It's truly a mystery. Why, oh why, would a openly corrupt political organization, being sued by its members that it despises, and produces one loser after another, have trouble raising donation?



Perez and the DNC have been especially unsuccessful in convincing their supporters to give the kind of money the RNC has brought in every month. The DNC brought in just $4.7 million in April — less than half of the RNC’s $9.6 million haul over that same time, according to FEC filings submitted by the parties this week. The RNC finished the month with $41.4 million cash on hand, dwarfing the DNC’s $8.8 million in cash on hand.

How bad is it? Pretty bad.



The Democratic National Committee reported its worst April of fundraising since 2009, according to Federal Election Commission records released Monday.

The DNC reported taking in $4.7 million last month. While this is an off-year for fundraising, the DNC hauled $8.5 million last year, and nearly $5 million in 2015. Between 2010 and 2014, the Democrats received anywhere from $6.3 million to $14.4 million per year.

Even FISA admits Obama's NSA spying violated 4th Amendment



According to a classified internal report reviewed by Circa, more than 5 percent of searches seeking "upstream Internet data on Americans inside the NSA’s so-called Section 702 database violated the safeguards Obama and his intelligence chiefs vowed to follow in 2011."

The Obama administration self-disclosed the problems at a closed-door hearing Oct. 26 before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that set off alarm. Trump was elected less than two weeks later.

The normally supportive court censured administration officials, saying the failure to disclose the extent of the violations earlier amounted to an “institutional lack of candor” and that the improper searches constituted a “very serious Fourth Amendment issue,” according to a recently unsealed court document dated April 26, 2017.

The admitted violations undercut one of the primary defenses that the intelligence community and Obama officials have used in recent weeks to justify their snooping into incidental NSA intercepts about Americans.

Circa has reported that there was a three-fold increase in NSA data searches about Americans and a rise in the unmasking of U.S. person’s identities in intelligence reports after Obama loosened the privacy rules in 2011.

victory for Wikipedia



A federal appeals court on Tuesday revived a Wikipedia lawsuit that challenges a U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) program of mass online surveillance, and claims that the government unconstitutionally invades people's privacy rights.

By a 3-0 vote, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia said the Wikimedia Foundation, which hosts the Wikipedia online encyclopedia, can pursue a challenge to the government's "Upstream" surveillance program.

The decision could make it easier for people to learn whether authorities have spied on them through Upstream, which involves bulk searches of international communications within the internet's "backbone" of cables, switches and routers.

Upstream's existence was revealed in leaks by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden in 2013.

Lawyers for the Wikipedia publisher and eight other plaintiffs including Amnesty International USA and Human Rights Watch, with more than 1 trillion international communications annually, argued the surveillance violated their rights to privacy, free expression and association.

China is in real financial trouble



The downgrade of China’s debt by Moody’s Investors Service may push Chinese companies to borrow even more money from domestic banks as overseas debt becomes more expensive, increasing risks for the nation’s finance industry.

With growing indebtedness at home, compounded by a slowing economy, there’s a risk of a “negative feedback loop,” said Khoon Goh, head of Asia research for Australia & New Zealand Banking Group who sees state-owned enterprises and property developers feeling the biggest impact. The downgrade will particularly hurt airlines and shipping companies, said Corrine Png, chief executive officer of Crucial Perspective in Singapore.

Mainland firms “will need to go back to the Chinese banks in order to get loans,” ANZ’s Goh said. “That means that Chinese banks will grow more exposed to the corporate sector.”

Since the start of the global financial crisis, Chinese companies have borrowed to keep the economy growing, pushing corporate debt to 156 percent of gross domestic product, from 100 percent in 2008, according to Bloomberg Intelligence. Most of that debt is held by state-owned enterprises, putting the government on the hook in case of defaults.

Not supposed to happen



With the crackdown on financial system leverage underway, Chinese banks (and securities firms) are in big trouble. As we noted previously, China's bond curve is inverted, yields are surging, and Chinese regulatory decisions shutting down various shadow-banking pipelines has crushed securities firms' stocks. However, as Bloomberg points out, as China’s deleveraging efforts cut into banks’ profit margins, rising base funding costs and interbank credit risk concerns have pushed banks' cost of borrowing beyond the rate they charge customers for loans for the first time in history.

As the chart above shows, the one-year Shanghai Interbank Offered Rate has exceeded the Loan Prime Rate, the first time this has happened since the latter was introduced in 2013.

“This is probably just the beginning” and interbank funding costs will rise further amid the drive to reduce leverage, said Xu Hanfei, chief fixed-income analyst at China Merchants Securities Co. in Shanghai.

Related to China's financial woes? Probably



Bitcoin rose more than 4.5 percent to an all-time high of $2,418.44, according to CoinDesk. The latest move marks a $400 gain since Saturday, when the digital currency first topped $2,000.

The digital currency is gaining more attention in the U.S., especially from high-profile institutional investors.

Jeffrey Gundlach, CEO of DoubleLine Capital, tweeted Tuesday that there could be a connection between bitcoin's surge this year and the drop in the Shanghai composite stock index. The theory is that Chinese looking for investments outside of a weakening yuan have turned to the digital currency.

Any available way to exit China



Bitcoin's market capitalisation shot past $30bn this month, as the price climbed.

Ethereum remains smaller at about $15bn, but it is growing too. The price spiked from less than $20 in March to about $170 today, according to CoinDesk, which tracks the two currencies.

Yet another political crisis in Brazil



Brazil’s President Michel Temer is struggling to put down a rebel movement by legislators in his own party who are discussing his replacement after damaging graft allegations surfaced.

The best solution to remove Temer, who is being investigated by the prosecutor-general on corruption and cover-up charges, is for the top electoral court to annul the 2014 election result in which he shared a ticket with ousted President Dilma Rousseff, according to half a dozen legislators from his ruling PMDB party who spoke to Bloomberg News. The court will retake the case on alleged illegal campaign financing on June 6.

In an effort to squash the dissidents, Temer called an emergency meeting with PMDB Senators on Wednesday morning, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter who asked not to be named. Separately, the largest member in Temer’s allied base, the PSDB, will meet hours later to discuss its future in the coalition.

The nation was rocked last week by news of a Supreme Court-authorized probe into Temer on allegations of passive corruption and obstruction of justice, only days before Congress had planned to vote on a pension bill considered central to the administration’s efforts to fix the country’s depleted public coffers and pull its economy out of recession.

Collateral murder 2.0



NGOs keeping track of the number of civilians the US is killing show a different story, however, with the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights putting the death toll at 225 over the last month, which by their reckoning is the most civilians the US has killed in any one month span of the ISIS war.

That’s a conservative estimate too, even though it’s likely more than 10 times what the Pentagon will admit to. Indeed, Air Wars themselves counted 230 civilians killed in a single US strike in Mosul, and they too recognize that the civilian toll is continuing to rise precipitously.

after ISIS



The US has made a big deal of publicly opposing Kurdish independence in Iraq since the 2003 US invasion and occupation of the country, but Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) chief Lt. Gen. Vincent Stewart says independence is a matter of “not if but when” for the Kurds....

It’s been expected that the ISIS war could give way to yet another civil war in Iraq over Kurdistan. Direct US armament of the Kurdish Peshmerga means they are now a very formidable fighting force, and might believe they can secede outright, even without Baghdad’s blessing.

DWS still being classy



Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz threatened the chief of the U.S. Capitol Police with “consequences” for holding equipment that she says belongs to her in order to build a criminal case against a Pakistani staffer suspected of massive cybersecurity breaches involving funneling sensitive congressional data offsite.

The Florida lawmaker used her position on the committee that sets the police force’s budget to press its chief to relinquish the piece of evidence Thursday, in what could be considered using her authority to attempt to interfere with a criminal investigation.

The Capitol Police and outside agencies are pursuing Imran Awan, who has run technology for the Florida lawmaker since 2005 and was banned from the House network in February on suspicion of data breaches and theft.

“My understanding is the the Capitol Police is not able to confiscate Members’ equipment when the Member is not under investigation,” Wasserman Schultz said in the annual police budget hearing of the House Committee On Appropriations’ Legislative Branch Subcommittee.

“We can’t return the equipment,” Police Chief Matthew R. Verderosa told the Florida Democrat.

“I think you’re violating the rules when you conduct your business that way and you should expect that there will be consequences,” Wasserman Schultz said.