Tag: news

Watch Live: Chicago Protesters Hope To Shut Down O’Hare Airport Over Gun Violence

Anti-violence protesters frustrated with Chicago gun violence are planning to march on a section of the Kennedy Expressway near O’Hare International Airport at noon Monday – the third such attempt to disrupt a major city roadway since July – in an effort to shut down access to O’Hare International Airport,

The march’s organizer, the Rev. Gregory Livingston, said Monday morning that he didn’t know how many protesters would show up. “Enough to shut the highway down,” he said quoted by the Chicago Tribune.

If enough people show up, the protest could lead to major travel disruptions on the holiday weekend at the nation’s second-busiest airport. Livingston shared an image on Twitter on Sunday laying out his demands as part of the effort. He is calling for legislation that requires 20% of the city’s workforce to be African-American; greater investment on the city’s South and West sides; resources for black-led anti-violence initiatives.

The demonstrators have also called for the resignation of mayor Rahm Emanuel, who is seeking a third term in the February 2019 city election.

The marchers have been protesting the city’s unrelenting gun violence. So far this year, more than 2,000 people have been shot in Chicago, which is fewer people than were shot around this time last year, but still more than in other recent years, according to Tribune data.

Livingston explained that his demands are about desegregating people and resources: “Segregation is a tool of racism that indoctrinates one group with irrational fears and dehumanizes another.”

Major David Byrd, spokesman for the Illinois State Police, told USA Today that authorities will prevent the protest from interrupting traffic, but did not detail how marchers would be stopped from entering the highway.

About 15 Chicago Police Department bicycle officers were near the protest scene Monday morning, as were suburban, state and city police squad cars. Tow trucks and state dump trucks lined a ramp onto the Kennedy. “At this time, we expect travel to remain uninterrupted,” said Illinois State Police Lt. Matt Boerwinkle on Friday. He declined to discuss specific plans to deal with the march along Interstate 90.

However, as of 11:15 a.m., the Tribune reports that police far outnumbered a small continent of a dozen or so protesters gathered on a street corner in 85-degree heat. Protesters carries signs that read “North Side against white supremacy,” and “White silence = violence.”

The Labor Day protest comes on the heels of an Aug. 2 march that briefly blocked Lake Shore Drive, then made its way through Lakeview and culminated in a short demonstration outside Wrigley Field. The summer’s largest protest took place July 7, when demonstrators led by the Rev. Michael Pfleger marched in the traffic lanes of the Dan Ryan Expressway.

Thousands walked on the Dan Ryan Expressway in an anti-violence march led by the Rev. Michael Pfleger and other religious leaders on Saturday, July 7, 2018. (Abel Uribe / Chicago Tribune)

On Monday, Livingston noted that police didn’t make arrests at the earlier marches. “They didn’t make any arrests on the Ryan,” he said. “What is so special about the Kennedy?”

Chicago police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said marching near O’Hare makes it “a much different situation” than the Dan Ryan event. In the runup to that protest, state police threatened arrests, only to allow marchers partial access to the highway. On-scene negotiations between Pfleger and Chicago police led to the eventual shutdown of all northbound lanes. The resulting shutdown led to a social media spat between Gov. Bruce Rauner and Mayor Rahm Emanuel, with the governor expressing his displeasure that the march caused “chaos.”

While Guglielmi said that Chicago police tried to work with Livingston on several possible locations for Monday’s march that would not have potential ramifications on O’Hare, Livingston stuck with his Kennedy Expressway route. If marchers try to block traffic on Interstate 190 at the entrance to O’Hare or otherwise attempt to block traffic, that could have federal implications and lead to arrests, Guglielmi said.

Livingston, of New Hope Baptist Church in West Humboldt Park, is an unsuccessful aldermanic candidate who also put together the Lake Shore Drive demonstration, which drew about 200 people. He said earlier that it’s important to keep the protest momentum going — even when people might want to sit back and relax on a three-day holiday weekend.

“Look, no one wants to be on the expressway on Labor Day, but … I pray to God that this holiday weekend is peaceful,” Livingston said. “We are just tired of all the mayhem, and we want to work to make things better. That’s really about it.”

According to USA Today there have been 368 murders in the city of Chicago through August, a 20% decrease through the same period last year. The city attracted national headlines last month after one of its most violent weekends of the year left 12 people dead and 62 wounded.

According to the Hill, President Trump, who has publicly feuded with Emanuel and may even side with today’s protest group, took notice of the violence and blamed it on city leadership.

“That’s bad stuff happening, and probably I guess you have to take from the leadership,” Trump said. “There’s no reason in a million years that something like that should be happening in Chicago.”

Live feed from the event courtesy of WGN TV:

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“It’s A Mystery”: Jack Dorsey “Frustrating” Twitter With Unpredictable Decrees Over Censorship

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has been causing some internal strife at the company’s San Francisco headquarters with last minute decisions on who gets censored from the social media platform, reports the Wall Street Journal, citing people familiar with the matter. 

Just who decides whether a user gets kicked off the site?

To some Twitter users—and even some employees—it is a mystery.

In policing content on the site and punishing bad actors, Twitter relies primarily on its users to report abuses and has a consistent set of policies so that decisions aren’t made by just one person, its executives say.

Yet, in some cases, Mr. Dorsey has weighed in on content decisions at the last minute or after they were made, sometimes resulting in changes and frustrating other executives and employees, according to people familiar with the matter. –WSJ

Key among Dorsey’s “frustrating” decisions was his alleged call not to ban Infowars founder Alex Jones – overruling a decision by Twitter employees amid a seemingly coordinated multi-platform shunning of the controversial host. Twitter disputes this account, and says Dorsey wasn’t involved in those discussions. 

According to the Journal’s sources, Dorsey weighs in “on the most high-profile cases,” while the company says he participates in discussions about accounts but isn’t the final word. 

“Any suggestion that Jack made or overruled any of these decisions is completely and totally false,” Twitter’s chief legal officer, Vijaya Gadde, said in a statement. “Our service can only operate fairly if it’s run through consistent application of our rules, rather than the personal views of any executive, including our CEO.” –WSJ

Dorsey will appear on Wednesday alongside Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and, upon last report, a “Google representative,” to discuss how the social media giants police “bad actors” (we presume means “deplorables” and “WikiLeaks supporters” among others). The companies will also discuss how “foreign actors can use the social-media platforms to spread misinformation and propaganda.” 

Later Wednesday, Dorsey will be questioned alone over whether Twitter is silencing conservatives. Several users have noted that the ubiquitous “QFD” shadowbans seemingly only applied to right-wing voices have recently been lifted – suggesting it was done ahead of Dorsey’s appearance. Perhaps an FEC complaint brought by Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) also had something to do with it. 

As the Journal reports, Twitter has taken a different approach than Facebook in policing “hateful” content. While Facebook has hired thousands of people to review content in the last couple of years, Twitter has far less staff and relies mostly on automation – typically only investigating harassment and abuse reported by users. Some have suggested this makes Twitter’s platform far easier to game by coordinated groups of political ideologues. 

After a user flags a tweet, the company says a user-services team first decides whether to elevate a complaint to Twitter’s trust and safety team. The company doesn’t disclose how many of its more than 3,500 employees are on each team or the number of contractors it hires to moderate content. On a case-by-case basis, the trust and safety team may ask Ms. Gadde to participate. –WSJ

Over the next few weeks, Twitter will begin showing a picture of a tombstone in place of tweets which have been taken down, as a way to signal that company policy has been violated and the user censored. 

Dorsey, meanwhile, has been promising that his company will do a better job of policing content. “We moved too slow. We are fixing,” he told one Twitter user in January. 

In October of that year, he tweeted: “We decided to take a more aggressive stance in our rules and how we enforce them.”

And then last month: “Truth is we’ve been terrible at explaining our decisions in the past. We’re fixing that.”  –WSJ

Frustrating employees

Several current and former employees tell the Journal that Dorsey’s “philosophical, arm’s-length leadership styler” has “at times complicated decision-making,” as he splits his time between Twitter and Square Inc., the payments company he founded. 

He generally delegates to his subordinates, but at times projects stall because either no one knows what he thinks or he doesn’t pull the trigger, according to people familiar with the matter. For example, Twitter took almost two years to decide how to expand beyond its 140-character limit for tweets, a delay many employees attribute to Mr. Dorsey’s indecision.  –WSJ

Twitter CFO Ned Seagal admitted that decision-making is one of the company’s weak points, telling analysts in May that Twitter is “getting better amongst ourselves at both making decisions and executing on them.” 

Following the Alex Jones incident, Twitter VP of global communications, Brandon Borrman, along with other executives said that Dorsey wasn’t involved in any of the decision-making since there really wasn’t one to make. Apparently nobody had flagged Jones’s account as inappropriate, despite having “posted hate-speech posts to other social media sites.” Borrman says he notified Dorsey in a text message that the company wasn’t planning to ban Jones (only to give him a seven-day suspension on August 14 after CNN flagged several tweets to the company. Several Twitter employees saw that has a “half measure” and complained that they hadn’t taken more decisive action against Jones. 

When Dorsey reinstated one of the accounts linked to White Nationalist Richard Spencer, several employees were upset about the decision. 

After Twitter reinstated one of Mr. Spencer’s accounts at Mr. Dorsey’s insistence the following month, many employees were upset about the decision, according to a person involved in the decision. At the company’s next all-hands meeting known as “Tea Time,” one employee asked about it. Mr. Dorsey instead turned the question over to Ms. Gadde, that person said.

In an interview, Mr. Spencer says he doesn’t recall being told by Twitter why his accounts had been shut down until Twitter offered to reinstate one of them. He said he found their reasoning “a bit incredible,” but “I went with it because it’s a public space, it’s the way everyone can issue their own little press release.” –WSJ

Perhaps Dorsey will expound on his thought process Wednesday. In the meantime, we’ll sadly be deprived of Zuckbot clips since he apparently didn’t have the balls to show up. And to think he was considering a run for President…

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11 Rage-Inducing Facts About America’s Wildly Out-Of-Control Student Loan Debt Bubble

Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

Higher education has become one of the biggest money-making scams in America...

We tell all of our young people that if they want to have a bright future, they must go to college.  This message is relentlessly pounded into their heads for their first 18 years, and so by the time high school graduation rolls around for many of them it would be unthinkable to do anything else.  And instead of doing a cost/benefit analysis on various schools, we tell our young people to go to the best college that they can possibly get into and to not worry about what it will cost.  We assure them that a great job will be there after they graduate and that great job will allow them to easily pay off any student loans that they have accumulated.  Of course most college graduates don’t end up getting great jobs, but many of them do end up being financially crippled for decades by student loan debt.

In all of American history, we have never seen anything quite like this student loan debt bubble.  Since 2007, the total amount of student loan debt in America has nearly tripled.

Let me repeat that again.

Since 2007, the total amount of student loan debt in America has nearly tripled.

But of course the quality of college education has not tripled over that time.  Instead, it has progressively gotten worse.  At this point most college courses have been so “dumbed down” that the family pet could pass them.  If you would like to look into this more, you can find a list of 37 of the most idiotic college courses in America right here.

These days, most college courses do not require any actual writing.  Instead, your performance is judged by a series of “tests” consisting of multiple choice, fill in the blank, and true/false questions.  And the questions are usually ridiculously easy, because most of our high school graduates need to take remedial courses in basic skills when they get to college.

I spent eight years at public universities, and the quality of education that I received was a joke, and that was many years ago.  Now the quality of education has deteriorated so dramatically that most college degrees are essentially worthless from a practical standpoint, but for many professions you still need that “piece of paper” in order to “qualify” for certain jobs.

So the scam continues, and thousands upon thousands of “administrators”, “diversity specialists”, “career counselors” and “college presidents” are taking home massively bloated salaries at our expense.  Beautiful new lecture halls, residential complexes and sports stadiums are going up at colleges and universities all over the country, and textbook publishers are laughing all the way to the bank.

If everything but the basics was stripped away, the cost of actually delivering a college education to students would be quite low.  In fact, most learning could be done over the Internet.

But instead, the “college education industry” has convinced all of us that we desperately need their services, and that we shouldn’t care about the price.

Of course many of our young people are filled with regret once they get out into the real world and they realize that student loan debt is going to financially cripple them for the rest of their lives.

At this moment, America is drowning in more student loan debt than ever before.  The following are 11 rage-inducing facts about America’s wildly out of control student loan debt bubble…

#1 The student loan debt bubble has now grown to 1.4 trillion dollars.

#2 In 2007, the total amount of student loan debt in the U.S. was just 545 billion dollars.

#3 Over the previous ten years, student loan debt has grown by a staggering 176 percent.

#4 Americans now owe more on their student loans than they do on their credit cards.

#5 In 2003, student loan debt accounted for just 3.3 percent of all household debt.  Today, that number has grown to 10.5 percent.

#6 The current student loan 90-day delinquency rate is 11.2 percent.

#7 30 percent of all student loans in the United States are either in “deferment” or “forbearance”.  The most common reason a loan is placed into one of those categories is because the borrower cannot pay.

#8 It is being projected that a whopping 40 percent all student loan borrowers will default on their loans by 2023.

#9 From 2007 through 2017, “college tuition costs jumped 63 percent, school housing surged 51 percent and the price of textbooks by 88 percent.”

#10 In 2001, 18.6 percent of all U.S. households led by someone in the 18 to 34 age bracket were carrying household debt.  Today, that number has jumped to 44.8 percent.

#11 Each year, more than a million Americans default on their student loans.

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Tesla Misses August Model 3 Production Goal

Confirming last week’s report that Tesla Model 3 production has been approximately 30% below the company own guidance, Tesla has missed its 6,000 Model 3 per week production goal that it set out to achieve by the end of August, according to a new report out by the Tesla-friendly bloggers over at Electrek. 

Despite missing the August bogey, the obligatory “carrot on a string” followed immediately, with the article repeating that Tesla is on track to meet its overall third-quarter production goals. Tesla has been targeting total production of 50,000 to 55,000 Model 3 vehicles for the third quarter.

Furthermore, we are still only about two-thirds through the quarter, so there is still plenty of time for force majeure events like cardboard fires, saboteur ex employees, or the CEO stopping the assembly line in order to headbutt more of his vehicles. These are among the various “acts of God” that one just can’t predict, and a lot can happen over four weeks.

Tesla reportedly built about 6,400 vehicles during the last seven days of August. However, only 4,300 of those turned out to be Model 3s – and there is no word how many of these vehicles may have to be “reworked” and how many of them were ready to be delivered to customers. Recall that according to a recent Business Insider article only 14% of 5,000 Model 3s that came off the line during the last week of June didn’t need to be reworked in some way.

Regardless of how many vehicles were able to go to customers and how many were “factory gated”, the 4,300 number is far behind the company‘s goal of 6,000 units per week by the end of August.

While admitting the shortfall in Model 3 output without stating the reasons (which could be on the supply side, or worse, in response to sliding demand), the Electrek article then qualifies that statement by stating that production for the quarter is simply “trending toward Tesla’s quarterly goal”.

It notes that the company has produced about 53,000 total vehicles and over 34,700 Model 3 vehicles in Q3, as of the start of September. To meet the low end of its target range, the company would need to make 15,300 Model 3 vehicles before the end of September, or around 3,825 Model 3s per week.

Despite the company reportedly being on track to reach this goal, it is still trying to exceed it by increasing its production to 6,000 units per week.

Meanwhile, stop us if you’ve heard this one before: Electrek concludes that innocent sounding “production issues” over the past two months not only explain the company missing its August target, but also explain delivery delays for Model 3s. Finally, the pro-Tesla blog makes what could arguably be its most important declaration, in stating “As a reminder production doesn’t equal deliveries.” We wonder if that line will be used against them at some point in the future.

Finally, the biggest question – what is going on with Model 3 demand – remains unanswered.

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Emerging Market Crisis: Nothing New Under The Sun

Authored by Jonathan Rochford via Narrow Road Capital,

The events overtaking Argentina and Turkey in recent months are textbook cases of an emerging market crisis. This article reviews the build-up, the break-down, the responses and who else is at risk.

“That which has been is that which will be, and that which has been done is that which will be done. So there is nothing new under the sun.”

– Ecclesiastes 1:9.

The events overtaking Argentina and Turkey in recent months are textbook cases of an emerging market crisis. Both countries have racked up substantial amounts of foreign currency debt despite having limited foreign currency reserves, have high rates of inflation and are running budget deficits. Their situations are the same as Brazil in 2015, the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s and the Latin American crisis of the early 1980s. This article reviews the build-up for Argentina and Turkey, the break-down, the responses and who else is at risk.

The Build-Up

Any review of emerging market crises has to begin with the lenders not the borrowers. There will always be countries, companies and consumers that want to borrow excessively and live it up, but they can only do so if there is a willing lender. This time around, ample liquidity from central bank quantitative easing and yield chasing fuelled by supressed interest rates kick started a global borrowing binge. There’s evidence of this right across developed and emerging market debt, as well as in government, corporate, consumer and financial sector debt.

Now that the US is normalizing its monetary policy (quantitative tightening and raising interest rates) and Europe is reducing its quantitative easing, global liquidity is being reduced and yield chasing has pulled back slightly. Emerging market debt, European high yield debt and Chinese shadow banking are the first sectors to show this turnaround. These three sectors all started with high levels of risk and minimal compensation, an unsustainable imbalance.

Turkey’s pathway to problems was fairly traditional. It had the largest foreign currency debt to GDP ratio amongst emerging countries and a high rate of credit growth, leaving it poorly placed if lenders wanted out. The failed coup in 2016 strengthened the political hand of its President and allowed him to proceed with popular but damaging economic policies. The threat of trade sanctions from the US further spooked investors and accelerated the downward trend.

Argentina’s pathway was less traditional yet still exhibited many of the same risk factors. It defaulted on its debts in 2001 and sought help from the IMF. It cleared the IMF loans in 2006. It undertook a series of debt restructurings in 2005 and 2010; but a small group of holdout creditors remained. The unresolved debt blocked Argentina from returning to international lending markets until a settlement was reached in 2016. The next eighteen months saw Argentina make up for lost time with a series of jumbo bond issues, including US$2.75 billion of 100 year bonds. The buyers of this bond were comfortable lending for 100 years to a country that has defaulted eight times in the previous 200 years.

The Breakdown

Argentina’s currency has been progressively devaluing over time as is expected for a country with very high levels of inflation. However, this accelerated in May as it became clear that a recession is likely this year. The exchange rate jumped from 20.5 Peso to the US dollar to just over 30 in three months. A recent bond sale failed to achieve the targeted volume, a far cry from the heavily oversubscribed bond issues of 2016 and 2017.

Turkey has seen the Lira jump from 3.5 to the US Dollar a year ago to as high as 7 this month. The ten year bond yield is now over 21% with inflation running at 16%. Standard and Poor’s downgraded Turkey’s credit rating to B+ this month and is forecasting a recession in the next year. 

The Responses

The difference in responses between Argentina and Turkey will make for an interesting case study in the years to come. Argentina is following the textbook solution of getting help from the IMF. In return for the US$50 billion standby facility, Argentina is tasked with implementing a range of measures to balance its budget, reduce inflation and clearly delineate the government (fiscal policy) from the central bank (monetary policy). This has included pushing the key central bank rate to 45%, a level that should hammer down inflation and stabilise the currency but with the side effect of a recession or substantially reduced GDP growth.

Turkey is taking an unusual route in trying to avoid an IMF bailout. The country’s strongman President wants to continue to run budget deficits and is in no mood to accept IMF spending restrictions. The central bank rate has been increased from 8% to 17.75%, but the threat that the President will intervene and push rates down has spooked investors. Qatar has agreed to provide US$15 billion of support which has led to a small turnaround in the Lira. However, without vital economic reforms it’s likely to be a temporary respite to Turkey’s troubles. In recent years Venezuela and Zimbabwe both refused to seek IMF assistance with their economies spectacularly failing.

Who Else is at Risk?

At a simple level, Pakistan and South Africa appear to be the other emerging markets most at risk. However, as the table below from a Bank for International Settlements report shows many emerging market countries have had material increases in their use of US dollar debt in the last five years. The report also found more than half of the international lending to emerging Asian economies was “hot money” with maturities of less than one year.

Pakistan’s foreign currency reserves have dwindled at the same time as its budget deficits have lifted government debt levels. The newly elected government has made promises to increase spending that international markets and the IMF won’t support. The government is hoping that by selling bonds to the Pakistani diaspora and obtaining further funding from China it can avoid the IMF’s much needed medicine.

South Africa stands out for its profoundly negative current account balance and consistently increasing government debt to GDP ratio. A 2017 paper from Deloitte mapped out how South Africa’s financial and political situation bears a striking similarity to Brazil’s before its breakdown in 2015. Ongoing corruption, plans to nationalise the central bank and the wider emerging market sell-off are scaring off lenders and pushing bond yields higher.

At a wider level, Greece and Italy both have troublesome characteristics. Whilst these two countries are generally considered developed economies it can be argued that their falling GDP per capita levels and weak institutions could push them back into emerging market classification. Greece’s GDP per capita is already well below South Korea and Taiwan, who are generally categorised as emerging markets. Both Italy and Greece have large amounts of debt in a currency they don’t control, very large debt to GDP ratios, weak banks burdened by problem loans and governments that are resistant to economic reforms. Neither has any plan to reduce to their debt levels, other than giving their lenders a haircut. 

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Police In Norway Investigating “Strange Disappearance” Of Julian Assange Associate 

Norwegian police have launched an investigation into the “strange disappearance” of Arjen Kamphuis – a Dutch citizen and associate of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. 

Kamphuis, an avid hiker, disappeared after leaving his hotel in Bodø, Norway on August 20 according to the WikiLeaks Twitter account. He was set to fly out of Trondheim on August 22 after a 10-hour train ride, “suggesting that he disappeared in within hours in Bodø, Trondheim or on the train.” 

A website set up to gather information on the missing person says: “He is 47 years old, 1.78 meters tall and has a normal posture. He was usually dressed in black and carrying his black backpack. He is an avid hiker.”

There have reportedly been two unconfirmed possible sightings, one in Alesund, Norway, and the other in Ribe, Denmark. –DW

Norwegian police began investigating Kamphuis’s disappearance  on Sunday. 

“We have started an investigation,” police spokesman Tommy Bech told AFP, adding that so far they have “no clue” where the Dutch citizen is and “would not speculate about what may have happened to him.”

Until Kamphuis is officially reported missing in the Netherlands, Norwegian police cannot legally access his cellphone’s tracking data, according to the Norwegian Verdens Gang tabloid. The Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, meanwhile, said that it is aware of the disappearance after a friend of Kamphuis and privacy activist Ancilla van de Leest sent a tweet about his disappearance. 

The first report of Kamphuis’s disappearance was reported by De Leest on Friday, writing that Kamphuis was set to board a train from Bodø to Trondheim.

Speculation over what’s happened to the Assange associate has ranged from “going dark” for a clandestine WikiLeaks mission, to killed by government operatives. 

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“Scabs” Are The True Labor Day Heroes

Authored by Gary Galles via The Mises Institute,

As long as I can remember, unions have attacked as “scabs” those willing to accept work for wages and conditions those unions reject, even if it involves crossing union picket lines. In fact, that usage goes back centuries, from English slang for a mean, low, “scurvy” rascal or scoundrel. As Stephanie Smith put it in Household Words:

From blemish…to strikebreaker, the history of the word scab…shows a displacement of meaning from the visceral or physical to the moral register…Just as a scab is a physical lesion, the strikebreaking scab disfigures the social body of labor.

Those union attacks have included some real “fist in your face” examples, such as the following, generally attributed to Jack London:

After God finished the rattlesnake, the toad, the vampire, He had some awful substance left with which He made a scab…No man has a right to scab so long as there is a pool of water to drown his carcass in, or a rope long enough to hang his body with.

Few current examples can match that level of vituperation. But “scab” remains near the surface. For instance, when Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner responded to a 2017 AFSCME strike authorization with a website enabling citizens to apply for government positions, the result was “cries of ‘SCABS’ filling the public airways.”

Union rhetoric asserts that scabs are harmful to workers. But they offer no proof of harm. So as we come to another Labor Day of union claims to advance workers’ interests, perhaps that name-calling should be considered more carefully.

Debaters know to advance their most convincing argument. However, calling someone a scab is an ad hominem (against the man) attack, not an argument. It amounts to “You are bad, therefore your argument/position is wrong.” But “bad” people sometimes have better arguments than “good” people, who can sometimes argue nonsense. Consequently, asserting badness implies nothing about the rightness of any particular argument/position. Given that yelling “scab” is the most frequent, and often only, “argument” unions offer against such people, one could conclude they have no real argument.

Further, even if someone considers you bad, you still retain your unalienable rights from the Declaration of Independence and a guarantee of equal treatment under the law from the Constitution. Those must be equally held by all. Yet denying others the ability to offer their labor services in competition with union members who reject their employers’ offers denies both their economic liberty and their right to equal treatment.

It also denies employers’ rights. An employer holds the right to decide who it will hire or continue to employ. Prior to signing a contract, a worker has no claim to a job. Workers acquire ownership interests in their jobs only if their contract creates one. But unions treat a certification vote as giving members rights to their jobs that would be violated if a scab took them. How did workers, without any individual ownership rights to deny competition from others, conjure up those rights right for themselves as a union, overriding employers’ rights?

In essence, the basis of calling someone a scab is only their willingness to work for less than union demands. But is that bad? If a store offers you lower prices for what you want to buy, you don’t call them names. You seek out bargains, which are the fruit of competition. So what makes monopoly good when your union labor is involved, but bad otherwise? (remember, the Wagner Act had to define labor as not a commodity, or antitrust laws would have made unions illegal). The only reason is narrow self- interest. You don’t want anything to undermine the current terms of your job, even if it was extracted with government-delegated coercive union power. But such a possibility only threatens unions, not workers’ interests.

In fact, it is special treatment of unions, not scabs, that harms workers. At the higher wages unions extract, fewer jobs are available. Those crowded out of such opportunities go elsewhere, increasing labor supply for non-union jobs. That lowers the earnings of existing workers as well as entrants seeking such jobs, which makes up the vast majority of workers. Because higher costs result as well, workers also pay higher prices as consumers and taxpayers.

In other words, scabs should not be demeaned. They are part of the solution to unions’ bleeding compensation from employers beyond what workers could get in an open labor market.

Blame and defamation belongs instead to unions whose “assault and battery” cuts against employers’ interests create “scabs” of those whose only offense is seeking an open market for their livelihoods.

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Italy’s Populist Leaders Challenge Brussels, Vow Much More Spending

After an initial burst of panic selling in May, Italian bond yields have continued to drift higher – the yield on the Italian 10Y is now well above the May highs – as the coalition government’s fiscal plans and expensive election promises have remained a key focus for investors and Brussels all summer, spooking bondholders who have continued to quietly offload their holdings of Italian bonds amid fears of an angry response from the EU to Italy’s “budget busting” ways.

Such fears will only grow after Italy’s populist leaders rejected the finance minister’s attempts to reassure investors that Italy won’t engage in a spending spree, and insisted voters’ needs must come before European spending constraints. Speaking at an event in Italy on Sunday, deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini said that next year’s budget will see the deficit almost double to “touch” the EU’s 3% deficit ceiling.

Quoted by Bloomberg, he said that the government will “try to respect all the hurdles Europe imposes, but the well-being of Italian citizens comes first,” he said.

Reminding markets that Italy remains Europe’s bond market flashpoint, on Friday Fitch Ratings cited budget concerns as it changed its outlook on Italy to negative from stable, even as it kept the overall rating unchanged, just two notches above junk.

In response to the Fitch announcement, Italian bonds initially rose on Monday with the 10Y yield 3 bps lower at 3.19 percent on relief that Fitch’s verdict wasn’t more severe. However, the early gains were quickly erased and the yield on 10Ys quickly rose back to multi-year highs, as the market continues to fret over the government’s budget plans and the growing sense of discord within the government.

To that point, in an interview with La Repubblica, finance minister Giovanni Tria said he is fighting to contain public spending and said that bonds will rise further when investors see the details of the 2019 budget. “Budget stability will be respected,” he said, although he probably did not expect Salvini to dash optimistic outlook within hours.

Tria, an economics professor drafted at a late stage of the coalition negotiations, has been trying to rein in the ambitions of Salvini and Luigi Di Maio of the anti-establishment Five Star Movement, though as Bloomberg notes, “he lacks the political muscle of the two populist party leaders.” The Italian government is due to set new public-finance and economic-growth targets by Sept. 27 and submit a draft budget to the European Commission by Oct. 15.

Salvini’s view of the 2019 deficit – a product of his generous campaign promises – is in stark contrast with the targets set by Italy’s previous government. They saw the budget gap narrowing to 0.8 percent of GDP from 1.6 percent this year. Tria told Bloomberg News in July that his aim is not to worsen the structural-budget situation and possibly to improve it. Still, he’s also said that slower-than-expected economic growth means the deficit is heading toward 1.2% in 2019.

In terms of what is priced in by the market, Deutsche Bank analysts wrote over the weekend that a twin deficit approach suggests that the market is pricing 2.25% deficits in 2019 (with a bias towards even higher implied deficits). This means that as more details leak and as Salvini’s ambition of “touching” the 3% deficit limit is realized, even more pain await Italian bondholders, especially with the ECB’s QE – that traditional backstop to Italian bonds and only real buyer of BTPs in recent years – set to fade away in just four months.

Meanwhile, Goldman said Italian assets will remain volatile as divisions within the administration cast doubt on the government’s commitment to lowering public debt. “Agreeing on such a budget will likely be a difficult and controversial process, with the risks skewed to a less favorable outcome,’’ said Silvia Ardagna, a fixed-income strategist at the bank.

Finally, confirming that it will be virtually impossible to reconcile the budget limits of Brussles, the wishes of Italian bondholders, and the spending needs of the government, Di Maio, Italy’s other deputy prime minister, doubled down on campaign pledges, saying at a rally in Tuscany that the so-called citizen’s income remains among the government’s top priorities. The citizen’s income, a relief plan for the poor that critics have dubbed an expensive handout, will be implemented in 2019. It is unclear if that will be the straw that breaks the budget’s 3% back, but looking at Italian bonds, the number of investors willing to take the risk is declining sharply.

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Gorsuch’s Record Was More ‘Liberal’ Than Kennedy’s This Term: New at Reason

Here’s a curious fact about the U.S. Supreme Court term that concluded in June: Trump-appointed Justice Neil Gorsuch racked up a more “liberal” voting record than Justice Anthony Kennedy.

Kennedy did not join the Court’s liberal bloc in a single 5–4 decision in the entire 2017–2018 sitting. That’s unusual. In previous terms, Kennedy’s fifth vote decided such contentious issues as gay marriage and abortion.

Gorsuch, on the other hand, did side with the liberal bloc in Sessions v. Dimaya, which struck down a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act dealing with the power of the federal government to deport any alien, including a lawful permanent resident, convicted of an “aggravated felony.” Justice Elena Kagan wrote for the majority, joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, and Sonia Sotomayor. Gorsuch, who concurred in part and joined in the judgment, provided the tie-breaking fifth vote, writes Reason‘s Damon Root.

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SocGen: This Feels Similar To Where We Were 20 Years Ago

Over the weekend, we highlighted that even as the US stock market has been grinding relentlessly higher, the big story of the summer have been the “rolling bear markets” observed across numerous asset classes, with EM equities, copper and European banks all experiencing bear markets, while EM FX carry has unwound almost all of its post-2016 gains.

As Bank of America showed, non-US equity markets have underperformed the US the most over a 3-month period since the global financial crisis, and notes that “the underperformance of non-US equities to US equities is reaching levels normally only exceeded in bear markets.”

In discussions with clients, Bank of America said that they remain confused because at the same time as the US stock market continues undaunted to new record highs, spurred by the ongoing US economic growth and stellar corporate earnings, the abovementioned bear markets are almost always associated with recessions, so “the key decision investors have to make is whether a recession is looming or whether the cycle has a good deal further to run”, or in other words – how close are we to the end of the cycle?

And while we won’t know the answer until well after the fact, with developed markets still an oasis of stability, attention predictably remains very much in focus on Emerging Markets, with several countries – especially Turkey, Argentina, Indonesia and Brazil – seeing rapid currency devaluation and some requiring financial assistance.

Still, as SocGen’s Andrew Lapthone writes, “equity market performance cannot be described as a disaster. Yes, Emerging markets lost 2.9% last month (in USD) and have been hovering around bear-market territory for the last couple of weeks, but performance looks orderly, albeit negative.”

Or maybe not, because if one scratches beneath the surface, “the metrics look increasingly weak” according to the SocGen strategist, and notes that equal-weighted average EM performance has fallen around 10% in the last three months, whilst DM is flat (left chart below). Importantly, as it tends to be self-feeding, the worst performing quintile of EM stocks (see bottom-right chart) is down around 30% in USD (or 26% in local).

And while we already discussed the near record divergence between US and non-US stocks as Emerging market angst continues to not be felt in the headline indices, it is clearly visible in the more economic sensitive Value space. Lapthorne, whose core competency is tracking market factors, highlights that value factors tend to reflect distress wherever it may be and have a strong negative correlation to bonds and a positive correlation to global economic sentiment.

So not only has Value performance been particularly weak over the last 3 months (and bonds have been stronger), but Value stocks are valued at recessionary levels.

In short, “the Nasdaq is flying higher whilst Value and Emerging markets languish.” Which, the SocGen strategist concludes, “for those with longer memories may feel not too dissimilar to where we were 20 years ago.”

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