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As Maduro Seeks “Best Relations” With Trump, Meet Venezuela’s Currency Crisis’ Arch-Nemesis

The value of the Venezuelan Bolivar has crashed by 50% in the last two months, breaking above 2000/$ on the black market today for the first time ever. We know this thanks to Gustavo Díaz, a Home Depot employee in central Alabama, who runs one of Venezuela’s most popular and insurgent websites, DolarToday.com, which provides a benchmark exchange rate used by his compatriots to buy and sell black-market dollars.

Hyperinflation is escalating as since Sept 22nd, the black market value of a Bolivar has collapsed from 1010/$ to 2021/$…

While the Black Market Bolivar has crashed 15% since the election, as El-Nacional reports, President Nicolas Maduro said he was committed to have the best possible relations with the newly elected US president, Donald Trump.

President Nicolas Maduro pledged to work to have the best possible relations with the elected US president (USA), Donald Trump.

 

"We hope to have the best relations with the people of the US and President – elect Donald Trump, and so mistakes as those committed by former eying George Bush are exceeded. All we want is to stop interventionism," said the Venezuelan president in the 73rd edition of his program Contact With Maduro , on Sunday.

 

The head of state and Trump congratulated for winning the elections this November 8th. However, on several occasions he demonstrated their dissatisfaction with both the republican and his then opponent, Hilary Clinton.

But, while the west in general are scapegoated as the reason for the economic collapse of his nation (not socialism), as The Wall Street Journal reports, Public Enemy No. 1 of Venezuela’s revolutionary government is Gustavo Díaz, a Home Depot Inc. employee in central Alabama.

How? He is president of one of Venezuela’s most popular and insurgent websites, DolarToday.com, which provides a benchmark exchange rate used by his compatriots to buy and sell black-market dollars. That allows them to bypass some of the world’s most rigid currency controls.

 

Socialist President Nicolás Maduro has accused DolarToday of leading an “economic war” against his embattled government and vowed to jail Mr. Díaz and his two partners, also Venezuelan expatriates in the U.S. The Venezuelan central bank unsuccessfully filed suit against the website twice in U.S. courts. The government has also turned to hackers to launch constant attacks, Mr. Díaz said, forcing the site to use sophisticated defenses.

 

“DolarToday is the Empire’s strategy to push down the currency and overthrow Maduro,” Vice President Aristóbulo Istúriz said earlier this year, asserting that the U.S.—“The Empire” to the Venezuelan government—was orchestrating the site’s work. “DolarToday is the enemy of the people.” The U.S. State Department declined to comment.

 

The alleged mastermind of the plot likes to sport a red University of Alabama baseball cap and answers questions at his day job from do-it-yourselfers on what kinds of screws they should use to hang shelves.

 

 

Mr. Díaz is a U.S.-trained retired colonel, and he indeed tried to overthrow Mr. Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chávez, by participating in a short-lived coup in 2002. Mr. Díaz, who had been deputy security chief to the businessman who briefly took power in the ill-fated overthrow, said his conspiring days are over.

 

Now, he said, he is fighting for economic freedom and for Venezuelans’ access to information in a country that makes financial and other data secret. Venezuela is undergoing a brutal recession that has made it hard for most of the country’s 30 million people to find enough food and medicine.

 

“It’s ironic that with DolarToday in Alabama, I do more damage to the government than I did as a military man in Venezuela,” said Mr. Díaz, a short, soft-spoken man with a gray mane.

 

He moved in 2005 to Alabama, where a brother and sister were already living, and after being granted political asylum became a citizen.

And finally, as we noted previously, while Venezuela waits for the latest disappointment out of OPEC, Reuters reports that the country's massively unpopular president, Nicolas Maduro, who presided over Venezuela's terminal collapse and is only in power thanks to the army's support, is now trying his hand at salsa music to cheer up his broke countrymen.

According to Reuters, Maduro, a music aficionado who used to play in a rock band, debuted "Salsa Hour" this month and has broadcast four episodes from a radio booth specially installed in the Miraflores presidential palace, with each episode lasting several hours.

"This is a program full of energy and joy," said Maduro, 53, in one show, headphones on as he drummed his fingers and spun classics of the Caribbean rhythm. "I would do it every day … to sing about our lives, anxieties, pains and dreams."

Surely singing about the "anxieties and pains" provides countless hours of content for the wannabe dictator. During the shows, sometimes also shown on TV, Maduro has danced with his wife, explained the history of salsa and devoted a program to Puerto Rican singer Ismael Rivera.

Politics have crept in too. He dedicated the song "You're crazy, crazy, but I'm cool" to arch-foe and National Assembly President Henry Ramos and the song "Vagrant" to opposition leader Henrique Capriles.

Though Venezuela's 30 million people adore music, especially salsa, Maduro's show has fueled criticism that he is disconnected from reality in a country where millions are skipping meals amid shortages and rising prices. "Maduro's program is like a mockery," said Capriles, who narrowly lost to him in the 2013 presidential vote and has championed a drive for a referendum to recall Maduro.

"He should have a bit more respect for the Venezuelan people. He is not an entertainer."

That however won't stop Maduro who appears to have taken a page right out of the Hillary Clinton book on how to become more popular with the poor:

"Maduro wants to connect with the poorest who, despite the crisis, still get together and listen to music," said Andres Canizales, a media scholar and spokesman for the Citizens' Monitor group.

We don't have high hopes for Maduro's radio show, but we can safely say that the modern equivalent of Nero fiddling while Rome burns, is Maduro dancing salsa while Venezuela's currency – and economy – disintegrates.

* * *

Given all that, we leave it to Gustavo Diaz to sum it all up…

“To me, it’s still a passionate daily fight against totalitarianism."

The question is – should he be banned from Twitter and Facebook for what the president of a country would call 'fake news'?

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President Trump + Military Drones = What, Exactly?

DroneWe have an incoming president who claims he will be less interventionist in foreign policy than President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, but also promises he will “bomb the shit out of” the Islamic State in order to fight terrorism.

It would be logical to conclude that this would mean Donald Trump might be a supporter of the use of armed drones to take out suspected terrorists in foreign countries as a way of fighting ISIS without committing more troops. In other words: We would see Trump continue Obama’s current drone strike policies.

But, in perhaps an example of how little concern about executive authority played in this election, Trump is not on the record for saying a whole lot about drones. The ISideWith site has Trump saying he supports drone strikes because he believes in using any tool to fight terrorism, but the story and video clip the site links to as a source does not actually have Trump declaring support for drones. The Center of the Study for Drones at Bard College examined what Trump and Clinton have said about drone use on the campaign trail. Here’s what they published on Trump in October:

The Republican candidate and his advisers have made fewer direct references to military drone use than the Clinton team. Unlike Clinton, Trump has had no direct experience in coordinating drone strikes. Furthermore, and also unlike Clinton, Trump has only one known adviser—Gen. Michael Flynn—who has played a direct role in U.S. military drone operations in the past two decades. That being said, it is possible to extrapolate the rough contours of a Trump administration’s policies governing drone use. Generally speaking, Trump has advocated a broad aerial campaign against ISIS that contrasts with the precision-centric targeted killing operations conducted by the current administration and advocated for by Hillary Clinton and many of her advisers. Trump’s advisers hold mixed views on drones. Three Trump advisers—Rudy Giuliani, Michael Woolsey, and Gen. Flynn—have publicly criticized the use of drones for targeted killing. Trump supports the expanded use of military drones to patrol U.S land borders, and has called for an increase in military spending that would likely impact drone acquisition programs, though the plan largely focuses on the procurement of fighter jets and ships, and an increase in personnel.

Trump did, in a foreign policy speech in August, say he wanted to keep drones as part of his military strategy, but also wanted to capture “high-value targets,” something that drone strikes often preclude.

Today CNN noted that Flynn, now Trump’s pick for National Security Adviser, had previously criticized drone strikes because they “cause more damage than [they’re] gonna cause good.” But he’s also criticized waterboarding as torture, a tool that Trump is openly embracing.

Now that Trump has won, there’s a cascade of “What will Trump do with these drones?” stories, and this is because Obama implemented his drone procedures completely through executive branch policies, unchallenged and unsupported by Congress. “Unsupported” is probably the wrong word because silence can be seen as support. We had Sen. Rand Paul engage in a filibuster in order to get assurances that the administration wouldn’t use drone strikes against U.S. citizens on American soil, and that’s about the extent of it.

There has been very little interest otherwise in oversight of the administration’s use of drones to kill suspected terrorists in foreign countries—particularly in countries like Yemen and Somalia where we aren’t engaged in authorized military activity. The fact that drones have killed many civilians not involved in terrorism doesn’t seem to have affected interest in using them.

It’s difficult to speculate what Trump might do here. He may be less involved in some countries like Syria, but his call for more strikes against terrorists does make it seem as though drones would have to be on the table. Drones poll well with Americans undoubtedly because it looks as though we’re fighting against terrorism without putting our own troops at risk. That seems to fit with the way Trump talks about foreign engagement. He is critical of direct military interventions that have put troops at risk without getting good results, like in Iraq and Syria. But he wants military strikes against terrorists. That seems to lead toward not only using drones but maybe even expanding them.

Post-election, Reason’s Damon Root warned that Trump was going to inherit all the expansion of executive authority under Obama that Democrats allowed to happen. It seems likely that extrajudicial use of drones to assassinate suspected terrorists will fall within that category.

Also relevant, my review of The Assassination Complex: Inside the Government’s Secret Drone Warfare Program, from our December issue of Reason magazine, is now readable online.

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John Mauldin: This Post-Election Stock Market Rally Won’t Last

Submitted by John Mauldin via MauldinEconomics.com,

I’d like to share an update that throws some chilly water on the post-election stock market rally.

My friends Van Hoisington and Lacy Hunt of Hoisington Investment Management usually write only quarterly letters. They send interim updates only when something of major consequence happens. The fact they wrote this one is significant… and what they say is definitely important.

Van and Lacy are not optimistic that Trump-led tax cuts and infrastructure spending will stimulate the economy to any significant degree. They also remind us that the economy still bears an enormous debt load that will likely restrain growth for years to come. They also point out that the current mild expansion shows signs of exhaustion.

Read on to get their take on what’s in store for the markets and the economy.

Interim Update and Comment

By Van Hoisington and Lacy Hunt
Hoisington Investment Management

The outcome of the national election does not change our view on the trajectory of the economy for the next four to six quarters. Markets are repricing because of the assumption that lower taxes, less regulation and higher deficit spending will provide a positive demand shock, followed by a surge in inflation.

The most potentially dynamic component of the Trump plan is the reduction in tax rates. The plan calls for a $500 billion decrease in taxes over the next ten years. With a tax multiplier of –2, there would be a lift in economic growth of $1 trillion over the next ten years for an economy that is on a growth path of about $5 trillion over that same time frame. As such the annual growth could be boosted from $500 billion a year to $600 billion. This stimulus will take a considerable amount of time to work through the economy and the positive contribution requires that monetary conditions remain favorable, not adversarial.

The Reagan tax cuts of the early 1980s are quite instructive on this point. That tax cut was far larger in relative terms than what is being proposed, and since the federal debt was so much less than it is currently, the tax multiplier was more negative, approximating –3. Additionally, the Reagan tax cuts were being implemented while interest rates were falling sharply. Even with fiscal and monetary conditions working in tandem, the economy was very slow to respond. The Republicans lost control of the US Senate in the 1984 Congressional elections and their numbers in the House were reduced. Also, Fed Chairman Volcker was required to orchestrate a major decline in the dollar under the Plaza Accord of 1985 and interest rates did not reach their cyclical low until 1986.

Additionally, initial conditions (which is an economics term for all the other factors that influence economic growth) are negative and have become more negative recently. The economy is extremely over-indebted, turning even more so this year. In the latest statistical year, debt of the four main domestic non-financial sectors increased by $2.2 trillion while GDP gained only $450 billion. Debt of these four sectors (household, business, Federal and state/local) surged to a new high relative to GDP. This will serve as a restraint on growth for years to come. Also, the economy is in an expansion that is 6 1/2 years old. This means that pent-up demand for virtually all big ticket items is exhausted – apartments, single family homes, new vehicles, and plant and equipment. Rents are falling as a result of a massive apartment construction boom. Reflecting a huge stock of new vehicles and significant easing of credit standards, the auto market appears saturated. Vehicle sales for the first ten months of this year have fallen slightly below last year’s sales pace. New and used car prices are down 1.2% over the past year. The residential housing market appears to have topped out even before the sharp recent advance in mortgage yields, which will place downward pressure on this market.

The recent rise in market interest rates will place downward pressure on the velocity of money (V) and also the rate of growth in the money supply (M). This is not a powerful effect, but it is a negative one. Some additional saving or less spending will occur, thus giving V a push downward. So, in effect, the markets have tightened monetary conditions without the Fed acting. If the Fed raises rates in December, this will place some additional downward pressure on both M and V, and hence on nominal GDP. Thus, the markets have reduced the timeliness and potential success of the coming tax reductions.

Another negative initial condition is that the dollar has risen this year, currently trading close to the 13-year high. The highly relevant Chinese yuan has slumped to a seven-year low. These events will force disinflationary, if not deflationary forces into the US economy. Corporate profits, which had already fallen back to 2011 levels, will be reduced due to several considerations. Pricing power will be reduced, domestic and international market share will be lost and profits of overseas subs will be reduced by currency conversion. Corporate profits on overseas operations will be reduced, but with demand weak and current profits under downward pressure, the repatriated earnings are likely to go into financial rather than physical investment.

The psychological reaction to Trump’s unexpected victory, along with the worsening initial conditions, means that the upcoming tax package may do little more than contain the additional negative momentum developing within the economy. Additional deficit spending for infrastructure also carries a negative multiplier. This is confirmed by recent scholarly research. Let’s say, for the purpose of argument, that the multiplier is a small positive. It will take a long time to develop the preliminary engineering and design work to identify the projects and even longer to hire the contractors. So even if the multiplier were not negative, the benefit seems to be well into the future.

Markets have a pronounced tendency to rush to judgment when policy changes occur. When the Obama stimulus of 2009 was announced, the presumption was that it would lead to an inflationary boom. Similarly, the unveiling of QE1 raised expectations of a runaway inflation. Yet, neither happened. The economics are not different now. Under present conditions, it is our judgment that the declining secular trend in Treasury bond yields remains intact.

*  *  *

Every week, celebrated economic commentator John Mauldin highlights a well-researched, controversial essay from a fellow economic expert. Whether you find them inspiring, upsetting, or outrageous… they’ll all make you think Outside the Box. Get the newsletter free in your inbox every Wednesday.

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Pennsylvania Governor Vetoes Bill To Keep Names of Police Officers in Shootings Secret

Democratic Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf vetoed a bill Monday passed by the state legislature that would have barred public officials from releasing the names of police officers involved in shootings of civilians for 30 days or until an internal investigation was completed.

The bill sailed through the state legislature in October with heavy support from Republicans—as well as local, state, and national police unions—but Wolf said in a veto statement Monday that “government works best when trust and openness exist between citizens and their government, and as such, I cannot sign into law a policy that will enshrine the withholding of information in the public interest.”

“These situations in particular—when law enforcement uses deadly force—demand utmost transparency, otherwise a harmful mistrust will grow between police officers and the communities they protect and serve,” Wolf continued. “Further, I cannot allow local police department policies to be superseded and transparency to be criminalized, as local departments are best equipped to decide what information is appropriate to release to the public.”

While high-profile police shootings over the past several years have led to wide-sweeping transparency and reform efforts, they have also led to several states, such as North Carolina, to restrict access to body camera footage and public records involving fatal incidents. As my Reason colleague Anthony Fischer wrote in October, shortly after the bill passed:

The bill sailed through Pennsylvania’s House 151-32 and 39-9 in the Senate, with a significant amount of Philadelphia-area lawmakers voting against it, according to Philly.com […]The bill was introduced by Rep. Marina White (R) as a means of providing officers involved in shootings “basic protection from threats” After voting in favor of the bill, Rep. Dominic Costa (D) declared, “We are the protectors of our protectors.”

Last year, then-Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey changed the department’s long-standing policy of releasing officers’ names whenever it felt it was appropriate to limiting the delay to a maximum of 72 hours. Ramsey was quoted by NPR as saying, “I don’t think you can shoot someone and expect to remain anonymous…and I do think that we have a responsibility as a police agency that work[s] for the people to provide that information, unless there are some extenuating circumstances.”

Reggie Shuford, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, said the bill was introduced as “backlash to the grassroots movement of people calling for fairer treatment by the police” and applauded Wolf for vetoing it.

“By rejecting this bill, Governor Wolf took a stand for transparency and accountability,” Shuford said. “This legislation would have taken us backwards, at the exact time that people are increasingly calling for more openness and fairness from police departments. There is nothing fair or open about withholding information from the public after someone has been injured or killed by an employee who is on the taxpayers’ payroll.

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Obama Won’t Pardon Snowden, Trump’s Favorability Increasing, IRS Wants Names of Bitcoin Users: P.M. Links

  • SnowdenPresident Barack Obama says he can’t pardon Edward Snowden, but it’s probably more likely that he won’t pardon him.
  • Now that the election’s over, President-Elect Donald Trump’s favorability ratings are slowly ticking back upwards. He’s still below 50 percent, though.
  • Kris Kobach, Kansas’ secretary of state and possible Trump pick for his cabinet, brought his written plans for national security to a meeting with Trump. A photographer managed to capture some of the info in a picture.
  • The #CalExit folks (those who want to have California secede from the union) are starting to push a new ballot initiative, hoping to get more support in the wake of Trump’s election. They are apparently still unaware that several inland counties within California went for Trump.
  • Democrats in North Carolina are calling on Republican Gov. Pat McCrory to concede the election. He trails Democratic challenger and state Attorney General Roy Cooper by 6,600 votes currently.
  • The IRS is looking to force Coinbase to provide a list of customers who engaged in virtual currency (like bitcoin) transactions to find those who might be skirting the tax code.
  • Workers at Chicago’s O’Hare airport voted to strike starting Nov. 29. They want $15-an-hour wages.
  • Democratic Hawaiian Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (a supporter of Bernie Sanders) broke ranks to meet with Trump today. She put out a statement saying they discussed her concerns about military escalation in Syria and desire to end our involvement in that country. Of additional interest (particularly where the Trump administration is concerned): She’s a member of the Fourth Amendment Caucus that formed earlier in the year to try to rein in government surveillance.

Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, and don’t forget to sign up for Reason’s daily updates for more content.

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Powerful M7.3 Earthquake Strikes Japan Off Coast Of Fukushima, Tsunami Warning Issued

A powerful earthquake, with a preliminary magnitude of 7.3 on the Richter scale has struck Japan, 156 miles from Tokyo, off the coast of ukushima, the site of the 2011 natural disaster and tsunami that resulted in the worst nuclear power plant disaster since Chernobyl.

Worst of all, a warning for a possible 3 meter Tsunami in Fukushima has been issued according to media reports.

  • JAPAN ISSUES WARNING FOR POSSIBLE 3M TSUNAMI IN FUKUSHIMA

The Tsunami is expected to hit Fukushima within minutes.

Developing.

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“Record Highs” For Everyone…

One. Big. Squeeze…

 

Everything must be awesome…

  • Russell 2000 longest win streak since 2003 – new record high
  • Nasdaq new record high
  • S&P 500 new record high – 2,200 looms
  • Dow new record high – 19,000 looms

S&P and Dow are now up over 8% from the limit down lows of the election…

 

An opening dip was bought and stocks across the board hit new record highs (led by Nasdaq)…

 

VIX smashed near an 11 handle…

 

Small Caps are up 12 days in a row – the longest streak since 2003…

 

Breadth is terrible…

 

Post-Election, oil and stocks are up, gold and bonds not so much…

 

US Treasuries continue to underperform the other developed market bonds…

 

But the long-end outperformed once again today… 30Y yields dropped back below 3.00%

 

As the US Treasury curve continues to flatten drastically to 6 week lows..

 

Completely decoupled from bank stocks…

 

The USD Index declined after 10 straight days higher…

 

Chaos early in the day around the gold lqiuidity moment sparked some jiggery pokery in GBP and JPY…

 

Crude soared again on OPEC headlines, copper was green and gold managed a small gain from Friday's close…

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About That “Fair Share”

Submitted by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,

There are two words that kept coming up over and over again over the last 20+ months during the US Presidential circus: “fair share”.

Hardly a day went by without hearing that certain taxpayers “need to pay more of their fair share.”

It sounds really great, and given the voter statistics, this idea resonated with tens of millions of people. After all, who could possibly be against fairness?

When you dive into the numbers, however, the data doesn’t support this assertion at all.

According to IRS figures, households that earn more than $1 million annually, roughly 0.4% of all taxpayers, pay a total of $364 billion in federal income tax.

This amounts to roughly 27% of all the US federal individual income tax that’s collected.

So in other words, the top 0.4%, pays 27% of the total tax bill.

If you extend this analysis to the upper middle class, i.e. the top 24.5% of households earning more than $100,000 per year, the numbers are even more dramatic.

(Bear in mind this includes two spouses earning $50,000 each.)

This group of households earning between $100,000 up to $1 million contributes 50.4% of all US federal individual income tax.

Combined, the two groups, which comprise the top 25% of US taxpayers, pay nearly 80% of the total tax bill.

(In case you’re wondering, the bottom 50% of income earners contributes less than 5% to the total tax bill.)

This isn’t intended to be a slight against any income group; rather, I’m honestly wondering exactly how much these people consider to be “fair”?

Because it’s not intuitively obvious to me that sticking 25% of the people with 80% of the bill is “unfair.”

Now, the common refrain from the “fair share” crowd is that taxes go to fund our roads, schools, police departments, fire fighters, etc., and that rich people can afford to pay more.

But there’s a big problem with this logic.

All the benefits that people cite, from fire fighters to public schools, are typically funded at the state and local level… and paid for with state and local taxes. NOT federal tax.

Your federal tax dollars don’t fund local fire departments.

Instead you’re paying for a giant, bloated, federal bureaucracy that squanders tax revenue on some of the most obscene waste imaginable.

You paid $2 billion for the Obamacare website that didn’t work.

You paid $1 billion for the military to destroy $16 billion of perfectly good ammunition.

You paid $856,000 for the National Science Foundation to teach mountain lions how to run on treadmills.

And you paid an incalculable sum of money to drop bombs by remote control on innocent civilians and children’s hospitals in countries populated by brown people.

None of this money is going to fix the pot hole in front of your driveway.

But despite their argument being totally specious and unsupported by IRS data, the “fair share” cries grow ever louder.

Warren Buffett, a 0.01% guy himself, has been a loud voice claiming that wealthy people should pay more.

Buffett complains every year that he pays less tax as a percentage of his income than his secretary.

And this has created a popular belief that wealthy people pay very low tax rates.

Again, IRS statistics disprove this claim; the average tax rate for top income earners in the US is over 30%, versus 9.8% for the bottom half of income earners.

Moreover, there’s nothing stopping Warren Buffett from writing a bigger check to the US government.

If he feels so strongly about his “fair share,” he’s free to make a donation to pay down the national debt.

But he hasn’t done that. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Several years ago Warren Buffett pledged to leave nearly all of his wealth to the charitable foundation run by Bill and Melinda Gates.

And he donates billions each year to other charities.

Warren Buffett could have bequeathed his entire fortune to Uncle Sam.

But he didn’t. That’s because Buffett knows his money can do more good in the world by funding those private organizations instead paying for more federal waste.

And this statement is true whether you make $50 million per year, or $50,000.

Bottom line, it’s not evil for anyone to want to keep their hard-earned savings and income out of the federal government’s ignominiously wasteful hands.

Nor is it evil to take completely legal steps to reduce what you owe, no matter what the specious “fair share” crowd says.

(By the way, regardless of your income level, there are always options to reduce your tax bill.)

Taking these steps is totally sensible.

And if you’re like me and feel disgusted by much of the destruction that your federal taxes have funded, you might even feel a moral obligation to do so.

Do you have a Plan B?

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A Day Trip to Dearborn, Michigan: New at Reason

For some quick perspective on topics that are flaring in the aftermath of the presidential election—American manufacturing, bigotry, the difference between coastal elite America and flyover country, the environment—one can do a lot worse than a quick day trip to Dearborn, Michigan, Ira Stoll writes.

On the day Stoll arrived in Michigan, midweek, rental cars were so scarce, because of “unusually high demand,” that the daily prices were more than his airfare from Boston. Was there big convention? A college football game? It turned out to be the opening day of deer hunting season with regular firearms.

“That explanation was so far outside the realm of what I had expected that I laughed aloud at the realization that I wasn’t in Boston anymore,” notes Stoll. “It wasn’t so clear if I was laughing at myself or at the hunters; what is clear is that college-educated journalists like me spent too much time this election cycle laughing at Trump voters and their regions of the country, and not enough time listening to them.”

View this article.

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Mayor de Blasio Vows To Make New York A Safe Space From “Excesses Of Trump”

Five days after meeting with president-elect Donald Trump in what was described as a “candid meeting”,  New York Mayor Bill de Blasio delivered what Bloomberg dubbed a “campaign-style rebuke to the President-elect” vowing to resist the “excess of Trump” including federal efforts to deport undocumented immigrants, push more aggressive police actions against minorities or remove health services from women and the poor.

De Blasio said he would sue to stop the federal government if the Trump administration went forward with a plan to require all Muslims to register in a database, the mayor said in a speech before hundreds of supporters on Monday denouncing many of Trump’s policies, said, “we will sue to block it.”

“We worry about a nation that was meant to be inclusionary becoming exclusionary,” de Blasio said. “We worry about deeper division. We worry about the negation of the American dream.”

The gathered crowd erupted in a round of applause after the mayor reminded the Queens-born President-elect “to remember where you come from.”

One day after President-elect Trump’s Chief of Staff Reince Priebus told “Meet the Press” the Trump administration wouldn’t rule a database out, though they weren’t planning it, de Blasio said “we will use all the tools at our disposal to stand up for our people,” he said.

Speaking in the same hall at Cooper Union where Abraham Lincoln gave a famous anti-slavery speech, de Blasio said it’s important for New York to be at the forefront of a burgeoning anti-Trump movement because this city has always been a beacon of opportunity all over the world.

He said we need to organize “issue by issue” with other Americans, and stressed that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was winning the popular vote by 1.5 million at last count.

He urged the crowd, which twice gave him a standing ovation, to “always be proud of our values.”

“The president-elect talked during the campaign about the movement that he had built. Now its our turn to build a movement, a movement of the majority,” he said.

The mayor also said that if Planned Parenthood funding is cut, “We will make sure women receive the health care they need” and would provide undocumented New Yorkers with expanded legal help if the government seeks to deport them. He also reiterated his pledge to not allow the NYPD to be used for deportations, and said that he would defy the Trump administration if it called on cities to ramp up stop and frisk policies for its police force.

The speech was the clearest sign yet that de Blasio intends to pitch his 2017 re-election effort holding himself and his city out as bulwarks against Trump administration policies. Democrats outnumber Republicans by more than 6-to-1 in New York City, where Hillary Clinton won close to 80 percent of the vote during the Nov. 8 election.

“He’s obviously running against Trump for re-election and there’s a double-edged sword here,” said George Arzt, a Democratic political consultant who served as press secretary to former Mayor Edward Koch in the 1980s. “While his poll numbers have been going up because of his attacks on Trump, in the final analysis, people will be asking ‘why isn’t he fixing this or fixing that?’ The mayoralty is all about delivering local services, and while he yearns for the national spotlight it’s a perilous game.”

As Bloomberg adds,De Blasio, 55, was buoyed by a Quinnipiac University poll last week that reported him well ahead in a hypothetical Democratic primary campaign. The poll showed the mayor with 47 percent approval, his best score since January. Still, 49 percent of the city’s voters feel he doesn’t deserve re-election, compared with 39 percent who say he does.

This comes despite allegations that have linked the mayor to at least five investigations into allegations that campaign donors received illegal favors such as government business. He has denied wrongdoing.

His past efforts to assume a national role as spokesman for the progressive wing of the Democratic Party have had mixed results. His attempt to build a coalition that would influence the presidential campaign fell flat after most candidates ignored him, and U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont took up his anti-Wall Street fight against income inequality in his campaign.

 

At the Democratic National Convention in July, de Blasio was relegated to a non-prime time speech, after fraying his relationship with Hillary Clinton by delaying his endorsement of her for months.

 

Back home, a continuing feud with Governor Andrew Cuomo and a failed effort to unseat state Senate Republicans has forced de Blasio to struggle to gain funds for city schools and affordable housing. Homelessness has increased on city streets, and reached record numbers of more than 60,000 in city shelters.

 

In his speech, de Blasio portrayed himself as the protector of the various constituencies upon which he built his 2013 election by the largest plurality ever for a non-incumbent. Those groups, he said, feel aggrieved and fearful in the aftermath of Trump’s election.

“To all of you, we will protect you,” the mayor said. “This is your home”, de Blasio concluded.

In short: de Blasio just promised to make New York a safe space for its residents from Donald Trump.

via http://ift.tt/2fVWDqX Tyler Durden