The World Bank is warning that trade tensions between the United States and other countries could hurt global trade as badly as the financial crisis did in 2008.
In its Global Economic Prospects report, the World Bank warns that tariff increases would have “severe consequences” for global trade and could cause a decline similar to that seen in 2008, or worse if tariffs are increased beyond the maximum level allowed by the World Trade Organization.
“A broad-based increase in tariffs worldwide would have major adverse consequences for global trade and activity,” the report reads. “An escalation of tariffs up to legally-allowed bound rates could translate into a decline in global trade flows amounting to 9 percent, similar to the drop seen during the global financial crisis in 2008-09.”
The World Bank’s assessment comes as President Trump has levied steep tariffs on U.S. allies, prompting other countries to impose their own retaliatory tariffs.
Whatever it was you wish you’d done before the last crash, I’d do it now. If you have a 401K, call the broker and put your money in an index fund.
So, thanks to this president* and his 63 million enablers, and his acolytes in the media, and all the people who didn’t care enough to stop him in 2016, and all the people who don’t care enough to stop him now, we have our own American variations on the Tuam babies and the Magdalene Laundries.
Children are being punished, cruelly and mindlessly, for the perceived sins of their parents and, because we are a secular republic, it is not being done in the name of God but, rather, on the behalf of everybody in this country. That does not make this better. Not by a longshot.
Saying he believes the country is already in a constitutional crisis, former Fox News national security analyst Col. Ralph Peters gave his first interview since leaving Fox to Anderson Cooper Wednesday night.
“Even Senator Joseph McCarthy never directly attacked the Constitution,” he said.
Cooper said Peters referred to a “cult of Trump.”
“Yeah, I think a lot of Trump supporters are so embarrassed by how it has turned out, that they just cling to him,” he said. “They won’t let facts penetrate their reality. I am startled by relatively educated people and military veterans who still insist that Trump can do no wrong. That he is some sort of messiah, and I part company with their views.”
“You have first-hand experience with how Russian intelligence operates, do you believe that Vladimir Putin has some grip on Trump,” Cooper said.
“I am convinced that Vladimir Putin has some grip on Trump. When I first learned of the Steele dossier, it rang true to me,” Peters said.
“That is how the Russians do things. And before he became a candidate for president, Donald Trump was the perfect target for Russian intelligence. Here is someone who has no self-control, a sense of sexual entitlement and intermittent financial crisis. Made to order for seduction of Russian intelligence. I hope I am wrong.”
He said when Christopher Steele put together his dossier, “when you look at Trump’s behavior patterns, his unwillingness to create problems with Russia even as he attacks NATO, how can he not draw the conclusions that President Trump, the president of the United States, is frightened of Vladimir Putin and his grip?”
“Without exaggeration, the Mueller investigation is the most important of my lifetime, and I am 66 years old. I lived through Watergate. Anderson, it is about a fundamental assault on the Constitution by the president of the United States.”
Once again, it’s Springtime For Hitler in the Trump administration.
During a State Dept. briefing this week, former Fox News bobblehead Heather Nauert cited the D-Day invasion as an example of our “very strong” relationship with the government of Germany.
“Looking back in the history books, today is the 71st anniversary of the speech that announced the Marshall Plan. Tomorrow is the anniversary of the D-Day invasion. We obviously have a very long history with the government of Germany, and we have a strong relationship with the government of Germany,” she said.
Does she really not know which side we were on? She worked for Fox, so it’s possible.
But the briefing goes downhill from there.
Ambassador Richard Grenell was recently condemned by German officials when he told Breitbart he was “excited” by the rising wave of conservatism in Europe, and said he saw his task as “empowering” Europe’s far-right governments and leaders.
“If you translate ‘awakening’ and ’empowering’ in this context, very ugly German language comes up, which resonates with the 1920s and 1930s,” he said, adding that Grenell would “be well advised” to learn more about German history “and the sensitivities that result from that.”
Then a reporter brought up Nauert’s recent remarks that ambassadors have “freedom of speech.”
“Don’t we all?” she retorted. “Don’t we all, as Americans, have the right to freedom of speech?”
The reporter pointed out that an ambassador occupies a position where his words affect the country he represents, and the country in which he is based. “When he says he will intervene in elections to see that certain ultra-conservative groups are elected…”
Nauert denied that Grenell said it.
The reporter said it was a “direct quote.” Nauert denied it again, and said it was out of context.
“I absolutely want to empower other conservatives throughout Europe, other leaders. I think there is a groundswell of conservative policies that are taking hold because of the failed policies of the left.”
He also said, “Look, I think Sebastian Kurz is a rockstar. I’m a big fan.” (Austrian Chancellor Kurz is a big fan of Vladimir Putin — and a major opponent of immigrants. At least for now, Israel boycotts Kurz’s Freedom Party due to its neo-Nazi past and xenophobic rhetoric.)
If you don’t read the European right-wing press, you may not understand that they serve the same function as Fox News with a constant barrage of (frequently fabricated) stories about white women raped by immigrants, etc. Those hysterical stories are then fed into the right-wing movement here, and used to drum up support for Trump.
And so it goes. We send a neo-Nazi to Germany as ambassador, and we use a former Fox bobblehead to lie and obfuscate about it.
Breaking news last night from the New York Times. Trump asked Jeff Sessions to walk back his recusal. If Trump wasn’t guilty, why would it matter?
When they met, Mr. Trump was ready to talk — but not about the travel ban. His grievance was with Mr. Sessions: The president objected to his decision to recuse himself from the Russia investigation. Mr. Trump, who had told aides that he needed a loyalist overseeing the inquiry, berated Mr. Sessions and told him he should reverse his decision, an unusual and potentially inappropriate request.
Mr. Sessions refused.
The confrontation, which has not been previously reported, is being investigated by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, as are the president’s public and private attacks on Mr. Sessions and efforts to get him to resign. Mr. Trump dwelled on the recusal for months, according to confidants and current and former administration officials who described his behavior toward the attorney general.
The special counsel’s interest demonstrates Mr. Sessions’s overlooked role as a key witness in the investigation into whether Mr. Trump tried to obstruct the inquiry itself. It also suggests that the obstruction investigation is broader than it is widely understood to be — encompassing not only the president’s interactions with and firing of the former F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, but also his relationship with Mr. Sessions.
This news rankled the academic world, but it perhaps didn’t come as a surprise. Many scholars saw this as just the latest revelation of strings-attached giving with an ideological slant – another encroachment on the sacrosanct idea that teaching and research at universities, especially public ones like George Mason, must be immune from outside influence.
Cabrera himself admitted that the Koch agreements with the Northern Virginia school “fall short of the standard of academic independence we should expect in every gift,” but as a journalist-turned-professor who has researched dozens of similar scenarios, I think transparency is a bigger issue than academic freedom.
When a student-led group called Transparent GMU sought copies of the Koch gift agreements under Virginia’s Freedom of Information Act, the foundation said it was not subject to such requests because it operates independently, according to coverage in the Fairfax Times, a local newspaper.
Foundations that raise, spend and invest private support for public universities have become staples of higher education in the last 40 years. They often refuse freedom of information requests, claiming that transparency laws governing their affiliated schools do not apply to independently operated 501(c)(3) nonprofits.
The Governmental Accounting Standards Board, an independent private-sector organization that sets accounting and financial reporting standards, considers the foundations to be “component units” of public universities for three reasons. First, they fundraise for specific schools. Second, those schools get most of that money. Third, schools count on that revenue.
A few states, like California, Colorado and Nevada have laws on the books mandating at least some financial transparency from university foundations. Courts in states like Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky and Ohio have found them to be public bodies or at least to be doing public work.
In most states, however, the foundations and their records are generally presumed to be private.
Transparent GMU’s lawsuit
The GMU Foundation is in court and the news because Transparent GMU sued when its records request was declined, arguing that because the foundation conducts business on behalf of a public university, it should be considered an arm of the school and therefore subject to the state’s freedom of information law.
Activists and journalists have long monitored Koch higher education donations because of the scope and breadth of their giving, which totaled about $150 million between 2005 and 2015, according to media reports. Still, the concern should extend beyond the Kochs to cover transparency for all gift agreements of whatever political hue.
Consider what happened when John Allison, an avowed fan of author and libertarian icon Ayn Rand, led BB&T. The U.S. bank offered colleges and universities grants averaging $1.1 million, usually with the stipulation that they design a new course incorporating Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged.”
BB&T also demanded that grantees create faculty positions, centers, speaker series and scholarships as part of a “Moral Foundations of Capitalism” program.
In short, I see no way to safeguard academic freedom without transparency. All the conditions embedded in gift agreements related to public colleges and universities should be brought to light, in my opinion.
It would be great to include private schools as well, but they by definition are private entities not subject to sunshine laws.
Foundations often cite the need to respect donors’ privacy because exposure might discourage giving, but I and other researchers have not seen any evidence to support that connection.
If names must be protected, the next best thing might be having objective third parties like state auditors vet these agreements. That way, any potential conflicts of interest or undue influence could more systematically come to light. The Hartford Courant suggested this approach in an editorial supporting a bill that would have made the UConn Foundation subject to Connecticut’s freedom of information law. The legislature has since forced the foundation to be more transparent, though it is still not subject to that law.
Once courts and state governments do more to resolve the question of whether university-linked foundations are subject to disclosure requirements, the public might finally see whether their state schools are offering academic influence to all big donors – not just the Koch brothers.
Former Intelligence chief James Clapper appeared on PBS Newshour Wednesday night, and told Judy Woodruff he believes the Russians handed the election to Trump.
“One of the things you write or have spoken about, I should say, in addition to writing about it very candidly is how you have concluded after what happened in 2016 that the Russians not only affected — tried to affect the election, but you said they actually did affect the outcome,” Woodruff said. “What did you mean?”
“Well, first, I need to make clear that, when we did our formal intelligence community assessment in January of 2017, we did not make any call at all about whether the Russians affected the outcome of the election,” Clapper said.
“We didn’t have the authority, charter or capability to do that. Since I left the government, though, as a private citizen, it’s what I would call my informed opinion that, given the massive effort the Russians made and the number of citizens that they touched and the variety and the multi-dimensional aspects of what they did to influence opinion and affect the election, and given the fact that it turned on less than 80,000 votes in three states, to me, it just exceeds logic and credulity that they turned the election.”
He also said “there’s an assault on our institutions both internally from both internal and external sources. The external source is Russia. The internal source is our president, is attacking these institutions that have served this country long and well. you know there’s not a whole lot of — these are actually fragile, and if they’re not protected and nurtured over time, we risk losing them, and not all that much different between where we are today and being a banana republic.”
@tedbarrettcnn spots Flood entering the Senate for the Gang of Eight meeting. The WH attorney dealing with Russia probe attended both briefings today for at least part of the time, despite the WH saying this week no WH official would attend pic.twitter.com/4RUbGg7E6r
Breaking News: Reports are that Emmett Flood, Trump's atty, went to DOJ meeting with Republicans about informant. Not clear yet how much of the meeting he was allowed to participate in. Completely inappropriate for him being there even a minute.
— Jill Wine-Banks (now on Threads as jillwinebanks) (@JillWineBanks) May 24, 2018
Time to open ANOTHER Special counsel on unauthorized disclosure of classified information and Conspiracy to Obstruct Justice. Flood should have known better. ACLU should file to Disbar him. https://t.co/hVLgN8gRAz
I don’t know how much more proof some people will need of this administration’s corruption, but some people believe in Trump fairies and will always clap their hands. Via the BBC:
Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, received a secret payment of at least $400,000 (£300,000) to fix talks between the Ukrainian president and President Trump, according to sources in Kiev close to those involved.
The payment was arranged by intermediaries acting for Ukraine’s leader, Petro Poroshenko, the sources said, though Mr Cohen was not registered as a representative of Ukraine as required by US law.
The meeting at the White House was last June.
Shortly after the Ukrainian president returned home, his country’s anti-corruption agency stopped its investigation into Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort.
A high-ranking Ukrainian intelligence officer in Mr Poroshenko’s administration described what happened before the visit to the White House.
Mr Cohen was brought in, he said, because Ukraine’s registered lobbyists and embassy in Washington DC could get Mr Poroshenko little more than a brief photo-op with Mr Trump. Mr Poroshenko needed something that could be portrayed as “talks”.
This senior official’s account is as follows – Mr Poroshenko decided to establish a back channel to Mr Trump. The task was given to a former aide, who asked a loyal Ukrainian MP for help.
He in turn used personal contacts in a Jewish charity in New York state, Chabad of Port Washington. This eventually led to Michael Cohen, the president’s lawyer and trusted fixer. Mr Cohen was paid $400,000.
There is no suggestion that Mr Trump knew about the payment.
Once courts and state governments do more to resolve the question of whether university-linked foundations are subject to disclosure requirements, the public might finally see whether their state schools are offering academic influence to all big donors – not just the Koch brothers.