Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The U.S. Supreme Court on April 23 directed the U.S. Department of Justice to reply to a man convicted in the Jan. 6, 2021, breach of the U.S. Capitol.

The U.S. Supreme Court in Washington on April 8, 2024. (Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times)

Justices said the department’s response to Russell Alford is due May 23.

Mr. Alford was convicted by a jury of four misdemeanor counts but is challenging two of the charges, arguing that they don’t apply to his conduct.

The charges should not have been brought because the laws on which they’re based bar disorderly and disruptive conduct in a Capitol building and in a restricted building, but Mr. Alford merely entered the Capitol and stood silently against a wall before exiting, the Supreme Court was told in a filing from Mr. Alford’s lawyers.

U.S. District Judge Tonya Chutkan, an appointee of President Barack Obama, originally rejected Mr. Alford’s request to dismiss the counts, finding that his “mere presence inside the Capitol disturbed the public peace or undermined public safety.”

A federal appeals court, after reviewing the rejection, upheld it in January. While Mr. Alford was “neither violent nor destructive ... a jury could rationally find that his unauthorized presence in the Capitol as part of an unruly mob contributed to the disruption of the Congress’s electoral certification and jeopardized public safety,” the ruling stated.

“The court should grant review because this case presents an important question of federal statutory interpretation,” Mr. Alford’s lawyers wrote to the Supreme Court, describing the appeals court ruling as “establish[ing] a slippery and counter-textual standard for criminalizing conduct in settings for political activity.”

One of the laws, 18 U.S.C. § 1752(a)(2), bars people from “knowingly, and with intent to impede or disrupt the orderly conduct of government business or official functions, engages in disorderly or disruptive conduct in, or within such proximity to, any restricted building or grounds when, or so that, such conduct, in fact, impedes or disrupts the orderly conduct of government business or official functions.”

The other, 40 U.S.C. § 5104(e)(2)(D), makes it a crime to “utter loud, threatening, or abusive language, or engage in disorderly or disruptive conduct, at any place in the grounds or in any of the Capitol Buildings with the intent to impede, disrupt, or disturb the orderly conduct of a session of Congress or either house of Congress, or the orderly conduct in that building of a hearing before, or any deliberations of, a committee of Congress or either house of Congress.”

The lower court rulings were wrong in part because they focused on the effects of Mr. Alford’s conduct, not the nature of the conduct, according to the writ to justices.

That focus “collapses the conduct element into the harm element by giving the adjectives no apparent force,” they said. They argued later that merely being present “is not disorderly conduct unless the presence is in defiance of an order to disperse.”

If the court grants the petition, it would review the case and decide if the rulings were appropriate.

The Department of Justice’s Solicitor General, Elizabeth Prelogar, told the court on April 12 that the government was waiving its right to file a response to the filing, “unless requested to do so by the court.” The petition was distributed to justices on April 18 for their scheduled May 9 conference. Then, on Tuesday, justices directed the Department of Justice to file a response to Mr. Alford.

Lawyers for Mr. Alford and the government did not respond to requests for comment.

If justices take up the petition and rule in favor of Mr. Alford, a number of other Jan. 6 defendants and convicts could see charges thrown out.

Obstruction Charge

The court already agreed to review another charge brought against many Jan. 6 defendants.

Justices sat for oral arguments on April 16 concerning obstruction of an official proceeding, a charge brought against former police officer Joseph Fischer after he entered the Capitol on Jan. 6.

One of Mr. Fischer’s attorneys said the charge should not have been brought because the law was only intended to be used in cases of evidence tampering.

Ms. Prelogar told justices that the charge was proper because it was “not limited to evidence impairment.”

Justice Neil Gorsuch, appointed by former President Donald Trump, wondered whether the government would bring the charge against people who heckled the court.

“Would a sit-in that disrupts a trial or access to a federal courthouse qualify? Would a heckler in today’s audience qualify, or at the State of the Union address? Would pulling a fire alarm before a vote qualify for 20 years in federal prison?” he asked.

Another justice later questioned if protesters blocking access to a trial would face the charge, noting that protests have taken place in the past at the Supreme Court but the government did not charge the protesters under the law.

Ms. Prelogar said the law might apply in such cases, if there was proof of “corrupt intent.”

Justices are due to hand down a decision in the case at some point in the future.

Dairy cattle moving between states must be tested for the bird flu virus, U.S. agriculture officials said Wednesday as they try to track and control the growing outbreak.

AP reports that the federal order was announced a day after health officials said they had detected inactivated remnants of the virus, known as Type A H5N1, in samples taken from milk during processing and after retail sale. They stressed that such remnants pose no known risk to people or the milk supply.

“The risk to humans remains low,” said Dawn O'Connell of the federal Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response.

The new order requires every lactating cow to be tested and post a negative result before moving to a new state. It will help the agency understand how the virus is spreading, said Michael Watson, an administrator with the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service.

“We believe we can do tens of thousands of tests a day,” he told reporters.

Until now, testing had been done voluntarily and only in cows with symptoms.

As The Epoch Times' Zachary Steiber reported earlier, commercially available milk from grocery stores has tested positive for highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI), the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced on April 23.

The FDA said in a statement it has been testing milk from cattle that have been sickened with the influenza, commonly known as the bird flu or H5N1, as well as milk “in the processing system, and on the shelves.”

“Based on available information, pasteurization is likely to inactivate the virus, however, the process is not expected to remove the presence of viral particles. Therefore, some of the samples collected have indicated the presence of HPAI using quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) testing,” the agency said.

While samples tested positive, that does not mean they contain an intact pathogen, according to the FDA.

“Additional testing is required to determine whether intact pathogen is still present and if it remains infectious, which determines whether there is any risk of illness associated with consuming the product,” the FDA said.

The agency is injecting samples into fertilized chicken eggs to see whether any active virus replicates, among other experiments. It is also completing testing on samples taken from pasteurized milk from across the nation.

“To date, we have seen nothing that would change our assessment that the commercial milk supply is safe. Results from multiple studies will be made available in the next few days to weeks,” the FDA said.

The agency did not immediately respond to a request for comment for more details, including how many samples tested positive and which stores the milk that tested positive came from.

Bird flu has been confirmed in 33 herds of cattle in eight states after spreading to ruminants for the first time in the United States earlier this year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. One person, a farm worker in Texas, has also tested positive for the influenza.

U.S. authorities previously said that milk from diaries with sickened animals was “being diverted or destroyed so that it does not enter the food supply” and that “pasteurization has continually proven to inactivate bacteria and viruses, like influenza, in milk,” but critics noted the authorities produced no evidence of testing to back up their position.

“There could be viruses in the milk on grocery shelves right now,” Gail Hansen, a veterinary expert who was formerly the state public health veterinarian for the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, and Andrew deCoriolis, executive director of the group Farm Forward, wrote in a recent op-ed.

Ms. Hansen said on the social media platform X that the FDA finding virus particles was “a little bit better than finding whole virus” but was “still not good.”

Rick Bright, the former director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, noted the shifting language from the government. The FDA now says that pasteurization “is very likely to effectively inactivate heat-sensitive viruses like H5N1 in milk from cows and other species.”

It also acknowledged that “no studies on the effects of pasteurization on HPAI viruses (such as H5N1) in bovine milk have previously been completed,” although it pointed to previous studies on effective pasteurization.

Yaneer Bar-Yam, president of the New England Complex Systems Institute, said the findings mean “milk from sick cows is being used” in the commercial supply. While pasteurization likely makes the milk safe, that safety is “not guaranteed,” he added.

Some experts emphasized that, at present, there were no indications that the positive tests meant the virus detected was infectious.

“There is no evidence to date that this is [an] infectious virus and the FDA is following up on that,” Lee-Ann Jaykus, an emeritus food microbiologist and virologist at North Carolina State University, told the Associated Press.

But Angela Rasmussen, a virologist, said on X that the positive samples “suggests there are undetected herds shedding virus into the milk supply” because they show intact virus “was once present.”

“It’s hard to say more as no raw data was shared, so we just have to take their word for it,” she added.

Submitted by David Stockman via Contra Corner blog,

The UniParty's Day Of Infamy, Part 1

The clusterf*ck in the US House of Representatives this past weekend is surely the final straw. The dreadful grip of the UniParty on national security policy has finally produced sheer madness in a single package. To wit:

• $95 billion of foreign aid boondoggles that do not benefit America’s homeland security in the slightest.

• An extension of section 702 of FISA that wantonly expands an already egregious affront to the Fourth Amendment.

• The illegal transfer of billions of sovereign assets stolen from Russia to its enemies in Kiev.

• A national security ban on 15-second TikTok videos about dances, pranks, pets and poppycock viewed overwhelmingly by under 30-year-old Americans whose viewing habits are of zero value to the Chicoms in Beijing.

It is bad enough that there is not an iota of informed consideration behind any of this. But what is really alarming is that every single House Democrat (210) voted in favor of $61 billion for the Ukrainian Demolition Derby. This included a 97-0 vote among so-called Dem “progressives”, who also voted 96-0 in favor of aid to Taiwan—the purpose of which is surely not a more pacific neighborhood on the Pacific Rim.

Once upon a time, the Democrats were the party of the peace candidates. No more, which surely explains their fury at RFK, who is.

At the same time, only fourteen Republicans voted against all four components of this wholesale assault on constitutional liberty and fiscal rectitude. As we have previously documented, America is now careening on fiscal automatic pilot toward a $140 trillion 4/23/24, 12:40 PM The UniParty’s Day of Infamy, Part 1 https://davidstockman.substack.com/p/the-unipartys-day-of-infamy-part 2/11 public debt by mid-century, but the overwhelming share of House Republicans choose to hammer the US economy with even more debt to fund pointless foreign aid boondoggles, while shackling private citizens and entrepreneurs with government intrusions based on the paranoid lies of the national security state.

In this context it was the predictable histrionics of the bevy of neocon warmongers on the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal that brought home the full extent of the challenge. Namely, that the mainstream narrative in the Imperial City and among the nation’s elite media is so utterly wrong-headed and morally obtuse that only the complete abandonment of the core framework of contemporary national security policy can save the day.

Accordingly, the “domino” theory needs be repudiated once and for all. Likewise, the Washington-Jefferson doctrine of “no entangling alliances” needs be revived in place of the vestigial cold war notion that informs Washington’s current destructive and bankrupting policies. We are referring to the wholly obsolete notion that America’s homeland security depends upon a worldwide system of military alliances, bases and kinetic power projection capabilities that enable Washington to function as the great Global Hegemon, who is ready, willing and able to intervene in virtually any spate that erupts among the 8 billion peoples of the planet.

The fourteen GOP stalwarts listed below essentially said, no dice to these tired, dangerous, costly and risible formulations: Neither Russia nor China pose even a remote military threat to the American homeland, while proxy wars and economic sanctions against “adversaries” demonized by the Deep State actually undermine domestic liberty and prosperity for no justifiable reason of homeland security at all.

With respect to the latter, for instance, there is no real reason for the sweeping multihundred billion cost to the American economy of sanctions and trade restrictions on China, Iran or Russia. And, similarly, there are no security threats in the world today that even remotely justify the national security state’s intrusion into the rights and privacies of American citizens.

Still, the pseudo-intellectuals at the WSJ trotted out Hitler, Tojo and the “isolationist” epithet as if these references prove anything at all, when, in fact, none have any real relevance to the world of today. There are simply no industrial state tyrants on the march anywhere on the global horizon that resemble even the apparent facts of the 1930s, let alone the actual historical realities of the matter.

The fact is, Stalin and Hitler were sui generis. They were one-time accidents of history arising from the folly of Versailles and the punitive peace of the victors enabled by Woodrow Wilson’s pointless intervention in a European war that would have otherwise ended in stalemate and the mutual exhaustion and bankruptcy of all the combatants.

That is to say, the DNA of the world’s nations is not infected with incipient tendencies toward totalitarianism and aggression. Maintaining the global peace and pacific commerce of the nations does not depend upon an alliance of virtuous interventionists or a Global Hegemon, prepared to enforce its writ at the slightest breakout of local and regional quarrels and conflicts.

At the end of the day, laissez faire is the path to prosperity in both economics and international affairs. Military alliances and Hegemons everywhere and always fall captive to the arms merchants they foster.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the honor roll from last weekend’s rampage of folly by the UniParty consists of a mere 14 House Republicans, who were awarded the scarlet “I” by the war-happy globalists at the Wall Street Journal:

Fourteen Republicans voted against all four bills on the House floor, including the one that would force a sale of TikTok from Chinese ownership. Here’s the dishonor roll in alphabetical order: Andy Biggs (Ariz.), Lauren Boebert (Colo.), Andrew Clyde (Ga.), Elijah Crane (Ariz.), Matt Gaetz (Fla.), Bob Good (Va.), Paul Gosar (Ariz.), Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.), Andy Harris (Md.), Thomas Massie (Ky.), Troy Nehls (Texas), Ralph Norman (S.C.), Matt Rosendale (Mont.), Chip Roy (Texas).

The unavoidable meaning of the votes is that these Members don’t believe the U.S. should support allies threatened by authoritarians on the march. Like Republicans in the 1930s who slept while Hitler and Tojo advanced, these Republicans apparently think America can sit out these fights in splendid isolation. But history suggests that if they prevail, American sons and daughters would eventually have to fight. Better to help allies who want to help themselves.

The isolationist caucus lost this round, but this GOP tendency is dangerous. Another 17 Members voted for arms for Israel but not for Taiwan and Ukraine. Do they want to encourage a Chinese invasion? Perhaps if Florida is attacked, they’ll awaken to the reality of the world’s growing dangers.

No, Florida is not about to be attacked by Putin, Xi or the Ayatollahs. This is just scary bedtime story stuff that no informed adult should accord any credibility whatsoever.

Needless to say, the GOP most rabid neocon and warmonger, Senator Lindsay Graham, is neither informed nor, apparently, even of adult mind.

His incoherent, bloodthirsty rant actually made the WSJ editorialists sound thoughtful by comparison.

“Here’s what I will tell you. If you give Putin Ukraine, he will not stop,” Graham said during an interview on “Fox News Sunday.” “This is not about containing NATO and if you give him Ukraine, there goes Taiwan because China’s watching to see what we do.”

“I want to know what they’re talking about over there before they kill us here. And if you shut this thing down, you’ve turned the war into a crime,” Graham said. “We’re not fighting our crime, we’re finding a bunch of people who would kill all of us if they could get here. So, when you intercept information from a foreigner overseas talking about America, I want to know what they’re talking about.”

The Ukranian military, with our help, has killed about 50 percent of the combat power of the Russians,” Graham said Sunday. “This is the year [of] more. They’re going to have more weapons, but we also want them to have new weapons.”

Nor was the House GOP to be outdone by Senator Graham’s bellicose fulminations. Recently resigned Rep.  Ken Buck let it be known that if you actually understand that America’s homeland security is in no way enhanced by Washington’s misguided proxy war on Russia, as does Rep. Marjorie Greene, why then you surely are a traitor in the pay of Vlad Putin himself:

“Well, Moscow Marjorie has reached a new low,” Buck said of his former colleague.

“She is just mouthing the Russian propaganda and really hurting American foreign policy in the process. She’s acting completely irresponsibly. And again, when history looks at this period of time, Russia invaded Ukraine, Ukraine is fighting for its freedom, and we should be with the freedom fighters in this war.”

Of course, the insanity of $200 billion of NATO funds already wasted; hundreds of thousands dead; millions fleeing the country to avoid the mayhem of war and the cruelty of being drafted as cannon fodder to serve the perverted pleasure of Washington’s armchair warriors; and the civilian infrastructure of one of Europe’s largest countries in shambles—all have nothing whatsoever to do with “freedom fighters”.

The undeniable fact is that there is nothing at stake worth fighting for in Ukraine that even remotely resembles democratic virtue. It has been a cesspool of egregious corruption virtually since the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1991, and recently even required a visit from the head of the CIA to tell Zelensky and his fellow thieves to “knock it off” on the corruption front.

To the contrary, as the venerable anti-war writer William Astore put it, the real purpose of Ukrainian installment of the Forever Wars is the enrichment of the merchants of death who have captured the levers of power in Washington:

Of course, this is yet another triumph for the MICIMATT: the military-industrialcongressional-intelligence-media-academe-think-tank complex. Its power and greed are almost irresistible. Add that to AIPAC, threat inflation, and fear-mongering and perhaps it is irresistible until the U.S. empire final collapses under the weight of its own folly.

Yet all of the mindless bellicosity of the Washington interventionists is not simply ludicrous nonsense from an empirical viewpoint. More importantly, the current neocon/interventionist Washington consensus blatantly repudiates the sage advice of both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson from more than 220 years ago. Together they articulated a theory of foreign policy that was not “isolationist” at all, but realist and evidence-based.

That is, these wise Founders held that foreign policy should be based on the facts and circumstances of national interest at any given point in time, and that when the facts change and alliances become obsolete, they should be jettisoned.

From George Washington’s Farewell Address: “The great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign nations, is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible. Europe has a set of primary interests, which to us have none, or a very remote relation. Hence, she must be engaged in frequent controversies the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns. Hence, therefore, it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves, by artificial ties, in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics, or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships or enmities… it is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world…”

As further amplified by Jefferson in his 1801 inaugural address, this realist doctrine viewed external military alliances to be arrangements of convenience and should be freely abandoned or reversed as indicated by changing needs of the national interest. Citing Washington’s Farewell Address as his inspiration, Jefferson described the doctrine as-

“peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations—entangling alliances with none.”

That famous phrase is precisely the policy cornerstone that fits today’s realities. America’s homeland security doesn’t require militarized alliances or the wherewithal to maraud militarily around the globe because there are no military-industrial-technological powers that can threaten its security.

Accordingly, institutions like NATO may well have served the national interest 70 years ago with respect to Stalinist Russia and its military capacities and intentions toward its erstwhile but estranged wartime allies in the West. But even there the open archives from both sides of the cold war cast considerable doubt on whether Stalin and world communism were actually on the march or had either the intention or military capability to enslave western Europe, to say nothing of the American homeland on the far side of the Atlantic and Pacific Moats.

As it happened, the Henry Wallace peaceful accommodationist wing of the Roosevelt coalition may have been closer to the truth than the Wall Street based coteries of Henry Stimson, James Forrestal, Dean Acheson and the abominable Dulles Bothers, who actually formulated the nation’s cold war policies during that era.

But that question was resolved once and for all in 1991 when the Soviet Union disappeared into the dustbin of history, and not because of NATO or even Reagan’s Star Wars threat. The real reason was that centralized state communism doesn’t work: Neither for the people it exploits and oppresses, nor for the ruling elites and state-empowered comrades who may have delusions of grandeur about the sustainability of their own rule, to saying nothing of extending it to peoples beyond their borders.

Yet even as the true lesson of Soviet Communism’s collapse marched across the pages of history after 1991, the entrenched military-industrial-foreign policy apparatus was not about to relinquish its power, budgets and perks, just as Eisenhower had warned in another of America’s great Farewell Addresses in 1961. In fact, NATO morphed into something far more obnoxious than a cancellable alliance that had accomplished its mission and was slated for early retirement under the Washington-Jefferson doctrine.

And well it should have been because after 1991, there was no there, there. The Russian rump of the Soviet Union even today has a GDP of merely $2.2 trillion compared to the $28 trillion GDP of the USA and $46 trillion for all 32 NATO countries combined. And Russia has a military budget of barely 6% of NATO’s $1.25 trillion of combined defense expenditures and but one aircraft carrier.

Furthermore, the latter is a 20th century relic that has been in drydock repair since 2017 and is outfitted with neither an armada of escort ships and warplanes or even a crew. The Russian military, therefore, has no way to land on the shores of New Jersey or even enter the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, for that matter. Nor is Putin stupid enough to invade Poland, which offers nothing but centuries of animosity to all things Russian.

Then again, if Poland really believed all the anti-Putin rhetoric spouted by its rightwing government, it would be spending a lot more on defense in 2024 than $30 billion and 3.1% of GDP; nor would it be offering to house NATO nuclear weapons next door to the Russian Bear, as its president did this week.

“If our allies decide to deploy nuclear arms on our territory as part of nuclear sharing, to reinforce NATO’s eastern flank, we are ready to do so,” Polish President Andrzej Duda said in an interview published today by the Fakt newspaper.

In truth, Duda’s offer is just another case of client state politics run amuck. Rid the scene of Washington’s entangling alliance with the relic of NATO, and the voters of Poland would be looking for a new government. And they would do so even as they were sending it leaders to Moscow to seek mutual accommodation from the natural trade and commercial relationships that are inherent in its geography.

The fact is, 33-years after the demise of the Soviet Union NATO is not simply a pointless obsolete relic. It has morphed into the greatest armaments marketing and sales organization in the history of mankind. The only benefit that came from betraying Bush the Elder’s promise to Gorbachev that NATO would not expand a “single inch” to the east has accrued to the defense contractors, especially the US based giants.

As RFK has cogently pointed out, when the NATO alliance mushroomed from 16 nations to now 32 countries, every one of the new members had to conform their weapons systems and munitions to NATO standards. Not suprisingly, Lockheed, Boeing, Northrup Grumman, Raytheon, General Dynamics and United Technologies prospered mightily–even as they effectively roamed the halls of Congress spreading the lies embedded in the above Wall Street Journal rendition of dominoes and the essentiality of Washington’s obsolete global alliances.

Yet two of the four components of Saturday’s abomination were directed against China, predicated on the same illusion that led to the vast threat-inflation with respect to the Soviet Union. To wit, Chinese Communism, even in the thinly veiled guise of “red capitalism”, is no more viable or sustainable than the Soviet version.

At the end of the day, if you don’t have free markets, constitutionally protected property and personal rights of expression and assembly and honest bankruptcy courts to dispose of failed economic bets, you do not have a sustainable economy or permanently rising prosperity. Period.

To the contrary, China is a vast house of economic cards and statist malignancies propped up by $50 trillion of unpayable debt incurred in barely two decades. Accordingly, it is utterly dependent upon the hard currency earnings from $3.5 trillion of annual exports, mainly to the West, to keep its vast excess of infrastructure and housing investment from capsizing the whole Rube Goldberg Contraption. In the event of war, this export lifeline would soon find its way to Davy Jones’ Locker, along with China’s entire jerry-built economy.

So, it’s not going to be invading anyone, probably not even Taiwan. Chairman Xi and his team of rulers may love to quote Mao and color themselves red ideologically, but they also know that what stands between them and an uprising of China’s oppressed 1.5 billion inhabitants is a consistent and reasonably rising level of internal prosperity.

That rules out a Chinese Armada of black ships heading for the coast of California. Indeed, even the Navy they have today consists of two repurposed Soviet Era aircraft carriers and one new build of far less formidable and lethal capacity than Washington current Gerald Ford class carriers. And its other 400 Navy vessels consists largely of coastal patrol vessels that likely would not make it to the shores of California in one piece.

In terms of lethal firepower, in fact, the US Navy has 4.6 million tons of displacement, averaging 15,000 tons per ship. By contrast, China’s Navy has but 2.0 million tons of displacement, averaging only 5,000 tons per boat. That is to say, the Chinese Navy is totally visible, assessable and trackable, and is not remotely of the size and lethality that would make an invasion of America remotely plausible.

Finally, the main military capacity that is needed for homeland security in the present world, of course, is America’s triad strategic deterrent including 3,800 nuclear warheads. At any moment in time these are scrambled and dispersed -

• along the ocean bottoms among 16 Ohio class subs each bearing 80 independently targetable warheads.

• aloft in the global airspace on a fleet of 66 B-2 and B-52 heavy bombers  

• buried deep in hardened underground silos bearing more than 1,000 ICBM warheads.

This awesome retaliatory force cannot possibly be detected or 100% neutralized by a would-be nuclear blackmailer.

As it happens, the triad deterrent costs about $65 billion per year according to a recent CBO analysis, and full protection of the US shorelines and airspace behind the great ocean moats could bring a total Fortress America model of homeland defense to $400 billion per annum, at most.

The other $500 billion in today’s 050 function represents the ill-gotten budgetary conquests of the military-industrial-intelligence complex, and all the think tanks, NGOs and beltway bandits who make a living getting paid by DOD, State, AID, NED etc. to manufacturing inflated threats and scary stories about sinister foreigners. Such malefic malarky was on full display in the US House last weekend. Accordingly, there is only one cure. A powerful force from outside the beltway needs to splinter the UniParty into a thousand pieces.

That’s the real mission of Robert F Kennedy’s Jr. independent candidacy for President, as we will further amplify in Part 2.

By Michael Every of Rabobank

"Where it will end is very much up for grabs."

Yesterday’s manufacturing PMIs shouted “stagflation”, even if some heard “rate cuts”. German manufacturing was 42.2, French 44.9, and Eurozone 45.6, as services were 53.3, 50.5, and 52.9 - but Europe must now factor in logjams appearing at key ports due to unsold Chinese EVs and the knock-on effects of the Houthi’s blockage of Suez; the UK prints were 48.7 and 54.9; and the US both 50.9 - but its fine print said: “Manufacturing has now registered the steeper rate of price increases in three of the past four months, with factory cost pressures intensifying in April amid higher raw material and fuel prices, contrasting with the wage-related services-led price pressures seen throughout much of 2023.”

Yesterday’s bigger picture was as big as it gets. No, not the UK “putting its economy on a war footing” in raising defence spending to 2.5% of GDP by 2030. It’s already at 2.32% despite UK armed forces being nowhere near ready for war. (Of more interest was that a tax cut might be dropped to fund this incremental spending: a ‘guns or butter’ decision we will see lots more of.)

Rather, the ECB’s Panetta gave a speech echoing Mario Draghi’s call for “radical change. He stated for the EU to thrive it needs a de facto national-security focused POLITCAL economy centered round: reducing dependence on foreign demand (i.e., fewer net exports – sorry, Germany/Netherlands!); enhancing energy security (green protectionism); advancing production of technology (industrial policy); rethinking participation in global value chains (tariffs/subsidies); governing migration flows (so higher labour costs); enhancing external security (huge funds for defence); and joint investments in European public goods (via Eurobonds… to be bought by ECB QE for a ‘strategic bond portfolio’?) Oddly, the people who spend their time transcribing every syllable of what the ECB says when it points to a slight shift in the timing of a 25bp rate move were quiet about a speech which promised to transform the entire EU economic and market architecture!

However, this is what we said Europe would do to try to achieve strategic autonomy. It’s also what I argued Western economies would do in 2016’s pre-Brexit, pre-Trump ‘Thin Ice’, which underlined that once you remove any leg of the free market ‘table’, the whole thing topples over. So, it’s now modern-day Hamiltonian economics – unless it’s “Build Back Better” all over again.

This is a global, fundamental issue. In 2025, we get either Bidenomics 2.0 or Trump 2.0: in either case we are going to see more huge fiscal deficits, protectionism, and industrial policy, but in the latter case, perhaps on steroids. At the same time, China is going to keep being mercantilist on its own steroids. Likewise, Japan and even Australia(!) are heading in that direction. Clearly, we need some understanding of what this all means beyond monthly PMI up- or down-ticks.

Narrowly, Trump 2.0 could mean a USD and US asset meltdown, or a further USD and US asset spike and an emerging market meltdown. It depends on how it’s implemented and how the world responds.

More broadly, the global system is close to massive structural change. As the Financial Times op-eds today, the US and EU can’t embrace national-security “infant industry” arguments, seize key value chains to narrow inequality, and break the fiscal and monetary ‘rules’, while also using the IMF and World Bank --and the economics profession-- to preach free-market best practice to EM ex-China. And China can’t expect others not to copy what it does. As the FT concludes, “The shift to a new economic paradigm has begun. Where it will end if very much up for grabs.”

And “up for grabs” is the key point. As far back as 1820, Hegel argued that bourgeois society was incapable of internally solving its problems of social inequality and instability arising from its tendency to over-accumulate wealth at one pole and deprivation at the other, and a "mature" civil society was thus driven to seek external solutions through foreign trade, colonial, or imperial practices. In 2024, Europe just made the point for him – but what was their alternative?

In 2020, I warned we needed a new ideological “-ism” to guide our *political* economy out of the mess it was in: Hamiltonianism is it, as predicted. However, we each want it only for ourselves, not for others. There appears no likelihood of a Global New Deal to distribute value chains and green technology so everybody gets a fair share. Yet without it, we are back to a world of all vs. all, as warned in ’Thin Ice’ – and now openly with violence. That was why we dreamed the post-WW2, post-Cold War neoliberal one-world dream: it wasn’t just so the rich could feast on the poor; it also held up a simple, illusory ideology the world could buy into to end all conflicts.

Such arguments sound silly to PMI-monomaniacs, but they matter deeply for policy. For example, in the UK there was a public St. George’s Day debate over whether it was free-market capitalism or its empire that led to the UK becoming global hegemon. Free marketeers say it was all markets, so more markets please; Hamasniks on campuses say it was all the latter, so more “decolonisation”, please. The implications are enormous.

The awkward historical fact is that it was capitalism and empire that enriched the UK. Free markets and the rule of law were essential; but so was empire – in particular India. As Arrighi (2007), notes: “India's huge demographic resources buttressed British world power both commercially and militarily. Commercially, Indian workers were forcibly transformed from major competitors of European textile industries into major producers of cheap food and raw materials for Europe. Militarily…Indian manpower was organized in a European-style colonial army, funded entirely by the Indian taxpayer, and used throughout the nineteenth century in the endless series of wars through which Britain opened up Asia and Africa to Western trade and investment. As for the financial aspect, the devaluation of the Indian currency, the imposition of the infamous Home Charges through which India was made to pay for the privilege of being pillaged and exploited by Britain, and the Bank of England's control over India's foreign-exchange reserves, jointly turned India into the "pivot" of Britain's world-financial and commercial supremacy.”

In short, free markets and forcing others not to be free has worked very well: denying that won’t help. Addressing what a global structure looks like that keeps the former but doesn’t do the latter, and which doesn’t produce inequality and destabilisation, is the issue. Or, given that may be a utopia, we at least need to predict what the all vs. all world looks like. (Which is what we did in predicting Europe would embrace the “radical” policy changes now floated even at the ECB.)

On all vs. all, the global capitalist hegemon has shifted over time to a successively larger polity/geography (Italian city states > Dutch United Provinces > England/the UK > the US) through economic or real war, with the complexity of the expanding global system requiring ever greater resources to sit at its centre. However, the US alone can no longer carry the world on its shoulders. The Triffin Paradox looms over the global role of the dollar --and any would-be successor; and the US will not be the net importer for everyone, the net provider of financial assets to all savers, nor the world policeman for all who require it. Indeed, the latter three stand in fundamental contradiction to each other.

This implies the next global hegemon has to be even larger than the US (or we fragment):

• Maybe the US will fail at a Hamiltonian relaunch and China is the next hegemon: but that implies geopolitical chaos ahead given the US won’t go home quietly.
• Maybe the US will succeed at Hamiltonianism, and the world/markets will shift accordingly.
• Maybe the scale needed for US hegemony involves it ‘bolting’ on Japan, South Korea, Canada, Mexico, Australia, and perhaps the UK and a ‘new look’ EU. But that implies a bifurcated world, with lots of bumps before we set up any buffers.
• Maybe the US will prefer what Kautsky called Ultra-Imperialism: making a global deal with China and Russia to carve out spheres of influence, and setting oligopolistic rules that benefit all three. Where does ‘old look’ Europe sit if so? Very uncomfortably, in all likelihood.

These are discussions we need, but we aren’t seeing them due to a key point Arrighi makes. The late stage of a global system has a ‘false dawn’ as the economy shifts from producing things, which make ever less profit due to competition, to producing financial assets, which make money while destabilising society and the global system itself. The Dutch Golden Age was just before it was pushed off the world stage by European mercantilism and the British; the late 19th century and early 20th century British belle époque was just before WW1; the boom in US financial services was as its industrial base has rotted away – and as wars start to break out again all over.

Those illusory good times, for some, take the market’s eyes off the prize: it’s no wonder few want to read Hamilton rather than a headline about rate cuts, and few seriously engage with what strategic decoupling and reindustrialisation might look like even when we are already seeing it via tariffs, the CHIPS Act, and the IRA. Not even when Trump may do far more, and the ECB says the EU should do it too!

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

Below is an expanded version of my column in the New York Post on the start of the Trump trial and much awaited explanation of District Attorney Alvin Bragg on the underlying alleged criminal conduct. The curious aspect of the case is that the prosecutors are stressing that they will prove largely uncontested facts. Indeed, if all of these facts of payments, non-disclosure agreements, and affairs are proven many of us (including liberal legal experts) are doubtful that there is any cognizable crime.

Here is the column:

For many of us in the legal community, the case of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg against former president Donald Trump borders on the legally obscene: an openly political prosecution based on a theory that even some liberal pundits have dismissed. Yet, this week the prosecution seemed like they were actually making a case for obscenity.

No, it was not the gratuitous introduction of an uncharged alleged tryst with a former Playboy bunny or planned details on the relationship with a former porn star. It was the criminal theory itself that seemed crafted around the standard for obscenity famously described by Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart in the case of Jacobellis v. Ohio, 378 U.S. 184 (1964): “I shall not today attempt further to define [it] … But I know it when I see it.”

After months of confusion of what crime they were alleging in the indictment, the prosecution offered a new theory that is so ambiguous and undefined that it would have made Justice Stewart blush.

New York prosecutor Joshua Steinglass told the jury that one of the crimes that Trump allegedly committed in listing the payments to Stormy Daniels as a “legal expense” was New York Law 17-152. This law states “Any two or more persons who conspire to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means and which conspiracy is acted upon by one or more of the parties thereto, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor.”

So they are arguing that Trump committed a crime by conspiring to unlawfully promote his own candidacy. He did this by paying to quash a potentially embarrassing story and then reimbursing his lawyer  with other legal expenses.

Confused? You are not alone.

It is not a crime to pay money for the nondisclosure of an alleged affair. Moreover, it is also not a federal election offense (which is the other crime alleged by Bragg) to pay such money as a personal or legal expense.

It is not treated under federal law as a political contribution to yourself.

Yet, somehow the characterization of this payment as a legal expense is being treated as an illegal conspiracy to promote one’s own candidacy in New York.

The Trump cases have highlighted a couple of New York’s absurdly ambiguous laws.  Under another law, New York Attorney General Letitia James secured an almost half of billion dollar judgment against Trump for loans where the alleged victims not only did not lose a dime but were eager for more business from his company. The law does not actually require any loss to a victim to impose a roughly $500 million penalty against a defendant that James pledged to bag in her campaign for office. While the over and under valuing of assets is common in the real estate area, James singled out Trump.

James declined to explain how this law could be used against other businesses since actual losses or injuries are not viewed as necessary. Businesses would just have to trust her and her judgment. In other words, the law could have sweeping applications, but we will know a violation under the civil law when we see it.

As with James, Bragg saw it in Trump. His predecessor did not see it. He declined charging on this basis. Bragg did to.  He stopped the investigation. However, after a pressure campaign, Bragg might not be able to see the crime but he certainly saw the political consequences of not charging Trump.

In New York, prosecutors are expected to have extreme legal myopia: they can see no farther than Trump to the exclusion of any implication for the legal system or legal ethics.

Of course, neither he nor his office has never seen this type of criminal case in any other defendant. Ever.

We have never seen a case like this one where a dead misdemeanor from 2016 could be revived as a felony just before any election in 2024.

The misdemeanors in this case, including falsifying these payments, expired with the passage of the statute of limitations. But Bragg (with the help of Matthew Colangelo, a former top official in the Biden Justice Department) zapped it back into life by alleging a federal election crime that the Justice Department itself rejected as a basis for any criminal charge.

So now there is a second crime that is hard for most of us to see, at least outside of New York. Trump is accused of conspiring to promote his own candidacy by mislabeling this payment, even though it was part of a larger legal payment to his former counsel, Michael Cohen.

They do not see a crime in analogous mislabeling of payments by Democratic candidates.

Take Hillary Clinton who served as senator from New York and ran for president against Trump. For months before the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton’s campaign denied that it had funded the infamous Steele dossier behind the debunked Russian collusion claims. That was untrue. When reporters tried to report on the funding story, one journalist said Elias that “pushed back vigorously, saying ‘You (or your sources) are wrong.’”

It was later discovered that the funding was hidden as legal expenses by then-Clinton campaign general counsel Marc Elias. (The FEC later sanctioned the campaign over its hiding of the funding.). Times reporter Maggie Haberman declared, “Folks involved in funding this lied about it, and with sanctimony, for a year.”

Elias even went with John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman, in speaking with congressional investigators and Podesta denied categorically any contractual agreement with Fusion GPS.

While the funds were part of the campaign budget, they were listed as legal expenses and the Clinton people continued to insist that such payments to a former intelligence figure to put together the dossier was a legal expenditure.

It is not clear if Trump even knew how this money was characterized on ledgers or records. He paid the money to his lawyer, who had put together this settlement over the nondisclosure agreement. Cohen will soon go on the stand and tell the jury that they should send his former client to jail for following his legal advice.

In addition to running for president, Trump was a married host of a hit television show. There were ample reasons to secure a NDA to bury the story. Even if money was paid to bury these stories with the election in mind, it is not unusual or illegal. There was generally no need to list such payments as a campaign contribution because they were not a campaign contribution in the view of the federal government.

It is not even clear how this matter was supposed to be noted in records. What if the Trump employee put “legal settlement in personal matter” or “nuisance payment”? Would those words be the difference

Again, it is not clear.

But that does not appear to matter in New York.

The crime may not be clear or even comprehensible.

However, the identity of the defendant could not be more clear and the prosecutors are hoping that the jury, like themselves, will look no further.

Authored by Simon White, Bloomberg macro strategist,

There continues to be scant evidence of inflation hedging in markets despite clear signs price-growth risks are rising.

Inflation remains in focus this week as we get the first quarter’s update for US PCE on Friday. Regardless of one data point, the trend is clearly that inflation has stopped falling, with multiple leading indicators suggesting a recurrence.

It’s not just in the US though. Globally, inflation is resurfacing. Through last year, the Citi Inflation Surprise indices were falling almost everywhere. Year-to-date in 2024, they are now rising in two-thirds of the countries the indices cover.

But that is not being priced in markets. Ven Ram points out that two-year Treasuries would struggle to sell-off on even a sticky core PCE print later this week, and that’s probably true in the nearer term. But even two-year yields are not yet pricing in the likelihood of a proper inflation shock that would require several more hikes from the Federal Reserve. That’s not a base case at the moment, but its probability is still underpriced.

Yields have been rising, and so have gold and silver, but there is a distinct lack of the inflation urgency seen in 2021 and early 2022, when CPI was hitting decade highs and the Federal Reserve had not yet responded with interest rate hikes.

As one sign of the relative complacency, take two ETFs that are designed to hedge inflation, INFL and IVOL.

These saw marked inflows in 2021, but the flows have been muted since the Fed started raising rates in 2022 and have remained so.

There have also been no marked pick-up in flows to ETFs of inflation-linked bonds, such as the TIP ETF.

Similarly shorting interest in Treasuries continues to be minimal. JPMorgan’s Client Treasury Survey is registering a near series-low of outright shorts, while short interest in the TLT long-term UST ETF is low and has barely risen.

There are no inflation alarms ringing. But that could prove to be misguided as inflation shows clear signs of resurfacing.

This is even more so as the structural backdrop, with increasingly coordinated fiscal and monetary policy, is conducive to a secular rise in price growth.

Cocoa futures in London on Tuesday plunged the most since April 2009, tumbling as much as 8.1%, while prices slid as much as 7.7% in New York. Prices recovered some losses on Wednesday morning. It appears the downdraft was caused by fast-money traders taking profits after a record high of $12,250 per ton was recorded in New York on Friday. 

Cocoa prices faded record highs as "opportunistic fast traders" exit positions to take profits after bearish signals flashed in recent sessions, Tristan Fletcher, chief executive officer at ChAI, a platform that uses AI to analyze commodity markets, told Bloomberg. 

Last week's catalyst for record-high prices came after data about grindings—where cocoa transforms into butter and powder used in candy—showed that demand destruction has not materialized despite soaring prices. 

Here's the cocoa grindings data from last week that served as fuel for bulls (via Barchart): 

Cocoa also has support on signs that global cocoa demand remains resilient despite record-high prices. Last Thursday, the National Confectioners Association reported that North American Q1 cocoa grindings rose +9.3% q/q and +3.7 % y/y to 113,683 MT. Also, last Thursday, the Cocoa Association of Asia reported that Q1 Asia cocoa grindings rose +5.1% q/q, although they fell -0.2% y/y to 221,530 MT. In addition, the European Cocoa Association reported that Q1 European cocoa grindings rose +4.7% q/q, although they fell -2.2% y/y to 367,287 MT.

Paul Joules, an analyst at Rabobank, wrote in a note that grindings figures are "an indication that for now demand is holding up despite current pricing," adding that "demand destruction will come, but clearly it's taking longer to filter into grind data than the market was anticipating."

Famed commodity trader Pierre Andurand told Bloomberg via an emailed interview, "We will finish the year with the lowest stocks-to-grinding ratio ever, and potentially run out of inventories late in the year." He added that cocoa prices "could break $20,000 later this year" based on the thesis of worsening drought and disease ravaging the world's largest cocoa farms in West Africa.

Paul Torres, a London-based trading and agricultural consultant, said, "I do not foresee prices falling significantly," adding that prices could range between $8,000 to $10,000. 

Torres noted: "There could be just some easing of the frenetic moves we've seen."

Meanwhile, analysts from JPMorgan recently told clients that cocoa prices in New York could come down to around $6,000 a ton in the medium term, while Citi analysts said a bear market could begin in early 2025.

There is some good news for cocoa supply: Bloomberg quoted Marijn Moesbergen, sourcing lead at Cargill, at the World Cocoa Conference in Brussels on Wednesday as saying cocoa production is expected to bounce back next year as the El Nino effect won't be in play. 

"The current prices are maybe a bit overshooting. The question indeed is what will be the new equilibrium between this supply issues versus what will be the demand impact going forward," adding, "That question will be answered in the coming period." 

The combination of a worsening global supply deficit plus bullish grindings data might only suggest prices have to head higher.