just how much demand there is for physical stores of value, consider this: the number of bills featuring a picture of Benjamin Franklin has about doubled since the start of the recession.

In 2018, the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago illustrated a correlation between low interest rates and high currency demand, though it also noted outside factors could help explain swelling demand.

The bank estimated that 80% of all $100 bills last year were actually in circulation in foreign countries, and explained that residents in other countries, particularly those with unstable financial systems, often use the notes as a safe haven.

The section on missing dollar bills begins 7’30” into the Mnuchin interview.

It’s not just US dollar that are disappearing, however.

Few are as perplexed by the fate of the missing cash as the German central bank: according to the Bundesbank more than 150 billion euros are being hoarded in Germany. This has led the European Central Bank, and others, to ask the public for help.

“Everyone says that they are not hoarding cash but the money is clearly somewhere,” said Henk Esselink, head of the issue and circulation section in the ECB’s currency management division.

“People hide their money everywhere,” said Sven Bertelmann, head of the Bundesbank’s National Analysis Centre in Mainz, Germany. Sometimes bank notes are buried in the garden, where they start decomposing, or hidden in attics, where they are used by mice for building nests. “It happens again and again that people keep money in an envelope and then they shred it by mistake,” Bertelmann said. “We pick up the bank notes with tweezers and then start to put them together, like a jigsaw puzzle.”

Australia’s central bank says its best guess is that only around a quarter of the bank notes in circulation are used for everyday transactions. Up to 8% of cash is used in the shadow economy—tax avoidance or illegal payments—while as much as 10% could have been lost. That is $7.6 billion Australian dollars ($5.2 billion) missing at the beach or in couch cushions… Or simply lost in a “boating accident” to avoid the taxman until the rainy days arrive.

The biggest use of cash is as a store of wealth “in safes, under beds and at the back of cupboards, both here in Australia and elsewhere around the world,” Mr. Lowe, the RBA governor, said.

Swiss National Bank officials likewise found that hoarding of Swiss francs jumped around the year 2000, likely motivated by fear of the Y2K bug infecting computer systems, the bursting of the dot-com bubble, the September 11 terrorist attacks and introduction of the euro. The financial crisis that began in 2007 encouraged people to stash even more.

Meanwhile, with a financial crisis looming – and getting closer by the day – for some countries, such as New Zealand, making money disappear is becoming a national pastime. Around a third of New Zealand’s new bank notes headed overseas in 2017, up from 6% four years earlier. That happened around the time that tourism overtook dairy as the country’s main export money-spinner, leading officials to speculate on the role played by currency exchanges, especially in Asia.

The trail mostly ran cold after that. The bank could only identify the whereabouts of around 25% of New Zealand’s cash. The rest, of about 75%, has disappeared.

“Our sense is that we’re in the same boat as a lot of other central banks out there,” said Christian Hawkesby, assistant governor at the RBNZ. “We can’t fully explain why holdings of cash are rising and where they are going.”

Are you a rich, virtue-signaling hypocrite experiencing ‘eco-guilt’ for bouncing all over world in a private jet while condemning others for their vastly smaller carbon footprint?

Fear not, Bloomberg News has you covered.

To atone for your carbon sins – particularly if you just can’t bring yourself to fly commercial (private jets emit as much as 20x more carbon dioxide per passenger) – simply snap up some carbon credits! In addition to convincing yourself you’re not a hypocrite, you’ll be prepared for awkward interview questions in Aspen after igniting 400 gallons of jet fuel to shuttle your entourage to next year’s film festival.

Beware of scams, however, as only Carbon credits which truly benefit the planet should only be purchased from ‘well-established NGOs.’

If you have the money, the easiest way is to pay for carbon credits. To make sure you’re investing in a project that will truly benefit the planet, look for credits from groups that well-established nongovernmental organizations support. Gold Standard, which NGOs including the WWF created, has issued more than 100 million carbon credits from about 700 projects worldwide. For example, you can offset a ton of CO2 by donating $18 to a reforestation effort in East Timor or by giving $15 to a program that provides fuel-efficient stoves for women in North Darfur. –Bloomberg

More Q&A for the curious (Via Bloomberg)

How do I know how much I need to offset?

It depends on factors such as the amount of fuel burned and the altitude reached in flight. “People are put off by the fact they can go to different calculators and get different estimates of what that footprint of their flight would be,” Leugers says. “The reality is there are different levels of calibration.” One “finely calibrated” online calculator for commercial flights is from German nonprofit Atmosfair, she says. The unique details involved with a personal jet trip mean you’ll probably need to call in your own expert. 

Can I use biofuel for my jet?

If you can find it. The 15 million liters (almost 4 million gallons) of aviation biofuel produced in 2018 accounted for less than 0.1% of total aviation fuel consumption, says the International Energy Agency. The IEA noted on its website in March that only five airports have regular biofuel distribution—Bergen, Norway; Brisbane, Australia; Los Angeles; Oslo; and Stockholm. Biofuels are also costlier. The aviation industry says this might eventually be resolved with ramped-up production of biofuels from cheap and plentiful feedstocks such as agricultural waste.

Can I just buy an electric private plane?

There are already small two- and four-seater electric planes in the air. Something comfier, in the 50-seat range, might be ready for short-haul flights by 2027, says Bertrand Piccard, co-founder of Solar Impulse, a solar-powered aircraft project. “Sixty-six years after the Wright Brothers, they put people on the moon,” he says. “That shows how fast innovation can go.”