Sep 22

Today’s News 22nd September 2018

  • Kavanaugh Accuser Misses 10PM Deadline, Grassley Grants Demand For One More Day

    Update: Grassley has granted Ford an additional day to decide on next week’s testimony. 

    In several late Friday tweets, Grassley wrote:

    “Five times now we hv granted extension for Dr Ford to decide if she wants to proceed w her desire stated one wk ago that she wants to tell senate her story  Dr Ford if u changed ur mind say so so we can move on I want to hear ur testimony. Come to us or we to u…

    … 

    Judge Kavanaugh I just granted another extension to Dr Ford to decide if she wants to proceed w the statement she made last week to testify to the senate She shld decide so we can move on I want to hear her. I hope u understand. It’s not my normal approach to b indecisive

    …

    With all the extensions we give Dr Ford to decide if she still wants to testify to the Senate I feel like I’m playing 2nd trombone in the judiciary orchestra and Schumer is the conductor“

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    After several intense days of negotiations between Congressional GOP and Christine Blasey Ford’s legal team this week, the woman who at the 11th hour accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault over 35 years ago missed a 10PM deadline set by Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley. Instead, she has demanded an additional day to make up her mind after her attorney, Debra Katz, called the 10:00 p.m. deadline “arbitrary.” 

    Katz made the demand at the end of a strongly worded letter accusing the Judiciary committee of “aggressive and artificial deadlines” which caused “unwarranted anxiety and stress on Dr. Ford.” 

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    The ball is now firmly in Grassley’s court in what is sure to be a nonstop weekend of rigorous debate over whether the Judiciary Committee Chairman will accede to Ford’s latest demand.  

    Earlier in the day, Grassley drew a hard line in the sand, allowing Ford’s to decide by 10 p.m. whether or not she would appear for testimony next Wednesday, while Ford’s team shot back a list of demands, including a Thursday testimony – and that the Committee of “11 old white men” question her instead of outside legal counsel. 

    Ford’s allies are doing their best to demonize Grassley and his committee of “11 old white men” for browbeating an alleged sexual assault victim into a rushed decision.

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    That said, many on the right have pointed out that Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) waited over 6 weeks to report Ford’s allegation to the FBI or any other authorities for investigation. Having employed several former FBI on her staff along with an alleged Chinese spy, Feinstein would have likely known of a number of flagpoles to fly Ford’s accusation up to begin the investigative process. 

    Congressional GOP agreed to skip the outside lawyer. 

    Perhaps another factor bolstering GOP steadfastness on the issue is the Friday revalation that Ford’s current political adviser – former Obama and Clinton White House official Ricky Seidman, had allegedly been working on Ford’s situation since July – outlining a plan on a newly released audio tape to use the allegation as political fodder to derail Kavanaugh’s confirmation, and if unsuccessful, at least politically harm Republicans during midterms. 

    One might think that Ford, an ostensibly intelligent PhD, would have considered the likelihood of her eventual Congressional testimony the moment she decided to involve California legislators in her claims prior to the 11th hour of Kavanaugh’s confirmation. 

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    Was Ford’s account leaked?

    Meanwhile, per the Washington Post, Ford now claims that Ed Whelan – a former Scalia clerk who posited a controversial theory that Ford may have mistaken Kavanaugh for a high school Doppelgänger, was creeping her Linkedin page before her accusation became public knowledge – suggesting that someone leaked her name to him. The White House denied the suggestion on Friday, stating that “neither Kavanaugh nor anyone in the White House gave Ford’s name to Whelan before it was disclosed by the Post.” 

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    And here we are, buckle up for a long weekend… 

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  • A Path To War? China Cancels US Trade Talks As 'Skirmish' Escalates

    Following a surge in Chinese, European, and much of the US equity markets this week amid hopes that the so-called ‘trade skirmish’ was less ‘war-like’ than expected, China just dropped an early Saturday morning (local time) tape bomb that is sure to resurrect ‘trade war’ talk.

    After President Trump slapped a fresh round of tariffs on Chinese goods, targeting 10 percent duties on $200 billion of goods; the two camps were scheduled to meet in order to dial back tensions. As we noted earlier in the week, China had ‘downgraded’ the team with a mid-level delegation from China due to travel to the U.S. capital to pave the way for Vice Premier Liu’s visit.

    That was what sparked hope that this was just a trade skirmish (as Jamie Dimon attempted to play down), sending stocks soaring all week.

    However, that is all over now.

    The Journal  just reported on Friday that, according to sources, China has rescinded the proposals to send two delegations to Washington.

    Chinese officials have said such pressure tactics wouldn’t induce them to cooperate.

    By declining to participate in the talks, the people said, Beijing is following up on its pledge to avoid negotiating under threat.

    “Everything the U.S. does hasn’t given any impression of sincerity and goodwill,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said at a press briefing Friday.

    “We hope that the U.S. side will take measures to correct its mistakes.”

    *  *  *

    The timing of this news, after the exuberant equity week, is also noteworthy as it follows Ray Dalio’s, founder of Bridgewater, warnings that the current trade tensions mirror those of the 1930s:

    “I think that the 1935-40 period is most analogous to the current period and that it is worth reflecting on what happened then when thinking about US-Chinese relations now. 

    To be clear, I’m not saying that we are on a path to a shooting war, but I am saying that we have to watch what path we are on, given these cause-effect relationships that history has taught us and that are described in the template. This excerpt describes how the economic and political conditions of the late 1930s evolved into the wars that followed. “

    Read more here…

    We have discussed this case-effect relation before…

    Get ready for some Sunday night futures fun and games…

  • Hold The Front Page: The Reporters Are Missing And Journalism Is Dead

    Authored by John Pilger via ConsortiumNews.com,

    So much of mainstream journalism has descended to the level of a cult-like formula of bias, hearsay and omission. Subjectivism is all; slogans and outrage are proof enough. What matters is ‘perception’…

    The death of Robert Parry earlier this year felt like a farewell to the age of the reporter. Parry was “a trailblazer for independent journalism”, wrote Seymour Hersh, with whom he shared much in common.

    Hersh revealed the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and the secret bombing of Cambodia, Parry exposed Iran-Contra, a drugs and gun-running conspiracy that led to the White House. In 2016, they separately produced compelling evidence that the Assad government in Syria had not used chemical weapons. They were not forgiven.

    Driven from the “mainstream”, Hersh must publish his work outside the United States. Parry set up his own independent news website Consortium News, where, in a final piece following a stroke, he referred to journalism’s veneration of “approved opinions” while “unapproved evidence is brushed aside or disparaged regardless of its quality.”

    Although journalism was always a loose extension of establishment power, something has changed in recent years. Dissent tolerated when I joined a national newspaper in Britain in the 1960s has regressed to a metaphoric underground as liberal capitalism moves towards a form of corporate dictatorship.

    This is a seismic shift, with journalists policing the new “groupthink”, as Parry called it, dispensing its myths and distractions, pursuing its enemies.

    Witness the witch-hunts against refugees and immigrants, the willful abandonment by the “MeToo” zealots of our oldest freedom, presumption of innocence, the anti-Russia racism and anti-Brexit hysteria, the growing anti-China campaign and the suppression of a warning of world war.

    With many if not most independent journalists barred or ejected from the “mainstream”, a corner of the Internet has become a vital source of disclosure and evidence-based analysis: true journalism sites such as wikileaks.org, consortiumnews.com, wsws.org, truthdig.com, globalresearch.org, counterpunch.org and informationclearinghouse.com are required reading for those trying to make sense of a world in which science and technology advance wondrously while political and economic life in the fearful “democracies” regress behind a media facade of narcissistic spectacle.

    Propaganda Blitz

    In Britain, just one website offers consistently independent media criticism. This is the remarkable Media Lens — remarkable partly because its founders and editors as well as its only writers, David Edwards and David Cromwell, since 2001 have concentrated their gaze not on the usual suspects, the Tory press, but the paragons of reputable liberal journalism: the BBC, The Guardian, Channel 4 News.

    Cromwell and Edwards (The Ghandi Foundation)

    Their method is simple. Meticulous in their research, they are respectful and polite when they ask why a journalist why he or she produced such a one-sided report, or failed to disclose essential facts or promoted discredited myths.

    The replies they receive are often defensive, at times abusive; some are hysterical, as if they have pushed back a screen on a protected species.

    I would say Media Lens has shattered a silence about corporate journalism. Like Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman in Manufacturing Consent, they represent a Fifth Estate that deconstructs and demystifies the media’s power.

    What is especially interesting about them is that neither is a journalist. David Edwards is a former teacher, David Cromwell is an oceanographer. Yet, their understanding of the morality of journalism — a term rarely used; let’s call it true objectivity — is a bracing quality of their online Media Lens dispatches.

    I think their work is heroic and I would place a copy of their just published book, Propaganda Blitz, in every journalism school that services the corporate system, as they all do.

    Take the chapter, Dismantling the National Health Service, in which Edwards and Cromwell describe the critical part played by journalists in the crisis facing Britain’s pioneering health service.

    The NHS crisis is the product of a political and media construct known as “austerity”, with its deceitful, weasel language of “efficiency savings”  (the BBC term for slashing public expenditure) and “hard choices” (the willful destruction of the premises of civilized life in modern Britain).

    “Austerity” is an invention. Britain is a rich country with a debt owed by its crooked banks, not its people. The resources that would comfortably fund the National Health Service have been stolen in broad daylight by the few allowed to avoid and evade billions in taxes.

    Using a vocabulary of corporate euphemisms, the publicly-funded Health Service is being deliberately run down by free market fanatics, to justify its selling-off. The Labour Party of Jeremy Corbyn may appear to oppose this, but is it? The answer is very likely no. Little of any of this is alluded to in the media, let alone explained.

    Edwards and Cromwell have dissected the 2012 Health and Social Care Act, whose innocuous title belies its dire consequences. Unknown to most of the population, the Act ends the legal obligation of British governments to provide universal free health care: the bedrock on which the NHS was set up following the Second World War. Private companies can now insinuate themselves into the NHS, piece by piece.

    Where, asks Edwards and Cromwell, was the BBC while this momentous Bill was making its way through Parliament? With a statutory commitment to “providing a breadth of view” and to properly inform the public of “matters of public policy,” the BBC never spelt out the threat posed to one of the nation’s most cherished institutions. A BBC headline said: “Bill which gives power to GPs passes.” This was pure state propaganda.

    Media and Iraq Invasion

    Blair: Lawless (Office of Tony Blair)

    There is a striking similarity with the BBC’s coverage of Prime Minister Tony Blair’s lawless invasion of Iraq in 2003, which left a million dead and many more dispossessed. A study by the University of Wales, Cardiff, found that the BBC reflected the government line “overwhelmingly” while relegating reports of civilian suffering. A Media Tenor study placed the BBC at the bottom of a league of western broadcasters in the time they gave to opponents of the invasion. The corporation’s much-vaunted “principle” of impartiality was never a consideration.

    One of the most telling chapters in Propaganda Blitzdescribes the smear campaigns mounted by journalists against dissenters, political mavericks and whistleblowers.

    The Guardian’s campaign against the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is the most disturbing. Assange, whose epic WikiLeaks disclosures brought fame, journalism prizes and largesse to The Guardian, was abandoned when he was no longer useful. He was then subjected to a vituperative – and cowardly — onslaught of a kind I have rarely known.

    With not a penny going to WikiLeaks, a hyped Guardian book led to a lucrative Hollywood movie deal. The book’s authors, Luke Harding and David Leigh, gratuitously described Assange as a “damaged personality” and “callous.” They also disclosed the secret password he had given the paper in confidence, which was designed to protect a digital file containing the U.S. embassy cables.

    With Assange now trapped in the Ecuadorean embassy, Harding, standing among the police outside, gloated on his blog that “Scotland Yard may get the last laugh.”

    The Guardian columnist Suzanne Moore wrote, “I bet Assange is stuffing himself full of flattened guinea pigs. He really is the most massive turd.”

    Moore, who describes herself as a feminist, later complained that, after attacking Assange, she had suffered “vile abuse.” Edwards and Cromwell wrote to her: “That’s a real shame, sorry to hear that. But how would you describe calling someone ‘the most massive turd’? Vile abuse?”

    Moore replied that no, she would not, adding, “I would advise you to stop being so bloody patronizing.” Her former Guardian colleague James Ball wrote, “It’s difficult to imagine what Ecuador’s London embassy smells like more than five and a half years after Julian Assange moved in.”

    Such slow-witted viciousness appeared in a newspaper described by its editor, Katharine Viner, as “thoughtful and progressive.” What is the root of this vindictiveness?  Is it jealousy, a perverse recognition that Assange has achieved more journalistic firsts than his snipers can claim in a lifetime? Is it that he refuses to be “one of us” and shames those who have long sold out the independence of journalism?

    Journalism students should study this to understand that the source of “fake news” is not only trollism, or the likes of Fox News, or Donald Trump, but a journalism self-anointed with a false respectability: a liberal journalism that claims to challenge corrupt state power but, in reality, courts and protects it, and colludes with it. The amorality of the years of Tony Blair, whom The Guardian has failed to rehabilitate, is its echo.

    “[It is] an age in which people yearn for new ideas and fresh alternatives,” wrote Katharine Viner. Her political writer Jonathan Freedland dismissed the yearning of young people who supported the modest policies of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn as “a form of narcissism.”

    “How did this man ….,” brayed the Guardian‘s Zoe Williams, “get on the ballot in the first place?”  A choir of the paper’s precocious windbags joined in, thereafter queuing to fall on their blunt swords when Corbyn came close to winning the 2017 general election in spite of the media.

    Complex stories are reported to a cult-like formula of bias, hearsay and omission: Brexit, Venezuela, Russia, Syria. On Syria, only the investigations of a group of independent journalists have countered this, revealing the network of Anglo-American backing of jihadists in Syria, including those related to ISIS.

    Leni Riefenstahl (r.) (Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images)

    Supported by a “psyops” campaign funded by the British Foreign Office and the U.S. Agency for International Development, the aim is to hoodwink the Western public and speed the overthrow of the government in Damascus, regardless of the medieval alternative and the risk of war with Russia.

    The Syria Campaign, set up by a New York PR agency called Purpose, funds a group known as the White Helmets, who claim falsely to be “Syria Civil Defense” and are seen uncritically on TV news and social media, apparently rescuing the victims of bombing, which they film and edit themselves, though viewers are unlikely to be told this. George Clooney is a fan.

    The White Helmets are appendages to the jihadists with whom they share addresses. Their media-smart uniforms and equipment are supplied by their Western paymasters. That their exploits are not questioned by major news organizations is an indication of how deep the influence of state-backed PR now runs in the media. As Robert Fisk noted recently, no “mainstream” reporter reports Syria.

    In what is known as a hatchet job, a Guardian reporter based in San Francisco, Olivia Solon, who has never visited Syria, was allowed to smear the substantiated investigative work of journalists Vanessa Beeley and Eva Bartlett on the White Helmets as “propagated online by a network of anti-imperialist activists, conspiracy theorists and trolls with the support of the Russian government.”

    This abuse was published without permitting a single correction, let alone a right-of-reply. The Guardian Comment page was blocked, as Edwards and Cromwell document.  I saw the list of questions Solon sent to Beeley, which reads like a McCarthyite charge sheet — “Have you ever been invited to North Korea?”

    So much of the mainstream has descended to this level. Subjectivism is all; slogans and outrage are proof enough. What matters is the “perception.”

    When he was U.S. commander in Afghanistan, General David Petraeus declared what he called “a war of perception… conducted continuously using the news media.” What really mattered was not the facts but the way the story played in the United States. The undeclared enemy was, as always, an informed and critical public at home.

    Nothing has changed. In the 1970s, I met Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler’s film-maker, whose propaganda mesmerized the German public.

    She told me the “messages” of her films were dependent not on “orders from above”, but on the “submissive void” of an uninformed public.

    “Did that include the liberal, educated bourgeoisie?” I asked.

    “Everyone,” she said. “Propaganda always wins, if you allow it.”

    Propaganda Blitz by David Edwards and David Cromwell is published by Pluto Press.

  • Apple's Mysterious New 'Trust Score' For iPhone Users Leaves Many Unanswered Questions

    Like Facebook (and the Chinese Communist Party) before it, Apple is now assigning users of its products a “trust” score that is based on users’ call and email habits, the Sun reports. The new ratings were added as part of the latest iOS 12 update, as VentureBeat explains.

    Apple’s promise of transparency regarding user data means that any new privacy policy update might reveal that it’s doing something new and weird with your data.

    […]

    Alongside yesterday’s releases of iOS 12, tvOS 12, and watchOS 5, Apple quietly updated some of its iTunes Store terms and privacy disclosures, including one standout provision: It’s now using an abstracted summary of your phone calls or emails as an anti-fraud measure.

    The provision appears in the iTunes store and privacy windows of iOS and tvOS devices. An Apple spokesperson clarified that the score is meant to stop unauthorized iTunes purchases, but as VentureBeat explains, the trust score is unusual for several reasons – not least of which being that users can’t make phone calls or send emails on Apple TVs. Indeed, the only thing Apple customers can say for sure is that the company’s disclosure leaves many unanswered questions.

    Trust

    Aside from the obvious inconsistencies surrounding the Apple TV, it’s also unclear how recording and tracking the number of calls or emails made from an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch will help Apple verify a user’s identity. One would think, as Venturebeat points out, that Apple could simply rely on serial numbers or SIM cards. Perhaps the company feels that verifying the device isn’t enough, and that it needs to go further to make sure the person using the device is the same. Still, exactly how the company will go about accomplishing this is suspiciously unclear.

    And what if a user wants to review their trust score? Well, that’s too bad, because Apple will refuse to disclose it, even if federal investigators demand it.

    Facebook’s trust score is intended to separate “credible” reports of flagged posts from the rest. In Apple’s case, the trust score is much more nebulous, which begs the question: Is this just a ruse to allow Apple to cull more valuable user data that it can then monetize without triggering a public backlash? Or is there something more nefarious at play?

     

  • Median Household Wealth In America Is Going Nowhere

    Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,

    Today’s headline at The Wall Street Journal looks wonderful: “U.S. Household Net Worth Neared $107 Trillion in Second Quarter.” The journal is reporting on a new report from the Federal Reserve.

    Unfortunately, the fact that the aggregate national net worth is up doesn’t tell us much about how Americans are faring right now.

    The “$107 trillion” number is just one big number of all assets added up minus debts. Marketwatch sums it up:

    It’s important to stress that the Fed report doesn’t represent the experience for the typical household — this is a report about the aggregate. A separate Fed survey from 2016 showed a little more than half of all families owned stocks, while about two-thirds of households owned homes.

    For the sizable portion of Americans who don’t own homes or a substantial amount of stocks, the report only illustrates, yet again, that asset price inflation mostly benefits people who already own a sizable amount of assets. If you’re a young person looking to build a portfolio — or a prospective first-time home buyer, you’re facing some very high prices right now.

    Moreover, not even every homeowner benefits, since the data suggests that homeowners in stylish housing markets are the primary beneficiaries of home price inflation. Americans who own property in less fashionable cities in flyover country aren’t seeing nearly as much growth in their net worth.

    This is familiar territory for those who have been monitoring the inflationary practices of central banks over the past decade. Asset price inflation is great for those who already own plenty of assets. Everyone else isn’t quite so lucky. In other words, the rich are getting richer faster. The non-rich are probably just holding steady.

    How About All Households?

    It looks like those with plenty of stocks and real estate are doing well. On the other hand, median household net worth in the United States doesn’t look so good.

    According to a 2017 report by Edward Wolff, median net worth in the United States, at least as late as 2016, was nowhere near returning to where it had been before the last financial crisis. In fact, in 2016, median net worth was about where it had been in 1983, more than three decades ago:

    In this report, Wolff was updating previous research from 2014 which showed that median wealth in 2013 was still at 1969 levels:

    Median wealth has increased significantly from 2013 to 2016, but as of 2016 it remained down 33 percent from where it was in 2007.

    It’s possible that in 2018, a full decade after the financial crisis, net wealth has recovered to its previous peak. We don’t know. But, even if median wealth finally recovers around 2018, what will happen to median wealth in the next recession if stock prices and home prices decline?

    As Wolff shows in his report, the majority of wealth held by Americans (56 percent) is in the form of a principal residence, financial securities, and pension funds – which are themselves largely composed of financial securities.

    Will it also take a decade to recover from the next recession? Let’s hope not. But if the past decade is any indicator, we could be looking at 20 years of sideways movement in median wealth if something doesn’t change. Sure, overall aggregate wealth will continue to increase as the wealthy continue to see ongoing increases in the prices of their assets. Central-bank-fueled asset-price inflation will contribute to this.

    Moreover, inflationary monetary policy directly benefits the politically well-connected at the expense of others, as recently explained by Thorsten Polleit:

    There is an additional severe problem with central banks’ fiat money: It affects income and wealth distribution, and it does so in a non-merit-based, anti-free market way. To understand this, we have to consider that if and when the quantity of money increases in an economy, the prices of different goods will be affected at different points in time and to a different degree. In other words: A rise in the quantity of money changes — and necessarily so — peoples’ relative income and wealth position.

    The early receivers of the new money will be the beneficiaries, for they can purchase goods at still unchanged prices with their fresh money. As the new money is passed from hand to hand, prices are rising. The late receivers are put at a disadvantage: They can purchase only goods at elevated prices with their new money. In other words: The early receivers of the new money get rich(er), the late receivers get poor(er). Needless to say, those who do not receive any of the new money will be worst off.

    If we want to see better growth in wealth for ordinary people, it’s clear that the “stimulus” strategies of the past decade aren’t cutting it.

    In fact, according to banking-industry researcher Karen Petrou, “Post-crisis [i.e., post-2008] monetary and regulatory policy had an unintended but nonetheless dramatic impact on the income and wealth divides.” In a recent interview with Petrou at Bloomberg, Petrou explains how new banking regulations have driven banks toward catering to the wealthy:

    [C]apital requirements imposed after the banking crisis make it a lot more expensive for banks to do a startup small-business loan than go into wealth management. Startup loans are riskier than wealth management, of course, but the capital costs have become prohibitive, and banks don’t lose money on purpose. … it’s basically impossible for banks to make mortgage loans to anyone but wealthy customers.

    This wouldn’t be the first time that government regulations benefit a small number of wealthy at the expense of everyone else. But combine this with inflationary monetary policy and we get at least a few insights into why median wealth in the United States is so sluggish.

  • Religious Texans Beat Back "Robot Brothel" Amid Fears It Will Become Rapist Training Ground 

    Texas sex doll enthusiasts may be in for a blow after a religious group mounted a vigorous petition to block a Toronto-based “robot brothel” from setting up shop in Houston, reports ABC 13. 

    “Our biggest concern is that this sex brothel with robots is gonna train men to become rapists,” said Micah Gamboah with the religious anti sex-trafficking group, Elijah Rising. “What’s next? Is it child robots? Where’s the line? Where is the boundary?“

    It seems like the law is on the brothel’s side, however, after a stiff penal regulation against such businesses was ruled unconstitutional a decade ago. 

    “As disgusting as some people may find it, I think under the law, it’s legal,” said attorney Steve Shellist, adding “As we sit here today those types of products being sold, used or rented is legal.” 

    Toronto’s Kinkys Dolls is expanding their offerings of synthetic companions which are “ready for you in every position you would choose, they lubed warm [sic] and ready to play.” 

    Their dolls – at least in Canada, go for $80 for 30 minutes of pure silicone ecstasy – though they do offer an outcall service for $250 an hour which we imagine includes some guy who waits in a van for you to “do your thing.” 

    Each “doll” has a name, a look and price tag in the thousands of dollars, if you want to buy one. But customers can also “rent before they buy,” getting a room and a doll of their choice where they can “play and have fun” …”fulfilling fantasies without limitations,” according to the website.

    According to their website: 

    1. You come to our location, we located in a private location ,
    we created a condo space inside a warehouse, where you will find everything you need.
     
    2. You Choose the doll that you’ll like out of our selection (better to chose when you come).
     
    3. You get your room and the doll you like. 
     
    4. Pay and have fun! 

    Gamboa’s group isn’t going to take this lying down, insisting: “We can’t allow these kind of public masturbation businesses to operate in our city.” 

    Perhaps all Elijah Rising needs to do is erect posters showcasing Italy’s closed-down sex doll brothel, which lasted just 9 short days before authorities raided it for breaking Italian laws and concerns that the dolls were improperly cleaned between uses. 

  • This Man's Incredible Story Proves Why Due Process Matters In The Kavanaugh Case

    Submitted by James Miller of The Political Insider

    Somewhere between the creation of the Magna Carta and now, leftists have forgotten why due process matters; and in some cases, such as that of Judge Brett Kavanaugh, they choose to outright ignore the judicial and civil rights put in place by the U.S. Constitution. 

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    In this age of social media justice mobs, the accused are often convicted in the court of public opinion long before any substantial evidence emerges to warrant an investigation or trial. This is certainly true for Kavanaugh. His accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, cannot recall the date of the alleged assault and has no supporting witnesses, yet law professors are ready to ruin his entire life and career. Not because they genuinely believe he’s guilty, but because he’s a pro-life Trump nominee for the Supreme Court.

    It goes without saying: to “sink Kavanaugh even if” Ford’s allegation is untrue is unethical, unconstitutional, and undemocratic. He has a right to due process, and before liberals sharpen their pitchforks any further they would do well to remember what happened to Brian Banks.

    In the summer of 2002, Banks was a highly recruited 16-year-old linebacker at Polytechnic High School in California with plans to play football on a full scholarship to the University of Southern California. However, those plans were destroyed when Banks’s classmate, Wanetta Gibson, claimed that Banks had dragged her into a stairway at their high school and raped her.

    Gibson’s claim was false, but it was Banks’s word against hers. Banks had two options: go to trial and risk spending 41 years-to-life in prison, or take a plea deal that included five years in prison, five years probation, and registering as a sex offender. Banks accepted the plea deal under the counsel of his lawyer, who told him that he stood no chance at trial because the all-white jury would “automatically assume” he was guilty because he was a “big, black teenager.”

    Gibson and her mother subsequently sued the Long Beach Unified School District and won a $1.5 million settlement. It wasn’t until nearly a decade later, long after Banks’s promising football career had already been tanked, that Gibson admitted she’d fabricated the entire story.

    Following Gibson’s confession, Banks was exonerated with the help of the California Innocence Project. Hopeful to get his life back on track, he played for Las Vegas Locomotives of the now-defunct United Football League in 2012, and signed with the Atlanta Falcons in 2013. But while Banks finally received justice, he will never get back the years or the prospective pro football career that Gibson selfishly stole from him.

    Banks’s story is timely, and it serves as a powerful warning to anyone too eager to condemn those accused of sexual assault. In fact, a film about Banks’s ordeal, Brian Banks, is set to premiere at the Los Angeles Film Festival next week.

    Perhaps all the #MeToo Hollywood elites and their liberal friends should attend the screening – and keep Kavanaugh in their minds as they watch.

  • Visualizing Over 50 Years Of US Government Discretionary Spending In 60 Seconds

    Every year, the U.S. government spends trillions of dollars on a wide range of budgetary items.

    While the largest categories of spending, such as entitlement programs or debt interest, do not offer lawmakers a lot of flexibility, as Visual Capitalist’s Jeff Desjardins notes, the government does get to decide how discretionary spending – about $1.3 trillion in FY2019 – gets put to use.

    DISCRETIONARY SPENDING OVER TIME

    Today’s animation from data scientist Will Geary shows the evolution of U.S. discretionary spending from 1963 until today:

    The U.S. budget is generally divided into three main categories:

    Discretionary Spending: This category, depicted in the animation, is the optional part of the budgetary equation – it’s the aspect that most people talk about, as the allocation of funding towards different things like defense, education, and transportation can be changed by lawmakers.

    Mandatory Spending: Also known as entitlement spending, this category includes funding for programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. It’s called mandatory spending because the government legally is committed to fulfilling these obligations, and it exists outside of the normal budget appropriations process.

    Net Interest: This category is for payments on the national debt, also something that is necessary unless the country is willing to default on these obligations.

    DISCRETIONARY SPENDING TODAY

    As the animation shows, after adjusting for inflation (using 2009 dollars), discretionary spending has doubled since 1963.

    In 1963, which was essentially the height of the Cold War, the U.S. was spending 73% on the military to make up the vast majority of the $547 billion (2009 dollars) in discretionary spending.

    Meanwhile, in Fiscal Year 2019, the government has allocated $1.3 trillion (today’s dollars) to the budget:

    Things haven’t changed much since 1963 in that defense still comprises the majority of spending – in fact, the only recent time periods where U.S. defense spending fell below 50% were roughly between 1977-1981 and 1999-2004.

    American spending on defense dwarfs all other countries, but there are other categories that make up decent chunks of the discretionary budget as well.

    While they seem small on the above chart, transportation (7%), education (7%), and veteran benefits (6%) are all actually categories that receive over $70 billion of annual funding – still a significant piece of change.

  • Wasting The Lehman Crisis: What Was Not Saved Was The Economy

    Authored by Michael Hudson via Counterpunch.org,

    Today’s financial malaise for pension funds, state and local budgets and underemployment is largely a result of the 2008 bailout, not the crash. What was saved was not only the banks – or more to the point, as Sheila Bair pointed out, their bondholders – but the financial overhead that continues to burden today’s economy.

    Also saved was the idea that the economy needs to keep the financial sector solvent by an exponential growth of new debt – and, when that does not suffice, by government purchase of stocks and bonds to support the balance sheets of the wealthiest layer of society. The internal contradiction in this policy is that debt deflation has become so overbearing and dysfunctional that it prevents the economy from growing and carrying its debt burden.

    Trying to save the financial overgrowth of debt service by borrowing one’s way out of debt, or by monetary Quantitative Easing re-inflating real estate, stock and bond prices, enables the creditor One Percent to gain, not the indebted 99 Percent in the economy at large. Therefore, from the economy’s vantage point, instead of asking how the banks are to be saved “next time,” the question should be, how should we best let them go under – along with their stockholders, bondholders and uninsured depositors whose hubris imagined that their loans (other peoples’ debts) could go on rising without impoverishing society and preventing creditors from collecting in any event – except from government by gaining control over it.

    A basic principle should be the starting point of any macro analysis: The volume of interest-bearing debt tends to outstrip the economy’s ability to pay. This tendency is inherent in the “magic of compound interest.” The exponential growth of debt expands by its own purely mathematical momentum, independently of the economy’s ability to pay – and faster than the non-financial economy grows.

    The higher the debt/income ratio rises, the more interest, amortization payments and late fees are extracted from the economy. The resulting debt burden slows the economy, causing defaults. That is what happened in 2008, and is accelerating today as debt ratios are rising for corporate debt, state and local debt, and student debt.

    Neither legislators, academics nor the public at large recognize a corollary Second Principle following from the first: An over-indebted economy cannot be saved unless the banks fail. That means writing down the financial claims by the One to Ten Percent – in other words, the net debts owed by the 99 to 90 Percent. Wiping out bad debts involves writing down the “bad savings” that are the counterpart to these debts on the asset side of the balance sheet. Otherwise the economy will suffer debt deflation and austerity.

    “Recovery” since 2008 has been much slower than earlier recoveries because debt deflation is siphoning off more and more personal and corporate income. To make matters worse, the bailout’s policy of Quantitative Easing to re-inflate asset prices has reduced rates of return for pension funds, insurance companies and employee retirement savings. This means that more state and local government income must be diverted to meet retirement commitments.

    Something has to give, and it is not likely to be the savings of the donor class at the top of the economic pyramid. As a result, the economy at large is threatened with an exponentially expanding erosion of disposable income and net worth for most people and companies. Investment managers are warning of a financial meltdown, given today’s historically high price/earnings ratios for stocks and also for rental properties.

    What is not acknowledged is that such a crisis is a precondition for today’s economy to recover from the rising debt/income and debt/GDP ratios that are burdening the United States, Europe and other regions. At least the United States has been able to monetize its budget deficits and subsidize banks to carry its rising debt overhead with yet new debt. The Eurozone has banned budget deficits of over 3 percent of GDP, imposing austerity that leaves the only response to over-indebtedness to be Greek-style austerity: depopulation, shrinking living standards, wipeouts of retirement income and pensions, mortgage defaults, shortening lifespans, and mass selloffs of public infrastructure to foreign financial appropriators.

    None of this was spelled out in the September 15 weekend marking the tenth anniversary of Lehman Brothers’ failure and subsequent rescue of Wall Street. President Obama, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and their fellow financial lobbyists at the Federal Reserve and Justice Department are credited with saving “the economy,” as if their donor class on Wall Street was a good proxy for the economy at large. “Saving the economy from a meltdown” has become the euphemism for saving bondholders and other members of the One Percent from taking losses on their bad loans. The “rescue” is Orwellian doublespeak for expropriating over nine million indebted Americans from their homes, while leaving surviving homeowners saddled with enormous bubble-mortgage payments to the FIRE sector’s owners.

    What has been put in place is not a restoration of traditional status quo, but a reversal of over a century of central bank policy. Failed banks have not been taken into the public domain. They have been enriched far beyond their former levels. The perpetrators of the collapse have been rewarded, not penalized for lending more than could possibly be paid by NINJA borrowers and speculators whose mortgage applications were doctored by systemic fraud at Countrywide, Washington Mutual, Bank of America, Citigroup and their cohorts.

    The $4.3 trillion that could have been used to save debtors was given to the banks and Wall Street firms whose recklessness and outright fraud caused the crisis. The Federal Reserve “cash for trash” swaps with insolvent banks did not restore normalcy or the status quo ante. What occurred was a financial revolution by stealth, reversing the traditional responsibility of creditors to make prudent loans.

    Quantitative Easing saved creditors and the largest stockholders and bondholders by lowering the interest rates by enough to make it profitable for new loans to inflate asset prices on credit. This revived the value of collateral backing bank loans and bondholdings. “Saving” the economy in this way actually sacrificed it. That is why our “recovery” is only “on paper,” a result of calculating GDP to include bank earnings and hypothetical homeowner windfalls as rents are soaring.

    Among Democrats, the most extreme tunnel vision denying that debt is a problem comes from Paul Krugman:

    Writing that “The purely financial aspect of the crisis was basically over by the summer of 2009, ”he criticized what he called the “bizarre Beltway consensus that despite high unemployment and record low interest rates, debt, not jobs, was the real problem.”

    This misses the point that 2009 was the real beginning for most of the nine million homeowners being foreclosed on and evicted from their homes. Consumers found themselves with less income “freely disposable” after paying their monthly FIRE sector nut off the top of their paycheck – housing charges, credit card charges, medical insurance, student debt, FICA withholding and tax withholding. Krugman says that he would have solved the problem by more deficit spending to pump enough money into the economy to enable debtors to keep paying the banks their exponential growth of interest claims.

    We are still living in the destabilized, debt-ridden aftermath of such pro-bank advocacy. In the New Yorker, John Cassidy celebrates a book by Columbia professor Adam Tooze promoting the idea that “the economy” cannot exist without the credit (that is, debt) provided by the financial sector. True enough, but does it follow that rescuing the economy must involve rescuing Wall Street and enriching the banks at the expense of the rest of the economy. That conflation is an Orwellian rhetoric of deception that has been introduced to the discussion of how the economy was “rescued” by locking in today’s Great Debt Deflation.

    At the neoliberal/neocon Brookings Institution, Treasury secretaries Hank Paulson and Tim Geithner joined with the Federal Reserve’s Ben Bernanke to explain that the public simply didn’t understand how successful they all were in saving not only the banks, but non-bank financial institutions. Unlike Sheila Bair, they did not point out that behind these institutions were the bondholders, the One Percent of savers who held the rest of the economy in debt. Bernanke wrote a Financial Timespiece producing junk statistics purporting to show that there was no underlying debt or financial problem at all, merely a “panic.” To paraphrase, he said: “The crisis was all in the mind folks. Nothing to see here. Keep moving on.” It is as if, as Margaret Thatcher liked to insist, There Is No Alternative.

    Can this bailout without debt writedowns really bring prosperity? Can economies achieve growth by “borrowing their way out of debt,” by creating enough new credit to cover the interest charges out of capital gains from the asset-price inflation fueled by new bank credit. That is the logic that has guided the Federal Reserve’s net $4.3 trillion in Quantitative Easing, and the parallel credit creation by the European Central Bank under Mario “Whatever it takes” Draghi. Ellen Brown recently published a review, “Central Banks Have Gone Rogue, Putting Us All at Risk, noting that the ECB has become a major stock buyer. The beneficiaries are the stockholders who are concentrated in the wealthiest percentiles of the population. Governments are not underwriting homeownership or the solvency of labor’s pension plans, but are underwriting the value of collateral backing the savings of the narrow financial class.

    The GDP accounts report the widening gap between low government bond rates and the cost of credit to banks compared to the higher rates paid by mortgage borrowers, credit-card holders and student loan customers as “financial services.” What is extracted from the economy is added to the GDP statistic instead of being treated as a subtrahend. This absurd practice reflects the degree to which Wall Street lobbyists have captured economic statistics. The National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA) have been turned into a vehicle for deception. What is celebrated as growth of the GDP since 2008 has been mainly the growth in financial extraction, along with the health-insurance sector profiting from Obamacare.

    Glenn Hubbard, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors under George W. Bush, uses Orwellian doublethink to pretend that “Debt is Wealth.” He concludes a Wall Street Journal op-ed:

    “An ability to recapitalize banks remains crucial and must be explained to a skeptical Congress and public,” so that wealthy bondholders and speculators will not suffer losses.

    On a brighter side, Adair Turner pokes fun at the “Authoritative experts such as the IMF [who] explained how increased securitisation and trading activity made the financial system more efficient and less risky.” It was as if “options” and hedges can get rid of risk entirely, not shift them onto Wall Street victims such as the naïve German Landesbanks.

    The aim of this week’s disinformation campaign is to prevent popular anger advocating what was done in classical antiquity. The ancients fought civil wars for land redistribution and debt cancellation. Today the demand should be for mortgage writedowns to bring their carrying charges in line with reasonable rent charges, limited to the former normal 25 percent of homeowner income – while rolling back the FICA wage withholding and allied taxes levied to bail out the creditor class.

    An Athenian antecedent to today’s financial takeover

    It is an old story, with a striking parallel in classical Athens. After losing the Peloponnesian war to oligarchic Sparta in 404, a Pinochet-style military junta – the Thirty Tyrants – was installed. During its eight months of terror its members killed a reported 1,500 democratic advocates whose land and other property they grabbed. Advocates of democracy took refuge in Thrace and other neighboring regions.

    After the exiled democratic leaders reconquered Athens, they sought to restore harmony, going so far as to pay off all the debts that the oligarchic junta had run up to Sparta. To top matters, the subsequent 4thcentury obliged Athenian jurors and indeed, mayors in some Greek cities to swear an oath: “I will not allow private debts (chreon idiom) to be cancelled, nor lands nor houses of Athenian citizens to be redistributed.”

    If no such pledge is needed today by public officials, it is because the financial administrators at the Treasury, Federal Reserve and other regulatory agencies already have shown themselves to be so tunnel-visioned from graduate school through their employment history that they can be trusted to find debt writedowns as unthinkable as enforcing laws against criminal financial fraud to punish individuals rather than their institutions. Academia joins in the deception that financial engineering can sustain a geometric growth in debt ad infinitumwithout imposing austerity.The bailout aftermath has demonstrated that corporations are not really  “persons” if they cannot be given jail time.

    The key financial principle is that this self-expansion of interest-bearing debt grows to absorb more and more of the economic surplus. The solution therefore must involve wiping out the excess debt – and savings that have been badly lent. That is what crashes are supposed to do. It was not done in 2008. That is why the status quo was not restored. A vast giveaway to the financial elites occurred, setting the rest of the economy on a road to debt peonage.

    • It would have been nice to have read an article by Sheila Bair explaining the procedures that the FDIC had in place, ready to take over insolvent Citigroup and other banks in similar straits, saving all the insured depositors by taking over these institutions. No doubt as public institutions they would not have indulged in junk mortgages or, for that matter, takeover loans.

    • It would have been nice to hear from Hank Paulson and perhaps Barney Frank on how they tried to get incoming President Obama to write down bad mortgages whose carrying charges were as far above the debtor’s ability to pay as they were above the going rental value for similar properties.

    • It would have been nice to hear a mea culpa from Mr. Obama apologizing for representing the interest of his campaign donors by standing between them and his voters with pitchforks. Even an article by Tim Geithner or Eric Holder on how lucky they felt at getting such high-paying jobs after they left office from the financial sector they had overseen and “regulated.”

    What is needed now is to follow up the primary policy perception that today’s financially dysfunctional economy cannot be saved without a bank crash. That means rolling back the enormous gains that the FIRE sector has made since 1980 at the expense of the “real” economy.  Banks have ceased to be an “engine of growth.” They are not making loans to create new means of production. They are lending to asset strippers, not asset creators. It is not hard to show this statistically. (I drafted an attempt in Killing the Host, and am now working with Democracy Collaborative to prepare a larger study.)

    At stake is whether the U.S. and Western European economies are going to end up looking like those of Greece, Latvia and Argentina – or imperial Rome for that matter. Neoliberals applaud today’s victorious finance capitalism as the “end of history.” One such end has already occurred once, at the close of Roman antiquity. It is remembered as the Dark Age. Progress stopped as the creditor and landowning class lorded it over the rest of society. Trade survived only among the lords at the top of the economic pyramid. Today’s “End of History” dream threatens to unfold along similar lines. It is all about relative power of the One Percent.

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