Fail, Madrid Edition

The Catalan independence referendum has faced an unbelievably heavy handed response from the central government in Madrid, with the obvious result, supporters of secession have flocked to the polls, while opponents are unwilling to get a baton to the crotch, so early results show overwhelming support for Catalonia leaving Spain:

Catalan officials have claimed that preliminary results of its referendum have shown 90% in favour of independence in the vote vehemently opposed by Spain.

Jordi Turull, the Catalan regional government spokesman, told reporters early on Monday morning that 90% of the 2.26 million Catalans who voted Sunday chose yes. He said nearly 8% of voters rejected independence and the rest of the ballots were blank or void. He said 15,000 votes were still being counted.The region has 5.3 million registered voters.

Turull said the number of ballots did not include those confiscated by Spanish police during violent raids which resulted in hundreds of people being injured. At least 844 people and 33 police were reported to have been hurt, including at least two people who were thought to have been seriously injured.

………

Puigdemont had pressed ahead with the referendum despite opposition from the Spanish state, which declared the poll to be illegal, and the region’s own high court. He told crowds earlier in the day that the “police brutality will shame the Spanish state for ever”.

The Spanish government defended its response after hundreds of people were hurt when riot police stormed polling stations in a last-minute effort to stop the vote on Sunday.

Spanish PM Mariano Rajoy, and his People’s Party, has been running against Catalonia, and against Catalonian independence for years, and this has served to galvanize the secessionists movement.

First, they rushed to overturn existing agreements, and now they have sent national and other police forces into Catalonia as an occupying force with a license to abuse, and the results are ugly: senior citizens bloodied, voters dragged out of polling areas by their hair, and condemnations from Human Rights Watch.

I don’t think that we are headed for another Spanish Civil War, but if someone doesn’t put a leash on Rajoy, things are going to get a lot worse.

Common Sense That I Did Not Expect out of State

But reports that there are direct contacts between the US and the DPRK is an indication of at least a small modicum of sanity in Foggy Bottom:

The Trump administration acknowledged on Saturday for the first time that it was in direct communication with the government of North Korea over its missile and nuclear tests, seeking a possible way forward beyond the escalating threats of a military confrontation from both sides.

“We are probing, so stay tuned,” Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson said, when pressed about how he might begin a conversation with Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, that could avert what many government officials fear is a significant chance of open conflict between the two countries.

“We ask, ‘Would you like to talk?’ We have lines of communications to Pyongyang — we’re not in a dark situation, a blackout,” he added. “We have a couple, three channels open to Pyongyang,” a reference to North Korea’s capital.

Considering the fact that the US and the DPRK are the principals in their dispute, direct contacts are a good thing, even if it runs against the standard US regime change consensus among the DC cognoscenti.

Bad Day at the Office

There was an uncontained engine failure on Airbus A380 on a Paris to London flight:

An Air France A380 superjumbo jetliner taking more than 500 people from Paris to Los Angeles made an emergency landing in Canada on Saturday following “serious damage” to one of its four engines, the airline said.

“Flight 066 landed without further damage at the Goose Bay military airport in Canada and all of the 520 people on board were evacuated with no injuries,” an Air France spokesman in Paris said.

The Airbus double-decker, wide body aircraft was rerouted as it passed over Greenland, landing in Goose Bay in eastern Canada, the spokesman said.

The landing went off with no problems for the jetliner carrying 496 passengers and 24 crew members, the spokesman said. The airline was exploring options to get the passengers to the US.

Glad not to be on that flight.

If You Have a Problem Understanding Monetary Theory, Read This

Rebecca Rojer has done meticulous work describing Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), and seeing as how it is an approach that is both becoming more popular, and is in opposition to the (almost always wrong) economic orthodoxy, it pays to understand this:

Too often the origins of our economic ills are cloaked by a mystical reverence for some autonomous money spirit. The economists behind Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) seek to lift money’s veil by studying the specific actions that occur as money is created, circulated, and destroyed.

For those seeking a grand, unifying sociopolitical economic theory, MMT will disappoint. But as an analytic tool, MMT clarifies who holds genuine power—sovereignty—within society, and how they organize the money system to serve their interests. Unsurprisingly, this is often a story of tremendous cruelty and exploitation.

But the revelation that the rules of money are not immutable laws of nature but are instead created and constantly modified by people opens up possibilities beyond the scope of our current political imagination. The questions become: What sort of society do we want? Do we have the physical resources to support that society? And finally, how the hell do we muster the political will to get there?

At its core, MMT sees money as being a construct that derives from the willingness of the state to use coercion, and frequently violence, to enforce the use of a token for value.

Typically, this is done through taxation. The sequence runs like this:

  1. Government: Pay your taxes.
  2. Citizen: Here is some grain.
  3. Government: Nope, you have to use my coin.
  4. Citizen: But I have no coin.
  5. Government: Then sell your grain to give coin to me.
  6. Citizen: Sell my grain to who?
  7. Government: You can sell it to me, or to the blacksmith who I paid for spears, or to whoever the blacksmith paid with my coin.

Thus, Money is born.

Read the rest.  It opens a world of possibilities not imagined by our current leaders..

Linkage

Caption this picture: (H/T naked capitalism)

Oh Snap!

In response to reports that the EU scientific report on the safety of its glyphosate (RoundUp) weedkiller, where large blocks of text were copied and pasted from Monsanto application for re-approval, the European parliament held hearings to investigate whether or not the agricultural giant exerted undue influence on the process.
Monsanto refused to attend the meeting, so the EU banned Monsanto and its lobbyists from the European parliament:

Monsanto lobbyists have been banned from entering the European parliament after the multinational refused to attend a parliamentary hearing into allegations of regulatory interference.

It is the first time MEPs have used new rules to withdraw parliamentary access for firms that ignore a summons to attend parliamentary inquiries or hearings.

Monsanto officials will now be unable to meet MEPs, attend committee meetings or use digital resources on parliament premises in Brussels or Strasbourg.

While a formal process still needs to be worked through, a spokesman for the parliament’s president Antonio Tajani said that the leaders of all major parliamentary blocks had backed the ban in a vote this morning.

“One has to assume it is effective immediately,” he said.

I’m a pessimist, so I expect that, after aggressive American lobbying, the EU will re-approve the chemical, but I’d really love to see them get slapped down.

Oh, Crap!

The Supreme Court will hear a challenge to public labor unions.

With Gorsuch on the board, I expect a 5-4 decision saying that unions cannot collect fees to cover the cost of representing non members, effectively gutting  public labor unions:

Its conservative majority restored, the Supreme Court said Thursday it will return to an issue with the potential to financially cripple Democratic-leaning labor unions that represent government workers.

After the justices deadlocked 4-4 in a similar case last year, the high court will consider a free-speech challenge from workers who object to paying money to unions they don’t support.

The court, with conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch on board, could decide to overturn a 40-year-old Supreme Court ruling that allows public sector unions to collect fees from non-members to cover the costs of negotiating contracts for all employees.

The union fees case is among nine new cases the justices added to their docket for the term that begins on Monday. Others deal with a defendant’s right to direct his own defense, police searches of vehicles and overtime pay for service advisers at car dealerships.

Unions, and public employees, are going to get absolutely screwed.

North Korea is Desperate

No, I don’t mean that the sanctions are causing real problems. Nor do I mean that military posturing by the US has them terrified. What I mean is that Donald Trump is simply too weird for them to understand, so they are trying to hire Republican political consultants to explain what the f%$# is going on.

“Their number-one concern is Trump. They can’t figure him out,” said one person with direct knowledge of North Korea’s approach of experts on Asia with Republican connections.

You and me both can’t figure Trump out.

 I think that the DPRK should consider hiring Paul Manafort, seeing as how he’s a Republican political consultant, and he’s not got a lot of clients right now.

This is Kind of Tempting

The websites of US telly giant CBS’s Showtime contained JavaScript that secretly commandeered viewers’ web browsers over the weekend to mine cryptocurrency.

The flagship Showtime.com and its instant-access ShowtimeAnytime.com sibling silently pulled in code that caused browsers to blow spare processor time calculating new Monero coins – a privacy-focused alternative to the ever-popular Bitcoin. The hidden software typically consumed as much as 60 per cent of CPU capacity on computers visiting the sites.

The scripts were written by Code [Coin] Hive, a legit outfit that provides JavaScript to website owners: webmasters add the code to their pages so that they can earn slivers of cash from each visitor as an alternative to serving adverts to generate revenue. Over time, money mined by the Code-Hive-hosted scripts adds up and is transferred from Coin Hive to the site’s administrators. One Monero coin, 1 XMR, is worth about $92 right now.

Let me start by saying that I won’t be putting code like this on my site.

I am considering placing an additional button on my tip jar (aka Matthew’s Saroff’s Beer Fund), but it would take the form of another donation button, since the revenue from Google™ Adsense™ is so pathetic.

If I do this, it will be voluntary, another button to click on the page, and I might occasionally nag my reader(s) to click the button.

As always, note that this post should in no way be construed as an inducement or a request for my reader(s) to click on any ad that they would not otherwise be inclined to investigate further. This would be a violation of the terms of service for Google™ Adsense™.

Yeah, Like This is Gonna Work………

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which in recent years has been rather more aggressive in its investigation and regulation of various financial shenanigans, is changing its policies to rely soley on financial malefactors reporting themselves.

Yeah, like That is going to work:

After years as a sleepy federal backwater, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission became one of Wall Street’s most aggressive watchdogs during the Barack Obama administration.

Now the agency — which is responsible for policing a broad swath of markets and financial machinery, from trading in commodities to digital currencies to the complex derivatives that helped torpedo the financial system in 2008 — is shifting its law enforcement strategy: It will increasingly look to banks and other financial institutions to come clean on their own about misconduct and problems in the market.

The commission’s director of enforcement, James McDonald, plans to unveil the new framework in a speech Monday night at New York University. It is premised on the idea that large financial institutions, given the right incentives, have the potential to be invaluable partners for law enforcement.

“We start with the shared understanding that the vast majority of businesses want to comply with the law,” Mr. McDonald will say Monday, according to a draft of the speech reviewed by The New York Times.

Yeah, this goes hand in hand with Citi going back into the Synthetic CDO market, so I expect to see a resurgence bucket shops to accompany this regulatory malfeasance.

We are f%$#ed.

Things Just Went Pear Shaped in Iraq

Kurdistan has just overwhelmingly backed a referendum for independence, and the government in Baghdad is going postal:

The Iraqi government escalated its confrontation with its northern Kurdish region on Wednesday, threatening to send troops and seize oil fields there and taking steps to shut down international flights to and from the region.

The moves came in retaliation for a referendum on Monday in which the region, Iraqi Kurdistan, voted decisively to seek independence from Iraq. Kurdish officials announced Wednesday that nearly 93 percent of voters approved the referendum, which aims to create an independent state for the Kurds, an ethnic minority in Iraq.

Iraq’s Parliament asked the country’s prime minister on Wednesday to deploy troops to the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, one of several disputed areas held by Kurdish troops but claimed by Baghdad, and to take control of all oil fields in the Kurdish region.

A decision to send troops would be up to Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi. He gave no public indication of his intentions on Wednesday, except to say he wanted “no fighting among the people of the country.”

He also sent a delegation from the Iraqi military to Iran to “coordinate military efforts,” a military statement said.

Iraq has called the vote illegal and has vowed to ignore the results. The vote has also provoked the Kurdish region’s two powerful neighbors, Turkey and Iran.

All three countries have been conducting military exercises near the border of Iraqi Kurdistan this week.

………

Iraqi aviation authorities notified foreign airlines on Wednesday that it would cancel all permits to land and take off from two international airports in the Kurdish region as of Friday afternoon. The action followed an ultimatum by Prime Minister Abadi on Tuesday for Kurdistan to surrender control of its two international airports or face a shutdown of international flights.


This Business Will get out of Control. It Will get out of Control and we’ll be Lucky to Live Through It.

This is going to get very crazy very fast.  I honestly expect both Iraq and Turkey to threaten invasion with a reasonable chance of this leading to an actual invasion.

To quote Freddie Dalton Thompson from The Hunt for Red October:

Crazy Motherf%$#er Wins Republican Primary

What? Not specific enough?

OK, It was the Georgia Senate primary, and the crazy motherf%$#er just won.

What, still not specific enough?

OK, it was Roy Moore who beat the rather aptly named Luther Strange:

Roy S. Moore, a firebrand former chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, overcame efforts by top Republicans to rescue his rival, Senator Luther Strange, defeating him on Tuesday in a special primary runoff, according to The Associated Press.

The outcome in the closely watched Senate race dealt a humbling blow to President Trump and other party leaders days after the president pleaded with voters in the state to back Mr. Strange.

Propelled by the stalwart support of his fellow evangelical Christians, Mr. Moore survived a multimillion-dollar advertising onslaught, in the eight figures, financed by allies of Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader. His victory demonstrated in stark terms the limits of Mr. Trump’s clout.

In a race that began as something of a political afterthought and ended up showcasing the right’s enduring divisions, the victory by Mr. Moore, one of the most tenacious figures in Alabama politics, will likely embolden other anti-establishment conservatives to challenge incumbent Republicans in next year’s midterm elections.

And more immediately, the party will be forced to grapple with how to prop up an often-inflammatory candidate given to provocative remarks on same-sex marriage and race — all to protect a seat in a deep-red state. Mr. Moore’s incendiary rhetoric will also oblige others in the party to answer for his comments, perhaps for years to come, at a time when many Republicans would just as soon move on from the debate over gay rights.

On Dec. 12, Mr. Moore will face Doug Jones, a former federal prosecutor and the Democratic nominee, in a race that will test the party loyalties of center-right voters who may be uneasy about their nominee. It may also reveal just how reliably Republican the state has become in the quarter-century since a Democrat last won a Senate election here.

My prediction for the general election: 

  • We will receive innumerable fund raising emails. 
  • Doug Jones will spend a lot of money, and hire Democratic Party consultants.
  • They will advise him to run against Trump and avoid talking about real issues.
  • Doug Jones will listen to these consultants.
  • Doug Jones will lose the election badly.
  • Said consultants will blame Bernie Sanders.

Not the Onion

The National Review is siding with a black athlete over a white Republican.

I think that this is a sign of the apocalypse:

Americans do not and should not worship idols. We do not and should not worship the flag. As a nation we stand in respect for the national anthem and stand in respect for the flag not simply because we were born here or because it’s our flag. We stand in respect because the flag represents a specific set of values and principles: that all men are created equal and that we are endowed with our Creator with certain unalienable rights.

These ideals were articulated in the Declaration of Independence, codified in the Constitution, and defended with the blood of patriots. Central to them is the First Amendment, the guarantee of free expression against government interference and government reprisal that has made the United States unique among the world’s great powers. Arguably, it is the single most important liberty of all, because it enables the defense of all the others: Without the right to speak freely we cannot even begin to point out offenses against the rest of the Constitution.

Now, with that as a backdrop, which is the greater danger to the ideals embodied by the American flag, a few football players’ taking a knee at the national anthem or the most powerful man in the world’s demanding that they be fired and their livelihoods destroyed for engaging in speech he doesn’t like?

I guess that this falls in the, “Stopped clock,” category, but still, the National Review?

We are in Bizarro World.

Oh Dear Lord!

The vaguely legal form of gambling known as Synthetic CDOs are back, but don’t worry, Citigroup is telling us that it’s different this time.

“It’s different this time,” is the most terrifying phrase in finance:

By now, the whole Lucy-and-the-football thing has become a political cliché, which is the worst kind of cliché to be. However, while considering the history and practice of the Wall Street casino, it is the most accurate metaphor and it’s likely to be until the day of glory and sunshine when the tumbrels begin to roll. From Bloomberg:

The 35-year-old Citigroup Inc. director has spent the past two years meeting clients, speaking at industry panels and becoming the face of a resurgent market for synthetic CDOs — complex derivatives that let buyers make big, leveraged bets on the health of corporate America. Along the way, she’s helped establish Citigroup as its dominant player. It’s an astonishing comeback for the roughly $70 billion market for synthetic CDOs, which rose to infamy during the crisis and then faded into obscurity after nearly destroying the financial system. But perhaps the most surprising twist is Citigroup itself. Less than a decade ago, the bank was forced into a taxpayer bailout after suffering huge losses on similar types of securities tied to mortgages. Now, many in the industry say Citigroup is responsible for over half the deals that come to market, though precise numbers are hard to come by.


I’ll bet they are.

This time, Citigroup says, it’s doing things differently. The deals are tailored in a way that insulates it from any losses, while giving yield-starved buyers a chance to reap returns of 20 percent or more. The market today is also just a fraction of its size before the crisis, and few see corporate defaults surging any time soon. But as years of rock-bottom interest rates have pushed investors toward riskier products, the revival of synthetic CDOs may be one of the clearest signs yet of froth in the credit markets.

Why in the everloving fck would we trust these clowns again? And, even if we all got really stoned and decided to do that, why would we trust them with the same goddamn hand grenades that blew up everything the last time? There’s recividism and there’s recidivism and then there’s a genetic predisposition to stick your hands in everyone’s pockets and steal every last lint-covered penny that’s in there.

This is unbelievably f%$#ed up and sh%$.

More of This

A group of people on Twitter known as “Sleeping Giants” has taken to visiting Breitbart, taking screenshots showing the ads and then naming and shaming the advertisers:

Hardly anyone paid attention last November when a strangely named Twitter account, Sleeping Giants, sent its first tweet into the digisphere. “Are you aware that you’re advertising on Breitbart, the alt-right’s biggest champion, today?” read the tweet, aimed at a consumer lending outfit called Social Finance. “Are you supporting them publicly?”

Within 30 minutes, Social Finance replied, tweeting that it would stop running ads on Breitbart.

It was, it turns out, the start of an odd, and oddly effective, social media campaign against Breitbart, the influential conservative news site headed by Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump’s former campaign chairman and ex-chief White House strategist.

………

Sleeping Giants’ basic approach is to make Breitbart’s advertisers aware that they are, in fact, Breitbart advertisers. Many apparently don’t know this, given that Web ads are often bought through third-party brokers, such as Google and Facebook. The brokers then distribute them to a network of websites according to algorithms that seek a specific target audience (say, young men) or a set number of impressions.

………

So when an ad appears on Breitbart, Sleeping Giants or one of its 109,000 Twitter followers and 35,000 Facebook followers flag the advertiser, often accompanied by an image of the sponsors’ ad next to a Breitbart story.

The other day, for example, a Sleeping Giants follower tweeted at Country Inns, informing the hotel chain that it was advertising on “the racist Breitbart site.” Within a day, the company tweeted back: “Thank you for your concern. . . . We have added Breitbart to our blacklist of ads.”

This apparently happens a lot. Sleeping Giants’ database lists nearly 2,900 companies that have declared Breitbart off limits since November — an astonishing figure, though one hard to confirm because some ad buys recur. Nevertheless, it’s not an implausible number. During one 24-hour period, advertisers such as the air-conditioning manufacturer Rheem, transport operator Caltrain, Sutter Health Plus and Rose Medical Center of Denver all publicly acknowledged that they had blacklisted Breitbart in response to a Sleeping Giants tweet.

………

The group decided to single out Breitbart almost by happenstance. “It really happened as a reaction to Steve Bannon’s rise,” the spokesman says. “We weren’t familiar with Breitbart at the time and were obviously pretty shocked at the articles. . . . To be honest, we weren’t familiar with [other conservative] sites,” so those weren’t even considered, he says.

The group has raised about $1,500 from T-shirt sales and about $7,000 from an online fundraiser, but it otherwise operates with little overhead, he notes. “If I had a nickel for every claim that we’re being funded by [liberal billionaire activist] George Soros, I’d be well off. It’s crazy. There’s not much need for funding. Tweeting is free.”

Two points here:

  • People have been writing to advertisers about where their ads appear since Madison Avenue was a cow path.
  • The fact that the big players in the online advertising market are this cavalier with how they serve up ads.  If you buy ads, be aware of this, or maybe beware of this; your choice.

I think that I might know someone who knows who these guys are.

Wah ……… Wah ……… Wah ……… Waaaaahhhhhh


Cue Sad Trombone Music

Mitch McConnell just threw in the towel in the last attempt to repeal Obamacare:

Senate Republican leaders on Tuesday abandoned their latest campaign to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, conceding that their plan lacked key support. But they showed little interest in moving swiftly to shore up the seven-year-old law with the crucial funding it needs.

The official collapse of the Cassidy-Graham health-care bill once again leaves the party short of fulfilling a signature promise, which some Republicans worried could inspire a backlash among their base heading into the 2018 midterm elections.

And the failure of that alternative to the ACA, combined with the GOP’s reluctance to fix weaknesses in the existing law, leaves states, insurers and millions of consumers who rely on its coverage with substantial uncertainty. Enrollment begins in barely a month for 2018 health plans in marketplaces created under the law.

The Senate leaders said they would turn their attention to their next major legislative undertaking. “Where we go from here is tax reform,” Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) told reporters after holding a closed-door policy lunch with members of his caucus.

Republicans already are bracing for the political fallout from the measure proposed by Sens. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.) and Bill Cassidy (La.)., which McConnell had hoped to bring to a vote this week. They said the pressure to pass a tax overhaul bill was higher than ever and hoped the Republican base would give them a bit more time to take another shot at repealing the ACA.

Sucks to be Mitch McConnell today, then again, it sucks to be Mitch McConnell EVERY day.

About the only thing that sucks worse is being Elaine Chao.