Tag: news

Everybody Suddenly Realizes the Supreme Court Is About To Hear an Important LGBT Issue

The Justice Department has submitted a brief to the Supreme Court arguing that federal civil rights laws do not protect workers against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.

This is not a surprise. The Department of Justice has taken this stance since 2017, when it formally ended its Obama-era position that federal law does in fact prohibit such discrimination. But the department’s amicus brief, submitted on Friday, has produced a burst of news coverage for the issue.

The Supreme Court agreed in April to take up a trio of cases about workplace discrimination against gay and transgender employees. This flew under a lot of people’s radar at the time, thanks perhaps to the complicated nature of the arguments. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination on the basis of “sex.” At the time of the law’s passage, this was understood to mean discrimination on the basis of whether a person was a man or a woman. A subsequent Supreme Court ruling, 1989’s Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins, held that the law prohibited discrimination on the basis of whether a person stereotypically looks or behaves a certain sex—in that case, a woman who was seen as not “feminine” enough.

In the years following that precedent, we’ve seen further legal analysis of what it means to discriminate on the basis of sex “stereotypes,” and that has led to some conflicts of opinion on the federal level. Some courts have held that discriminating against a person for being transgender is the same as discriminating on the basis of stereotypes of how men and women are supposed to look and dress. Under President Barack Obama, the Justice Department agreed with this interpretation, leading to a guidance from his administration that public schools could not force transgender students to use the facilities that matched their birth sex.

Under President Donald Trump, this Justice Department quickly reversed this position, determining that the Civil Rights Act’s definition of “sex” did not include sexual orientation or gender identity. Meanwhile, the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission still supports the Obama administration’s reading. The nation’s top court has resisted weighing in until this year, leaving conflicting rulings and positions in place.

The Department of Justice’s argument is pretty easy to summarize: Sexual orientation and gender identity is not included in the Civil Rights Act; Congress has the power to add sexual orientation and gender identity to federal laws and has done so in the past; Congress has not added sexual orientation and gender identity to the Civil Rights Act despite political pushes to do so; therefore, these characteristics are not protected under federal law.

There’s been some misleading coverage of what’s happening here. One Buzzfeed headline—”The Trump Administration Asked The Supreme Court To Legalize Firing Workers Simply Being Gay“—is particularly egregious. The Justice Department is not asking the Supreme Court for permission to fire people for being gay. It’s arguing that the current federal law doesn’t protect against anti-LGBT discrimination and that these firing decisions are already currently legal.

The article also suggests that a ruling in the Justice Department’s favor would affect both federal and state-level discrimination laws against sex-based discrimination. This is simply not accurate. Many states have their own statutory or constitutional bans on gay and/or transgender discrimination. This ruling would not affect those. It only addresses the federal Civil Rights Act. Now, this could certainly have an impact in states that do not have their own antidiscrimination rules. The three lawsuits central to this case are from states that don’t, on their own, protect against anti-LGBT workplace discrimination. But even if the Supreme Court sides with the Justice Department’s interpretation, it won’t affect LGBT workers in the 21 states that already prohibit this discrimination.

The case is fundamentally not about whether it should be legal to fire people for being gay or transgender; it’s about how far a law’s meaning can be stretched before it no longer represents what those who passed it intended. It’s very clear that Congress did not intend to include gay and transgender people at the time. This was five years before the Stonewall Riots, at a time when the federal government was purging gay employees and when most politicians believed that gays were mentally ill sexual predators.

Furthermore, as the Justice Department notes in its brief, lawmakers have been trying for years—all the way back to 1974—to add sexual orientation and gender identity to the Civil Rights Act. Congress started getting closer in 2013, when the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) made it through the Senate and died in the House. But then that morphed into a new bill called the Equality Act, which includes ENDA but also dramatically increases the definition of “public accommodation” in its regulations against customer discrimination to include just about every single consumer business.

That means the federal government would be able to take action against just about any business in the country accused of discrimination against customers, not just certain types of venues, such as hotels, restaurants, gas stations, and clubs. The expansion of ENDA into the Equality Act probably makes it radioactive for any number of conservatives who might have otherwise have come to support ENDA. (A cynic might wonder if that is the point.)

Some of the same folks who support the Equality Act also want the Supreme Court to find that the Civil Rights Act already protects against LGBT discrimination. The American Civil Liberties Union is assisting the plaintiff in one of the cases that the Court is considering, while at the same time lobbying for the passage of the Equality Act.

It’s easy to understand the political logic here—you want to cover all your bases and not just pin your hopes on one path or the other. But it’s still contradictory. If an ALCU lawyer is arguing before the court, you should expect a justice to ask why the organization is arguing that the Civil Rights Act already protects against anti-LGBT discrimination while at the same time lobbying for reforms to the law so that it will protect against anti-LGBT discrimination.

Given the current makeup of the Supreme Court, I predict a ruling that sides with the Justice Department. Again, a cynic might wonder if that’s partly the point. An adverse ruling here could serve as a helpful election-year rallying point, with the Democratic base coming out to push for a Democratic president and Senate able to pass the Equality Act and change the balance of the Court.

I’ve said my own piece about the Equality Act: I think the cultural shift toward LGBT acceptance makes additional federal regulations unnecessary, because while discrimination still exists, it’s not as widespread or as oppressive as it once was.

The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear oral arguments on October 8.

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Ron Paul Asks “Who Are The Real Extremists?”

Authored by Ron Paul via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity,

The recent mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton have re-ignited efforts to pass “Red Flag” laws, which allow the government to take away a person’s guns without due process, and expanded background checks on those wishing to purchase a gun. Some supporters of these measures acknowledge they would not have prevented the Dayton and El Paso shootings, but they think the government must “do something,“ even if that something only makes it more difficult for average Americans to exercise their Second Amendment rights.

The fact that one of the shooters may have been motivated by anti-immigrant views has led to calls for government surveillance of “right-wing extremists.” There are talks of developing computer programs to search social media and identify those whose extreme views supposedly make them likely to commit violence. There are also calls for legislation giving the government new powers to prevent “domestic terrorism.”

Proposals targeting individuals based on their political beliefs — no matter how noxious they are — are a step toward criminalizing those beliefs. If the government gains new powers to treat those with abhorrent beliefs as potential criminals, it will not be long before those powers are used against anyone who challenges the welfare-warfare status quo.

The current use of “right-wing extremism” as a justification for expanding the surveillance state is the mirror image of the use of “Islamo-fascism” to justify the post 9-11 infringements on civil liberties. That is why it is distressing to see progressives and Muslim advocacy groups pushing for new federal authority to crack down on “domestic terrorism,” just as it was disappointing when so many conservatives who opposed Bill Clinton’s attempt to expand the surveillance state endorsed the exact same proposals when they were included in the PATRIOT Act. It is ironic that progressives are supporting new laws against domestic terrorism while simultaneously protesting FBI targeting of Black Lives Matter activists as domestic terrorists.

This is not to say there are not those with extreme ideologies who threaten our liberty and safety, but they are the Republicans and Democrats located in Washington, DC! The most obvious example of DC-based violent extremism is the war party propagandists who spread falsehoods to build support for regime change wars. By the time their falsehoods have been exposed, it is too late: America is stuck in another no-win quagmire and the war party has moved on to its next target.

Demagogic politicians also fan fear and hatred to protect and expand the welfare state. Right-wing nationalists scapegoat illegal migrants without distinguishing between those who come here to take advantage of the welfare system from those who come here seeking economic opportunity — while left-wing progressives demonize the wealthy without distinguishing between those who made their fortunes in the market serving consumers and those who made their fortunes by manipulating the political process. These extremists use scapegoating and demagoguery to gain power and keep the people from focusing on the real source of their discontent: the welfare-warfare state and the fiat money system that makes it possible.

As the welfare-warfare-fiat money system collapses, we will see increased violence. This will result in an increase in police state power. The only way to avoid this fate is for good people to unite and replace the extremist ideologies of the mainstream of both left and right with the ideas of liberty. A good start would be applying “Red Flag” laws to remove neocons from any influence over US foreign policy!

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2NABAh0 Tyler Durden

Everybody Suddenly Realizes the Supreme Court Is About To Hear an Important LGBT Issue

The Justice Department has submitted a brief to the Supreme Court arguing that federal civil rights laws do not protect workers against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.

This is not a surprise. The Department of Justice has taken this stance since 2017, when it formally ended its Obama-era position that federal law does in fact prohibit such discrimination. But the department’s amicus brief, submitted on Friday, has produced a burst of news coverage for the issue.

The Supreme Court agreed in April to take up a trio of cases about workplace discrimination against gay and transgender employees. This flew under a lot of people’s radar at the time, thanks perhaps to the complicated nature of the arguments. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination on the basis of “sex.” At the time of the law’s passage, this was understood to mean discrimination on the basis of whether a person was a man or a woman. A subsequent Supreme Court ruling, 1989’s Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins, held that the law prohibited discrimination on the basis of whether a person stereotypically looks or behaves a certain sex—in that case, a woman who was seen as not “feminine” enough.

In the years following that precedent, we’ve seen further legal analysis of what it means to discriminate on the basis of sex “stereotypes,” and that has led to some conflicts of opinion on the federal level. Some courts have held that discriminating against a person for being transgender is the same as discriminating on the basis of stereotypes of how men and women are supposed to look and dress. Under President Barack Obama, the Justice Department agreed with this interpretation, leading to a guidance from his administration that public schools could not force transgender students to use the facilities that matched their birth sex.

Under President Donald Trump, this Justice Department quickly reversed this position, determining that the Civil Rights Act’s definition of “sex” did not include sexual orientation or gender identity. Meanwhile, the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission still supports the Obama administration’s reading. The nation’s top court has resisted weighing in until this year, leaving conflicting rulings and positions in place.

The Department of Justice’s argument is pretty easy to summarize: Sexual orientation and gender identity is not included in the Civil Rights Act; Congress has the power to add sexual orientation and gender identity to federal laws and has done so in the past; Congress has not added sexual orientation and gender identity to the Civil Rights Act despite political pushes to do so; therefore, these characteristics are not protected under federal law.

There’s been some misleading coverage of what’s happening here. One Buzzfeed headline—”The Trump Administration Asked The Supreme Court To Legalize Firing Workers Simply Being Gay“—is particularly egregious. The Justice Department is not asking the Supreme Court for permission to fire people for being gay. It’s arguing that the current federal law doesn’t protect against anti-LGBT discrimination and that these firing decisions are already currently legal.

The article also suggests that a ruling in the Justice Department’s favor would affect both federal and state-level discrimination laws against sex-based discrimination. This is simply not accurate. Many states have their own statutory or constitutional bans on gay and/or transgender discrimination. This ruling would not affect those. It only addresses the federal Civil Rights Act. Now, this could certainly have an impact in states that do not have their own antidiscrimination rules. The three lawsuits central to this case are from states that don’t, on their own, protect against anti-LGBT workplace discrimination. But even if the Supreme Court sides with the Justice Department’s interpretation, it won’t affect LGBT workers in the 21 states that already prohibit this discrimination.

The case is fundamentally not about whether it should be legal to fire people for being gay or transgender; it’s about how far a law’s meaning can be stretched before it no longer represents what those who passed it intended. It’s very clear that Congress did not intend to include gay and transgender people at the time. This was five years before the Stonewall Riots, at a time when the federal government was purging gay employees and when most politicians believed that gays were mentally ill sexual predators.

Furthermore, as the Justice Department notes in its brief, lawmakers have been trying for years—all the way back to 1974—to add sexual orientation and gender identity to the Civil Rights Act. Congress started getting closer in 2013, when the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) made it through the Senate and died in the House. But then that morphed into a new bill called the Equality Act, which includes ENDA but also dramatically increases the definition of “public accommodation” in its regulations against customer discrimination to include just about every single consumer business.

That means the federal government would be able to take action against just about any business in the country accused of discrimination against customers, not just certain types of venues, such as hotels, restaurants, gas stations, and clubs. The expansion of ENDA into the Equality Act probably makes it radioactive for any number of conservatives who might have otherwise have come to support ENDA. (A cynic might wonder if that is the point.)

Some of the same folks who support the Equality Act also want the Supreme Court to find that the Civil Rights Act already protects against LGBT discrimination. The American Civil Liberties Union is assisting the plaintiff in one of the cases that the Court is considering, while at the same time lobbying for the passage of the Equality Act.

It’s easy to understand the political logic here—you want to cover all your bases and not just pin your hopes on one path or the other. But it’s still contradictory. If an ALCU lawyer is arguing before the court, you should expect a justice to ask why the organization is arguing that the Civil Rights Act already protects against anti-LGBT discrimination while at the same time lobbying for reforms to the law so that it will protect against anti-LGBT discrimination.

Given the current makeup of the Supreme Court, I predict a ruling that sides with the Justice Department. Again, a cynic might wonder if that’s partly the point. An adverse ruling here could serve as a helpful election-year rallying point, with the Democratic base coming out to push for a Democratic president and Senate able to pass the Equality Act and change the balance of the Court.

I’ve said my own piece about the Equality Act: I think the cultural shift toward LGBT acceptance makes additional federal regulations unnecessary, because while discrimination still exists, it’s not as widespread or as oppressive as it once was.

The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear oral arguments on October 8.

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After Mark Carney Admits That Low Rates Lead To War, San Fran Fed Suddenly Changes Its Mind On NIRP

Back in February 2019, we reported that the San Francisco Fed, already infamous for wasting millions in taxpayer funds on glaringly idiotic research, reached a remarkable, goalseeked conclusion: in a paper titled “How Much Could Negative Rates Have Helped the Recovery“, it found that – as the title suggests – negative interest rate would have helped the recovery.

As a reminder, unlike Europe or Switzerland, where deposit rates have been negative for years, the US central bank is generally perceived as not having a mandate to take rates below the “lower bound” or negative, i.e. to implement what is affectionately known as “NIRP.” And yet, according to the regional west coast Fed this is a mistake, because research from San Fran Fed’s Vasco Curdia, “allowing the federal funds rate to drop below zero may have reduced the depth of the recession and enabled the economy to return more quickly to its full potential. It also may have allowed inflation to rise faster toward the Fed’s 2% target. In other words, negative interest rates may be a useful tool to promote the Fed’s dual mandate.“

While the report engages in the type of tortured, goalseeked analysis that we have grown to “love” from central banks for the past decade, the same central banks who did not anticipate that their disastrous bubble-blowing policies would result in the financial crisis of 2008 (which last we checked, has not been blamed on Putin just yet), and presents the following chart to confirm that, indeed, if only the Fed had cut rates to -0.75%, the recovery would have magically been far stronger…

… and concludes that NIRP is precisely what the (econ) PhD(octor) should have ordered:

This Letter quantitatively evaluates the beneficial impact a negative Fed policy rate could have had during the recovery from the Great Recession. While it’s difficult to capture all the complexities of the economy in a model, this analysis suggests that negative rates could have mitigated the depth of the recession and sped up the recovery, though they would have had little effect on economic activity beyond 2014. The analysis also shows that the interest rate does not have to fall too deeply into negative territory to accomplish meaningful economic improvements.

As we concluded then “In short, NIRP would have made the recession shorter and less acute according to the San Francisco Fed, and since it is impossible to argue the counterfactual, we now have “research” that sets the framework for what happens next.“

That this report was issued just days after the ECB itself “found” that QE had, hilariously, reduced inequality, was probably not a coincidence.

After just months later, first the ECB pre-announced it would cut rates even more negative and resume QE, while the Fed waited a few months before its first rate cut in a decade, with some speculating that the Fed will cut all the way to zero and beyond.

In other words, the SF Fed was merely setting the stage for what comes next, or so we thought.

Or maybe not, because in an unexpected reversal, on Monday the same San Francisco Fed published an economic letter, titled “Negative Interest Rates and Inflation Expectations in Japan” which reaches a decidedly different conclusion: that contrary to economist expectations – and we highlight “economist”, because this conclusion would have been obvious to anyone with a semi-functioning frontal cortex – Japan’s negative rate experience “resulted in decreased, rather than increased, immediate and medium-term expected inflation.“

In other words, NIRP actually compounded the problem it was meant to address, and hardly the panacea that the San Fran Fed said back in February is what would have helped quicken the recovery.

Here is the summary from the paper:

After Japan introduced a negative policy interest rate in 2016, market expectations for inflation over the medium term fell immediately. This can be seen by assessing how prices for Japanese bonds with embedded deflation protection responded to the policy announcement. The reaction stresses the uncertainty surrounding the effectiveness of negative policy rates as expansionary tools when inflation expectations are anchored at low levels. Japan’s experience also illustrates the desirability of taking preemptive steps to avoid the zero interest rate bound.

But… but… the San Francisco Fed in February said precisely the opposite.

Mocking intellectually challenged individuals, i.e. career economists, aside, here is the “unexpected” conclusion:

Because of the long period of low inflation in Japan, its experience provides an interesting example of the impact of negative monetary policy rates when inflation expectations are well-anchored at very low levels. We examine movements in yields on inflation-indexed and deflation-protected Japanese government bonds to gauge changes in the market’s inflation expectations from the BOJ moving to negative policy rates. Our results suggest that this movement resulted in decreased, rather than increased, immediate and medium-term expected inflation. This therefore suggests using caution when considering the efficacy of negative rates as expansionary policy tools under well-anchored inflation expectations.

Why, what a total and unexpected surprsie: almost as if nobody could have possibly foreseen that doing much more of the same will not only not lead to a different outcome, but will make the existing situation worse. Congratulations to at least the two SF Fed economists who “figured it out.”

And yet, we wondered, what may have prompted this shift, and the answer quickly presented itself when we thought of Mark Carney’s historic Jackson Hole speech in which the BOE head admitted that the days of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency are ending, and it should be replaced with an alternative (his laughable proposal was to have a “Synthetic Hegemonic Currency”, i.e. Facebook’s Libra become the world’s next reserve currency. While we are confident that Mark Zuckerberg would be delighted if he were to become the central banker to the world, the probability of such an outcome absent war is nil.

However, what was maybe even more notable in Carney’s speech was the following brief admission that everything that has happened in the past decade, every central bank policy pursued since the financial crisis has been a mistake. This:

Past instances of very low rates have tended to coincide with high risk events such as wars, financial crises, and breaks in the monetary regime.

So, let’s get this straight: for years, the general population has been told that only lower rates can spark an economic recovery, inspire higher inflation (as if that’s good) and lead to an economic rebound. Yet suddenly we find ourselves in an odd predicament, where years after a website called Zero Hedge warned that low rates and QE would lead to civil war in the US (a prediction for which it was roundly mocked), none other than one of the most respected central bankers warns that, wait for it, “low rates have tended to coincide with events such as wars and financial crises.”

So… we were right and these creatures were either clueless or lying all along?

As for the San Fran Fed, that absurd joke of a “research institution” which couldn’t see the housing bubble in 2006/2007 despite being smack in the middle of it when it was headed by one Janet Yellen, finally figuring out what we first said ten years ago – when we were broadly mocked as conspiracy theorists –  all we can say is “who gives a shit.”

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

“It May Just Detonate…”

Via AdventuresInCapitalism.com,

Over the years, I’ve avoided talking much about US politics unless it directly impacts the markets. Longtime readers will know that I’m socially liberal and economically libertarian. As for politicians, I find them all to be liars; playing off human emotions for their own gain. I hate both main parties equally, as I don’t see either party representing what I believe in. With that out of the way, I feel compelled to speak about politics and how it’s about to affect the market.

Let’s start with our Stock Pumper n’ Chief. I had high hopes for Trump. Besides cutting my taxes, he’s accomplished very little. I guess I should have expected that outcome, as our political system exists to perpetuate inertia on key issues. Besides, Trump hasn’t exactly gone out of his way to build up coalitions. In fact, he’s mostly done the opposite. However, my main expectation for Trump, was that he’d be good for the stock market. Even my optimism was too conservative in this regard. For three years, he’s barely let a day go by, without reminding people to buy stocks. He’s met every selloff with frantic tweeting and cajoling of the various government branches. Fed Reserve Chairman Powell has become his piñata. Say what you will about Trump’s Presidency, he’s built one hell of a stock market bubble.

You need to go back to the Jesse Livermore era to find anyone who’s used the media and the political pulpit as successfully to pump stocks…

Now, let’s turn to the upcoming Democratic Party primary.

One of these candidates needs to win this thing and then compete against Trump for President. That’s how the system works. Looking through the list, some are worse than others for the market. Not one of the leading contenders talks about the market in a positive light. In fact, quite a few of the candidates are openly hostile to the market.

My guess at who wins? It looks increasingly likely that Elizabeth Warren will be the candidate.

Why do I say that? I’m simply looking at the current betting odds.

Using basic Kuppy logic; Bernie just doesn’t seem to have it this time (I don’t know why). Not a day goes by where Biden doesn’t seem to fumble and say or do something dumb. He’s likely a bit too senile to hold it together. No one else is really close in the running. Sure, it’s still early and someone could come from behind and clean up, but that hasn’t been how the last few of these primaries worked once you’re this far into the process. Usually, one of the top contenders goes all the way and the rest of the pack falls further behind.

Could Warren beat Trump in the presidential election? It’s far too early to know. I do know that as we start getting closer to that date, there will be polls. Some of these polls will show her winning. Then chaos will break out in the markets. If Argentina’s stock market could drop by half as the socialist candidate pulled ahead in the primary, why can’t ours? Even the polls showing her ahead in the Democratic Party primaries ought to scare the hell out of the market. This is one of those black swans that no one is talking about, yet it’s increasingly coming into sight.

I don’t want to get into the politics of Warren vs. Trump. I see good and bad policy plans from both. What I want to point out is that Trump is the greatest stock promoter of our generation and Warren is openly hostile to the stock market. When polls show them sort of close, what do you think the market will do? I suspect the market wants to crash anyway. Will Trump blame the crash on Warren – putting this all further into the spotlight?

I’ve spoken a lot about avoiding shorts over the years, but for the first time in a decade, I bought a decent slug of long-dated index puts over the past two weeks – enough to cover all of my long exposure (and then some). Most of my longs are “long-shorts” but experience tells me that if the market drops substantially, my “long-shorts” will drop too – then roar – much as they did in 2009 to 2012. First, I want to be protected for any potential market collapse.

We’re looking at an imploding global economy, combined with a US election that will have major implications for the equity markets. Meanwhile, valuations are at all-time highs, yet our Stock Pumper n’ Chief seems to have lost control of the narrative. This sure seems like the setup for a crash. Watch those predictor polls; a Warren presidency sure isn’t priced into anything.

I don’t like being short, I don’t like watching my puts slowly bleed theta. I always avoid these things. However, investing is about recognizing when there are exceptions to your own rules. I think the market is about to crash. I sure as hell want protection.

*  *  *

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via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2U3qRgp Tyler Durden

Accused Pedophile Woody Allen Seen Popping Out Of Convicted Pedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s Mansion

The list of people caught associating with Jeffrey Epstein after he did time for pedophilia keeps growing. From Bill Gates to Prince Andrew to Ehud Barak – the list of famous names associated with Epstein now includes filmmaker and accused pedophile Woody Allen, who was seen exiting the financier’s Manhattan townhouse after a December, 2010 party in honor of another accused pedophile, Prince Andrew. 

Allen and his wife, Soon-Yi Previn (who ex-wife Mia Farrow adopted when she was eight years old) were seen leaving the soire, however the two were spotted leaving the mansion on more than one occasion during Prince Andrew’s stay, according to the Daily Mail. 

In 2017, Allen’s adopted daughter Dylan Farrow wrote an open letter to the New York Times, accusing Allen of sexually abusing her when she was just 7 years old.

Soon-Yi came to Allen’s defense in a 2018 New York Magazine profile, calling Dylan Farrow’s accusations “so unjust.” 

Farrow hit back, posting in a statement on Twitter “Woody Allen molested me when I was seven years old, part of a documented pattern of inappropriate, abusive touching that led a judge to say there was no evidence I was coached and that it was unsafe for me to be in Woody Allen’s presence. 

Back to Andrew’s party: 

As the Mail reports: “The December 2 dinner was held in the mansion’s second-floor dining room. TV anchor Katie Couric, once the highest-paid female presenter in the US, sat alongside comedian Chelsea Handler, a close friend of Gwyneth Paltrow and Jennifer Aniston. Also there was George Stephanopoulos, a former White House communications director under President Bill Clinton turned £15 million-a-year ABC News host.”  

So we can add the above names to the list of people with no problem hanging out with a pedophile. 

The soiree is believed to have also been attended by Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of the disgraced media tycoon Robert Maxwell and Epstein’s one-time girlfriend.

Multiple Epstein accusers have claimed that Ms Maxwell ‘procured’ girls for the perverted millionaire. She denies the allegations.

Guests would have walked past bizarre erotic artwork en route to the dining room with its gleaming mahogany table, including a painting of Bill Clinton in red heels and a blue dress, a reference to the outfit worn by Monica Lewinsky when she performed a sex act on him. –Daily Mail

Sounds like quite the gathering…

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

Can Trump Re-Industrialize America Without Blowing-Up The World?

Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,

The G-7 Blues

What’s at stake in all these international confabs like the G-7 are the tenuous supply lines that keep the global game going. The critical ones deliver oil around the world. China imports about 10 million barrels a day to keep its operations going. It produces less than 4 million barrels a day. Only about 15 percent of its imports come from next door in Russia. The rest comes from the Middle East, Africa, and South America. Think: long lines of tanker ships traveling vast distances across the seas, navigating through narrow straits. The Chinese formula is simple: oil in, exports out. It has worked nicely for them in recent decades. Things go on until they don’t.

That game is lubricated by a fabulous stream of debt generated by Chinese banks that ultimately answer to the Communist Party. The party is the Chinese buffer between banking and reality. If the party doesn’t like the distress signals that the banks give off, it just pretends the signals are not coming through, while it does the hokey-pokey with its digital accounting, and things appear sound a while longer.

The US produces just over 12 million barrels of oil a day. About 6.5 million of our production is shale oil. We use nearly 20 million a day. (We’re not “energy independent.”) The shale oil industry is wobbling under the onerous debt load that it has racked up since 2005. About 90 percent of the companies involved in shale oil lose money. The capital costs for drilling, hauling a gazillion truckloads of water and fracking sand to the rig pads, and sucking the oil out, exceed the profit from doing all that. It’s simply all we can do to keep the game going in our corner of the planet, but it’s not a good business model. After you’ve proved conclusively that you can’t make a buck at this using borrowed money, the lenders will quit lending you more money. That’s about where we are now.

Europe is near the end of its North Sea oil bonanza and there’s nothing in the on-deck circle for them. Germany tried to prove that they could run the country on “renewables” and that experiment has flopped. They have no idea what they’re going to do to keep the game going in their patch of nations. They must be freaking out in their charming capital cities.

The next economic bust is going to amount to the crack-up of the oil age, and the “global economy” that emerged in its late stage. It was all about moving fantastic quantities of things around the planet. The movements were exquisitely tuned, along with the money flows that circulated freely, like blood carrying oxygen to each organ. All of that is coming to an end. The nations of the world must be feeling desperate, despite the appearance of good manners at meetings like the G-7. What’s at stake for everybody in the dark background is the ability to maintain high standards of living only recently attained. And the fear behind that is not knowing just how far backward these high standards of living may have to slide.

A lot of people still alive in China must remember a daily existence on par with the 12th century. In the USA, where democracy is mostly represented by low-order thinking skills, the memory of life before electricity and running water is long gone. We’ve been living in Futurama since the end of the last world war. That war, by the way, is not entirely forgotten in Europe, despite all the charm currently on display and the tourists swarming with their selfie sticks. The place was a charnel house for centuries and the Euro folk will do about anything to suppress conflict. Lately, it looks like they’re willing to give up on Western Civilization itself to keep the peace.

Lord knows what Mr. Trump’s strategy is with these so-called “trade talks.” He has explicitly enough pushed for the re-industrialization of America, and that implies — among other things — decoupling from the China’s torrential merchandise supply lines, cutting off its revenues. Closing off China’s access to US markets itself might be enough to finally blow up China’s deeply fraudulent banking system. Maybe the aim is to just disable China, derail it from its seeming aim of becoming the next world hegemon. Does Mr. Trump think he can do that without blowing up the rest of the world’s financial arrangements? The stock markets haven’t been digesting that story very well lately. Could the US government be collectively dumb enough to think that shale oil will permit this country to re-industrialize while the rest of the world stumbles back into a dark age?

More likely, all the advanced nations will make that downward journey together. The US is well on its way, despite all the MAGA bravado. The country is reeling in bad faith, delusion, official corruption, porno-pharmaceutical vice, and ethnic rancor. The people who live in FlyoverLand style themselves like Visigoths, all tatted up and armed to the teeth, moiling angrily at the edge of the Rome-like coastal enclaves. The elites want to stuff themselves inside their phones and live there. Guess what: that won’t be a “safe space.”

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/343RWES Tyler Durden

‘Mystery Buyer’ Has Purchased The 2.1M Barrels Of Iranian Oil Aboard The Adrian Darya

As the previously detained Grace 1 tanker, since renamed the Adrian Darya 1, continues its voyage toward a port in southern Turkey, there’s been a significant development regarding the 2.1 million barrels of Iranian crude aboard which the US has sought to capture, claiming the ship is engaged in illegal sanctions busting. 

On Monday an Iranian government spokesman announced the 2.1 million barrels have been sold to an unnamed buyer while en route across the Mediterranean. 

In statements made to reporters in Tehran, spokesman Ali Rabiei, said of the oil’s as yet unmentioned unloading point, “The buyer of the oil decides where its destination is.” He added that the world is “witnessing the wrong policy by the U.S. in monitoring and intervention in others’ internal affairs.”

Image source: Getty/AFP

The Associated Press noted that “At market rates, the crude oil aboard the Adrian Darya would be worth about $130 million” and further that “anyone buying it likely would be targeted by U.S. financial sanctions.”

Over the weekend the real-time ship tracking website MarineTraffic showed a change in the Iran-flagged Adrian Darya’s destination. This after the US State Department threatened that should Greece provide any aid or facilities to the vessel carrying 2.1 million barrels of Iranian oil, it would be tantamount to “material support to terrorism”. 

The Unites States says the tanker is controlled by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and thus deems any state’s interaction with it support of a formally designated terrorist group. There’s still an active US seizure warrant for the vessel. 

The tanker’s data initially had as its intended destination Kalamata, Greece, but later changed it during the voyage to Mersin, Turkey.

Tracking data now shows it plans to dock at the southern Turkish port on Aug. 31 — an interesting choice given Washington-Ankara relations are at a low point over Turkey’s purchase of the Russian S-400 anti-air defense systems, and resulting cancellation of the US F-35 transfer.

Iran for its part has warned the US and UK not to interfere in the Iranian-flagged vessel’s movement, even recently voicing the possibility of sending a military escort to ensure the ship’s safe passage. 

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/344qtmv Tyler Durden

The Benefits Of A Profoundly Shattering Recession

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

Does anyone really think The Everything Bubble can just keep inflating forever?

What do I mean by a profoundly shattering recession? I mean, a systemic, crushing recession that can’t be reversed with central bank magic, a recession that only deepens with time. The last real recession was roughly two generations ago in 1981; younger generations have no experience of a profound recession, and perhaps older folks have forgotten the shock, angst and bitterness.

A profoundly shattering recession leaves tremendous damage and pain in its wake. Millions of people who reckoned their position was secure get laid off, businesses that looked solid melt into air, large corporations flip from hiring thousands to firing thousands, and everyone on the edge of insolvency gets a hard push over the cliff.

Profoundly shattering recessions feed on themselves in a self-reinforcing dynamic: the first domino could be a supply-shock, or a decline in demand due to credit exhaustion. Since businesses have cut everything to the bone in the past decade, there are no buffers left: layoffs begin immediately, and those layoffs further reduce demand as households have to tighten their belts to survive as even those who escape the first round of layoffs find bonuses and overtime have been slashed.

Since the problem isn’t high interest rates, central banks reducing rates or pushing them into negative territory only reveals their impotence. If negative interest rates boosted the real economy, Europe and Japan would be experiencing rapid expansion instead of stagnation.

Layoffs, the failure of central banks and soaring fiscal deficits trigger a drop in consumer and investor sentiment which feeds back into declining sales and profits, which then trigger more layoffs as businesses must cut expenses as revenues crater.

Clearly, there is no benefit to households or enterprises to this self-reinforcing recession. The benefits are structural: financialization, the parasite that has eaten our economy from the inside, will collapse along with the mountains of debt that fueled it.

Zombie corporations and local governments that have been insolvent in all but name will finally go bankrupt, clearing the system of their dead weight. Economies supporting zombie entities are sacrificing their capital to keep insiders afloat, which leaves less capital to invest in increasing productivity, which is the only way to increase broad-based wealth.

The Everything Bubble will finally pop, stripping the system of phantom speculative wealth and fictitious capital. Price discovery will once again be possible, as all the central bank-inflated bubbles will deflate and real demand and supply will set the price of assets.

Once central banks have been revealed as powerless, the quasi-religious belief in their omnipotence will dissipate, and people will finally start dealing with the Gilded Age excesses of the past 20 years. Common sense limits on financial predation and trickery will gather support, and tricks like corporate buybacks will be outlawed or restricted.

If capital can’t earn a low-risk return, then it can’t flow to productive uses.Once central bank manipulation fails, capital might demand a yield, and in doing so, it will start a beneficial cycle in which speculation will no longer be enabled and rewarded by zero-interest rates or negative rates.

Only those enterprises and households with productive uses for borrowed capital will reckon the interest costs are worth the risk of taking on debt. The bloated, parasitic banking sector will implode, and what’s left of it will return to its proper role, a thin, regulated sector of the economy stripped of political power.

All the cartels and monopolies that depend on debt will implode: banking, higher education, and ultimately national defense and sickcare, which depend on federal borrowing to fund their predatory pricing.

The U.S. economy needs a re-set if it is to lift all boats, and the sooner the re-set occurs, the sooner we can dispense with all the cronyist intervention, self-serving manipulation and exploitive distortion that’s turned our economy and society into a speculative casino that only benefits a few insiders and those who know how to rig the game in their favor.

A profoundly shattering recession requires patience, fortitude and an awareness that the sacrifices demanded will be worth the pain if we rid our society of at least the top layer of financial and political parasites and predators that have corrupted our economy, our governance and our society.

Does anyone really think The Everything Bubble can just keep inflating forever? Surely nobody’s that deluded.

The global economy is destabilizing, and we’re about to discover there is no way to halt a profoundly shattering recession. We have a once in 80 years opportunity to right the ship before it sinks into oblivion.

*  *  *

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Did Trump’s 2016 Rallies Trigger a 226% Increase in Local Hate Crimes? Not Exactly.

Last March, a number of media outlets—including The Washington Post, Business Insider, Vox, and The Hill—reported a startling figure: During the 2016 campaign, U.S. counties in which candidate Donald Trump held a political rally experienced a 226 percent increase in hate crimes over those that did not.

The Post reupped this claim in a recent article, and numerous Trump-critical politicians—including Sen. Bernie Sanders (D–Vt.) and Rep. Ilhan Omar (D–Minn.)—seized upon it. “Mr. President: stop your racist, hateful and anti-immigrant rhetoric,” wrote Sanders in a Facebook post that referenced the statistic. “Your language creates a climate which emboldens violent extremists.”

But much like the unsupported idea that the hate crime rate is higher than ever, the 226 percent statistic doesn’t quite stand up to scrutiny.

The source of the statistic is a study by political scientists Ayal Feinberg, Regina Branton, and Valerie Martinez-Ebers. The trio co-authored the initial Post story, which ran under the title “Counties that hosted a 2016 Trump rally saw a 226 percent increase in hate crimes.” This headline misrepresents the study’s findings. Trump’s appearance did not cause counties to suddenly experience 226 percent more hate crimes—rather, counties that hosted Trump rallies experienced 3.26 times as many incidents as other counties, a 226 percent difference.

And those incidents, in turn, were not all hate crimes. The authors’ sole source of data is the Anti-Defamation League’s 2016 report on hate, extremism, anti-Semitism, and terrorism. This lists 1,321 anti-Semitic incidents reported to the organization in 2016. There are two important things to keep in mind here: 1) the list‘s focus is anti-Semitism, and 2) many of the incidents on the list are not actually hate crimes.

The first point matters because many people have interpreted this study’s findings as proof of the notion that Trump’s odious comments about immigrants and Muslims (“shithole countries,” the travel ban, etc.) correspond with a spike in hate crimes committed against these groups. The Associated Press’s coverage of the 226 percent statistic, for instance, begins by noting that “President Donald Trump has often railed about an ‘invasion of illegals’ at the southern border, words echoed in a screed the El Paso shooting suspect apparently posted that called the attack that killed 22 people at a Walmart his response to a ‘Hispanic invasion of Texas.'” It’s certainly conceivable that Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric could prompt an increase in hate crimes against them, but this study doesn’t really test such a proposition, as it is almost exclusively focused on anti-Semitic acts.

The second point is important because “hate crime” is a very specific category that requires the perpetrator to have committed a crime—assault, vandalism, etc.—for reasons of animus toward a marginalized group. The ADL counts all sorts of anti-Semitic speech—vile stuff, to be sure, but much of it non-criminal. A great many incidents on the ADL’s list are schoolyard bullying, for example. According to this study, Trump’s political rallies are correlated with a significant spike in these kinds of incidents, but that’s not as strong a finding as the headlines suggest.

The ADL dataset, by the way, is compiled using “news and media reports, government documents (including police reports), victim reports, extremist-related sources and Center on Extremism investigations.” Greater public interest in reporting on these kinds of incidents could result in a perceived increase. The list is naturally selective, and incomplete: There are more than 3,000 counties in the U.S., and the ADL counted just 1,321 incidents in 2016. A “226 percent increase” sounds like a lot, but we’re talking about less than one hate crime per county on average.

When I reached out to the study’s authors some months ago, Feinberg explained that the study had not yet been peer reviewed, and thus he couldn’t release it to me. (This was frustrating, given that the study’s findings were already being reported as if they were unimpeachable.) But after the second round of media coverage, Feinberg’s team released it.

When I raised some of these issues with him—that anti-Semitic incidents are not necessarily hate crimes, in particular—he replied that “as a result of queries like yours,” his team would be re-running the numbers. This time they intend to use the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting database, which compiles statistics on hate crimes.

“The trump rally coefficient is both significant and directionally consistent with the ADL data,” Feinberg assured me. His team plans to release the updated findings in the near future.

The FBI’s database has a significant flaw of its own: Not all police jurisdictions participate in it, and thus its overall portrait of an ever-increasing hate-crime rate may well be misleading. Perhaps it could be a more useful vehicle for county-to-county comparisons than the ADL figures, but with the important caveat that there are some areas of the country that don’t submit data at all. While I look forward to parsing the new results, it will still be important to interpret them with the appropriate levels of salt.

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