March 2018 – Page 29

City of Dallas Sues Nightclub Over Mural Honoring Fallen Officers

The offending mural The owners of Last Call Lounge in Dallas installed some sheet metal on their property’s preexisting fence last year. Then they had a mural painted on it to commemorate five officers killed at a march against police violence the previous year.

“We’re just trying to honor and respect the Dallas Police Department about what happened a year ago,” co-owner Diana Paz told Fox News in 2017.

Now the mural is no more. The bar took it down yesterday under threat of a lawsuit from City of Dallas, which says the fence is a code violation. City officials claim that they first issued a citation and notice of violation to the club’s owners “on or about” May 26, 2017; the citation said that the siding was added without a permit and that it obstructed visibility at the nearby intersection.

The mural itself was completed in July 2017, a year after the honored officers were killed. The club’s other owner, Cesar Paz, disputes the city’s timeline, telling the local CBS affiliate that he never recieved a notice of violation until after the mural was complete.

An Associated Press story notes the steps the club took to remedy the violation once it was discovered, including applying for a permit for the fence and spending an additional $2,100 to have the fence moved back from the road to increase visibility. The whole project has reportedly cost $15,000.

This did little to appease the city, which started hitting the Last Call Lounge with fines. On March 5, 2018, the city also filed a suit demanding that the fence be dismantled, saying the structure “is illegal and constructed in such a way that it can conceal illegal activity.”

Across the country, murals are becoming flashpoints in the struggles over everything from code enforcement to housing construction. The City of New Orleans faces a lawsuit after threatening resident Neal Morris for a mural depicting Trump’s “grab her by the pussy” comments. In a different sort of case in San Francisco, anti-development activists are citing a long-gone mural to establish the alleged historical significance of a laundromat whose owner is struggling to convert it into apartment buildings.

For the Last Call Lounge, having to take down the mural is a tough pill to swallow.

“We thought we were doing something right and something nice for the city. We never thought we were going to have these kind of issues,” says Paz.

The dismantled mural is reportedly being stored at the Dallas office of the National Latino Law Enforcement Organization, which is looking to find it another home.

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Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower: My Predecessor Was Poisoned

Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Chris Wylie’s testimony before the culture select committee of MPs has been nothing short of shocking. But perhaps the most disturbing claim made by the former Cambridge Analytica data scientist was that his predecessor was murdered in Kenya after a mysterious “influence brokering” deal went sour.

Wylie told the committee that he wasn’t aware of his predecessor or his fate when he arrived at Cambridge in 2012. But shortly after, he was looking for a file that would’ve been maintained by his predecessor. During the course of looking for the file, another employee told him about the rumors. Wylie’s predecessor, Dan Muresan, the son of a former Romanian minister of agriculture who is now imprisoned, was found dead in 2012, according to the Daily Mail.

Wylie said his predecessor had been working for President Uhuru Kenyatta’s re-election campaign when he was found dead.

‘Dan was my predecessor….what I heard was that he was working on some kind of deal of some sort – I’m not sure what.

‘The deal went sour.

‘People suspected he was poisoned in his hotel room. I also heard that the police had got bribed not to enter the hotel room for 24 hours.’

He added: ‘That is what I was told – I was not there so I speak to the veracity of it.

Muresan was the son of former Romanian Agriculture Minister Ioan Avram Muresan, who is now in prison for corruption charges.

According to a report of his death which ran in 2012 in the Bucharest Herald, the 32 year-old had studied at the LSE in London and had coordinated election campaigns in Europe, Africa and the US.

Romania’s Foreign Ministry told the Bucharest Herald at the time: The Romanian citizen was working with a British telecommunications company, being in Kenya for a while.

He had not yet registered his presence on Kenyan territory with the Romanian diplomatic mission.

When the police finally arrived, Muresan’s body was taken for an autopsy. It’s unclear if the death was even investigated as a homicide.

During his lengthy appearance, Wylie made other extreme claims, including corroborating earlier reports that SCL Group – Cambridge Analytica’s parent company – had contracted with an Israeli private security firm to steal emails and other kompromat to be used against Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari, who was running for president at the time.

Wylie then compared his former company’s work in Africa to the practice of colonialism.

Describing how SCL operates, Mr Wylie said: ‘You can be a colonial master in these countries…it was very much like a privatized colonial operation’

He also claimed that Alexander Nix, CA’s chief executive, set up a fake office in Cambridge in a bid to woo Steve Bannon.

He claimed that Nix was very wealthy, saying “you have to remember that a lot of these people are very wealthy already.”

“Alexander Nix in particular – there was one time when we were running late because he had to pick up a £200,000 chandelier.

These are people who don’t need to make a lot of money, but the thing that I learned is that for certain wealthy people, they need something to keep them occupied and they need projects.”

“Going into the developing world and running a country is something that appeals to them.”

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GE Spikes Most In 2 Years Amid Buffett ‘Buy’ Speculation

General Electric Shares are up 5% today and while yesterday’s epic meltup in the broad markets ignored GE (and was blamed on easing trade wars fears), today’s spike in GE – the biggest in two years – is being pinned on speculation that Warren Buffett is Buying The F**king Freefall…

Bloomberg reports that the sudden increase is because of market chatter that the billionaire investor will take a position, Nicholas Heymann, an analyst at William Blair & Co., said Tuesday.

There’s no confirmation that Buffett, the chief executive officer of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., will buy into GE. Buffett has previously said he would consider an investment in GE or assets of the company if the price was right.

“It may be a plausible theory, given Buffett had recently spoken to the press that he might be interested in GE at the right price,” Heymann said in a telephone interview.

As a reminder, Buffett has been an investor in GE before. He helped inject capital into the industrial giant during the crisis and received a common-stock holding once some warrants expired years later. Berkshire has mostly sold that stock, Buffett said in February.

Now there is another possible reason… GE had collapse to being dramatically oversold and just as we saw in yesterday’s market, a panic algo bid has run the stock higher…

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“Iran Can Easily Skirt Sanctions” If Oil Sector Pressured By West Crackdown

Authored by Tsvetana Paraskova via OilPrice.com,

Iran could do a lot of different things to kind of skirt possible tighter sanctions on its oil sector, such as sending oil to different places, Michael Cohen, head of energy commodities research at Barclays, told Bloomberg on Monday.

“There’s a lot of different things that Iran can do to kind of skirt sanctions. In the past, they’ve used more oil in their power sector, they’ve actually sent oil to different places that can take it,” Cohen told ‘Bloomberg Daybreak: Americas’.

Commenting on last week’s oil price rally that diverged from a general slump in equities, Cohen said that at the end of last week that oil prices were supported by EIA’s Wednesday inventory report that reported a decline in crude oil inventories of 2.6 million barrels for the week to March 16, and the appointment of John Bolton, an Iran hawk and a proponent of war, as National Security Advisor.

With Bolton’s appointment, market participants are looking at pretty much an end to the Iranian nuclear deal as of May 12, Barclays’ Cohen said today.

“I think that the market pretty much assumes that there’s going to be some kind of reduction in Iranian supply,” he said, but added: “I’m not so sure that that’s the case.”

There is some wiggle room and Iran could send oil to other places, according to Cohen.

Asked about if Saudi Arabia could increase its oil production in the event of reduced Iranian supply, Cohen said that “there is some wiggle room at least in terms of other OPEC suppliers, but they are all committed to this OPEC deal and I don’t expect them to diverge from that either.”

While OPEC is expected to continue to stick to its production cut agreement with Russia, at least for now, analysts believe that the geopolitical risk premium in oil prices has definitely returned, and the month of May could be important for oil prices, because of the deadline for the Iranian deal on May 12 and elections on May 20 in Venezuela, whose oil production is in freefall.

“Even if it’s just additional sanctions on Iran, that could hurt investment in the country and reduce flows of their oil. The market would really miss their oil this time around because of Venezuela,” John Kilduff at Again Capital told CNBC last week.

“If they go forward with those elections, we could see much more coercive economic policies toward Venezuela. That’s when the oil market might start paying attention,” Helima Croft, global head of commodity strategy at RBC, told CNBC.

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Zuckerberg Has Decided To Testify Before Congress

If we had to guess, we’d be willing to venture that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg isn’t the most popular man in Parliament right about now.

After earlier confirming that he would send one of his top deputies to testify to British MPs, Facebook has apparently leaked to CNN that Zuckerberg will, in fact, make time to testify before lawmakers during the coming weeks.

Facebook is already plotting its strategy for the meeting and telling CNN that the pressure from the public (not to mention lawmakers desperately looking for a pariah) has become to intense, and the CEO wouldn’t risk rocking the boat.

CNN’s anonymous sources (presumably from within the Facebook comms department) believe Zuckerberg’s willingness to testify will also put pressure on Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to join him. Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley has officially invited all three CEOs to a hearing on data privacy on April 10.

Zuckerberg’s decision means that Washington – not London – will be the site of the great public inquest into technology firms and their leveraging of sensitive user data for commercial purposes.

Facebook has been the subject of a powerful public backlash since reports surfaced two weeks ago that Cambridge Analytica, a data analytics firm that worked for the Trump campaign, improperly used data from more than 50 million Facebook users during its work for the Trump campaign – a charge Cambridge has denied. Facebook has apologized profusely and Zuckerberg has claimed Facebook was mislead by CA, which had told Facebook it had deleted the data.

The news follows reports that the FTC could assess damages against Facebook worth up to $2 trillion – essentially allowing the US government to take over the social media giant. That news sent Facebook shares lower in late-morning trading.

For the sake of the Facebook communications department, let’s hope Zuck does a better job of conveying remorse when he faces lawmakers than he did during last week’s widely panned CNN interview.

Otherwise, we’ll in for another one of these…

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Justice John Paul Stevens Is Wrong About the Second Amendment, Again

In his 2008 dissent in District of Columbia v. Heller, Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens insisted that the Second Amendment offers zero protection for what he called the “right to possess and use guns for nonmilitary purposes like hunting and personal self-defense.”

Writing in today’s New York Times, the retired justice reiterates that losing view. “For over 200 years after the adoption of the Second Amendment,” Stevens maintains, “it was uniformly understood as not placing any limit on either federal or state authority to enact gun control legislation.” To clear the path for sweeping gun control restrictions now, Stevens advises, activists should turn their energies towards passing a “constitutional amendment” that would overturn Heller and “get rid of the Second Amendment.”

One problem with Stevens’ position is that he is dead wrong about the legal history. His preferred reading of the Second Amendment has never been “uniformly understood.”

For example, consider how the Second Amendment was treated in St. George Tucker’s 1803 View of the Constitution of the United States, which was the first extended analysis and commentary published about the Constitution. For generations of law students, lawyers, and judges, Tucker’s View served as a go-to con-law textbook.

Tucker was a veteran of the Revolutionary War, a colleague of James Madison, and a professor of law at the College of William and Mary. He observed the debates over the ratification of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights as they happened. And he had no doubt that the Second Amendment secured an individual right of the “nonmilitary” type. “This may be considered as the true palladium of liberty,” Tucker wrote of the Second Amendment. “The right of self-defense is the first law of nature.” In other words, the Heller majority’s view of the Second Amendment is as old and venerable as the amendment itself.

Regrettably, today’s op-ed is not the only example of Stevens trying to claw back a portion of the Bill of Rights.

Stevens cast a dissent, for instance, in Texas v. Johnson (1989), the landmark case in which the Court ruled that flag-burning is protected by the First Amendment. “Government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable,” declared the majority opinion of Justice William Brennan. Stevens rejected that endorsement of bedrock free speech principles.

Likewise, Stevens has said that had he not retired from the Court in 2010, he would have joined Justice Samuel Alito’s dissent in Snyder v. Phelps (2011), the case in which the Court recognized First Amendment protections for the rights of Westboro Baptist Church members to stage offensive protests outside of military funerals. “Such speech cannot be restricted simply because it is upsetting or arouses contempt,” declared the majority opinion of Chief Justice John Roberts. Stevens rejected that endorsement of free speech principles too.

And then there is Stevens’ record on the Fifth Amendment, as exemplified by his majority opinion in Kelo v. City of New London, which allowed a municipality to wield its eminent domain powers not for a “public use,” as the Constitution requires, but for the benefit of a private developer working with the Pfizer corporation. “The Kelo majority opinion remains unpopular,” Stevens acknowledged in a 2011 speech at the University of Alabama School of Law. “Recently a commentator named Damon W. Root described the decision as the ’eminent domain debacle.'” (Guilty.) How did Stevens’ justify his debacle? He claimed that “Kelo adhered to the doctrine of judicial restraint, which allows state legislatures broad latitude in making economic policy decisions in their respective jurisdictions.”

In sum, John Paul Stevens has a bad habit of shortchanging the Bill of Rights for the benefit of overreaching officials and would-be censors. I’d think twice before taking his constitutional advice.

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What If Trump Signs a Right-to-Try Law and Nothing Happens?

House Republicans passed a “right-to-try” bill late last week after failing to gather the necessary votes a week earlier. The legislation, which expands patients’ ability to seek experimental treatments, now heads to the Senate, which passed its own, looser version of a right-to-try bill last summer. Politico has a rundown of the back and forth, including some oddly vague positioning by Sen. Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.). I would bet that some version of a right-to-try bill makes its way to President Donald Trump’s desk eventually, and that when it does he’ll sign it.

But the politics of the bill aren’t as interesting to me as what happens once we do have a federal right-to-try law.

In the best-case scenario, the law saves lives that would otherwise be lost. Doctors whose patients are terminally ill and incapable of benefitting from currently approved therapies or participating in a clinical trial would be able to request experimental drugs from pharmaceutical companies and then administer them, all without seeking approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). In this scenario, pharmaceutical companies would be willing to sell (or donate) these investigational drugs, which, by law, would need to have passed only the first safety stage (“Phase I”) of clinical trials. Ideally, some number of people would receive a treatment years before the FDA approves it, the treatment would work in a way that no other treatment has, and the patients would outlive their current prognosis.

This scenario relies on some assumptions that we cannot currently test.

The first assumption is that there is a large pool of people who would benefit from right-to-try who are not benefitting from the FDA’s existing Expanded Access/Compassionate Use program. When patients have exhausted all approved treatment options and failed to gain admission to a clinical trial, doctors can apply for the FDA’s permission to use an investigational drug. The approval rate for Expanded Access is 99 percent and the agency recently simplified the application process, but we don’t know much about the one percent who are rejected, or how many doctors and patients feel overwhelmed by the application process, or whether the application process is structured in such a way as to discourage certain types of doctors and patients from ever applying. In 2017, 1,143 Expanded Access applicants were allowed to proceed, while only eight were not. I have seen no estimates of the number of people likely to seek access under right-to-try; it could be dozens or thousands or zero.

The second assumption is that drug developers are willing to participate in this partially deregulated market. The legislation, after all, does not require manufacturers and developers to provide drugs to a doctor; it only gives them the legal option to do so, and some protection from civil liability. But it is far from clear that any established drug maker wants to test those waters. Every calculation that drug developers make is aimed at increasing the odds of obtaining FDA approval and the subsequent period of monopoly. When they cut corners, it is to maximize profits. When they exercise an abundance of caution, it is to maximize profits. When they mess around with patent laws and voluntarily impose restricted distribution and make side deals with generic companies, they do all of that to maximize profits (which makes even more sense when you consider that the U.S. is where most drug makers can turn the biggest profit).

How does right-to-try maximize a drug developer’s profits? Under the House version, adverse events that reflect a drug’s safety profile must be reported to the FDA. That adverse event could extend the length of the developer’s clinical trial. It could even cause the FDA to issue a hold. What drug developer wants to trust that risk with a third party whose primary interest is not maximizing the drug company’s profits?

While I think right-to-try would better position patients and their doctors to demand access to unapproved drugs (and to use public opinion as leverage), I’m not sure protection from lawsuits is adequate incentive for drug developers to operate without preauthorization from the FDA. Sabotaging a trial, or irritating an FDA reviewer by breaking ranks, would likely outweigh the signalling benefits of having helped a desperate patient, or even dozens of desperate patients. Anything bad that happens on the alternative pathway—some weird or awful side effect, a terminally ill patient dying before she was expected to, or even a patient dying right when he would’ve under the existing standard of care—is going to look worse for a drug developer than if the same events had occurred under FDA’s Expanded Access program. Drug companies may not love the FDA, but they love FDA approval. Without it, insurance companies will not pay for a drug, hospital pharmacies will not stock it, and doctors will not prescribe it.

My colleague Ron Bailey sees right-to-try as a baby step toward a more widely deregulated drug development market. Along with former FDA Commissioner Andrew von Eschenbach, he’d like to see therapies approved for market after Phase II safety testing. Whether they work, and what they work for—currently the role of Phase III trials—could be determined on the open market and tracked with patient registries and post-marketing studies.

If a federal right-to-try law unleashes a torrent of applicants or emboldens drug makers to operate outside the FDA’s purview, that would be evidence that the FDA is, in fact, holding up the process. It could be that step toward the regulatory environment Bailey and von Eschenbach envision. My suspicion, though, is that the FDA has exerted just enough influence over the House right-to-try bill that its scope and scale will be severely limited—especially since the Senate seldom produces less onerous legislation. If so, whatever bill Trump signs will likely make things only slightly easier for doctors and patients and a lot riskier for drug developers. And that is the perfect combination of tweaks to give people the impression that the Expanded Access program is all we need.

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Bank Sector In Peril As Refi Activity Crashes Amid Rising Rates

To visualize the impact the recent spike in mortgage rates is having on the US housing market in general, and home refinancing activity in particular…

… look no further than this recent chart from the January Mortgage Monitor slidepack by Black Knight: it shows the recent collapse of the refi market using the recent jump in 30Y and mortgage rates.

As Black Knight writes, it looks at the – quite dramatic – effect the mortgage rate rise has had on the population of borrowers who could both likely qualify for and have interest rate incentive to refinance. It finds that the number of potential refinance candidates has tumbled to the lowest since December 2008.

Some more details from the source:

the recent spike in interest rates cut the population of borrowers with an interest rate incentive to refinance by nearly 40 percent in 40 days
- Virtually all of the decline in potential refinance candidates was among 2009 and later vintages; Fewer than 100K traditional refinance candidates (720+ credit score, <80 percent loan-to-value (LTV) ratio) remain in 2012 and later vintages
Approximately 1.4 million borrowers lost the interest rate incentive to refinance in just the first six weeks of 2018
2.65 million potential candidates could still both benefit from and likely qualify for a refinance at today’s rates
That is the smallest this population has been since late 2008, prior to the initial decline in rates during the recession
Though the population is only 10 percent off its February 2017 mark, rate/term refinance production could see a more significant impact than this might suggest due to increasing burnout in the market
A corresponding drop in the average credit score of refinance originations is typically observed when rates rise

To be sure, it is hardly a shock that after a decade of record low rates, the current rise in rates means a collapse in refi activity: after all anyone who could, and would, refinance, already has, while the universe of those who have yet to take advantage of lower rates and are eligible to do so, has collapsed.

Which is bad news not only for homeowners, but also for the banks, whose refi pipeline – a steady source of income and easy profit – is about to vaporize.

Here are some more details from the WSJ: last year, 37% of mortgage-origination volume was because of refinancings, according to industry research group Inside Mortgage Finance. That is the smallest proportion since 1995, and the number of refinancings is widely expected to shrink again this year. In 2012, refinancings were 72% of originations.

While purchase activity has climbed steadily from a post-financial-crisis nadir in 2011, growth in 2017 wasn’t enough to offset a $366 billion decline in refinancing activity. The result: The overall mortgage market fell around 12%, to $1.8 trillion, according to Inside Mortgage Finance.

“The market has just gotten so very competitive because every loan matters,” said Ed Robinson, head of the mortgage business at Fifth Third Bancorp . He added that the bank is contacting homeowners who could be eligible for a refinancing in coming years to help maintain that business, and it is also instructing mortgage-loan officers to focus more on purchases.

We demonstrated this plunge in bank mortgage financing last quarter when we showed the near record low mortgage application activity at America’s largest traditional mortgage lender, Wells Fargo.

Non-traditional lenders face even greater peril: Quicken Loans Inc. got about 70% of its mortgage-origination volume last year from refinancings, according to Inside Mortgage Finance—a higher proportion than any other large lender.

Of course, the higher rates rise, the more mortgage applications drop, suggesting that contrary to expectations for a rebound in interest expense as Net Interest Margin rises, bank will be far worse off as a result of rising rates as refi activity grinds to a crawl.

Or, as the WSJ explains it, “increased mortgage rates can hamper refinancing activity because many homeowners have rates that are already lower than what lenders can now offer. In other cases, the higher rates cut into the savings a homeowner stands to reap by refinancing a mortgage.”

The Mortgage Bankers Association expects nothing short of a bloodbath: it forecasts overall mortgage-purchase volume to grow about 5% in 2018 but refinancing volume to drop 27%. Refinance applications fell 5% in the week ended March 16 from the prior one, according to the group.

Here is another example of how higher rates are crushing – not helping – traditional banks: since around the beginning of 2017, Valley National Bancorp , based in Wayne, N.J., has transitioned its mortgage business to 40% refinancing from 90%, said Kevin Chittenden, who runs residential lending. The bank previously relied largely on attracting homeowners through its ads for low-cost refinancings, but has since engaged with outside sales reps who are focused on purchases.

“Refi goes with the rates,” Mr. Chittenden said. “So you definitely don’t want to be too leveraged on refinancings.”

It’s about to get worse.

Guy Cecala, chief executive of Inside Mortgage Finance, said he expects some smaller nonbank lenders to sell themselves by the end of the year because of the drop in the refinancing market and mortgage originations overall. Unlike banks, nonbank lenders typically don’t rely on branches or ties to local agents, which are traditional tools for capturing mortgage purchases.

Another risk: the return of subprime borrowers. As the WSJ adds, the waning of the refinancing boom also attracts a different type of homeowner than at the beginning. As mortgage rates go up, the average credit score of refinancings tends to go down, according to industry research.

That is partly because savvy borrowers are the ones who tend to take advantage of low interest rates first. Also, some borrowers who are refinancing now are doing so to get rid of their mortgage insurance: Home prices in many parts of the country are going up, meaning some homeowners are less leveraged even if they have paid down only a small portion of their mortgage.

As for “new” mortgage platforms such as Quicken Loans which face an imminent calamity as their refi platform implodes, Chief Executive Jay Farner said the company is still enjoying demand for both purchases and refinancings, including from homeowners whose decision to refinance is focused less on rates and more on consolidating debt or switching to a shorter-term loan.

But, he added, “You’ve got to be a little bit more strategic about how you market, versus what we saw lenders do in the last few years, which is, ‘Hey, rates are low, you should do something now.’”

* * *

The biggest irony in all of the above, of course, is that there are still those who will claim that higher rates in the “new normal” are good for banks. For the far more unpleasant reality: see a chart of Wells Fargo stock.

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Pat Buchanan Asks “Is Trump Assembling A War Cabinet?”

Authored by Patrick Buchanan via Buchanan.org,

The last man standing between the U.S. and war with Iran may be a four-star general affectionately known to his Marines as “Mad Dog.”

Gen. James Mattis, the secretary of defense, appears to be the last man in the Situation Room who believes the Iran nuclear deal may be worth preserving and that war with Iran is a dreadful idea.

Yet, other than Mattis, President Donald Trump seems to be creating a war cabinet.

Trump himself has pledged to walk away from the Iran nuclear deal — “the worst deal ever” — and reimpose sanctions in May.

His new national security adviser John Bolton, who wrote an op-ed titled “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran,” has called for preemptive strikes and “regime change.”

Secretary of State-designate Mike Pompeo calls Iran “a thuggish police state,” a “despotic theocracy,” and “the vanguard of a pernicious empire that is expanding its power and influence across the Middle East.”

Trump’s favorite Arab ruler, 32-year-old Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman, calls Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei “the Hitler of the Middle East.”

Bibi Netanyahu is monomaniacal on Iran, calling the nuclear deal a threat to Israel’s survival and Iran “the greatest threat to our world.”

U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley echoes them all.

Yet Iran appears not to want a war. U.N. inspectors routinely confirm that Iran is strictly abiding by the terms of the nuclear deal.

While U.S. warships in the Persian Gulf often encountered Iranian “fast attack” boats and drones between January 2016 and August 2017, that has stopped. Vessels of both nations have operated virtually without incident.

What would be the result of Trump’s trashing of the nuclear deal?

First would be the isolation of the United States.

China and Russia would not abrogate the deal but would welcome Iran into their camp. England, France and Germany would have to choose between the deal and the U.S. And if Airbus were obligated to spurn Iran’s orders for hundreds of new planes, how would that sit with the Europeans?

How would North Korea react if the U.S. trashed a deal where Iran, after accepting severe restrictions on its nuclear program and allowing intrusive inspections, were cheated of the benefits the Americans promised?

Why would Pyongyang, having seen us attack Iraq, which had no WMD, and Libya, which had given up its WMD to mollify us, ever consider given up its nuclear weapons — especially after seeing the leaders of both nations executed?

And, should the five other signatories to the Iran deal continue with it despite us, and Iran agree to abide by its terms, what do we do then?

Find a casus belli to go to war? Why? How does Iran threaten us?

A war, which would involve U.S. warships against swarms of Iranian torpedo boats could shut down the Persian Gulf to oil traffic and produce a crisis in the global economy. Anti-American Shiite jihadists in Beirut, Baghdad and Bahrain could attack U.S. civilian and military personnel.

As the Army and Marine Corps do not have the troops to invade and occupy Iran, would we have to reinstate the draft?

And if we decided to blockade and bomb Iran, we would have to take out all its anti-ship missiles, submarines, navy, air force, ballistic missiles and air defense system.

And would not a pre-emptive strike on Iran unite its people in hatred of us, just as Japan’s pre-emptive strike on Pearl Harbor united us in a determination to annihilate her empire?

What would the Dow Jones average look like after an attack on Iran?

Trump was nominated because he promised to keep us out of stupid wars like those into which folks like John Bolton and the Bush Republicans plunged us.

After 17 years, we are still mired in Afghanistan, trying to keep the Taliban we overthrew in 2001 from returning to Kabul. Following our 2003 invasion, Iraq, once a bulwark against Iran, became a Shiite ally of Iran.

The rebels we supported in Syria have been routed. And Bashar Assad — thanks to backing from Russia, Iran, Hezbollah and Shiite militias from the Middle East and Central Asia — has secured his throne.

The Kurds who trusted us have been hammered by our NATO ally Turkey in Syria, and by the Iraqi Army we trained in Iraq.

What is Trump, who assured us there would be no more stupid wars, thinking? Truman and LBJ got us into wars they could not end, and both lost their presidencies. Eisenhower and Nixon ended those wars and were rewarded with landslides.

After his smashing victory in Desert Storm, Bush I was denied a second term. After invading Iraq, Bush II lost both houses of Congress in 2006, and his party lost the presidency in 2008 to the antiwar Barack Obama.

Once Trump seemed to understand this history.

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Twitter Tanks After Citron Warns “Wait Til Congress Finds Out About This”

Twitter stock is down over 5% following a report from Citron Research that exposes a major potential problem for the social media company…

Via CintronResearch.com,

Alongside Facebook and Google, Twitter is now being hauled in by Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) to a hearing on data privacy on April 10.

Wait until the Senate finds out that:

Twitter Will Generate $400 million THIS YEAR, by just selling user data. Not advertising.

How important is Data Licensing to Twitter? The Scary Answer

In 2017, ad revenue declined to $2.11 billion from $2.25 billion in the prior year while data licensing revenue grew to $333 million from $282 million in the prior year.

TWTR CFO Ned Segal on Q4’17 earnings call last month that data licensing is “a really high margin business”. TWTR generated $333 million in data licensing revenue in 2017.

If we assume 100% margin, this segment accounts for almost 80% of total profits.

Twitter makes this money from selling user data even from private messages — and yes a lot of “dick picks”. To see the underbelly of Twitter just watch this undercover investigation done by James O’Keefe and other Project Veritas reporters:

https://www.projectveritas.com/2018/01/15/hidden-camera-hundreds-of-twitter-employees-paid-to-view-everything-you-post-online-including-private-sex-messages/

Dynamics Are In Place to Short Twitter

Twitter’s valuation gap with FB and GOOGL has widened to largest spread ever. On 2018 P/E (ex-cash), FB and GOOGL trade @ 16-17x vs. TWTR @ 50x.

Over the last year, insiders have sold/surrendered almost $300 million of stock. The last time there was this much insider selling was in 2015 when the stock was $50 and then preceded to fall to $14 over the next year.

Short interest is at all-time lows at 4.6%

Acquisition by another party is far less likely until these companies clean house with regard to privacy concerns and selling user data.

And the result is – Twitter is tanking…

Citron has gone short TWTR with a target of $25

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