Month: April 2016

Mississippi’s New LGBT Law Is About Protecting Only Certain Religious Beliefs

Gov. Phil BryantRepublican Mississippi  Gov. Phil Bryant has signed a new bill into law in his state that lets religious people and institutions discriminate in some areas on the basis of attitudes toward homosexuality and transgender identities.

It can be complicated to evaluate what these laws do. What Mississippi has approved is very different from what Georgia’s legislature approved (and was then vetoed by the governor) and what North Carolina approved. I’ll get basic about it.

To start, this is not a “Religious Freedom Restoration Act” (RFRA). Those acts (which was mostly what Georgia passed) mimic a federal law that allows individuals to use their religious beliefs as a defense against complying with certain laws. It’s not a perfect defense—the government must then respond by showing that the law meets a compelling government interest and that the law is the least intrusive way of meeting that interest. An RFRA is not a “do whatever you want” exemption for any religion.

HB 1523 starts by making it clear that its goal is to protect three beliefs in particular, not the right to live life based on one’s religion as a whole. Those three beliefs are:

  • Marriage is or should be recognized as the union of one man and one woman;
  • Sexual relations are properly reserved to such a marriage; and
  • Male (man) or female (woman) refer to an individual’s immutable biological sex as objectively determined by anatomy and genetics at time of birth.

It then implements regulations that protect some behaviors based on these beliefs:

  • Religious organizations (churches, religious schools and hospitals, et cetera) cannot be accused of discrimination on the basis of making decisions based on the above beliefs. Religious organizations cannot be forced to solemnize same-sex marriages or provide services or accommodations for them. They can make hiring and firing decisions based on these beliefs (which I guess means they can fire single people for having sex if they want). They can make decisions on selling or renting property on the basis of these beliefs.
  • The government cannot discriminate against religious foster and adoption agencies for decisions on where to place children based on the above mentioned beliefs. Furthermore the state cannot discriminate against a potential foster or adoptive parent on the basis of them sharing the above beliefs and intending to raise a child based on these religious beliefs.
  • The government cannot take action against therapists or medical professionals for refusing to provide their services if it violates the above beliefs. This doesn’t mean that doctors can just refuse to provide medical care in general for gays and transgender people. It means therapists don’t have to counsel those who want to switch genders over this process, doctors do not have to perform the surgery, and fertility services may be refused for a same-sex couple looking to reproduce through non-traditional means.
  • Businesses that provide goods and services for weddings cannot be forced to serve couples (presumably same-sex couples, but I guess it would also apply to polyamorous ceremonies, should they come up) if the business owner has a sincere religious belief of the three mentioned above.
  • The state cannot stop businesses and schools from deciding whether to accommodate transgender individuals in facilities like bathrooms or lockers or to establish sex-specific access guidelines based on the above beliefs. Furthermore, the law also indicates that businesses and schools can set “dress and grooming” guidelines, which appears to mean that schools can outright forbid transgender students from even dressing as their preferred sex.
  • The state cannot punish its own government employees for refusing to hand out marriage licenses or refusing to solemnize wedding ceremonies if doing so would violate the above religious beliefs (as what happened with Kim Davis). However, the law requires that they must formally recuse themselves in writing, and the courts are responsible for making sure that the couples who want to get legally married (as in, same-sex couples) may still do so.

That’s a lot of stuff to consider, and some of the consequences are not entirely clear. Does this mean that if a religious couple wanted to adopt an openly gay teen and declare that they’re going to pursue “conversion” therapy to try to turn the kid straight, would it be against this law for a state agency to use that as a reason not to place the teen with them?

This all has much broader implications in some ways than what passed in North Carolina, so we’ll see what happens next. Today PayPal announced it was going to abandon plans to expand and open a center in Charlotte because of the law North Carolina passed. 

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President Obama Uses Panama Papers to Condemn Government Corruption Demand More Power for Government

Let’s recap: Yesterday, millions of documents related to a law firm that helps people set up off-shore companies were leaked. Those are the “Panama Papers.” They identify the assets of 140 current and former politicians from around the world, as well as a few dozen private citizens.

Governments are up in arms, not because of the endemic corruption the ill-gotten wealth of the politicians in the Panama Papers represents but because, apparently, they didn’t get enough of a cut. And there’s little evidence additional tax enforcement authority would be used to catch corrupt politicians instead of merely curbing your freedom to move yourself or your assets across national borders.

Today, President Obama addressed the Panama Papers issue not by saying the U.S. would, say, re-examine its foreign aid spending to ensure U.S. dollars aren’t fueling corruption abroad, but by using it as an excuse to call on Congress to pass laws to prevent Americans from moving their money out of the country as freely as they can now. He should call Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump, who has also railed against “inversions” as if money that Americans earn actually belongs to the U.S. government, and who has some novel ideas about limiting the outflow of money (specifically to Mexico) that maybe the president could build on.

Great Britain, too, has used the Panama Papers leak to push for more taxation authority. The billions in assets held by former government officials overseas represents how lucrative working in government and the power government has to take people’s money can be. The use of this example of public corruption to demand government get even more power to confiscate people’s assets and corrupt itself is beyond shameless, but, tragically, totally predictable.

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Liberty Links 4/5/16

13 links today. Enjoy.

Yanis Varoufakis: Why We Must Save the EU (Ignore the title, it’s a phenomenal read, The Guardian)

15 Out Of 15 Most Recent EU Terrorists Were Known To The Authorities In Multiple Ways (TechDirt)

Americans Show Up in the Panama Papers, Too (No one remotely important, why am I not surprised, McClatchyDC)

Sanders Raises $44 Million in March (New monthly record for him, Politico)

Wasserman Schultz Challenger Tim Canova Raises $550,000 in Q1 (Awesome story, Bloomberg)

Ted Cruz Says Cheese is His Favorite Food, Yet Can’t Name His Favorite Cheese (What a loser, Wall Street Journal)

See More Links »

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‘Economic Models’ Forecast GOP White House (With Or Without Trump)

Despite bookies' odds at 66% that The Democratic Party will win The White House in November, economic models predict a Republican victory (with or without Trump).

 

 

As The Hill reports, Republicans are expected to win the White House under two economic models that have accurately forecast presidential elections for decades. A third model run by Moody’s Analytics predicts Democrats will win the White House, in part because of President Obama’s rising approval rating.

“As economists this is a very unusual election and there’s a lot more uncertainty introduced this time around that could upset the balance and the historical relationship of how marginal voters vote,” said Dan White, an economist with Moody’s Analytics who oversees the firm’s monthly election model.

 

Ray Fair, a Yale professor who launched his model in 1978, told The Hill that while all elections include unruly features that an economic model can’t pick up, “this one seems particularly unusual.”

 

“If there’s any time in which personalities would trump the economy it would be this election,” Fair said.

 

Fair’s model has correctly forecast all but three presidential races since 1916 but was wrong in 2012, when it predicted a narrow loss for Obama to Mitt Romney.

 

It relies on just three pieces of information: per capita growth rate of gross domestic product in the three quarters before an election, inflation over the entire presidential term and the number of quarters during the term growth per capita exceeds 3.2 percent.

 

Given the sluggish economy, his model doesn’t show enough growth under Obama to predict a Democratic win in the election. In his most recent forecast from January, his model predicted a 45.66 percent share of the presidential vote for the Democratic candidate, less than the 49 percent it predicted in 2012.

 

The other two models, unlike Fair’s, consider the incumbent president’s approval rating. In both cases, Obama’s improving favorability helps his party’s chances of winning the White House. But only one of those models predicts a Democratic win.

White said that one of the most frequently asked questions he gets is whether a Trump variable could be added into the model to test out how his brand of fireworks factors in.

No way, he said.

 

“The model doesn’t know or care if there are two or 10 candidates,” he said. “It knows the economics and whether marginal swing voters will keep the incumbent party in or not.”

In fact, their models are designed to sweep away the effects of boisterous personalities and the usual ebbs and flows of a long presidential campaign season and instead track specific economic factors that voters deem most important.

"So the logic that says that these models should have worked over the past few decades also says that they should work in this election cycle, too,” he told The Hill.

 

“There's no reason to think the models should do better or worse in 2016,” he said.


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Bernie Sanders Hates the World’s Poor, and Wants to Hurt Them

As I tweeted once during a Democratic debate, “Bernie Sanders’ socialism has always been sadly nationalistic.” Politics allegedly concerned with bettering the conditions of the nationally less well off at the expense of the more well well always seems to cut off compassion at the water’s edge.

And not just the compassion of “taking from some by force to give to others” but even the compassion of “allowing things to happen that will overwhelmingly benefit the less well off” around the globe, like doing business with them, buying what they have to sell. 

Bernie Sanders is pretty much against that as well, as he revealed in an interview for the New York Daily News conducted last week.

He started off with a pro forma “I’m not anti-trade. We live in a global economy, we need trade.”

But he goes on to admit that his version of the only good trade—”fair trade”—has to be based on not trading with any nation whose wages tend to be lower than ours, “renegotiating all of the trade agreements that we have. And by establishing principles that says that what fair trade is about is you are going to take into consideration the wages being paid to workers in other countries….So if you are in Vietnam, where the minimum wage is 65¢ an hour, or you’re in Malaysia, where many of the workers are indentured servants because their passports are taken away when they come into this country and are working in slave-like conditions, no, I’m not going to have American workers ‘competing’ against you under those conditions.”

In other words, those whose productivity and standard of living make them really among the poor of the earth, President Sanders will make sure no freely chosen action of any American could possibly benefit them via trade, while he works hard to redistribute money from the global top .1 percent to the global 1 percent here in America.

This wicked man deliberately wants to make it impossible for Americans to do the thing that historically most guarantees helping the truly poor in the long term: supporting their jobs and economies.

Given that Sanders is a guy who thinks it’s better that the government make you line up for rare and precious free bread than that a free and prosperous economy guarantees the wide availability of highly affordable bread in a free market, this should not be surprising, but it’s still disgusting.

Elsewhere in the long interview, Sanders showed he pretty literally has no idea what he’s talking about when it comes to “breaking up the banks” and “arresting financial executives” even though they are the absolute core of his appeal and message.

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Oil Will Be Over $50 a Barrel by July 4th (Video)

By EconMatters

A strong API Report reporting over a 4 million barrel drawdown in Oil inventories, and a report out of Kuwait saying that an output freeze deal by major oil producers would proceed without Iran will be bullish for the oil market. We expect the short covering to begin tonight, tomorrow and for the next 8 days before the Doha Meeting.


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Porn Star Explains Why You Are A Scumbag Who “Gets In The Way Of Justice”

Submitted by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,

The Internet practically exploded this weekend after a detailed report was published proving that dozens of corrupt politicians around the world have been stealing public funds and hiding the loot overseas.

In other news, the Pope is Catholic.

Not to make light of this, but this hardly comes as a surprise. There’s some Grade A filth in positions of power who routinely funnel public funds into their own pockets.

Whether they secret the funds offshore, buy expensive flats in London, purchase Bitcoin, or stuff cash under their mattresses seems hardly relevant.

The real issue is that systems of government routinely put morally bankrupt individuals in control of trillions of dollars of cash.

Seriously, what do people expect is going to happen?

Yet this never seems to be concern. The media outcry always seems to focus on the manner in which public officials hide their assets, not the fact that the funds were stolen to begin with.

This report targets the illicit use of offshore corporations, specifically those set up by a single law firm in Panama.

In reality, this issue hardly boils down to one firm.

There are thousands of law firms all around the world, including in the UK and the United States, that register companies for their clients.

Some of those companies end up being used for nefarious purposes, including fraud and theft.

But it’s crazy to presume that corrupt officials and con artists are the only ones who would ever need a company in one of these “shady” jurisdictions.

(Those “shady” jurisdictions, by the way, include Wyoming, South Dakota, and Delaware.)

Alongside the report is a video with a scantily clad porno actress named Lisa Ann, star of “Who’s Nailin’ Paylin,” a satire in which Ms. Ann spoofs former Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin engaged in sexual… congress.

No I am not making this up…

In her video, the porn starlet explains that only arms dealers and scumbags set up asset protect vehicles like anonymous shell companies, which can include something like a Delaware LLC.

Never mind that people in the Land of the Free are living in the most litigious society in human history.

Or that last year the US government stole more money and private property from its citizens through civil asset forfeiture than all the thieves and felons in the country combined.

Given such obvious realities, you’d have to be crazy to NOT take steps to protect your savings.

But if a porn star says that you’re a scumbag who ‘gets in the way of justice’ by setting up a Delaware LLC to safeguard your assets and reduce your legal liability, it must be true.

So let it be written.

Look, the anger and disgust of seeing corrupt people getting away with a crime is understandable, particularly when that crime is stealing from taxpayers.

But nobody ever seems to attack the real problem– that these people are ever put in positions enabling them to steal taxpayer funds to begin with.

Instead the spotlight is always on how they hide it. That’s like focusing on what color T-shirt the ax murderer was wearing.

My concern is that is if corrupt officials shift tactics and start buying gold, there will be calls to outlaw gold. Or if they start holding cash, there will be even louder calls to ban cash.

These reports are incredibly damning for the dozens, even hundreds or thousands of bad actors who abuse the system.

But at the same time they create a mass hysteria that puts law-abiding taxpayers who value their financial privacy into the same category as some corrupt African dictator.

Listen in to today’s podcast as we discuss this trend even more, what I call the “New Dark Ages”.

We’ve entered a time where privacy and personal freedom are trivial inconveniences rather than the bedrock cultural values they used to be.

For example, I question when our society degenerated to the point that a porn star gets to tell us what we should and should not be able to do with our own private property. . .

I’d advise you to turn DOWN the volume. This podcast is probably the most intense I’ve ever done. Listen in here.

(click image for link to podcast)


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Shots Fired: Wikileaks Accuses Panama Papers’ Leaker Of Being “Soros-Funded, Soft-Power Tax Dodge”

Earlier today, for the first time we got a glimpse into some of the American names allegedly contained in the “Panama Papers”, largest ever leak. “Some”, not all, and “allegedly” because as we said yesterday, “one can’t help but wonder: why not do a Wikileaks type data dump, one which reveals if not all the 2.6 terabytes of data due to security concerns, then at least the identities of these 441 US-based clients. After all, with the rest of the world has already been extensively shamed, it’s only fair to open US books as well.”

The exact same question appeared in an interview conducted between Wired magazine and the director of the organization that released the Panama Papers, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, or ICIJ, Gerard Ryle.

This is what Ryle said:

Ryle says that the media organizations have no plans to release the full dataset, WikiLeaks-style, which he argues would expose the sensitive information of innocent private individuals along with the public figures on which the group’s reporting has focused. “We’re not WikiLeaks. We’re trying to show that journalism can be done responsibly,” Ryle says. He says he advised the reporters from all the participating media outlets to “go crazy, but tell us what’s in the public interest for your country.”

Question aside about who it is that gets to decide which “innocent private individuals” are to be left alone, Wikileaks clearly did not like being characterized as conducting “irresponsible” journalism – and to the contrary, many in the public arena have called for another massive, distributed effort to get to the bottom of a 2.4TB treasure trove of data which a handful of journalists will simply be unable to dig through – and moments ago, on Twitter, accused the ICIJ of being a “Washington DC based Ford, Soros funded soft-power tax-dodge” which “has a WikiLeaks problem.”

 

Moments later, in a subsequent tweet it added that the “Putin attack was produced by OCCRP which targets Russia & former USSR and was funded by USAID & Soros.“

And so, a new contest is born: one between the “old” source of mega leaks, and the new one. We wonder if and when Edward Snowden and/or Glenn Greenwald will also chime in.

But we are far more interested if now, that there appears to be a war brewing between Wikileaks and ICIJ, who what “information” will be released next, and whether whatever comes out will put the entire Panama Papers project in a different perspective, one which, as even Bloomberg has hinted, may have been to benefit the last remaining global tax haven around, the United States itself, as well as the most notorious provider of “tax haven” services in in said country: Rothschild.


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As Seen On One Billboard: The San Francisco Housing Bubble

That San Francisco, ground zero of the second tech – this time private (and currently bursting) – bubble, has a housing market that is “just a little frothy” is no surprise to anyone, but even we had to chuckle when we saw this billboard making the twitter rounds.

 

As Marketwatch notes, real estate is so frothy in the San Francisco Bay Area that a new development in the city’s Lake Merced neighborhood felt the need to advertise its townhomes on a billboard as million-dollar deals – get in now while the price is right!

This is what the “low $1,000,000s” will buy you: a 1,547 square foot, 3-bedroom, 2-bath townhome (listed on real estate site Redfin for $1,012,000+).

 

Feel like hunting for better bargains? Then how about this 3-bedroom, 3.5-bathroom, 2,393 square foot townhome listed for $1,649,900+.

“You’ll take in the lifestyle of the city but leave all the limitations of San Francisco behind,” according to the development’s website. “So, when your day is done, you’ll pull into the garage, hit the button and walk into a place that’s different from the start.”

Translation: these aren’t located near the hustle and bustle. The Lake Merced area is located in the city’s southwest corner, far from downtown and other popular neighborhoods in the central parts of the city.

For some context, here’s a look at the rest of the San Francisco housing market. This shack was listed for $350,000 and sold in September 2015 for $408,000, nearly 17% above the asking price. The real-estate agent referred to the “home” as “above and beyond distressed.”

If that didn’t sufficiently impress (or exasperate) you, take a look at some listings in the city’s more central areas, which may leave you thinking “low 1,000,000s” in Lake Merced is a deal after all.

This 1-bedroom, 2-bath home is located near the baseball stadium AT&T Park. It’s 1,428 square feet and is listed for $1,950,000, plus $563.36 in monthly homeowners association dues.

 

This 3-bedroom, 2-bath home is located in hipster enclave Mission Dolores and is larger at 2,580 square feet. It is listed with the words “huge price reduction” for just $2,599,000.

 

As a reminder, according to Case Shiller, home prices in San Francisco rose 10.5% over the past year. U.S. house prices overall rose 5.7% compared with a year ago in January, or about three times more than average wages. Since 2012, median housing prices in San Francisco have more than doubled, hitting $1.225 million in February 2016, as the following dramatic charts demonstrate.

 

And here is the problem: to be able to purchase a house in San Francisco, a prospective buyer should make on average over quarter million dollars per year, nearly 6 times more than for the broader U.S.

Much more on the San Fran housing market in the Paradon “March 2016 San Francisco Real Estate Report”


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Wisconsin Primary, Bernie Sanders vs. Third World Poor People, Panama Papers Have Nothing to Do with Canals: P.M. Links

  • CanalBernie Sanders’ policies would be disastrous for poor people in other countries, observes Vox (correctly, for once).
  • Today, at approximately 3:00 P.M., I decided I finally had to learn what this Panama Papers business is about. And thus, so do you. Here. (Warning: Does not involve canals. Sad!)
  • The Trump campaign is totally collapsing. Any day now, it’s all over. Sure.
  • Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant signed House Bill 1523, a religious freedom bill that critics say is anti-gay.
  • The Wisconsin primary is happening now.

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