Burying the lede today because what's happening across the pond is more important.
-- Markets across the world are being whipsawed by the UK vote -- 72% turnout, by the way -- to leave the European Union. Britain's currency, the pound, has hit an 31-year low -- that's 1985, the Reagan-Thatcher years -- to the dollar, stocks in Germany and elsewhere in the EU are plummeting but the stock futures markets are melting down. The carnage has spread to Asia, as Chinese and Japanese equities are down almost 10% overnight. Investors are leaving 'on paper' assets for safe havens like gold. US stocks are slumping and even oil is down again, under $50/bbl as a global recession suddenly looms.
When the rich get hit this hard, it's the middle class and the poor who get slammed harder. Any possible recovery -- and US election years generally present enough uncertainty to stall markets all by themselves, to say nothing of what 2016 has already wrought -- is by the wayside now. Central banks are going to be forced to pump money into their economies to stave off calamity. "It's the economy, stupid", a Clinton 1.0 rallying cry, is going to get a remodeling.
The most adverse ramifications are yet to be felt. Capitalism is going to take a body blow in the months to come, as economic pain exacerbates the stress in nations like Greece and Puerto Rico, which will infect other countries.
As this is posting, British Prime Minister David Cameron has announced his intention to resign. A new PM will be in place by the fall. Considering the rise of the British right-wing, and particularly the anti-immigrant backlash in the stunning BREXIT results, don't expect it to be Jeremy Corbin. Oh and meet the UK's Donald Trump.
Here's the BBC's "what we know at this time".
Update: Let's jump ahead in the action and take note of this political climate advisory from Down With Tyranny:
-- Among the decisions announced yesterday at the Supreme Court, mediocre white legacies at the University of Texas failed to take down affirmative action, as Wonkette bluntly wrote. Obama's immigration executive orders were undone by a Supreme tie, leaving in place the appeals court's decision to strike them down. Ken Paxton gets to declare victory, and Lyle Dennison at SCOTUSblog declares the orders -- one of Obama's hoped-for legacies -- as 'doomed'. If Latin@s needed another reason to turn out and vote in November, they have one; the immigration policies of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton could not offer a more striking contrast. Oh, and the cops can test your breath without a warrant if you get pulled over for drunk driving, but not your blood.
Personally I'm still reeling from the SCOTUS rewrite of the Fourth Amendment earlier this week.
We still await a momentous decision on the case of the restrictions on women's reproductive freedoms in Texas (and elsewhere) to be announced. That will dominate another day's news cycle when it finally gets handed down.
-- All of this news shoved Drumpf out of the headlines for another day, but Hillary Clinton still has email problems.
-- Markets across the world are being whipsawed by the UK vote -- 72% turnout, by the way -- to leave the European Union. Britain's currency, the pound, has hit an 31-year low -- that's 1985, the Reagan-Thatcher years -- to the dollar, stocks in Germany and elsewhere in the EU are plummeting but the stock futures markets are melting down. The carnage has spread to Asia, as Chinese and Japanese equities are down almost 10% overnight. Investors are leaving 'on paper' assets for safe havens like gold. US stocks are slumping and even oil is down again, under $50/bbl as a global recession suddenly looms.
When the rich get hit this hard, it's the middle class and the poor who get slammed harder. Any possible recovery -- and US election years generally present enough uncertainty to stall markets all by themselves, to say nothing of what 2016 has already wrought -- is by the wayside now. Central banks are going to be forced to pump money into their economies to stave off calamity. "It's the economy, stupid", a Clinton 1.0 rallying cry, is going to get a remodeling.
The most adverse ramifications are yet to be felt. Capitalism is going to take a body blow in the months to come, as economic pain exacerbates the stress in nations like Greece and Puerto Rico, which will infect other countries.
As this is posting, British Prime Minister David Cameron has announced his intention to resign. A new PM will be in place by the fall. Considering the rise of the British right-wing, and particularly the anti-immigrant backlash in the stunning BREXIT results, don't expect it to be Jeremy Corbin. Oh and meet the UK's Donald Trump.
Here's the BBC's "what we know at this time".
Update: Let's jump ahead in the action and take note of this political climate advisory from Down With Tyranny:
The vote in Britain wasn't entirely about racism, bigotry and xenophobia-- though that was certainly part of it. A lot of people who felt they had no stake in the status quo-- no stake in Britain's financial good times-- voted to smash he system. Many of Trump's supporters are what we've been referring to as "life's losers" and their motivations are not unlike many of the Brexit voters. "When you ain't got nothin', you ain't got nothin' to lose."
David Atkins got it right when he pointed out that we can "blame Brexit on racism and a lunatic fringe all [we] want. People are freaking pissed off and want to destroy the system they have because it's not working for them. A lot of people with conservative tendencies take it out on immigrants and 'the other.' But a whole lot of other people just want to get 'their' jobs and 'their' country back-- even if it means doing something patently stupid like Brexit or electing Donald Trump. Middle-class people forced into lower living standards do stuff like this. And the most shocked people about it are the centrists who clutch their pearls and tut tut over how untoward it all is."
Hillary and those around her are exactly who those tut-tutters are in our country. That's why Bernie outpolls her and outpolls Trump in every general election match-up. Trump knows exactly how to exploit this kind of toxic brew-- and count on him doing just that.
-- Among the decisions announced yesterday at the Supreme Court, mediocre white legacies at the University of Texas failed to take down affirmative action, as Wonkette bluntly wrote. Obama's immigration executive orders were undone by a Supreme tie, leaving in place the appeals court's decision to strike them down. Ken Paxton gets to declare victory, and Lyle Dennison at SCOTUSblog declares the orders -- one of Obama's hoped-for legacies -- as 'doomed'. If Latin@s needed another reason to turn out and vote in November, they have one; the immigration policies of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton could not offer a more striking contrast. Oh, and the cops can test your breath without a warrant if you get pulled over for drunk driving, but not your blood.
Personally I'm still reeling from the SCOTUS rewrite of the Fourth Amendment earlier this week.
We still await a momentous decision on the case of the restrictions on women's reproductive freedoms in Texas (and elsewhere) to be announced. That will dominate another day's news cycle when it finally gets handed down.
-- All of this news shoved Drumpf out of the headlines for another day, but Hillary Clinton still has email problems.
Former Secretary Hillary Clinton failed to turn over a copy of a key message involving problems caused by her use of a private homebrew email server, the State Department confirmed Thursday. The disclosure makes it unclear what other work-related emails may have been deleted by the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.
The email was included within messages exchanged Nov. 13, 2010, between Clinton and one of her closest aides, Deputy Chief of Staff Huma Abedin. At the time, emails sent from Clinton's BlackBerry device and routed through her private clintonemail.com server in the basement of her New York home were being blocked by the State Department's spam filter. A suggested remedy was for Clinton to obtain a state.gov email account.
"Let's get separate address or device but I don't want any risk of the personal being accessible," Clinton responded to Abedin.
Clinton never used a government account that was set up for her, instead continuing to rely on her private server until leaving office.
The email was not among the tens of thousands of emails Clinton turned over to the agency in response to public records lawsuits seeking copies of her official correspondence. Abedin, who also used a private account on Clinton's server, provided a copy from her own inbox after the State Department asked her to return any work-related emails. That copy of the email was publicly cited last month in a blistering audit by the State Department's inspector general that concluded Clinton and her team ignored clear internal guidance that her email setup violated federal standards and could have left sensitive material vulnerable to hackers.
So Abedin had the email, but Clinton didn't (and she wrote it). The timebomb is still ticking, Hillbots. Keep hoping and praying it doesn't explode.
