During the Democratic debates this week there was a lot of tough talk.
On Tuesday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), defended his plan to eliminate gas-powered car sales in the next two decades.
We’ve got to ask ourselves a simple question, “What do you do with an industry that knowingly, for billions of dollars in short-term profits, is destroying this planet?” I say that is criminal activity that cannot be allowed to continue.
Sen. Kamala Harris (D–Calif.), who is running on her record as a prosecutor, answered a question about the Mueller report and possible impeachment or prosecution of the sitting president this way:
There are 10 clear incidents of obstruction of justice by this president, and he needs to be held accountable. I have seen people go to prison for far less.
She might well have said, “I’ve put people in prison for far less.”
Still, if you were feeling generous you could chalk this up to little rhetorical flourish, I suppose.
But leave it to former vice president and America’s wacky Uncle Joe Biden to say the loud part quiet and the quiet part loud.
We should put some of these insurance executives who totally oppose my plan in jail for the 9 billion opioids they sell out there.
Important note: Democrats certainly do not have a monopoly on threating those who oppose them with severe legal sanctions.
In all these cases, the politicians are accusing their targets of having committed crimes. But threatening to prosecute your political opponents as an applause line at a campaign event isn’t good practice in a liberal democracy, and both parties would do well to tone it down.
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During the Democratic debates this week there was a lot of tough talk.
On Tuesday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), defended his plan to eliminate gas-powered car sales in the next two decades.
We’ve got to ask ourselves a simple question, “What do you do with an industry that knowingly, for billions of dollars in short-term profits, is destroying this planet?” I say that is criminal activity that cannot be allowed to continue.
Sen. Kamala Harris (D–Calif.), who is running on her record as a prosecutor, answered a question about the Mueller report and possible impeachment or prosecution of the sitting president this way:
There are 10 clear incidents of obstruction of justice by this president, and he needs to be held accountable. I have seen people go to prison for far less.
She might well have said, “I’ve put people in prison for far less.”
Still, if you were feeling generous you could chalk this up to little rhetorical flourish, I suppose.
But leave it to former vice president and America’s wacky Uncle Joe Biden to say the loud part quiet and the quiet part loud.
We should put some of these insurance executives who totally oppose my plan in jail for the 9 billion opioids they sell out there.
Important note: Democrats certainly do not have a monopoly on threating those who oppose them with severe legal sanctions.
In all these cases, the politicians are accusing their targets of having committed crimes. But threatening to prosecute your political opponents as an applause line at a campaign event isn’t good practice in a liberal democracy, and both parties would do well to tone it down.
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If there is anything today’s violent reversal in the market demonstrated, where this morning’s inexplicable levitation (well, maybe explicable now that “terrible news is great news” again) was smashed with stocks plummeting once Trump tweeted that the China trade war ceasefire is dead, and the US would impose “a small additional Tariff of 10% on the remaining 300 Billion Dollars of goods and products coming from China into our Country”, it is that algos, quants, and systematic funds remain the marginal price setters of the US stock market.
Indeed, as Bloomberg’s Andrew Cinko said when commenting on today’s early morning levitation, it “looks more like it’s being driven by ETF flows or perhaps quant- or multi-strategy firms. That’s money that tends to go out as quickly as it came in, leaving the S&P vulnerable to a reversal as the bid dissipates.” Ironically, just minutes later we got definitive proof of just how fast the passive, or algo money, flees in the milliseconds following Trump’s tweet.
So with the question of who did all the buying and subsequent selling today laid to rest, it makes further sense to ask what happens next, now that the ETFs, quants and generally math PhDs are in charge.
Well, according to Nomura’s quant insight team led by Masanari Takada, the answer is nothing good.
As Takada writes in his FOMC post-mortem analysis, he notes that in his baseline scenario, he expects selling of equities by CTAs and other such market participants “to not go beyond the clearing out of long positions; we would not expect these investors to start staking out new short positions unless the US economy were to suffer an obvious loss of momentum.” Which is precisely what Trump’s restart of the US-China trade war virtually assures.
Looking over the positioning of various speculative traders, Nomura says that it appears that the selling of US equities has been led by trend-following algos (CTAs, risk-parity funds). For the moment, then, the selling thus appears to be mostly technically driven.
As the Nomura quant notes, “trend-following CTAs seem to be prioritizing exits from long positions in US equity futures. Having recently built up sizable net long positions in both S&P 500 futures and NASDAQ 100 futures, CTAs are now paring those positions in response to uptick in volatility and shift in market tone that followed the FOMC meeting.”
However, the selling by CTAs is as of yet just a matter of profit-taking. According to Takada, the average break-even line for CTAs’ net long position in S&P 500 futures is at around 2,960, below which the selling will accelerate in linear fashion. Which is precisely where the S&P is trading as of this moment.
Furthermore, the net long position itself is only about 15% smaller now than it was at the most recent peak on 16 July. Similarly, CTAs’ net long position in NASDAQ 100 futures breaks even at around 7,220 on average, and the position has shrunk by only around 11% since the 11 July peak.
Risk-parity funds are mostly waiting out the rise in volatility in DM equity markets, although they are slightly more inclined to sell than to buy. However, if stock market volatility were to rise in a more pronounced fashion in August, Nomura is certain that they would likely take urgent steps to rebalance their portfolios by selling equities and buying bonds.
Meanwhile, when looking at global macro hedge funds, as of August 1st, it still seems possible that the steep drop in US equities will turn out to be just a matter of temporary undershooting, but what happens over the next two or three days should bring some clarity. Of particular importance is whether global macro hedge funds and other fundamentals-oriented investors pile in to buy a perceived dip in US equities over the next few trading days.
While fundamentals-focused global macro hedge funds seem to still be bullish on US equities, their swing to bullishness in July can be explained by a combination of the dovish turn that the Fed took in June and the improvement observed in the US economic surprise index.
Yet, despite looking bullish on US equities now, macro-oriented market participants that had latched onto the dovish tone that the Fed struck in June may take the July FOMC meeting outcome as a reason to become less optimistic about US equities. If the market loses some of the buying support it has been getting from macro-oriented funds and longer-term investors, systematic selling pressure could gain the upper hand for a while. In that event, the US stock market as well as the global stock market could, true to form, be faced with the customary August volatility shock.
So once the stops are taken out, Nomura then sees the S&P 500 being taken down into the 2,850-2,900 range. Meanwhile, Takada also warns that “the US rates market may well start moving in a way that pressures the Fed to cut policy rates again in September”, a way such as this for example, which saw the 2Y yield plummet after the Trump tweet…
… lending indirect support to the US stock market.
And here comes the punchline, because according to the Nomura quants, “if the latter half of August brings increasingly clear signs that the pick-up in US economic indicators is running out of steam, there could be a global run of stock-selling by CTAs and fundamentals-oriented investors alike.” In that event, Takada believes there would be a plausible tail risk of US stocks sinking into crisis-driven market conditions in September comparable to those that prevailed at the time of the Lehman crisis. If this were to happen “the Fed, having fallen behind the curve, would be dragged into making an emergency rate cut of at least 50bp.“
Some more details on how this August risk off/September crisis scenario would look like:
Fluctuations in CTAs’ net long position in S&P 500 futures tend to be restricted to a range that is consistent with US economic growth momentum. Although CTAs’ trades are driven by technical considerations in the short term, it appears that they seldom stray far beyond the constraints imposed by fundamentals over the longer term. The US ISM Manufacturing PMI for July came in just below expectations, but because it held near the same level in August, Nomura estimates that CTAs’ net position in S&P 500 futures (indexed) should fall in a range with a lower end of 0.09, still in net long territory. In other words, selling of equities by CTAs will go no further than the complete liquidation of outstanding longs, provided that there is no clear downward break in US economic growth momentum.
Incidentally, just prior to the FOMC meeting, CTAs had been leaning towards closing out long positions in 10yr USTfutures (TY). However, the average cost of CTAs’ recently accumulated longs corresponds to a 10yr UST yield of around 2.06%, so we yields below this would not be conducive to such selling.
So having gone over NOmura’s baseline forecast scenario, Takada lays out the risk scenario, which in the aftermath of Trump’s tweet, now appears will come true as any hope of a trade deal between the US and China has been crushed. According to the Nomura quants, if the latter half of August brings increasingly clear signs that the pick-up in US economic indicators is running out of steam, fundamentals-oriented investors could well decide to join CTAs in selling off stocks. In this scenario, Nomura warns that “the possibility of US stocks sinking into crisis-driven market conditions in September comparable to those that prevailed at the time of the Lehman crisis stands as a plausible tail risk.“
Nomura concludes by noting that if this were to happen, the Fed, having fallen behind the curve, would most likely be dragged into making an emergency rate cut of at least 50bp.
The problem is that – just like during the financial crisis of 2008 – by then it would be too late to stop what may soon be the biggest crash in capital markets history.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2ytL9FV Tyler Durden
For decades, critics of the administrative state have called upon the Supreme Court to enforce limits on Congress’s ability to delegate authority to administrative agencies – and there is little to show for it. For decades, the Court has turned away these arguments, at times suggesting that there is no judicially administrable standard for determining when a delegation of authority goes too far. Some thought Gundy v. United States would be different. Alas it was not.
While four justices in expressed a willingness to consider judicially enforceable limits on the delegation of power to the executive branch, five justices (those in the plurality and Justice Alito who concurred in the judgment) were unwilling to prevent Congress from (in the words of Justice Gorsuch’s dissent) “hand[ing] off to the nation’s chief prosecutor the power to write his own criminal code.”
One reason some thought Gundy was a particularly strong candidate for the nondelegation doctrine’s revival was because it did not involve a popular regulatory program or threaten settled expectations about the distribution of authority to any particular administrative agencies. At issue instead was whether Congress could delegate authority to determine whether the requirements of the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act (SORNA) apply to those whose offenses predated the act. In this particular case, because the Attorney General decided to apply SORNA’s requirements retroactively to those who had committed prior offenses, Herman Gundy faced a ten-year prison term for failing to register under SORNA. By comparison, Gundy spent only five years in jail for his underlying offense, which, again, he committed prior to SORNA’s enactment.
SORNA’s delegation was upheld only because Justice Alito opted to concur in the judgment. Thus there may still be a nascent majority to revive limits on Congress’s ability to delegate broad authority to executive branch officials – the three dissenters, Justice Alito, and Justice Kavanaugh, who did not participate – but any such assumption may be premature.
Although he joined Justice Gorsuch’s dissent, there are reasons to suspect the Chief Justice might not be willing to be the fifth vote to dramatically change administrative law as we know it. The Chief has written his own “anti-administrativist” dissents, as in City of Arlington v. FCC, but when he’s had the opportunity to cast the fifth vote to alter administrative law doctrine in a significant way (as in Kisor v. Wilkie), he’s trimmed his sails.
The Chief Justice may be particularly reluctant to upset the settled understanding of Congress’s authority to delegate broad power to administrative agencies, particularly insofar as this would require courts to reconsider the constitutionality of long-established programs. He’s likely to be more comfortable with a decision that tells Congress “this far, but no farther,” than with a decision that directly challenges the last half-century of legislative delegations. As Rick Hills suggested at Prawfsblawg, any nondelegation revival may be limited to preventing future excesses at the margin.
All this may mean that hopes for a robust revival of the nondelegation doctrine are misplaced. After all, as Rick notes, the proper boundary between a permissible and impermissible delegation is anything but clear. It’s far easier to declare the principle that Congress cannot delegate legislative power to administrative agencies than it is to demarcate the boundary such a principle should produce.
If delegation is a problem, is there an alternative to waiting for the Court to come around? Perhaps those concerned about delegation focus too much on the courts, and too little on delegation’s source: Congress.
As I noted in a prior post, Chris Walker and I argue in a new paper, “Delegation and Time,” that it is time to reconsider institutional mechanisms that could encourage Congress to more carefully delineate the scope of legislative delegations. In effect, we argue that Congress may be in a better position to address many delegation concerns than courts have been to date, particularly insofar as one is concerned about broad delegations contained in older, potentially obsolescent, legislation.
While it may be hard for Congress to take the initiative to revisit and revise legislation as a general matter – and the enactment of broad REINS Act-type reforms may be unlikely—it may be possible for Congress to alter the incentives against more regular legislative action through the use of temporary legislation. Congress may not like to legislate, but when given sufficient inducement to act, even recent Congresses have shown themselves capable of acting—and a Congress that acts legislatively on a more frequent basis is a Congress that is likely to be exercising greater oversight and control of how delegated power is being used—or so we argue.
I’ll have more to say on how sunsets and mandatory reauthorizations might induce more responsible legislative action in a follow-up post. In the mean time, if you want more now, check out the paper.
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People who retired after spending decades working for department store Sears came together early in 2019 to protest the company’s plan to terminate their life insurance as part of its bankruptcy, according to Bloomberg.
And it seems as though they have good reason to. Benefits that once would have been worth as much as tens of thousands of dollars have been priced at just $135 by the Sears estate in a proposal to its former employees.
It’s another blow in a long line of disasters for Sears employees who have worked for – or are still working for – the company through its transition into bankruptcy. Sears filed for bankruptcy last year and sold its stores and most of its assets to the Eddie Lampert-owned ESL Investments, Inc. in the beginning of this year.
The Sears estate, responsible for settling old debts, was left behind.
The plan for retirees provided policies to about 29,000 former workers with benefits between $5,000 and $14,000. A smaller group of senior executives had policies with death benefits that ranged from $356,000 and $2.7 million.
The new proposal would terminate the plan altogether and award employees an unsecured claim of $5,000. But due to the estate’s limited resources, unsecured claims would get about 2.3% to 2.7% of what they are owed in payouts. This would be between $115 to $135.
Ronald Olbrysh, chairman of the National Association of Retired Sears Employees said:
“The new plan is totally unacceptable to the retirees. Many Sears retirees aren’t able to obtain new life insurance policies now because they’re too old. It’s totally unfair, what Sears is attempting to do.”
Retirees who died after the plan was terminated but before the proposal was approved would receive an administrative claim of $5,000. Administrative claims get higher priority for payment, which means these plans would likely pay out the full amount.
The estate did away with the retiree plan in March and offered participants the choice to pay into a new individual life insurance policy at their own cost. Lawyers for the retirees objected to the termination and the court approved the formation of a committee to represent the interests of retired workers in June.
A Sears estate lawyer in court last month said that the estate tried to make Lampert’s ESL Investments assume the retiree benefits, but that they were unsuccessful.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2ZqlWIa Tyler Durden
For decades, critics of the administrative state have called upon the Supreme Court to enforce limits on Congress’s ability to delegate authority to administrative agencies – and there is little to show for it. For decades, the Court has turned away these arguments, at times suggesting that there is no judicially administrable standard for determining when a delegation of authority goes too far. Some thought Gundy v. United States would be different. Alas it was not.
While four justices in expressed a willingness to consider judicially enforceable limits on the delegation of power to the executive branch, five justices (those in the plurality and Justice Alito who concurred in the judgment) were unwilling to prevent Congress from (in the words of Justice Gorsuch’s dissent) “hand[ing] off to the nation’s chief prosecutor the power to write his own criminal code.”
One reason some thought Gundy was a particularly strong candidate for the nondelegation doctrine’s revival was because it did not involve a popular regulatory program or threaten settled expectations about the distribution of authority to any particular administrative agencies. At issue instead was whether Congress could delegate authority to determine whether the requirements of the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act (SORNA) apply to those whose offenses predated the act. In this particular case, because the Attorney General decided to apply SORNA’s requirements retroactively to those who had committed prior offenses, Herman Gundy faced a ten-year prison term for failing to register under SORNA. By comparison, Gundy spent only five years in jail for his underlying offense, which, again, he committed prior to SORNA’s enactment.
SORNA’s delegation was upheld only because Justice Alito opted to concur in the judgment. Thus there may still be a nascent majority to revive limits on Congress’s ability to delegate broad authority to executive branch officials – the three dissenters, Justice Alito, and Justice Kavanaugh, who did not participate – but any such assumption may be premature.
Although he joined Justice Gorsuch’s dissent, there are reasons to suspect the Chief Justice might not be willing to be the fifth vote to dramatically change administrative law as we know it. The Chief has written his own “anti-administrativist” dissents, as in City of Arlington v. FCC, but when he’s had the opportunity to cast the fifth vote to alter administrative law doctrine in a significant way (as in Kisor v. Wilkie), he’s trimmed his sails.
The Chief Justice may be particularly reluctant to upset the settled understanding of Congress’s authority to delegate broad power to administrative agencies, particularly insofar as this would require courts to reconsider the constitutionality of long-established programs. He’s likely to be more comfortable with a decision that tells Congress “this far, but no farther,” than with a decision that directly challenges the last half-century of legislative delegations. As Rick Hills suggested at Prawfsblawg, any nondelegation revival may be limited to preventing future excesses at the margin.
All this may mean that hopes for a robust revival of the nondelegation doctrine are misplaced. After all, as Rick notes, the proper boundary between a permissible and impermissible delegation is anything but clear. It’s far easier to declare the principle that Congress cannot delegate legislative power to administrative agencies than it is to demarcate the boundary such a principle should produce.
If delegation is a problem, is there an alternative to waiting for the Court to come around? Perhaps those concerned about delegation focus too much on the courts, and too little on delegation’s source: Congress.
As I noted in a prior post, Chris Walker and I argue in a new paper, “Delegation and Time,” that it is time to reconsider institutional mechanisms that could encourage Congress to more carefully delineate the scope of legislative delegations. In effect, we argue that Congress may be in a better position to address many delegation concerns than courts have been to date, particularly insofar as one is concerned about broad delegations contained in older, potentially obsolescent, legislation.
While it may be hard for Congress to take the initiative to revisit and revise legislation as a general matter – and the enactment of broad REINS Act-type reforms may be unlikely—it may be possible for Congress to alter the incentives against more regular legislative action through the use of temporary legislation. Congress may not like to legislate, but when given sufficient inducement to act, even recent Congresses have shown themselves capable of acting—and a Congress that acts legislatively on a more frequent basis is a Congress that is likely to be exercising greater oversight and control of how delegated power is being used—or so we argue.
I’ll have more to say on how sunsets and mandatory reauthorizations might induce more responsible legislative action in a follow-up post. In the mean time, if you want more now, check out the paper.
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Joe Biden and Kamala Harris both caught flak during last night’s Democratic presidential debate because of their records on criminal justice. The criticism is both justified and encouraging, and so are the two candidates’ attempts to remake themselves as reformers. The attacks and defenses show that the bipartisan consensus on putting more and more people in cages for longer and longer periods of time has not only fallen apart but is perceived as a shameful episode from which leading Democratic politicians are eager to distance themselves.
When Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) slammed Biden for his conspicuous role in promoting mass incarceration as a senator, the former vice president said the crime bills he wrote or cosponsored “were passed years ago and passed overwhelmingly.” It’s true!
The Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984, which abolished parole in the federal system, increased drug penalties, established mandatory sentencing guidelines, and expanded civil forfeiture, passed the Senate by a vote of 91 to 1. The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, which imposed new mandatory minimums for drug crimes and created the notorious 100-to-1 weight-based sentencing disparity between snorted and smoked cocaine, got 97 votes in the Senate. Eighty-seven senators thought the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988, which created additional mandatory minimums, including a five-year minimum for mere possession of crack cocaine, was a swell idea.
Everyone (or almost everyone) was doing it, so why pick on poor Joe Biden? Well, for one thing, not everyone was quite as eager as Biden to be identified with the anti-drug, tough-on-crime, lock-’em-up-and-throw-away-the-key agenda. He was the lead cosponsor of the 1984 bill, wrote the 1986 bill, and introduced the bill that became the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which created 60 new capital offenses, increased drug penalties yet again, and provided $10 billion in funding for prison construction. Support for the 1994 law, which Biden was still bragging about as recently as 2015, was less overwhelming: It got 61 votes in the Senate.
Still, it’s true that 1994 was “years ago.” Or as Biden complained later in the debate, “We’re talking about things that occurred a long, long time ago.”
Biden noted that he had seen the error of his ways, although he tellingly did not put it that way. “Since 2007, I, for example, tried to get the crack/powder cocaine disparity totally eliminated,” he said. Biden introduced that bill in the midst of his unsuccessful run for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, only 21 years after he created the disparity.
Booker was not impressed by Biden’s excuses. “You are trying to shift the view from what you created,” he said. “There are people right now in prison for life for drug offenses because you stood up and used that ‘tough on crime’ phony rhetoric that got a lot of people elected but destroyed communities like mine. This isn’t about the past, sir. This is about the present right now. I believe in redemption. I’m happy you evolved. But you’ve offered no redemption to the people in prison right now for life.”
Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), another drug warrior turned reformer, likewise got an earful from Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii). “Senator Harris says she’s proud of her record as a prosecutor and that she’ll be a prosecutor president,” Gabbard said. “But I’m deeply concerned about this record. There are too many examples to cite, but she put over 1,500 people in jail for marijuana violations and then laughed about it when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana. She blocked evidence that would have freed an innocent man from death row until the courts forced her to do so. She kept people in prison beyond their sentences to use them as cheap labor for the state of California. And she fought to keep a bail system in place that impacts poor people in the worst kind of way.”
I don’t know how sincere Biden and Harris are in their new commitment to a less mindlessly punitive criminal justice system, but it may not matter. The climate of opinion on this subject has changed so dramatically that they feel politically obliged to support sentencing and drug policy reform. Nor is the shift limited to Democrats. It is no longer unusual to hear conservatives decry excessive punishment and mass incarceration, and even Donald Trump, who ran on an anti-crime platform eerily similar to what Joe Biden was saying in the 1980s and ’90s, has intermittently joined their ranks by condemning unjust prison terms, commuting drug sentences (well, just two so far), and supporting the FIRST STEP Act.
It would be going too far to say this trend amounts to a new consensus, since more than a few Republicans are strenuously resisting it. But the old consensus, the one that Biden tried to hide behind last night, is dead, and it’s a pleasure to see politicians dumping dirt on it.
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In the race to determine who will serve as Commander in Chief of the most powerful military force in the history of civilization, night two of the CNN Democratic presidential debates saw less than six minutes dedicated to discussing US military policy during the 180-minute event.
That’s six, as in the number before seven. Not sixty. Not sixteen. Six. From the moment Jake Tapper said “I want to turn to foreign policy” to the moment Don Lemon interrupted Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard just as she was preparing to correctly explain how President Trump is supporting Al-Qaedain Idlib, approximately five minutes and fifty seconds had elapsed. The questions then turned toward the Mueller report and impeachment proceedings.
Night one of the CNN debates saw almost twice as much time, with a whole eleven minutes by my count dedicated to questions of war and peace for the leadership of the most warlike nation on the planet. This discrepancy could very well be due to the fact that night two was the slot allotted to Gabbard, whose campaign largely revolves around the platform of ending US warmongering. CNN is a virulent establishment propaganda firm with an extensive history of promoting lies and brazen psyops in facilitation of US imperialism, so it would make sense that they would try to avoid a subject which would inevitably lead to unauthorized truth-telling on the matter.
But the near-absence of foreign policy discussion didn’t stop the Hawaii congresswoman from getting in some unauthorized truth-telling anyway.
Attacking the authoritarian prosecutorial record of Senator Kamala Harris to thunderous applause from the audience, Gabbard criticized the way her opponent “put over 1,500 people in jail for marijuana violations and then laughed about it when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana,” “blocked evidence that would have freed an innocent man from death row until the court’s forced her to do so,” “kept people in prisons beyond their sentences to use them as cheap labor for the state of California,” and “fought to keep the cash bail system in place that impacts poor people in the worst kind of way.”
Harris, who it turns out fights very well when advancing but folds under pressure, had no answer for Gabbard’s attack, preferring to focus on attacking Joe Biden instead. Later, when she was a nice safe distance out of Gabbard’s earshot, she uncorked a long-debunked but still effective smear which establishment narrative managers have been dying for an excuse to run wild with.
“This, coming from someone who has been an apologist for an individual, Assad, who has murdered the people of his country like cockroaches,” Harris told Anderson Cooper after the debate.
“She who has embraced and been an apologist for him in a way that she refuses to call him a war criminal. I can only take what she says and her opinion so seriously and so I’m prepared to move on.”
That was all it took. Harris’ press secretary Ian Sams unleashed a string of tweets about Gabbard being an “Assad apologist”, which was followed by a deluge of establishment narrative managers who sent the word “Assad” trending on Twitter, at times when Gabbard’s name somehow failed to trend despite being the top-searched candidate on Google after the debate. As of this writing, “Assad” is showing on the #5 trending list on the side bar of Twitter’s new layout, while Gabbard’s name is nowhere to be seen. This discrepancy has drawn criticism from numerous Gabbard defenders on the platform.
“Somehow I have a hard time believing that ‘Assad’ is the top trending item in the United States but ‘Tulsi’ is nowhere to be found,” tweeted journalist Michael Tracey.
It really is interesting how aggressively the narrative managers thrust this line into mainstream consciousness all at the same time.
The Washington Post‘s Josh Rogin went on a frantic, lie-filled Twitter storm as soon as he saw an opportunity, claiming with no evidence whatsoever that Gabbard lied when she said she met with Assad for purposes of diplomacy and that she “helped Assad whitewash a mass atrocity”, and falsely claiming that “she praised Russian bombing of Syrian civilians“.
In reality all Gabbard did was meet with Assad to discuss the possibility of peace, and, more importantly, she said the US shouldn’t be involved in regime change interventionism in Syria. This latter bit of business is the real reason professional war propagandists like Rogin are targeting her; not because they honestly believe that a longtime US service member and sitting House Representative is an “Assad apologist”, but because she commits the unforgivable heresy of resisting the mechanics of America’s forever war.
MSNBC’s Joy Reid gleefully leapt into the smearing frenzy, falsely claiming that “Gabbard will not criticize Assad, no matter what.” Gabbard has publicly and unequivocally both decried Assad as a “brutal dictator” and claimed he’s guilty of war crimes,much to the irritation of anti-imperialists like myself who hold a far more skeptical eye to the war propaganda narratives about what’s going on in Syria. At no time has Gabbard ever claimed that Assad is a nice person or that he isn’t a brutal leader; all she’s done is say the US shouldn’t get involved in another regime change war there because US regime change interventionism is consistently and predictably disastrous. That’s not being an “Assad apologist”, that’s having basic common sense.
“Beware the Russian bots and their promotion of Tulsi Gabbard and sowing racial dischord [sic], especially around Kamala Harris,” tweetedNew York Times and CNN contributor Wajahat Ali.
All the usual war cheerleaders from Lindsey Graham to Caroline Orr to Jennifer Rubin piled on, because this feeding frenzy had nothing to do with concern that Gabbard adores Bashar al-Assad and everything to do with wanting more war. Add that to the fact that Gabbard just publicly eviscerated a charming, ambitious and completely amoral centrist who would excel at putting a friendly humanitarian face on future wars if elected, and it’s easy to understand why the narrative managers are flipping out so hard right now.
To repeat: There is no quote in which Tulsi praises, supports, or otherwise “apologies for” Assad. I checked the record a long time ago, and it doesn’t exist. This is just a smear intended to delegitimize diplomatic engagement https://t.co/Iyww1C5Ew0
War is the glue that holds the empire together. A politician can get away with opposing some aspects of the status quo when it comes to healthcare or education, but war as a strategy for maintaining global dominance is strictly off limits. This is how you tell the difference between someone who actually wants to change things and someone who’s just going through the motions for show; the real rebels forcefully oppose the actual pillars of empire by calling for an end to military bloodshed, while the performers just stick to the safe subjects.
The shrill, hysterical pushback that Gabbard received last night was very encouraging, because it means she’s forcing them to fight back. In a media environment where the war propaganda machine normally coasts along almost entirely unhindered in mainstream attention, the fact that someone has positioned themselves to move the needle like this says good things for our future. If our society is to have any chance of ever throwing off the omnicidal, ecocidal power establishment which keeps us in a state of endless war and soul-crushing oppression, the first step is punching a hole in the narrative matrix which keeps us hypnotized into believing that this is all normal and acceptable.
Whoever controls the narrative controls the world. Whoever disrupts that narrative control is doing the real work.
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Joe Biden and Kamala Harris both caught flak during last night’s Democratic presidential debate because of their records on criminal justice. The criticism is both justified and encouraging, and so are the two candidates’ attempts to remake themselves as reformers. The attacks and defenses show that the bipartisan consensus on putting more and more people in cages for longer and longer periods of time has not only fallen apart but is perceived as a shameful episode from which leading Democratic politicians are eager to distance themselves.
When Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) slammed Biden for his conspicuous role in promoting mass incarceration as a senator, the former vice president said the crime bills he wrote or cosponsored “were passed years ago and passed overwhelmingly.” It’s true!
The Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984, which abolished parole in the federal system, increased drug penalties, established mandatory sentencing guidelines, and expanded civil forfeiture, passed the Senate by a vote of 91 to 1. The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, which imposed new mandatory minimums for drug crimes and created the notorious 100-to-1 weight-based sentencing disparity between snorted and smoked cocaine, got 97 votes in the Senate. The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988, which created additional mandatory minimums, including a five-year minimum for mere possession of crack cocaine, got 87.
Everyone (or almost everyone) was doing it, so why pick on poor Joe Biden? Well, for one thing, not everyone was quite as eager as Biden to be identified with the anti-drug, tough-on-crime, lock-’em-up-and-throw-away-the-key agenda. He was the lead cosponsor of the 1984 bill, wrote the 1986 bill, and introduced the bill that became the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which created 60 new death penalty offenses and provided $10 billion in funding for prison construction. Support for the 1994 law, which Biden was still bragging about as recently as 2015, was less overwhelming: It got 61 votes in the Senate.
Still, it’s true that 1994 was “years ago.” Or as Biden complained later in the debate, “We’re talking about things that occurred a long, long time ago.”
Biden noted that he had seen the error of his ways, although he tellingly did not put it that way. “Since 2007, I, for example, tried to get the crack/powder cocaine disparity totally eliminated,” he said. Biden introduced that bill in the midst of his unsuccessful run for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, only 21 years after he created the disparity.
Booker was not impressed by Biden’s excuses. “You are trying to shift the view from what you created,” he said. “There are people right now in prison for life for drug offenses because you stood up and used that ‘tough on crime’ phony rhetoric that got a lot of people elected but destroyed communities like mine. This isn’t about the past, sir. This is about the present right now. I believe in redemption. I’m happy you evolved. But you’ve offered no redemption to the people in prison right now for life.”
Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), another drug warrior turned reformer, likewise got an earful from Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii). “Senator Harris says she’s proud of her record as a prosecutor and that she’ll be a prosecutor president,” Gabbard said. “But I’m deeply concerned about this record. There are too many examples to cite, but she put over 1,500 people in jail for marijuana violations and then laughed about it when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana. She blocked evidence that would have freed an innocent man from death row until the courts forced her to do so. She kept people in prison beyond their sentences to use them as cheap labor for the state of California. And she fought to keep a bail system in place that impacts poor people in the worst kind of way.”
I don’t know how sincere Biden and Harris are in their new commitment to a less mindlessly punitive criminal justice system, but it may not matter. The climate of opinion on this subject has changed so dramatically that they feel politically obliged to support sentencing and drug policy reform. Nor is the shift limited to Democrats. It is no longer unusual to hear conservatives decry excessive punishment and mass incarceration, and even Donald Trump, who ran on an anti-crime platform eerily similar to what Joe Biden was saying in the 1980s and ’90s, has intermittently joined their ranks by condemning unjust prison terms, commuting drug sentences (well, just two so far), and supporting the FIRST STEP Act.
It would be going too far to say this trend amounts to a new consensus, since more than a few Republicans are strenuously resisting it. But the old consensus, the one that Biden tried to hide behind last night, is dead, and it’s a pleasure to see politicians dumping dirt on it.
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Just as investors thought it was safe to buy-the f**king-dip after Powell’s plunge, President Trump steals the jam out of their donut by announcing new China tariffs…
“… on September 1st, putting a small additional Tariff of 10% on the remaining 300 Billion Dollars of goods and products coming from China into our Country “
In a series of tweets, Trump laid out the state of the China trade deal… in a word – terrible…
Our representatives have just returned from China where they had constructive talks having to do with a future Trade Deal. We thought we had a deal with China three months ago, but sadly, China decided to re-negotiate the deal prior to signing. More recently, China agreed to…
…buy agricultural product from the U.S. in large quantities, but did not do so. Additionally, my friend President Xi said that he would stop the sale of Fentanyl to the United States – this never happened, and many Americans continue to die! Trade talks are continuing, and…
…during the talks the U.S. will start, on September 1st, putting a small additional Tariff of 10% on the remaining 300 Billion Dollars of goods and products coming from China into our Country. This does not include the 250 Billion Dollars already Tariffed at 25%…
…We look forward to continuing our positive dialogue with China on a comprehensive Trade Deal, and feel that the future between our two countries will be a very bright one!
And just like that – gains were gone…
And 10Y Treasury yields crash to 1.92% – the lowest since 2016…
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2GGVIK7 Tyler Durden
