Month: September 2018

Milk: The New Symbol Of Racism In Donald Trump’s America

Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,

In the era of social justice warriors, when racism doesn’t exist, it’s manufactured out of thin air.  A sociology professor has now invented a “tool of white superiority” and it’s something most of us – regardless of our race – have sitting in our refrigerators right now.

Milk is racist, according to George Washington University Law School’s writing professor Iselin Gambert.  Ignoring the fact that all human women have the ability to produce milk to feed their babies, Gambert decided to go looking for racism. She also sees milk as a tool of the patriarchy, which is incredibly unsurprising.

Milk is one of the most ubiquitous and heavily regulated substances on the planet – and perhaps one of the most contested. It is tied closely to notions of purity, health, and femininity, and is seen as so central to human civilization that our own galaxy – the Milky Way – is named after it. But despite its wholesome reputation, milk has long had a sinister side, being bound up with the exploitation of the (human and nonhuman) bodies it comes from and being a symbol of and tool for white dominance and superiority.

– Iselin Gambert, Got Mylk? The Disruptive Possibilites Of Plant Milk

According to Breitbart, who found this oddly disturbing “research” paper, the crux of arguably the dumbest research paper that Breitbart News has covered is Gambert’s argument in favor of a widespread adoption of “mylk,” a plant milk replacement that she argues has the potential to cure society’s issues with bigotry, patriarchy, and the exploitation of animals.

 This article argues that while plant milk should not be legally prohibited from being called “milk,” it may not be a word worth fighting for given the entanglements of milk with the oppression and exploitation of women, people of color, and nonhuman animals.

– Iselin Gambert, Got Mylk? The Disruptive Possibilites Of Plant Milk

The paper dedicates a significant amount of its whopping 75 pages to attempting to manufacture a connection between the consumption of milk and bigotry against women and minorities. In another section of the paper entitled “Milk and patriarchy,” Gambert argues that the consumption of milk is directly related to the oppression of women, according to Breitbart.

  “A number of scholars have written about Western patriarchal society’s consumption of and relationship to milk as being “rooted in gender stereotypes, inequalities, and injustices,” she writes.

While we agree that milk and even the plant-based alternatives, which are great for those suffering from a lactose intolerance, should not be so heavily regulated by the government; we also find it quite difficult to draw a line between milk consumption and bigotry or the patriarchy. It sure looks like SJWs are trying to invent outrage and manufacture racism and sexism where none exists.

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WTI Extends Losses After Smaller Than Expected Crude Draw

WTI continued to drift lower today into the inventory data amid concern that “emerging-market contagion is going to suppress economic growth and limit demand,” said Gene McGillian, manager of market research at Tradition Energy.

API reported a third weekly draw in a row for Crude inventories but WTI extended the day’s losses as the 1.17mm draw was smaller than the expected 2.99mm draw (and stocks rose at Cushing and for gasoline and distillates).

 

API

  • Crude -1.17mm (-2.9mm exp)

  • Cushing +613k (+600k exp)

  • Gasoline +1.0mm

  • Distillates +1.8mm

 

“The market was clearly overheated on storm concerns,” said Thomas Finlon, director of Energy Analytics Group LLC in Wellington, Florida. “The real sharp run-up yesterday was quite an overreaction.”

WTI sat right around $69 ahead of the API data but extended the day’s losses

More than 9 percent of U.S. Gulf of Mexico oil output remained shut down on Wednesday as Gordon weakened and drifted northward over Mississippi.

Meanwhile the Permian pipeline discounts continue to collapse to record highs…

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NYT Publishes Anonymous Op-Ed By Saboteur Inside Trump White House

A senior White House official has published an anonymous op-ed in the New York Times titled: I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration (I work for the president but like-minded colleagues and I have vowed to thwart parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.). 

The Times prefaces the piece with this disclaimer:

The Times today is taking the rare step of publishing an anonymous Op-Ed essay. We have done so at the request of the author, a senior official in the Trump administration whose identity is known to us and whose job would be jeopardized by its disclosure. We believe publishing this essay anonymously is the only way to deliver an important perspective to our readers. We invite you to submit a question about the essay or our vetting process here.

***

I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration

President Trump is facing a test to his presidency unlike any faced by a modern American leader.

It’s not just that the special counsel looms large. Or that the country is bitterly divided over Mr. Trump’s leadership. Or even that his party might well lose the House to an opposition hellbent on his downfall.

The dilemma — which he does not fully grasp — is that many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.

I would know. I am one of them.

To be clear, ours is not the popular “resistance” of the left. We want the administration to succeed and think that many of its policies have already made America safer and more prosperous.

But we believe our first duty is to this country, and the president continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic.

That is why many Trump appointees have vowed to do what we can to preserve our democratic institutions while thwarting Mr. Trump’s more misguided impulses until he is out of office.

The root of the problem is the president’s amorality. Anyone who works with him knows he is not moored to any discernible first principles that guide his decision making.

Although he was elected as a Republican, the president shows little affinity for ideals long espoused by conservatives: free minds, free markets and free people. At best, he has invoked these ideals in scripted settings. At worst, he has attacked them outright.

In addition to his mass-marketing of the notion that the press is the “enemy of the people,” President Trump’s impulses are generally anti-trade and anti-democratic.

Don’t get me wrong. There are bright spots that the near-ceaseless negative coverage of the administration fails to capture: effective deregulation, historic tax reform, a more robust military and more.

But these successes have come despite — not because of — the president’s leadership style, which is impetuous, adversarial, petty and ineffective.

From the White House to executive branch departments and agencies, senior officials will privately admit their daily disbelief at the commander in chief’s comments and actions. Most are working to insulate their operations from his whims.

Meetings with him veer off topic and off the rails, he engages in repetitive rants, and his impulsiveness results in half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless decisions that have to be walked back.

“There is literally no telling whether he might change his mind from one minute to the next,” a top official complained to me recently, exasperated by an Oval Office meeting at which the president flip-flopped on a major policy decision he’d made only a week earlier.

The erratic behavior would be more concerning if it weren’t for unsung heroes in and around the White House. Some of his aides have been cast as villains by the media. But in private, they have gone to great lengths to keep bad decisions contained to the West Wing, though they are clearly not always successful.

It may be cold comfort in this chaotic era, but Americans should know that there are adults in the room. We fully recognize what is happening. And we are trying to do what’s right even when Donald Trump won’t.

The result is a two-track presidency.

Take foreign policy: In public and in private, President Trump shows a preference for autocrats and dictators, such as President Vladimir Putin of Russia and North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, and displays little genuine appreciation for the ties that bind us to allied, like-minded nations.

Astute observers have noted, though, that the rest of the administration is operating on another track, one where countries like Russia are called out for meddling and punished accordingly, and where allies around the world are engaged as peers rather than ridiculed as rivals.

On Russia, for instance, the president was reluctant to expel so many of Mr. Putin’s spies as punishment for the poisoning of a former Russian spy in Britain. He complained for weeks about senior staff members letting him get boxed into further confrontation with Russia, and he expressed frustration that the United States continued to impose sanctions on the country for its malign behavior. But his national security team knew better — such actions had to be taken, to hold Moscow accountable.

This isn’t the work of the so-called deep state. It’s the work of the steady state.

Given the instability many witnessed, there were early whispers within the cabinet of invoking the 25th Amendment, which would start a complex process for removing the president. But no one wanted to precipitate a constitutional crisis. So we will do what we can to steer the administration in the right direction until — one way or another — it’s over.

The bigger concern is not what Mr. Trump has done to the presidency but rather what we as a nation have allowed him to do to us. We have sunk low with him and allowed our discourse to be stripped of civility.

Senator John McCain put it best in his farewell letter. All Americans should heed his words and break free of the tribalism trap, with the high aim of uniting through our shared values and love of this great nation.

We may no longer have Senator McCain. But we will always have his example — a lodestar for restoring honor to public life and our national dialogue. Mr. Trump may fear such honorable men, but we should revere them.

There is a quiet resistance within the administration of people choosing to put country first. But the real difference will be made by everyday citizens rising above politics, reaching across the aisle and resolving to shed the labels in favor of a single one: Americans.

The writer is a senior official in the Trump administration.

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Woodward: Trump Scribbled ‘TRADE IS BAD’ in Margins of Speech

President Donald Trump’s economic policies have shaken long-standing trade deals, rattled global supply chains, and worried American businesses that depend on imports.

All of it—the tariffs, the threats to kill NAFTA, the trade war with China—reflects a worldview that can be summed up neatly with three simple words: “Trade is bad.”

That’s what Trump reportedly scribbled in the margins of a speech he was editing with then–staff secretary Rob Porter, according to an excerpt from a forthcoming book by the Pulitzer-winning reporter Bob Woodward. On Wednesday, Axios reported several stunning trade-related tidbits from the book, Fear, which is due to be released next week. (Other juicy bits were leaked to The Washington Post and CNN on Tuesday.) The portions of the book released this week paint a picture of a White House in chaos, led by a president who is underprepared for and overwhelmed by the office he holds.

White House economic adviser Gary Cohn tried several times to engage Trump over his anti-trade views, Woodward writes.

“Why do you have these views [on trade]?” Cohn asked Trump, according to Woodward.

“I just do,” Trump reportedly replied. “I’ve had these views for 30 years.”

Trump has indeed held a favorable view of tariffs for decades. Trump’s hostility toward China—and, more importantly, the underlying idea that trade is a zero-sum game with winners and losers—is not the product of his late-in-life transformation from hotel mogul to reality TV star to politician. It fits with the rest of the nationalist economic message he used to catapult himself to the top of an increasingly nationalistic Republican Party, but it has roots that go deeper than that.

For example, here’s something Trump said in a 1990 interview with Playboy:

I think our country needs more ego, because it is being ripped off so badly by our so-called allies; i.e., Japan, West Germany, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, etc. They have literally outegotized this country, because they rule the greatest money machine ever assembled and it’s sitting on our backs. Their products are better because they have so much subsidy. We Americans are laughed at around the world for losing $150 billion year after year, for defending wealthy nations for nothing, nations that would be wiped off the face of the earth in about 15 minutes if it weren’t for us. Our “allies” are making billions screwing us.

In the same interview, Trump talked about how he would like to put “a tax on every Mercedes-Benz rolling into this country and on all Japanese products.” He also said he could someday be president because “the working guy would elect me. He likes me.”

For a man who seems to have few guiding stars, Trump’s economic nationalism has been remarkably consistent. No wonder, then, that the 1990 Playboy interview has become something of a Rosetta Stone for understanding Trump, with foreign officials studying it for clues about how to woo the president.

It’s equally unsurprising that the president has apparently done little self-reflection over the past three decades about these views. Now he’s getting an up-close view of how tariffs warp the economy, create international tensions, and invite opportunities for wanton cronyism—all while failing to achieve their primary policy goals, of course. But that doesn’t seem to be causing any second thoughts.

Just last month, representatives from more than 300 American businesses and trade associations descended on D.C. for six days of hearings about Trump’s plan to expand his trade war with China by targeting another $200 billion in import with new tariffs. Despite their widespread opposition—and despite warning signs from the economy—Trump is reportedly pressing ahead with the new trade barriers, which could be announced before the end of the week.

Trade is, of course, not bad. It is in fact quite good. But Trump’s economic illiteracy isn’t the biggest problem here. It’s his inability or unwillingness to learn anything new or to challenge his long-held beliefs.

“He’s an idiot,” John Kelly, the president’s chief of staff, says in a portion of Woodward’s book excerpted Tuesday by The Washington Post. “It’s pointless to try to convince him of anything.” (Kelly has denied this.)

When Cohn confronted Trump about his views on trade, the president reportedly couldn’t offer a better defense than the fact that he’d believed these things for a long time.

“I had the view for 15 years I could play professional football,” Cohn replied, according to Woodward. “It doesn’t mean I was right.”

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What Mass Incarceration Looks Like, State By State

For several years, the most ambitious goal among criminal justice reform advocates has been to reduce America’s staggering and world-leading reliance on prisons and jails. On Wednesday, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) released its first batch of reports on how to do exactly that in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

The ACLU’s Campaign For Smart Justice, along with the Urban Institute and the ACLU’s state affiliates, published the first 25 of 51 “blueprints” identifying the drivers of mass incarceration in each state, as well as what policy changes could cut their prison populations by 50 percent.

“No matter what state you live in there is a mass incarceration crisis,” says Udi Ofer, the director of the ACLU’s Smart Justice campaign, “but the solutions have to be state-focused. That’s the goal of these blueprints: to provide a state-by-state analysis of how each state can cut incarceration in half and combat racial disparities in incarceration.”

One of the ongoing debates among criminal justice advocates is what exactly is responsible for the meteoric rise in prison populations since the 1970s. Michelle Alexander’s influential The New Jim Crow popularized the idea that our prisons and jails are filled with nonviolent drug offenders. Other academics, such as Fordham University’s John Pfaff, have pointed out that nonviolent drug offenders make up only about 16 percent of the overall prison population. Even if every nonviolent drug offender were released from prison tomorrow, it would only make a small dent in the estimated 1.9 million Americans serving time in prisons and jails. Ending mass incarceration, as it’s popularly understood, would also require shortening sentences for violent crimes, a politically fraught enterprise.

“There’s these national conversations about whether it’s all about drugs or not all about drugs,” Ofer says. “The truth is, it is and it isn’t.”

For example, according to the ACLU’s report on Michigan, 74 percent of inmates are serving time for violent offenses, driven by the state’s especially tough “truth in sentencing” laws, which largely abolished parole.

But in Oklahoma, which recently overtook Louisiana as the per capita incarceration leader in the U.S., “drug offenses are a leading driver of incarceration,” Ofer says. “Thirty-two percent of all admissions to prisons are related to drugs. Three out of four people entering Oklahoma prisons have been sentenced to a drug, property, or other offense that did not involve violence.”

Other states’ incarceration rates are driven by so-called “three-strikes” laws, harsh mandatory minimums, habitual offender laws, or punitive bail practices, so there’s no one-size-fits-all solution.

Each report also examines racial disparities in incarceration. Ofer says the ACLU and Urban Institute’s research showed that, somewhat counterintuitively, reducing prison populations without addressing bias in enforcement can lead to an increase in racial disparities.

New Jersey has led the U.S. in decarceration, reducing its prison population by 35 percent since 1999. But it also leads the country in racial disparities in incarceration: Black residents make up 61 percent of the prison population, but are only 13 percent of the state population overall.

“Part of the reason we released these blueprints is to avoid another New Jersey,” Ofer says.

In 2014, the ACLU launched its campaign to reduce incarceration in the U.S. by 50 percent by 2020, but progress has been slow and hard-won, even with tens of millions of dollars in funding. Ballot initiatives are expensive and difficult to sell to voters, and legislative reformers have had to negotiate with law enforcement groups, which tend to object to all but the most cosmetic changes to the status quo.

For example, despite a successful 2016 ballot initiative to reclassify drug possession and some other crimes as misdemeanors, Oklahoma’s prison population is projected to keep rising.

“Those policy reforms absolutely led and will lead to thousands of fewer people going to prison for low-level offenses, but our blueprint shows our job is not done, and a lot more needs to happen.”

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US Tech Wrecks, Cryptos Crash As Global Contagion Spreads

Just keep buying, everyone else is…

 

Bad night for Chinese stockholders…No afternoon National Team BTFD effort!!

 

European stocks tumbled to their lowest since early April as EM contagion spread on fears of soaring exposures…

 

And US Equities were mixed – The Dow clung to unchanged all day as Nasdaq was battered (supposedly on regulatory concerns from the Congressional hearings)…

 

Futures had dipped overnight – mainly during the European session, then NASDAQ snapped at the US Cash open…

 

Tech is notably underperforming financials in September…

 

Is this the start of stocks’ catch down to VIX…

 

FAANG Stocks were ugly…

Amazon is no longer a trillion dollar company…

With both NFLX and GOOGL below their 50DMA…

TWTR tumbled on the day as Dorsey spoke…

 

And TSLA dropped another 3% to 3-month lows… and TSLA bonds hit a new low…pushing the bond’s yield above 8% – almost as bad as Turkey!

 

Despite stock weakness, Treasury yields are up once again…

 

The Dollar ended the day lower – breaking a four-day win streak

 

Cable spiked and dropped on headlines about Germany’s attitude towards Brexit documents…

 

EM FX bounced modestly today…

 

Yuan remains stable…

 

Cryptos were smacked with the ugly stick today after headlines reported Goldman Sachs delaying its plans for a crypto trading desk…ETH is down 15% this week!

 

Knocking Bitcoin back below $7000…

And Ethereum plunged to its lowest since Sept 2017…

 

WTI Crude slipped lower (below $69) ahead of tonight’s inventory data but PMs and copper limped higher on a modest USD drop…

 

Gold futures managed to scramble back above $1200…

 

Gold buys the most silver in a decade…

 

So is this is the start of the meanest reversion in US stocks to the reality of many other global markets?

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“The Very Definition Of Contagion”: Catching Falling Knives In Emerging Markets

Don’t look now – or look – but while the US stock market trades just shy of all time highs, absent the occasional hiccup in the mighty FANGs, the rout across emerging markets is now the longest since the global financial crisis, or specifically 222 days for stocks, 155 days for currencies, and 240 days for local government bonds.

The duration of each selloff – as calculated by Bloomberg – had taken even the most ardent bears by surprise because “not one of the seven biggest selloffs since the financial crisis – including the so-called taper tantrum – inflicted such pain for so long on the developing world.”

The slump and the duration, calculation in the number of days from peak to trough, has pushed some strategists to say the EM crisis is more than just a knee-jerk reaction to higher U.S. interest rates or the unfolding trade war: “It’s become a full-fledged crisis of confidence for investors in developing nations.“

The duration of the decline also impacts trader behavior, as lingering downtrends upend futures and options contracts, forcing traders to take losses. They also lock up investors’ collateral in the form of enhanced margin calls, leaving them little room to make other trading decisions, as Bloomberg notes.

More importantly, the longer selloff also means the argument for buying the dip – one frequently made by money managers earlier this year – gives way to cautions over avoiding a falling knife.

And that, in turn, can persuade money managers who treat emerging markets as one homogeneous group to sell weak and strong markets in tandem, no matter their specific fundamentals. It’s the very definition of contagion.

One strategist who would agree with the gloomy assessment that the EM crisis is in its contagion phase, is Macquarie’s Viktor Shvets who in a note released today, titled appropriately “Catching falling knives & EM contagion” explains – once again – what prompted this particular EM crisis, and why it will be so difficult to exit it.

We excerpt from his note below:

EM equities are continuing to underperform; down 20% from high (Feb’18). And while immediate drivers are weaker EMs, the causes are broad & persistent: these are liquidity compression, US$ & shutdown of growth engines. CBs and China can reverse this trend; alas, at this stage not enough from either.

EM equities are continuing to underperform DMs, as vulnerable EMs refuse to accept unpalatable choices and the global & US$ liquidity continues to compress.

Despite our expectation of some relief, EMs’ underperformance continued to build through the summer. Since the high (Feb’18), EMs underperformed DMs by ~15%, adding effectively another 3-4% in the last two months. The same occurred to funds flow, with Asia ex equity flows to market cap approaching 0.5% (negative) as ~US$32bn left the universe. While valuations are not yet distressed, the multiples (PER) are today trading at ~27% discount (vs historic average of ~20%). Is it the right time to get into EMs, particularly as there are already tentative signs of some return of foreign flows?

The key to determining whether the time is right is the degree of contagion from periphery to sturdier parts of the EM universe. We believe that it is totally incorrect to argue that Turkey’s US$0.5 trillion of FX debt (~8% of entire EM FX debts) is not systemic. In our view, Turkey is highly systemic, from both financial & geopolitical perspective. Besides, if history is any guide, the straw that breaks the camel’s back does not actually need to be critical (it could just easily have been Hungary, for example). The key to contagion is not geography or size of the initial victim but rather assessment of responses and the impact on global and regional liquidity flows. This in turn is determined by reactions of not just countries involved but also of any committee that might have been formed to ‘save the world’ (a la LTCM in ’98, Brady bonds in ‘80s).

The challenge with Turkey and Argentina is not only that these two economies have unsustainable twin deficits and suffer from massively rising inflationary pressures, but also that their responses thus far were either slow or hostile. In reality both face politically unpalatable choice of either deep recession or some form of capital controls & debt renegotiation. The position of other EMs is not as extreme; but it matters little, as long as there is no change in global liquidity.

This remains the key. As long as global CBs insist on reducing liquidity while simultaneously attempting to raise cost of capital, victims would continue to float to the surface, starting with weaker players but then gradually spreading to the sturdier corners. We have already seen a significant rise in EM currency volatilities and a rise in EM and high yield spreads. In addition, investors are coming to terms with the US seeming willingness to ‘weaponise’ trade & US$, while technology and de-globalization are shutting down EM growth engines.

We estimate that the global liquidity growth now stands at less than 5% (not enough to cover global GDP; providing nothing for assets) while US$ liquidity is turning deeply negative, thus supporting US$.

But on the other hand, China is moving towards more stimulative position. How do we balance these factors? Unless there is a stronger private sector recovery or China becomes more aggressive, CBs must change their narrative. At this stage, we still don’t see committees to ‘save the world’.

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Russia’s Alleged Skripal ‘Assassins’ Caught Breaking The Laws Of Physics

As we detailed earlier, in what appears to be the latest escalation in the UK government’s campaign to blame Russia for the poisoning of former double agent Sergei Skripal, his daughter Yulia Skripal and three other seemingly random Britons (one of whom succumbed to the deadly Novichok nerve agent used in the attacks), British prosecutors are saying they have “sufficient evidence” to charge Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov, both Russian nationals, with conspiracy to murder Skripal, as well as the attempted murder of his daughter and police detective Nick Bailey, according to Reuters.

The news comes nearly two months after investigators said they had identified the suspected perpetrators of the Novichok attack by crossing referencing CCTV feeds with records of people who entered the country around that time.

Russians

There’s just one thing… About that CCTV feed!

Authored by Craig Murray,

Russia has apparently developed an astonishing new technology enabling its secret agents to occupy precisely the same space at precisely the same time.

These CCTV images released by Scotland yard today allegedly show Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Borishov both occupying exactly the same space at Gatwick airport at precisely the same second. 16.22.43 on 2 March 2018. Note neither photo shows the other following less than a second behind.

There is no physically possible explanation for this. You can see ten yards behind each of them, and neither has anybody behind for at least ten yards. Yet they were both photographed in the same spot at the same second.

The only possible explanations are:

1) One of the two is traveling faster than Usain Bolt can sprint

2) Scotland Yard has issued doctored CCTV images/timeline.

Will any mainstream media organizations question this publicly?

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Grieving Parents’ Policy Preferences Are Irrelevant to the Constitutionality of Gun Laws

Whether or not Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh deliberately spurned a handshake with the father of a teenager who died in the Parkland massacre, the response from Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) was puzzling. “If Kavanaugh won’t even give him a handshake,” she tweeted, “how can we believe he would give gun violence victims a fair shake in court?”

Unless Harris imagines that one of the doomed lawsuits charging gun makers with complicity in mass shootings will somehow make it to the Supreme Court, she presumably had in mind the next time the justices decide to hear a Second Amendment case. But “gun violence victims” are not parties to such cases, which involve individuals who challenge the constitutionality of legal restrictions on firearms. Harris’ misrepresentation of what’s at stake in that situation reflects a broader strategy of replacing logic with emotion in the campaign for stricter gun control.

A father’s grief is not an argument for the effectiveness of any particular gun control law, and it certainly is not an argument for the constitutionality of that law. Contrary to Harris’ implication, it is not relevant in deciding whether, say, a ban on so-called assault weapons is consistent with the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.

“We have witnessed horrific mass shootings from Parkland to Las Vegas to Jacksonville, Florida,” Harris said in her opening statement during Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing yesterday. “Yet Judge Kavanaugh has gone further than the Supreme Court and has written that because assault weapons are in ‘common use,’ assault weapons and high-capacity magazines cannot be banned under the Second Amendment.”

Kavanaugh’s argument in the 2011 case to which Harris referred, where he dissented from a D.C. Circuit decision upholding a local ban on certain arbitrarily selected semi-automatic rifles, was a pretty straightforward extension of the Supreme Court’s logic in the landmark 2008 case District of Columbia v. Heller. “In Heller,” Kavanaugh noted, “the Supreme Court held that handguns—the vast majority of which today are semi-automatic—are constitutionally protected because they have not traditionally been banned and are in common use by law-abiding citizens. There is no meaningful or persuasive constitutional distinction between semi-automatic handguns and semi-automatic rifles. Semi-automatic rifles, like semi-automatic handguns, have not traditionally been banned and are in common use by law-abiding citizens for self-defense in the home, hunting, and other lawful uses. Moreover, semi-automatic handguns are used in connection with violent crimes far more than semi-automatic rifles are. It follows from Heller‘s protection of semi-automatic handguns that semi-automatic rifles are also constitutionally protected and that D.C.’s ban on them is unconstitutional.”

Maybe Kavanaugh misapplied Heller. Maybe Heller misinterpreted the Second Amendment. Maybe Harris believes both of those things. But the fact that “horrific mass shootings” occur, or that they leave behind grieving parents, has nothing to do with those questions. If Kavanaugh is on the Supreme Court when it hears a challenge to an “assault weapon” ban, he will owe a “fair shake” to the people claiming the law violates their constitutional rights and to the government lawyers claiming it does not. The policy preferences of gun violence victims, no matter how heartfelt, should not carry any weight.

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FBI Probing American Express Forex Pricing, Stock Slides

The FBI has launched a probe into forex pricing practices inside American Express Co.’s foreign-exchange unit, the WSJ reports. The investigation, which is in its early stages, is being run out of the FBI’s Washington field office  and is focused on whether the foreign-exchange international payments department misrepresented pricing to clients in order to win their business.

The FBI began its investigation in August, and followed a previous report from the WSJ that AmEx’s foreign-exchange unit had recruited business clients with offers of low currency-conversion rates before raising prices without warning.

An AmEx spokeswoman declined to comment on the FBI investigation. In July, Amex said it took the allegations very seriously and would conduct a review. The unit’s employees have been instructed to avoid deleting emails, people familiar with the instructions said.

For now, the FBI is in the fact-gathering stage of the investigation, and is communicating with AmEx and is waiting for the company to answer a list of questions.

Separately, the WSJ also notes that the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency also is looking into how AmEx disclosed pricing to customers, including what the customers were told about potential rate increases and who knew about the practice within the company.

At the end of July, the WSJ first reported that AmEx’s foreign-exchange international payments department routinely increased conversion rates without notifying customers, to boost revenue and employee commissions. The practice occurred until early this year and dated back to at least 2004.

The good news for Amex is that its forex business, which largely serves small and midsize businesses, accounts for less than half of a percentage point of the company’s total revenue.

Still, news of the probe sent its stock sliding, with AXP dropping to session lows, down as much as 2% on the report.

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