iftttwall

Last weekend, One River’s CIO Eric Peters explained what he thought would be the nightmare scenario for the next Fed chair, who as we now know will either be Jerome Powell or John Taylor, or both (with an outside chance of Yellen remaining in her post). According to the hedge fund CIO, the “worst case scenario” is one in which despite an improving economy, yields simply refuse to go up, leading to the final asset bubble and Fed intervention that “pops” it:

“if we don’t see a sustained cyclical jump in wages, then yields won’t go up. And if yields don’t go up, then the asset price ascent will accelerate,” continued the strategist. “Which will lead us into a 2018 that looks like what we had expected out of 2017; a war against inequality, a battle for Main Street at the expense of Wall Street, an Occupy Silicon Valley movement.” He paused, flipping through his calendar.  “Then you’ll have this nightmare for the next Federal Reserve chief, because they’ll have to pop a bubble.”

While Peters never names names in his pieces, the “strategist” in the weekend letter was BofA’s Michael Hartnett, who several days after Peters penned the above, followed up with some thoughts of his own on precisely this topic, and in a note released this week, described what he believes is the “biggest market risk” for the market. Not surprisingly, it is precisely what Peters was referring to in the above excerpt.

Responding to the question of “What is the biggest market risk”, Hartnett writes that “in our gut, it’s that the two most important investment trends of the past decade, central bank liquidity & technological disruption, ends in a bubble for tech stocks (Chart 7), & High Yield & EM bonds, the epicenters of the “scarce growth” & “scarce yield” themes.

As with Peters, for Hartnett it all comes down to one thing: inflation and higher yields, specifically among long-dated yields: 

Multi-year lows in unemployment, multi-year highs in consumer confidence, soaring global PMIs, soaring profits, a doubling of the oil price, fiscal stimulus…little wonder the world is short bonds in 2017.

 

And yet inflation & bond yields refuse to rise.

The reason is simple: in attempting to stimulate wage growth, and thus benign inflation, the Fed continues to target the symptom of a condition which it no longer has any control over. Remember: Deflation = Debt + Demographics + Disruption? Well, they’re back. Quote Hartnett:

Aging Demographics and excess Debt remain structural impediments to higher inflation. But the biggest impediment is technology, and the potential for the labor market to be permanently disrupted, as AI and robotics crush wage expectations, particularly in the service sector.

For now the bond market still gives the Fed the benefit of the doubt, with 10Y yields occasionally pushing higher when the nearly extinct bond vigilantes make a surprise appearance, pushing rates up at least until the next deflationary scare emerges. But what happens if the bond vigilantes finally throw in the towel? Well, that’s what unleashes the final bubble… and sends 30Y yields toward 2% and the Nasdaq  to 10,000.

Capitulation of bond bears would send 30-year Treasury yields toward 2%, the Nasdaq toward 10,000, and high yield & Emerging Market bond spreads 100bps tighter (all-time lows…241bps in the US, 179bps in Europe, 139bps in EM). The outperformance of “deflation” versus “inflation” could turn exponential (Chart 8).

And while the market may or may not have a major correction in the coming months (Hartnett also predicted last week that the next major market drop will take place between Thanksgiving and Valentine’s Day), the longer-term implications as this tension is finally resolved either way, most likely with the intervention of the Fed – whose next chair will have no choice but to burst the bubble – will define the market for the next generation, or as the BofA strategist puts it:

‘“Icarus Unleashed” in coming quarters would then set-up 2018/2019 as a period of volatility, aggressive Fed tightening to pop bubbles, and more hostile War on Inequality & Occupy Silicon Valley politics, setting the stage for the end of the bull market as Icarus crashes back to earth.’

via http://ift.tt/2zpiIr0 Tyler Durden

Authored by Patrick Buchanan via Buchanan.org,

Asked to name the defining attributes of the America we wish to become, many liberals would answer that we must realize our manifest destiny since 1776, by becoming more equal, more diverse and more democratic – and the model for mankind’s future.

Equality, diversity, democracy – this is the holy trinity of the post-Christian secular state at whose altars Liberal Man worships.

But the congregation worshiping these gods is shrinking.

And even Europe seems to be rejecting what America has on offer.

In a retreat from diversity, Catalonia just voted to separate from Spain. The Basque and Galician peoples of Spain are following the Catalan secession crisis with great interest.

The right-wing People’s Party and far-right Freedom Party just swept 60 percent of Austria’s vote, delivering the nation to 31-year-old Sebastian Kurz, whose anti-immigrant platform was plagiarized from the Freedom Party. Summarized it is: Austria for the Austrians!

Lombardy, whose capital is Milan, and Veneto will vote Sunday for greater autonomy from Rome.

South Tyrol (Alto Adige), severed from Austria and ceded to Italy at Versailles, written off by Hitler to appease Mussolini after his Anschluss, is astir anew with secessionism. Even the Sicilians are talking of separation.

By Sunday, the Czech Republic may have a new leader, billionaire Andrej Babis. Writes The Washington Post, Babis “makes a sport of attacking the European Union and says NATO’s mission is outdated.”

Platform Promise: Keep the Muslim masses out of the motherland.

To ethnonationalists, their countrymen are not equal to all others, but superior in rights. Many may nod at Thomas Jefferson’s line that “All men are created equal,” but they no more practice that in their own nations than did Jefferson in his.

On Oct. 7, scores of thousands of Poles lined up along the country’s entire 2,000-mile border — to pray the rosary.

It was the centennial of the Virgin Mary’s last apparition at Fatima in Portugal in 1917, and the day in 1571 the Holy League sank the Muslim fleet at Lepanto to save Europe. G. K. Chesterton’s poem, “Lepanto,” was once required reading in Catholic schools.

Each of these traditionalist-nationalist movements is unique, but all have a common cause. In the hearts of Europe’s indigenous peoples is embedded an ancient fear: loss of the homeland to Islamic invaders.

Europe is rejecting, resisting, recoiling from “diversity,” the multiracial, multicultural, multiethnic and multilingual future that, say U.S. elites, is America’s preordained mission to bring about for all mankind.

Indeed, increasingly, the indigenous peoples of Europe seem to view as the death of their nations and continent, what U.S. liberal elites see as the Brave New World to come.

To traditionalist Europeans, our heaven looks like their hell.

Thus Poles fall on their knees to pray to the Virgin Mary to spare them from threats of an Islamic future, as their ancestors prayed at the time of Lepanto, and of Vienna in 1683, when the Polish King John Sobieski marched to halt the last Muslim drive into the heart of Europe.

European peoples and parties are today using democratic means to achieve “illiberal” ends. And it is hard to see what halts the drift away from liberal democracy toward the restrictive right. For in virtually every nation, there is a major party in opposition, or a party in power, that holds deeply nationalist views.

European elites may denounce these new parties as “illiberal” or fascist, but it is becoming apparent that it may be liberalism itself that belongs to yesterday. For more and more Europeans see the invasion of the continent along the routes whence the invaders came centuries ago, not as a manageable problem but an existential crisis.

To many Europeans, it portends an irreversible alteration in the character of the countries their grandchildren will inherit, and possibly an end to their civilization. And they are not going to be deterred from voting their fears by being called names that long ago lost their toxicity from overuse.

And as Europeans decline to celebrate the racial, ethnic, creedal and cultural diversity extolled by American elites, they also seem to reject the idea that foreigners should be treated equally in nations created for their own kind.

Europeans seem to admire more, and model their nations more, along the lines of the less diverse America of the Eisenhower era, than on the polyglot America of 2017.

And Europe seems to be moving toward immigration polices more like the McCarran-Walter Act of 1950 than the open borders bill that Sen. Edward Kennedy shepherded through the Senate in 1965.

Kennedy promised that the racial and ethnic composition of the America of the 1960s would not be overturned, and he questioned the morality and motives of any who implied that it would.

So, why is liberalism dying?

Because it is proving to be what James Burnham called it in his 1964 “Suicide of the West” — the ideology of Western suicide.

What we see in Europe today is people who, belatedly recognizing this, have begun to “rage, rage, against dying of the light.”

via http://ift.tt/2xcAlK0 Tyler Durden

The US stock market celebrated the 30th anniversary of Black Monday with the 2017 version of a rocky trading day: Stocks sold off early, with S&P 500 futures recording their steepest post-midnight drop of the year. But the dip was reflexively and aggressively bought, and stocks even poked back into the green seconds before the close as algos mistook a repetitive Politico headline about Jay Powell’s chances of becoming the next Fed chair for news – leaving us with yet another record close.

Of course, the historical juxtaposition of the 1987 crash with today’s unnaturally placid markets practically forced even the most bullish of traders to question how much longer the present market paradigm – where markets listlessly drift through a seemingly interminable series of record highs while trading volume and volatility remain suppressed – can possibly last.

With that question in mind, Real Vision released a video early today containing interviews with some of the biggest names in the hedge fund universe. Though the interview was shot a few weeks ago, remarks from Hayman Capital’s Kyle Bass resonated with market's mood.

Bass discussed what he sees as the many short- and long-term risks to the US equity market, including the rise of algorithmic trading and passive investment, which have enabled investors to take risks without understanding what they’re doing, leaving the market vulnerable to an “air pocket."

And with  so many traders short vol, Bass said investors will know the correction has begun when a 4% or 5% drop in equities snowballs into a 10% to 15% decline at the drop of a hat.

“The shift from active to passive means that risk is in the hands of people who don’t know how to take risk. Therefore we’re likely to have a 1987 air pocket. This is like portfolio insurance on steroids, the way algorithmic trading is now running the market place.

 

Investors are moving from active to passive, meaning they’re taking the wheel themselves all at a time when CTAs are running their own algo strategies where they’re one and a half times long and half short and they all believe they can come out at the same time."

 

“If you see the equity market crack 4 or 5 points, buckle up, because I think we’re going to see a pretty interesting air-pocket, and I don’t think investors are ready for that,” Bass said.

When it comes to identifying potential catalysts, Bass said the US’s deteriorating relationships with both China and North Korea present significant long-term risks…

“Our trade relationship with China is worsening our relationship with north korea whatever it is continually worsens. We’ve got three people at the head of these countries that are trying ot maike their countries great again, I think that’s a real risk geopolitically."

…While the unwind of G-4 central bank stimulus could hammer equities and bonds in the short term.

"But when you think about it financially, which is actually easier to calculate, the financial reason is the G-4 central banks going from a period of accommodation to a period of tightening, and that’s net of bond issuance."

In summary, investors better snap up those out-of-the-money S&P 500 puts before it’s too late, because central banks – try as they might – can’t forestall the return of volatility forever.

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

From the Slope of Hope: One of my favorite little books is called Hey Skinny! Great Advertisements from the Golden Age of Comic Books, which pretty much describes the contents exactly. It is a hodgepodge of cheesy ads from the mid 1940s to late 1950s for all manner of junk, and it’s eye-opening to see via these come-ons just how much has changed in merchandising. I thought I’d provide a sampling for your amusement, not edification.

First up is the “Lucky Grab Bag”, in which children would send in their precious cash in exchange for a bag of……….stuff. God only knows what stuff would come back, but I suspect it was whatever overstock items happened to be laying around the office……..ballpoint pens, sanitary napkins, swizzle sticks. I suspect an entire generation of kids learned the meaning of disappointment from the receipt of these parcels o’ crap.

Next up is the most amazing sun watch in the world. The fact it was the only sun watch in the world probably helped. Evidently it was a watch with a triangle sticking out of it (helpful for accidentally cutting yourself) which, if you aimed it precisely right on a sunny day, could give you the time within two hours of accuracy. This allowed you to tell time “the truly scientific way”. It wasn’t just a watch, though – – this product claimed to have nine functions, including “weather forecaster”, which I suppose meant if you couldn’t tell what time it was, it was either cloudy or already raining on your dumb ass.

Now we step into the yesterday of political incorrectness with rubber masks. There’s Satan, an “Idiot”, and……umm……..a Minstrel. This advertisement, only partly shown, suggests that wearing one of these masks was a great way to bag the ladies, since they found it terribly amusing. In the parlance of the day, you could “panic a party” (whereas today you could “earn a lawsuit.”)

This next one is, for me, the most appalling of all. It seems there was a company back in the 50s whose sole purpose in life was to create photo enlargements. In exchange for giving their sales information to twenty of your friends, they would send you………brace yourself……..a monkey. How they shipped it to you or managed to keep it alive during the shipment (or, indeed, kept it from committing monkey suicide out of terror en route) is beyond me. It’s hard for me to believe that the good people of the U.S. had much success with miniature monkeys shrieking and throwing poo around the house across the suburbs of our once-great republic.

For nascent crimestoppers, there is the “new toy gun” which, it seems, fires off pieces of potatoes. No big deal. What I find intriguing is the story they lay out in in the ad, in which a couple of young chaps stop a bank robbery cold (and are immediately paid for doing so by Mr. Bank Manager). It takes some serious suspension of disbelief to think hardened bank robbers would be stopped in their tracks by some ten year old holding what appears to be the letter “L” from Sesame Street in his hand, but that’s how the story is told. One can only hope the kids of the 50s didn’t seek out to emulate this behavior by hanging out in rougher parts of town with their weapon, waiting for their payday.

The ads weren’t all just for kids, though. There were ads aimed at adults as well, and judging from the ad, there must have been plenty of desperate, disillusioned dads in America. Allow me to lay out what was being advertised here, as the story is told: (1) a guy pulls up in his driveway in a new car under the gaze of his envious neighbor, who puzzles over how he could afford such a luxury (2) the car owner states he is pulling down the big money by selling shoes door-to-door (3) Instead of laughing hysterically, the neighbor implausibly inquires as to how he can muscle in on this kind of action (4) the neighbor evidently signs up to be a new salesman for Mason Shoes, and he is provided a catalog and, yes, a sample air cushion which is the distinctive edge of Mason that makes them better than other shoes (5) the poor bastard pesters his neighbors, co-workers, and anyone else with feet to buy these shoes, and he does well enough that Mason sends him some sample shoes, sparing him the continue embarrassment of having nothing more than a soft insole as his only selling aid.

We finish our journey with an ad specifically targeted to adult women (why they would be reading Archie comic books is beyond me, but there we are). The ad portrays a town whose women are having their engagement and wedding rings stolen from their homes. Mary has been robbed too, but she’s chill. How could this be? After all, the diamonds were worth at least a thousand dollars! That’s easy – – because Mary has her actual jewelry locked up in a safe where no one can see or enjoy it. What she’s been wearing on her fingers day after day are a set of rings that cost $2.98, and apparently no one could tell the difference. Nice going, Mary. I bet they look fabulous.

Well, that’s it for our trip down memory lane. Perhaps you were expecting an article on trading. But ask yourself – – how much value have you received from all the articles you’ve been reading about trading for the past eight years? Yeah, that’s what I thought.

via http://ift.tt/2hTUcHv Tim Knight from Slope of Hope

Authored by Tho Bishop via The Mises Institute,

via http://ift.tt/2xX6XeW Tyler Durden

With NAFTA negotiations going badly, Goldman Sachs has published a report, “Thoughts on the Potential US Withdrawal from NAFTA”, that concludes that the US is likely to withdraw from the trade agreement next year “At this point, efforts at revising the agreement look likely to be unsuccessful, though a deal is still possible, in our view. If the talks do not result in a revised agreement by early 2018, we believe that the Trump Administration could announce its intent to withdraw from NAFTA.” The NAFTA agreement calls for a six-month notice period before a nation can withdraw and “we believe it would follow a similar pattern to the strategy the White House has used in recent decisions on immigration (the DACA program), Iran, and health subsidies. Each involved a disruption to the status quo pursuant to a campaign pledge, with delayed implementation and an expectation that a new arrangement might be negotiated in the interim.”

Trump has threatened to pull out of the pact several times if “America First” demands are not met. Following an unsuccessful fourth round of discussions, the parties have accepted that end 2017 timeframe for reaching agreement will no longer be achieved and talks will extend into Q1 2018.

According to Goldman, major sticking points in the talks are:

5-year sunset: The US has proposed that NAFTA would be terminated after 5 years unless all three parties agree to keep it in force. As a practical matter, this would result in a prescheduled renegotiation every ?ve years and increase uncertainty while the agreement is in effect, decreasing the bene?ts of the agreement on investment and cross-border trade ?ows.

 

Chapter 19: NAFTA allows member countries to settle anti-dumping and countervailing duty disputes through binational arbitration, which has been a priority for Canada in particular.  The US has called for Chapter 19 to be non-binding.

 

Investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS): The US has called for the ISDS program to exist on an opt-in basis. ISDS allows companies to seek recourse against policy changes in NAFTA countries that infringe on property rights, such as expropriation of assets.

 

Government procurement: The Trump Administration is seeking “dollar for dollar government procurement, which would mean that Mexican or Canadian companies could bid on US government contracts equal only to the amount of Mexican or Canadian contracts open to US companies. This would reduce the amount of US government contracts open to NAFTA partners to a fraction of the current amount.

 

Rules of origin: NAFTA currently requires auto imports to include at least 62.5%n regional content, i.e., parts from NAFTA countries. The Trump Administration has proposed raising this threshold to 85%, and requiring 50% US content.  These levels seem unattainable, in our view, since the US applies only a 2.5% tariff on cars imported from outside NAFTA, and with such high content requirements auto companies would be better off paying the tariff instead.

While Goldman acknowledges that some of the demands might be merely part of a negotiating strategy, it cautions that some of them are of a binary nature, with little room for compromise versus the current agreement.

It sees three reasons for expecting the talks to fail:

First, the recent proposals suggest that the Trump Administration is not concerned about the possibility of a failure to revise the agreement.

 

Second, an announcement to withdraw from NAFTA would be in keeping with the strategy the White House has recently followed on other issues.  The Administration’s recent decisions regarding the Iran agreement, the DACA program, and ACA subsidies have followed the same pattern: The White House has announced that it will end the status quo, against expectations, but that it will allow for an interim period where a new arrangement could be negotiated.  In these examples, the White House has left Congress with the responsibility for establishing a replacement.

 

Third, it is far from clear that there would be suf?cient support in Congress to pass a revised NAFTA agreement at this point.  We believe most trade-skeptic lawmakers might not want to be associated with even a revised version of the agreement, and most pro-trade lawmakers might prefer the status quo, although they might be more supportive of a revised agreement if the US has already announced a withdrawal from NAFTA.

On that basis, it expects the White House to give notice of US withdrawal.

Meanwhile, the risk of a US withdrawal is galvanising efforts by Congress and the business sector to thwart Trump if he does, indeed, serve notice. A legal challenge is thought to be certain from both sides of the House and the auto industry. As the WSJ notes  “Congressional trade lawyers and attorneys from private firms in Washington have begun meeting informally to come up with ways to challenge any decision by President Donald Trump to pull out of the North American Free Trade Agreement.”

While contingency planning is in its early stages, the WSJ acknowledges that it has thrown up a critical question“ How much authority does the president actually have to scuttle an existing trade agreement? ‘This is sort of uncharted territory where no one really knows,’ said Warren Maruyama, a former trade official in the Reagan and two Bush administrations…Mr. Maruyama agreed that the president probably has the power to cancel or gut Nafta, but he expects challenges—with a chance of success—if Mr. Trump attempts to kill the deal unilaterally. “There are people who are desperately scouring [key provisions of trade law] on Capitol Hill and law firms and at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce right now to try to create some kind of argument that Trump can’t do this,” said Mr. Maruyama, now partner at Hogan Lovells LLP in Washington.”

The potential avenues for challenging a withdrawal appear to be twofold, either on the basis that it is unconstitutional, or that a President can’t reverse laws which were passed by Congress with regard to its implementation. Should Trump serve notice, any parties, such as lawmakers or businesses, with standing could seek an injunction in a Federal court. If that fails, the WSJ reports that Congress could still take further measures to exercise leverage over the White House “The Congressional Research Service said in a 2016 report that a final notice of withdrawal from the president ‘appears sufficient’ to release the U.S. from its international obligations under Nafta, but that Congress might wield a variety of powers to dissuade a president from canceling the deal, including through its control over the budget. Congress in theory could also pass a law reinstating Nafta or a similar agreement, but lawmakers are divided on the issue and unlikely to advance legislation protecting a trade agreement, especially if they don’t have a veto-proof majority.

For a moment, let’s assume that the US leaves NAFTA, what would it mean in economic terms?

Goldman explains that besides short-term uncertainty if the US does withdraw from NAFTA, Goldman predicts that the economic fallout will likely be relatively modest.

“A NAFTA withdrawal announcement would create near-term uncertainty but would likely have relatively modest economic effects, as the US-Canada trade would be likely to be covered under a prior free trade agreement, and exports to Mexico constitute only 1.2% of GDP. Most estimates of the trade gains from NAFTA suggest that it raised the level of US GDP by less than 0.2%, and some of these gains might have occurred anyway as Mexico has substantially lowered tariffs for non-NAFTA countries since the deal was implemented. That said, tariffs would rise, non-tariff barriers would increase, and some industries could face more substantial disruption. The auto sector would be most affected, as tariffs on some vehicles are still quite high outside of trade agreements and supply chains have been integrated across borders.  Agricultural trade, while not as large, would face important constraints given high protective tariffs on certain products.”

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

The morning of June 29, 2010, began much like any other day for Frank Ranelli, the owner of FAR Computers in Ensley, Alabama. Ranelli, who had owned his computer repair business just outside of Birmingham for more than two decades, was doing some paperwork in his windowless office when he heard loud banging on the front door.  Within a matter of moments Ranelli was placed under arrest and all of the computer equipment in his store, much of which belonged to customers, had been confiscated by Alabama police never to be returned.  Per AL.com:

Within moments, a Homewood police sergeant had declared a room full of customers’ computers, merchandise and other items “stolen goods,” Ranelli recalled. He ordered his officers to “arrest them all,” according to Ranelli, who was cuffed and taken to the Homewood jail along with two of his shop employees.

 

The police proceeded to confiscate more than 130 computers – most of which were customers’ units waiting to be repaired, though some were for sale – as well as the company’s business servers and workstations and even receipts and checkbooks.

 

“Here I was, a man, owned this business, been coming to work every day like a good old guy for 23 years, and I show up at work that morning – I was in here doing my books from the day before – and the police just f***ed my life,” he said.

Nothing ever came of the case. The single charge levied against Renelli of receiving stolen goods was dismissed after he demonstrated that he had followed proper protocol in purchasing the sole laptop computer he was accused of receiving illegally. That said, despite no official charges and no jury trial, Ranelli has been trying, to no avail, for nearly 7 years now to recover the items the officers took from his business.

Rick Hightower had a similar experience with Alabama police when he was a student at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.  After being arrested for “lewd behavior” at a college party in 2008, Hightower says police raided his apartment and confiscated as much as $200,000 worth of musical instruments and other property.  Despite never being charged with stealing the property, Hightower says police have refused to return any of the confiscated items. 

On April 13, 2008, he was arrested and initially charged with lewd behavior after police said he was caught exposing himself at Samford University in Birmingham, according to court filings. Hightower, who has a fairly extensive rap sheet, was ultimately convicted of indecent exposure and resisting arrest in connection with that incident.

 

Five days after his arrest, officers with the Homewood and UAB police departments raided Hightower’s apartment, executing a warrant to search for files, cameras and any other evidence related to the incident at Samford.

 

They also decided to seize “a large amount of property believed to be stolen,” including “musical instruments, electronics and other items,” according to a UAB Police Department report on the search.

 

As such, Hightower was charged with receiving stolen property. He was never charged with stealing any of the other items that were seized from his apartment, and was not convicted of stealing the English horn, as he provided a receipt that showed that he had purchased the item from a thrift store.

 

And yet the Homewood Police Department – which stored and ostensibly continues to store the items seized in the raid – did not return the horn or any other items to Hightower. More than nine years later, he has yet to even lay eyes on any of the possessions that were taken from him.

Unfortunately, the raids on Ranelli’s business and Hightower’s apartment are not isolated incidents. They are just a couple of many similar cases that have taken place in Alabama and across the U.S. in recent years, according to Joseph Tully, a California criminal lawyer with expertise in civil asset forfeitures.

Long used in major criminal busts as a means to confiscate money and possessions obtained by illegal means, civil asset forfeiture impacts thousands of Americans each year and has become the subject of intense national and local scrutiny over the past decade.

 

The ability of law enforcement agencies to use such tactics to take people’s assets and property almost at will “lends itself to abuse,” Tully, who describes cases like Ranelli’s as “theft,” said.

 

“It’s really hard to fight the system. If it was a private citizen who stole your things, you could go get your things, or in the olden days you could get your shotgun and pay the thief a visit and say, ‘give me my stuff back.’ But you can’t do that in this case because it’s the police.”

 

In fiscal year 2016, law enforcement agencies in Alabama seized more than $2.2 million worth of “assets that represent the proceeds of, or were used to facilitate federal crimes,” according to its annual report to Congress. In fiscal 2014, the total value of such assets seized by law enforcement in the state was more than $4.9 million.

That recent drop is the local manifestation of a nationwide reduction in the use of civil asset forfeiture as public awareness and outcry over its widespread use has grown in recent years, according to experts. The tactic is still regularly deployed, impacting dozens of Alabamians each year. But the tide is turning. Fourteen states, from New Mexico to Connecticut, have passed laws in recent years to stop police from seizing property absent a criminal conviction.

“The pendulum is starting to swing but I wouldn’t say that it has been swinging back the other way for too long,” Tully said. “State and local governments are starting to act … Law enforcement officers are coming around a bit and there’s a little bit of a curb in police doing whatever they want.”

 

And on Tuesday, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued a memo directing a deputy to establish a unit aimed at ensuring there are no abuses of a federal policy reinstated by Sessions in July to help state and local law enforcement agencies seize accused criminals’ property.

 

Alabama’s laws, however, still provide the state’s citizens with few protections from the practices, earning the state a “D- for its civil asset forfeiture laws” in a November 2015 report by the Institute for Justice, a Virginia nonprofit advocacy law firm.

 

Alabama laws stack the deck against victims of asset forfeiture by establishing a “low bar to forfeit” and not requiring a conviction to do so; offering “limited protections for innocent third-party property owners”; and letting “100% of forfeiture proceeds go to law enforcement,” the report stated.

The irony here, of course, is that we live in a country where the police can show up to any “Regular Joe’s” apartment on any given day and legally confiscate all of his stuff but James Comey couldn’t even manage to interview a material witness in the Hillary email investigation without first granting them an immunity deal.  Seems fair…

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

Authored by Anthony Gockowski via CampusReform.org,

A socialist student group at Iowa State University has repeatedly made threatening comments about conservatives on social media, but the school says the comments are protected speech.

In one recent tweet, the school’s Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA) chapter called for the hanging and extermination of all “capitalists.”

“The left has done a good job radicalizing juggalos, weebs, furries, but I will not rest until ‘hXc’ stands for hang+Xterminate capitalists,” the group wrote in an October 4 tweet that has since been deleted.

After students brought the tweet to attention of the university, it replied via twitter by stating “this falls under free speech” and then offering available “resources” to student if they “feel threatened or harassed.”

Nor is this the first time that YDSA has posted threatening tweets, such as a September 30 tweet in which the club endorsed “shooting” President Trump.

“COMRADES: stay away from needle drugs! The only dope worth shooting is in the oval office rn [right now],” the group tweeted, though it subsequently deleted that post, as well.

Notably, YDSA is an officially registered student organization at the university, making it one that is “consistent with the mission and culture of the university,” according to the expectations for registered student groups.

While the university did not respond to Campus Reform’s request for comment, one student asserted that YDSA has a long-established pattern of making vitriolic remarks about conservatives.

“Overall, the club has had many hateful tweets against capitalism and capitalists, with the occasional directly-threatening tweet as shown above,” student Michael Fredrickson told Campus Reform.

“If this was a conservative group, all hell would break loose. It wouldn’t be allowed. Making them delete tweets isn’t going to do anything,” a recent graduate of the university commented on Twitter.

“Why isn’t the school doing something? This sounds like a threat to students on campus and in the Ames area. How is this allowed?”

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

Authored by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

Until the American public ceases bickering amongst itself along Democratic and Republican or “left” vs. “right” lines, we’ll continue to be divided and conquered by authoritarians who wield tremendous power throughout both sides of the traditional political spectrum.

This isn’t to say there aren’t real, meaningful differences between those who classify themselves on the “left” or the “right,” but it is to say there’s a much bigger battle afoot and nothing’s going to get better until we frame the new political reality for what it is. The most significant, existential struggle at play in these modern United States is a battle between Liberty and Authoritarianism, and it’s extremely important you know where you stand.

While the entire Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution is crucial to our civil liberties, no right is more significant than the First Amendment. If we lose freedom of speech, it’s game over for our society, and we have to understand that authoritarians on both the “right” and “left” are taking shots at freedom of speech as I write this. As such, differences between “right” and “left” should be deemphasized because if we lose the First Amendment, we lose everything.

A major political realignment is not simply a good idea, it’s absolutely crucial to the survival of a thriving civilization here in the U.S. The historical struggle we face today is not Democrat vs. Republican, or right vs. left, but Liberty vs. Authoritarianism.

Let’s get started by highlighting an extremely creepy proposal recently published, titled, Fool Me Once: The Case for Government Regulation of “Fake News.” One of the authors is Ann M. Ravel, who was previously a Democratic Commissioner on the Federal Election Commission (FEC).

For the most part, the proposal outlines how social media should be regulated in order to track and categorize how advertisements on the platforms are created and distributed. It’s not until the end that the authors’ more Orwellian objectives become apparent. They write:

Government regulations to help voters avoid spreading disinformation

Educate social media users. Social media users can unintentionally spread disinformation when they interact with it in their newsfeeds. Depending on their security settings, their entire online social network can see items that they interact with (by “liking” or commenting), even if they are expressing their opposition to the content. Social media users should not interact with disinformation in their feeds at all (aside from flagging it for review by third party fact checkers). Government should require platforms to regularly remind social media users about not interacting with disinformation.

 

Similarly, after a social media user clicks “share” on a disputed item (if the platforms do not remove them and only label them as disputed), government can require that the user be reminded of the definition of libel against a public figure. Libel of public figures requires “actual malice”, defined as knowledge of falsity or reckless disregard for the truth. Sharing an item that has been flagged as untrue might trigger liability under libel laws.

 

Nudge social media users to not view disputed content. Lawmakers should require platforms to provide an opt-in (or, more weakly, opt-out) system for viewing disputed content and periodically remind users of their options. We think the courts should uphold this as a constitutional regulation of political speech, but we acknowledge that it is a closer question than the more straightforward disclosure regulations above. The most analogous cases are to commercial speech cases (AdChoices and Do Not Call Registry, which was upheld). Commercial speech receives less protection than political speech.

Think about how creepy all of that is. They want social media companies to warn its users when they’re apparently interacting with “disinformation,” which I assume government will enthusiastically define at a later date. Even worse, a simple warning isn’t enough for them, the authors actually want social media companies to warn citizens they might be exposed to libel laws if they share a particular piece of content.

As such, it becomes crystal clear that when it comes to libel laws some Democrats have a lot more in common with Donald Trump than they’d like you to believe. Which basically proves my point — there’s a lot more agreement between authoritarians on the “right” and the “left” than meets the eye. Both types want the power to control what you see, what you read and how you think. Don’t let political labels fool you, anti-free speech is anti-free speech whether it comes from a Democrat or a Republican. The real battle is Liberty vs. Authoritarianism.

If that’s not creepy enough, let’s take a look at what’s currently happening at Facebook. From the Bloomberg article, Facebook Is Looking for Employees With National Security Clearances:

Facebook Inc. is looking to hire people who have national security clearances, a move the company thinks is necessary to prevent foreign powers from manipulating future elections through its social network, according to a person familiar with the matter.

 

Workers with such clearance can access information classified by the U.S. government. Facebook plans to use these people — and their ability to receive government information about potential threats — to search more proactively for questionable social media campaigns ahead of elections, according to the person, who asked not to be identified because the information is sensitive. A Facebook spokesman declined to comment.

 

Job candidates like this are often former government and intelligence officials or contractors. The status can carry over to private-sector jobs, as long as the position still requires access to sensitive information. Previously granted clearances become inactive when intelligence workers leave government employment, but they can be reactivated on Facebook’s behalf, the person said.

Facebook is about to be swarming with CIA personnel, assuming it isn’t already.

Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said last month that Facebook plans to add more than 250 people across its teams that deal with security and safety for the social network and to more than double the team working on election integrity. He also said the company would seek to work more closely with government officials to get information on what to investigate ahead of elections.

 

It’s common for private companies, such as military contractors, information technology and engineering firms, to hire employees with U.S. government-issued security clearance. Candidates with top-secret clearance have been in high demand for years.

 

These types of employees are needed when private companies interact and share information back and forth with government agencies. If Facebook is going to cooperate with intelligence agencies to identify potentially problematic ads and share that information with the government, it will likely need workers with security clearance.

I’m not sure how to describe the above, but free market capitalism it’s definitely not.

Moving along, this post wouldn’t be complete without pointing out how much Donald Trump, and in particular his deranged Attorney General Jeff Sessions, despises the First Amendment. Here’s some of what he had to say on the topic yesterday.

From The Hill:

Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Wednesday said he could not make a “blanket commitment” to not putting journalists in jail.

 

During testimony in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) asked Sessions if he could pledge to not place “reporters in jail for doing their jobs.”

 

“Well, I don’t know that I can make a blanket commitment to that effect. But I will say this, we have not taken any aggressive action against the media at this point,” Sessions replied.

 

“But we have matters that involve the most serious national security issues that put our country at risk,” he said, “and we will utilize the authorities that we have legally and constitutionally if we have to.”

 

The comments from Sessions come after President Trump, unhappy with a story published by NBC News, said last week that network licenses should be challenged. While the major networks do not have licenses themselves, their local affiliates do.

Finally, I want to provide the following tweets in case you’re still in denial regarding Trump’s authoritarian nature and his clear determination to launch more wars in the Middle East.

A lot of you voted for Trump because you knew Hillary was a disaster and so you held out some hope he’d be better. I get it. This isn’t about lecturing anybody about how much of a con Trump is, it’s about asking you to accept reality and be part of a political realignment which must be birthed into existence.

We need to recognize that the battle is much bigger than you’ve been taught. It’s not Democrat vs. Republican or right vs. left, it’s Liberty vs. Authoritarianism, and if we don’t accept this and come together, we’ll lose everything.

*  *  *

If you liked this article and enjoy my work, consider becoming a monthly Patron, or visit our Support Page to show your appreciation for independent content creators.

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

In 2010, shortly after Hillary Clinton assumed her position as Secretary of State in the Obama administration, the FBI broke up a deep-cover Russian spy ring that had been operating in the U.S. for decades.  The operation, code named “Ghost Stories,” was a huge bust for the FBI that handed the U.S. intelligence community 10 highly trained, deep-cover, Russian spies presumably with immensely valuable insights into Russia’s covert operations in the homeland.  All of which is why its so confounding that Hillary, as Secretary of State, “worked so feverishly” to retun them all to Moscow posthaste rather than exploit their intelligence value to the fullest extent possible.

As the Daily Caller points out today, the FBI’s bust couldn’t have come at a worse time for the Clintons as it came literally the day before Bill Clinton delivered a $500,000 speech in Moscow on behalf of a Russian bank with an interest in securing approval of the controversial Uranium One deal…oh the tangled webs…

For a decade, the FBI ran an operation called Ghost Stories to monitor and rip apart a deep-cover Russian agent network. Ghost Stories tracked a ring Russian spies who lived between Boston and Washington, D.C., under false identities. It was one of the FBI’s most elaborate and successful counterintelligence operations in history.

 

Under the code name Operation Ghost Stories, the FBI had been working the ring for a decade. Its targets had burrowed in along the Acela Corridor between Boston, New York, and Washington DC. They lived normal daily lives as Americans to attend universities, run businesses, marry, and conceive and raise children to infiltrate society and subvert government institutions. One of the SVR agents had stolen the identity of a six week-old Canadian baby who had died in 1963. That prompted the Ghost Stories code name. The ring inspired the FX network’s television series, “The Americans.”

 

After the FBI arrested 10 of the spies in June, 2010, Secretary of State Clinton worked feverishly to return the Russian agents to Moscow in a hastily arranged, lopsided deal with Putin.

 

It all happened as the uranium deal was in play: An arrangement to provide Moscow’s state Rosatom nuclear agency with 20 percent of American uranium capacity, with $145,000,000 to pour into the Clinton Family Foundation and its projects.

 

For the Clintons, the FBI’s biggest counterintelligence bust in history couldn’t have come at a worse time.

 

The day the FBI arrested the Russian agents, on June 28, 2010, the day before the secretary of state’s husband, Bill Clinton, was to give a speech in Moscow. A Kremlin-connected investment bank, Renaissance Capital, paid the former president $500,000 for the hour-long appearance.

Making Clinton’s decision to expel the captured spies even more confounding, was evidence that Hillary was perhaps one of the biggest targets of the Russian spy operation as agent Lidiya Guryeva, or Cynthia Murphy as she was known in her fake American life, tracked her daily movements and even moved to Washington D.C. along with Hillary in 2009. 

From New York, SVR agent Lidiya Guryeva had Clinton in her sights. Guryeva had a real-life job, under the assumed name Cynthia Murphy, as vice president of a high-end tax services company in lower Manhattan. Guryeva’s prime targets, FBI evidence and later news reports show, were Clinton and no fewer than five members of her inner circle.

 

Guryeva was far more important than a fellow agent would become the most famous member of the spy ring. The publicity would go to Anna Vasilyevna Kushchenko, who after her arrest would be become a glamourous spy princess under her married name, Anna Chapman.

 

While the FBI’s unclassified information is vague, it is clear that Guryeva’s target was an early Obama administration member from New York who handled foreign policy after having run for high-level public office. Clinton is the only person fitting that description.

 

Clinton became secretary of state on January 21, 2009. Two weeks later, on February 3, Guryeva sent an encrypted message to the SVR’s Moscow Center. The agent reported “several work-related meetings” with a New York-based “financier” who was “prominent in politics,” an “active fundraiser” for a major political party whose name the FBI redacted, and “a personal friend” of an Obama cabinet official whom the FBI did not publicly identify. Guryeva told her bosses that she would seek to use that personal friend to “provide” inside information on American foreign policy and the White House, and invite her to major political events.

 

Guryeva and her husband would sell their New Jersey house and follow Clinton to the nation’s capital. There, she could get a job with a Washington, DC-based company or policy shop. A tasking message dated October 18, 2009, from Moscow Center sought agents to seek out information “unknown publicly but revealed in private by sources close to State Department, Government, major think tanks.”

 

As the FBI told the court, “the SVR requested information on the U.S. position with respect to a new Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, Afghanistan, and Iran’s nuclear program.” Moscow Center specifically asked Guryeva for intelligence concerning “approaches and ideas” of what the FBI called “four names of sub-cabinet United States foreign policy officials, omitted,” meaning that all four were deputies to Secretary Clinton whose identities had been redacted.

 Hillary Clinton was mining Kremlin cash for her personal benefit while secretary of state, at the exact time Putin’s SVR spies were targeting her and penetrating her inner circle. She had every personal motivation to make the spy problem disappear and deny that she had been a target.

Of course, given that the Clintons were on the verge of securing a windfall of donations for their “Clinton Foundation,” which came shortly after the Uranium One deal was completed just a few months later, among other Russian-based schemes to enrich her friends and family (described below), it seems Hillary was forced to choose between exploiting an intelligence treasure chest of information for the benefit of the country at large or covering up yet another scandal that would potentially disrupt her family’s personal self-enrichment schemes…

Clinton pledged at Foggy Bottom to “reset” relations with the Putin-controlled regime. She blamed the former George W. Bush administration for the bad feelings. To the Kremlin’s relief, she opposed what would become the Magnitsky Act to sanction Russian criminal oligarchs and regime figures. Weeks into her tenure as secretary, she told Russian television, “our goal is to help strengthen Russia.”

 

She immediately used her position as America’s top diplomat to pour Russia-related money into her family foundation. One of her earliest acts as secretary of state was personally to authorize the State Department to arrange for 28 American tech CEOs and venture capitalists – 17 of them Clinton Foundation donors – to visit a Russian high-tech hub called Skolkovo. With Skolkovo, the SVR doesn’t need to steal when it can arrange legal purchases. The US military calls Skolkovo “an overt alternative to clandestine industrial espionage.” The Skolkovo visit, which reportedly began as a Clinton Foundation initiative, occurred in May, 2010, a month before the arrests.

 

Four days before the FBI would break up the ring, on June 24, Obama personally met with his Russian counterpart, Dmitry Medvedev, to coordinate billions of dollars in deals with Kremlin-affiliated businesses. Putin held power behind the scenes as prime minister, between his terms as president.

…guess which path she chose…

Clinton didn’t want leverage. She wanted the issue to go away. She toiled feverishly to get the 10 Ghost Stories spies back to Moscow as quickly as possible. She accepted whatever Putin would give her to pass off as a face-saving swap.

 

She folded America’s strong hand of cards. The US had ten relatively young, highly trained Russian spies in custody with immense, fresh knowledge of SVR statecraft. A normal secretary of state would bide her time and get the best deal.

 

The State Department coordinated quickly with the Kremlin to return the spies in a lopsided swap over a busy Fourth of July weekend, when few in Washington were paying attention.

 

In return, the US accepted an SVR officer who had been an American double agent, an open-source researcher whom Amnesty International considered a political prisoner, a Russian military intelligence colonel who spied for the British, and an elderly ex-KGB man from Soviet times whom not even a Communist court convicted of treason.

All of which, as the Daily Caller notes, raises several questions: Precisely what did the FBI know about Russia’s spy service targeting Hillary Clinton and her inner circle? Why did Clinton deny through spokespersons that she had been a Russian target? Why did she work so feverishly to get the spies out of the United States and back to Russia? Why has the FBI leadership not been more vocal in touting one of its greatest counterintelligence successes ever? And why did nobody in the FBI leadership raise this issue during the 2016 Russian election meddling controversy?

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