Tag: news

Kevin Hassett: Trump-Powell Meeting Would Be “A Very Favorable Thing”

Mere minutes after stocks staged the biggest reversal since 2010 to build on Wednesday’s historic rebound (a rebound that many attributed to Kevin Hassett’s assurances that Fed Chairman Jerome Powell’s jobs was “100% safe”), the White House economic advisor was back on Fox Business Thursday afternoon to reprise his role as the last remaining WH official with any credibility in the eyes of the market.

Hassett, the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said that while he has no first-hand knowledge of plans for a meeting between Trump and Powell (speculation has intensified since WSJ reported yesterday that Powell would be “open” to such a meeting), Hassett believes such a get together would be “very productive” and “a very favorable thing.”

TP

Both Powell and Trump are “great guys” who would “get along” if they could only meet up and talk through their issues.

“I’ve not been involved in those discussions but I can say that I think that if they did meet it would be a very favorable thing,” Hassett said during the interview. “The two of them are great guys that would get along if they were to meet and talk things through and the president loves to listen to reason, to arguments, to analysis, and Jay does too. So I think they would have a very productive dinner were they to meet.”

Trump continued his attacks on the Fed this week, tweeting on Christmas Eve after the worst pre-Christmas session in history that “the only problem our economy has is the Fed. They don’t have a feel for the Market, they don’t understand necessary Trade Wars or Strong Dollars or even Democrat Shutdowns over Borders.”

But as we pointed out earlier this week, while the Fed is to blame for the market carnage, it’s not for the reasons Trump thinks. By dropping interest rates to zero and aggressively expanding its balance sheet, the Fed created what campaign-era Trump once decried as a “big fat ugly bubble.”

Then again, even if a meeting between Trump and Powell goes south, how long would it take the market to switch gears and realize that getting rid of the hawkish Fed chairman might possibly be a good thing (for asset prices, that is)? 

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Riots Loom As Food Stamp Cash Will Run Out By End Of January If Government Shutdown Continues

Authored by Michael Snyder via The End of The American Dream blog,

According to the Department of Agriculture, if this government shutdown stretches into February there won’t be money for food stamps.  And it certainly looks like this shutdown could last for quite a while, because President Trump is not backing down on his demand for border wall funding, and the Democrats have pledged not to give him a single penny. 

So a few weeks from now, approximately 38 million people could be suddenly cut off from the food stamp program.  If that scenario were to unfold, there is no telling what could happen.  After just a few days, government workers are already freaking out about having their paychecks delayed. 

If people are getting this restless already, what will things look like when tens of millions of Americans are suddenly cut off from their primary source of food money?

Even though the government has been shut down, the Department of Agriculture still has some existing financial resources at their disposal, and they are assuring us that those enrolled in the food stamp program will still receive their benefits “for January”.  The following comes from CNN…

Eligible households will still receive monthly SNAP benefits for January. But other domestic nutrition assistance programs such as the Commodity Supplemental Food Program, WIC, and the Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations will only be operational based on available resources. Additional federal funds and commodities will not be provided during the shutdown.

Child nutrition programs including School Lunch, School Breakfast, Child and Adult Care Feeding, Summer Food Service and Special Milk will continue through February.

The mainstream media is blaming this shutdown entirely on President Trump, and that gives the Democrats a tremendous amount of leverage.  The longer this shutdown lasts, the more painful it will become for ordinary Americans, and once food stamp funds run out the pressure on President Trump to surrender will be immense.

Will Trump be able to keep going once tens of millions of Americans are yelling and screaming about having their food stamp benefits cut off?

For now, the Department of Agriculture will attempt to keep things going for as long as possible “using existing resources”.

But those “existing resources” will not last for very long.

And things are already changing.  At this point, approximately 95 percent of all federal workers involved with the food stamp program have been furloughed…

As the government shutdown drags into its fifth day, nearly all employees in the office overseeing federal food stamps have been cut.

As of Wednesday morning, the remaining staff dwindled down to a mere 5 percent.

We have never seen food stamp benefits cut off nationwide before.  So we actually don’t have any frame of reference for what could happen.

Could we see the type of civil unrest and rioting that I warned about in The Beginning Of The End?  When people are hungry, they get desperate pretty quickly.  And history has shown that when people don’t know where their next meal is going to come from they can get quite violent.

And even without the government shutdown, President Trump was planning to knock millions of people off of the food stamp program anyway by tightening work requirements…

If Congress won’t make more food stamp recipients work for their benefits, the Trump administration will.

The US Department of Agriculture unveiled a proposed rule Thursday that would expand work requirements in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, as the food stamp program is formally known. The proposal comes on the same day as President Donald Trump plans to sign a farm bill that had a similar provision that was eventually eliminated.

So one way or another, a lot of people are soon going to lose their benefits.

Meanwhile, federal workers continue to freak out over this government shutdown.  The following comes from a New York Times article entitled “Federal Workers, Some in ‘Panic Mode,’ Share Shutdown Fears on Social Media”…

A Department of Transportation worker in Missouri picked up cashier shifts at Barnes & Noble. A paralegal for the Justice Department in Texas stopped using her “gas-guzzling” pickup truck and pulled her motorcycle out of storage. An air traffic controller in California is avoiding any purchases that aren’t vital.

As you can see, the suffering is getting worse with each passing day.

What is next?  Will we soon discover that some government workers have been forced to buy generic brands at the grocery store due to this never ending horror of a government shutdown?

But seriously, the longer this shutdown lasts, the more that people are going to complain.

And right now Trump does not appear to have any intention of giving in.  When reporters asked him how long he is willing to wait, Trump responded by saying “whatever it takes”…

Funding for nine federal departments lapsed Saturday amid an impasse over whether to fund the president’s proposed border wall. As congressional leaders and the White House appear to make little progress toward a deal, the shutdown could last past Jan. 3, when Democrats take control of the House.

Asked Wednesday during a surprise visit to U.S. troops in Iraq how long he would wait to see his demands met, Trump responded: “Whatever it takes.” The comment suggests little willingness on the president’s part to back down as Democrats refuse to approve funds for the proposed barrier.

Of course Chuck Schumer has drawn a line in the sand and has pledged that he will never, ever allow Trump to have funding for a border wall.

And so we have a political game of chicken playing out right in front of our eyes, and the Democrats have absolutely no incentive to back down because the worse things get the better it will be for them politically.

At this point it is very easy to imagine a scenario in which this shutdown extends into February, and when food stamp benefits get cut off we could truly see a national temper tantrum unlike anything that we have ever seen before.

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‘Monkey Business’: Chris Brown Might Go to Jail Over His Adorable Pet

Last December, singer Chris Brown posted a video to Instagram of his daughter, Royalty, playing with a pet capuchin monkey named Fiji.

The video was adorable, and it’s worth watching:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by CHRIS BROWN (@chrisbrownofficial) on Dec 6, 2017 at 6:46pm PST

Cute or no, Captain Patrick Foy of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) told the Associated Press in January that about six people called in to complain. It turns out Brown didn’t have a permit to own Fiji, which was problematic. According to CDFW regulations, capuchin monkeys are just one of many animals you need to obtain a permit in order to own. And permits are not given out for “pet purposes,” the agency says.

Brown agreed to give up Fiji, but it might not be enough. Citing legal documents, TMZ reported today that he faces two misdemeanor counts of possessing “a restricted species without a permit.” If convicted, Brown could be looking at six months behind bars (which is a stiffer penalty than he received for assaulting Rihanna). A spokesperson for the Los Angeles City Attorney’s office confirmed TMZ‘s report to the Daily Mail.

Brown’s attorney, Mark Geragos, told TMZ in January that it was a waste of resources for the prosecutors to pursue charges against Brown. “As I leave my office in Downtown L.A. and walk past people sleeping on the street on my way to defend people charged by the city attorney with selling medical marijuana…now spending taxpayer money on investigating monkey business, this completes the circle on his absurdity,” Geragos told the outlet.

There doesn’t appear to be any evidence that Brown mistreated the monkey, or that he obtained it in a nefarious way. That jail is even an option for such a minor offense is absurd, but not unheard of. In July, I wrote about a Key West tourist who was sentenced to 15 days behind bars for collecting 40 conch seashells. There’s also the Florida man sentenced in September to 20 years in prison for stealing $600 worth of cigarettes. And don’t forget about the man sentenced in 2016, under Louisiana’s since-reformed habitual offender law, to life behind bars for stealing $31 worth of candy bars.

Does it make a difference if Fiji is endangered? Yes, but not in the way one might think. “One thing that we know that helps endangered animals more than endangered species lists,” Reason‘s Nick Gillepsie said in 2011, “is actually giving people ownership rights over animals”:

“In a libertarian society,” he continued, “there would be ownership of more types of animals, and there would be more types of animals.”

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“Everything Is Fake”: Ex-Reddit CEO Confirms Internet Traffic Metrics Are Bullshit

“It’s all true: Everything is fake,” tweeted Former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao regarding a Wednesday New York Magazine article which reveals that internet traffic metrics from some of the largest tech companies are overstated or fabricated. In other words; they’re bullshit. 

Pao was responding to a tweet by the Washington Post‘s Aram Zucker-Schariff, quoting the following segment of the article: 

The metrics are fake.

Take something as seemingly simple as how we measure web traffic. Metrics should be the most real thing on the internet: They are countable, trackable, and verifiable, and their existence undergirds the advertising business that drives our biggest social and search platforms. Yet not even Facebook, the world’s greatest data–gathering organization, seems able to produce genuine figures. In October, small advertisers filed suit against the social-media giant, accusing it of covering up, for a year, its significant overstatements of the time users spent watching videos on the platform (by 60 to 80 percent, Facebook says; by 150 to 900 percent, the plaintiffs say). According to an exhaustive list at MarketingLand, over the past two years Facebook has admitted to misreporting the reach of posts on Facebook Pages (in two different ways), the rate at which viewers complete ad videos, the average time spent reading its “Instant Articles,” the amount of referral traffic from Facebook to external websites, the number of views that videos received via Facebook’s mobile site, and the number of video views in Instant Articles.

Can we still trust the metrics? After the Inversion, what’s the point? Even when we put our faith in their accuracy, there’s something not quite real about them: My favorite statistic this year was Facebook’s claim that 75 million people watched at least a minute of Facebook Watch videos every day — though, as Facebook admitted, the 60 seconds in that one minute didn’t need to be watched consecutively. Real videos, real people, fake minutes. –NYMag

“It’s all true: Everything is fake,” tweeted Pao, adding “Also mobile user counts are fake. No one has figured out how to count logged-out mobile users, as I learned at reddit. Every time someone switches cell towers, it looks like another user and inflates company user metrics.” 

The New York Magazine article by Max Read goes much deeper, however, asserting; “The people are fake” , “The businesses are fake” , “The content is fake” , “Our politics are fake,” and finally “We ourselves are fake.”

Tell us how you really feel Max! 

For starters Read notes that “Studies generally suggest that, year after year, less than 60 percent of web traffic is human.” Some years, “a healthy majority of it is bot.” In fact, half of all YouTube traffic in 2013 was bots according to the Times. 

The internet has always played host in its dark corners to schools of catfish and embassies of Nigerian princes, but that darkness now pervades its every aspect: Everything that once seemed definitively and unquestionably real now seems slightly fake; everything that once seemed slightly fake now has the power and presence of the real. –NYMag

Also of interest, the Times found in their August investigation that there is a flourishing business buying clicks. In fact, one can buy 5,000 video clicks in 30-second increments – for as little as $15, with the traffic typically coming from bots or “click farms.” 

So what constitutes “real” traffic, Read asks? 

If a Russian troll using a Brazilian man’s photograph to masquerade as an American Trump supporter watches a video on Facebook, is that view “real”? Not only do we have bots masquerading as humans and humans masquerading as other humans, but also sometimes humans masquerading as bots, pretending to be “artificial-intelligence personal assistants,” like Facebook’s “M,” in order to help tech companies appear to possess cutting-edge AI. We even have whatever CGI Instagram influencer Lil Miquela is: a fake human with a real body, a fake face, and real influence –NYMag

Read the rest here – including Max Read’s thoughts on navigating a world of “deep fakes,” bullshit propaganda which purports to “redpill” people to the “truth” of everything, and how utterly fake people have become. 

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Another Massive Buy Program Sends Dow Soaring Over 900 Points

Dow futures plunged over 760 points after tagging yesterday’s highs overnight, but those darn algos ripped the market higher in the last hour erasing the entire drop…  with the biggest buy program since February…

 

In words…

And pictures… Dow futs exploded over 900 points higher, taking out yesterday’s highs and ending like yesterday at the highs of the day…

 

On the day, Small Caps ended red but The Dow led the rest green…

 

Quite a wild ride this week so far…

The plunge was not a total surprise after economic confidence crumbled and job expectations crashed, but the buying panic had the same short squeeze and pension panic reallocation fingerprints from yesterday.

However, gold and bonds remain green since the Fed hike and stocks still down over 4%…

 

It certainly has the smell of a massive pension reallocation as the moment stocks started to surge, bonds were dumped…

 

Especially the long-end as pensions unwound as much duration as quickly as possible to cover the increased equity exposure…

 

While the USD and stocks were correlated today, the former plunged and was unable to rip back with the magnitude of stocks…

 

Dollar weakness helped lift Silver again as crude slipped…

 

Silver has dramatically outperformed gold in the last few days…

 

But finally, no matter how much lipstick they put on December, it is still a pig…

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Shutdown Drags On As House GOP Leaders Say No Vote This Week

The partial government shutdown continues with no end in sight, as House GOP leaders said on Thursday that they do not expect a vote this week on a financial package that might reopen the government, according to The Hill. 

House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA), who supports President Trump’s firm stance on $5 billion for his long-promised southern border wall, advised members “that no votes are expected in the House this week.”

“As the House awaits Senate action on remaining FY19 appropriations, we will aim to provide 24 hours’ notice ahead of any expected votes in the House,” added Scalise’s office in a notice. 

The Senate was scheduled to convene at 4 p.m. on Thursday, but no votes were expected until President Trump and congressional Democrats reach a deal to end a funding lapse that is affecting about 25 percent of the federal government.

Little progress has been made in negotiations as Democratic lawmakers and the White House remain at odds over funding for Trump’s proposed border wall.

“No end in sight to the President’s government shutdown,” Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) tweeted on Thursday. “He’s taken our government hostage over his outrageous demand for a $5 billion border wall that would be both wasteful and ineffective.” –The Hill

Trump resumed his recent attacks on Democrats over the wall funding, Tweeting on Thursday “Have the Democrats finally realized that we desperately need Border Security and a Wall on the Southern Border. Need to stop Drugs, Human Trafficking, Gang Members & Criminals from coming into our Country,” adding “Do the Dems realize that most of the people not getting paid are Democrats?”

Last week the House passed a bill with $5.7 billion in border funding, however it was considered DOA in the Senate – which passed a measure earlier in the week to keep border security funding at current levels, with no additional money for Trump’s wall. 

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Trump Did Not Expose “Covert” SEAL Team In Iraq, Say Special Forces Vets

It’s the latest outrage fail after over a week of “outrage!” including Trump’s announcing the pullout of all American forces from Syria, a major reduction of troops from Afghanistan eventually leading to a full withdrawal, and his telling a seven-year old that belief in Santa is “marginal” at that age. During Trump’s Wednesday surprise Christmas visit to US troops in Iraq, he posed for a photo op with a Navy SEAL team deployed to Iraq; and after flying out of Baghdad posted the video to Twitter, yet the video was uploaded before the SEAL team members’ faces could be blurred out to protect their identities according to protocol. 

This immediately prompted howls and headlines that Trump exposed “covert” and “classified” ops from pundits and the media; however, a number of military and special forces experts, including some members of American special forces themselves quickly pointed out this was hugely exaggerated given that SEAL team 5 — the unit Trump posed with while they wore full combat gear and night vision goggles — is a “white” unit (not classified), whose department with Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force Iraq (CJSOTF-I) is public knowledge.

Among the more prominent special forces combat veterans to weigh in, former Green Beret Jack Murphy and editor-in-chief of veteran-run NEWSREP, pointed out the following while linking to a Defense Department image sharing platform, which is full of public images showing currently deployed SF personnel: “Deployments to Iraq are not covert. SOF soldiers are not under a covered status in Iraq. DOD publishes unredacted photos of SOF soldiers just about every day,” wrote Murphy.

And retired US Army Special Forces officer and author Lino Miani had this to say:

Bob Wilson, a retired Army Colonel who served on the National Security Council in the Obama and Trump administrations (and author of a WaPo op-ed this week on Gen. Mattis) dismissed the whole “news” event as “ridiculously false”. 

Col. Wilson noted that while unusual according to standard protocol, the hype over Trump supposedly exposing a “secret” deployment is false: 

Further, Politico’s military affairs reporter Wesley Morgan agreed and explained why the outraged media pundits have no idea what they’re talking about, as these were not JSOC operators standing by Trump in the photo (in which case they would indeed be “covert”):

And even the popular but highly dubious “Angry White House Staffer” Twitter account (supposedly a “Resistance” mole tweeting from within the White House) admitted the following: 

None of this stopped unnamed Pentagon sources from feeding the hype over what at worst was a minor failure of protocol regarding Trump’s Christmas visit to Iraq.

One official told Newsweek, “Even during special operation demonstrations for congressional delegations or for the president or vice president, personnel either have their faces covered or their face is digitally blurred prior to a release to the general public.” The anonymous DoD source claimed further, “I don’t recall another time where special operation forces had to pose with their faces visible while serving in a war zone.”

But another prominent military analysis website run by veterans took the opportunity to educate the public on what “covert” actually means within the context of military operations: 

Task & Purpose notes that while photographing deployed special forces troops is not ideal, it in no way constitutes revealing “covert ops” as many of the headlines are now claiming.

“Is it a secret that these guys are out there in that part of the world? No,” a defense official told Task & Purpose on condition of anonymity. “It’s been a little more sensationalized than we would’ve hoped.”

The military analysis site explains: 

As it stands, the vast majority missions carried out by U.S. special operations forces are non-statutory clandestine operations under Title 10 rather than explicitly (and legally) covert operations under Title 50; OPSEC, in the case of the former, is usually designed to conceal an operation for tactical purposes rather than fully embrace the level of plausible deniability usually referred to spies. In this context, the only true “covert” operation carried out by U.S. special operations forces was the SEAL Team 6 raid on Osama Bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in 2011.

Simply belonging to a SEAL Team doesn’t make your every move “covert,” especially if you’re hanging out in the DFAC during the commander-in-chief’s visit.

All of this is to say that if SEAL Team 5 was deployed to Iraq on a covert mission, there’s no way in hell anyone, including conventional U.S. forces, would likely know they were there. I mean, Lt. Lee, the SEAL chaplain, was identified as a member of SEAL Team 5 in the public pool report and photographed by Agence France-Presse. No commander on an actual “covert” mission would ever let that happen, no matter how amped they are to hang out with the commander-in-chief, given the gravity surrounding Title 50 activities; even letting personnel engage with the commander-in-chief in public completely negates the plausible deniability that supposedly comes with covert operations.

This may seem like a pedantic argument, but it’s an important one, especially for matters of civil-military engagement. But make no mistake: Revealing the identities of SOF personnel is still bad news, even if they’re not tasked with a real “covert” mission.

So ultimately we just witnessed another 24-hour Trump outrage news cycle dominated by total hype, extreme overstatement, and sensationalism driven by willed ignorance and reflexive anti-Trumping — all of which of course leads to further bad analysis. 

And we don’t expect any mainstream media corrections to be issued after such deep investment in the fake story. 

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Mark Sanford’s Farewell: Spending and Debt ‘Could Lead to a Future Hitler-like Character’

||| Nancy Kaszerman/ZUMA Press/NewscomMark Sanford, the libertarian-leaning Republican congressman from South Carolina, driven from elected office after being primaried in June by a White House-backed immigration hawk who went on to lose to a Democrat in November, published a congressional farewell message to his Facebook page yesterday so unrelentingly grim in its outlook that it included this disclaimer: “I want to be clear and explicit that I am not likening Trump to Hitler.”

That was the good news. The bad? “[F]orces at play could lead to a future Hitler-like character if we don’t watch out.”

Sanford, a former governor who was once thought of as limited-government presidential material until his infamous 2009 dalliance not quite on the Appalaichan Trail, has been since 2013 one of a dwindling number of anti-spending hardliners in the House GOP caucus. He has been allergic to Donald Trump from first contact, calling the then-candidate in July 2016 “long on hyperbole and short on facts.” The president returned the disfavor by endorsing primary challenger Katie Arrington, calling Sanford “very unhelpful to me in my campaign to MAGA,” then dunking on Sanford in front of his congressional colleagues after Arrington won.

Unsurprisingly, Sanford devotes considerable portions of his long and discursive message to the national debt, warning ominously that, “We are riding on the Titanic as it now stands. This will end tragically for all of us, if we don’t turn our spending habits around.” More in that vein:

Math always works. Professors Reinhart and Rogoff spoke eloquently to this theme in their book “This Time Is Different.” Over the 800 years of financial history that they studied, it never was different. In every instance, the civilization in question found itself confronting the same math that our country now faces, and the politicians inevitably answered “this time is different” when talking about the math behind their debt burden. The political answer brought with it the seeds of destruction, and if we simply accept the political answer of more spending – that this administration and past administrations have proffered, we will face the same fate of those now extinct civilizations.

I believe that we are marching our way toward the most predictable financial and economic crisis in the history of our republic. If we don’t change course soon, markets will do it for us, and the consequences will be damning with regard to future inflation, the value of the dollar, the worth of our savings, and ultimately our way of life.

Happy 2019!

In Sanford’s reading, fiscal irresponsibility and an increasingly ponderous state are driving voters into the arms of populists. “Because as open political systems become cumbersome and inefficient, inevitably a strong man comes along and offers easy promises,” he wrote. “He says that he can take care of it for us. People desperate for a change accept his offer. They have to give up a few freedoms in the equation to get more security. It doesn’t work out so well[.]”

Sanford is explicit about seeing the president as a threat, spending two paragraphs bemoaning the use of the term “fake news,” and warning that “Open political systems cannot survive in a post-truth world.”

So what’s next for Sanford? “It’s still completely up in the air,” he told the Greenville News earlier this month. Libertarian Party officials have reached out to Sanford in the past, so it wouldn’t be a surprise to see some try to scare up a non-anarchistic challenger to Bill Weld for the party’s 2020 presidential nomination. Certainly, his congressional goodbye doesn’t sound like a politician going gently into that good night.

“We seem to flirt with populism about every hundred years in this country, and it seems we are in our latest courtship given the era of Trump,” Sanford says. “But a cult of personality is never what our Founding Fathers intended. We in fact were to be a nation of laws and not men.”

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Who Got Hit: Here Are The Best And Worst Performing Hedge Funds Of 2018

December is almost done, as if 2018, and the latter is shaping up as the worst for most quant, CTA and managed futures funds. And not only: a quick look at the best and worst performers so far in 2018 shows a distinct skew to the downside, with one clear exception: Odey’s 51.5% YTD return is almost twice as good as the second best performing fund of 2018 according to HSBC.

And here is our usual universe of some of the most recognizable, marquee hedge fund names, sorted by YTD performance. It is clear that almost none of the “hedge” funds was hedged for the events that took place in Q4.

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Hello, FIRST STEP Act! Goodbye, Jeff Sessions! The Year in Criminal Justice Reform

Jeff SessionsWith the passage of the FIRST STEP Act just before Christmas, 2018 has been a banner year for incremental reforms to our awful criminal justice system. We’ve seen efforts to reduce levels of incarceration and the harshness of prison sentences, particularly those connected to the drug war; further legalization of marijuana in the states; and efforts to constrain the power of police to seize people’s property and money without convicting them. While all this was happening, crime mostly declined in America’s largest cities.

But we’ve also seen increased deliberate efforts to crack down on voluntary sex work by conflating it with forced human trafficking. And, despite learning from the drug war that harsh mandatory minimum sentences don’t reduce the drug trade, lawmakers and prosecutors are yet again pushing for more punishment to fight opioid and fentanyl overdoses.

Here are some highlights (and lowlights) of American criminal justice in 2018:

The FIRST STEP Act passed (finally). After years of lobbying, activism, and negotiations between Senate Democrats and Republicans, we finally saw important changes to federal sentencing policy and prison programming happen right as 2018 was wrapping up.

The FIRST STEP Act expands job training opportunities for federal prisoners, calls for inmates to be housed within 500 miles of their hometowns and families when possible, and bans the shackling of pregnant inmates. It also reduces some mandatory minimum sentences, gives judges more leeway to show mercy with “safety valve” provisions, and, perhaps most importantly, retroactively applies the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 to prisoners who have been given harsher sentences for drug crimes because they involved crack instead of powder cocaine. That last part is expected to reduce the sentences of approximately 3,000 prisoners.

The bill passed easily in the House, but was caught up in the Senate by Republican lawmakers who demanded it be weakened. Sen. Tom Cotton (R–Ark.) tried his best to kill the bill, claiming that America, despite all evidence to the contrary, has an “underincarceration” problem. Cotton failed and President Donald Trump signed the bill into law on Dec. 21.

Marijuana legalization continued apace. In November, Michigan became the 10th state to legalize recreational marijuana consumption, the result of a voter-approved ballot initiative. Vermont also legalized recreational use through lawmaking in 2018. Oklahoma, Utah, and Missouri voters all approved medical marijuana use this year.

Legalizing marijuana consumption inherently serves as criminal justice reform on the front end by reducing opportunities for police to arrest people on the basis of what they put in their body. That’s great moving forward, but it leaves the matter of all those people who have criminal records from their pre-legalization arrests. Thankfully, many stats and cities are working on expunging those records. If there isn’t one already, there should be a replicable legislative model for mass expungement of cannabis offenses.

The desire of state and local governments to find ways to make money off of marijuana is causing its own set of problems. California’s regulatory and tax regime is so oppressive that many companies are finding it hard to get off the ground. The state did not earn nearly as much revenue as it predicted for 2018 and a black market for pot continues to exist in most legalization states.

Civil Asset Forfeiture under the microscope. The more Americans learn about civil asset forfeiture, the more they hate it. In 2018, Philadelphia agreed to scale back its program in response to a class-action lawsuit, and a federal judge ordered Albuquerque to stop its own program, which continuied to operate in defiance of state law.

A case heard by the Supreme Court in November will keep civil asset forfeiture in the news in 2019. In Timbs v. Indiana, the justices have been asked whether these property seizures are violations of the Eighth Amendment’s ban on excessive fines and fees. During oral arguments, the justices seemed very skeptical of the idea that government representatives have the authority to take and keep your property in response to anything they deem criminal activity. It seems likely that a ruling in 2019 will force a scaling back of the practice.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions shown the door. When Trump nominated Sessions as his first attorney general, it seemed as though he was actually closing the door on the possibility of a more merciful criminal justice system. Sessions’ view of the law is harsh and punitive. He’s a drug warrior through and through. He exaggerated crime statistics to sow fear and stop reforms, and he undermined efforts to hold police accountable for misconduct. He also ordered federal prosecutors to pursue the harshest possible penalties for drug offenders in order to maximize their sentences, and he advocated attacking doctors as the right way to fight the opioid overdose crisis.

But he wasn’t able to stop Robert Mueller’s special investigation into Russia’s attempts to meddle in the 2016 presidential election, which is the thing Trump seems to have wanted most from his attorney general. Right after the November election, Trump demanded Sessions’ resignation. Unfortunately, William Barr, Trump’s nominee to replace Sessions, could be a lot like his predecessor.

The war on sex trafficking leads to online censorship, not safety. In April, Trump signed the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) into law. Ostensibly intended to help fight forced human sex trafficking online, the law strips online platforms of their protections from liability for prostitution advertising. That means platforms like Facebook and Reddit could be held legally responsible for sex work ads.

Having shut down Backpage.com, the federal government is continuing to prosecute the site’s founders (not under FOSTA but under the Travel Act). We’ve since seen all sorts of sex-related censorship bubble up on social media platforms and other online outlets, from Craigslist removing personal ads, to YouTube removing videos that teach sex education, to Tumblr’s recent decision to delete all “adult” content. While it’s hard to draw a straight line from these actions to FOSTA, it’s equally difficult to dismiss the legal liability these businesses now face.

What has all this done for the safety of people involved in sex work? Not much. Studies continue to show that it’s actually the criminalization of sex work that endangers the lives and safety of its participants.

Treating opioid overdose deaths as murders. One particularly nasty trend advancing in 2018 is for prosecutors to charge people who provided opioids to another user with homicide or murder if the recipient of an overdose. The implication here is that they’re going after “dealers,” but often supplier is a friend or somebody close to the overdose victim. The threat of extremely harsh prosecution discourages people from calling for emergency assistance in the case of overdoses.

These prosecutions have not deterred opioid abuse or prevented overdoses, but harm reduction efforts, like access to naloxone, have made a difference in places like Ohio. In addition, several cities this year explored the possibility of opening up supervised injection sites that would give people who are addicted to drugs a relatively safe place to use. San Francisco had planned to open sites this year, but Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed legislation that would have protected clinic workers from police prosecution. Some cities are promising to build sites in 2019.

Reducing dependence on cash bail. This year marks two years since New Jersey implemented a new bail system that all but eliminated the demand requirement that people arrested for crimes pay some sort of bail in order to remain free prior to their day in court.

New Jersey now uses pretrial risk assessments to determine the likelihood that a defendant will miss court or potentially commit crimes while free. Based on that assessment, judges can require various levels of monitoring or even detain defendants if they seem to dangerous to be freed. Whether a person is stuck behind bars before being convicted is no longer based on how much money they can scrape together. In 2018, Alaska launched its own pretrial systems to reduce its dependence on bail, and California passed a bill over the summer that would completely eliminate the use of cash bail bonds. The reforms may seem new to the public, but have been in the works for years.

Doing away with cash bail sounds good in theory. Studies show that it’s the poorest defendants who end up detained in jail under a cash bail system, even when they’re not flight risks or dangers, and the end result is that they often get terrible plea deals and harsher sentences than they would if they were free. All of this costs taxpayers billions of dollars. But giving judges the power to detain defendants with no bail option at all can backfire. While New Jersey’s system has resulted in more people being freed prior trial, in Baltimore, judges ended up detaining more people than they were in the cash bail era. In California, these bail reforms give judges a lot of power over how these pretrial systems will operate, and civil rights groups worry the state will end up more like Baltimore than New Jersey.

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