Month: May 2023

Why Are So Many COVID Authoritarians Suddenly Shifting Their Narratives?

Why Are So Many COVID Authoritarians Suddenly Shifting Their Narratives?

In February of 2019, the White House under Trump established the position of Chief Medical Advisor to the President.  The fist person to occupy that position was a physician by the name of Ronnie Jackson and his job was to advise Donald Trump on public health policy.  Right before the initial outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, Jackson left the post and it remained vacant for a year; instead the role was filled for the most part by Anthony Fauci, who did not become the next Chief Medical Advisor officially until Joe Biden entered office.

After numerous conflicts with Trump on policies and mandates, Fauci transitioned seamlessly into the new Democrat controlled White House.  Biden and Fauci were like two peas in a pod.  

Fauci is a figure with a controversial career in virology and medicine and the key official best known for spreading false claims that created nationwide hysteria over the HIV/AIDS virus.  Why Trump brought him in as an adviser and who recommended him is not widely known and opinions vary.  What we do know is that the elevation of Fauci as a primary point of contact for covid rules was disastrous for the country as a whole.  Specifically, his prominence within the Biden Administration brought America to the brink of medical authoritarianism on a scale that could have erased the Bill of Rights for good.  

  

Of course, Fauci didn’t act alone during the march towards total societal lockdowns and perpetual vaccine mandates, he was just one bureaucrat among many that joined forces to spread fear and panic over a virus with an average official Infection Fatality Rate of 0.23%.  Covid was a non-threat to the vast majority of the population, and yet it was presented as if there would soon be bodies in the streets if Americans did not comply with every government demand.

As if to acknowledge the ultimate failure of the pandemic narrative, multiple government officials have suddenly (and perhaps begrudgingly) started to back away from their original positions.  However, instead of admitting they were wrong and apologizing to the public, they are instead trying to rewrite history and claim that they were actually against many of the measures and restrictions they implemented.

In a recent interview with the New York Times, Anthony Fauci made some surprising admissions on “mistakes made” during the pandemic.  Fauci tried to distance himself from the lockdowns and school closures as if he had no say or influence in how they were enacted:

“…When people say, ‘Fauci shut down the economy’ — it wasn’t Fauci. The CDC was the organization that made those recommendations. I happened to be perceived as the personification of the recommendations. But show me a school that I shut down and show me a factory that I shut down. Never. I never did. I gave a public-health recommendation that echoed the C.D.C.’s recommendation, and people made a decision based on that. But I never criticized the people who had to make the decisions one way or the other.”  

Here is the truth:

Fauci also noted that:

“From a broad public-health standpoint, at the population level, masks work at the margins — maybe 10 percent. But for an individual who religiously wears a mask, a well-fitted KN95 or N95, it’s not at the margin. It really does work. But I think anything that instigated or intensified the culture wars just made things worse. And I have to be honest with you, David, when it comes to masking, I don’t know.”

Here is the truth – Fauci changed positions multiple times on the masks according to the political theater involved:

Interestingly, Fauci’s latest flip-flop has been published in tandem with multiple other officials who have also tried to adjust the optics surrounding their medical tyranny.  For example, Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers and a member of the AFL–CIO, advocated for the forced shutdowns of US schools for years despite extensive data showing the lockdowns were pointless.  In fact, she threatened union strikes if schools were allowed to reopen.  Now, she claims she had been trying to reopen schools the whole time…

Justin Trudeau, one of the more malicious leaders among western nations when it came to covid authoritarianism, now claims that he never tried to force Canadians to get vaccinated.  Keep in mind that Trudeau regularly spread propaganda associating anti-mandate protesters with “racists” and “terrorists,” while also arresting those who refused to submit to his lockdowns:

The reason these staunch defenders of limited freedoms in the face of covid are now acting defensively may be because the truth about the science on Covid is becoming insurmountable.  Nearly every narrative that was originally promoted by government officials in the past three years has been debunked.  To summarize, here are the realities of the mandates and vaccines:

The masks were never effective in stopping the spread of covid and mask mandates made little to no difference.  Children were never at any serious risk from covid.  School shutdowns made no difference in stopping the spread, and did more harm than good.  Economic lockdowns made no difference, doing more harm than good. 

There was never any evidence of hospitals in the US being overwhelmed by covid patients (in fact, hospital admissions fell dramatically in 2020).  There is also evidence that the number of deaths associated with covid were inflated by incidental covid infections; covid was blamed for deaths caused by other conditions.

There is no such thing as “Covid Heart” (heart failure caused by covid).  The vaccines do not stop transmission of the virus.  Vaccinated people still die from the virus. Natural immunity is more effective than the vaccines.  The much hyped “pandemic of the unvaccinated” never happened.  And yes, there is ample evidence of negative side effects including heart failure associated with the mRNA vaccines. 

The narratives and the agenda fell apart in spectacular fashion.  Now, the people that rallied around the virus panic and tried to exploit it for their own ends are attempting to fade into the background as if nothing ever happened.  Perhaps even more damning data is on the horizon and officials are preemptively positioning to deflect responsibility.

Tyler Durden
Mon, 05/01/2023 – 13:40

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Pope Says Vatican Engaged In Secret Ukraine Peace Mission

Pope Says Vatican Engaged In Secret Ukraine Peace Mission

Pope Francis says the Vatican is engaged in a peace mission toward ending the war between Russian in Ukraine. This includes a plan on the table to repatriate Ukrainian children who were evacuated to Russia or who are now in Russian-occupied territory. However, the details of the efforts thus far are ‘secret’.

“There is a mission in course now but it is not yet public. When it is public, I will reveal it,” the pope explained to reporters on his jet while en route to Rome following a three-day visit to Hungary.

Via Reuters

“I think that peace is always made by opening channels. You can never achieve peace through closure. … This is not easy,” he said.

His trip centered on a rare sit-down meeting which mulled options for peaceful settlement and other war-related issues with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and Metropolitan (bishop) Hilarion, who represents the Russian Orthodox Church in Budapest.

“In these meetings we did not just talk about Little Red Riding Hood. We spoke of all these things. Everyone is interested in the road to peace,” Francis told reporters.

“The Holy See is willing to do this (help repatriate the children) because it is the right thing,” Francis said on the plane. “All human gestures help but gestures of cruelty don’t help. We have to do all that is humanly possible”.

The Pope has from the start of the conflict repeatedly offered to mediate peace between the warring parties. He has also at times caused some degree of frustration and embarrassment among the Western allies for giving controversial public takes, most notably when he said NATO likely provoked Russia’s invasion.

For example, last May the 86-year old pontiff told Italian daily Corriere della Sera that “the barking of NATO at the gates of Russia” is likely what motivated Putin to attack Ukraine. He has also cast the international weapons transfers to Kiev in a very negative light, saying that those large powers fueling the conflict with such weaponry do not seem interested in peace, but that it benefits the greedy and powerful defense industry.

China too has of late pushed its own peace plan – and despite both sides greeting Beijing’s efforts positively – this has so far not resulted in any concrete move toward the negotiating table or ceasefire. There hasn’t been any meaningful attempt of the two sides to directly engage in dialogue in over a year. 

Tyler Durden
Mon, 05/01/2023 – 12:10

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Another Judicial Ethics Story About Judge Kacsmaryk Falls Apart

About two weeks ago, the Washington Post published yet another story about Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk. There were two primary claims. First, the Post charged that Kacsmaryk wrote an article for the Texas Review of Law & Politics (TROLP), but when he was under consideration for the federal bench, he asked the journal to take his name off the article. Second, the Post claimed that Kacsmaryk failed to disclose this article to the Senate, and this was a breach of ethical standards. As soon as I read this article, I knew both claims were either false, or at best, misleading.

TROLP accepts submissions, like most law reviews, but a substantial chunk of its book includes invited articles. That is, the journal asks an author to write on something. In other words, an offer is made before the article is actually written. I have published four articles in TROLP. Two of them were solicited. One was something I pitched largely on the basis of my blog posts and an amicus brief, which was accepted. For three articles, I was given a green-light to publish non-existent scholarship. This approach is fairly common for symposium issues of law reviews. TROLP publishes invited pieces in most issues. And based on my records, I never actually signed some sort of publication agreement or copyright assignment. At most, I received an email of approval from the journal. That’s how TROLP works. Professors at the University of Texas, Austin, could have easily confirmed this regular process to the press.

Without knowing anything about Kacsmaryk’s particular situation, I concluded with a high degree of confidence that either (a) TROLP invited lawyers from First Liberty to write on a specific topic or (b) lawyers from First Liberty pitched TROLP on writing a piece on a particular topic. In either case, there was nothing written when the article was accepted.

I also concluded that the second facet of the Post’s reporting was a non-story. DOJ routinely tells potential-judicial nominees to stop writing anything during the process. It would not surprise me that DOJ told Kacsmaryk to not publish anything new. And that request would have been easy enough to follow, if he didn’t actually write the article.

This background brings us to the latest reporting in the Washington Free Beacon from Aaron Sibarium. He confirms everything I suspected about the Post’s story.

The Post made much of the fact that Kacsmaryk submitted an early draft of the article, titled “The Jurisprudence of the Body,” in early 2017 under his own name. The byline switch came that April, when he informed the Texas Review of Law and Politics that, “for reasons I may discuss at a later date,” First Liberty attorneys Stephanie Taub and Justin Butterfield would coauthor the piece instead. Their names weren’t anywhere on the first draft, the Post stressed, and it was Kacsmaryk who’d been corresponding with the journal. He also provided some edits on later drafts, according to emails reviewed by the Post.

But Taub and Butterfield told the Washington Free Beacon that they wrote the first draft themselves. Kacsmaryk, they said, had been brainstorming ideas with Taub, who was his research assistant at the time. “When his schedule became too busy to write an article, or even to review my outline,” Taub said, “I took the initiative of drafting an article. I listed [Kacsmaryk’s] name as the author of this and subsequent drafts because I assumed I was ghostwriting it for him.” . . .

Taub’s drafts of the article were mainly edited by Butterfield, he said. Kacsmaryk’s primary contribution was serving as a liaison to the Texas Review of Law and Politics, with which he had institutional ties.

Kacsmaryk did not actually write the article, but gave credit to his junior colleagues. (Good for him!) Kacsmaryk continued to serve as a liaison with the editors due to his institutional connection to the journal. That’s it!

The Free Beacon does not get into the nuances of the submission process. But the chronology in the piece establishes that the article was written after there was an acceptance. Kacsmaryk did not submit an article that he did not write, because he did not actually submit an article. Kacsmaryk did not take his name off an article he wrote, because he did not write the article. Kacsmaryk did not fail to disclose an article he wrote, because he did not write the article.

The Free Beacon also quotes Bethany Pickett, who worked with judicial nominees during the Trump administration. DOJ’s Office of Legal Policy (OLP) routinely tells nominees to not publish anything during the confirmation process.

The Senate Judiciary Committee requires nominees to disclose all “published material” they have written or edited, any excerpt of which can be used against them. That is why, when someone is about to be nominated, the Justice Department tells that person to shut up.

“Our advice to nominees was to wind down their practices and not publish or give speeches while they were being considered for a federal appointment, even if they had made plans to do so up to that point,” said Bethany Pickett, who worked on hundreds of judicial nominations in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Policy under former president DonaldTrump. “It would be common for any nominee not to author or further engage with a publication once being considered for the federal bench.”

The Biden Administration has tapped legal scholars to fill certain positions. I suspect these nominees were given the same advice, and they put a pause on any unpublished pieces. There is nothing to see here.

Once again, a media story about judicial ethics falls apart. At this point, you should pause at least twenty-four hours before reacting to any story about a conservative judge. The media is so fixated on finding ethical scandals. Yet, they have to invent stories that are all smoke, and no fire.

The media is embarrassing itself. To continue with the theme of the day, editors should withdraw any yet-unpublished stories. Or call me for a reality check. Stop talking to the regular stable of legal ethics experts who give predictable answers.

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They’re taking a wrecking ball to the “American Reality”

Last September– a bit more than seven months ago– my father died. Technically he was my step-father, but he was every bit my dad, and I loved him. The loss was hard.

We didn’t do a memorial service right away, though. My mother understandably just wasn’t in the right frame of mind. So we waited… until last weekend, and held the memorial service at the George Bush Presidential Center at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

It was a good thing my mother booked such a large venue; the memorial service was incredibly well attended, and nearly 500 people came to pay their respects.

After the service was over, I wanted to get my mind off the day’s events, so some friends and I popped upstairs to check out the Bush presidential museum… which was currently presenting an exhibit aptly named “Freedom Matters”.

I couldn’t agree more.

Access to the museum, however, is tightly controlled. And you can only enter after going through an airport-style security checkpoint. You know the drill– empty your pockets, take off your clothes, and submit to an angry authority who treats you like you’ve just been booked at the county jail.

My friend Jim was lucky enough to receive extra screening; after setting off the metal detector, he was pulled aside and assumed the “I surrender” pose while gruff security personnel waved a magnetic wand near his genitals.

Curiously the security wand kept going off, prompting the increasingly irate guard to demand “what is this? What’s in here?”

I couldn’t help myself and shouted, “It’s his dignity!” Apparently Jim forgot to remove it before going through security.

The irony seemed to be lost on the guards, whose brusque treatment of museum visitors was taking place directly in front of an exhibit literally called “Freedom Matters”.

At the front of the exhibit was a large banner– I snapped a photo– defining freedom, according to a former Soviet dissident:

“Can a person walk into the middle of the town square and express his or her views without fear of arrest, imprisonment, or physical harm? If he can, then that person is living in a free society. If not, it’s a fear society.”

I thought about this quote for a few moments, glanced back at the security guards wanding another unlucky visitor, and quickly realized– based on this definition– that the US is quickly becoming a fear society.

You can no longer freely express views without fear of reprisal anymore– especially if those views conflict with the radical woke left.

Personal opinions can easily be viewed as hate speech, misinformation, violence, etc. And we’ve all seen too many instances of people’s lives being ruined by cancel culture. But I’ll come back to this.

After wandering around the museum for a while and enjoying some jokes with my friends, I finally returned home to the AirBnb I’m renting with my family, very close to where I grew up in the Dallas area.

It’s the quintessential American suburb: clean, quiet, safe, and stable. The house where I’m staying is at the end of a picturesque tree-lined cul-de-sac, and on the other end of the street is a large park where small children were playing organized sports in the afternoon.

Parents chatted with each other on the playground while their kids bounced around the jungle gym. Retirees were out walking their dogs. Even the postman drove by and greeted some of the residents by name. Everyone was happy… and it was basically perfect.

This isn’t the famous ‘American Dream’. It’s not a dream. This is real life as it’s supposed to be… the pinnacle of civilization, the product of more than two centuries of hard work and responsibility. It is the American Reality.

That’s why it’s so frustrating to watch the people in charge dismantle it. Brick by brick, neighborhood by neighborhood, they’ve been chipping away at this vast, enviable middle class prosperity, ripping it away in front of our very eyes.

They’ve encouraged “mostly peaceful” violence and caused an alarming rise in crime as a result of their soft “criminal first” policies.

They’ve sent the cost of living to record highs, and yet have no understanding how their spending practices could have possibly contributed to inflation. They’ve expanded the national debt to a record high $31.5 trillion and plan to keep overspending tax revenue by trillions of dollars every year.

They’ve worked hard to re-engineer childhood education (and have succeeded in many school districts). Biology has been rewritten to conform to new woke ethics. Math is racist. And parents who complain about the decline in educational standards are threatened by the federal government.

The most comical part of this suffering is the abject political dysfunction that’s on display every single day of our lives.

Consider that, amid deadly and toxic train derailments, airplanes around the country that have been grounded, total chaos at the national seaports, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s priority right now is ensuring that Ford and General Motors use female crash test dummies.

It’s so ridiculous it almost sounds made up. And yet it’s completely true.

Or consider that the Treasury Department is now weeks away from defaulting on the national debt, once again, having reached its statutory debt limit. Congress is required to pass a law to raise the debt ceiling.

Yet the President of the United States refuses to negotiate a single penny in spending cuts in order to reach a compromise with the House of Representatives. Not a penny.

Simultaneously the guy was shown on video recently unable to remember how many grandchildren he has, or even the fact that he had recently returned from a trip to Ireland.

These examples of extreme incompetence never end. It’s so aggravating. Even terrifying.

That’s why I write so much about taking simple, sensible steps to reclaim control.

For example, if you think Pete Buttigieg is doing a great job as Transportation Secretary, then by all means, please continue to overpay your taxes and give him as much of your money as possible.

If, on the other hand, you recognize that he is demonstrably incompetent, completely unqualified to be Transportation Secretary, and was only given the position because he checks a diversity box (and agreed to endorse candidate Biden in 2020) then you might want to consider the multitude of completely legal ways to reduce your tax bill… and stop giving Pete so much money to waste.

It’s perfectly normal to feel angry or disgusted with America’s terrible leadership. But it’s a lot more effective to channel some of that energy into reducing their impact on your life.

There absolutely are ways to reduce your tax bill, to mitigate the effects of inflation, to still make phenomenal investments, to fund your retirement, and to ensure that you’re in a position of strength no matter how destructive they become.

There’s no downside in doing this. If this decline reverses and America starts to dig its way out of this hole, you won’t be worse off for putting yourself in a stronger position.

And that is actually still a possibility. This country has so much potential upside from its entrepreneurial brilliance, talented workforce, immense resource wealth, and more. That’s why it’s so bewildering to see how badly the people in charge are screwing it up.

At the moment, though, it’s difficult to see any real change on the horizon. As President Biden said in his re-election announcement, he wants to “finish the job”. By that I presume he means completely destroying the country.

This is nothing new; history is full of superpowers who eradicate themselves from within. They lay waste to the very ideals that made them strong and prosperous to begin with, they create divisions and disunity, and they subject themselves to horrendous, weak leadership.

But it’s one thing to understand the decline of empires and civilizations through the lens of history. It’s quite another to watch it happen from your living room window.

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What Supreme Court Advocates Mean When We Say “Those Are Good Facts”

Recently, I was speaking to a group of high school students about Supreme Court advocacy. I referenced a recent cert grant, involving a veteran who was injured in war, and suffered a debilitating injury. I said, without thinking about it, “those are good facts.” I immediately stopped myself, and realized that I just told a group of teenagers that it was “good” this poor veteran was in such pain. I then realized how perverse it is that Supreme Court advocates often have to fish around (to use a word for the day) for sympathetic plaintiffs who have been subject to unfair or harmful treatment. Bad facts make bad law. But sad facts can make a cert grant.

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Has the Supreme Court Put Chevron in the Crosshairs?

The Supreme Court granted certiorari in two cases today, Murray v. UBS Securities, LLC and and Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimando. The first case concerns which party must demonstrate the existence of “retaliatory intent” (or lack thereof) for whistleblower claims under Sarbanes-Oxley, and the latter concerns the scope of the National Marine Fisheries Service’s authority to impose requirements on fishing vessels. Yet it’s the phrasing of the question presented in the second case that is of particular intersest.

The petition for certiorari in Loper Bright presented two questions to the Court:

  1. Whether, under a proper application of Chevron, the MSA [Magnuson-Stevens Act] implicitly grants NMFS the power to force domestic vessels to pay the salaries of the monitors they must carry.
  2. Whether the Court should overrule Chevron or at least clarify that statutory silence concerning controversial powers expressly but narrowly granted elsewhere in the statute does not constitute an ambiguity requiring deference to the agency.

Of note, the Court only granted certiorari on the second question, meaning that the briefing and argument will focus on whether the Court should “overrule” or “clarify” Chevron v. NRDC. To say this is significant is an understatement.

The prospect of overruling Chevron already has legal commentators in a tizzy, but it is important to note that the question presented is not limited to whether the Court should overturn Chevron. The QP asks the Court, in the alternative, to limit Chevron—some would say, confine Chevron to its proper domain—by making clear that a statutory silence does not constitute the sort of ambiguity that justifies deference to the agency. Put another way, the QP asks the Court to reinforce the principle that agencies only have that authority Congress has actually delegated to them or, if you prefer, that a statute grants what it grants, and the rest is silence.

The Court’s cert grant in Loper Bright brings to mind the Court’s 2013 grant in City of Arlington v. FCC, in which the Court also limited the grant to the underlying Chevron question (whether to grant deference to an agency’s determination of its own jurisdiction), leaving out the request to consider the intricacies and application of the specific regulatory scheme at issue.

In Arlington the agency prevailed, over a forceful dissent from Chief Justice Roberts that stressed the foundational principle that federal agencies only have the authority delegated to them by Congress. While deference about some questions may be warranted, the Chief argued, it is abdication for courts to defer to agencies on the question of what authority the agencies have been given by Congress. Rather, he explained, it is the job of courts to determine what power an agency has been given before considering whether there is an ambiguity that might justify some degree of deference.

Though he was in dissent, the Chief has harkened back to this principle repeatedly in subsequent cases, including King v. Burwell and West Virginia v. EPA. This case presents another opportunity the Chief to build on those prior decisions (and vindicate his Arlington dissent) by emphasizing delegations of authority to federal agencies are a departure from the constitutional baseline, and thus agencies can only claim that authority which has been clearly and expressly delegated to them. (In effect, it’s an argument for a more robust form of “Step Zero” analysis.) Of course, the Chief may not be in control here, and if there are five votes to overturn Chevron without him, that is what the Court will do, but I have my doubts.

It seems to me this is likely to be another case in which the Court narrows Chevron so as to limit its application. Note that the Supreme Court has not cast doubt on Chevron in recent years so much as it has ignored it (in some sense giving it the Lemon treatment). The Court has not relied upon the Chevron doctrine to decide a case since 2016, and just last term it resolved a major Chevron case without even citing the opinion. The Court has left Chevron in place for use by the lower courts, which continue to use the doctrine with some regularity, while also making clear that courts should defer less often than they have in the past. This is of a piece with the Court’s decision to narrow Auer deference in Kisor v. Wilkie, as well as the elevation of the Major Questions doctrine. This is a way to curtail the ability of agencies to aggrandize their power, but without destabilizing judicial review of agency action.

While most calls for overturning Chevron today come from the political Right, it is worth remembering that the Chevron doctrine was initially embraced by a Republican adminsitration and conservative judges as a way to push back against broad, purposivist interpretations of regulatory statutes that compelled agencies to regualte more aggressively. Telling courts to resolve all statutory ambiguities themselves is not a particularly effective way to curtail or constrain the administrative statute, at least not without greater guidance about how statutes should be interpreted in the first place. And if the Court were to provide greater guidance about how statutory grants of authority should be construed, Chevron would not do nearly so much to empower federal agencies.

So is the Court preparing to overturn Chevron? Perhaps it is, but I think it is more likely the Court merely takes the opportunity to narrow the doctrine and make clear that statutory silences and ambiguities should not be construed as grants of agency authority.

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Oren Cass Notices One of Industrial Policy’s Fatal Flaws


industrial policy Oren Cass Congress Chips Act subsidies semiconductors economics New Right national conservatives Biden administration child care

One prominent advocate of giving politicians more control over the economy seems to have realized one of the idea’s fatal flaws.

All the politics.

In a nutshell, that’s the complaint lodged by American Compass executive director and industrial policy superfan Oren Cass last week at a conference hosted by the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation. If only progressives would be willing to drop their own political goals, Cass argued, there could be bipartisan agreement about what’s necessary to advance the “national good.”

Cass was responding to a question from Wall Street Journal economic writer Greg Ip about the Biden administration’s decision to mandate that semiconductor companies receiving subsidies through the CHIPS and Science Act to expand domestic manufacturing production must provide child care to construction workers and permanent employees. Cass called it “extraordinarily disappointing” to see a Democratic administration attaching Democratic goals to the CHIPS Act, which American Compass had cheered as it moved through Congress.

“This is the political obstacle right now to continuing to make progress in this direction,” Cass said, referring to Democrats’ eagerness to lard up industrial policy bills with seemingly unrelated issues. That includes not only the child care mandate but a ban on stock buy-backs, a requirement that union-approved “prevailing wages” are paid on CHIPS-funded construction projects, and more. Some of that was in the text of the bill when it passed—with the support of 17 Republican senators—and some of it, most notably the child care mandate, has been created by the Biden administration as it rolls out the specifics of the subsidy program.

That has poisoned the well for future bipartisan industrial policy deals, Cass argued. “If you are ever going to have a bipartisan consensus on making these kinds of investments, you have to be willing to take the social priorities on which there is no bipartisan agreement and put them to the side for the sake of the national good,” he said.

We all might wish that the politicians would stop caring about everything except the issues we think are most important, but any serious understanding of American democracy requires starting out by understanding why that is highly unlikely. If your political project requires everyone in Washington to agree on the definition of the “national good” (or the “common good“), then your project is likely to fail.

Indeed, moments after Cass finished complaining about Democrats gumming up noble industrial policies with their silly social priorities, Rep. Ro Kanna (D–Calif.), who was sitting next to Cass onstage, jumped in to defend those goals. “If you want to get bipartisan commitment in the Congress, I think you can get it on issues of economic populism, which is both in industrial policy and in policy on child care, education, and health care.”

This exchange is illustrative in a few different ways. For one, the fact that Khanna and Cass cannot put aside their political perspectives in a one-on-one discussion—even though both want to expand industrial policy—ought to give some indication of why it’s insanity to expect a majority of Congress to do that.

Second, it highlights how arbitrary the notion of “national good” really is, even if Cass and others on the New Right think it’s a self-evident truth. “Anyone building a fab who felt that offering child care was necessary to get the workforce they wanted, of course, could do that,” Cass said at one point.

Hey, that sounds a lot like the free market approach that he often likes to criticize. He’s right, of course, that the market would do a fine job of determining what benefits—including free child care—employers should offer to attract the right talent. Why not apply that thinking more generally? Anyone building a fab who felt that attracting investment was necessary to get the factory built could do that too. There are lots of ways to get child care and lots of ways to build a semiconductor factory that don’t involve government mandates or subsidies, but Cass sees government funding as essential for one and superfluous for the other.

Unfortunately for pro-industrial-policy conservatives, the people actually in charge of this industrial policy don’t agree. “Every one of the requirements—or they’re not really requirements—nudges are for criteria or factors we think relate directly to the effectiveness of the project,” Gina Raimondo recently told The New York Times‘ Ezra Klein. “You want to build a new fab that will require between 7,000 and 9,000 workers. The unemployment rate in the building trades is basically zero. If you don’t find a way to attract women to become builders and pipe fitters and welders, you will not be successful. So you have to be thinking about child care.”

Klein criticized this approach, calling it “everything-bagel liberalism.” Piling unrelated goals and agendas onto industrial policy adds costs and delays to the projects the government is trying to fund. “Even if no single standard or mandate is decisive on its own,” Klein writes, “the accumulation of them regularly dooms everything from housing projects to highway construction, and now seems to hang heavily over the CHIPS Act.

For Cass, the solution to this problem is convincing Congress and the White House to set aside politics when the national conservatives decide something is really, really important.

Here’s a better idea: Stop giving politicians greater control over the economy. They will always use those powers to advance political agendas. If your preferred version of industrial policy only works when politics are removed from the process, then your industrial policy will never work.

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Keep Calm And Carrion

Keep Calm And Carrion

By Benjamin Picton of Rabobank

Leading into the release of the Eurozone GDP figures on Friday this Daily was upbeat. Europe has been a bright spot, we said. The spot has dimmed a little now though, because European 1st quarter GDP printed at 0.1% m-o-m against a Bloomberg consensus estimate of 0.2%. The good news was that German and Spanish inflation numbers released on the day came in lower than expected, but the French numbers surprised to the upside. That shouldn’t change things too much for the ECB this week when they meet to set monetary policy. A 25bps rate hike is all but assured, and there is still a chance that the bank could go a little harder and deliver a half percentage point hike. That would certainly be consistent with the hawkish commentary from ECB speakers last week, but our resident ECB expert Bas van Geffen expects the ECB to stick with 25bp increments for the time being.

Europe wasn’t the only miss. Chinese manufacturing PMIs slid back into contractionary territory at 49.2. That was way below the Bloomberg consensus estimate of 51.4, and might be the canary in the coalmine for the global demand outlook. US data also painted a bit of a mixed picture. The headline PCE deflator came in higher than expected at 4.2% y-o-y, but this was still a handy fall from the upwardly-revised 5.1% figure recorded in March. The core readings, meanwhile, were in-line with expectations, but the expectation was for no progress from the previous month, so it’s not time to break out the bunting just yet. The employment cost index was unambiguously strong at 1.2% q-o-q. That was a tick higher than consensus estimates and the prior read.

All-in-all, the data flow out of the US doesn’t paint a clear picture for the Fed. Except for maybe painting a picture of stagflation, which we pointed to last week when the 1st quarter GDP figures underwhelmed big-time. Our Fed watcher Philip Marey expects the FOMC to raise the Fed Funds target range by 25bps later this week to a new upper bound of 5.25%. Philip thinks this will be the last hike in the cycle and that the Fed will hold rates at that level for the remainder of 2023. The major risk to this outlook is the situation with First Republic Bank, which is the lede I have been waiting to bury below:

Over the weekend there was a new kink in the First Republic story when it emerged that JP Morgan, PNC and several other financial institutions had been asked by the US government to make bids for First Republic following a mooted FDIC takeover. This seems to suggest that efforts to find a private-sector suitor have proved unsuccessful which, as we pointed out last week, was always going to be the case when the price being paid had to be higher than the market value of the consideration received. So, it looks like the FDIC is going to have to bail out the depositors of the bank, and then the carcass will be dismembered and sold off piecemeal, or swallowed up whole by a larger competitor. However, this begs the question as to what degree the depositors will be made whole by the FDIC. Will the FDIC again exercise the “systemic risk exemption” to refund 100% of deposits, as it did in the case of SVB? Or will it cap refunds at $250,000, which is what the law actually says it should do?

Long-time market watchers will be getting a sense of deja-vu from this story as it looks an awful lot like the Bear Stearns situation back in 2008 where JP Morgan ultimately snapped up Bear for $10/share. Market watchers don’t get much longer-term than Berkshire Hathaway’s Charlie Munger, who was quoted in the FT over the weekend warning that US banks were full of bad loans due to exposures to commercial real estate:

“It’s not nearly as bad as it was in 2008… but trouble happens to banking just like trouble happens everywhere else. In the good times you get into bad habits… When bad times come they lose too much.”

We’re again looking at markets through the lens of moral hazard. Certainly in the financial sense, but a cynic might also suggest there is an element of political moral hazard given the profile of SVB and First Republic’s depositor bases. A 100% FDIC bailout of First Republic depositors preceding a fire sale of the bank’s assets will again raise the question why it is that banks now operate on the pretence of private risk intermediation, when in reality they are being backstopped by the FDIC and, ultimately, the Fed (or the taxpayer). Saule Omarova, the one-time Biden pick for the Comptroller of the Currency raised these same points with Bloomberg here, arguing that US banks are now effectively public utilities.

There are latent risks in the banking system as a result of the years of cheap money that reached a crescendo in the early years of the pandemic. It is not only clear that these risks exist, but that they are non-linear. As we have found with the banking system turmoil, or the British pension system blow-up last year, it is hard to predict where the next shoe will drop until it has already hit the floor. What’s a Fed to do? They can’t ease off while inflation is high and the Dollar threatened.

We agree with Charlie Munger’s assessment that things are not nearly as bad as 2008, and believe that most of the risk is idiosyncratic. So, for now we will keep calm and watch the pace of monetary tightening, while the banking system eats carrion.

Tyler Durden
Mon, 05/01/2023 – 11:50

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/Rf4WjUA Tyler Durden

Drone-Escorted Buses Evacuate Hundreds Of Americans To Port Sudan

Drone-Escorted Buses Evacuate Hundreds Of Americans To Port Sudan

Following expressions of shock and disgust by Americans disappointed that the Biden administration wasn’t facilitating their evacuation from war-torn Sudan, two bus convoys ferried Americans to the safer city of Port Sudan on the country’s Red Sea coast over the weekend. 

In the first convoy, buses traveled more than 500 miles under the protection of armed U.S. drones. However, from Port Sudan, Americans are left to find tickets on boats making the voyage across the Red Sea to the Saudi city of Jeddah — a trip that, by ferry, takes about 12 hours.

“U.S. officials also are working with Saudi Arabia to see if one of the kingdom’s naval vessels can carry a larger number of Americans to Jeddah,” reported the Associated Press. 

“A second USG-organized convoy arrived in Port Sudan today,” tweeted State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller on Sunday. “We are assisting U.S. citizens and others who are eligible with onward travel to Jeddah, where additional personnel are ready to assist with consular & emergency services.”

They’ll need that assistance, as Sky News reports a scene of “sheer chaos” and desperation in Port Sudan as people of many countries queue up for a way out of the country. 

This photo purports to show Americans evacuating to Port Sudan (@sentdefender)

Miller said the US government, in a multinational effort, has facilitated the evacuation of almost 1,000 Americans since violence erupted on April 15th. Channeling Matthew McConaughey in The Wolf of Wall Street, other countries might say “those are rookie numbers”: India’s already cleared almost 3,000.  

Miller said fewer than 5,000 Americans in Sudan “have sought guidance from the government” as Sudan is gripped by an escalating civil war between two armed forces associated with rival generals.

Rather than toting citizens to the coast and then begging the Saudis for help, other countries are taking a more hands-on and expedient approach to rescuing their citizens. A Turkish C-130 took small arms fire while landing outside Khartoum, the Indian Air Force has used its own C-130s, and China is dispatching its own navy. 

Also over the weekend came reports of the murder last Tuesday of a US-born doctor who was about to evacuate his parents, wife and two children from the capital city of Khartoum. “A roving band of strangers surrounded him in his yard, stabbing him to death in front of his family,” reported the Associated Press. In addition to heavy fighting, the city of 5 million has also been beset by widespread looting. 

The 49-year-old doctor was the second American to die so far, along with an unidentified U.S. civilian who was earlier killed in a crossfire.

On April 23, the US government executed a military airlift of its embassy personnel, with three Chinook helicopters carrying nearly 100 Americans about 760 miles southeast to Camp Lemonnier, a US Navy-led base in the the country of Djibouti.

The White House subsequently ruled out any large-scale military evacuation of the estimated 16,000 Americans who were in the country as the war began. To the disappointment of Americans in Sudan — and their worried family members in the US — the Biden administration continued to say conditions weren’t suitable for a civilian evacuation. 

Many other countries quickly reached a different conclusion…

Tyler Durden
Mon, 05/01/2023 – 11:30

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/B0TcFNX Tyler Durden

Three-Times-Deported Mexican Who Shot 5 Neighbors Described By Media As “Texas Man”

Three-Times-Deported Mexican Who Shot 5 Neighbors Described By Media As “Texas Man”

Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

A three times deported Mexican national who allegedly shot and killed five of his neighbors, including a child, is being described by the media as a “Texas man”.

Twitter/Bill Melugin

The illegal immigrant is accused of gunning down five Honduran nationals on Friday night in Cleveland, Texas and is still on the run.

Francisco Oropesa’s neighbors complained that him shooting his gun in the garden was keeping their baby awake. Oropesa responded by invading their home and killing them, including an 8-year-old child.

It is now being reported that Oropesa has been deported on three occasions, with his most recent removal being in 2016.

“San Jacinto County Sheriff Greg Capers told Breitbart Texas on Sunday that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers deported 38-year-old Francisco Oropeza, a Mexican national now wanted for five alleged murders, in three separate incidents. Sheriff Capers and other sources advised that the last time ICE officers removed Oropeza was in 2016.”

As Chris Menahan notes, unlike other mass shootings when the suspect is white, the media seem loathe to accurately describe or portray Oropesa.

“The controlled media are all going out of their way to avoid using Oropeza’s photos, choosing instead to share pictures of empty homes and white cops in the area standing around,” he writes.

“Why do New York Times articles about nonwhite fugitive mass murderers on the run usually lack photos of the armed and dangerous suspect, but instead feature photos of white men standing around?” asked one Twitter user. “And why nothing on Francisco Oropeza’s immigration status?”

Despite there being numerous mugshots showing Oropesa, the media appears to be unwilling to use them and keeps referring to him as a “Texas man”.

Biden DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas was asked about the shooter’s immigration status during an NBC interview but refused to comment on the case.

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Tyler Durden
Mon, 05/01/2023 – 11:10

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/0POX8Q9 Tyler Durden