Tag: news

Activists Want a Problematic Mural of George Washington Destroyed. It Will Cost a High School $600,000.

A high school in San Francisco is considering three options for censoring a mural of George Washington deemed problematic by the local activist community: putting up a curtain (price tag: $300,000), painting over it ($600,000), or hiding it behind panels ($875,000).

No doubt San Francisco United School District could hire quite a few teachers in lieu of executing even the cheapest of those plans, but a 13-member working group asserts the mural must go. It “glorifies slavery, genocide, colonization, manifest destiny, white supremacy, oppression,” and “doesn’t represent SFUSD values of social justice, diversity, united, student-centered.” It’s also responsible for traumatizing students, according to the activists.

The truth is that George Washington High School’s mural is provocative by design. It was painted in 1936 by a Russian-American artist named Victor Arnautoff, who held leftist sympathies. Arnautoff did not wish to blindly celebrate Washington while ignoring the less savory aspects of the American founding, and thus he depicted the first president working his slaves and sending men to confiscate Native American lands. It was an attempt to remind students that history is a lot messier than what they read in class.

“He put those ghastly gray pioneers literally walking over the dead body of an Indian to demonstrate that the settlement of the west was an act of conquest that involved the slaughter of Native Americans,” Robert Cherny, a San Francisco State University professor, told the school district’s board of education in 2018. “That was a very bold effort on his part to counter the kinds of textbooks that students were seeing.”

Modern activist culture, however, is preoccupied with an ever-expanding definition of safety, which now includes emotional safety. To walk past a mural that depicts violence against Native Americans and people of color—even if that’s what actually happened—is considered trauma-inducing, and the purpose of education is to mitigate discomfort. (This is a major theme of my new book, Panic Attack: Young Radicals in the Age of Trump, which was released this week and is available in book stores and online.)

“Why do we have to explain the pain caused by the visual offense that we see in that building that is supposed to be an institution for learning?” asked one woman at a public meeting about the issue on Tuesday.

“It’s not in a museum, it’s inside a school,” lamented another speaker, who apparently did not understand the point of a school. “Our students, all of them, deserve better.”

Other speakers, several of them Native American, expressed no objection to the mural, correctly pointing out that it was depicting “what actually happened.”

According to National Review‘s James Sutton, most of the students want to keep the mural, or don’t really care one way or another. The controversy is the work of “outside busybodies.” Naturally, it looks like they are going to get their way. The school board is currently deciding between three different plans, all of which involve destroying the mural, or covering it up. A final decision is expected next week, reports The College Fix.

By the way, if you’re wondering why it would cost several hundred thousand dollars to get rid of the mural, here’s your answer: Officials are required to conduct environmental impact reports before they take any action.

from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2Ir9mlP
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Summer Reading: The Life (and Times) of Frederick Law Olmsted

If you are looking for some really good summer reading that you can sink your teeth into, and have any interest at all in U.S. history during the mid- to late-19th Century, let me most enthusiastically recommend Justin Martin’s wonderful biography of Frederick Law Olmsted (“Genius of Place”), which I have just finished reading, to you.

Olmsted’s life and career were astonishing, embodying much of the restless and propulsive energy that permeated life in mid-19th Century America, and his biography reads like a chronicle of the almost unbelievably wide range of opportunities then available to people—at least, to white men—of energy and ambition. The son of a successful dry-goods merchant in Hartford CT, Olmsted spent considerable portions of his life as a “scientific farmer,” a newspaper reporter, a merchant seaman, an author (of several influential books covering his journeys through England and through the American South in the early 1850s), the supervisor and manager of operations at the Mariposa gold mine in Bear Valley CA, a magazine publisher (Putnam’s and The Nation), and the first Director of the United States Sanitary Commission (a federal agency set up at the start of the Civil War and charged with the Herculean task of seeing to it that Union soldiers had access to adequate medical, food, and sanitary facilities at or near the front lines) . . .  while also inventing, almost single-handedly, the practice and profession of landscape architecture in the United States.

His legacy is astonishing as well, his influence on all of our lives in 21st century America deep and profound. There are, of course, his parks, many of which are true masterpieces in an art form (“park design”) that had barely even existed before he arrived on the scene:  Central, Prospect, Morningside, and Riverside Parks in New York, Boston’s “Emerald Necklace” parks, the park system in Buffalo NY, the grounds of the US Capitol, Chicago’s Washington and Jackson Parks. Olmsted-designed parks can be found in a staggering number of American communities, including (among others) Boston, Hartford, New York, Trenton, Rochester, Buffalo, Springfield MA, Montreal, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Atlanta, Asheville NC, Louisville, Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, St. Louis, and San Francisco, where, each and every day, millions of people encounter and enjoy the fruits of his labors.

And his impact extends far beyond the boundaries of all of those city parks that would not have come into being without him. His writings played an important role in rallying people (in the North, and in Great Britain) to the anti-slavery cause; he was instrumental in protecting Yosemite Valley and Niagara Falls from private exploitation long before the idea of a system of National Parks was even a glimmer in Teddy Roosevelt’s eye; his work on the Sanitary Commission not only saved thousands of lives but helped form the foundation for the creation of the American Red Cross.

It’s not only an amazing legacy for one person to have left behind, but it is a legacy of public benefit that strikes me as especially unalloyed and untainted. It’s all good! Building dozens of glorious parks, helping to abolish slavery, preserving great natural spaces like Yosemite and Niagara Falls, caring for and saving the lives of the wounded . . . that’s a great deal on the plus side of the ledger, without much on the minus side. Who, today, can complain that their lives were made worse off by anything that Olmsted left behind? I don’t think there are a great number of historical figures about whom that can be said, whose accomplishments do not contain some small (or not-so-small) worm of malignancy, some taint of the rotten or the corrupt, some idea or institution or practice that dishonors or diminishes their legacy, in retrospect.

And Olmsted’s core principles are, as the reviewers always like to say, “relevant for our times.” All of Olmsted’s work was in service of that peculiarly American 19th Century democratic ideal; not only do cities need green spaces lest they choke to death, these spaces must be truly public, shared spaces accommodating the widest possible range of people doing the widest possible range of activities, the millionaires and the newsboys, young families and the elderly, picknickers and horseback riders and musicians and fishermen and boaters and walkers and ice skaters and bicyclists and birdwatchers and softball players, rich people and poor people, people seeking quiet and solitude and people seeking companionship and the company of others.

Olmsted believed that these spaces could bind communities together for the benefit of all. And they did.

It’s a reminder of a kind of public-spiritedness that was a big part of the 19th Century story in the U.S., the flip side, if you will, of the “rugged individualism” archetype that is perhaps better known and more often referred to. I happen to think that we could use more of it these days.  Even if you disagree, I think you might find the story of someone who really embodied this ideal to be an interesting and even instructive one.

Martin’s book is extremely well-constructed, and he tells the story with real verve. He strikes the right balance: the focus is on Olmsted’s work, but with enough details of his personal and emotional life to give context and resonance to the story. I found it extraordinarily interesting from start to finish and, by the end, quite moving. Highly recommended.

from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2ZGp6Y5
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Activists Want a Problematic Mural of George Washington Destroyed. It Will Cost a High School $600,000.

A high school in San Francisco is considering three options for censoring a mural of George Washington deemed problematic by the local activist community: putting up a curtain (price tag: $300,000), painting over it ($600,000), or hiding it behind panels ($875,000).

No doubt San Francisco United School District could hire quite a few teachers in lieu of executing even the cheapest of those plans, but a 13-member working group asserts the mural must go. It “glorifies slavery, genocide, colonization, manifest destiny, white supremacy, oppression,” and “doesn’t represent SFUSD values of social justice, diversity, united, student-centered.” It’s also responsible for traumatizing students, according to the activists.

The truth is that George Washington High School’s mural is provocative by design. It was painted in 1936 by a Russian-American artist named Victor Arnautoff, who held leftist sympathies. Arnautoff did not wish to blindly celebrate Washington while ignoring the less savory aspects of the American founding, and thus he depicted the first president working his slaves and sending men to confiscate Native American lands. It was an attempt to remind students that history is a lot messier than what they read in class.

“He put those ghastly gray pioneers literally walking over the dead body of an Indian to demonstrate that the settlement of the west was an act of conquest that involved the slaughter of Native Americans,” Robert Cherny, a San Francisco State University professor, told the school district’s board of education in 2018. “That was a very bold effort on his part to counter the kinds of textbooks that students were seeing.”

Modern activist culture, however, is preoccupied with an ever-expanding definition of safety, which now includes emotional safety. To walk past a mural that depicts violence against Native Americans and people of color—even if that’s what actually happened—is considered trauma-inducing, and the purpose of education is to mitigate discomfort. (This is a major theme of my new book, Panic Attack: Young Radicals in the Age of Trump, which was released this week and is available in book stores and online.)

“Why do we have to explain the pain caused by the visual offense that we see in that building that is supposed to be an institution for learning?” asked one woman at a public meeting about the issue on Tuesday.

“It’s not in a museum, it’s inside a school,” lamented another speaker, who apparently did not understand the point of a school. “Our students, all of them, deserve better.”

Other speakers, several of them Native American, expressed no objection to the mural, correctly pointing out that it was depicting “what actually happened.”

According to National Review‘s James Sutton, most of the students want to keep the mural, or don’t really care one way or another. The controversy is the work of “outside busybodies.” Naturally, it looks like they are going to get their way. The school board is currently deciding between three different plans, all of which involve destroying the mural, or covering it up. A final decision is expected next week, reports The College Fix.

By the way, if you’re wondering why it would cost several hundred thousand dollars to get rid of the mural, here’s your answer: Officials are required to conduct environmental impact reports before they take any action.

from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2Ir9mlP
via IFTTT

Summer Reading: The Life (and Times) of Frederick Law Olmsted

If you are looking for some really good summer reading that you can sink your teeth into, and have any interest at all in U.S. history during the mid- to late-19th Century, let me most enthusiastically recommend Justin Martin’s wonderful biography of Frederick Law Olmsted (“Genius of Place”), which I have just finished reading, to you.

Olmsted’s life and career were astonishing, embodying much of the restless and propulsive energy that permeated life in mid-19th Century America, and his biography reads like a chronicle of the almost unbelievably wide range of opportunities then available to people—at least, to white men—of energy and ambition. The son of a successful dry-goods merchant in Hartford CT, Olmsted spent considerable portions of his life as a “scientific farmer,” a newspaper reporter, a merchant seaman, an author (of several influential books covering his journeys through England and through the American South in the early 1850s), the supervisor and manager of operations at the Mariposa gold mine in Bear Valley CA, a magazine publisher (Putnam’s and The Nation), and the first Director of the United States Sanitary Commission (a federal agency set up at the start of the Civil War and charged with the Herculean task of seeing to it that Union soldiers had access to adequate medical, food, and sanitary facilities at or near the front lines) . . .  while also inventing, almost single-handedly, the practice and profession of landscape architecture in the United States.

His legacy is astonishing as well, his influence on all of our lives in 21st century America deep and profound. There are, of course, his parks, many of which are true masterpieces in an art form (“park design”) that had barely even existed before he arrived on the scene:  Central, Prospect, Morningside, and Riverside Parks in New York, Boston’s “Emerald Necklace” parks, the park system in Buffalo NY, the grounds of the US Capitol, Chicago’s Washington and Jackson Parks. Olmsted-designed parks can be found in a staggering number of American communities, including (among others) Boston, Hartford, New York, Trenton, Rochester, Buffalo, Springfield MA, Montreal, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Atlanta, Asheville NC, Louisville, Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, St. Louis, and San Francisco, where, each and every day, millions of people encounter and enjoy the fruits of his labors.

And his impact extends far beyond the boundaries of all of those city parks that would not have come into being without him. His writings played an important role in rallying people (in the North, and in Great Britain) to the anti-slavery cause; he was instrumental in protecting Yosemite Valley and Niagara Falls from private exploitation long before the idea of a system of National Parks was even a glimmer in Teddy Roosevelt’s eye; his work on the Sanitary Commission not only saved thousands of lives but helped form the foundation for the creation of the American Red Cross.

It’s not only an amazing legacy for one person to have left behind, but it is a legacy of public benefit that strikes me as especially unalloyed and untainted. It’s all good! Building dozens of glorious parks, helping to abolish slavery, preserving great natural spaces like Yosemite and Niagara Falls, caring for and saving the lives of the wounded . . . that’s a great deal on the plus side of the ledger, without much on the minus side. Who, today, can complain that their lives were made worse off by anything that Olmsted left behind? I don’t think there are a great number of historical figures about whom that can be said, whose accomplishments do not contain some small (or not-so-small) worm of malignancy, some taint of the rotten or the corrupt, some idea or institution or practice that dishonors or diminishes their legacy, in retrospect.

And Olmsted’s core principles are, as the reviewers always like to say, “relevant for our times.” All of Olmsted’s work was in service of that peculiarly American 19th Century democratic ideal; not only do cities need green spaces lest they choke to death, these spaces must be truly public, shared spaces accommodating the widest possible range of people doing the widest possible range of activities, the millionaires and the newsboys, young families and the elderly, picknickers and horseback riders and musicians and fishermen and boaters and walkers and ice skaters and bicyclists and birdwatchers and softball players, rich people and poor people, people seeking quiet and solitude and people seeking companionship and the company of others.

Olmsted believed that these spaces could bind communities together for the benefit of all. And they did.

It’s a reminder of a kind of public-spiritedness that was a big part of the 19th Century story in the U.S., the flip side, if you will, of the “rugged individualism” archetype that is perhaps better known and more often referred to. I happen to think that we could use more of it these days.  Even if you disagree, I think you might find the story of someone who really embodied this ideal to be an interesting and even instructive one.

Martin’s book is extremely well-constructed, and he tells the story with real verve. He strikes the right balance: the focus is on Olmsted’s work, but with enough details of his personal and emotional life to give context and resonance to the story. I found it extraordinarily interesting from start to finish and, by the end, quite moving. Highly recommended.

from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2ZGp6Y5
via IFTTT

How Europe Censors What Americans Say Online

Google, Facebook, and Twitter are protected by the First Amendment, but are their decisions about which content to remove and which users to evict from their platforms really free from government pressures?

Social media firms are complying with the requests of lawmakers from European countries, where free speech protections are significantly weaker, according to Daphne Keller, a former Google attorney who’s now a law professor at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society. They’re pressuring these U.S.-based firms to ban “hate speech,” “terrorist content,” and alleged disinformation, and because these policies are applied across their platforms, they also affect what U.S. customers are allowed to see.

“They are making European law global,” Keller says.

Reason‘s Zach Weissmueller sat down with Keller to talk about the so-called Terrorist Content Regulations currently being debated in the European Union, which could empower local police to track and report terms of service violations. They also discuss the chilling effects that content regulations have on legitimate political discourse and why Mark Zuckerberg’s call for federal regulation of Facebook and other social media could be a way of blocking potential competitors.

Produced by Zach Weissmueller. Camera by Alexis Garcia. Graphics by Josh Swain, with additional graphics from Meredith Bragg.

“Written in Ink” by Kai Engel (http://bit.ly/1QLk8Ac) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License.

“Aveu” by Kai Engel (http://bit.ly/2L8LIMV) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License.

“Paranoia” by Kai Engel (http://bit.ly/2WWGNFS) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License.

“Extinguished” by Kai Engel (http://bit.ly/2L2yykl) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License.

from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2L3uD6J
via IFTTT

How Europe Censors What Americans Say Online

Google, Facebook, and Twitter are protected by the First Amendment, but are their decisions about which content to remove and which users to evict from their platforms really free from government pressures?

Social media firms are complying with the requests of lawmakers from European countries, where free speech protections are significantly weaker, according to Daphne Keller, a former Google attorney who’s now a law professor at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society. They’re pressuring these U.S.-based firms to ban “hate speech,” “terrorist content,” and alleged disinformation, and because these policies are applied across their platforms, they also affect what U.S. customers are allowed to see.

“They are making European law global,” Keller says.

Reason‘s Zach Weissmueller sat down with Keller to talk about the so-called Terrorist Content Regulations currently being debated in the European Union, which could empower local police to track and report terms of service violations. They also discuss the chilling effects that content regulations have on legitimate political discourse and why Mark Zuckerberg’s call for federal regulation of Facebook and other social media could be a way of blocking potential competitors.

Produced by Zach Weissmueller. Camera by Alexis Garcia. Graphics by Josh Swain, with additional graphics from Meredith Bragg.

“Written in Ink” by Kai Engel (http://bit.ly/1QLk8Ac) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License.

“Aveu” by Kai Engel (http://bit.ly/2L8LIMV) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License.

“Paranoia” by Kai Engel (http://bit.ly/2WWGNFS) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License.

“Extinguished” by Kai Engel (http://bit.ly/2L2yykl) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License.

from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2L3uD6J
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US Steel Plants Are Going Idle, But The Fed Perpetuates The Myth That Everything Is Just Fine

Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

Even though there is a tremendous amount of evidence to the contrary, the Federal Reserve continues to insist that the U.S. economy is in good shape. 

On Wednesday, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell told the nation that “the economy has performed relatively well” in 2019 and he insisted that “the baseline outlook is a good one.”  Of course he didn’t say anything about our collapsing manufacturing numbers, the worst global trade numbers since the last recession or the “bloodbath” in the U.S. trucking industry.  Powell did concede that “the risk of less favorable outcomes has risen”, but other than vague statements like that he really didn’t acknowledge our growing economic problems at all.  Considering the fact that Powell has more power over the U.S. economy than anyone else in the entire country, this should deeply concern all of us.  To me, Powell’s performance on Wednesday was quite reminiscent of the moment in 2008 when Fed Chair Ben Bernanke told us that the Federal Reserve was not “currently forecasting a recession” after a recession had already begun.

As I have been documenting for weeks, evidence that another major economic downturn has already started can be clearly seen all around us.

For example, we got some very alarming news from the steel industry on Wednesday.  When the Trump administration slapped a 25 percent tariff on steel imports last year, that was supposed to greatly help the U.S. steel industry.  But instead, a dramatic drop in demand due to this new economic downturn is forcing steel companies to take dramatic measures.  According to CNN, U.S. Steel just announced that it will be shutting down a blast furnace in Gary, Indiana and another one that is located just outside of Detroit…

Pain has returned to the US steel industry despite the tariffs put on imported steel last year that were designed to help.

Late Tuesday US Steel announced it will idle two of the blast furnaces where it makes steel, one in its flagship mill in Gary, Indiana, near Chicago, the other in Ecorse, Michigan, near Detroit. The idled furnaces will cut production by about 200,000 tons of steel or more a month, the company said.

“We will resume blast furnace production at one or both idled blast furnaces when market conditions improve,” said the company.

But when will market conditions improve?

In 2020?

After this new economic downturn is over?

Never?

Of course U.S. Steel is not the only steel producer that is hurting right now.  In fact, Nucor and Steel Dynamics have both cut profit forecasts…

US Steel’s action follows similar warnings Monday from Nucor, the nation’s largest steelmaker, and Steel Dynamics. Both are now forecasting lower profits. Nucor pointed to weaker demand from the US auto industry.

Sadly, the truth is that major industry after major industry is deeply suffering at this moment…

-Our ongoing “retail apocalypse” is absolutely brutalizing the retail industry, and we are on pace to have the worst year for store closings in our entire history.

-Auto industry sales have been absolutely abysmal, and auto loan delinquencies have shot up to alarmingly high levels.

-The agriculture industry is going to have the worst year it has seen in at least several decades.

-Our 800 billion dollar trucking industry is already in the midst of a “bloodbath”.

-The real estate industry is poised for the worst downturn that we have seen since the subprime mortgage meltdown during the last financial crisis.

-The manufacturing industry has not seen numbers this bad since the last recession, and things are rapidly getting worse.

But yeah, let’s tell the American people that the economy is “booming” and see if they will buy it.

Really?

Let’s get real.  The U.S. economy is mired in the worst slump in a decade, and economic conditions continue to deteriorate rapidly.  The Federal Reserve could have given us a short-term boost by cutting interest rates on Wednesday, but they decided not to do that…

A divided Federal Reserve held the line on interest rates Wednesday and indicated formally that no cuts are coming in 2019. The decision came amid divisions over what is ahead and still leaves open the possibility that policy loosening could happen before the end of the year depending on how conditions unfold.

The central bank predicts one or two rate cuts in its set of economic predictions, but not until 2020. Despite cautious wording in the post-meeting statement Wednesday, markets are still betting the Fed cuts, as soon as July.

Perhaps they want to save their very limited ammunition for when the recession officially starts, and I can understand that.

But this latest move by the Fed is definitely not going to please President Trump, and it will likely prompt more speculation that Trump would like to demote Powell…

The action sets up a possible confrontation between Fed Chairman Jerome Powell and President Donald Trump, who has been pressuring the Fed to cut rates. Just Tuesday, Trump said “let’s see what he does” at the Fed meeting when asked if he still wants to demote Powell.

At the post-statement news conference, Powell was asked about his future as chairman. “I think the law is clear that I have a four year term, and I fully intend to serve it,” he said.

Trump needs the U.S. economy to be as strong as possible as he heads into an election year.

The stronger the U.S. economy is, the more likely it is that he will be re-elected.

And actually the Federal Reserve may be doing Trump a favor by trying to perpetuate the myth that everything is just fine.  Because if the Fed had cut rates on Wednesday, it would have essentially been an admission that a new recession is on our doorstep.  As John P. Hussman has aptly pointed out, almost every initial rate cut in history “has been associated with an oncoming or ongoing recession”…

With the exception of 1967 and 1996, every initial Fed rate cut has been associated with an oncoming or ongoing recession. Be careful what you wish for.

So for now, the Fed seems to have adopted a “fake it until you make it” approach, and sometimes that can work.

Unfortunately, I don’t think it is going to work this time.  And meanwhile millions upon millions of Americans have been lulled into a false sense of security, and they are not getting prepared for the exceedingly hard times that are coming.

One of my readers recently left a comment in which he stated that what we are facing “is not a drill”, and I believe that he is quite correct.

We haven’t seen economic conditions anything like this since the last recession, and the outlook is getting worse with each passing day.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2L425KE Tyler Durden

Libor Tumbles The Most Since May 2009

Having been headfaked by Powell in the fourth quarter of 2018 – along with every other asset class – when 3M USD Libor rose from 2.300% to 2.800%…

… Libor has staged a dramatic reversal, largely following the path taken by the effective fed funds rate after the Fed’s dovish reversal, and on Thursday it was fixed lower by 4.3bps, the largest drop since May 2009, falling to 2.34313% from 2.38613% on June 19 as the short end of the fixed-income market catches up in pricing Federal Reserve rate cuts. As a result, the Libor-OIS spread, has narrowed to 17.7bps from 20.6bps prior session.

The drop “is a product of the market catching up in pricing for Fed rate cuts,” said Gennadiy Goldberg, a strategist at TD Securities quoted by Bloomberg. “3m OIS also declined by 1.5bp, but you should see Libor also pricing in some cuts, given the Fed’s dovishness yesterday.”

Meanwhile, in the aftermath of the FOMC announcement, October fed funds futures which indicate the expected level of fed funds after the September FOMC meeting, show a rate of 1.81%; that’s 56bp below the current fed effective rate of 2.37%.

Separately, the effective fed funds rate was unchanged at 2.37% on Wednesday with the Fed’s interest on excess reserves (IOER) rate now at 2.35%, that puts the fed funds rate 2bp above IOER. The effective fed funds rate has been higher than IOER since March 20, when a negative spread emerged between the two benchmark rates for the first time since 2008, and it’s stayed above almost every day since.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2IU3IHY Tyler Durden

Kansas City Uses Bad Research To Justify Corporate Welfare

Applebee’s spent the 1980s headquartered in Kansas City, Missouri, before moving right across the border to Lenexa, Kansas, in 1993. The casual restaurant chain moved its headquarters back to the Missouri side of the border in 2008, before leaving the region entirely for Glendale, California, in 2015.

Why all the jumping around? Essentially, local governments promised tens of millions of dollars in tax breaks and subsidies to try to convince Applebee’s to move a few miles one way or another.

Some politicians and companies champion these so-called economic development incentives as a way to generate wealth and revitalization in struggling urban areas. However, interest groups that benefit from these subsidies often use dubious research methods to inflate the amount of economic growth attributed to these handouts. States and localities often end up competing with each other and offering larger and larger subsidy packages to woo particular companies. The most prominent recent example of this involves Amazon. 

For the past few years, there has been something of an economic border war going on between Kansas and Missouri. As NPR’s Planet Money reported in 2016, each state has offered larger and larger tax breaks to companies, incentivizing them to relocate to its side of the appropriately named State Line Road in Kansas City. Since 2010, officials in Kansas and Missouri have spent $184 million and $151 million, respectively, just trying to get various companies to choose their state over the other one, with minimal long-term economic growth coming to either state.

However, a 2018 report from the Kansas City Council of Development Finance Agencies (CDFA) found that each dollar of development incentive, called tax increment financing, or TIF, generated $3.83 in new tax revenue. This finding stands in contrast with the majority of empirical research on TIF, which has found that these types of subsidies do not spur economic development.

There are reasons to question the CDFA study. As Patrick Tuohey, director of municipal policy at the Show-Me Institute, a free market think tank in Missouri, noted in a press conference, the CDFA is a trade group that represents the TIF industry, so asking it to review the effectiveness of these incentives “is analogous to asking the tobacco industry to study the impact of smoking.” The Show-Me Institute conducted its own research and described the CDFA study as “fatally flawed from its inception and completely unresponsive to the City Council’s directive” to evaluate the impact of such programs. 

In his criticism of the report, Tuohey detailed the numerous conflicts of interest surrounding the study. He also pointed out that the report simply takes the tax revenue a project created and then divides that by the size of the subsidy it received. As a result, the CDFA study does not consider whether the incentive actually had any impact on the original decision to go forward with the project.

For comparison, a study from the nonpartisan Upjohn Institute for Employment Research found that somewhere between 75 and 98 percent of firms that received economic development incentives would have made the same decisions anyway. For context, if only a quarter of the companies that received such incentives moved to Kansas City because of the incentives, then, using the information from the CDFA’s study, the city would receive roughly 95 cents in new revenue for every dollar of subsidy spent—in other words, the city would lose money.

Some scholars have asserted economic development incentives hurt local economies by shifting economic resources away from productive industries and towards politically connected ones. Film tax credits are a common example of a particularly inefficient state-level subsidy, as they use tax revenue from existing business to attract and subsidize film production, which shifts money, workers, and other resources away from productive firms, thereby reducing productivity and economic growth.

It’s not hard to understand why politicians refuse to give up these subsidies, as they allow them to take credit for new businesses and new jobs that the market would have created anyway.

from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2WRSQ7n
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FBI Ignored Repeated Warnings That Manafort ‘Black Ledger’ Might Be Fake

Just when you thought the Steele dossier was the only piece of “garbage” intel the FBI relied on in its efforts against the Trump campaign, The Hill‘s John Solomon reveals that Ukrainian officials thought Paul Manafort’s “black cash ledger” was likely a fake which should not be relied on. 

The ledger, which was reported in 2016 and resulted in Manafort’s resignation from the Trump campaign, purported to show $12.7 million in undisclosed cash payments designated for Manafort from former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych’s political party between 2007 and 2012. 

The FBI relied on this ledger to obtain search warrant affidavits “months after the feds were warned repeatedly that the document couldn’t be trusted and was likely a fake,” according to Solomon, who cites documents and over a dozen interviews. 

For example, Ukraine’s top anticorruption prosecutor, Nazar Kholodnytsky, told me he warned the U.S. State Department’s law enforcement liaison and multiple FBI agents in late summer 2016 that Ukrainian authorities who recovered the ledger believed it likely was a fraud. –The Hill

“It was not to be considered a document of Manafort. It was not authenticated. And at that time it should not be used in any way to bring accusations against anybody,” said Kholodnytsky, who says he told FBI agents the same thing. 

Manafort’s Ukranian business partner, Konstantin Kilimnik – a longtime State Department informant – told the US government that the ledger was probably a fake shortly after an August 2016 article about it appeared in the New York Times. 

Kilimnik said in an August 2016 email to a senior US official that Manafort “could not have possibly taken large amounts of cash across three borders. It was always a different arrangement — payments were in wire transfers to his companies, which is not a violation,” adding “I have some questions about this black cash stuff, because those published records do not make sense. The timeframe doesn’t match anything related to payments made to Manafort. … It does not match my records. All fees Manafort got were wires, not cash.”

What’s more, Mueller’s team and the FBI had copies of Kilimnik’s warning according to the report. 

Solomon points out that the FBI may have violated its own rules by knowingly submitting false or suspect evidence in a federal court proceeding. According to the FBI operating manual, “To establish probable cause, the affiant must demonstrate a basis for knowledge and belief that the facts are true.” 

WTF?

While neither Mueller nor the FBI cited the actual ledger, they cited media reports about it, and relied on those stories as sources.

For example, agents mentioned the ledger in an affidavit supporting a July 2017 search warrant for Manafort’s house, citing it as one of the reasons the FBI resurrected the criminal case against Manafort.

“On August 19, 2016, after public reports regarding connections between Manafort, Ukraine and Russia — including an alleged ‘black ledger’ of off-the-book payments from the Party of Regions to Manafort — Manafort left his post as chairman of the Trump Campaign,” the July 25, 2017, FBI agent’s affidavit stated.

Three months later, the FBI went further in arguing probable cause for a search warrant for Manafort’s bank records, citing a specific article about the ledger as evidence Manafort was paid to perform U.S. lobbying work for the Ukrainians.

“The April 12, 2017, Associated Press article reported that DMI [Manafort’s company] records showed at least two payments were made to DMI that correspond to payments in the ‘black ledger,’ ” an FBI agent wrote in a footnote to the affidavit. –The Hill

According to liberal law professor, Alan Dershowitz, citing news articles is almost never done. “They are supposed to cite the primary evidence and not secondary evidence,” he said, adding “It sounds to me like a fraud on the court, possibly a willful and deliberate fraud that should have consequences for both the court and the attorneys’ bar.” 

What’s more, Solomon reports that both the FBI agent cited in the the AP article failed to disclose to FBI officials and DOJ prosecutor Andrew Weissman – later Mueller’s ‘legal pit bull’ – that he met with the AP reporters the day before the story was published, and that he assisted with the story. 

According to FBI records of the April 11, 2017 meeting, the AP reporters “were advised that they appeared to have a good understanding of Manafort’s business dealings” in Ukraine. 

So, essentially, the FBI cited a leak that the government had facilitated and then used it to support the black ledger evidence, even though it had been clearly warned about the document.

Secondly, the FBI was told the ledger claimed to show cash payments to Manafort when, in fact, agents had been told since 2014 that Manafort received money only by bank wires, mostly routed through the island of Cyprus, memos show. 

During the 2014 investigation, Manafort and his partner Richard Gates voluntarily identified for FBI agents tens of millions of dollars they received from Ukrainian and Russian sources and the shell companies and banks that wired the money. “Gates stated that the amounts they received would match the amounts they invoiced for services. Gates added they were always paid late, and in tranches,” FBI memos I obtained show. –The Hill

The best evidence that the FBI knew the black ledger was a sham? They never presented it in Manafort’s trial. 

On Wednesday night, Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC) told Solomon that he is asking the DOJ’s Inspector General to investigate the Manafort warrants, including media leaks and whether evidence exists that the government knew the black ledger was unreliable evidence. 

Manafort was sentenced to 7.5 years in prison by two different judges on eight charges of tax and bank fraud, and admitted to ten more charges related to work in Ukraine. 

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2x6cRb6 Tyler Durden