Former Maricopa County Sheriff, failed U.S. Senate candidate, and habitual abuser of power Joe Arpaio announced he will run to regain his old office in 2020.
“Thousands want me to run for Sheriff,” Arpaio, 87, announced in a tweet Sunday. “Ready for bruising, bitter campaign. Never back down.”
Arpaio was first elected sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, in 1993 and held the office until he was defeated in 2016. He styled himself as “the toughest sheriff in America” and became known for his “tent city” jail, where inmates wearing old-timey striped uniforms were held in tents in the brutal desert heat.
He was also notorious for using large-scale sweeps of Latino neighborhoods and traffic stops of Latino drivers to round up illegal immigrants. The sweeps drained resources from his department and were abhorred by civil liberties advocates and immigration groups, but they brought the publicity-seeking sheriff to national attention.
In a statement accompanying his tweet, Arpaio said he would reopen his tent city jail and resume immigration enforcement.
“I will continue to stand and fight to do the right thing for Arizona and America, and will never surrender,” Arpaio said in the statement. “Those who break the law will have to deal with this Sheriff.”
In 2011, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division released a report finding that the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office “engages in racial profiling of Latinos; unlawfully stops, detains, and arrests Latinos; and unlawfully retaliates against individuals who complain about or criticize MCSO’s policies or practices.”
For the next five years, Arpaio continued to flout orders by federal judges to improve the conditions inside his jails and cease the unconstitutional racial profiling of Latinos, leading to him being found guilty of both civil and criminal contempt of court in 2017.
Arpaio was also a vocal Trump supporter, and a month after his conviction, Trump returned the favor and pardoned Arpaio. I wrote then:
In pardoning Arpaio, Trump has given a free pass to an unrepentant and habitual abuser of power, a man with insufficient regard for the Constitution he swore to uphold or the separation of powers it enshrines. The move should come as no surprise. The two are kindred spirits.
Arpaio is quite sensitive about his problems with federal judges. Conservative attorney and noteddunce Larry Klayman filed a defamation lawsuit on Arpaio’s behalf against CNN and several other news outlets seeking $300 million in damages after the outlets labeled him a “convicted felon.” (Arpaio’s contempt offense was a misdemeanor, not a felony.)
A federal courtdismissed Arpaio’s lawsuit in August, writing that his complaint “comes nowhere close to pleading sufficient facts that plausibly establish ‘actual malice.’ Indeed, Plaintiff pleads no facts at all.”
In addition to unconstitutional immigration sweeps, Arpaio’s 24 years as sheriff were marred by numerous cases of brutality and misconduct, abuses of power, retaliation, and cover-ups.
In 2007, Maricopa County’s board of supervisors settled a lawsuit filed by the founders of the Phoenix New Times newspaper against Arpaio and the board for $3.5 million. The newspapers’ founders sued after they were arrested by MCSO deputies for publishing details of a grand jury subpoena for the paper’s notes and sources for its coverage of Arpaio. The charges against the newspaper were quickly dropped.
In 2016, after years of scandals and millions upon millions of dollars in lawsuit settlements, voters replaced Arpaio with a Democrat candidate buoyed by large infusions of cash from a super PAC connected to liberal megadonor George Soros.
“Tonight, the people have spoken,” Arpaio said in a campaign statement following his 2016 defeat. “And while Ava and I are disappointed in the results we respect their decision.”
In 2018, Arpaio came in third place in the Republican primary election for Arizona’s U.S. Senate seat, behind Rep. Martha McSally (R–Az.) and Kelli Ward.
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The Treasury Department released new budget deficit numbers last week, and with two months still to go in the fiscal year, 2019’s budget deficit is the highest its been since the US was still being flooded with fiscal stimulus dollars back in 2012.
As of July 2019, the year-to-date budget deficit was 866 billion dollars. The last time it was this high was the 2012 fiscal year when the deficit reached nearly 1.1 trillion dollars.
At the height of the recession-stimulus-panic, the deficit had reached 1.4 trillion in 2009. (The 2019 deficit is year-to-date):
What is especially notable about the current deficit is that it has occurred during a time of economic expansion, when, presumably, deficits should be much smaller.
For example, after the 1990-91 recession, deficits generally got smaller, until growing again in the wake of the Dot-com bust. Deficits then shrank during the short expansion from 2002 to 2007. During the first part of the post Great Recession expansion, deficits shrank again. But since late 2015, deficits have only gotten larger, and are quickly heading toward some of the largest non-recession deficits we’ve ever seen.
The situation is a result of both growing federal spending and falling tax revenues. As of the second quarter of 2019, year-over-year growth was nearly at a nine-year high. Federal spending rose 7.5 percent, year over year, during the second quarter of this year. The last time growth rose as much was during the first quarter of 2010 when spending increased 13.8 percent, year over year.
Meanwhile, federal revenue growth has fallen, with only one quarter out of the last eight showing year-over-year growth.
Historically, a widening gap between tax revenue and government spending tends to indicate a recession or a period immediately following a recession. We saw this pattern during the 1990-91 recession, the Dot-com recession, and the Great Recession.
The Trump administration has attempted to brag that it has increased revenues through tax hikes (i.e., tariff increases), and as Bloomberg reports, “tariffs imposed by the Trump administration helped almost double customs duties to $57 billion in the period.”
But tariff hikes also cut intro entrepreneurial activity and overall production, reducing earnings and hobbling economic growth. Not surprisingly, tax revenues have not kept up.
Of course, if tax revenues actually limited government spending, there wouldn’t be much to complain about. Lower revenues really would mean fewer resources flowing into government coffers — and that can be a good thing.
But, in a world where government borrowing allows spending to balloon even in times of falling revenue, we’re setting the stage for future problems. The more the total national debt rises, the more debt service will become a serious issue if interest rates increase even moderately. Given the prospects for higher interest rates in the future, the Congressional Budget Office estimates interest payments on the debt will increase substantially in the future:
It is troubling that after a decade of an economic expansion, the US government is still spending money as it does during and immediately following a recession. Thus, if deficits are this large right now when times are good, how big will they become when the US enters recession territory? Back in 2009, the recession and its aftermath (i.e., massive amoounts of stimulus) drove deficits beyond the trillion dollar mark four years in a row. With 2019’s deficit total now pushing toward 900 billion, we should perhaps expect deficits to top two trillion when the next recession hits. And probably for several years.
The piper will then need to be paid when interest rates increase and substantial cuts must be made to social security, medicare, and to military budgets in order to service the debt and avoid default.
This reckoning can be put off, however, so long as the dollar remains the world’s reserve currency, and the central bank can continue to monetize the debt. As long as the dollar reigns supreme, the central bank can keep this up without causing high levels of price inflation. But when the day comes that the dollar can no longer count on being stockpiled worldwide, things will look very different.
The central bank won’t be able to simply buy up debt at will anymore, interest rates will rise, and Congress will have to make choices about how many government amenities will be cut in order to pay the interest bill. Americans who live off federal programs will feel the pinch. State governments will have to scale back as federal grants dry up. The US will have to scale back its overstretched foreign policy. Not all of this is a problem, of course. But lower-income households and the elderly will suffer the most. Everything may seem fine now, but by running headlong into massive deficits even during a boom, the feds are setting up the economy for failure in the future.
But that’s in the future, and few lawmakers in Washington are worried about much of anything beyond the next election cycle.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2MDcSwM Tyler Durden
On Friday, when CNBC’s Steve Liesman was interviewing the IMF’s new chief economist, Gita Kopinath, we suggested that he ask what the IMF’s plan is for Argentina now that the country was facing what appears yet another bond default.
Hey @steveliesman can you ask the IMF chief economist what their Argentina plan is now.
And while Steve did in fact ask that question, he didn’t get a direct answer for one simple reason: the IMF has no clue what it will do now that it is facing a historic loss on its latest, and biggest ever, $56 billion bailout of Argentina, which was completed less than over a year ago in September 2018.
It gets worse: not only does the IMF have to scramble to preserve its current bailout, and credibility, having sunk billions into a country which humiliated the IMF at the start of the century when it defaulted last, the monetary fund has to decide whether to keep injecting money into a nation that many believe will soon default on its foreign obligations – and the IMF – again, after President Mauricio Macri just got trounced by the populist opposition in a nationwide primary vote, after his IMF-backed program – based around much hated budget austerity and the world’s highest interest rates – failed to pull the economy out of recession. What happened next, as we reported two weeks ago, was a 20% crash in the peso and a collapse in government bonds, which pushed the implied risk of default above 80%.
It was in this dire context that IMF delegates arrived in Argentina on Saturday and, as Bloomberg reports, immediately began meetings with policy makers, facing a deja vu choice from two decades ago: risk making the turmoil even worse by withholding a $5.3 billion installment due next month – or cough it up, and risk even more losses with the IMF bailout program on the verge of collapse.
The IMF’s henchmen also have to figure out the economic plans of opposition chief Alberto Fernandez – who is set to head a less market-friendly government in a few months, an outcome which the IMF clearly not even once considered when it “offered” Macri’s regime tens of billions in loans in exchange for draconian terms that flipped public opinion against him in just a handful of months. And while elections are still two months away, and miracles can certainly happen, Macri’s 15-point primary defeat has led analysts to write him off as a lame duck.
Lagarde and Macri
“The IMF has put a lot in – not just money, but prestige,” said Hector Torres, a former executive director at the Fund who represented South American countries. “The fact that the arrangement is not performing well right now is an embarrassment,” he said. And the September installment is “going to be a difficult call.”
If the IMF does decide to throw good money after bad, it can justify it by pointing out what until recently, was at least modest success: Argentina was roughly on track to meet an IMF target of balancing the budget this year (excluding interest payments). Of course, the reason why the country performed as expected is also the reason why Macri is now on the way out, and the IMF’s involvement in the Argentine economy and politics has managed to unite the local population in its hatred unlike any other issue.
The Fund may cite that performance in the first half of the year as grounds for handing over next month’s payout, according to Priscila Robledo, Latin America economist at Continuum Economics in New York. “That’s what I think will be the justification: ‘Nothing happened at the end of June, we’re all fine’,” she said.
This is also known as the ostrich head in the sand approach, which works great… until Argentina “unexpectedly” announces it is defaulting once again.
What the fund will not cite is Argentina’s economic performance, as GDP expectations have collapsed under the IMF’s supervision, as the following Bloomberg chart shows.
And then there are the IMF’s attempts to tame Argentina inflation. Needless to say, they have failed dismally.
Another reason why the IMFwill be careful how to spin its “success” to date is that even Macri appears to have given up on compliance. Since the ballot reverse, Macri’s government has begun to aggressively loosen policy, in contravention to IMF orders. It froze fuel prices and boosted subsidies, in an effort to shield the poorest Argentines as the peso’s latest slide threatens to push inflation even higher.
“The Fund might say its evaluation going forward is that they won’t be met,” said Daniel Marx, an Argentina “expert” who negotiated with the IMF two decades ago as the country’s finance secretary, and now heads research company Quantum Finanzas in Buenos Aires. In that case, “the disbursement could be at risk.” It would also put the IMF on the hook for billions in losses, mostly funded by US taxpayers who will be curious to learn why their money is sued to perpetuate the IMF’s gross incompetence.
The central bank could also breach IMF targets, as it burns through cash to defend the peso, Marx said. “Now that they’re starting to intervene in spot markets, that might affect net reserves.” While last week, the bank managed to steady currency and bond markets, Argentina’s benchmark debt trades below 50 cents on the dollar, a red flag for the Fund which realizes default when it sees it.
No matter how the IMF spins it, even a cursory look at Argentina’s economic performance over the past year confirms the fund’s intervention has only made the disaster worse.
As Bloomberg notes, the IMF has special criteria, which it adjusted after the Greek crisis, for jumbo loans like the one Macri got – and compliance is reassessed at each review. Two of them are key for Argentina right now: the Fund has to be satisfied that a borrower’s debt is sustainable and that it has decent prospects of access to private capital.
Judging by the markets, Argentina will almost certainly not meet those benchmarks. That opens a range of possibilities, including what the IMF calls “reprofiling” – an extension of debt maturities a la Greece, with few other changes – or the kind of restructuring brokered by the Fund for Ukraine in 2015, which involved haircuts too.
In an amusing twist Fernandez, who trumpets his experience working with the IMF as cabinet chief in the years after the 2001 crisis, insists that there’ll be no replay. “There’s no possibility that Argentina will fall into default if I’m president,” he said on Wednesday. Well, yes: one would probably not expect him to admit his first action as president will be to push the country into yet another sovereign default.
Bracing for the worst, the IMF has already opened channels to the opposition leader, including meetings with advisers Matias Kulfas and Cecilia Todesca, and those contacts are set to deepen starting this week. None of that will have any impact on the ultimate outcome, and explains why Fernandez has been vague about policy commitments and says talks with the IMF are Macri’s responsibility while he’s president. The bottom line is simple: opposition chief has said the program must be revised to allow Argentina to grow again. Failing that, a default is inevitable.
“Fernandez’s first request will be to reschedule,” said Patrick Esteruelas, head of research at EMSO Asset Management in New York. If a deal can’t be hammered out, “private sector debt holders would have to take some form of haircut.”
But while creditors will be hit, it will be the ordinary Argentina citizens that will be crushed:
Ordinary Argentines also have traumatic memories of failed IMF programs. Many blame the Fund for the epic collapse of two decades ago, one reason why Macri’s decision to go to the IMF last year was so risky.
Of course, a worst case outcome won’t be unprecedented as the Latin American nation already has an illustrious history of stuffing the IMF: in late 2001, after a series of missed budget targets and re-upped IMF loans, the government announced it was preparing to restructure debt. Argentines rushed to the banks to pull their money out, finding their deposits had been frozen by authorities, an event known as the “corralito”, an outcome similar to what happened in Greece in the summer of 2015.
A week later, the IMF finally pulled the plug, declining to disburse more funds. Mass protests erupted, leading to dozens of deaths. The political system convulsed, with four presidents succeeding each other in the space of a month. In the longer run, Argentina was frozen out of world markets for over a decade, and millions saw their savings wiped out.
While some analysts are confident that this time will be different, others argue that with an even greater build up of imbalances, the outcome could be even more devastating, especially when considering the prospect of an extended transition of power, something which traditionally results in social upheaval in Argentina.
There’ll be a four-month gap between the Aug. 11 primary and the swearing-in of a new government. And the Fund has its own leadership vacuum: Christine Lagarde, the IMF chief who signed off on Argentina’s loan, is in transit to the European Central Bank and may not be replaced for weeks.
“The IMF is in a serious pickle,” said Esteruelas. “It reminds me of the saying: If you owe the bank $100, it’s your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, it’s the bank’s problem.”
The best news? After leaving Argentina’s economic in disaster, and the IMF’s reputation in tatters, Christine Lagarde is off to finish off her work by taking over the ECB and doing what she does best: destroying Europe once and for all.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2ZtiyeC Tyler Durden
The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) announced today that it will “facilitate and expand scientific and medical research for marijuana in the United States” by publishing “notice of pending applications from entities applying to be registered to manufacture marijuana for researchers.”
It’s a step in the right direction, albeit a mostly symbolic one.
The DEA usually publishes notice of applications to manufacture controlled substances within weeks of receiving them. But two dozen of the applicants revealed today in the Federal Register applied for a license to grow research cannabis more than two years ago. They’ve been on hold ever since. They’ll probably be on hold a little longer.
“I am pleased that DEA is moving forward with its review of applications for those who seek to grow marijuana legally to support research,” Attorney General William Barr said in a statement. “The Department of Justice will continue to work with our colleagues at the Department of Health and Human Services and across the Administration to improve research opportunities wherever we can.”
The DEA first announced it would license additional cannabis growers here in the U.S. in August 2016. At the time, cannabis advocates interpreted the notice as an acknowledgment that America’s sole legal grower of cannabis—the University of Mississippi, which has a DEA license and a contract with the National Institute on Drug Abuse—was incapable of serving the needs of researchers and drug developers.
That hope was misplaced. Under Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the Justice Department brought the process to a halt. Sessions told Congress that it was not clear additional research cannabis was necessary, and that approving new manufacturers might violate the United Nations’ Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs. This was pure stonewalling. There is nothing in the U.N. treaty that prohibits licensing additional cannabis growers, and it has been clear for years now that Mississippi’s monopoly on legal cannabis production has stymied medical research.
In June, one of the applicants sued the DEA and the Justice Department, seeking a “writ of mandamus” from a federal court that would compel action on the applications. The Scottsdale Research Institute, a Phoenix-based clinical trial company that applied in 2016 for a DEA manufacturing license in order to grow its own cannabis for an ongoing study of medical marijuana as a treatment for veterans suffering from PTSD, argued in its suit that federal law requires “that the Attorney General, upon receiving an application to manufacture a Schedule I substance for use only in a clinical trial, publish a notice of application not later than 90 days after accepting the application for filing.”
In July, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ordered the Drug Enforcement Administration to explain why it has yet to respond to nearly two dozen researchers around the U.S. who applied three years ago for a license to grow research cannabis.
The court gave the DEA a deadline of August 28. Today’s announcement is the first time since 2016 that the agency has beat a deadline. (Sessions blew several of the deadlines Congress set for the Justice Department on this very issue.)
Applicants are not out of the woods yet. There are now 33 entities requesting a federal license to manufacture research cannabis, and the DEA will almost certainly not approve all of them. The agency also plans to modify and reissue the notice that was sent out by President Barack Obama’s Justice Department in 2016: “Prior to making decisions on these pending applications, DEA intends to promulgate regulations that govern the program of growing marihuana for scientific and medical research under DEA registration.” The Federal Register notice published today says the DEA will propose those new regulations “in the near future.”
The DEA is also allowing any applicant who wants a license to grow hemp—which is no longer a controlled substance, thanks to the Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018—to withdraw their application and have the application fees returned. Applicants wishing to receive a refund of their fees must notify the DEA in writing by November 1, 2019.
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The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) announced today that it will “facilitate and expand scientific and medical research for marijuana in the United States” by publishing “notice of pending applications from entities applying to be registered to manufacture marijuana for researchers.”
It’s a step in the right direction, albeit a mostly symbolic one.
The DEA usually publishes notice of applications to manufacture controlled substances within weeks of receiving them. But two dozen of the applicants revealed today in the Federal Register applied for a license to grow research cannabis more than two years ago. They’ve been on hold ever since. They’ll probably be on hold a little longer.
“I am pleased that DEA is moving forward with its review of applications for those who seek to grow marijuana legally to support research,” Attorney General William Barr said in a statement. “The Department of Justice will continue to work with our colleagues at the Department of Health and Human Services and across the Administration to improve research opportunities wherever we can.”
The DEA first announced it would license additional cannabis growers here in the U.S. in August 2016. At the time, cannabis advocates interpreted the notice as an acknowledgment that America’s sole legal grower of cannabis—the University of Mississippi, which has a DEA license and a contract with the National Institute on Drug Abuse—was incapable of serving the needs of researchers and drug developers.
That hope was misplaced. Under Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the Justice Department brought the process to a halt. Sessions told Congress that it was not clear additional research cannabis was necessary, and that approving new manufacturers might violate the United Nations’ Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs. This was pure stonewalling. There is nothing in the U.N. treaty that prohibits licensing additional cannabis growers, and it has been clear for years now that Mississippi’s monopoly on legal cannabis production has stymied medical research.
In June, one of the applicants sued the DEA and the Justice Department, seeking a “writ of mandamus” from a federal court that would compel action on the applications. The Scottsdale Research Institute, a Phoenix-based clinical trial company that applied in 2016 for a DEA manufacturing license in order to grow its own cannabis for an ongoing study of medical marijuana as a treatment for veterans suffering from PTSD, argued in its suit that federal law requires “that the Attorney General, upon receiving an application to manufacture a Schedule I substance for use only in a clinical trial, publish a notice of application not later than 90 days after accepting the application for filing.”
In July, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ordered the Drug Enforcement Administration to explain why it has yet to respond to nearly two dozen researchers around the U.S. who applied three years ago for a license to grow research cannabis.
The court gave the DEA a deadline of August 28. Today’s announcement is the first time since 2016 that the agency has beat a deadline. (Sessions blew several of the deadlines Congress set for the Justice Department on this very issue.)
Applicants are not out of the woods yet. There are now 33 entities requesting a federal license to manufacture research cannabis, and the DEA will almost certainly not approve all of them. The agency also plans to modify and reissue the notice that was sent out by President Barack Obama’s Justice Department in 2016: “Prior to making decisions on these pending applications, DEA intends to promulgate regulations that govern the program of growing marihuana for scientific and medical research under DEA registration.” The Federal Register notice published today says the DEA will propose those new regulations “in the near future.”
The DEA is also allowing any applicant who wants a license to grow hemp—which is no longer a controlled substance, thanks to the Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018—to withdraw their application and have the application fees returned. Applicants wishing to receive a refund of their fees must notify the DEA in writing by November 1, 2019.
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When former White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders joined Fox News as a contributor last week, her announcement was greeted with a predictable flurry of jokes about the minimal difference between her new role at the conservative network and her old job for the Trump administration. But she was hardly the first government official of either major political faction to find a new perch in the media—or to move the other way, for that matter. It’s all part of the creeping merger between the political class and the journalists supposedly tasked with subjecting government to scrutiny.
That kind of close relationship between the public and the nominally private sector isn’t new. The revolving door between government and lobbying has long seen officials, both elected and appointed, move from powerful jobs regulating industry to well-paid jobs glad-handing their old colleagues on behalf of regulated industries. Although it troubles seemingly everybody, the relationship is inevitable given the power of the state and the need by companies to cultivate insider contacts to beg (or pay) for special favors or just leniency when navigating red tape.
But the lobbying business evolved to formalize contacts between officials and industry that were going to take place anyway. The flow of faces and names between government and “news” media has turned what was supposed to be a watchdog over the destructive power of the state into little more than a forum for political marketing and an extended battleground for factional fighting.
Hours after Huckabee announced her deal with Fox New, CNN revealed a similar relationship with former FBI deputy director and Trump antagonist Andrew McCabe. McCabe might well look up former colleagues from the FBI Josh Campbell and James Gagliano, since they also hold plum positions with the network and share common sentiments about the current resident of the White House.
From the intelligence community comes former CIA director John Brennan, who has a sweet deal with NBC as a senior national security and intelligence analyst—duties that make him a counterpart to his predecessor, Michael Hayden, at CNN. James Clapper, who lied to Congress about warrantless domestic spying when he was director of national intelligence, also landed a nice job at CNN as a national security analyst.
“National security veterans thrive under TV’s grow lights” in numbers “almost too numerous to list” Politico‘s Jack Shafer noted last year.
More pedestrian members of the political class thrive, too, as exemplified by Huckabee’s hiring at Fox News. She joined former Trump aide Hope Hicks at the network, as well as her one-time deputy, Raj Shah.
More people have moved in the other direction, including Bill Shine, who left Fox to work at the White House before shifting to Trump’s reelection campaign. Heather Nauert left the network to join the administration and was briefly considered for appointment as UN ambassador. Ben Carson, now Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and John Bolton, now National Security Adviser, were both Fox News contributors before their current administration jobs.
Tom Homan took quite a spin through the revolving door, serving as acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement director under Trump before taking as gig as a Fox News contributor and then returning to the administration as “border czar.”
“They are joined at the hip,” Fox News personality Juan Williams says of his employer and the Trump White House.
Which you might also say of CNN anchor Chris Cuomo regarding his interview with brother Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York. Hard-hitting stuff, that.
Fox leans right and pro-Trump while most of the rest of the news media leans left and anti-Trump, and the outlets’ chosen representatives of the political class publicly spar over which faction should operate the mechanisms of government power. Whether those mechanisms should exist at all isn’t something that commonly comes up. James Clapper certainly has few qualms about the surveillance state, Tom Homan doesn’t ponder the wisdom of strict border controls, and Andrew McCabe is a lousy candidate for examining the excesses of law enforcement, just as Sarah Huckabee Sanders isn’t likely to question executive overreach.
Their big disagreement is over who should be in charge, not what they should be in charge of.
Former cops, spooks, and politicians “remain protective of their institutions. This makes nearly every word that comes out of their mouths suspect,” Politico‘s Shafer commented in his 2018 piece. “Imagine a TV network covering the auto industry through the eyes of dozens of paid former auto executives and you begin to appreciate the current peculiarities.”
Put that way, the vitriolic fulminating at the networks over policies, official conduct, and political outcomes has very little to do with informing members of the viewing audience about current events and the wisdom or lack thereof in various proposals. Instead, it’s all about jockeying for position among factions vying for power, attempts to win over the public to one side or another, and petty sniping between those temporarily out of power and those momentarily in charge. Any information gleaned, beyond the current temperament of the players, is almost beside the point.
True, the incestuous relationship between elite media and the people they cover, socialize with, and sleep with isn’t a recent development. “Every administration draws in a few journalists, typically as speechwriters and press secretaries, a natural given the overlapping skills,” The Washington Postreported in 2013. “But Obama may be different in terms of the sheer number of ink-stained wretches and other news-media denizens that he has attracted.”
The problem clearly hasn’t slowed under a new administration from a different party. Instead, familiar faces move from government office to media slots and back again in copious numbers, sorting according to the outlets that represent their factions and distorting “news” coverage of the government that plays a core role in their lives.
We’d be better off if they all took jobs as lobbyists. That might leave a little more room for actual scrutiny of the government.
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For a few brief hours overnight, the much-watched 2s10s segment of the US Treasury curve un-inverted, following Friday’s collapse. That is now over as the curve has dropped back below -1bps…
Source: Bloomberg
Time to start focusing on another part of the yield curve or else this is getting serious.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2Zp9CH9 Tyler Durden
One of the obvious and expected consequences or instances of ‘blowback’ from Israel’s unprecedented decision to extend its “anti-Iran” campaign into Iraq, with three airstrikes widely blamed on either Israeli drones or possibly F-35s in the last five weeks, is that it will force a deepening conflict between Iraq’s military and US coalition forces.
There’s long been a broad base of Iraqi support that would like to see the American presence completely out of the country with the Islamic State long defeated, but now that political bloc just got a lot stronger in the wake of the alleged Israeli raids, at least one of which US officials have already admitted Israel bore responsibility for (a July 19 attack on a Popular Mobilization Forces base in Amirli). A powerful pro-Iran faction of parliament has called Israel’s alleged attacks “a declaration of war”.
Aftermath of the recent ‘mystery blast’ at a military base southwest of Baghdad. Image source: AP
The Associated Pressreports in the aftermath of yet another Israeli drone strike targeting and killing a Kataeb Hezbollah leader in al-Qaim, Iraq near the Syrian border that, “A powerful bloc in Iraq’s parliament is calling for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq following a series of airstrikes blamed on Israel targeting Iran-backed Shiite militias in the country.”
The influential and powerful Fatah Coalition, representing the country’s pro-Iranian Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) issued a statement Monday holding the United States responsible for facilitation Israeli aggression on Iraqi soil, “which we consider to be a declaration of war on Iraq and its people,”the statement said. The statement noted further that American troops are no longer needed and only now serve to jeopardize Iraqi national security.
PMF commanders and officials have over the past weeks been the most vocal part of Iraq’s military and government blaming the recent spate of devastating attacks on Israel; however, following last week’s explosion at a base outside Baghdad – believed the result of an Israeli airstrike – it appears this view is now gaining support even from the prime minister’s office amid an ongoing official investigation into the blasts.
Footage showing the August 12th arms depot blast, widely blamed on Israel. Another strike on a munitions storage depot occurred on Aug. 20, and before this a July 19 attack grabbed headlines.
Last week Prime Minister Abdul-Mahdi had called foran end to all “unauthorized flights” including US drones, spy planes, jets, or helicopters. The directive demanded that all aerial vehicles comply with Iraqi law and operations must be under Iraqi government authorization.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2L8NZGe Tyler Durden
When former White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders joined Fox News as a contributor last week, her announcement was greeted with a predictable flurry of jokes about the minimal difference between her new role at the conservative network and her old job for the Trump administration. But she was hardly the first government official of either major political faction to find a new perch in the media—or to move the other way, for that matter. It’s all part of the creeping merger between the political class and the journalists supposedly tasked with subjecting government to scrutiny.
That kind of close relationship between the public and the nominally private sector isn’t new. The revolving door between government and lobbying has long seen officials, both elected and appointed, move from powerful jobs regulating industry to well-paid jobs glad-handing their old colleagues on behalf of regulated industries. Although it troubles seemingly everybody, the relationship is inevitable given the power of the state and the need by companies to cultivate insider contacts to beg (or pay) for special favors or just leniency when navigating red tape.
But the lobbying business evolved to formalize contacts between officials and industry that were going to take place anyway. The flow of faces and names between government and “news” media has turned what was supposed to be a watchdog over the destructive power of the state into little more than a forum for political marketing and an extended battleground for factional fighting.
Hours after Huckabee announced her deal with Fox New, CNN revealed a similar relationship with former FBI deputy director and Trump antagonist Andrew McCabe. McCabe might well look up former colleagues from the FBI Josh Campbell and James Gagliano, since they also hold plum positions with the network and share common sentiments about the current resident of the White House.
From the intelligence community comes former CIA director John Brennan, who has a sweet deal with NBC as a senior national security and intelligence analyst—duties that make him a counterpart to his predecessor, Michael Hayden, at CNN. James Clapper, who lied to Congress about warrantless domestic spying when he was director of national intelligence, also landed a nice job at CNN as a national security analyst.
“National security veterans thrive under TV’s grow lights” in numbers “almost too numerous to list” Politico‘s Jack Shafer noted last year.
More pedestrian members of the political class thrive, too, as exemplified by Huckabee’s hiring at Fox News. She joined former Trump aide Hope Hicks at the network, as well as her one-time deputy, Raj Shah.
More people have moved in the other direction, including Bill Shine, who left Fox to work at the White House before shifting to Trump’s reelection campaign. Heather Nauert left the network to join the administration and was briefly considered for appointment as UN ambassador. Ben Carson, now Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and John Bolton, now National Security Adviser, were both Fox News contributors before their current administration jobs.
Tom Homan took quite a spin through the revolving door, serving as acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement director under Trump before taking as gig as a Fox News contributor and then returning to the administration as “border czar.”
“They are joined at the hip,” Fox News personality Juan Williams says of his employer and the Trump White House.
Which you might also say of CNN anchor Chris Cuomo regarding his interview with brother Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York. Hard-hitting stuff, that.
Fox leans right and pro-Trump while most of the rest of the news media leans left and anti-Trump, and the outlets’ chosen representatives of the political class publicly spar over which faction should operate the mechanisms of government power. Whether those mechanisms should exist at all isn’t something that commonly comes up. James Clapper certainly has few qualms about the surveillance state, Tom Homan doesn’t ponder the wisdom of strict border controls, and Andrew McCabe is a lousy candidate for examining the excesses of law enforcement, just as Sarah Huckabee Sanders isn’t likely to question executive overreach.
Their big disagreement is over who should be in charge, not what they should be in charge of.
Former cops, spooks, and politicians “remain protective of their institutions. This makes nearly every word that comes out of their mouths suspect,” Politico‘s Shafer commented in his 2018 piece. “Imagine a TV network covering the auto industry through the eyes of dozens of paid former auto executives and you begin to appreciate the current peculiarities.”
Put that way, the vitriolic fulminating at the networks over policies, official conduct, and political outcomes has very little to do with informing members of the viewing audience about current events and the wisdom or lack thereof in various proposals. Instead, it’s all about jockeying for position among factions vying for power, attempts to win over the public to one side or another, and petty sniping between those temporarily out of power and those momentarily in charge. Any information gleaned, beyond the current temperament of the players, is almost beside the point.
True, the incestuous relationship between elite media and the people they cover, socialize with, and sleep with isn’t a recent development. “Every administration draws in a few journalists, typically as speechwriters and press secretaries, a natural given the overlapping skills,” The Washington Postreported in 2013. “But Obama may be different in terms of the sheer number of ink-stained wretches and other news-media denizens that he has attracted.”
The problem clearly hasn’t slowed under a new administration from a different party. Instead, familiar faces move from government office to media slots and back again in copious numbers, sorting according to the outlets that represent their factions and distorting “news” coverage of the government that plays a core role in their lives.
We’d be better off if they all took jobs as lobbyists. That might leave a little more room for actual scrutiny of the government.
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At the end of last week, the trade war between the United States and China escalated dramatically, and investors all over the globe really started freaking out. Unfortunately, developments over the weekend have only made things worse, and that means that this could be a very “interesting” week for global financial markets. As I write this article, stock prices around the world are plunging, the price of gold is spiking and the Chinese yuan is crashing. There is clearly a lot of fear out there right now, and at this point even CNBC is warning that the last week of this month “could be highly volatile”…
The final week of August – the bittersweet end of summer for many – could be highly volatile, as markets fret over the economy and the latest developments in trade wars.
Of course things can swing rapidly from moment to moment in this environment. President Trump could say something in a few hours that temporarily gives investors some hope, and that could cause markets to swing wildly upward for a little while. Everyone is on edge right now, and every piece of significant news is likely to cause gyrations in the marketplace.
But overall the trend is clearly down. U.S. stocks have now fallen for four weeks in a row, and many are becoming deeply concerned about what September will bring.
And for many U.S. businesses, this trade war has turned into a complete nightmare. Executives crave predictability, but now everywhere we look there is chaos, and this is causing a lot of headaches for business leaders…
Businesses crave predictability so they can make informed decisions and plan for the future. Many companies that depend on Chinese manufacturers and consumers have already shifted supply chains out of the country and taken other steps to reduce their exposure to China. And while Mr. Trump’s tweets are unlikely to trigger immediate changes, more uncertainty is unwelcome.
“Continued escalation and rhetoric are harmful to American businesses, workers and farmers,” said Tom Linebarger, chief executive of Cummins Inc., which makes diesel engines. Cummins pays a tariff on components it imports from its own plants in China for engines assembled at U.S. factories by American workers. The tariffs amount to a tax paid by Cummins’ customers, he said.
Unfortunately, nobody can no longer deny that global economic activity is really starting to slow down. We just learned that global trade was down 1.4 percent in June from a year earlier, and that represented the largest decline that we have seen since the last financial crisis…
World trade volume – a measure of imports and exports of merchandise across the globe – declined in its zigzag manner in June to the lowest level since October 2017, according to the Merchandise World Trade Monitor by CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis. The index was down 1.4% from June 2018. This small year-over-year decline is the biggest year-over-year decline since the Financial Crisis, and it’s a reversal from the heady growth in 2017 and 2018 that had topped out at 6.7%.
I have been using phrases like “since the last financial crisis” and “since the last recession” in almost every article recently. We are seeing so many things happen that we haven’t seen for a decade or longer, and yet most Americans still don’t seem to understand that we have a real crisis on our hands.
If the U.S. and China were to mend their relationship and agree to a comprehensive trade deal, that would certainly help things.
When asked if Trump had second thoughts about Friday’s move to escalate the trade war with China, Trump said “Yup.” “I have second thoughts about everything,” he added.
Hours later, the White House issued a statement saying that Trump meant to say that he wished he had raised tariffs on Beijing even higher.
“His answer has been greatly misinterpreted. President Trump responded in the affirmative – because he regrets not raising the tariffs higher,” White House spokeswoman Stephanie Grisham wrote in a statement.
And the Chinese are warning that we should not “underestimate the determination” of the Chinese people and that they will be the ones to “have the last laugh”…
On Saturday, China’s commerce ministry issued a statement calling on Washington not to “misjudge the situation and underestimate the determination of Chinese people” after US President Donald Trump announced new tariffs on Chinese imports.
“The US should immediately stop its wrong action, or it will have to bear all consequences,” the statement said.
At the same time, a sharply worded commentary in the official party mouthpiece, People’s Daily, said China had the strength to continue the dispute and accused Washington of sacrificing the interests of its own people. Published under the pseudonym “Wuyuehe”, the piece described the latest tariff measures by the US as “barbaric”. The op-ed said China’s own tariffs on $75 billion worth of American products, announced late on Friday, were a response to America’s unilateral escalation of the trade conflict, and vowed that China was determined to fight back “until the end”.
“China’s will to defend the core interests of the country and the fundamental interests of the people is indestructible, and will not fear any challenge,” the author wrote, promising that “history will prove that the side on the path of fairness and justice will have the last laugh.”
As I have repeatedly warned, there isn’t going to be a trade deal before the 2020 presidential election.
So that means that things are going to get progressively worse, and we need to be prepared for a lot of economic pain.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said on Sunday that Democrats should not criticize President Trump for taking on China over trade as they have complained for years about Beijing’s policies but done nothing.
“Every Democrat and every Republican of note has said China cheats,” Graham said on CBS News’ “Face the Nation.” “The Democrats for years have been claiming that China should be stood up to, now Trump is and we’ve just got to accept the pain that comes with standing up to China.”
Sadly, the truth is that the American people are not well equipped to deal with pain. We have been spoiled by decades of debt-fueled “prosperity”, and even a relatively minor economic downturn would result in a massive national temper tantrum.
Right now our nation is a seething cauldron of anger and frustration, and the mainstream media is stirring the pot on a daily basis. It isn’t going to take much to spark an explosion, and this will especially be true the closer we get to the next presidential election.
The season of “the perfect storm” is upon us, and what is coming next is going to be one of the most chaotic chapters in modern American history.
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