*Economic Giants Go to War | Billionaire Heads to Prison | Addictive Businesses

“The older I grow, the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.” – H.L. Mencken

“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.” – H.L. Mencken

If the skirmishes that precede the actual battle are any indication, this impending US trade war with China will be really ugly. Both sides have set July 6 at the official “it’s on” day. The Trump administration said it will implement a 25% tariff Friday on $34 billion of Chinese imports ranging from cars to vaporizers and “smart home” devices. Should China retaliate, President Trump said he will impose additional tariffs on up to $200 billion of Chinese goods. China has said it will not fire the first volley, but last month China’s Ministry of Commerce called Trump’s trade tactics “blackmail” and vowed to retaliate in both “quantitative and qualitative” ways.

Some US companies wonder if Beijing has already begun practicing some of the “qualitative” retaliatory ways it will fight back, such as stalled product approvals, worker visas, and licensing applications. Industry executives raised concerns over an increasingly hostile regulatory environment, including unusually burdensome fire inspections and stricter environmental regulations. One example is an American company that ships cherries to a province in southeast China. Customs officers at the border ordered a load of cherries into quarantine for a week. The cherries spoiled and were sent back to the US.

– Trapped for nine days, twelve boys and their sports coach were found in the caves of Thailand in good health and surprisingly good spirits. Though they were found, the rescue efforts may take months, as the boys will either have to learn how to dive or wait for the flooded caves to empty. (BBC)

– Tuesday the Pnut reported on Poland’s constitutional crisis. It involved legislation passed by parliament that would purge the existing Supreme Court and create a path for the institution to come under government control. On Wednesday, the president of the Supreme Court, whose retention is guaranteed by Poland’s constitution, showed up for work, and authorities did not prevent her from entering the building. But while the purged judges, who had technically lost their jobs just hours before, refused to recognize their dismissal, government officials said the judges would not be allowed to hear cases. The courthouse confrontation was followed by dueling news conferences, fiery speeches, and more street protests.(NYT)

– A new sentence was handed down this week in a criminal trial against Eike Batista, once Brazil’s richest man. Batista, a mining tycoon, was accused of paying more than $16.5 million in bribes to secure public contracts and has been convicted in several other corruption cases. He faces a total prison sentence of more than 120 years. People convicted of white-collar crimes in Brazil are often allowed to remain free until their conviction and sentence have been reviewed by an appeals court.(NYT)

– Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte continues on his self-styled vigilante crusade, this time against “street loiters.” Duterte’s anti-drug crackdown resulted in more than 12,000 deaths, and in the past three weeks, more than 11,000 “tambays” or loiters, have been thrown in jail. Some are children as young as five. Duterte reportedly told a room full of police officers on June 13 that if idlers refuse to go home, he’ll “take care of it. Tie their hands together and I’ll throw them in [the river].” He later clarified those remarks, saying he had not instructed police to bring in people for loitering (which was decriminalized in the Philippines in 2012), but only if they had been drinking or “making a living room” on the streets. (Washington Post)

Today’s Immigrants are Strangers in an Anti-Strangers Land: As civil wars and other territorial conflicts rage across parts of the world, what to do about immigration and refugees has piqued political and humanitarian colloquy. Often, renewed calls to control unauthorized immigration are tied more broadly to anxiety over social change than to any actual surges at the borders. Demagogues on both sides of the Atlantic have whipped voters’ feelings, from what might have been a latent sense of threat or loss of control, into clamoring attachments to ethnic and national identities. For some people, antipathy toward immigrants is clearly racial, but for others, it’s economic dislocation or changes in social hierarchies and demographics that produces an unwelcome sense of loss of control.

Many citizens in both the US and Europe see the arrival of asylum seekers at their border, without permission or warning, as demonstrative of their government’s failure to protect them and their interests. In the US, the federal government has centralized control over immigration policy, allowing the Trump administration to turn anti-immigrant sentiment into harsh deterrence policies like family separations and prosecutions. But for the 28 member states of the European Union, the crisis is more complex, touching on the bloc’s need for political unity. Europe’s leaders have pursued policies that deter asylum claims by making the crossing too dangerous or impossible for migrants to attempt, like cutting deals with the governments of Sudan and Libya despite evidence of serious human rights abuses in those countries. While the migrant trek to the US through Mexico is less dangerous, that country’s new president is on record as saying he will not cooperate with the US to cut off migration routes.

– A Michigan federal judge dismissed a class action lawsuit on Friday brought by students who claimed dismal conditions in their public schools violate their constitutional rights. The suit, filed in September 2016, alleged students at some of Detroit’s most troubled schools, which serve mostly racial minorities, were denied “access to literacy” because of underfunding, mismanagement and discrimination. The lawsuit named Michigan officials, including Gov. Rick Snyder, as defendants because the state had played an outsized role in managing Detroit’s schools. In his decision, Judge Stephen J. Murphy III said that “access to literacy”, or a “minimally adequate education”, was not a fundamental right, and plaintiffs had failed to show that the state had practiced overt racial discrimination. (NYT)

Addictive Businesses: I use to lather Nutella on everything I could: bread, bagels, strawberries, etc… I picked us this habit while stationed in Germany. And Ferrero Rocher candy is a status symbol for my immigrant parents. More recently I have gravitated to Kinder bars. Yet all this time I thought Willy Wonka (or maybe Warren Buffet, as I also do indulge in See’s Candy) was getting rich off of my chocolate hazelnut addiction. Lo and behold I have been enriching an Italian family of billionaires: “Inside The Ferrero Family’s Secret Empire.” I’ve also come to the sad realization that some of the best businesses are typically those that are dressed up as businesses but are actually addictions: sugar, social networks (Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter), coffee, gaming, and gambling. (Thrillist & Forbes)

A couple years ago it seemed like cigarettes and nicotine addiction were on the decline. Hooray! But not so fast. All of a sudden it’s back with a vengeance. Last week e-cigarette start-up Juul raised over a billion dollars at roughly a $16 billion dollar valuation: “Why is it so valuable? Selling nicotine has been a good business model for a long time, and Juul is making a product that delivers nicotine like a cigarette.” What’s most troubling about Juul and e-cigarettes is that the FDA has said there’s a “disturbingly high number of youth who are using e-cigarettes and vaping products.” (Verge)

To AI or Not to AI: One can’t escape headlines today that computers and artificial intelligence (AI) will put the mass of humanity out of jobs. And then there’s news that screams that hold up, there’s too much AI hype, and this isn’t going to happen overnight: “Self-Driving Cars Are Headed Toward an AI Roadblock: Skeptics say full autonomy could be farther away than the industry admits.” What isn’t running into a roadblock is machines are now “grading students’ essays. Computers are scoring long-form answers on anything from the fall of the Roman Empire, to the pros and cons of government regulations.” (Verge & NPR)

LAST MORSELS

“Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol, morphine or idealism.” – C.G. Jung

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