Month: January 2018

The hazelnut spread Nutella nearly triggered a wave of riots across France this week when Intermarche supermarkets offered a 70% on the popular product, lowering the price of a jar from 4.50 euros to 1.40 euros.

 

In some cases, police were called when people began pushing and fighting one another trying to get their hands on as many containers as they could carry, the BBC reported.

“They are like animals. A woman had her hair pulled, an elderly lady took a box on her head, another had a bloody hand,” one customer told French media.

A member of staff at one Intermarché shop in central France told the regional newspaper Le Progrès: “We were trying to get in between the customers but they were pushing us.”

All of that supermarket’s stock of Nutella was gone within 15 minutes, while one customer left with a black eye. Similar scenes have been reported across France, with some being described by authorities as “riots.”

 

Serieux ??!! Tout ça pour du Nutella ?! 😮 #Emeute #Nutella pic.twitter.com/UoNTmK78eE

— •KENNY LE BON• (@kennyLebon) January 25, 2018

 

The hunt for discounted jars continued on Friday, with a supermarket near Toulouse rationing one jar per customer.

Nutella was created by the Ferrero family in the 1940s in the Piedmont region of Italy, which is famed for its hazelnuts.

Intermarche said it regretted the violence it had inadvertently caused, saying the discount had been decided at the corporate level.

If nothing else, the phenomenon has been a valuable source of free advertising for the brand…

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Authored by Patrick Buchanan via Buchanan.org,

Asked if he would agree to be interviewed by Robert Mueller’s team, President Donald Trump told the White House press corps, “I would love to do it … as soon as possible. … under oath, absolutely.”

On hearing this, the special counsel’s office must have looked like the Eagles’ locker room after the 38-7 rout of the Vikings put them in the Super Bowl.

If the president’s legal team lets Trump sit for hours answering Mueller’s agents, they should be disbarred for malpractice.

For what Mueller is running here is not, as Trump suggests, a “witch hunt.” It is a Trump hunt.

 

After 18 months investigating Trumpian “collusion” with Putin’s Russia in hacking the DNC’s and John Podesta’s emails, the FBI has hit a stone wall. Failing to get Trump for collusion, the fallback position is to charge him with obstruction of justice. As a good prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich, the tactic is understandable.

Mueller’s problem: He has no perjury charge to go with it. And the heart of his obstruction case, Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey, is starting to look like something Trump should have done sooner.

Consider what is now known of how Comey and the FBI set about ensuring Hillary Clinton would not be indicted for using a private email server to transmit national security secrets.

The first draft of Comey’s statement calling for no indictment was prepared before 17 witnesses, and Hillary, were even interviewed.

Comey’s initial draft charged Clinton with “gross negligence,” the requirement for indictment. But his team softened that charge in subsequent drafts to read, “extreme carelessness.”

Attorney General Loretta Lynch, among others, appears to have known in advance an exoneration of Clinton was baked in the cake. Yet Comey testified otherwise.

Also edited out of Comey’s statement was that Hillary, while abroad, communicated with then-President Obama, who had to see that her message came through a private server. Yet Obama told the nation he only learned Hillary had been using a private server at the same time the public did.

A trial of Hillary would have meant Obama in the witness chair being asked, “What did you know, sir, and when did you know it?”

More information has also been unearthed about FBI collusion with British spy Christopher Steele, who worked up — for Fusion GPS, the dirt-divers of the Clinton campaign — the Steele dossier detailing Trump’s ties to Russia and alleged frolics with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel.

While the Steele dossier was shopped around town to the media, which, unable to substantiate its lurid and sensational charges, declined to publish them, Comey’s FBI went all in.

Not only did the Steele dossier apparently trigger a wider FBI investigation of the Trump campaign, it served as the basis of FBI requests for FISA court warrants to put on Trump the kind of full-court press J. Edgar Hoover put on Dr. King for the Kennedys and LBJ.

Amazing. Oppo-research dirt, unsourced and unsubstantiated, dredged up by a foreign spy with Kremlin contacts, is utilized by our FBI to potentially propel an investigation to destroy a major U.S. presidential candidate. And the Beltway media regard it as a distraction.

An aggressive Republican Party on the Hill, however, has forced the FBI to cough up documents that are casting the work of Comey’s cohorts in an ever more partisan and sinister light.

This cabal appears to have set goals of protecting Obama, clearing Hillary, defeating Trump, and bringing down the new president the people had elected, before he had even taken his oath.

Not exactly normal business for our legendary FBI.

What have these people done to the reputation of their agency when congressmen not given to intemperate speech are using words like “criminal,” “conspiracy,” “corruption” and “coup” to describe what they are discovering went on in the FBI executive chambers?

Bob Mueller, who inherited this investigation, is sitting on an IED because of what went on before he got there. Mueller needs to file his charges before his own investigation becomes the subject of a Justice Department investigation by a special counsel.

As for Trump, he should not sit for any extended interview by FBI agents whose questions will be crafted by prosecutors to steer our disputatious president into challenging or contradicting the sworn testimony of other witnesses.

This a perjury trap.

Let the special counsel submit his questions in writing, and let Trump submit his answers in writing.

At bottom, this is a political issue, an issue of power, an issue of whether the Trump revolution will be dethroned by the deep state it was sent to this capital to corral and contain.

If Trump is guilty of attempted obstruction, it appears to be not of justice, but obstruction of an injustice being perpetrated against him.

Trump should be in no hurry to respond to Mueller, for time no longer appears to be on Mueller’s side.

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Just one day after the White House reversed its position on naturalizing young illegal immigrants, unveiling a proposal late on Thursday to double the number of Dreamers the US would accept in exchange for billions in Wall funding, President Trump said on Friday that Republican senators – even those who have taken a tough approach to immigration such as Tom Cotton, John Cornyn and David Perdue – could agree to the unexpected proposal to offer citizenship within 10 to 12 years to so-called “Dreamers.”

“They’ve really shifted a lot, and I think they’re willing to shift more, and so am I,” the Republican president told CNBC in an interview from Davos. “We’re going to see. If we make the right deal, I think they will.”

The problem is that while a handful of republicans were happy with Trump’s plan, many more were not even as the elephant in the room – or rather the donkey – remained the democrats. As we said yesterday, the fate of Trump’s proposal – and by extension whether or not the government is shut down again on February 8 should  there be no immigration deal – “depends on the Democrats’ response which is yet to come.”

And, as it turns out, early indications are not looking good, because as The Hill reports, Trump’s immigration plan has slammed into heavy opposition on and off Capitol Hill, suggesting the much-anticipated framework has failed to move the needle as a bipartisan group of senators try to negotiate a deal.

While Trump is hoping the Senate will draft legislation based on his blueprint (it can be seen here)and introduce it by Feb. 5, just three days before funding for the government runs out, the day-old plan is already taking heavy fire from both the right and the left.

In some ways, it may now be even worse than before: for the bipartisan gang of 20 senators trying to hammer out an agreement to protect the “Dreamers,” it’s clear the Trump outline — intended as an olive branch to Democrats — gets them no closer to a deal. One of the key negotiators of the group, Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), warned that Trump’s plan places the White House’s “hardline immigration agenda … on the backs of these young people.“

Charles Schumer, the Senate Minority Leader who will need to sign off on any deal for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) to pass the upper chamber, echoed those sentiments on Twitter on Friday. Trump is using DACA recipients as “a tool to tear apart our legal immigration system and adopt the wish list that anti-immigration hardliners have advocated for for years,” he wrote.

What is more surprising is how much pushback the Trump plan got from his own party.

In all, while Trump’s plan did get an endorsement from a pair of key conservatives, i.e., David Perdue and Tom Cotton, for the most part conservative outside groups, members of the House Freedom Caucus and other vocal immigration hard-liners all panned the White House plan, saying providing a path to citizenship for 1.8 million “Dreamers” amounted to “mass amnesty” for law breakers.

“Illegals have No Right to be here & have ALL violated our laws. This #Amnesty deal negotiates away American Sovereignty,” Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), an immigration hawk, tweeted Friday.

The American People have a Right to enforcement of our laws & a Right to a sealed border. Illegals have No Right to be here & have ALL violated our laws. This #Amnesty deal negotiates away American Sovereignty.

— Steve King (@SteveKingIA) January 26, 2018

Roy Beck, president of NumbersUSA, a group that advocates for reduced immigration, had embraced an immigration proposal by House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.). That bill includes a path to legalization for nearly 700,000 DACA recipients — the first time since 1986 that NumbersUSA has supported any proposal along those lines.

But the White House proposal goes too far for Beck.

“NumbersUSA has no choice but to oppose what is being suggested as the White House ‘framework’ for a mass amnesty,” Beck said.

The pile up continued:

The outside conservative group Heritage Action described Trump’s plan as a “nonstarter” because it “expands the amnesty-eligible population,” while the head of the Center for Immigration Studies, an immigration restrictionist group, suggested Trump had betrayed the conservative base that had propelled him to the presidency.

“Time to start burning your #MAGA hats. Send pictures and I’ll retweet,” Mark Krikorian tweeted.

And former Freedom Caucus Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), appearing on Fox News on Friday, said he had “concerns” about the Trump plan.

The Ohio Republican said he favors the Goodlatte bill, which places greater emphasis on border-enforcement measures like mandating that all employers use E-Verify, ending chain migration, also known as family reunification, and cracking down on sanctuary cities.

If there is a “focus on DACA first and then a little pretend security and pretend border wall and pretend chain migration,” Jordan said, “that’s a different animal, and I won’t be for that, and neither will lots of conservatives, more importantly, lots of Americans.”

* * *

Meanwhile, predictably, Democrats threw up all over Trump’s plan. On the other end of the political spectrum, Democratic leaders, liberal groups and pro-immigration advocates accused Trump of holding Dreamers hostage while demanding draconian policies that would greatly curb legal immigration.

The plan calls for a $25 billion trust fund for border security — many times more than what Durbin and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) had entertained in their bipartisan negotiations. It also would scrap the visa lottery system and severely limit family-based immigration, which Republicans call “chain migration.”

Frank Sharry, executive director of America’s Voice, an advocacy group that works closely with progressive members on immigration, said the White House plan “comes nowhere close to finding the sweet spot” for a bipartisan agreement.

“It is a far-right restructuring of our entire immigration system in trying exploit the crisis that was created by Trump ending DACA,” he said.

Greisa Martinez Rosas, a DACA recipient and policy director for United We Dream, a youth network of Dreamer advocates, said Dreamers — even those benefited by the proposal — would not accept its price.

“The immigration proposal presented yesterday by the Trump White House is nothing more than a white supremacist ransom note. A ‘Sophie’s choice’ by an immoral and horrible man whose aim is to wipe immigrant families from this country,” she said.

Like the Goodlatte bill, the White House proposal would cut legal immigration and change the methods by which immigrants are selected. John C. Yang, president and executive director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice, said the proposal “decimates the family immigration system that has made this country so dynamic.”

Democrats, wary of their base’s reaction to the short-lived shutdown, took a similar tone.

“We cannot allow the lives of young people who have done everything right to be used as bargaining chips for sweeping anti-immigrant policies,” said Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chairwoman Rep. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D-N.M.) in a statement.

“The White House is using Dreamers to mask their underlying xenophobic, isolationist, and un-American policies, which will harm millions of immigrants living in the United States and millions of others who want to legally immigrate and contribute to our country,” she said.

* *  *

In short, with one short proposal Trump managed to infuriate both Democrats and Republicans.

And while the White House proposal follows a well-worn formula in immigration negotiations — trading enforcement measures for legalizing blocs of immigrants in the country illegally, Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) on Thursday warned, before the White House made its proposal public, that Republican enforcement demands were far outweighing their offer in terms of legalizations.

“It’s not reasonable to say that for a group of 700,000-800,000 students in this country, to ask what was negotiated for comprehensive immigration reform,” he said.

Finally, with the White House unlikely to move much on its original proposal, Trump’s gambit is that the Democrat will cave entirely lest they be blamed for the next government shutdown in exactly two weeks. The problem is that Schumer won’t agree to a capitulation, and the most likely outcome is another government shutdown, only this time with no possibility of an olive branch, it will extend deep into February if not March.

Which is a problem, because as we discussed last week, should the shutdown extend into the debt ceiling X-Date period, expected to hit around mid-March, then not only are all bets off, but a US technical default suddenly looks especially likely.

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Authored by Lance Roberts via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,

What goes up, eventually comes down.

That is just reality.

The bull market that began in 2009, has now entered the final stage of “capitulation” as investors throw caution to the wind and charge headlong into the markets with reckless regard for the consequences.

Of course, it isn’t surprising given the massive amounts of liquidity continually injected into the financial markets and global Central Banks have now figured out that continually rising financial markets solve much of the world’s ills. Simply, with enough liquidity, you can cover up bad (credit risks) by guaranteeing holders they will never default.

It’s genius.  It’s a “no lose” investment scheme.

Unfortunately, we have seen this repeatedly in the past.

In the 1980’s it was “Portfolio Insurance” – a “no lose” investment program that eventually erupted into the crash of 1987. But not before the market went into a parabolic advance first.

In the 1990’s – it was the dot.com phenomenon which was “obviously” a “no lose” proposition. Even after Alan Greenspan spoke of “irrational exuberance,” two years later the market went parabolic once again.

Then in 2006-2007, banks invented the CDO-squared, a collateralized derivative obligation based on other collateralized derivative obligations. It was a genius way to invest with “no risk” because the real estate market had never crashed in history.

Today, it is once again an absolute “certainty” that markets will rise from here as global Central Banks have it all under control.

What possibly could go wrong?

Here is your weekend reading list.

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