According to the MBA, the benchmark 30-year fixed mortgage rate broke below the 4% level in August, repeating what’s occurred three other times since 2012; in the first two episodes, purchase applications jumped by double-digits while in the third and current, activity slowed
Consumer expectations for lower interest rates spiked to a ten-year high in August; though falling rates have flowed through to a bump in new and existing home sales, the lack of urgency communicated in falling rate expectations will likely pressure housing activity
In Q2, ‘tappable’ home equity rose to a record $6.3T suggesting refinancing activity, up 167% over the last year, should continue to benefit; while refinancing bolsters consumption, a six-month low in perceived job availability and the trade war could crimp home sales
“Something is rotten in the state of Denmark,” is one of the most recognizable lines of all time. What’s key is that Shakespeare wrote this line into Hamlet, but it was not spoken by Hamlet. Marcellus said it to Horatio after the ghost of Hamlet’s father appeared and Hamlet exited stage left with his dear old floating dad. The iconic phrase called out political corruption, a subtlety that high school students must glean from their required reading. Or, if you prefer the obvious, it flags something that’s gone awry.
Today, something really is negative in the State of Denmark. As per this CNBC headline: “Danish bank offers mortgages with negative 0.5% interest rates – here’s why that’s not necessarily a good thing.” On Monday, August 5, Jyske Bank A/S, Denmark’s third-largest bank, announced that big carrot on a 10-year mortgage. Banks offering negative mortgages are willing to take a smaller loss compared to lending at higher interest rates where they risk less creditworthy borrowers that may not be able to pay them back in the future.
The good news? Something is positive in the State of America. Positive mortgage rates are still all the rage in the good ole U.S. of A. That doesn’t make lenders any less nervous. According to the latest weekly report from the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA), in August, the benchmark 30-year fixed rate made its fourth foray into sub-4% territory. The only three other periods where 30-year mortgages dabbled in 3-handles occurred from May 2012 to May 2013, January 2015 to April 2015 and February 2016 to October 2016.
Was ‘3’ a magic number for mortgage brokers? In the first two instances, mortgage loan applications to purchase homes ignited, growing by double digits on a year-over-year basis. In the third episode, growth slowed from double digits to single digits.
The jury is still out on the here and now. We fear the law of diminishing returns is at play. Over the last three weeks, purchase applications have slowed by more than 5% even as mortgage rates fell from 4.01% to 3.94%.
We know this short span does not constitute a trend, but homebuyers might be holding out for even lower rates. As you can see above, in August, consumer expectations for lower interest spiked to a ten-year high. Why lock in today when you’ll get “paid” to wait for an even lower rate?
This lack of urgency implies disappointing home sales. To that end, through July, we’ve had three consecutive misses in new home sales. Despite this, new home sales are still up 13% thus far this year. Meanwhile, existing home sales broke their losing streak, rising by 0.6% over the prior year for the first time since February 2018.
Pending home sales’ track record has been more mixed in recent months and we’ll know more this morning with the release of July’s data. For context, commitments to buy homes have risen by a tenth since bottoming in December 2018.
These developments smell like a turning point. Enter Richard Curtin’s take on consumer interest rate expectations from the August University of Michigan consumer survey:
“The main takeaway for consumers from the first cut in interest rates in a decade was to increase apprehensions about a possible recession. Consumers concluded, following the Fed’s lead, that they may need to reduce spending in anticipation of a potential recession. Falling interest rates have long been associated with the start of recessions.”
The silver lining for lenders and households alike will be refinancing. Fresh data from Black Knight finds that the equity homeowners can pull from their homes rose by $355 billion to a record $6.3 trillion in the second quarter, a quarter more than the mid-2006 $5 trillion prior peak. The money to cushion household budgets as the economy slows is there for the taking — of the 45 million with excess equity, half have mortgage rates north of 4.25%. Little wonder, refinancing activity is 167% above its year ago level.
While this will help boost consumption, it’s new digs that drive the economy. With households’ perceptions of job availability at a six-month low, the risk is rising that home purchases will be postponed despite falling mortgage rates, frustrating policymakers at the Federal Reserve. With rates so low, and precious little in the way of easing capacity at the Fed, re-booting residential real estate could prove futile in the current easing cycle.
That brings us back to what is rotten in the State of America. What started here – the trade war – has already transitioned into rising costs among employers. As these drag on topline growth, labor cost cuts will increasingly be in focus threatening to enflame households’ growing anxiety about the sky-high expense of putting a roof over their head.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2HBlWOO Tyler Durden
Just days before many kids in the United States return to school from summer vacation, President Donald Trump’s administration responded in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York to a multi-state lawsuit challenging its watered-down requirements under the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) National School Lunch Program.
The lawsuit, which was filed earlier this year by attorneys general from several states, including California and lead plaintiff New York State, claims the Trump administration didn’t take the proper steps to amend the rules, which the suit argues contravene the will of Congress. The suit claims the USDA’s 2018 actions were not “‘consistent with the goals of the most recent Dietary Guidelines for Americans’ [nor] ‘based on’ the Nutrition Board’s recommendations, as required by the School Lunch Act.” The suit also alleges the rules are not—as required—based on “tested nutritional research.” And it claims the amended requirements “significantly weaken the nutritional requirements for sodium and whole grains applicable to the school lunch” program.
The Obama administration’s changes to the National School Lunch Program, championed by then-First Lady Michelle Obama and adopted in 2012, modified requirements for sodium, whole grain, milk, and fruits and vegetables served as part of the school lunch program. In 2018, the Trump administration rolled back many of those changes.
“The reforms were announced this week by new USDA Secretary Sonny Purdue under a plan to—honestly—’Make School Meals Great Again,'” I wrote in a 2017 column on the Trump administration’s new approach. “That headline should tell you all you need to know about the Trump administration’s plans.”
Still, the inanity of Trump’s plans doesn’t mean the changes advocated by First Lady Obama and her husband’s administration were any good. “[T]he Obama administration’s food is not great food,” I noted in 2017.
I’ve documented many of the problems with the USDA’s National School Lunch Program over the years. In a 2014 column on the First Lady’s school lunch reforms, I noted some of the flaws in those efforts: students and school districts fleeing the program in droves, soaring costs, and “unprecedented mountains of food waste.” Claims that the quality of food served under the program improved after the First Lady’s reforms are dubious, to say the least.
The states sued the USDA last year under the legal theory of parens patriae, arguing that the states are acting on behalf (and representing the interests) of those who cannot speak for themselves; in this case, low-income families and their children who eat school lunches. “The 2018 Rule will expose children who live in the States and eat meals in schools to health consequences to which they would not have been exposed if USDA had not eliminated the final sodium target… and lowered the whole-grain requirement,” the suit alleges.
This week’s federal government response sought to pour cold water on that theory. As Reuters reported, the USDA argued in its response that “states have no power to sue over new rules they say make school meals less healthy.”
Regardless of which side wins, the only sure losers are America’s taxpayers and its schoolchildren. Many of the latter will have little choice but to eat the lousy food that’s served in most public schools.
I argued two years ago that walking the school lunch program back a few years is a big idea only to small minds. That hasn’t stopped New York, California, and a handful of other states from fighting with the USDA over school-lunch minutiae instead of implementing sorely needed, wholesale reforms to the program.
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Vintners in France haven’t seen such a succession of hot weather and dry harvest since the 14th century, during a time called “the Black Death”, according to Bloomberg. Has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?
Though these weather extremes may seem normal to those under the age of 30, they are unprecedented by historical standards, going all the way back to when Europe was recovering from the pandemic that trounced its population. This is the conclusion of researchers who examined temperature, grape harvest and wage data dating back to 1354.
In their paper, the authors led by Thomas Labbe conclude:
“Outstanding hot and dry years in the past were outliers, while they have become the norm since the transition to rapid warming in 1988. Hotter temperatures over the last three decades have resulted in Burgundy grapes being harvested on average 13 days earlier than they were over the last 664 years.”
The study underscores how the effects of climate change are forcing some populations to adapt to new cycles.
Comparing land surface temperatures from June to July 2019
The hotter temperatures have an effect on Burgundy’s farmers tending to their vineyards, itinerant harvesters, merchants and consumers.
Through looking at about 300 documentary weather reports, the researchers looked at the legendary hot summer of 1540 that dried up the Rhine River. That year, workers harvested grapes that looked like “withered raisins” and “yielded a sweet sherry-like wine which made people rapidly drunk.”
Doesn’t sound that bad to us…
Regardless, Hugh Johnson, a well known wine critic, said tasting the 1540 vintage was “one of the most memorable moments of his career”.
High temperatures don’t necessarily guarantee quality harvests, according to the research, which notes that the duration of ripening and winemaker styles are also important inputs.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2Ztk3yg Tyler Durden
Just days before many kids in the United States return to school from summer vacation, President Donald Trump’s administration responded in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York to a multi-state lawsuit challenging its watered-down requirements under the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) National School Lunch Program.
The lawsuit, which was filed earlier this year by attorneys general from several states, including California and lead plaintiff New York State, claims the Trump administration didn’t take the proper steps to amend the rules, which the suit argues contravene the will of Congress. The suit claims the USDA’s 2018 actions were not “‘consistent with the goals of the most recent Dietary Guidelines for Americans’ [nor] ‘based on’ the Nutrition Board’s recommendations, as required by the School Lunch Act.” The suit also alleges the rules are not—as required—based on “tested nutritional research.” And it claims the amended requirements “significantly weaken the nutritional requirements for sodium and whole grains applicable to the school lunch” program.
The Obama administration’s changes to the National School Lunch Program, championed by then-First Lady Michelle Obama and adopted in 2012, modified requirements for sodium, whole grain, milk, and fruits and vegetables served as part of the school lunch program. In 2018, the Trump administration rolled back many of those changes.
“The reforms were announced this week by new USDA Secretary Sonny Purdue under a plan to—honestly—’Make School Meals Great Again,'” I wrote in a 2017 column on the Trump administration’s new approach. “That headline should tell you all you need to know about the Trump administration’s plans.”
Still, the inanity of Trump’s plans doesn’t mean the changes advocated by First Lady Obama and her husband’s administration were any good. “[T]he Obama administration’s food is not great food,” I noted in 2017.
I’ve documented many of the problems with the USDA’s National School Lunch Program over the years. In a 2014 column on the First Lady’s school lunch reforms, I noted some of the flaws in those efforts: students and school districts fleeing the program in droves, soaring costs, and “unprecedented mountains of food waste.” Claims that the quality of food served under the program improved after the First Lady’s reforms are dubious, to say the least.
The states sued the USDA last year under the legal theory of parens patriae, arguing that the states are acting on behalf (and representing the interests) of those who cannot speak for themselves; in this case, low-income families and their children who eat school lunches. “The 2018 Rule will expose children who live in the States and eat meals in schools to health consequences to which they would not have been exposed if USDA had not eliminated the final sodium target… and lowered the whole-grain requirement,” the suit alleges.
This week’s federal government response sought to pour cold water on that theory. As Reuters reported, the USDA argued in its response that “states have no power to sue over new rules they say make school meals less healthy.”
Regardless of which side wins, the only sure losers are America’s taxpayers and its schoolchildren. Many of the latter will have little choice but to eat the lousy food that’s served in most public schools.
I argued two years ago that walking the school lunch program back a few years is a big idea only to small minds. That hasn’t stopped New York, California, and a handful of other states from fighting with the USDA over school-lunch minutiae instead of implementing sorely needed, wholesale reforms to the program.
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via IFTTT
Facing a Parliamentary majority opposed to a hard Brexit – a crashing out of the EU if Britain is not offered a deal she can live with – Boris Johnson took matters into his own hands.
He went to the Queen at Balmoral and got Parliament “prorogued,” suspended, from Sept. 12 to Oct. 14. That’s two weeks before the Oct. 31 deadline Johnson has set for Britain’s departure.
The time his opposition in Parliament has to prevent a crash out of the European Union has just been sliced in half. His adversaries are incensed.
The speaker of the House of Commons called Johnson’s action “a constitutional outrage.” Johnson’s Tory Party leader in Scotland resigned. Labor Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn said Parliament will start legislating Tuesday to block Johnson.
There is talk of a no-confidence vote in the Tory government.
One recalls the counsel Benjamin Jowett, Master of Balliol, gave his students: Never retract, never explain, just do it and let them howl! For Johnson has done what he was chosen, and pledged, to do.
Though he lacks a majority for a “no-deal Brexit,” his suspension of Parliament keeps faith with the hardline Tories who put their trust in him — that he would honor his commitment to get done by October’s end what the British people voted to do in 2016.
Whatever may be said of him, Johnson has shown himself as a man of action, a risk-taker, a doer, like Trump, who has hailed Johnson for the suspension. And leaders like Johnson are today shouldering aside the cookie-cutter politicians to dominate the world stage.
Matteo Salvini, interior minister, leader of the League party, and the most popular political figure in Italy, brought down his own government to force new elections he felt he would win. His ambition is to take the leadership not only of Italy but of the European populist right.
Salvini’s boldness backfired when the League’s ex-partner in the government, the leftist Five Star Movement, joined the Democratic Party to form a new government from which the League is excluded.
Yet Salvini, too, is in the mold of Trump and Vladimir Putin, who, when he saw a U.S.-backed coup take down the pro-Russian president in Ukraine, seized Crimea, home port of Russia’s Black Sea fleet since the 18th century.
These leaders are men of action not words. And their countrymen are cheering their decisiveness.
India’s Narendra Modi is in the mold. After reelection, he revoked Article 370 of India’s constitution that guaranteed special rights to the Muslim-majority in Kashmir, a state over which India and Pakistan have fought two wars. To effect the annexation of Kashmir, Modi sent thousands of troops into the disputed territory, imposed a curfew, shut down the internet and arrested political leaders.
When Prime Minister Imran Khan asked Trump to intervene on Pakistan’s behalf, Trump, meeting with Modi at the G-7, called it a matter between the two countries.
While autocrats appear ascendant, there is another phenomenon of our time: popular uprisings and mass demonstrations as shortcuts to political change.
These began to flourish with the Arab Spring in Tunisia and Egypt in 2011, the latter of which brought down President Hosni Mubarak after 30 years in power. The Cairo revolution and subsequent election brought to power Mohammed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood. This was intolerable to the Egyptian army, which executed a coup that led to new elections and the installation of the present ruler and former general Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi.
In 2014 came the protests in Maidan Square that led to the ouster of the pro-Russian government in Kiev and loss of Crimea.
This year saw mass demonstrations in Puerto Rico bring down the government in San Juan. In France, the Yellow Vest movement, rebelling against a fuel tax Emmanuel Macron imposed to cut carbon emissions, flooded the streets for months, demonstrating, rioting, even vandalizing the heart of Paris to get it repealed.
Then there is Hong Kong, a city of 7 million claimed by a China of 1.4 billion, where scores of thousands, even millions, have protested, blocked streets, shut down businesses and closed the airport.
The Hong Kong demonstrators are demanding what the 13 colonies demanded: freedom, liberty, independence. But as Xi Jinping is very much an authoritarian autocrat, the protesters are pushing their luck.
What motivates the democratic protesters and what propels the rise and welcome reception of the autocrats, the men of action, is not all that dissimilar.
It is impatience, a sense that the regime is out of touch, that it does not reflect or respond to what people want, that it is torpid and cannot act decisively, that it does not “get things done,” that it is tedious and boring.
Part of Trump’s appeal to his base is that people sense he feels exactly as they do. And they readily understand why Trump would not want to sit down at a G-7 gathering and gas endlessly about climate change.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2ZC2XgV Tyler Durden
As bitcoin turns 10, a new book aims to chronicle the digital currency’s ideological origins. “The technology alone is not enough,” Finn Brunton writes in Digital Cash: The Unknown History of the Anarchists, Utopians, and Technologists Who Created Cryptocurrency. “Even with good math, scientific discoveries, the free circulation of ideas, reliable hardware and running code, you need a desire, a vision, a dissatisfaction, a fantasy, a story.” The source of that story was a movement called the cypherpunks, which started to coalesce in the late 1980s. In turn, the cypherpunks did not appear sui generis but were the culmination of decades—centuries, really—of broadly libertarian thought and activism.
Brunton, who teaches in New York University’s media department, first offers an overview of the history of monetary authentication, then traces cryptocurrencies’ roots to several offbeat subcultures. He finds precursors ranging from the Great Depression–era group Technocracy Inc. to the Extropians, a band of trailblazing transhumanists and accelerationists that flared up in the ’80s. (The Extropians’ plans included cryonic timeouts: If their preferred future didn’t come fast enough, they planned to freeze themselves and wake up later.) Another chapter examines gold bugs and devotees of Austrian economics, who took the 2008 recession as a vindication of their contempt for central banking. Digital Cash even voyages into the niche waters of seasteading, an old idea that has garnered new interest since the early 2000s.
Brunton argues that “early Bitcoin itself was understood as a utopian, speculative currency in the context of libertarian dreams: digital cash built for verifiably inflation-proof production, in anticipation of a redemptive economic emergency.” Cryptocurrencies appeal to fringe optimists and fringe pessimists alike, with tenets encompassing both monetary romanticism and economic eschatology.
Brunton argues that these subcultures’ clustered worldviews laid the groundwork for Satoshi Nakamoto’s synthesis of cryptography and Austrian economics—that is, for bitcoin. This observation is at once banal and profound.
On the banal side: Of course people’s intellectual fascinations lead them to corresponding social milieus. And when you’re dealing with people who have been striving for years to extricate money from state control, of course those social milieus are often on the fringes. “You can’t really work in cryptocurrency without an openness to weird ideas,” Neeraj Agrawal of the cryptocurrency think tank Coin Center told me in 2017.
On the profound side: As with any historical development, the creation of bitcoin was situated, both temporally and conceptually. Nakamoto, the technology’s pseudonymous inventor, was indisputably brilliant. But he drew on copious prior art and collaborated with like-minded software iconoclasts. Brunton shows the social context that allowed Nakamoto’s idea to appear.
He also notes another important piece of social context: Bitcoin “could not have existed without markets for digital moving images, especially video games, driving down the price of microchips,” or without readily available electricity. And then there’s the trial-and-error process that involved several other attempts to create an electronic currency, such as DigiCash, Hashcash, and b-money. “This,” Brunton writes, “was not a technology that fell out of the cargo bay of a UFO.”
The cypherpunk subculture that Nakamoto frequented had its own complex trajectory, branching off from nexus points shared with adjacent social clumps. Cryptocurrency enthusiasts are a fragmented and contentious group, but Digital Cash attributes their ardor for the technology to a common set of assumptions about the world.
In brief, the cypherpunks believed that individual freedom is paramount, that any centralized system with no right of exit will inevitably abridge your liberty, and that technology can obviate concentrations of nonconsensual power, reconfiguring society so that people can be left alone unless they welcome interference.
Brunton believes that the cypherpunks’ activities, and those of the other subcultures he explores, are best understood as expressions of longing for particular far-term outcomes, undertaken with varying levels of pragmatism. He argues that any form of money “acts as a model of the future—but always the future within a particular time.”
Digital cash is an elegant engineering solution, a social and communal phenomenon, and the instantiation of particular philosophical assumptions. “The people this book studies organize themselves and their speculative monies in terms of powerful fantasies of the future,” Brunton writes. Their vision, as he describes it, is that “society might be irretrievably and utterly disrupted, with money as the mechanism of transformation and the escape route out of the present into the future.”
Bitcoin routes around state control of money. The endgame for many crypto-currency enthusiasts is a complete replacement of traditional finance and a move toward market anarchism. Current “bitcoin maximalists” exemplify this attitude; newer communities like the one around Ethereum tend to diverge in messy and idiosyncratic ways.
To my mind, Brunton is correct. We who are invested in digital cash—financially, ideologically, or otherwise—tend to be dreamers. We are cynical about incumbent systems but starry-eyed enough to hope that remaking the world’s economic foundations will fix everything else too. It may be grandiose to imagine that this is possible, but the imagining is what fuels efforts toward concrete progress.
For example, an open-source project called BTCPay Server recently launched a self-hosted, uncensorable alternative to Kickstarter. The team opened its announcement with a statement of lofty ideals: “Our core belief is that everyone deserves the right to have total control over their finances and that trusted third-parties are security holes.” (The latter phrase is a direct reference to a seminal essay by the cypherpunk luminary Nick Szabo.)
When it comes to cryptocurrency projects, disentangling the sci-fi mission from practical execution is impossible. Cypherpunks are applied futurists: It’s fun to sit around workshopping ideas, but it’s much more effective to write code that increases the probability of your preferred end state.
Generally speaking, Brunton’s sociological treatment of cryptocurrency enthusiasts holds up. I might quibble about some of the inclusions—I’m skeptical that seasteaders were especially important to either bitcoin or the cypherpunks, for example—but the overall narrative is convincing.
And to his credit, Brunton explains the relevant technologies lucidly. “What secures the scarcity of this kind of digital cash is the transformation of energy into heat by friction; it is a currency whose production and transaction are constrained by expenditure, by waste,” he writes, distilling the concept known as proof of work. “Bitcoin wasn’t magic but a technology in context, and part of that context was the power grid, the business of microchip fabrication, and the planet’s atmosphere.”
Yet Digital Cash has a couple of baffling oversights. Later in the book, Brunton tries to figure out why the gold bugs at the libertarian gathering PorcFest are attracted to bitcoin, “since much of the contempt for [fiat bank notes] began with the idea that nothing backed them but promises.” He appears to have forgotten how he himself described proof of work; his puzzlement implies that bitcoin, like fiat currencies, is backed by nothing.
On the contrary: While there is no centrally controlled reserve a la Fort Knox, cryptocurrencies are backed by the energy expenditure necessary for computation—the marginal cost of each newly “minted” coin or transaction, on top of the capital required to amass mining hardware in the first place.
On the next page, Brunton writes, “Cryptocurrencies in circulation are nothing more or less than records of creation, ownership, and transaction in the blockchain ledger: their existence is constituted by the user-visible records of their existence.” While technically correct, this sentence elides the continual investment that sustains the system.
Brunton is also surprisingly blasé about the decentralization built into cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin is structured to allow disparate people and groups to collaborate based on the profit motive, without any single entity being able to seize control. He describes technologists’ fears in the late 20th century: “Electronic money could serve as a control apparatus for making the marketplace into a rapid response system for the police, a location log, and a Skinner box for rewarding and denying citizens into doing what corporations or governments wanted.” All of the above has happened under traditional payment systems: It is extraordinarily difficult, perhaps impossible, for controversial businesses like the alt-right social media site Gab to retain credit-card processing services—not to mention the numerous difficulties that sex workers (including legal ones) have faced transacting with customers and securing their personal finances. Yet Brunton devotes surprisingly little space to discussing censorship and its chilling effects.
Despite such lapses, Digital Cash is a good book. Even experienced denizens of the cryptocurrency space are likely to learn something from it. Brunton comes across as a thoughtful outsider, one who takes bitcoin and the ideas embraced by its users quite seriously.
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As bitcoin turns 10, a new book aims to chronicle the digital currency’s ideological origins. “The technology alone is not enough,” Finn Brunton writes in Digital Cash: The Unknown History of the Anarchists, Utopians, and Technologists Who Created Cryptocurrency. “Even with good math, scientific discoveries, the free circulation of ideas, reliable hardware and running code, you need a desire, a vision, a dissatisfaction, a fantasy, a story.” The source of that story was a movement called the cypherpunks, which started to coalesce in the late 1980s. In turn, the cypherpunks did not appear sui generis but were the culmination of decades—centuries, really—of broadly libertarian thought and activism.
Brunton, who teaches in New York University’s media department, first offers an overview of the history of monetary authentication, then traces cryptocurrencies’ roots to several offbeat subcultures. He finds precursors ranging from the Great Depression–era group Technocracy Inc. to the Extropians, a band of trailblazing transhumanists and accelerationists that flared up in the ’80s. (The Extropians’ plans included cryonic timeouts: If their preferred future didn’t come fast enough, they planned to freeze themselves and wake up later.) Another chapter examines gold bugs and devotees of Austrian economics, who took the 2008 recession as a vindication of their contempt for central banking. Digital Cash even voyages into the niche waters of seasteading, an old idea that has garnered new interest since the early 2000s.
Brunton argues that “early Bitcoin itself was understood as a utopian, speculative currency in the context of libertarian dreams: digital cash built for verifiably inflation-proof production, in anticipation of a redemptive economic emergency.” Cryptocurrencies appeal to fringe optimists and fringe pessimists alike, with tenets encompassing both monetary romanticism and economic eschatology.
Brunton argues that these subcultures’ clustered worldviews laid the groundwork for Satoshi Nakamoto’s synthesis of cryptography and Austrian economics—that is, for bitcoin. This observation is at once banal and profound.
On the banal side: Of course people’s intellectual fascinations lead them to corresponding social milieus. And when you’re dealing with people who have been striving for years to extricate money from state control, of course those social milieus are often on the fringes. “You can’t really work in cryptocurrency without an openness to weird ideas,” Neeraj Agrawal of the cryptocurrency think tank Coin Center told me in 2017.
On the profound side: As with any historical development, the creation of bitcoin was situated, both temporally and conceptually. Nakamoto, the technology’s pseudonymous inventor, was indisputably brilliant. But he drew on copious prior art and collaborated with like-minded software iconoclasts. Brunton shows the social context that allowed Nakamoto’s idea to appear.
He also notes another important piece of social context: Bitcoin “could not have existed without markets for digital moving images, especially video games, driving down the price of microchips,” or without readily available electricity. And then there’s the trial-and-error process that involved several other attempts to create an electronic currency, such as DigiCash, Hashcash, and b-money. “This,” Brunton writes, “was not a technology that fell out of the cargo bay of a UFO.”
The cypherpunk subculture that Nakamoto frequented had its own complex trajectory, branching off from nexus points shared with adjacent social clumps. Cryptocurrency enthusiasts are a fragmented and contentious group, but Digital Cash attributes their ardor for the technology to a common set of assumptions about the world.
In brief, the cypherpunks believed that individual freedom is paramount, that any centralized system with no right of exit will inevitably abridge your liberty, and that technology can obviate concentrations of nonconsensual power, reconfiguring society so that people can be left alone unless they welcome interference.
Brunton believes that the cypherpunks’ activities, and those of the other subcultures he explores, are best understood as expressions of longing for particular far-term outcomes, undertaken with varying levels of pragmatism. He argues that any form of money “acts as a model of the future—but always the future within a particular time.”
Digital cash is an elegant engineering solution, a social and communal phenomenon, and the instantiation of particular philosophical assumptions. “The people this book studies organize themselves and their speculative monies in terms of powerful fantasies of the future,” Brunton writes. Their vision, as he describes it, is that “society might be irretrievably and utterly disrupted, with money as the mechanism of transformation and the escape route out of the present into the future.”
Bitcoin routes around state control of money. The endgame for many crypto-currency enthusiasts is a complete replacement of traditional finance and a move toward market anarchism. Current “bitcoin maximalists” exemplify this attitude; newer communities like the one around Ethereum tend to diverge in messy and idiosyncratic ways.
To my mind, Brunton is correct. We who are invested in digital cash—financially, ideologically, or otherwise—tend to be dreamers. We are cynical about incumbent systems but starry-eyed enough to hope that remaking the world’s economic foundations will fix everything else too. It may be grandiose to imagine that this is possible, but the imagining is what fuels efforts toward concrete progress.
For example, an open-source project called BTCPay Server recently launched a self-hosted, uncensorable alternative to Kickstarter. The team opened its announcement with a statement of lofty ideals: “Our core belief is that everyone deserves the right to have total control over their finances and that trusted third-parties are security holes.” (The latter phrase is a direct reference to a seminal essay by the cypherpunk luminary Nick Szabo.)
When it comes to cryptocurrency projects, disentangling the sci-fi mission from practical execution is impossible. Cypherpunks are applied futurists: It’s fun to sit around workshopping ideas, but it’s much more effective to write code that increases the probability of your preferred end state.
Generally speaking, Brunton’s sociological treatment of cryptocurrency enthusiasts holds up. I might quibble about some of the inclusions—I’m skeptical that seasteaders were especially important to either bitcoin or the cypherpunks, for example—but the overall narrative is convincing.
And to his credit, Brunton explains the relevant technologies lucidly. “What secures the scarcity of this kind of digital cash is the transformation of energy into heat by friction; it is a currency whose production and transaction are constrained by expenditure, by waste,” he writes, distilling the concept known as proof of work. “Bitcoin wasn’t magic but a technology in context, and part of that context was the power grid, the business of microchip fabrication, and the planet’s atmosphere.”
Yet Digital Cash has a couple of baffling oversights. Later in the book, Brunton tries to figure out why the gold bugs at the libertarian gathering PorcFest are attracted to bitcoin, “since much of the contempt for [fiat bank notes] began with the idea that nothing backed them but promises.” He appears to have forgotten how he himself described proof of work; his puzzlement implies that bitcoin, like fiat currencies, is backed by nothing.
On the contrary: While there is no centrally controlled reserve a la Fort Knox, cryptocurrencies are backed by the energy expenditure necessary for computation—the marginal cost of each newly “minted” coin or transaction, on top of the capital required to amass mining hardware in the first place.
On the next page, Brunton writes, “Cryptocurrencies in circulation are nothing more or less than records of creation, ownership, and transaction in the blockchain ledger: their existence is constituted by the user-visible records of their existence.” While technically correct, this sentence elides the continual investment that sustains the system.
Brunton is also surprisingly blasé about the decentralization built into cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin is structured to allow disparate people and groups to collaborate based on the profit motive, without any single entity being able to seize control. He describes technologists’ fears in the late 20th century: “Electronic money could serve as a control apparatus for making the marketplace into a rapid response system for the police, a location log, and a Skinner box for rewarding and denying citizens into doing what corporations or governments wanted.” All of the above has happened under traditional payment systems: It is extraordinarily difficult, perhaps impossible, for controversial businesses like the alt-right social media site Gab to retain credit-card processing services—not to mention the numerous difficulties that sex workers (including legal ones) have faced transacting with customers and securing their personal finances. Yet Brunton devotes surprisingly little space to discussing censorship and its chilling effects.
Despite such lapses, Digital Cash is a good book. Even experienced denizens of the cryptocurrency space are likely to learn something from it. Brunton comes across as a thoughtful outsider, one who takes bitcoin and the ideas embraced by its users quite seriously.
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You won’t find any shallow hashtags at the former concentration camp, just quiet, powerful reality…
Right now, someone in the media is finding another excuse to proclaim that Trump is Hitler, America is Germany 1933, and detention centers on the southern border are concentration camps.
Recently I went to Dachau, just outside of Munich, to see a real concentration camp.
The first thing you notice is the irony. The people who, in too loud voices, mill around the station entrance asking “Is this the train to Dachau?” and then the conductor’s announcement calling out the name as if it were just another stop. The mediocre station has a McDonald’s. The bus stop sign for the shuttle you need to take has “Concentration Camp” written in English. Everyone around you is on vacation, dressed for it and chattering like it. You arrive at a visitor’s center, and there’s a rush for the toilets and the snack bar. Which way to the camp, Dad? Can we see the crematorium? Can we?
A hundred steps outside the snack bar, the world changes. The road turns gray even though the light playing through the poplars is out of a postcard. They’ve changed the entrance location from a few years ago so that you now enter through the former SS barracks and come to the gate. It really says Arbeit Macht Frei (“Work Will Set You Free”) on the iron bars and you walk through just like they did. The gate only swings one way; you will leave today, but it wasn’t originally designed that way and you can tell. There may be a hundred people with you but it is completely silent as you enter.
It is too small. You see the administrative buildings to the right, the reconstructed prisoner barracks to the left, the assembly ground in front of you. You see the fences and walls on all four sides, walkable in a few minutes at an easy pace on a gorgeous day. It is too small to have held all those people, too small for all that happened, too small to be the symbol of Nazi power it was then. You expect something more substantial, with the distant site lines obscured, like at Disney World, where tricks of the eye make things seem grander.
It is too familiar. It takes only a few minutes to get your bearings. You’ve seen photos before, and there are many posted, populating the place with buildings and people once here and forever gone. It is unlike, say, an art museum on the scale of the Met or the Uffizi, where, after hours of circling corridors, you have no idea where you’ve been. You know Dachau.
The museum unfolds in the order that new prisoners were processed. The early days of National Socialism are explained where the inmates were once assigned numbers. The seizure of power by Hitler is documented in the room where people were stripped and deloused (subtlety is missing when the backdrop is Nazism). And you exit into the campgrounds awkwardly after reading about their liberation by the 45th Infantry Division.
You think, after all that reading and those museum exhibits (and it is a thorough education, much more than an Instagram collection of artifacts and, oh look, a real prisoner’s uniform, honey!), you understand something. But not yet. You have really just arrived, and in front of you is Dachau itself, the ground, the air—the same ground they saw and air they breathed—and you have a choice. Many visitors turn back towards the snack bar, falsely satiated after an hour, thinking they’ve seen Dachau and anxiously trying to remember when the shuttle bus runs back to the station.
If you wait for them to leave, you can see Dachau.
Most of the place is empty, acres of crushed stone with flat markers showing where the now-missing barracks were. The trees lining the central road bisecting the camp are old. They were here when Dachau was working. You can match up an individual tree from a 1942 photo with the one in front of you and touch it. The sun is warm; it’s a beautiful late summer afternoon with those wonderful tickles of early fall all around. A day to be alive, grandpa would have called it. There must have been days just like this one in 1942.
There is some minor archaeological excavation work going on. An archaeologist stands over a hole about three feet deep and explains that he’s looking for evidence of the original fence line, the border of the camp before it was expanded in 1937. He’s found some wooden post fragments and some barbed wire. So the bottom of that hole is 1937, I ask? Yes, he says, the dirt and stones piled here haven’t seen sunlight since then. I ask if I can take one of the stones with me as a keepsake, and he explains that is not allowed, even as he looks away just long enough. Doing the right thing is hard enough elsewhere, never mind in Dachau.
A sign states simply that the area in front of you is where the barracks used for medical experiments on live humans once stood. Another denotes the punishment barracks, where the SS concocted even darker methods of retribution. You see where the bodies were stacked like cordwood but you know that wood is strong and straight and the images you are recreating show corpses floppy and tangled in their piles. Now you are seeing Dachau, here in the deeper waters.
Dachau does not believe in your tears. This is not a sentimental place. It is not clean. A universe of victims died here but there is no acknowledgement of victimhood, or raising of awareness, or giving of voice, or trafficking in of shallow hashtags. Dachau is here to declare what happened and charge you with doing something on the scale and with the accuracy that are required.
See, by coming here, it is now handed to you, that obligation. Hitler and his Dachau did not emerge from an election that frowned on a favored candidate. Following World War I, Germany was purposefully humiliated and saddled with war reparations that were not payable. An economic crisis unrolled. Inflation drove the nation to starvation. With no history of democracy, Germany was willed into a republic as unprepared as two virgins in an arranged marriage. Both across the border and at home, powerful communist forces threatened. Hungry people weren’t tricked into a strongman because of Facebook or some Electoral College fluke; they demanded one.
Within three months of taking office, Hitler gave himself the right to amend the constitution, ended representative government, created special political courts, made criticism of the government a capital crime, and established Dachau. Two months after that, Jews were fired from government positions, political parties and unions were prohibited, opponents were murdered, and books were burned. There was no slippery slope. It was not incremental; it was inevitable.
There is obviously more to this story than a travelogue about an interesting day trip out to Dachau by train from nearby Munich. To say that Trump is Hitler, America is Germany in 1933, and a grimy detention facility is a concentration camp means you have never been to Dachau.
The presentation at Dachau is very un-2019, where everyone vies for adopted victimhood and chosen trauma. Dachau is cold because only its facts matter.
Tweets childishly mocking political opponents and regulations preventing a small number of self-declared trans people from joining the Army have nothing to do with Dachau. To cite 2019 border facilities or exaggerate the historical impact of a march in Charlottesville is to turn Dachau relative, the dial jiggered to magnify some other event. It makes people numb; it dumbs down discussion; it is cheap, inaccurate, and exploitative. It demands mighty outrage from a partial set of facts. Both butterflies and elephants have legs, but no one should claim a butterfly is an elephant.
Propagandists have always used ignorance to manipulate. Yet while CNN works to convince viewers that silver mylar blankets instead of comfy quilts for migrants means there are concentration camps in America, Dachau reminds us that physicians here dissected human beings alive as part of medical experiments. Just as is taught in beginning writing courses, truth comes from showing, not just telling. For those who call Trump a Nazi, there is Dachau to visit. For the record.
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The U.S. opioid crisis has been making headlines again this week after pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson was fined $572 for fuelling the epidemic in Oklahoma in a historic ruling.
As Statista’s Niall McCarthy notes, last year, drug overdoses claimed more than 68,000 American lives and 47,000 of those deaths involved an opioid. Even though heroin, prescription opioids and synthetic opioids like fentanyl are receiving most of the attention, deaths from other drugs like cocaine and methamphetamine are increasing.
A new report from the RAND Corporation has shed light on just how many people use illicit drugs across America as well as how much they pay for them.
In 2016 alone, people in the U.S. spent an estimated $146 billion on cocaine, heroin, marijuana and methamphetamine. Adding RAND’s figures together from 2006 to 2016 would mean total spending on illegal drugs over the course of the decade was nearly $1.5 trillion.
Out of all four drugs in 2016, users spent the most on illicit marijuana – $52 billion.
The market for the illegal green stuff is around the size of the cocaine and methamphetamine markets combined. Heroin has the second highest financial outlay ($43 billon) followed by methamphetamine ($27 billion) and cocaine ($24 billion).
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2ZIdvHm Tyler Durden
The former deputy director’s FBI coddled Clinton and addled Trump. Now he seeks clemency… even as he sues the Justice Department…
Hillary Clinton checked every box for a violation of the Espionage Act. So much so that, in giving her a pass, the FBI figured it better couch her conduct as “extremely careless,” rather than “grossly negligent.” The latter description was stricken from an earlier draft of then-director James Comey’s remarks because it is, verbatim, the mental state the statute requires for a felony conviction. It wouldn’t do to have an “exoneration” statement read like a felony indictment.
In point of fact, the careless/negligent semantic game was a sideshow. Mrs. Clinton’s unlawful storage and transmission of classified information had been patently willful. In contemptuous violation of government standards, which she was bound not only to honor but to enforce as secretary of state, she systematically conducted her government business by private email, via a laughably unsecure homebrew server set-up. Her Obama administration allies stress that it was not her purpose to harm national security, but that was beside the point. The crime was mishandling classified information, and she committed it. And even if motive had mattered (it didn’t), her purpose was to conceal the interplay between her State Department and the Clinton Foundation, and to avoid generating a paper trail as she prepared to run for president. No, that’s not as bad as trying to do national-security harm, but it’s condemnable all the same.
While Clinton’s mishandling of classified information got all the attention, it was just the tip of the felony iceberg. Thousands of the 33,000 emails she withheld and undertook to “bleach bit” into oblivion related to State Department business. It is a felony to misappropriate even a single government record. The destruction of the emails, moreover, occurred after a House Committee investigating the Benghazi massacre issued subpoenas and preservation directives to Clinton’s State Department and Clinton herself. If Andrew Weissmann and the rest of the Mueller probe pit-bulls had half as solid an obstruction case against Donald Trump, the president would by now have been impeached, removed, and indicted.
And that dichotomy is the point, isn’t it?
In the Obama Justice Department — as extended by the Mueller investigation, staffed by Obama Justice Department officials and other Clinton-friendly Democrats — justice was dispensed with a partisan eye. If you were Hillary Clinton, you skated. If you were Donald Trump, they were determined to dig until they found something — and, even when they failed to make a case, the digging never stopped . . . it just shifted to Capitol Hill.
No one knows the skewed lay of the land better than Andrew McCabe.
The FBI’s former deputy director is in the Justice Department’s crosshairs. His lawyers are reportedly pleading with top officials not to indict him for lying to FBI agents who were probing a leak of investigative information, orchestrated by none other than McCabe.
McCabe is feeling the heat because the evidence that he made false statements is daunting. So daunting, in fact, that even he concedes he did not tell the truth to investigators. Listen carefully to what he says about the case — there being no shortage of public commentary on it from the newly minted CNN analyst. He never “deliberately misled anyone,” he insists. Sure, he grudgingly admits, some of his statements “were not fully accurate,” or perhaps were “misunderstood” by his interrogators. But “at worst,” you see, “I was not clear in my responses, and because of what was going on around me may well have been confused and distracted.”
Uh-huh.
Seems to me that General Michael Flynn “may well have been confused and distracted,” too. After all, it was on Flynn’s insanely busy first full day on the job as the new president’s national-security adviser that McCabe and Comey dispatched two agents — Peter Strzok and Joe Pientka — to brace him for an interview.
As our Rich Lowry recounts, Comey later bragged to an audience of like-minded anti-Trumpers at the 92nd Street Y that he knew this was a breach of protocol. Because seeking to interview a member of the president’s staff in a criminal investigation is a big deal, the Bureau is supposed to go through the attorney general, who alerts the White House counsel. That ensures that the administration is aware of the situation, and that the suspected staffer is advised of the reason for the interview and given an opportunity to consult with a lawyer.
Of course, if protocol had been followed, McCabe would not have been able to have Flynn grilled without preparation and without counsel. That put Flynn in a very different posture from Hillary Clinton.
She got every courtesy. The FBI not only scheduled her interview well in advance; before she showed up, before they asked her a single question, they had already finished drafting Comey’s statement exonerating her. Not just that. Clinton was permitted to bring along — among her phalanx of lawyers — her State Department aides Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson, key witnesses who had gotten immunity from prosecution. (In a real investigation, they’d have been considered subjects, not witnesses.) Allowing witnesses to sit in as lawyers was not just a violation of Justice Department practice (to say nothing of common sense). Federal criminal law prohibits former officials from lobbying the government on behalf of another person in a matter in which the former official was heavily involved while working for the government.
Recall that when he decided against an indictment of Clinton, Comey famously pronounced that “no reasonable prosecutor” would charge her. Even though Clinton’s conduct technically transgressed the law, the then-director rationalized that he could find no prior Espionage Act prosecution for gross negligence on facts analogous to Clinton’s case.
Where exactly would we expect find analogous facts? Not much precedent about secretaries of state sedulously setting up non-government communications systems for years of correspondence involving thousands of classified communications. But let’s put this historical anomaly aside. Let’s even ignore that military officials have been prosecuted for less-egregious classified-information violations. Here’s the point: In giving Clinton a pass, Comey explained that “responsible” prosecutorial decisions “consider the context of a person’s actions, and how similar situations have been handled in the past.”
Okay . . . then how is it that General Flynn gets investigated and charged?
Flynn, as a member of Trump’s transition team and incoming national-security adviser, had been consulting with the Russian ambassador, among other foreign counterparts. Context? There was nothing illegal or illegitimate about such communications. And even if it had been appropriate for the FBI and the Justice Department to inquire into the foreign policy of the incoming president elected by the American people, the Bureau did not need to interview Flynn. They had recordings of the conversations. What reason could there have been to question Flynn about them — without playing the recordings for him — except to lay the groundwork for a false-statements prosecution?
Moreover, how have similar situations been handled in the past? In investigating Flynn, the Obama Justice Department and the FBI theorized that he might have violated the Logan Act, a dubious law that purports to criminalize foreign policy freelancing by private citizens. Despite being on the books for over two centuries, the Logan Act has never resulted in a successful prosecution. Not once. In fact, it has not even been used to indict anyone in the last 170 years. Indeed, but for its desuetude, the Logan Act would certainly have been held unconstitutional; because the Justice Department never invokes it, no one has had the opportunity to challenge it. Yet, the Logan Act was used to justify investigating Flynn — a transition official whose very job entailed consultation with foreign officials.
As we noted a few days ago, the FBI and Mueller’s investigators prosecuted George Papadopoulos for lying about the date of a meeting. Though the lie was inconsequential to the probe, they made the then-28-year-old eat a felony charge. And while they could easily have had his lawyer surrender him for processing on the charge and quick release on bail, they instead choreographed an utterly unnecessary nighttime arrest that forced him to spend a night in jail.
Suffice it to say that Paul Combetta did not get the Papadopoulos brass-knuckles treatment.
Combetta was not prosecuted even though he brazenly lied to the FBI about the circumstances of his destruction of Clinton’s private emails. He was the key witness who had been in communication with Clinton confederates before and after his bleach-bit blitz through Clinton’s emails. In a normal case, prosecutors would charge him with obstruction and false statements to pressure him into cooperating. In the Clinton caper, though, he was given immunity . . . and duly clammed up.
No false-statements charges against Combetta. No false-statements charges against Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin, intimate Clinton aides who claimed not to know about Clinton’s private server while they worked for her at the State Department — even though emails show them involved in discussions about the server.
In the Clinton investigation, if you were a lawyer, such as Mills and Samuelson, the Obama Justice Department said “pretty please” and gave you immunity — rather than a subpoena — to induce you to surrender private laptop computers containing classified Clinton emails. And then the Justice Department, in consultation with the Clinton camp’s lawyers, imposed restrictions on what the FBI could look at and what its agents could ask. After all, we wouldn’t want to imperil the attorney-client privilege, right?
Well, at least as long as you were not a lawyer in the Trump-Russia investigation. If you were, as was Melissa Laurenza, an attorney who worked for Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, prosecutors and the FBI compelled you to testify about client communications. If you were Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, the FBI executed search warrants at your home and office, and you were prosecuted. So was Alex van der Zwaan, an attorney who worked with Manafort and Gates in representing Ukrainian interests. He was induced to plead guilty to a false-statements charge in the Mueller probe.
And needless to say, if you were Manafort, there was no act-of-production immunity for you. And no one asked “pretty please” for you to turn over evidence. Under the Mueller team’s direction, the FBI got search warrants allowing them to break into Manafort’s home before dawn and at gunpoint to seize documents. Of course, this seems like kid-gloves treatment compared to what was done to Manafort’s friend and fellow Trump adviser, Roger Stone. The S.W.A.T.-style raid on Stone’s home included helicopter surveillance, an amphibious team (apparently to guard against escape by sea), and so many FBI vehicles that the CNN crew that just happened to be on scene almost couldn’t find a parking space! Was that show of force really necessary for a 66-year-old man charged with nonviolent process crimes whom the court released on bail a few hours later?
Mueller spent nearly two years trying to make an obstruction case against Trump for endeavoring to influence the Russia investigation. Congressional Democrats are still trying to breathe impeachment life into this effort. By contrast, the media-Democrat complex was unperturbed when Obama publicly announced in April 2016 that he did not think Clinton should be indicted. Far from accusing the 44th president of endeavoring to influence an investigation, the prosecutors and the press amplified Obama’s narrative that Clinton had not intended to harm the country — and dutifully looked the other way when the FBI airbrushed Obama’s name out of Comey’s Clinton exoneration speech (the president having knowingly communicated with Clinton through her unsecure server when she emailed him from a hostile foreign country).
The goal was to make Clinton’s crimes disappear, while suspicions about Trump were was blazoned on the public consciousness. Even though the Trump-Russia probe was a counterintelligence investigation, then-director Comey went public about it in March 2017 congressional testimony.
That was stunning. It is not enough to say that the Justice Department and the FBI customarily neither confirm nor deny the existence of any investigation, no matter how comparatively trivial. Counterintelligence investigations are classified. They are never spoken of. Yet, Comey both revealed the investigation and identified the Trump campaign as a subject, suspected of “coordinating” in Russia’s cyberespionage. For good measure, he gratuitously added that an assessment would be made about whether crimes had been committed. As any sensible person would have foreseen, the FBI director’s proclamation was taken by the media and the public as a signal that President Trump was the prime suspect in one of the most heinous crimes in American history.
To say the least, a different tune was sung in the Clinton emails probe. There, Comey acceded to the instructions of Obama’s attorney general, Loretta Lynch, that he not publicly speak of it as an investigation. Just call it “a matter,” he was told. Funny thing about that: it sounded exactly like what the Clinton campaign was saying at the time.
I don’t pretend to be a McCabe fan. Nevertheless, I have sympathy for him. The 2016 election will define his career, but it does not fairly reflect his long years of service defending the rule of law and American national security. If we could consider his case in a vacuum, and I had my druthers, I would not want to charge him. He was fired for cause in disgrace and is slated to lose at least some of his pension. These are significant penalties. I’d like to be able to say, “Enough is enough, no need to pile on with an indictment.”
But there’s more to it than that. A lot more.
For one thing, McCabe is suing the government for wrongful termination, arguing that he was fired due to a political vendetta carried on by President Trump. I certainly agree that the president should not have commented on McCabe’s case or status. As I’ve repeatedly argued, the president’s often-unhinged commentary makes investigations and prosecutions much more difficult to execute. It has already resulted in slap-on-the-wrist treatment for deserter Bowe Bergdahl, who should have received a stiff sentence.
That said, though, it is an audacious strategy on McCabe’s part to (a) ask the Justice Department to exercise clemency by declining to charge an eminently prosecutable false-statements case against him, while (b) simultaneously hauling the Justice Department into court on an accusation of bad faith in a case in which McCabe leaked and then provided explanations that weren’t true. If I were the attorney general, my inclination would be to say, “If he’s going to make us go to war, let’s go to war on offense — indict him.”
More significantly, we are now living in a law-enforcement world of McCabe’s making.
Again, in a better world, I’d prefer to take account of the considerable positive side of McCabe’s ledger and what he’s already suffered, especially if he exhibited some contrition. That is, I’d ordinarily be open to declining prosecution. But then, how about the positive side of General Flynn’s ledger? And why, if it would be overkill to charge McCabe was it not overkill to charge Papadopoulos? Why do Clinton, Mills, Abedin, and Combetta get a pass in a criminal investigation triggered by actual crimes, but Flynn, Papadopoulos, van der Zwaan, and Stone get hammered in an investigation predicated by no crime — just a fever dream of Trump-Russia cyberespionage conspiracy?
FBI and Justice Department officials keep telling us they grasp that there must be one standard of justice applicable to everyone, not a two-tiered system. So, here’s the question: If Andrew McCabe’s name were Michael Flynn, how much mercy could he expect from, say, Andrew Weissmann?
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2NFWxao Tyler Durden
