Post-Nomination, Trump Property Buyers Make Clear Shift to Secretive Shell Companies →

Nick Penzenstadler, Steve Reilly, and John Kelly, reporting for USA Today:
Since President Trump won the Republican nomination, the majority of his companies’ real estate sales are to secretive shell companies that obscure the buyers’ identities, a USA TODAY investigation has found.
Over the last 12 months, about 70% of buyers of Trump properties were limited liability companies — corporate entities that allow people to purchase property without revealing all of the owners’ names. That compares with about 4% of buyers in the two years before.
From 4 percent to 70 percent.
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David Frum, on Twitter:
Nobody’s calling it money laundering! But if you — purely hypothetically — were money laundering via US real estate, this is how you’d do it.

A Whole New Jupiter: First Science Results from NASA’s Juno Mission →

Click through to see a number of amazing photographs.

Early science results from NASA’s Juno mission to Jupiter portray the largest planet in our solar system as a complex, gigantic, turbulent world, with Earth-sized polar cyclones, plunging storm systems that travel deep into the heart of the gas giant, and a mammoth, lumpy magnetic field that may indicate it was generated closer to the planet’s surface than previously thought.

Trump Tests the Emoluments Clause →

A lawsuit filed by Maryland and the District of Columbia is the second such suit alleging that President Trump is violating the clause in the U.S. Constitution that prohibits officials from accepting emoluments from foreign states.
The principal focus of the suits is the Trump hotel that occupies the Old Post Office Building a few blocks from the White House (and is the subject of yet another irregularity, in that government officials are supposed to be legally barred from leasing that publicly owned property).
The new suit may have a better chance than the first one of establishing standing to sue, given that the plaintiffs represent jurisdictions with business interests that may lose customers to the Trump hotel because of its connection to the presidency. Earlier this year, for example, the Kuwaiti embassy, which for many years had held its national day celebration at the Four Seasons Hotel, held the event instead at Trump’s hotel.
The lost business is legally significant regarding standing to sue, and when a public official gains a commercial advantage because of his position, there is a fairness issue regarding businesses competing on an uneven playing field. But which Washington hotel gets to host embassy parties is hardly the most important question involved.
We can get a sense of the relevant concerns of the Founding Fathers by noting that the Emoluments Clause is part of a broader prohibition in the Constitution (in Article I, Section 9) that bars the granting of any title of nobility and the acceptance “of any present, Office, Emolument, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”
Emolument may be an Eighteenth-Century word that is not in many active vocabularies in the Twenty-first Century, but the concern about the effects of flattery and favor are at least as relevant today as they were when the Constitution was written.
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That disregard for ethics also has set a terrible example for people around that Cabinet table and others in this administration who also have conflicts of interest. All this is a major problem even when no foreign governments are involved. Many aspects of domestic policy are being shaped by people who have private interests at stake, which often point in a different direction than the nation’s interests.
The writers of the Constitution were concerned about this broader problem of keeping public business separate from private pecuniary interests. Another place in the document where the term emolument comes up is in Article II, which is about the presidency and the Executive Branch. Section 1 says that the president’s salary should not be changed during his term and that “he shall not receive within that Period any other Emolument from the United States, or any of them.”
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When a foreign government is involved, in violation of the Emoluments Clause in Article I, the fundamental problem is that U.S. foreign policy may be influenced by the President’s private financial interests and thus may be shaped in ways different from what is in the national interest. The shaping need not entail a specific quid pro quo with a foreign state; general affinities or preferences, or a natural inclination to favor those who have bestowed favors — or profitable business — in the other direction may be sufficient to shape policy in ways detrimental to U.S. interests.
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There can be a further detriment to U.S. interests that involves how other foreign governments perceive the drivers of U.S. policy, and their willingness to conform to or cooperate with that policy. If foreign leaders are left to wonder whether a U.S. president’s policies reflect the president’s private pocketbook rather that U.S. national interests, let alone interests that the two countries share, U.S. credibility suffers.

There are more refugees today than ever before →

65.6 million
That’s the number of people who were forcibly displaced from their homes in 2016, including refugees, internally displaced persons (IDPs), stateless persons, returnees, and asylum seekers.
Put simply: There has never been a worse refugee crisis.
22.5 million are refugees, 40.3 million are internally displaced persons, and 2.8 million are asylum seekers.
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The surge in refugees is a result of the rise in violence and conflict worldwide. While the Syrian civil war played a dominant role in the statistics, emerging conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa also contributed significantly.
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51
That’s the percentage of all refugees in 2016 who were children, many of whom were from Afghanistan, South Sudan, or Syria.
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Developing regions handled the lion’s share of the world’s refugee crisis in 2016, hosting 84 percent of refugees under the UNHCR. Three of the top refugee-hosting countries — the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, and Uganda — are formally considered the world’s least developed countries by the U.N.’s Human Development Index. 
And it’s only getting more dangerous… 
More refugees died trying to get to these countries in 2016 than ever before.  
1 in 47  
That’s the odds of a refugee dying on their journey from the northern coast of Africa to Italy, also known as the Central Mediterranean route.

The Link Between Domestic Violence and Mass Shootings →

...As Rebecca Traister has written, for New York magazine, “what perpetrators of terrorist attacks turn out to often have in common more than any particular religion or ideology, are histories of domestic violence.” Traister cites Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, who drove a truck through a Bastille Day crowd in Nice, last summer, and Omar Mateen, the Pulse night-club shooter. She also cites Robert Lewis Dear, who killed three people at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, in 2015. According to Traister, “two of his three ex-wives reportedly accused him of domestic abuse, and he had been arrested in 1992 for rape and sexual violence.”
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Obviously, not everyone accused of domestic violence becomes a mass shooter. But it’s clear that an alarming number of those who have been accused of domestic abuse pose serious and often a lethal threats, not just to their intimate partners but to society at large.
The statistical correlation between domestic violence and mass shootings has also been documented. As the Times reported:
When Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun control group, analyzed F.B.I. data on mass shootings from 2009 to 2015, it found that 57 percent of the cases included a spouse, former spouse or other family member among the victims — and that 16 percent of the attackers had previously been charged with domestic violence.

Illinois legislature passes civil asset forfeiture reform →

Hopefully a national trend:

The Illinois House of Representatives voted 100-1 in favor of an amendment to House Bill 303, meaning the bill ultimately passed. If the governor signs the bill into law, it will take effect July 1, 2018.
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Law enforcement uses a tool called asset forfeiture, which breaks down into two categories. Criminal asset forfeiture allows government agencies to take property the government has proved was involved in criminal activity. Civil asset forfeiture allows law enforcement officials to seize property they suspect was involved in criminal activity; no conviction is required for officials to take property under civil asset forfeiture laws.
Eighty-seven percent of all federal property seizures are civil, not criminal – meaning that most often, property is taken from people not convicted of a crime, according to a report from the Institute for Justice.
Since 2005, while federal law enforcement took in more than $404 million through asset forfeiture in Illinois, state and local law enforcement took $319 million from private citizens over the same time period.
The most important reform in the amended version of HB 303 is that the legislation shifts the burden of proof from the property owner to the government. In simple terms, that means that when law enforcement decides to take property under forfeiture laws, the state must be able to show a court that law enforcement was entitled to seize the property. Today, that burden falls on property owners, who must make the case to keep their property.
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The legislation also eliminates the requirement that property owners must pay a “cost bond” equal to 10 percent of the value of the seized property before their case can be heard by a judge. Currently, some of Illinois’ forfeiture laws require property owners to post a “cost bond” of 10 percent of the property’s value and to agree to pay all costs and expenses of forfeiture proceedings in the event the government prevails, in order to have the case heard by a judge. Failure to post the bond will result in nonjudicial forfeiture of the property. Even if the claimant prevails in the forfeiture case, the law provides that the circuit court clerk shall retain 10 percent of the bond amount as “costs.”

How inequality makes our government corrupt and our democracy weak →

In absolute terms, lawmakers have had their pay cut by 10 percent since 2009. And like most Americans (but not CEOs), they received less compensation in 2015 than they did in 1975. It seems odd to say that members of Congress have more in common with the average American than they do with corporate CEOs, but in this case, it is true. Of course, $174,000 is pretty great compared to most people in a country where the median household income is about a third of that. And it is. But it’s peanuts relative to CEO pay; the average CEO made $12.2 million in 2015. And the salary for members of Congress is actually less than an average 26-year-old first-year lawyer gets at a top corporate law firm. The differential is often starker with state level legislators. In fact, politicians have actually seen relative pay stagnation along with teachers, social workers, journalists, and most American workers.
This differential shows how much we value our public sector leadership versus our private sector leadership. We are say that CEOs are the essential actors in our culture, while public leadership is a sinecure for the already wealthy.
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...Lobbyists write statutes, track process, enact legislative strategy, and work with administrative agencies to make sure the laws are carried out. It’s just government work, on a private payroll. And corporate interests are a lot more effective if most Hill staffers are 23-year-olds with second jobs bartending to make the rent. Current anti-corruption models, like underpaying congressman, staff, state legislators and regulators, will simply lead to more power for corporate interests that are only too happy to pay for governing work that favors them. The combined attack on the public sector and its ability to govern, and the dramatic concentration in the control of corporate resources, has led to a dangerously weak and unbalanced political culture.
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If we want to restore a democratic culture, we’re going to have to not just raise the pay of public servants, but reduce inequality dramatically. We must attack the problem of a two-tiered society. We must go after the concentration of corporate assets through strong competition and anti-monopoly policy so that we don’t have a society split between billionaires with rights and powerless peasants living with varying degrees of comfort. Basic public goods – quality education, health care, transportation, nutrition — must be available to all without the need to incur huge debts. Private sector CEOs perhaps should be able to have more lavish lifestyles than the rest of us, but it should be a matter of living a fancier version of the same life. No one should go broke if they have a medical problem, not just because that’s a problem in and of itself, but because that is a route to social corruption.
There is no free lunch. If we want a functioning democracy, we need to pay for a functioning public sector. If public servants are treated poorly relative to corporate CEOs, then we will get bribed and subservient public servants and government via the board room. Public servants, and citizens themselves, will become dependent upon private concentrations of power. If we want to stabilize our society, we must strengthen the public institutions designed to protect our democracy. If we don’t, we may not have a democracy for much longer.

The Data Defying The Job-Killing Robot Myth →

The story of mass displacement of workers by robots is a story of rapid productivity growth. Robots are supposed to be doing the work formerly done by people. This means that we should be seeing far more output for each hour of human labor. This is something we can easily check, since the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) puts out data on productivity growth every quarter.
Rather than going through the roof as the robot story would imply, productivity growth has fallen through the floor. It’s averaged just 1.2 percent annually in the last 10 years and 0.6 percent in the last five years. By comparison, productivity growth averaged 3.0 percent in both the decade from 1995 to 2005 and the long Golden Age from 1947 to 1973.
It’s possible to point to many great advances in technology. It’s also possible in future years that innovations like driverless cars will lead to mass displacement of workers, but to date the data are very clear: This mass displacement is not happening. Insofar as people are seeing job opportunities disappear, it is due to factors other than robots.
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However, if robots are expensive and therefore redistributing large amounts of money from ordinary workers to the people who own robots, it is because of the patent and copyright monopolies associated with building robots. But these monopolies have nothing to do with the technology; these are incentives the government gives to support innovation. In other words, the length and strength of patents and copyrights are determined by public policy.
If these protections were leading to upward redistribution it would indicate that we have made patent and copyright protection too long and/or too strong. This is especially true if we aren’t seeing much payoff in the form of higher productivity growth. Robots don’t provide an alternative to the explanations for inequality that attribute it to deliberate policy choices. On more careful examination, the robot story ends up being just one more policy based explanation like trade, the weakening of labor unions, declining minimum wages, and contractionary macroeconomic policy.
The robot story is likely attractive to many people since it appears to pin the blame for inequality on the natural development of technology. This undoubtedly explains why we hear it so frequently even though there is zero evidence to support it.