Month: August 2018

Socialism: So Bad Women Are Willing To Be Sexually Abused To Escape It

Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,

The democratic socialist nation of Venezuela’s collapse is showing just how far people will go in order to escape the horrors of big government. In fact, the situation in Venezuela has gotten so bad that women are willing to risk being sexually abused in human trafficking rings in order to escape the horrors of socialism.

Unfortunately, the harsh reality of government is bearing down on real people and making life incredibly miserable for those stuck in Venezuela.  It’s also no walk in the park for those who have managed to escape.  The Washington Post detailed one woman’s plight, and it’s a disturbing an harrowing tale:

In Trinidad, the International Organization for Migration, a United Nations body, has received 23 suspected cases of trafficked Venezuelans in the past three months — compared with no Venezuelan cases last year, according to Jewel Ali, the organization’s local director.

They include victims like Luz — who said she lost one of her three children in April after the hospital in her Venezuelan town ran out of medication to treat her daughter’s bacterial infection. When she was approached to come to Trinidad, the offer seemed too good to be true.

“But I told myself, I’m going anyway. I’m not going to lose the chance for my kids to be better off just because I had some doubts,” she said.

The ordeal — five weeks spent captive and repeatedly filmed being raped — had “damaged” her, she said. At one point, Luz said, she and a friend were tied up and raped side by side.

“We were looking at each other,” Luz said, tearing up. “We would cry. And I would tell her, ‘Sister, be strong, you have a daughter.’ I would just keep repeating that.” –The Washington Post

As the oil-rich country buckles under the weight of a failed socialist experiment, an estimated 5,000 people a day are departing the country in Latin America’s largest migrant outflow in decades.  Millions have fled Maduro’s reign of terror creating an even bigger crisis.

Carolina Jimenez, a senior official with Amnesty International, said, “Venezuela’s unprecedented situation has turned a domestic human rights crisis into a regional human rights crisis. Countries in the region are not prepared to take in so many migrants and do not have the asylum systems needed to prevent job exploitation and human trafficking,” she said. “These people should be protected, but instead they are being taken advantage of.”

The beginning of the end for Venezuela came when Hugo Chávez became president in 1999. Spouting similar policies to those of American socialist Bernie Sanders,  Chávez forced a form of socialism on the people that resulted in many businesses collapsing or being nationalized. A purge of the state-run oil industry which was a center of opposition to his rule and essential to the nation’s economy removed thousands of workers, who were often replaced by political supporters with little to no technical experience. Venezuela’s slide into despotism increased in speed exponentially under current President Nicolás Maduro. The tyrannical authoritarian was a former bus driver and union leader who inherited power after Chávez’s death in 2013.

The United Nations projects 2 million Venezuelans will flee their dystopian native country and this year. That’s in addition to an exodus of 1.8 million over the past two years. Diplomats in Trinidad along with international agencies say there is also evidence of a horrifying trend: Desperate Venezuelans, mostly women, have become commodities to be bought and sold.

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Visualizing How America Uses Its Land In 13 Illustrations

Bloomberg is out with a fascinating look at how America uses its land for various purposes in the lower 48 contiguous states, based on extensive data published in 2017 by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. 

The 48 contiguous states alone are a 1.9 billion-acre jigsaw puzzle of cities, farms, forests and pastures that Americans use to feed themselves, power their economy and extract value for business and pleasure. -Bloomberg

First, let’s take a look at the big picture: 

By grouping each color, we have can see wide “bands” of land use by color. Of note, Special Use areas are categorized as national parks, wildlife areas, highways, railroads and military bases. 

The U.S. is becoming more urban—at an average rate of about 1 million additional acres a year. That’s the equivalent of adding new urban area the size of Los Angeles, Houston and Phoenix combined. U.S. urban areas have more than quadrupled since 1945.

The USDA categorizes national parks, wildlife areas, highways, railroads and military bases as special-use areas. And another USDA land classification—miscellaneous—includes cemeteries, golf courses, marshes, deserts and other areas of “low economic value.”

More than 100 million acres of special-use areas are park and wilderness areas, where most commercial activities, such as logging, mining and grazing, are excluded.

Agricultural land takes up about a fifth of the country. 

Yet the actual land area used to grow the food Americans eat is much smaller—only about the size of Indiana, Illinois and half of Iowa combined. More than a third of the entire corn crop is devoted to ethanol production. Most cropland is used for livestock feed, exports or is left idle to let the land recover.

 

While the U.S. benefits from an overall agricultural trade surplus, Americans imported 15 percent of their food and beverage products in 2016. More than 30 percent of the fresh fruits and vegetables Americans consume come from other countries, predominantly Mexico and Canada. The amount of U.S. land used to produce citrus fruits alone is larger than Rhode Island.

More than one-third of U.S. land is used for pasture—by far the largest land-use type in the contiguous 48 states. And nearly 25 percent of that land is administered by the federal government, with most occurring in the West. That land is open to grazing for a fee.

There’s a single, major occupant on all this land: cows. Between pastures and cropland used to produce feed, 41 percent of U.S. land in the contiguous states revolves around livestock.

Forestland is the last major category of land categorized by the USDA. Unprotected forests and timberland constitute a quarter of the contiguous U.S.

According to the U.S. Forest Service, timber harvests typically occur on about 11 million acres each year. But because of regrowth, the volume of U.S. timber stock grew by about 1 percent annually from 2007 to 2012. Weyerhaeuser Co. is the largest private owner of timberlands in the U.S. With 12.4 million acres, the company controls 2.3 percent of all commercially available timber, an area nearly the size of West Virginia.

Putting all those pieces together, this map gives you a rough sense of all the ways U.S. land is used. Much of U.S. land serves specific purposes, such as the 2 million acres devoted to golf courses or the 3 million acres for airports.

Methodology Land use classifications are based on data published in 2017 by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service in a report called the Major Uses of Land in the United States (MLU). Data from the report provide total land-use acreage estimates for each state across six broad categories. Those totals are displayed per 250,000 acres.

Data from Alaska and Hawaii are excluded from the analysis. Special-use land and forestland make up the biggest land types in those states.

Bloomberg referenced the USDA data against estimates from the National Land Cover Database to generally locate these categories within each state.

Miscellaneous uses are defined as wetlands, rural residential lands, non-harvestable forests, desert, tundra and barren land of low economic value. Unlike all other land-use categories in the USDA data, a component breakdown for miscellaneous uses by state is not provided in the MLU.

To locate miscellaneous areas, Bloomberg referred to the National Land Cover Database to generally calculate and locate acreage by miscellaneous uses. “Rural residential lands” in the USDA data make up most of the 69 million-acre miscellaneous-use category. This category does not equally correlate to data in the National Land Cover Database, so Bloomberg subtracted the total of the other miscellaneous components to arrive at a rough estimate of “rural residential lands”—about 50 million acres.

Total pasture/range areas are proportionally divided by animal group based on National Agricultural Statistics Service livestock counts.

Data showing the 100 largest landowning families are based on descriptions of acreage and land type in The Land Report magazine. Representative amounts of acreage were subtracted from private timber and cropland/range to show this category, which is not a part of the USDA data.

Sources: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service: Major Uses of Land in the United States, 2012; U.S. Department of the Interior, National Land Cover Database, 2011; U.S. Census Bureau; State governments; stateparks.org; American Farmland Trust; Golf Course Superintendents Association of America; USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service; USDA Census of Agriculture; U.S. Bureau of Land Management; U.S. Forest Service; Weyerhaeuser Co.; The Land Report magazine

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Reporters, Celebs Call Trump-Supporters “Nazis”, “KKK”, Want Them “Euthanized” After Tampa Rally

Reported by Benny Johnson via The Daily Caller,

President Trump held a raucous rally in Tampa, Florida, Tuesday night.

Thousands of supporters packed the arena to hear Trump hammer his critics and tout his administration’s accomplishments. There was plenty of hecklers, comedy and chants about Hillary and 2020. Trump stopped to pick on one of his favorite targets, the media, approximately half-way through the speech. The president heckled the press in the press pen as “fake news” and the audience roared, chanting “Fake News” and “CNN Sucks” at the reporters.

One of the favorite targets of the audience was CNN’s Jim Acosta, who tweeted multiple videos of the crowd mocking him before and after the rally.

Acosta blamed Trump for the vitriol, saying “I’m very worried that the hostility whipped up by Trump and some in conservative media will result in somebody getting hurt.”  The tweet showed Trump supporters jeering at Acosta after the rally.

The tweet quickly went viral with many celebrities and journalists insulting the supporters. Celebrated composer Christopher O’Riley, who is a regular on PBS and NPR, literally called for the enforced slaughter of Trump supporters. “Calling them Deplorables is euphemizing them. Maybe better to euthanize?” the verified twitter user quipped.

Other verified handles of celebrities and reporters were just as vulgar, likening the Trump supporters to Nazis, KKK members, white trash and Hitler while speculating the crowd will eventually commit murder. Others said the Trump supporters made them “ashamed” of America.

Acosta wasn’t done – the fragile snowflake appeared visibly upset when he appeared on Brooke Baldwin’s CNN show, following Thursday’s press briefing after Sarah Sanders refused to agree with him that the press is not the “enemy of the American people.”

Acosta whined to Brooke Baldwin… “And, you know, I think maybe we should make some bumper stickers. Make some buttons, you know — maybe we should go out on Pennsylvania Avenue like these folks who chant CNN sucks and fake news, maybe we should go out, all journalists should go out on Pennsylvania Avenue and chant we’re not the enemy of the people because I’m tired of this. Honestly, Brooke, I’m tired of this. It is not right. It is not fair.“

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July Nonfarm Payrolls Preview: All Eyes On Wages

Tomorrow at 8:30am ETF, the BLS will release the July jobs report: headline payrolls are expected to slow modestly to 190k after printing above 200k in the past two months. With record low unemployment and a bubbly labor market fueled by Trump’s stimulus, where labor shortages are said to be the biggest concern to companies, absent some “force majeure” in the words of Elon Musk, markets will focus squarely on average hourly earnings to gauge if inflationary pressures are finally seeping into wages (according to Cheesecake Factory the answer is a resounding yes).

Here are Wall Street’s consensus expectations:

  • Nonfarm Payrolls: Exp. 190k, Prev. 213k (Min: 150k, Max: 240k)
  • Unemployment Rate: Exp. 3.9%, Prev. 4.0% (Min: 3.8%, Max: 4.0%)
  • Average Hourly Earnings Y/Y: Exp. 2.7%, Prev. 2.7% (Min: 2.6%, Max: 2.8%)
  • Average Hourly Earnings M/M: Exp. 0.3%, Prev. 0.2% (Min: 0.2%, Max: 0.6%)
  • Average Work Week Hours: Exp. 34.5hrs, Prev. 34.5hrs (Min: 34.4hrs, Max: 34.6hrs)
  • U6 Unemployment Rate: Prev. 7.8%
  • Labour Force Participation: Prev. 62.9%

More details on what to expects tomorrow, courtesy of RanSquawk:

  • LABOUR MARKET TRENDS: Last Month’s headline beat expectations (of 200k) with the US adding an 213k jobs in the month, below the 6-month average of 219k but above both the 3 and 12-month figures of 205k, and 196k respectively. Consensus looks for a slightly below trend increase of 190k in July.  “We expect headline payrolls to slow modestly after coming in about 200k in the past two months” says Credit Suisse, while UBS expects a payroll rise of 207k in July and note “we see strength across the spectrum as construction continues its robust expansion, manufacturing maintains momentum and education payrolls again rise above trends.” The jobless rate is expected to decline to 3.9% after ticking up to 4.0% (from 3.8%), Nomura notes the prior month’s uptick was “driven by an influx of workers into the labour market and weaker employment growth relative to its payroll counterpart.” On the tariff threat front, Goldman notes that “while trade policy uncertainty is likely on the rise, the recent escalation may have occurred too late to meaningfully impact tomorrow’s report.”
  • PAYROLL GROWTH: The ADP report showed a rise of 219k (Exp. 185k) jobs in July with the prior revised higher by 4k to 181k in June. “The labour market is on a roll with no signs of a slowdown in sight,” said the VP of ADP Research Institute Yildirmaz. “Nearly every industry posted strong gains and small business hiring picked up.” The numbers provide of optimism ahead of the NFP release, however, it is worth noting the ADP has not been the most reliable indicator (see Figure 1). Furthermore, the ADP figure has been below nonfarm payrolls for the last three Julys, by an average of 30k.
  • EARNINGS GROWTH: Average hourly earnings are expected to increase 0.3% M/M, keeping the Y/Y growth at 2.7%. Credit Suisse shares this view, while adding “a tight labour market, better nominal growth, and some improvements in labour productivity should continue to put upward pressure on wages”. Average hourly earnings will be key for the future path of Fed policy as the FOMC decide whether to hike one or two more times this year, However, with one further employment report before the next FOMC decision, this may have less of an impact this time around.
  • LABOUR MARKET DATA: The employment component of the ISM manufacturing survey was consistent with strong job growth, showing a faster than expected expansion at 56.5 from a prior 56.0. The measure remains firmly above the expansionary threshold and has now been above 50 for 22 consecutive months. The non-manufacturing ISM report is not released until after NFP but the employment component of the flash IHS Markit services PMI fell to its lowest since January. Other US data has been mostly positive. In the NFP survey week, initial jobless claims dropped to their lowest level since December 1969 at 207k while the Fed’s latest Beige Book showed that worker shortages persisted in early July throughout most of the districts, which would suggest that the economy is close to or at full employment.
  • MARKET REACTION: A beat on expectations for nonfarm payrolls should initially strengthen the USD and weigh on bonds, and vice versa for a miss, BMO suggests: “Keep a close eye on aggregate work hours, as a further expansion would suggest the economy’s recent momentum carried into the third quarter.” On the other side, TD Securities says “USD could trade lower on combination of softer jobs/wage growth, with particular focus on USDJPY,” and in terms of rates, says “Treasuries could see disproportionate reaction to a weaker print, but we expect any bull steepening to be transitory as the curve continues to flatten.”

Commenting on tomorrow’s report, economist David Rosenberg urges investors to keep an eye on the wage number, especially anything at or above 0.3%:

“The vast majority of responses in our poll for tomorrow’s NFP number are 175k-200k. Good to see what the band is to gauge what can move the market. Also keep an eye on the wage number — anything over +0.3% will raise some eyebrows.”

 

Meanwhile, on the rosier sides, Goldman points out that the majority of economic factors leading into tomorrow argue for a stronger report. These include:

  • Service-sector surveys. Service-sector business surveys generally remained elevated in July. Despite a modest sequential decline in our non-manufacturing employment tracker (-0.3pt to 56.2), the measure remains within a point of its cycle-high. Service-sector job growth decelerated to +149k in June and has averaged 156k over the last six months.
  • Manufacturing surveys. Manufacturing-sector surveys also pulled back on net but they too remain elevated. Our manufacturing employment tracker fell by 0.3pt to 60.2 in July after reaching a new cycle-high in June. As shown in Exhibit 1, despite some sequential moderation in the survey responses, employers continue to report broad-based gains in employment across the two sectors. Manufacturing-sector payrolls rose 36k in June and have increased 26k on average over the last six months.
  • Jobless claims. Initial jobless claims declined during the four weeks between the payroll reference periods (averaging 221k vs. 224k in the June payroll month) and reached a 49-year low in the payroll survey week (208k). While continuing claims rebounded by 40k between the survey weeks, this followed sizeable declines earlier in the year (that may now be resuming).
  • ADP. The payroll processing firm ADP reported a 219k increase in July private payroll employment—33k above consensus and the fastest pace since February. While some of the strength may have reflected firmness in the financial and economic indicators used as inputs in the ADP model, the report nonetheless provides incremental evidence that the pace of job growth likely remains firm.
  • Job availability. The Conference Board labor market differential—the difference between the percent of respondents saying jobs are plentiful and those saying jobs are hard to get—rose 2.8pt to +28.1 in July, a new 17-year high. JOLTS job openings also remain close to record highs, despite their May declines (-202k to 6,638k).
  • Job cuts. Announced layoffs reported by Challenger, Gray & Christmas declined by 10k to 29k in July (SA by GS), a two-and-a-half year low. On a year-over-year basis, announced job cuts fell by 1k.

* * *

Goldman notes that there is just one possible factor arguing for a weaker report:

  • Tariff uncertainty. While trade policy uncertainty is likely on the rise and may have weighed on the July ISM manufacturing report, the recent escalation may have occurred too late to meaningfully impact tomorrow’s employment numbers. Trade frictions began to escalate further on July 10th— four days before the end of the July payroll month–with the White House’s detailed proposal for a 10% tariff on $200bn worth of Chinese imports. As a result, any potential impact of these developments on hiring and layoffs may not manifest itself until the August employment report (on September 7th).

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Is Trump Being Sabotaged By His Own Lawyer?

Authored by Andrew Napolitano via Unz.com,

In the past week, former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, now the chief lawyer and principal spokesman for President Donald Trump’s legal team, has offered arguments more harmful to Trump than helpful. In a series of combative, disjointed and logically challenged television rants, Giuliani has essentially argued that Trump did not engage in any conspiracy with the Russians for them to provide help to his campaign and that even if he did, it wasn’t criminal.

In making this argument, Giuliani has played a word game in which he has effectively created a straw man and then denied it’s real because it’s made of straw.

He has done this by avoiding the use of the word “conspiracy,” substituting the word “collusion” and then arguing that there is no crime of collusion and therefore Trump did not commit a crime. This is an argument based on a false premise.

Here is the back story.

When the FBI received word from a former British intelligence source in June 2016 that Russian intelligence agents might be providing assistance to the Trump campaign, it began an investigation of the campaign. After the British source gave the FBI a dossier that alleged salacious behavior by Trump in Moscow in 2013 — behavior he has denied — and purported to corroborate awareness of the behavior by Russian government officials, the FBI used the dossier as part of a presentation to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which authorized surveillance of the Trump campaign.

Because one of the Trump campaign officials under surveillance, Jeff Sessions, became the attorney general in January 2017, he recused himself from the investigation, and the Department of Justice appointed former FBI Director Robert Mueller special counsel to head the investigation independent of the attorney general.

Mueller discovered dozens of contacts between the Trump campaign and Russians, many of them Russian intelligence agents. Mueller’s grand juries have indicted over two dozen Russians, some Russian intelligence officials, for interfering with the 2016 presidential campaign, and President Trump imposed heavy financial sanctions on many of them.

Mueller also discovered the existence of a June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower in New York between high-ranking campaign officials and Russian agents. When The New York Times revealed the meeting a year after it took place, the Trump folks claimed that the meeting was about the difficulties Americans were having adopting Russian children. Then emails emerged showing an offer to Donald Trump Jr. by a Russian agent to meet and provide help to the campaign in the form of dirt on Hillary Clinton. This was dirt allegedly obtained by hacking into her campaign’s computers. This was an offer that Don Jr. accepted.

The president has denied any knowledge of this meeting until it emerged publicly in July 2017, and Don Jr. has testified under oath before Congress that his father did not know of the meeting until the media revealed it. But last week, Michael Cohen, a lawyer who represented Trump for the 10 years preceding his inauguration and whose office was three doors down a hall from Trump’s, told Mueller and the media that Trump knew of the meeting beforehand and encouraged his campaign folks, including Don Jr., to make it happen.

Is any of this unlawful? That question brings us back to Giuliani.

In Giuliani’s zeal to represent his client, he has unleashed vitriolic verbal attacks on the credibility, morality and ethics of Cohen, using words and innuendo too lurid to recount here. Yet the ferocity of Giuliani’s attacks is now a problem for Trump. That’s because the rules of legal ethics prohibit lawyers from attacking the credibility of likely witnesses against their clients outside the courtroom. This is especially so for government witnesses.

Government witnesses meet with prosecutors and testify before grand juries in secret. When defense counsel attacks those witnesses in public, the government often views that as witness tampering – behavior that gives witnesses pause before testifying by freighting or threatening them. When defense counsel did that to government witnesses in cases that a young Rudy Giuliani prosecuted, he persuaded judges to remove those lawyers from the cases. That is the danger that confronts Giuliani and Trump now.

If Mueller has enough ammo (all of it from Giuliani’s mouth) to persuade a federal judge to bar Giuliani from continuing to represent Trump — and it appears he does — whoever replaces Giuliani will need to review and understand more than 1.4 million documents that the White House and the Trump campaign have surrendered to Mueller. That will be an enormous burden and a major financial, political and legal setback for Trump.

The case Mueller is investigating is not about collusion. Collusion is a Hollywood and a media word. The case is about conspiracy — and Giuliani knows this. A conspiracy is an agreement to commit a crime as a result of which at least one of those who agreed took at least one material step in furtherance of the agreement. Stated differently, Mueller is investigating an alleged agreement between Russian intelligence agents and Trump campaign officials for the Russians to provide dirt on Clinton to the campaign. The dirt need not have arrived — and whatever may have arrived need not have been dirt — for the crime of conspiracy to have taken place, because the essence of conspiracy is an agreement, whether consummated or not.

In one of his more bizarre rants on Fox News Channel early this week, Giuliani said there may have been a meeting at Trump Tower to plan the meeting with the Russians. Why would he reveal this? Because Mueller knows it and will reveal it. And both know that such a meeting would be the beginning of an agreement, as well as a material step in furtherance of it.

Sometimes even famous lawyers do more harm than good to their clients.

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House Majority Leader Demands Jack Dorsey Testify On Twitter “Shadowbans”

After months of rumored Twitter “shadowbans” on conservative accounts were finally confirmed by VICE  and other publications, the GOP is taking action ahead of midterms.

Axios reports that House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy sent a letter Thursday to Greg Walden, the chairman of a powerful House committee, to ask that he publicly grill Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey over recent allegations that the platform limits the reach of some conservative accounts.

“Any solution to this problem must start with accountability from companies like Twitter, whose platforms have enormous potential to impact the national conversation — and unfortunately, enormous potential for abuse,” McCarthy said in the letter to House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Greg Walden.

“In particular, I would like to request a hearing with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey so that the American people can learn more about the filtering and censorship practices on his platform.”

Full Letter below:

McCarthy, who has worked on tech issues for years, has pressured social media companies over the way they treat conservatives in recent months. McCarthy and other Republican leaders met with Facebook staffers in June over their concerns, and as recently as last month McCarthy was running ads on Facebook inviting supporters to join him “and President Trump in defending our conservative voice against social media censoring,” according to the platform’s public database of political ads.

This action follows Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) complaint filed with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) against Twitter after he discovered that his account was being ‘shadowbanned’ – the practice of excluding or reducing the visibility of one’s tweets from normal circulation on the platform.

Then last Friday, Twitter issued a strange explanation to “set the record straight,” in response to growing outrage over the practice of “shadow banning” conservatives, as confirmed last week by the liberal publication VICE and promptly tweeted about by President Trump, where they explicitly state that they do not engage in the practice – except then they describe how they do exactly that. 

“People are asking us if we shadow ban. We do not. But let’s start with, “what is shadow banning?”

The best definition we found is this: deliberately making someone’s content undiscoverable to everyone except the person who posted it, unbeknownst to the original poster.” –Twitter 

Then, Twitter reiterates they don’t shadow ban – with the caveat in parentheses that you may need to go directly to the timeline of some users in order to see their tweets. (tee hee!)

“We do not shadow ban. You are always able to see the tweets from accounts you follow (although you may have to do more work to find them, like go directly to their profile). And we certainly don’t shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology.” –Twitter 

In other words, Twitter says they don’t shadow ban – it’s just that tweets from people you follow may never appear unless you click directly into their timeline.

Source: Ben Garrison

The problem Jack Dorsey is going to have if and when he faces his grilling is,  as we detailed previously, Twitter’s own employees admitted to the practice in a January undercover exposé, after investigative journalists with Project Veritas went undercover in San Francisco, Twitter’s hometown. 

In one clip, a former Twitter software engineer who explains how/why Twitter “shadow bans” certain users:

Abhinav Vadrevu:  “One strategy is to shadow ban so you have ultimate control. The idea of a shadow ban is that you ban someone but they don’t know they’ve been banned, because they keep posting but no one sees their content.”

“So they just think that no one is engaging with their content, when in reality, no one is seeing it. I don’t know if Twitter does this anymore.”

Then there was Olinda Hassan, a Policy Manager for Twitter’s Trust and Safety team explains on December 15th, 2017 at a Twitter holiday party that the development of a system of “down ranking” “shitty people” is in the works:

“Yeah. That’s something we’re working on. It’s something we’re working on. We’re trying to get the shitty people to not show up. It’s a product thing we’re working on right now.”

In the full video, Twitter Content Review Agent Mo Nora explains that Twitter doesn’t have an official written policy that targets conservative speech, but rather they were following “unwritten rules from the top”:

“A lot of unwritten rules, and being that we’re in San Francisco, we’re in California, very liberal, a very blue state.You had to be… I mean as a company you can’t really say it because it would make you look bad, but behind closed doors are lots of rules.”

“There was, I would say… Twitter was probably about 90% Anti-Trump, maybe 99% Anti-Trump.”

Meanwhile, Pranay Singh reveals again just how creepy Twitter can be by digging into your profile and conversation history to determine whether or not you’re a “redneck” and therefore worthy of being banned:

“Yeah you look for Trump, or America, and you have like five thousand keywords to describe a redneck. Then you look and parse all the messages, all the pictures, and then you look for stuff that matches that stuff.”

When asked if the majority of the algorithms are targeted against conservative or liberal users of Twitter, Singh said, “I would say majority of it are for Republicans.”

Brad Parscale, along with Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, wrote a letter in May calling for the CEOs of Facebook and Twitter to address concerns over conservative censorship ahead of the 2020 election, as well as a call for transparency.

“We recognize that Facebook and Twitter operate in liberal corporate cultures,” the letter reads.

“However, rampant political bias is inappropriate for a widely used public forum.”

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Bitcoin Use For Consumer Purchases Craters 85% In 8 Months

Bitcoin’s use as a medium of exchange has cratered over the last year, dropping from a high of $411 million in transactions last September to a “scant” $60 million in May across the largest 17 crypto merchant-processing services, according to research conducted for Bloomberg by firm Chainalysis. 

While the amount merchant services such as BitPay, Coinify and GoCoin received increased slightly in June to $69 million, it was still a far cry from the $270 million received a year ago, Chainalysis found. –Bloomberg

Volatility, meanwhile, has moderated: 

While cryptocurrency advocates have long suggested that Bitcoin or other virtual currencies will someday replace fiat currency as a medium of exchange, the historically volatile cost of crypto transactions, the convenience of traditional payment methods and spikes in Bitcoin volatility have hampered its use.

“It’s not actually usable,” Nicholas Weaver, a senior researcher at the International Computer Science Institute, said in an email. Often, he said, “the net cost of a Bitcoin transaction is far more than a credit card transaction.” And Bitcoin-based transactions can’t be reversed, an issue when a merchant or a consumer comes up against fraud. –Bloomberg

Unsurprisingly, Bitcoin’s popularity as a means of payment coincided with its record high of nearly $20,000 in December – prompting stupid people to sell all sorts of assets such as houses and cars in cryptocurrencies. In December, Craigslist began offering sellers the option of accepting cryptocurrency – adding to a growing number of companies adopting cryptocurrency options for their customers, including online gaming platform Steam, Overstock.com, Tesla, Newegg, Microsoft, and Virgin Galactic.

And in January, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s credit card processing company, Square, integrated support for the purchase and sale of bitcoins (though not the ability to accept it for transactions) – a move which stirred up controversy and was a “pretty contentious move within the company,” said Dorsey. 

Dorsey’s move came as payment service Stripe stopped supporting bitcoin for transactions as usage declined and volatility increased. Travel company Expedia dumped cryptocurrency as well in what some investors see as a troubling sign. 

“Most people who are not Bitcoin core maximalists argue that yes, you need people to use these things as means of payment to become money,” Kyle Samani, managing partner at Austin, Texas-based hedge fund Multicoin Capital, said in a email to Bloomberg . “Or as my co-founder Tushar likes to say, don’t think of money as a noun, but rather as an adjective. The more something is used as money, the more ‘moneyness’ it has.” 

Meanwhile, the way people use cryptocurrencies to pay for things is changing; 

The way Bitcoin is being utilized is changing as well. Because the fees to process a transaction in Bitcoin can be steep and varied — they peaked at $54 in December, but are down to less than $1 today — not many people are using the coins for small transactions, like buying a cup of coffee. They are spending the virtual currency more to pay vendors like freelancers located overseas: For those cases, using Bitcoin can be cheaper and faster than using traditional financial services. –Bloomberg

“In the last six months we’ve seen a large uptick in crypto companies paying their vendors in Bitcoin, including law firms, hosting companies, accounting firms, landlords and software vendors,” says Sonny Singh, chief commercial officer at processor BitPay – which has seen a 500x increase in crypto companies paying their bills over last year. 

It’s not all cratering, however. Overstock.com for example reports a two-fold increase in crypto-based sales this year vs. 2017, with the top items bought using digital currency being living room furniture, bedroom furniture and laptops.

That said, many are holding Bitcoin for long-term speculation and don’t intend on using it to pay for goods and services at present. 

“I assume many people are like me, where you won’t be doing your everyday transactions in it,” said longtime advocate Graham Tonkin – chief growth officer at crypto finance research firm Mosaic. “I don’t believe [it] fits the characteristics of money very well.”

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Vancouver Home Sales Crash 30%, Drop To Lowest In 18 Years

What happens when prices rise so high that a chasm forms between bids and asks? The market grinds to a halt.

That’s what happened in Vancouver housing in July, when according to the Real Estate Board of Vancouver (REBGV), residential property sales tumbled by 14.6% from June 2018, and a whopping 30.1% from one year ago. In fact, a total of only 2,070 transactions took place which was the fewest since the year 2000, as both buyers and sellers continue to sit on their hands amid confusion whether the recent price gains will continue or whether the housing bubble has burst.

Sales of detached properties in July was just 637, a decrease of 32.9% from the 949 recorded in July 2017, and the 1,079 apartment sold was a 26.5% drop compared compared to the 1,468 sales in July 2017.

And no, it’s not seasonal: last month’s sales were 29.3% below the 10-year July sales average.

The reason for the collapse in transactions: the formerly all too willing buyers, mostly Chinese oligarchs who would use Vancouver real estate as their offshore Swiss bank account, have disappeared.

“With fewer buyers active in today’s market, we’re seeing less upward pressure on home prices across the region,” Phil Moore, REBGV president said. “This is most pronounced in the detached home market, but demand in the townhome and apartment markets is also relenting from the more frenetic pace experienced over the last few years.”

“Summer is traditionally a quieter time of year in real estate. This is particularly true this year,” Moore added,

Curiously, despite the slowdown in the market, prices remained at nosebleed levels, suggesting that sellers are not in a rush to sell. Detached homes sold for an average of C$1.59 million, down 1.6% from a year ago, and apartments averaged C$700,055, up 13.6% from July 2017. The overall composite benchmark price fell just 0.6% in July to C$1.09 million, which is still up 6.7% from a year earlier, and remains unreachable for most ordinary buyers.

The report signals buyers are still adjusting to tougher mortgage qualification rules the federal government introduced Jan. 1, and more worryingly, to the four increases in the Bank of Canada’s trend-setting interest rate over the past year. Those rules were put in place after surging prices in both Toronto and the Pacific coast city led to warnings about excessive speculation.

“With increased mortgage rates and stricter lending requirements, buyers and sellers are opting to take a wait-and-see approach for the time being”, Moore said.

Other levels of government have also cracked down. British Columbia’s provincial government imposed a tax on foreign buyers, and Vancouver is trying to deter property speculators with a levy on vacant homes.

So will prices catch up to the collapse in sales? According to the REBGV, for all property types, the sales-to-active listings ratio for July 2018 is 17.1%. By property type, the ratio is 9.9% for detached homes, 20.2 per cent for townhomes, and 27.3 per cent for condominiums.

Generally, analysts say that downward pressure on home prices occurs when the ratio dips below the 12% mark for a sustained period, while home prices often experience upward pressure when it surpasses 20% over several months.

In other words, with the surge in detached listings coupled with the lack of declining prices, all that Vancouver’s real estate market needs is a spark that launches the selling deluge; however since the bulk of purchases were made “all cash”, and in most cases sight unseen, it is unlikely that further monetary tightening will be the catalyst that finally pops one of the world’s biggest housing bubbles.

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The White House Is Moving Forward on Prison Reform Despite Justice Department Resistance

Despite opposition from the Justice Department, the White House is continuing to work with Republicans in Congress to pass prison reform legislation, possibly including some elements of sentencing reform.

On Wednesday the White House hosted a meeting on criminal justice reform with key Republican senators, including Mike Lee (R-Utah), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the chairman of the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee. “We had a great meeting with President Trump on criminal justice reform this afternoon, and I think we’ve made some meaningful progress,” Lee said in a statement to Reason. According to a source familiar with the meeting, Trump agreed to support four provisions from the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act, a Senate bill that would reduce some mandatory minimum sentences.

The move would be significant because the core group of Republicans and Democrats behind the Senate bill has insisted on including sentencing reform as part of any criminal justice legislation, but Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is highly unlikely to bring a bill to the floor if there is vocal opposition from either the White House or the Republican caucus. “The question is whether there [are] enough sentencing provisions in there to make those guys happy without turning off too many Republicans and making it too toxic for McConnell to put on the floor,” says Alex Gudich, deputy director of #Cut50, a criminal justice advocacy group that has been closely following the legislation.

In May, the House passed the FIRST STEP Act, which would mandate various changes to the federal Bureau of Prisons, by a wide, bipartisan margin. Trump son-in-law and senior White House adviser Jared Kushner has been a driving force behind that bill, and Trump, joined by criminal justice advocates, evangelical organizations, and business groups, has touted prison reform as an opportunity to get formerly incarcerated Americans back on their feet and into the job market.

Progressive Democrats and groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund said the bill fell far short of their requirements, and Grassley has been adamant that the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act, which his committee approved in February, be included in some way. Adding sentencing reform provisions to the FIRST STEP Act would also be noteworthy because of Justice Department’s opposition to it. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a staunch law-and-order conservative, fiercely opposes reducing mandatory minimum sentences and is no fan of the FIRST STEP Act either.

At the same time Trump was hosting a meeting on criminal justice reform yesterday, the Washington Free Beacon published a leaked letter from the Justice Department to the White House outlining its concerns about the FIRST STEP Act. “In the Department’s view,” the letter says, “this legislation, if passed in its current form, would further and significantly erode our long established truth-in-sentencing principles, create impossible administrative burdens, effectively reduce the sentences of thousands of violent felons, and endanger the safety of law-abiding citizens and law enforcement officers.”

#Cut50’s Gudich says the letter uses the same sort of “dehumanizing language and baseless fear tactics” that led to mass incarceration in the first place. He notes that the reductions in sentences resulting from the FIRST STEP Act would be insignificant. “In some cases, we’re talking about a matter of weeks,” Gudich says. “Claiming that keeping them in prison for a couple more weeks is going to keep communities safer makes no sense.”

The Justice Department letter also ties the declining federal prison population to rising crime rates, as Sessions has done in many of his public speeches. “The number of federal inmates has declined more than 16 percent since 2013 and is at its lowest level since 2004,” the letter reads. “It is likely no coincidence that, at the same time, we are in the midst of the largest drug crisis in our nation’s history and recently experienced the two largest single-year increases in the national violent crime rate in a quarter of a century.”

Conservative and libertarian groups that support criminal justice reform pushed back against the Justice Department letter today. FreedomWorks published a lengthy rebuttal. “Simply put,” it said, “correlation doesn’t equal causation.”

Those groups have been bolstered by a poll released last week by Freedom Partners, a nonprofit group that funds conservative and libertarian causes, showing 70 percent of voters nationwide think the Senate should pass the FIRST STEP Act. Opposing the bill “means accepting a status quo in which two out of every three formerly incarcerated people is rearrested within three years of their release,” former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, now a member of Right on Crime, another conservative criminal justice reform group, said in a statement provided to Reason. “We can’t continue treating our federal prisons like warehouses and expecting things to change.”

When reporters asked Grassley today about his former Senate colleague Sessions’ efforts to derail the legislation, he didn’t hold back. “With all that I have done to help Sessions, to keep the president from firing him, I think Sessions ought to stay out of it,” Grassley told reporters.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

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Top Trump Donor Agreed To Pay Cohen $10 Million For “Help With Funding”: WSJ

Right before the feds raided former Trump attorney Michael Cohen in early April, a top Trump donor offered to pay Cohen $10 million plus a retainer fee in exchange for help securing funding for a nuclear-power project – including a $5 billion loan from the US Government, claims the Wall Street Journal, citing people familiar with the matter.

Under the contract, Mr. Haney agreed to pay Mr. Cohen a monthly retainer in addition to the $10 million success fee if he could help obtain the funding, including approval of the full amount of the project’s application under a U.S. Department of Energy loan program, the people familiar with the deal said. –WSJ

Before we get too far down the rabbit hole, it should be noted that Cohen never actually entered into the deal according to the donor’s attorney, while application with the Department of Energy (DOE) is still pending. The Journal also provides no evidence of the contract, only anonymous sources, and there is also no suggestion that President Trump knew about the alleged offer from the donor – who contributed $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund, yet primarily backed Democrats before the Cohen arrangement. 

The donor, Franklin L. Haney, gave the contract to Trump attorney Michael Cohen in early April to assist his efforts to complete a pair of unfinished nuclear reactors in Alabama, known as the Bellefonte Nuclear Power Plant, these people said.

Had he been paid the success fee, Mr. Cohen’s deal with Mr. Haney could have been among the most lucrative of the known consulting agreements he secured after Mr. Trump’s election by emphasizing his personal relationship with the president, according to people familiar with his pitches. –WSJ

According to the DOE, Cohen hasn’t communicated with Energy Secretary Rick Perry about the project, however he did make “several calls to officials at the Energy Department in the spring” to inquire about the process for securing the loan – including what could be done to speed it up, according to the Journal.

Had Cohen accepted the deal, it would mark yet another corporate interest which lined his pockets, yet received nothing in return.

In May it was revealed that AT&T paid Cohen up to $600,000 for his “insights” – asking him to specifically look into the proposed $85 billion merger with Time Warner Inc. He also took money from Swiss healthcare giant Novartis, Korea Aerospace Industries and Russian businessman Victor Vekselberg. In total, Cohen has been paid a total of $1.8 million since Trump took office for his “insights,” according to the companies, which would have been better off tossing their money in a fireplace.

In other words, Cohen – who Trump has severed ties with, was either a terrible unregistered lobbyist or ran a bait and switch operation. 

Authorities are investigating whether Mr. Cohen engaged in unregistered lobbying in connection with his consulting work for corporate clients after Mr. Trump went to the White House, according to people familiar with the probe.

Investigators are also examining potential campaign-finance violations and bank fraud surrounding, among other deals, Mr. Cohen’s October 2016 payment to Stephanie Clifford, the former adult-film star called Stormy Daniels, to keep her from discussing an alleged sexual encounter with Mr. Trump, according to people familiar with the probe. Mr. Trump denies any encounter took place. –WSJ

“Neither Mr. Haney nor Nuclear Development LLC ever entered into a contract with Michael Cohen or his affiliate for lobbying services related to the Bellefonte project,” said Haney’s attorney, Larry Blust, referring to the name of the Company Haney is using for the project. 

Haney’s company, Nuclear Development, agreed to pay $111 million in a November 2016 contract to purchase the unfinished Bellefonte Nuclear Plant from the Tennessee Valley Authority. He has until this November to close on the deal. 

One month after the November agreement, Haney donated $1 million to the Trump inaugural fund via a corporate entity, according to FEC records. He had previously backed Democrats.

As part of their arrangement, Cohen reportedly participated in an April 5 meeting in Miami with Haney to pitch his project to the vice chairman of the Qatar Investment Authority, Sheikh Ahmed bin Jassim bin Mohammed al-Thani, the Journal reported in May, citing yet more anonymous people familiar with the matter. 

The meeting took place near Miami Beach, where a Qatari delegation had come to promote business ties with the U.S. Mr. Cohen spent a night on Mr. Haney’s yacht during the trip, one of those people has said.

There is no indication that the Qataris have decided to invest with Mr. Haney. A Qatar spokesman in Washington has confirmed the meeting. A representative of the Qatari sovereign-wealth fund didn’t respond to a request for comment. –WSJ

A professor of government at American University, James Thuber, told the WSJ that such fees are “outside the ethical norms” among Washington lobbyists are frowned upon. 

Century-old court rulings deemed fees contingent on lobbyists obtaining public funds or killing legislation unenforceable and counter to public policy, saying they encouraged corruption, he said. Several lobbyists contacted by the Journal said $10 million was an unheard-of sum to pay a consultant for government-related work. –WSJ

That said, there is no blanket federal ban on success fees for Washington lobbyists, while Cohen has never worked for the Trump administration – something former chief strategist Steve Bannon ensured early on in the campaign. 

Following the money…

Meanwhile, five Republican Congressmen urged the Trump administration in a May 14 letter to finish reviewing Nuclear Development’s loan application, describing the project as an “engine for economic development.” 

According to the Journal, the DOE’s Loan Programs Office COO Dong Kim wrote back saying that the agency would address the application “as quickly as possible, while still performing the necessary due diligence to protect taxpayer interests.” 

Nothing swampy here…

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