Tag: news

Neumann’s Dreams Of 5th Avenue Palace Crash And Burn As WeWork Starts Mass Layoffs

Neumann’s Dreams Of 5th Avenue Palace Crash And Burn As WeWork Starts Mass Layoffs

Former WeWork CEO Adam Neumann may have managed to extract $700 million from his WeWork stake via share-sales and bank loans, but apparently it takes more than money to secure a place among New York Cities wealthy elite. According to the New York Post‘s Page Six, many of the coop boards at some of the most prestigious buildings in the city have preemptively rejected Neumann and his wife, Rebekah Paltrow Neumann.

The Neumanns were reportedly shopping around for a home on Fifth Avenue when the boards of three buildings in the area including 950 and 960 Fifth Avenue. The Neumanns have reportedly contracted with multiple brokers, and even hired WeWork’s former head of commercial real estate, Mark Lapidus, to help with the search.

But one market “insider” quoted by the NYP said the “gilded life” that the Neumanns dreamed of might be forever out of their reach.

“Neumann wanted the gilded life on Fifth Avenue…But the brokers put in discreet calls to members of the co-op boards, and they all said no.”

The coop boards have reportedly taken issue with the “outlandish” behavior that led to Neumann’s ouster as WeWork’s CEO (he’s still the chairman and a large shareholder). Media reports that landed as the company’s valuation was in free-fall last month described Neumann’s hard-partying ways, and even mentioned a specific incident where Neumann brought a large quantity of marijuana on an international flight, angering the owner of the plane.

Neumann has also been lambasted for some of his comments that make him sound like a character on the satirical TV show Silicon Valley. The former executive has said that he wants to build a ‘WeWork’ on Mars, and that ‘The We family’ might give the world’s orphans “a new family.”

He has also boasted about becoming the world’s first ‘trillionaire’.

While the Neumann’s have seen their fortune shrink dramatically in recent weeks, many WeWork employees are anxiously waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Bloomberg reports that the company’s new top executives, co-CEOs Artie Minson and Sebastian Gunningham, have warned the company’s employees that potentially thousands of layoffs could happen as soon as this month. They promised that the cuts will be handled as “humanely” as possible. Executives have told BBG that the company is considering laying off some 2,000 employees, roughly 16% of its global workforce of 12,500.

Since the company’s plan for an IPO crumbled, WeWork has warned that it will slow the pace of its rapid international expansion and focus on growing its core business.

Unfortunately, there’s no way to do that without letting some heads roll. What’s worse: This time around, the survivors probably won’t be greeted by champagne and snacks, like they would have in Neumann’s day.


Tyler Durden

Fri, 10/04/2019 – 10:50

Tags
Business Finance

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3368bzA Tyler Durden

Pornography Is Protected by the First Amendment

The specter of pornography is once again haunting the minds of certain American conservatives. “Let’s ban porn,” Ross Douthat of The New York Times declared last year. Porn is “just a product,” he wrote, “something made and distributed and sold, and therefore subject to regulation and restriction if we so desire.” The Daily Caller‘s Zak Slayback recently doubled down on Douthat. “Unlike a Scorsese film or a newspaper, both of which are consumed for artistic enjoyment,” he wrote, “pornography is consumed with one outside end in mind: orgasm and masturbation. Its primary purpose is not entertainment (in any colloquial sense of the word) or enlightenment. In that sense, pornography is just a tool, like any other product, and can be regulated like any other product.” Slayback added: “Don’t let the pornography lobby and libertarians frame this as a free speech issue. It’s isn’t.”

But of course this is a free speech issue, as the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly recognized, even in cases in which the Court allowed certain restrictions on “obscene” material to stand.

For more than half a century, the Supreme Court has drawn a line between pornography, which enjoys the protections of the First Amendment, and obscenity, which does not. The distinction between the two shows why any sort of all-encompassing government ban on porn would run afoul of the Constitution.

In A Book Named “John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure” v. Attorney General of Massachusetts (1966), the Supreme Court considered a state effort to have a sexually explicit book declared obscene and therefore banned under state law. Not so fast, the justices told the Bay State. Even a “patently offensive” pornographic work, the Court held, is still protected by the First Amendment. “A book cannot be proscribed unless it is found to be utterly without redeeming social value.”

Seven years later, the Court revised its obscenity test in a landmark ruling that continues to hold sway in all legal debates over porn and censorship. According to Miller v. California (1973), “state statutes designed to regulate obscene materials must be carefully limited.” A state may only prohibit a work for being obscene if the work meets all of the following criteria:

(a) whether “the average person, applying contemporary community standards” would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest…(b) whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law; and (c) whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.

The Court applied the Miller test a year later in Jenkins v. Georgia (1974), a case which centered on the obscenity conviction of a movie theater manager who screened the film Carnal Knowledge, which featured nudity but would hardly qualify as pornographic by today’s standards. Writing for the majority, Justice William Rehnquist—nobody’s idea of a liberal squish—struck down the conviction.

Although the Georgia Supreme Court had upheld the theater manager’s obscenity bust on the grounds that “the First Amendment does not protect the commercial exhibition of ‘hard core’ pornography,” as Rehnquist put it, he took a different view—literally. “Our own viewing of the film,” Rehnquist wrote, “satisfies us that ‘Carnal Knowledge’ could not be found under the Miller standards to depict sexual conduct in a patently offensive way.” One can only imagine the sort of conversations that Rehnquist and his colleagues had in chambers that day.

As these cases illustrate, the question of whether sexually charged material rises to the level of potentially prohibitable obscenity turns in significant part on the specific contents of the work at issue. If the government wants to ban the sale or distribution of a particular dirty movie, in other words, the government must be able to convince the courts that the movie “taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.” Otherwise, it is protected by the First Amendment.

A one-size-fits-all government ban on pornography, by contrast, necessarily avoids all such case-by-case determinations and thus violates both the Supreme Court’s precedents and the broader First Amendment principles they endorsed.

Like it or not, the debate about porn is always a debate about free speech. The hands of every would-be government censor are still bound by the First Amendment.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2MfWn7c
via IFTTT

Brexit Irony: EU Rejects Its Own Proposal

Brexit Irony: EU Rejects Its Own Proposal

Authored by Michael Shedlock via MishTalk,

Boris Johnson Proposes a Northern Ireland solution. This is what the EU originally proposed.

Brexit Irony

When Theresa May first started negotiating Brexit, Michel Barnier, the EU’s negotiator, suggested a Northern Ireland Backstop.

Theresa May how to reject that idea because she needed 9 DUP MPs to hold her fragile coalition together.

Brexit Basics

BBC Brexit Basics shows a NI solution is what the EU originally proposed.

A Northern Ireland only backstop? This is what the EU originally proposed.

It would involve Northern Ireland alone remaining in the EU’s single market and customs union, leaving Great Britain (England, Scotland and Wales) free to strike trade deals.

But the DUP – a Northern Ireland unionist party that propped up Theresa May’s minority Conservative government – objected to this.

Idea Revived

Boris Johnson revived the idea, somehow getting DUP on board, but now the EU seems united against its own idea.

Barnier Objects

European Commission Objects

Placing the Blame

The Guardian Live once again has a good synopsis.

The DUP has accused the Irish government of being “obstructionist and intransigent”. This is from the DUP leader Arlene Foster, commenting on what Simon Coveney, Ireland’s deputy premier and foreign minister, said earlier about the Brexit deal being unacceptable in its current form.

“The Irish government’s preparedness to dump the consent principle for their country’s expediency is foolish in the extreme and sends a very clear message to unionists.”

Donald Tusk, European Council President

Tusk is “Open but Unconvinced”.

What’s Going On?

  1. Bluff by Ireland?

  2. Bluff by EU?

  3. Irish Intransigence?

  4. EU Intransigence?

  5. All of the Above?

Note the one missing ingredient: UK Intransigence.

Despite appearances, I do not think it is number 4. My guess is 1, 2, and possibly 3.

Odds of Deal

Yesterday, I noted On the Verge of a Brexit Breakthrough.

I see no reason to change that view.

The important point is not the seemingly major disagreements but rather the fact there are are major negotiations underway.

A bluff by Ireland and the EU are highly likely. The alternative is Irish Intransigence, EU Intransigence, or both.

I rule out EU Intransigence on the grounds that the EU will go along if Ireland does.

Key Point

“The flippant Dublin reaction to the Prime Minister’s proposals has also exposed the reality that the Irish government would never have consented to the United Kingdom leaving the backstop if it had been implemented.”

Admitting the Trap

Majority in UK Parliament on Board

Boris Johnson has achieved something everyone thought impossible:

A Majority!

  • DUP is on board

  • Rebel Labour MPs on board

  • Hard Brexiteers on board

  • Most Tories on board

All Aboard

Steve Baker, the chair of the European Research Group, which represents Tories pushing for a harder Brexit, and one of the 28 “Spartans” who voted against Theresa May’s deal on every occasion, tells Johnson: “We now glimpse the possibility of a tolerable deal.”

Johnson says he welcomes that coming from Baker, although he says the two have spoken regularly in recent days, and so, he implies, he is not surprised to have Baker’s support.

That’s pretty amazing actually. And note this.

Northern Ireland’s chief constable, Simon Byrne, has said that his officers will not staff any form of border security after Brexit. At a meeting of the Northern Ireland Policing Board earlier, Byrne said he had “made it clear” to the Northern Ireland Office that police would not “staff any form of border security” after the UK leaves the EU.

If Ireland or the EU sink this deal, the most likely consequence is No Deal.

Polls show that Johnson will clobber Jeremy Corbyn in an election. Heck, the Liberal Democrats might even become the opposition leader.

The EU has to understand this.

Excellent Eleven-Tweet Chain on a Landing Zone

Conclusion: “The goal is a decent UK-EU working partnership with peace and legitimacy for Ireland, North and South.”

Duff adds in a second Tweet “Johnson is frank about turning away from May’s agreement. In these circs, what works for Ireland that is better than no deal ?”

May’s Deal

It is clear that May’s deal was better for the EU than Johnson’s deal. But it can’t pass.

The choice will be between Johnson’s deal (assuming he can work one out) or no deal.

For political purposes, the Tories and the Liberal Democrats want elections. For political reasons the EU does not want the UK having a say in EU policies and procedures.

Excellent Speech by Johnson

Hand Exposed

The hand of the those allegedly wanting to stop No Deal is exposed.

  • No majority for a referendum.

  • No majority for elections

  • No majority for a caretaker government

  • No majority for Remain

Labour, the Lib Dems, and SNP say their top priority is to stop No Deal and they are against Johnson doing just that!

WTF?


Tyler Durden

Fri, 10/04/2019 – 10:30

Tags
Politics

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2LK53DK Tyler Durden

Pornography Is Protected by the First Amendment

The specter of pornography is once again haunting the minds of certain American conservatives. “Let’s ban porn,” Ross Douthat of The New York Times declared last year. Porn is “just a product,” he wrote, “something made and distributed and sold, and therefore subject to regulation and restriction if we so desire.” The Daily Caller‘s Zak Slayback recently doubled down on Douthat. “Unlike a Scorsese film or a newspaper, both of which are consumed for artistic enjoyment,” he wrote, “pornography is consumed with one outside end in mind: orgasm and masturbation. Its primary purpose is not entertainment (in any colloquial sense of the word) or enlightenment. In that sense, pornography is just a tool, like any other product, and can be regulated like any other product.” Slayback added: “Don’t let the pornography lobby and libertarians frame this as a free speech issue. It’s isn’t.”

But of course this is a free speech issue, as the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly recognized, even in cases in which the Court allowed certain restrictions on “obscene” material to stand.

For more than half a century, the Supreme Court has drawn a line between pornography, which enjoys the protections of the First Amendment, and obscenity, which does not. The distinction between the two shows why any sort of all-encompassing government ban on porn would run afoul of the Constitution.

In A Book Named “John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure” v. Attorney General of Massachusetts (1966), the Supreme Court considered a state effort to have a sexually explicit book declared obscene and therefore banned under state law. Not so fast, the justices told the Bay State. Even a “patently offensive” pornographic work, the Court held, is still protected by the First Amendment. “A book cannot be proscribed unless it is found to be utterly without redeeming social value.”

Seven years later, the Court revised its obscenity test in a landmark ruling that continues to hold sway in all legal debates over porn and censorship. According to Miller v. California (1973), “state statutes designed to regulate obscene materials must be carefully limited.” A state may only prohibit a work for being obscene if the work meets all of the following criteria:

(a) whether “the average person, applying contemporary community standards” would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest…(b) whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law; and (c) whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.

The Court applied the Miller test a year later in Jenkins v. Georgia (1974), a case which centered on the obscenity conviction of a movie theater manager who screened the film Carnal Knowledge, which featured nudity but would hardly qualify as pornographic by today’s standards. Writing for the majority, Justice William Rehnquist—nobody’s idea of a liberal squish—struck down the conviction.

Although the Georgia Supreme Court had upheld the theater manager’s obscenity bust on the grounds that “the First Amendment does not protect the commercial exhibition of ‘hard core’ pornography,” as Rehnquist put it, he took a different view—literally. “Our own viewing of the film,” Rehnquist wrote, “satisfies us that ‘Carnal Knowledge’ could not be found under the Miller standards to depict sexual conduct in a patently offensive way.” One can only imagine the sort of conversations that Rehnquist and his colleagues had in chambers that day.

As these cases illustrate, the question of whether sexually charged material rises to the level of potentially prohibitable obscenity turns in significant part on the specific contents of the work at issue. If the government wants to ban the sale or distribution of a particular dirty movie, in other words, the government must be able to convince the courts that the movie “taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.” Otherwise, it is protected by the First Amendment.

A one-size-fits-all government ban on pornography, by contrast, necessarily avoids all such case-by-case determinations and thus violates both the Supreme Court’s precedents and the broader First Amendment principles they endorsed.

Like it or not, the debate about porn is always a debate about free speech. The hands of every would-be government censor are still bound by the First Amendment.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2MfWn7c
via IFTTT

You can now be fined $250,000 in New York City for saying this phrase

Are you ready for this week’s absurdity? Here’s our Friday roll-up of the most ridiculous stories from around the world that are threats to your liberty and finances.

New York City starts banning words

You can now be fined $250,000 in New York City for using the term “Illegal alien” in a negative way according to new guidance from the City’s Commission on Human Rights.

This applies to landlords, employers, and in public accommodations.

So if a landlord says, “I can’t rent to rent to illegal aliens,” or a prospective employer says, “I can’t hire you because you’re an illegal alien,” you could be facing a quarter of a million dollar fine.

Click here for the full story.

Nurse takes newborn away after parents refuse vitamin K shot

A newborn’s first twelve hours of life were spent without her parents after they told a nurse not to administer a vitamin k shot.

The nurse announced she was reporting the family to child services, and left the room with the infant.

An old Illinois Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) policy classified parents who refused the vitamin K shot as negligent. The policy had been rescinded, but hospital staff still routinely use it to threaten parents.

The baby was returned without explanation. The next day a DCFS employee visited the parents and said there would be no actions taken, but that someone would still have to visit their home to check on the other children.

That’s what you get for having the nerve to choose what elective medical treatments you think are best for your child.

Click here for the full story.

Germany proposes three years in prison for insulting EU flag

It’s already illegal in Germany to insult foreign flags and German national emblems.

We’ve highlighted a case where a German man living in Germany was charged for reading an offensive poem about the Turkish Dictator.

Now, one chamber of the German legislature has passed a law that will apply those rules to the European Union as well.

Germans could get three years in prison for denigrating the ‘values’ of the European Union.

(We’re curious whether those EU values include negative interest rates?)

If the second chamber passes the bill, it will become hate speech to speak out against the European Union, insult its flag, or criticize its anthem.

Click here for the full story.

Flag of communist China raised above Boston City Hall

How far Boston had fallen since 1776.

To celebrate the 70th anniversary of the Communist takeover of China, the Chinese Progressive Association of Boston held a ceremony and raised the Chinese Communist flag over city hall.

With a death toll of at least 45 million, Communism in China is nothing to celebrate… making this a clear indication of how powerfully the Socialist fever is gripping the Land of the Free.

Click here for the full story.

Police SWAT team responds to meme

A “Threat Assessment Unit” in full SWAT tactical gear stormed a Florida man’s home after he posted a meme.

The man shared a picture of former National Rife Association President Charlton Heston holding a rifle, with a caption of Heston’s catchphrase– “from my cold dead hands.”

In the post, the man named three local anti-gun politicians, and said he hoped they were the ones who would come to confiscate his guns.

One of the politicians’ wife reported the meme, saying she felt threatened.

And that was more than enough for the police to enter the man’s home (without a warrant) to interrogate him.

Click here for the full story.

Utah woman arrested and charged for being topless in her own home

If you’ve ever installed insulation, you know how aggravating the little fiberglass pieces can be on your skin.

So a Utah woman and her husband stripped their shirts off so they wouldn’t get fiberglass all over the house on the way to the shower.

The woman’s stepchildren saw her bare chested. That, she said, was a little embarrassing. But she used it as a teaching moment to ask why topless men and women should be treated any differently?

A year or two passed and suddenly the woman was arrested and charged with lewdness in front of a child.

Click here for the full story.

Source

from Sovereign Man https://ift.tt/2ICTg8D
via IFTTT

Where The September Jobs Were: Who Is Hiring And Who Isn’t… And The Retail Apocalypse

Where The September Jobs Were: Who Is Hiring And Who Isn’t… And The Retail Apocalypse

Whether today’s payrolls report was “stagflationary” – as wage growth hit a brick wall, stagnating sequentially and posting the worst annual growth in one year, or simply lousy, is debatable, but with just 114K private payrolls created in September (government added 22K jobs) one thing is certain: this was the 5th lowest private jobs print in the past 3 years.

And yet, if one looks at the various job sectors, the emerging picture is hardly a dismal one, with 10 industries adding jobs, 3 losing, and one unchanged.

Some of the highlights: manufacturing fell by 2,000 jobs, the third consecutive drop, while service providers added a four-month low 109,000 jobs; and while leisure and hospitality workers added 21,000 jobs, a six-month high, retailers cut jobs for an eighth consecutive months. Most notably, since reaching a peak in January 2017, retail trade has lost 197,000 jobs. Separately, government added 22K jobs, “not great, not terrible“, even though census hiring was a surprisingly low 1,000 jobs.

The composition of job gains was not great, with low paying jobs in the education and health category were the top addition in September at 40,000; meanwhile Professional, Business and Service jobs added 23.8K (ex-temp).

  • In September, health care added 39,000 jobs, in line with its average monthly gain over the prior 12 months. Ambulatory health care services (+29,000) and hospitals (+8,000) added jobs over the month.
  • Employment in professional and business services continued to trend up in September (+34,000). The industry has added an average of 35,000 jobs per month thus far in 2019, compared with 47,000 jobs per month in 2018.  
  • Employment in government continued on an upward trend in September (+22,000). Federal hiring for the 2020 Census was negligible (+1,000). Government has added 147,000 jobs over the past 12 months, largely in local government.
  • Employment in transportation and warehousing edged up in September (+16,000). Within the industry, job growth occurred in transit and ground passenger transportation (+11,000) and in couriers and messengers (+4,000).
  • Retail trade employment changed little in September (-11,000). Within the industry, clothing and clothing accessories stores lost 14,000 jobs, while food and beverage stores added 9,000 jobs. Since reaching a peak in January 2017, retail trade has lost 197,000 jobs.

Below is a visual breakdown of all the main categories:

Digging into the numbers above, below we show the fine detail level for industries with the highest and lowest rates of employment growth for the most recent month, via Bloomberg.

Finally, the most notable trend was the continued decline in retail, where the Amazonification of America is accelerating, in the process destroying the legacy brick and mortar sector, which peaked in Jan 2017, and has lost jobs for 8 consecutive months, and 9 of the past 10, as the legacy retail sector is getting gutted.


Tyler Durden

Fri, 10/04/2019 – 10:18

Tags
Business Finance
Labor

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

Canada Catches America’s Cold – PMI Plunges To 4 Year Lows

Canada Catches America’s Cold – PMI Plunges To 4 Year Lows

As goes America, so goes Canada it seems. Following the collapse in both Manufacturing and Services survey data in the US, Canada’s PMI just collapsed most since Feb 2016, back into contraction for the first time since March 2015.

From a 12-month high of 60.6in August, Ivey PMI collapsed to a 4-year lows of 48.7…

Source: Bloomberg

Under the hood things are mixed (but hurting in the most important areas)

  • Ivey employment index decreased to 49.6 in September from 52.7 in prior month

  • Ivey inventory index decreased to 50.5 in September from 54.8 in prior month

  • Ivey supplier index increased to 50.2 in September from 49.9 in prior month

  • Ivey prices index increased to 56.9 in September from 51.3 in prior month

Time to restart rate-cuts.


Tyler Durden

Fri, 10/04/2019 – 10:09

Tags
Business Finance

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

Trump Does Not Need Alligators in Moats for a Draconian Anti-Immigration Crackdown—He’s Already Outdoing Ike’s Harsh ‘Operation Wetback’

President Donald Trump has denied a New York Times report that he fantasized about building an electrified wall with spikes that “pierce the human flesh” surrounded by a snake- and alligator-filled moat. He is also disputing that he suggested shooting migrants in the legs to slow them down—a part of the story that ABC News separately confirmed. Of course, he is on the record advocating lethal force (not just maiming) against rock-throwing migrants.

He doesn’t deny that he wants to get a whole lot tougher on immigration. And he doesn’t deny that he fired Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, who deployed tear gas against the approaching Central American migrants and defended separating children from migrant parents, after she balked at some of his other demands.

At this stage, Trump has already exceeded the harshness even of President Dwight Eisenhower’s Operation Wetback, one of the most draconian deportation programs in this country’s history—a policy that Trump for years has espoused as a “humane” and successful model.

From 1942 to 1947 the U.S. government barred Texas farmers from using the bracero guest worker program, which allowed farmers elsewhere in the country to legally hire Mexican help. That meant that the Lone Star state faced labor shortages just when its agriculture industry was expanding, thanks to the rise of large-scale farming. Predictably, thousands of Mexican workers started swimming across the Rio Grande to avoid border agents, arriving all wet into the eager arms of Texan farmers.

This upset the Mexican government, which didn’t like losing too many able-bodied Mexican men to better-paying gringos. Meanwhile, American labor unions did not like to see their members’ wages undercut by unauthorized Mexicans. And nativists opposed the immigrants just because they were brown. Even some churches and progressive social groups jumped on the enforcement bandwagon, thinking this would rescue the immigrants from exploitative employers. The Teamsters exploited Cold War worries to whip up fears that “more than 100 Communists a day” were flooding the country from the unregulated Mexican border, just like President Trump has been baselessly claiming that terrorists are streaming over America’s southern border.

So successful was the campaign to vilify unauthorized immigrants that the University of Chicago’s Louis Leal, who was also chairman of the Mexican American Council of Chicago, declared: “One of problems is that of wetbacks coming to Chicago.”

Eisenhower was ordinarily a champion of civil rights, and he was actually quite generous to refugees, at least of the white European variety. But facing mounting public pressure, he listened to Border Patrol chief Harlon B. Carter—a convicted murderer—and in 1954 he asked Attorney General Herbert Brownell to ramp up immigration enforcement. The result was Operation Wetback.

Carter had previously tried to deploy the National Guard in rounding up and ejecting immigrants. But it was illegal to use the military to enforce domestic laws—so when Brownell launched Operation Wetback, he instead just appointed a general to run the program using military tactics. Jeeps and planes would swoop in on farms and factories and round up all the brown-skinned folks on the premises, even if they were there legally. Some of them were sent into detention camps pending deportation, just like now. The conditions in these camps were abysmal, and many of the detainees died while being held. In one particularly gruesome incident, 88 Mexicans died of a heat stroke as result of a roundup that occurred while it was 112°. Those who survived were subjected to all kinds of indignities, such as having their heads shaved to make it easier to spot them if they tried to re-enter anytime soon.

Some migrants were airlifted to the Mexican interior. (About three planeloads were flown out of Chicago alone every week.) But as historian Mae M. Ngai has documented, about a quarter were herded into cargo ships—which a later congressional investigation compared to 18th century slave ships and “penal hell ships”—at Port Isabel, Texas, and taken way south in Mexico, so that it would be harder for them to return.

Mercifully, the program was shut down after only a few months. General revulsion at its inhumane tactics sapped support, and Congress refused to renew funding.

Trump and other anti-immigration hardliners sometimes claim that Operation Wetback solved the illegal immigration problem by deporting over 1.3 million Mexicans and putting the fear of God in future illegal migrants. But actually what solved the problem wasn’t Ike’s crackdown—it’s the fact that he reformed and expanded the bracero program, allowing migrants to legally enter the country. President Lyndon Johnson ended that program about a decade later, once again sowing the seeds for unauthorized immigration whose fruits we are witnessing today.

Eisenhower created so much havoc over a few months with only 1,000 border patrol agents. Trump has close to 20,000 agents, about 16,000 on the southern border. He does not need alligators in moats to outdo even the damage done by Operation Wetback.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2VdrS5X
via IFTTT

Trump Does Not Need Alligators in Moats for a Draconian Anti-Immigration Crackdown—He’s Already Outdoing Ike’s Harsh ‘Operation Wetback’

President Donald Trump has denied a New York Times report that he fantasized about building an electrified wall with spikes that “pierce the human flesh” surrounded by a snake- and alligator-filled moat. He is also disputing that he suggested shooting migrants in the legs to slow them down—a part of the story that ABC News separately confirmed. Of course, he is on the record advocating lethal force (not just maiming) against rock-throwing migrants.

He doesn’t deny that he wants to get a whole lot tougher on immigration. And he doesn’t deny that he fired Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, who deployed tear gas against the approaching Central American migrants and defended separating children from migrant parents, after she balked at some of his other demands.

At this stage, Trump has already exceeded the harshness even of President Dwight Eisenhower’s Operation Wetback, one of the most draconian deportation programs in this country’s history—a policy that Trump for years has espoused as a “humane” and successful model.

From 1942 to 1947 the U.S. government barred Texas farmers from using the bracero guest worker program, which allowed farmers elsewhere in the country to legally hire Mexican help. That meant that the Lone Star state faced labor shortages just when its agriculture industry was expanding, thanks to the rise of large-scale farming. Predictably, thousands of Mexican workers started swimming across the Rio Grande to avoid border agents, arriving all wet into the eager arms of Texan farmers.

This upset the Mexican government, which didn’t like losing too many able-bodied Mexican men to better-paying gringos. Meanwhile, American labor unions did not like to see their members’ wages undercut by unauthorized Mexicans. And nativists opposed the immigrants just because they were brown. Even some churches and progressive social groups jumped on the enforcement bandwagon, thinking this would rescue the immigrants from exploitative employers. The Teamsters exploited Cold War worries to whip up fears that “more than 100 Communists a day” were flooding the country from the unregulated Mexican border, just like President Trump has been baselessly claiming that terrorists are streaming over America’s southern border.

So successful was the campaign to vilify unauthorized immigrants that the University of Chicago’s Louis Leal, who was also chairman of the Mexican American Council of Chicago, declared: “One of problems is that of wetbacks coming to Chicago.”

Eisenhower was ordinarily a champion of civil rights, and he was actually quite generous to refugees, at least of the white European variety. But facing mounting public pressure, he listened to Border Patrol chief Harlon B. Carter—a convicted murderer—and in 1954 he asked Attorney General Herbert Brownell to ramp up immigration enforcement. The result was Operation Wetback.

Carter had previously tried to deploy the National Guard in rounding up and ejecting immigrants. But it was illegal to use the military to enforce domestic laws—so when Brownell launched Operation Wetback, he instead just appointed a general to run the program using military tactics. Jeeps and planes would swoop in on farms and factories and round up all the brown-skinned folks on the premises, even if they were there legally. Some of them were sent into detention camps pending deportation, just like now. The conditions in these camps were abysmal, and many of the detainees died while being held. In one particularly gruesome incident, 88 Mexicans died of a heat stroke as result of a roundup that occurred while it was 112°. Those who survived were subjected to all kinds of indignities, such as having their heads shaved to make it easier to spot them if they tried to re-enter anytime soon.

Some migrants were airlifted to the Mexican interior. (About three planeloads were flown out of Chicago alone every week.) But as historian Mae M. Ngai has documented, about a quarter were herded into cargo ships—which a later congressional investigation compared to 18th century slave ships and “penal hell ships”—at Port Isabel, Texas, and taken way south in Mexico, so that it would be harder for them to return.

Mercifully, the program was shut down after only a few months. General revulsion at its inhumane tactics sapped support, and Congress refused to renew funding.

Trump and other anti-immigration hardliners sometimes claim that Operation Wetback solved the illegal immigration problem by deporting over 1.3 million Mexicans and putting the fear of God in future illegal migrants. But actually what solved the problem wasn’t Ike’s crackdown—it’s the fact that he reformed and expanded the bracero program, allowing migrants to legally enter the country.

Eisenhower created so much havoc over a few months with only 1,000 border patrol agents. Trump has close to 20,000 agents, about 16,000 on the southern border. He does not need alligators in moats to outdo even the damage done by Operation Wetback.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2VdrS5X
via IFTTT

Treason (!), Sedition, and Trump Derangement Syndrome

I understand that actually taking seriously what the President of the United States says and writes brings with it the risk of being accused, at least by the more vigorous of Trump’s defenders among our readers, of having succumbed to Trump Derangement Syndrome.  (More about that below.)

But he is, as his stoutest defenders continually remind us, the duly elected president, and they might be more persuasive in their defense if they treated him as such, and not as some bumbling nincompoop whose says meaningless and nonsensical things that we shouldn’t be getting so bent out of shape over.

Here are a few of the things, repeated verbatim (italics added), that Trump has tweeted, or said, in the last few days:

Rep. Adam Schiff illegally made up a FAKE & terrible statement, pretended it to be mine as the most important part of my call to the Ukrainian President, and read it aloud to Congress and the American people. It bore NO relationship to what I said on the call. Arrest for Treason?

Why isn’t Congressman Adam Schiff being brought up on charges for fraudulently making up a statement and reading it to Congress as if this statement, which was very dishonest and bad for me, was directly made by the President of the United States? This should never be allowed!

His lies were made in perhaps the most blatant and sinister manner ever seen in the great Chamber. He wrote down and read terrible things, then said it was from the mouth of the President of the United States. I want Schiff questioned at the highest level for Fraud & Treason…..

Adam Schiff made up my conversation, every word of it, and then read it to Congress as though I said it.  I’ll tell you what, he should resign from Congress … he’s a low-life, he should be forced to resign.  He took a perfect conversation, realized he couldn’t read it to Congress, it was a perfect conversation … He took that conversation, which was perfect, he said: “I can’t read this.”  And he made up a conversation and said it to Congress and to the American people.  And it was horrible, what he said.  And that was supposed to be coming from me, and it was all fabricated.  He should resign from office in disgrace, and frankly they should look at him for treason, because he is making up the words of the President of the United States, it’s a disgrace and it shouldn’t be allowed to happen.

Congressman Adam Schiff should resign for the Crime of, after reading a transcript of my conversation with the President of Ukraine (it was perfect), fraudulently fabricating a statement of the President of the United States and reading it to Congress, as though mine! He is sick!

One hardly knows where to begin to dissect the venality and stupidity of these remarks.  Arrest for Treason?  No, you cannot arrest Adam Schiff for treason.

Let’s begin with the Speech and Debate Clause of the US Constitution (Art. 1 Sec. 6), shall we? The President, who has sworn and oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution, appears not to be aware of its existence.  It provides that members of Congress “shall not be questioned in any other Place” for “any Speech of Debate in either House.”  If Rep. Schiff “fraudulently fabricated” a statement of the President and “read it to Congress as if it was [his]”—a ridiculous charge (see below), but let that pass for the moment and assume it is true—it is not a crime (or even a “Crime”), and he cannot be arrested for it.

Second: Schiff’s speech does not and could not possibly, by any remote stretch of the imagination or any remotely plausible interpretation of the law, constitute treason. Another clause of the Constitution that the President appears unaware of is in Art. I Sec. 3:

“Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.”

Notice, among other things, the requirement of an “overt Act”—you cannot be guilty of treason for speech alone. So even if Rep. Schiff made up a conversation that he purported was Trump’s, and even if he were not protected by the Speech and Debate Clause, he’s not committing treason by doing so.

And the notion that Rep. Schiff’s statement—even if totally fabricated and bearing “NO relationship to what [Trump] said on the call”—constitutes “levying War” on the United States, surely, is too ridiculous to need serious rebuttal, no?  Donald Trump is not the United States, and an attack on him is not an attack on the United States.  And the Sedition Act, which made it a crime to

” … write, print, utter, or publish, … any false, scandalous and malicious writing or writings against the government of the United States, or either house of the Congress of the United States, or the President of the United States, with intent to defame the said government, or either house of the said Congress, or the said President, or to bring them, or either of them, into contempt or disrepute; or to excite against them, or either or any of them, the hatred of the good people of the United States …

was repealed some time ago—in 1801, to be exact.  Having flirted with the idea, embodied therein, that the government and the nation were one and the same, and that an attack on the one is an attack on the other, we rid ourselves of that idea, and it is deeply unfortunate that Trump is resurrecting it now.

And finally, on the actual merits of Trump’s claim.  Here is the portion of the statement read by Rep. Schiff at the start of last week’s hearings that the President of the United States asserts is a “Crime,” a “FRAUD,” and, possibly, “TREASON”:

“It reads like a classic organized crime shakedown. Shorn of its rambling character and in not so many words, this is the essence of what the president communicates. We’ve been very good to your country, very good. No other country has done as much as we have. But you know what? I don’t see much reciprocity here. I hear what you want. I have a favor I want from you though. And I’m going to say this only seven times so you better listen good. I want you to make up dirt on my political opponent, understand. Lots of it. On this and on that. I’m going to put you in touch with people, not just any people, I am going to put you in touch with the attorney general of the United States, my Attorney General Bill Barr. He’s got the whole weight of the American law enforcement behind him. And I’m going to put you in touch with Rudy. You’re going to love him. Trust me. You know what I’m asking. And so I’m only going to say this a few more times. In a few more ways. And by the way, don’t call me again. I’ll call you when you’ve done what I asked.

This is in sum and character what the president was trying to communicate with the president of Ukraine.” (italics added)

Was what Schiff said a fair characterization of what Trump said?  Reasonable people can, I suppose, disagree about that—the way that reasonable people disagreed about whether AG Barr’s summary of the Mueller Report was, or was not, a fair characterization of that document.

But bear in mind, please: we don’t know what Trump said.  All we know is what Trump’s White House said he said—a “Memorandum” that states, on the first page of the document:

CAUTION: A Memorandum of a Telephone Conversation (TELCON) is not a verbatim transcript of a discussion. The text in this document records the notes and recollections of Situation Room Duty officers and NSC policy staff assigned to listen and memorialize the conversation in written form as the conversation takes place.

We don’t know what Trump actually said because he has not released a full transcript or recording of the call.

It is somewhere between outrageous and laughable for Trump to claim, on the one hand, that Schiff’s characterization constitutes not just a crime but quite possibly a capital crime, while simultaneously not releasing the actual transcript of the conversation so we can judge for ourselves.

Here’s my characterization of what he’s doing now:  “Trust me.  I’ve given you my version of the conversation.  It was perfect. Trust me.  Saying otherwise is criminal and possibly treasonous.”

Moroever, no reasonable person could possibly think, listening to Rep. Schiff or reading his remarks, that he was giving us a verbatim account of the Trump call—”putting words in the mouth of the president.” He couldn’t have been much clearer: This is the “essence,” in “not so many words,” the “sum and character” of the conversation. It’s not what he said verbatim, it’s what I think he meant to say.

Does anyone—anyone?—not see Trump’s tirade here for what it is: a transparent (and rather clumsy) attempt to distract our collective attention away from Trump’s own behavior? It is difficult for me to how anyone—whatever grievances one may have with the Democrats, Hillary Clinton, President Obama, the Squad, etc. etc.—can fail to call it out as unbefitting a president of the United States.

Finally, regarding Trump Derangement Syndrome: I’m getting rather tired of the phenomenon whereby anyone who examines and tries to comprehend what our president has done or said and to have a rational conversation about it is accused of suffering from TDS.  Let’s change that narrative, shall we?  A number of diseases or syndromes are named after well-known sufferers from the disease—Lou Gehrig’s disease being best known in this category. We’ve been thinking about Trump Derangement Syndrome all wrong! It refers, actually, to the particular form of derangement from which our president appears to be suffering.  I invite readers to read what I have written about the Ukrainian Affair and what Trump has written about the Ukrainian Affair (additional excerpts from Trump’s Twitter feed are below, and the rest can be found here), and to ask yourself: who’s the deranged one here?

 

**************************

More verbatim excerpts from the President’s Twitter feed:

Rep. Adam Schiff fraudulently read to Congress, with millions of people watching, a version of my conversation with the President of Ukraine that doesn’t exist. He was supposedly reading the exact transcribed version of the call, but he completely changed the words to make it sound horrible, and me sound guilty. HE WAS DESPERATE AND HE GOT CAUGHT,” Trump wrote. “Adam Schiff therefore lied to Congress and attempted to defraud the American Public. He has been doing this for two years. I am calling for him to immediately resign from Congress based on this fraud!”

As I learn more and more each day, I am coming to the conclusion that what is taking place is not an impeachment, it is a COUP, intended to take away the Power of the People, their VOTE, their Freedoms, their Second Amendment, Religion, Military, Border Wall, and their God-given rights as a Citizen of The United States of America!

The congratulatory phone call with the Ukrainian President was PERFECT, unless you heard Liddle’ Adam Schiff’s fraudulently made up version of the call. This is just another Fake News Media, together with their partner, the Democrat Party, HOAX!

To show you how dishonest the LameStream Media is, I used the word Liddle’, not Liddle, in discribing Corrupt Congressman Liddle’ Adam Schiff. Low ratings @CNN purposely took the hyphen out and said I spelled the word little wrong. A small but never ending situation with CNN!

The Fake News Media wants to stay as far away as possible from the Ukraine and China deals made by the Bidens. A Corrupt Media is so bad for our Country! In actuality, the Media may be even more Corrupt than the Bidens, which is hard to do!

Very simple! I was looking for Corruption and also why Germany, France and others in the European Union don’t do more for Ukraine. Why is it always the USA that does so much and puts up so much money for Ukraine and other countries? By the way, the Bidens were corrupt!

WHO CHANGED THE LONG STANDING WHISTLEBLOWER RULES JUST BEFORE SUBMITTAL OF THE FAKE WHISTLEBLOWER REPORT? DRAIN THE SWAMP!

Again, the President of Ukraine said there was NO (ZERO) PRESSURE PUT ON HIM BY ME. Case closed!

 

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2od0nxe
via IFTTT