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Every day our editors collect the most interesting things they find from around the internet and present a summary “reading list” which will include very brief summaries (and sometimes longer ones) of why each item has gotten our attention. Suggestions from readers for “reading list” items are gratefully reviewed, although sometimes space limits the number included.
This feature is published Monday, Wednesday, and Friday in the late afternoon New York time. For early morning review of headlines see “The Early Bird” published Monday through Friday in the early am at GEI News (membership not required for access to “The Early Bird”.).
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Topics today include 18 articles and 15 graphics:​
- Is It Time To Change Asset Allocations?
- The Top 5 Charts Of The Week
- New York Times Provides Cover for Austerity Cranks
- Science and Subterfuge in Economics
- Debt, inequality and economic stability
- Oil tumbles after Trump tells OPEC to relax
- Trump Tells His Lawyers: Stay for the Coming Legal Hellscape
- Oscars 2019: A Spike Lee Win Notwithstanding, Hollywood’s Dinosaurs Prevailed
- Support is Increasing for Stricter Environmental Regulation, Even Among Republicans
- Trump Org. asks Judiciary panel to cease investigations: report
- Trump Org. asks Judiciary panel to cease investigations: report
- Bills Criminalizing Pipeline Protest Arise in Statehouses Nationwide
- Labour party to back second referendum on Brexit
- British PM May says deal within grasp, Brexit delay won’t solve crisis
- Iran’s Foreign Minister Zarif, architect of nuclear deal, resigns
- After Putin’s warning, Russian TV lists nuclear targets in U.S.
- US Navy dispatches destroyer, cargo ship through Taiwan Strait in message to China
- Trump amps up pressure on Venezuela with fresh aid, sanctions
- And More
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Articles about events, conflicts and disease around the world
Global
- Oil tumbles after Trump tells OPEC to relax (Reuters) Oil fell by more than 2% Monday, reversing earlier gains, after President Donald Trump told OPEC producers to relax, as prices are too high.
Brent crude oil futures were down $1.43 at $65.69 a barrel at 1403 GMT, having earlier risen to a 2019 high of $67.47. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude futures were down $1.38 at $55.88 a barrel.
U.S.
- Trump Tells His Lawyers: Stay for the Coming Legal Hellscape (Daily Beast) Donald Trump has signaled to his inner circle that even he knows Special Counsel Robert Mueller finishing his investigation will be a new beginning, not a dramatic end, for Trumpworld’s eclectic legal hellscape.
The president made clear to his outside legal team, which includes Rudy Giuliani and Jay Sekulow, that he didn’t want his lawyers going anywhere – even after the Mueller probe ends. The conversations served as a private admission that federal investigations bedeviling his first term in office will be haunting him for possibly years to come.
- Oscars 2019: A Spike Lee Win Notwithstanding, Hollywood’s Dinosaurs Prevailed (The New Yorker) This is a little less boring rundown of Oscar winners than most.
- Support is Increasing for Stricter Environmental Regulation, Even Among Republicans (Pew Research Center) The share of Americans who say stricter environmental laws and regulations are “worth the cost” has ticked up in recent years, with a significant shift coming among Republicans. Today, 63% of U.S. adults say stricter environmental regulations are “worth the cost,” while 30% say such regulations “cost too many jobs and hurt the economy,” according to a new survey by Pew Research Center.
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- Trump Org. asks Judiciary panel to cease investigations: report (The Hill) A lawyer for the Trump Organization has asked the House Judiciary Committee to stop any and all investigations into the company, arguing that there is an alleged conflict of interest with one of the lawyers consulting with the Democratic-led panel, The Washington Post reported.
Lawyer Alan Futerfas reportedly asserted in a letter on Monday that the panel must “cease and desist from any and all activities that are adverse to the Company” because it hired Berry Berke, a lawyer who works for a law firm that has previously represented the Trump Organization on a range of matters. This crossover, Futerfas argues, disqualifies the investigation from including the company.
- Bills Criminalizing Pipeline Protest Arise in Statehouses Nationwide (The Real News Network) Eight different statehouses across the nation are considering bills criminalizing protests on property owned by the oil and gas industry which critics say could squelch pipeline protesters and others calling attention to climate change-causing infrastructure. The bills offer steep criminal penalties for trespass onto oil and gas industry-owned private property defined as “critical infrastructure” under state law. The legal definition of “critical infrastructure,” which incorporates essentially all assets serving as the bedrock of the current economic system, has greatly expanded in the post-September 11 era. With that expansion came increasingly harsh criminal enforcement mechanisms available to prosecutors in the name of protecting national security.
It is no coincidence that the bills are rolling out simultaneously with nearly identical language, in various states. The Real News has traced these bills back to model bills emanating from two organizations, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the Council of State Governments (CSG), both of which receive generous financial backing from the oil and gas industry.
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- Betting Odds for Democratic Candidates for President (A Shot of Politics) The current odds for getting the nomination:
- Economic Impact of Immigration (WalletHub) Immigrants contribute much to the U.S. economy but the amount and type of impact varies widely among the states.
UK
- Labour party to back second referendum on Brexit (Financial Times) Jeremy Corbyn gave hope to Brexit opponents on Monday by announcing the opposition Labour party would back a new referendum on whether Britain should leave the EU. The shift in policy, announced at a meeting of Labour MPs late on Monday night, recast the Brexit debate with just a month left before the UK’s scheduled departure, and marks the Labour leader’s clearest contrast to date with Theresa May’s headlong push for an EU divorce.
- British PM May says deal within grasp, Brexit delay won’t solve crisis (Reuters) Prime Minister Theresa May said a timely exit for Britain from the European Union is “within our grasp” and insisted on Monday that delaying Brexit would be no way to solve the impasse in parliament over the departure.
Iran
- Iran’s Foreign Minister Zarif, architect of nuclear deal, resigns (Reuters) Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, the urbane, U.S.-educated architect of its 2015 nuclear deal with world powers, announced his resignation unexpectedly on Monday on Instagram.
Russia
- After Putin’s warning, Russian TV lists nuclear targets in U.S. (Reuters) Russian state television has listed U.S. military facilities that Moscow would target in the event of a nuclear strike, and said that a hypersonic missile Russia is developing would be able to hit them in less than five minutes.
China
- US Navy dispatches destroyer, cargo ship through Taiwan Strait in message to China (Fox News) The U.S. Navy dispatched a guided-missile destroyer and a cargo ship through the Taiwan Strait Monday, the latest in a series of American military maneuvers intended to send a message to Beijing that the United States will continue its support of Taiwan in the face of recent threats by the Chinese government.
Venezuela
- Trump amps up pressure on Venezuela with fresh aid, sanctions (The Hill) The Trump administration is increasing pressure on Venezuelan President Nicolfls Maduro to step down with new sanctions and a visit to the region by Vice President Pence, who called Maduro a “usurper” with no claim to his country’s presidency. In a speech to the Lima Group, a coalition of countries in the Western Hemisphere aligned against Maduro, Pence said the Trump administration will not back down from is support for Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó.
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Other Scientific, Health, Political, Economics, and Business Items of Note – plus Miscellanea
- Is It Time To Change Asset Allocations? (Twitter)
- The Top 5 Charts Of The Week (LinkedIn) If these charts say anything to you other than sell everything and hide, you are a very brave person. (Some of the other charts are not so scary.)
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- New York Times Provides Cover for Austerity Cranks (Dean Baker, Fair) DB has contributed to GEI. Here are some key points (in addition to numerous findings of false data):
The paper has repeatedly told readers that policies that undermined the welfare state and redistributed money upward, were being done for the purpose of revitalizing the economy. This was especially the case with Emanuel Macron in France (here, here and here). In these and other cases, the media took at face value the claims of politicians that the reason for the measures was to help workers, not to reduce their bargaining power, which is their immediate effect.
To be clear, labor market regulations can be excessive, and there are certainly contexts in which streamlining them would end up benefiting most of the labor force, even if such streamlining could hurt narrow groups of workers. But the idea that excessive labor market regulation, rather than inept macroeconomic policy, is the main problem limiting growth and reducing employment in France, Spain and elsewhere in Europe does not have any evidence to support it.
- Science and Subterfuge in Economics (Jayati Ghosh, Project Syndicate) JG has contributed to GEI. Prof. Ghosh starts and ends her essay with most ascerbic (and in our oppinion true) assertions:
Mainstream economics has a tendency to decide on some “established” conclusions, and then hold to them, notwithstanding all evidence to the contrary. This is bad enough, but what may be worse for a discipline that lays claim to being a science is the lack of insistence on the replicability of empirical results. This is both standard and essential in most natural sciences; in economics, by contrast, there is mostly indifference and occasionally even fierce resistance to it. In some cases, the data that must be used to replicate conclusions are denied to other researchers.
To recover credibility, economics needs to become more open to criticism of assumptions, methods, and results. The inconvenient truths spoken by dissenting voices cannot be ignored indefinitely. Sooner or later, reality bites.
- Debt, inequality and economic stability (Steve Keen, unescap.org) SK contributes to GEI. This presentation is a classic in the definition of how credit and debt drive economic growth. Models are developed using the Minksy flow analysis program to develop dynamic models of the economy. This is a documentation of the application and realization of Minsky’s Instability Hypothesis. Some key graphics:
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