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Friday, November 1, 2024

Her Father’s Daughter: Donald Harris’ Hidden Influence on Kamala

 “If there is any virtue in the writing of this book, it springs from the sacrifices knowingly or unknowingly made by my two daughters, Kamala and Maya,” Donald J. Harris wrote in 1977 when he was an economics professor at Stanford University. “In return, it is dedicated to them.”

The book, “Capital Accumulation and Income Distribution,” is a 313-page critique of capitalism and its allegedly inherent flaws, including “income inequality,” “cyclical disturbances,” and “exploitation” of workers. “Drawing upon certain elements of Marxian theory,” the preface says, Harris approvingly cites the socialist nostrums of Karl Marx and his partner Friedrich Engels – as well as Vladimir Lenin, the founder of communist Russia – to make his case for an “alternative” economic model in America.

AP
Kamala Harris followed in her father's footsteps and studied economics at Howard University. 

Kamala Harris was 13 at the time. Five years later, she majored in economics at Howard University in Washington, D.C., where she led an economics club founded in the name of black Marxist Abram Harris.

Such facts might be unexceptional but for the Harris campaign’s narrative that the presidential candidate has little to do with her father. A New York Times article reported this month that the two have “been estranged for years” and “seldom speak.” The Times even repeated rumors he was a no-show at the Democratic convention, another sign of their alleged “cold war.”

While the vagaries of family relationships are often complex and hidden from view, RealClearInvestigation’s examination of the six-decade relationship between father and daughter suggests they have been closer than the campaign lets on. While there is little evidence to support Donald Trump’s claim that Kamala Harris is a “Communist,” the record shows that Donald Harris’ left-wing views resonate with his daughter. In a campaign that has provided little policy discussion, her perspective also suggests how she might govern. 

Despite her mother taking custody of the two daughters following a 1971 divorce, Kamala Harris echoes her father in both the egalitarian language he used, such as “social equity” and “income disparities,” and the progressive policies he advocated, including government-run health care and expansive government poverty programs.

The year before she first ran for president in 2019, her Jamaican-born father wrote an essay for a Jamaican publication in which he recounted instilling a “deep social awareness” in his oldest daughter. “Kamala was the first in line to have it planted,” Donald Harris wrote.

While there’s no evidence Donald Harris has formally advised his daughter’s 2024 campaign, he has been more of a factor in her life and intellectual development than is commonly understood. And while he does not show up in White House visitors logs, it doesn’t mean the two haven’t met privately. Property records show the 86-year-old lives in a condo less than two miles from the vice presidential mansion where Kamala Harris lives with her husband on the grounds of the Naval Observatory. Her father has lived in Washington since Kamala was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2016; and back then, they lived right down the street from each other.

AP
Donald Harris was an economic advisor to Jamaican Prime Minister Michael Manley, left, who admired Fidel Castro. 

A search of the LexisNexis database of news articles and public records going back several decades reveals details of their relationship through the years:

  • After her parents split, Kamala spent her entire summers living with her father in Palo Alto, Calif., and would often attend marches and protests with him.
  • Donald Harris, or “Don,” as he’s known, attended Kamala’s high school graduation in Montreal.
  • He took her on trips to Jamaica not only to teach her about her heritage but also about the whites who colonized Jamaica and enslaved its people. He introduced Kamala and her younger sister to key figures involved in the island’s socialist struggle.
  • “I would also try to explain to them the contradiction of economic and social life in a ‘poor’ country, like the striking juxtaposition of extreme poverty and extreme wealth, while working hard myself with the government of Jamaica to design a plan and appropriate policies to do something about those conditions,” Don Harris recalled in his 2018 essay. Harris was an economic adviser to Jamaica’s socialist politician, Michael Manley.
  • After Kamala won her U.S. Senate seat in 2016, her father sent her a note of congratulations, and the two celebrated her victory over dinner.
  • Don Harris posed with Kamala for a photograph in 2018 at a family get-together, which he later posted on a Jamaican website. The two are seen standing arm in arm. “All grown up now, Kamala is carving a way for herself in America,” her father proudly said in a caption.
  • In early 2019, when she announced her bid for the White House, her father offered to give her and her campaign economic policy advice. But the arrangement soured months later when Kamala gave an interview in which she came out in support of legalizing marijuana while suggesting that her Jamaican roots made her predisposed to accepting pot-smoking. But Don Harris sternly opposed the “ganja” culture of Jamaica, arguing it held its people back, and he publicly scolded his daughter in the Jamaican press.
  • The next year, however, the father sent a letter to Kamala congratulating her on her nomination to the Democratic ticket as Joe Biden’s running mate. After her 2020 election, the daughter invited him to the inauguration festivities. It’s not clear if Harris, who likes to stay out of the spotlight, attended.
Donald Harris
Kamala Harris with her father, Don Harris, and niece, Meena.

Kamala Harris has never confirmed publicly she is estranged from her father, whom she noted in her convention speech “taught me to be fearless.” In an email to the Washington Post in 2021, in fact, Harris said that she and her father were on “good terms.” She has, however, also said they are “not close.” 

Though Donald Harris no longer lectures at Stanford, he still does consulting and has recently advised the World Bank and the city of Baltimore, among other clients, on economic issues. 

Neither the Harris campaign nor Don Harris returned requests for comment.

Radical Politics

In 1961, Donald Jasper Harris immigrated to America and eventually earned a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley, where he completed his dissertation, ironically, on inflation – an issue that has dogged the Biden-Harris administration and his daughter’s campaign. The next year, he joined a radical black Marxist group on campus known as the Afro-American Association, where he gave lectures on “social inequality.” He met his wife, a biomedical scientist named Shyamala Gopalan, who shared his leftwing views, at one of the group’s rap sessions. They married in 1963. Kamala was born a year later.

The group – which Don Harris referred to as his “oasis” – refused admission to white students; included among its members were Bobby Seale and Huey Newton, who would establish a violent breakaway offshoot, the Black Panther Party. The Afro-American Association was also enamored with Fidel Castro and the communist takeover of Cuba and arranged trips to Havana in 1963 and 1964 in defiance of a State Department travel ban.

The group, which took young Kamala on protests and marches in the San Francisco area, had a lasting influence on her. One of its members, black nationalist Aubrey LaBrie, became a lifelong family friend. Like the others, LaBrie believed the underlying cause of black problems in America was not just discrimination but free market capitalism. His aunt rented the Harris family a flat in the ’60s and ’70s. When Kamala was sworn in to the Senate, she placed her hand on an old Bible that belonged to his aunt, according to published reports.

AP
Don Harris bonded with Malcolm X over the black leader's rejection of both white society and capitalism.  

While enrolled at Berkeley, Kamala’s father formed a friendship with Malcolm X. “I had the privilege of knowing him personally,” Don Harris revealed in a lengthy column he wrote for the Jamaican newspaper, “The Kingston Gleaner,” in 1965, following the assassination of the civil-rights firebrand.

Harris said he bonded with Malcolm X over his rejection of both white society and capitalism. Harris complained the black man’s daily experience “consists of confronting the unscrupulous white landlord, the hostile white policeman, the insensitive white social worker, and if he has a job, the arrogant white employer.”

In his tribute to Malcolm X, Kamala’s father argued in favor of Malcolm X’s version of resistance, which condoned violence against “white racists,” in contrast to Martin Luther King’s non-violent approach to securing equality. He explained that peaceful civil-rights protesters did not have enough “real contact” with “rank-and-file” blacks to understand their “anger, resentment and frustration” and “take up more militant positions.” Don Harris also viewed America as a colonizer of blacks: “Certainly there is some validity to [Malcolm X’s] comparison of the civil-rights movement [in the U.S.] and the anti-colonial movement in Africa and Asia.”

After graduating from Berkeley, Harris bounced around at a number of colleges teaching economics before landing a plum assignment at Stanford in 1972. Thanks to lobbying by fellow Marxists with the Union for Radical Political Economics (URPE), Stanford granted Harris a tenured professorship in economics in 1974, according to the Journal of Economic Issues.

Some colleagues in the department frowned on his hiring, however, viewing him as a troublemaker and a bad influence on the student body. A 1976 article published in “The Stanford Daily” campus newspaper said that faculty described Harris as a “Marxist scholar” who was “leading students astray” from mainstream economics supporting American capitalism. Another article called him a “radical professor.” 

Tyrannies of Capitalism

In 1972, Harris penned a 33-page paper, “The Black Ghetto as Colony,” that examined Karl Marx’s analysis of the “super-exploitation” of black workers. He claimed that American landlords, merchants, repair shops, and small manufacturers – the “petty capitalists” – “are tough and mean with respect to their application of the capitalist rules of the game. The victims of their toughness and meanness are black workers and consumers.” He also complained that “corporate capitalists” benefit from “American imperialism.”

Then he advanced the Marxist conspiracy theory that capitalists keep blacks in a chronic state of unemployment as a “reserve army” of labor they can tap into when factories reach full capacity. This way, he claimed, they are able to suppress black workers’ wages. 

Strikingly, he did not blame racism but the profit “system” for the alleged exploitation of blacks. “It stretches the imagination to see why, if this were indeed a possibility, black workers should in any way be better off under black owners than under white owners,” Harris wrote.

In other words, the problem of inequality besetting blacks is capitalism, and until it is transformed into Marx’s utopian vision of state-enforced equal outcomes, the black condition won’t improve.

“Mr. Harris’ work is more unashamedly Marxist than anything in modern American politics,” The Economist magazine recently editorialized.

Wikipedia
At Howard University, Kamala Harris led an economics club named for Abram Lincoln Harris Jr., who argued capitalism was "morally bankrupt." 

Following in her father’s footsteps, Kamala studied economics at Howard University in a program founded by black Marxist scholar Abram Lincoln Harris Jr., who argued that capitalism was morally bankrupt.

Kamala, who served as president of the Abram Harris Economics Society, describes herself as a capitalist. But, like her father, she appears to reject free markets in favor of “equity,” which seeks to engineer economic outcomes for blacks. “Everybody should end up in the same place,” she has argued, with the same income, property, and assets. Because blacks didn’t start in the same place, she explains, they “need more equitable distribution.” 

Her long career shows unwavering support for government welfare programs and race-based preferences and the redistribution of income to pay for them. “[We must be] giving resources based on equity,” she’s said. “If you look at the reality of who will benefit from certain policies, when you take into account that they’re not starting at the same place, and they’re not starting on equal footing,” she added, “it will directly benefit black children, black families, black homeowners.”

These ideas are influencing her campaign promises, which include “fully forgivable” loans up to $20,000 for black entrepreneurs and unspecified “others” and $25,000 for downpayment assistance for first-time homebuyers. Harris is also offering $6,000 a year in tax credit payments for low-income families with children to help “close the wealth gap.” To help pay for these initiatives, she has pledged to raise the corporate tax rate from 21% to 35%, which is higher than the 28% that President Biden had proposed, and to hike taxes on those earning more than $400,000. She also proposes increasing estate taxes, taxing capital gains on stocks and home sales at regular income rates, and, for the first time in history, taxing the unrealized gains of the wealthy.

In a 2019 interview on ABC’s “The View,” Kamala was even open to the idea of raising the top individual tax rate to as high as 80%. “That should be discussed,” she intoned. 

In a 2021 interview with Forbes, Kamala argued that capitalism is based on the “false assumption” of equal opportunity. “What we have to do is recognize the disparities that have long existed” between whites and blacks and rich and poor, and close them through socioeconomic programs, such as affordable housing, guaranteed minimum wage, universal health care, and industrial policy initiatives.

This is precisely what her father advocated – and recommended in several economic blueprints he drafted for the Jamaican government over the past four decades. His government-heavy proposals were intended to boost Jamaica’s anemic economy. But output languished.

The Jamaican Experiment

If Kamala is given the reins of the U.S. economy, it won’t be the first time a Harris has helped guide a nation’s economic policies. 

“Harris served in Jamaica as economic policy consultant to several prime ministers including Michael Manley,” said John P. David, director of the Southern Appalachian Labor School and emeritus professor of economics at West Virginia University Institute of Technology.

Wikipedia
Manley and his wife visit President Jimmy Carter at the White House in 1977.

Manley, who died in 1997, idolized Lenin and served as Jamaica’s prime minister from 1972 to 1980 as head of the socialist-leaning People’s National Party. He returned to power in 1989 before stepping down in 1992 due to poor health. He was succeeded by P.J. Patterson, who remained in office until 2006. The PNP, which leaned toward the Soviet Union until its 1991 collapse, controlled the government again from 2012 to 2016.

In his 2018 essay, Don Harris spoke approvingly of “the progressive reforms of the Manley era.” But these periods of socialist “reforms” – which included “price controls” on food similar to what his daughter is proposing – marked some of the worst in the history of the Jamaican economy. 

The Manley regime directly inserted itself into the management of the economy “by imposing a freeze on wages and imposing price controls, nationalizing three foreign-owned banks, and assuming the ownership of the majority of the media,” according to a 1980 U.S. General Accounting Office report. The government also established a national minimum wage and, on Harris’ advice, broke up large agricultural holdings into farm co-ops.

Jamaica’s price controls backfired with severe shortages, the report found: “Some supermarket shelves are nearly empty of certain staples, such as milk and bread.”

Following the same path, Kamala has announced she would enact “the first-ever federal ban on price gouging – setting clear rules to make clear that big corporations can’t unfairly exploit consumers to run up excessive corporate profits on food and groceries.” She said the pricing rules would be enforced by the Federal Trade Commission.

Economists warn this prescription for taming such inflation will end up having the same bleak result as what happened in Jamaica. 

“The key assumption behind price controls is the nationalist delusion that some group of policymakers can figure out what a ‘fair’ price is for each and every good and service across the vast U.S. economy,” said Brian Wesbury, chief economist at First Trust Advisors in Chicago. “It’s the pretense of the kind of central planners who ran the Soviet Union’s economy for decades.”

"It’s a very bad idea,” he added.

The Jamaican economy continued to deteriorate during the 1990s and 2000s under the leadership of Patterson, who softened Manley’s socialist stance and made efforts to liberalize Jamaica’s economy to attract more private investment.

In 1996, Patterson called on Harris to help craft the country’s “national industrial policy.” Harris’ new reforms, though more market-friendly, eschewed the “American model” of the individual entrepreneur freely pursuing his or her own dreams in favor of a network or “group” of entrepreneurs working collectively toward “long-range” goals within “a structured framework” and in “partnership” with the “state.” This was better than just “settling for quick profits,” Harris claimed.

His daughter has promised 1 million government loans for black entrepreneurs and others in “underserved communities.” It’s not clear what social strings would be attached, if any, to starting their businesses.

In 2012, Don Harris returned to Jamaica to help produce yet another economic development plan for the government’s planning institute. His 312-page report proposed establishing a “National Poverty Reduction Coordinating Unit (NRRCU)” to “eradicate” poverty by 2030. He also proposed a massive infrastructure program with goals similar to the one the Biden-Harris administration signed into law in 2021.

“The issue of how to achieve sustainable economic growth with social equity remains a matter of primary concern,” he wrote.

Jeffrey O. Gustafson
In 1996, Jamaica's Prime Minister P.J. Patterson called on Harris to craft the country's national industrial policy.

Patterson credits Harris’ prescriptions for Jamaica’s recent economic turnaround. “He was an invaluable resource,” the former prime minister recently told the Washington Post. “The economic improvements we are witnessing today were founded on the principles and the priorities established in his industrial policy, which have born expected fruit.”

Jamaican economist Damien King disagrees, arguing that Harris’ approach of redistributing ever-dwindling state resources will hurt the country in the long run. He said that the politics of handouts and redistributing wealth to pay for it only makes everyone poorer – the middle and upper classes, who end up paying more in taxes, as well as the poor, who wind up dependent on government succor. King said the socialist party’s “pandering to the poor” did not increase economic opportunities for Jamaicans.

Even the Jamaican government recently reported that a post-COVID boom in cruise ship tourism to the island is mainly responsible for renewed economic growth, not industrial policy. “Resurgence in tourism spurs economic growth in Jamaica,” according to the Statistical Institute of Jamaica.

At the same time, communist China has been propping up the fragile Jamaican economy with massive loans for new infrastructure projects including new highway construction, which has plunged the government deeper into debt. The Chinese are also pouring billions of dollars into bauxite mining and sugar production on the island, which is also contributing to its economic rebound.

Two years ago, Don Harris had no idea his 2012 plan was working. The Jamaican press quoted him blaming the conservative government now in power for not doing more to fix the “problems plaguing the country.” He called for a “reordering of the public sector” to provide more funding for, and intervention in, the private sector. And he slammed the one sector fueling the economy – resorts – for being too corporatized and importing too many foreign goods to supply hotels.

Echoing a favorite phrase of the Biden-Harris administration, he said that “the country needs to have a whole government approach to begin to address the problems,” doubling down on his belief that bigger government is always the best solution.

Like Father, Like Daughter

During the debate last month between Trump and Harris, Trump claimed that Kamala is a Marxist secretly trying to carry her father’s radical mantle into the White House.

“Her father’s a Marxist professor in economics,” Trump said. “And he taught her well.”

Allies of the Democratic candidate argue she isn’t a Marxist; she just wants “equitable treatment” for the historically disadvantaged.

Although the Harris campaign has sought to airbrush Don Harris out of his daughter’s life, it is clear there are strong overlaps in their thinking and her governance. In 2019, for example, GovTrack, a non-partisan group that tracks lawmakers’ voting on bills in Congress, ranked Harris the “most liberal compared to all Senators,” including Bernie Sanders. That means her voting record was to the left of even a self-described socialist, according to Josh Tauberer, GovTrack founder. In addition, Kamala has had her own radical associations. As San Francisco's District Attorney ( 2002-2011), for example, Harris hired Lateefah Simon, former leader of the militant Marxist group STORM Revolutionary Movement to help reform the criminal justice system. She gave Simon, who is now running for Congress in California, a speaking spot at this summer's Democratic National Convention.

In a recent interview with Fox News media critic Howie Kurtz, Trump wondered why the media hadn’t explored the extent to which Kamala was steeped in radical Marxist ideology. He said he fears she was born into an anti-American political movement, which she may be trying to use the presidency to advance.

“Her father’s a Marxist professor of economics. How come nobody interviews him?” Trump demanded. Asked why her father’s political persuasion should matter, Trump asserted that Kamala has adopted his radical worldview and is now trying to cover it up by sounding moderate, even co-opting some of his own MAGA policies.

“Go back to when she was defeated by Biden [in 2020], and she was radical left. She was probably beyond Marxist, if you want to know the truth,” Trump said. 

“When you’re more liberal than Bernie Sanders, by a lot, this country cannot have that,” Trump warned. “This country has to get wise to it. They have to find out.”

Columbia University history professor Adam Tooze called Trump’s remarks “the sort of silly nonsense that the GOP circulates when it describes the Democrats as socialist. They clearly aren’t.”

One academic who befriended Don Harris in the 1990s said Kamala is much like her father. “I have the impression that the press tends to exaggerate the distance between them in the political sense, with people saying that he was much more to the left, more of a social democrat than she is,” said Joanilio Teixeira, an emeritus professor of economics at the University of Brasilia, in an interview with a Brazilian newspaper earlier this year.

“I am aware, of course, that some of his theories are very present in his daughter,” Teixeira added. “The question of the distribution of wealth. The question of raising up people of African descent. These issues are very present in what she says.”

Paul Sperry is an investigative reporter for RealClearInvestigations. He is also a longtime media fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. Sperry was previously the Washington bureau chief for Investor’s Business Daily, and his work has appeared in the New York PostWall Street Journal, New York Times, and Houston Chronicle, among other major publications.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2024/10/31/her_fathers_daughter_donald_harris_hidden_influence_on_kamala_1069092.html

Noncitizen voted in Michigan. So much for Democrats claiming it doesn't happen

 

Let me get this out of the way. I am not a proponent of election conspiracy theories, and I do not think Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election.

I believe Trump’s allegations of widespread voter fraud worked to undermine confidence in elections, especially among his followers. 

However, Democrats and the legacy news media have taken the conversation too far the other way by painting those who want to increase the security of our elections in any way as kooky conspiracy theorists.

It should be a bipartisan aim to ensure our elections are only for U.S. citizens.

That’s not controversial, right? 

Yet, by continually eschewing tougher voter ID requirements, Democrats and their allies are hurting their own cause. 

Case in point: Over the weekend, a University of Michigan student from China – and a noncitizen – seemed to very easily register to vote and cast a ballot in an election the student has no business voting in. 

Election officials say there is no way to invalidate the student’s ballot since it’s already been tabulated. 

As a Michigan resident and U.S. citizen, I find that appalling.


In Michigan, every vote is going to matter this election 

First, a little more about what happened. 

The student is a 19-year-old from China who registered to vote using his university ID and other documents proving residency in Ann Arbor, where the university is located. The student also signed a document saying he was a U.S. citizen. His ballot was then entered into a tabulator. 

The only reason the student got caught is that he allegedly later requested the ballot back. The student has now been charged with two crimes, since voting as a noncitizen is illegal in the United States.

While this may be an isolated incident, it also highlights that fraud can and does happen. If this student initially got away with the fraud, and will have his vote counted, then how many others have as well? 

In Michigan, a pivotal swing state in the presidential election, every vote is going to matter. In 2016, Trump won the state by fewer than 11,000 votes. And it’s expected to be close this time, too.

According to the University of Michigan, during fall term 2023, there were 12,720 international students, scholars, faculty and staff at the university. 

The number is large enough to raise concerns when it comes to who is registering to vote. 

It's not asking too much of voters to prove their citizenship 

Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson testifies during a House committee hearing on elections in September 2024 in Washington, D.C.

Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, is trying to quell the situation. 

“Friends: we are in the middle of a battle over the future of our democracy," Benson posted on social media Thursday. "Voting ends in less than a week. Expect bad actors to take minor issues and use them to fuel baseless conspiracy theories in order to further their own agenda. Don’t buy into their attempts to create chaos, confusion and fear.”

Is this a minor issue though? 

"Our laws are meant to make sure that every eligible citizen can vote," Benson spokeswoman Angela Benander told me via email. "There have been many efforts over the years looking into noncitizen participation in elections – all have come up with the same conclusion – that cases like this are very isolated and rare."

Benson, who has campaigned for Vice President Kamala Harris, similarly tried to convince a congressional committee in September that Michigan was ready for the election and blamed threats against election workers on “the spread of false information about the security and accuracy of our elections.” 

She told me the same in an interview earlier this year

Opinion:Michigan's elections chief talks democracy, the November election and, of course, Trump

Incidents like with the Michigan student from China undermine the premise that our elections are fully secure. 

Michigan isn’t alone with voting concerns. Thousands of voter registration forms in Pennsylvania have been flagged for fraud, and Virginia had to seek the help of the U.S. Supreme Court to clear its voter rolls of suspected noncitizens.

An easy fix would be to require proof of citizenship to register to vote, and it’s weird that Democrats are so against the idea.

Republicans in Congress have tried several times this year to pass the SAVE Act, which would require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections. But Democrats have blocked the measure.

Democrats complain that it’s already illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections. It happens, though, despite the illegality. 

If Democrats like Benson want us to have faith in our elections, they should spend less time scolding people and more time safeguarding this fundamental right. 

Ingrid Jacques is a columnist at USA TODAY. 

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2024/11/01/noncitizen-voting-election-security-voter-fraud/75963501007/

Behind The Bond Sell-Off

 by Louis-Vincent Gave via Evergreen Gavekal blog,

TLT.US, the long-dated US treasury ETF, is back trading below its 200-day moving average, and on current form is looking at its fourth year running of negative price returns.

Not that this sell-off reflects any lack of retail investor enthusiasm for US bonds. Quite the contrary.

As US treasuries pulled back, flows into TLT.US went parabolic - and the ETF’s market cap rose from US$10bn in 2019 to US$60bn today.

But long-dated bonds continue to sell off. And like successes, sell-offs usually have many fathers.

When it comes to today’s bond bear market, it’s possible to point to four main explanations.

1) Essentially, the market is slowly realizing that the post-2008 “new normal” era of depressed nominal growth is well and truly over. The real estate bubbles have been digested, while bank and consumer balance sheets have been repaired.

Consequently, the world’s major central banks will not push interest rates back to zero any time soon. Zero rates were a historical aberration that need not be repeated. In this case, why own long bonds that yield less than short-term bills? Giving up today’s higher T-bill yields for the hopes of lower treasury note yields down the road makes little sense. This explanation for the sell-off is by far the likeliest. Incidentally, this means that we could now see a little bit of a rally in the oversold bond markets, as data to be published in the coming weeks looks to come in soft. Following Hurricanes Helene and Milton, jobless claims are likely to pick up, while production numbers may show some temporary softness on the back of short-term supply chain disruptions.

2) It’s the issuance. Any debate about how to tackle the US government’s runaway budget deficit has been notably absent from the US electoral campaign. The deficit did not feature in either the presidential or vice presidential debates. And when challenged on the topic, the presidential candidates have typically fallen back on worn-out tropes like “slashing inefficiencies” or “getting the rich to pay their fair share.” Meanwhile, the outstanding stock of US government debt continues to grow. According to the International Monetary Fund, US government spending will hit US$13trn a year by 2029 (compared with US$2.5trn when Bill Clinton left office). And these forecasts do not factor in proposed additional spending by Donald Trump or Kamala Harris.

Against this backdrop, in the past few weeks an assortment of legendary investors—Paul Tudor Jones, Stanley Druckenmiller, Leon Cooperman— have taken to the airwaves to warn about the unsustainability of the current fiscal path. This illustrates how the zeitgeist surrounding the US fiscal situation may be changing. In the new zeitgeist, investors are more likely to sell rallies in bonds than to buy dips.

3) It’s the inflation. One of the more interesting developments in the past year is how resilient inflation has proved to be. Sure, inflation rolled over hard from its 2022-23 highs. But given easier year-on-year comparisons, the balance-sheet recession in China, the pull-back in oil prices and much lower prices for wheat, corn and other foods, you might have expected inflation absolutely to collapse. Yet the consumer inflation rate has remained above 2.4%.

That is the past. What happens now that the world’s major central banks, except the Bank of Japan, are cutting interest rates? Now that oil inventories are severely depleted? Now that the US and EU seem set to embrace higher tariffs and reject China’s cheap industrial goods? In the shorter term, it also appears that Helene and Milton might also prove inflationary, with higher used car prices, and higher car and house insurance premiums.

4) It’s the shifting geopolitical environment. Last week saw both the IMF meeting in Washington and the Brics summit in Kazan in Russia. The timing clash was probably not an accident. Clearly, Brics leaders such as Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, and perhaps even Narendra Modi, are keen to underscore that there is an “old” Western world and a “resurgent” Global South. And this Global South is keen to dedollarize its trade, create new settlement systems not reliant on Swift, and diversify its central bank holdings. Given these aims, perhaps it should be no surprise that precious metals have climbed to new highs while long-dated US treasuries have sold off.

Putting this all together leaves investors with some fairly straightforward questions.

  • Will global growth roll over from here? In the short term, US data could soften in the aftermath of the two recent hurricanes. But in the longer term, an easing of fiscal policy seems to be on the cards regardless who wins the US presidential election. Meanwhile in China, the government is pushing most of its stimulative buttons. So the two largest contributors to global growth over recent years seem likely to add more growth in 2025 than they did in 2024.

  • Will the US government tighten its belt and take it easy on debt issuance? This seems highly unlikely.

  • Will inflation continue to decelerate? Given the growing belief that trade tariffs are the answer to the world’s ills, this also seems unlikely.

  • Will the geopolitical environment brighten? Perhaps. Donald Trump is promising to put an end to the Ukraine war if he’s elected, and may even seek some kind of deal with China. But for now, betting in line with the underlying trend of ever more decoupling would seem to make sense

Obama FBI Ran Off-The-Books 'Honeypot' Operation On Trump Campaign In 2015: Whistleblower

 A whistleblower has told the House Judiciary Committee that the Obama FBI launched an off-the-books operation targeting Donald Trump and his campaign as soon as he announced his bid for the White House in 2015.

The operation, ordered by then-FBI Director James B. Comey, predicated the Crossfire Hurricane operation. According to an FBI agent involved in the clandestine criminal investigation, Comey sent two female FBI undercover agents to infiltrate Trumps 2016 campaign at high levels, who were directed to act as "honeypots" while traveling with Trump and his campaign staff on the trail, the Washington Times reports.

According to the disclosure, which The Washington Times reviewed, the investigation differed from the later Crossfire Hurricane counterintelligence operation targeting Russian collusion. It said the early off-the-books probe was a criminal investigation targeting Mr. Trump and his 2016 presidential campaign staff.

The agent “personally knew” that Mr. Comey ordered an FBI investigation against Mr. Trump and that Mr. Comey “personally directed it,” according to the disclosure.

The whistleblower says that the investigation wasn't targeting any specific crimes, but was more of a 'fishing expedition' to try and find something incriminating on Trump.

Former FBI Assistant Director Chris Swecher told the Times that if the report is true, it's a "booming, egregious violation" of the rules governing the attorney general and the FBI.

"It’s an unpredicated infiltration of a presidential campaign which is sensitive," he said. "It’s sensitive to the point where it would have to have been approved by the [attorney general] and … would have to be predicated. And in this case, I’m not hearing any predication. It would have to be on the books anyway, regardless."

Unlike Crossfire Hurricane - a counterintelligence investigation into whether members of the Trump campaign coordinated, knowingly or unknowingly, with the Russian government - the earlier honeypot operation "had no predicated foundation, so Mr. Comey personally directed the investigation without creating an official case file in Sentinel or any other FBI system."

The report claims that the undercover agents’ real targets included campaign adviser George Papadopoulos, a now-infamous figure in the Trump-Russia saga. Papadopoulos ultimately pled guilty to a single count of making false statements to the FBI about his Russian contacts—a charge that landed him 12 days in prison. But documents released later showed that he had repeatedly denied Trump campaign involvement in the 2016 hacking of the Democratic National Committee emails.

In one chilling detail, the whistleblower’s disclosure alleges that the FBI closed the secret operation only after a journalist got hold of a photograph of one of the undercover agents, threatening to publish it. In an attempt to quash the story, the FBI press office reportedly told the outlet that the photo depicted an “informant” whose life could be endangered if her identity was revealed.

One of the undercover agents was allegedly moved to the CIA to keep her out of the spotlight as a potential witness, while another FBI employee involved in the operation was promoted.

Comey, who was fired by Trump in 2017 amid controversy over the Russia probe, has yet to respond to the new allegations.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/obama-fbi-ran-books-honeypot-operation-trump-campaign-2015-whistleblower

TV Exec Tells CNN Inconvenient Truth: "Trump Victory Means MSM Dead In Current Form"

 CNN chief media analyst Brian Stelter shared a comment from an anonymous television executive on X, "If half the country has decided that Trump is qualified to be president, that means they're not reading any of this media, and we've lost this audience completely. A Trump victory means mainstream media is dead in its current form."

The anonymous TV exec's comment to Stelter nailed it. Trust in corporate media has been sliding for decades but has imploded to record-low levels in the last several years. 

History might show that the 2020s was the decade when the curtain was lifted on the censorship blob, a combination of MSM, government, big tech, nonprofits (fake fact-checkers), and globalist billionaires that work overtime to sow division across the nation, trick the American people into endless foreign wars, and artificially create a news flow environment favorable to far-left policies. 

At the start of the year, Wall Street Journal EIC Emma Tucker told fellow elites at Davos: "We owned the news. We were the gatekeepers, and we very much owned the facts as well. Nowadays, people can go to all sorts of different sources for the news. And they're much more questioning about what we're saying." 

Fast-forward to recent months, and some of those far-left globalist elites, including Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, sounded the alarm about free speech as their control over information waned with the rise of Elon Musk's 'free speech' platform X. 

A combination of alternative media outlets, Musk and his platform X, helped to shape this election cycle with news flow that shifted 'Overton Window' from unthinkable and radical leftist propaganda to the center of common sense. This allowed for narratives such as 'Bidenflation' and 'migrant invasion' to dominate news cycles instead of the leftist propaganda of wokeism. This, of course, has infuriated the Deep State's censorship blob, which this week launched an attack on alternative media via the NYTimes And Media Matters

Perhaps one of the biggest wake-up calls for MSM was their full-blown hate-speech propaganda blitzkrieg of calling Trump a 'Nazi' and 'Hitler' - only finding out that most Americans have given up on CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, and MSNBC - and could care less about the misinformation and disinformation pushed by those muppets.

Another big wake-up call for MSM was some of their own allies defecting from the liberal cause, including The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and USA Today, which the three papers did not endorse Harris-Walz nor any other candidate. This is out of the norm for these papers. 

WaPo's owner, Jeff Bezos, wrote in an explainer about his decision, indicating, "Our profession is now the least trusted of all. Something we are doing is clearly not working." 

If Trump wins, David Sacks on X offered some views of what could be next for MSM...

Here's what X users say about Stelter citing an anonymous TV exec...

It happened decades ago.

Correct. 

* * *  

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/tv-exec-tells-cnns-brian-stelter-inconvenient-truth-trump-victory-means-msm-dead-current