My motto as I live and learn is: dig and be dug in return. -- Langston Hughes
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Monday, 04 February 2019
I've been looking high and low
This photo comes from a page where you can pick your favorite skyscape for a people's choice award at the Royal Museums Greenwich site. Some striking images to feast your eyes on, and one surprising single-shot, no-tricks photo of the Milky Way hanging over suburban homes.
So, he was flipping through the channels and suddenly we were captivated by this documentary on the BBC that we didn't know was on, "The Everly Brothers: Harmonies from Heaven", which brought tears to my eyes. Watch it if you can.
Fears of US-Backed 'Coup' in Motion as Trump Recognizes Venezuela Opposition Lawmaker as 'Interim President': President Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela officially cut off diplomatic ties with the U.S. government on Wednesday — and gave American diplomats 72 hours to leave the country — in response to President Donald Trump declaring formal recognition of an opposition lawmaker as the 'Interim President' of Venezuela, despite not being elected by the nation's people for that position. [...] Critics of U.S. imperialism and its long history of anti-democratic manuevers in Latin American expressed immediate alarm on Wednesday after Trump's announcement. And what Trump identified as 'democracy,' critics of the move instead used Maduro's description: 'coup.'" Of course it's a coup - orchestrated from Washington on the heels of years of sanctions imposed by Barack Obama. No doubt because Venezuela has all that nice oil. Centrist hearththrob Justin Trudeau has already recognized the coup leader, Since even the "progressives" seem largely to be supporting the coup, you can be sure that most of what you're seeing in the news about this is false. Is Maduro bad? He's not great, but he's better than the alternative, which is a coup against a Democratically elected leader. Was the election rigged? We don't know, because although Maduro asked for international oversight of the elections, the same people who are staging the coup refused to let them in. When the Bush administration pulled this with Chavez, they managed to convince a lot of people that he was depriving his people of all kinds of rights that Americans don't have, either. But no one points that out. The opposition to Maduro is staging huge, violent events to try to get the government to respond, and after they've stolen some vehicles and blocked thoroughfares and set building on fire for a few hours and the authorities finally show up, then they start filming and claiming it's "government repression". The shortages of food and medical supplies? Well, yeah, those sanctions are working, what did you expect?
Why France's Yellow Vest Protests Have Been Ignored by the US 'Resistance': To the surprise of no one, mainstream pundits have stoked fears of 'Russian interference' behind the unrest. [...] It turned out that a crisis was not averted but merely postponed when Macron defeated his demagogue opponent Le Pen in the 2017 French election. While it is true that the gilets jauneswere partly impelled by an increase on fuel prices, contrary to the prevailing narrative their official demands are not limited to a carbon tax. They also consist of explicit ultimatums to increase the minimum wage, improve the standard of living, and an end to austerity, among other legitimate grievances. Since taking office, Macron has declared war on trade unions while pushing through enormous tax breaks for the wealthy (like himself) — it was just a matter of time until the French people had enough of the country's privatization.
The Political Economy Research Institute, "Economic Analysis of Medicare for All: This study by PERI researchers Robert Pollin, James Heintz, Peter Arno, Jeannette Wicks-Lim and Michael Ash presents a comprehensive analysis of the prospects for a Medicare for All health care system in the United States. The most fundamental goals of Medicare for All are to significantly improve health care outcomes for everyone living in the United States while also establishing effective cost controls throughout the health care system. These two purposes are both achievable. As of 2017, the U.S. was spending about $3.24 trillion on personal health care — about 17 percent of total U.S. GDP. Meanwhile, 9 percent of U.S. residents have no insurance and 26 percent are underinsured — they are unable to access needed care because of prohibitively high costs. Other high-income countries spend an average of about 40 percent less per person and produce better health outcomes. Medicare for All could reduce total health care spending in the U.S. by nearly 10 percent, to $2.93 trillion, while creating stable access to good care for all U.S. residents."
"Wall Street freaks out about 2020: Many of the nation's top bankers want Trump gone, but they're growing anxious about some Democratic presidential contenders." I'm betting it's not Beto or Kamala or Biden who's got them worried. "NEW YORK — Top Wall Street executives would love to be rid of President Donald Trump. But they are getting panicked about the prospect of an ultraliberal Democratic nominee bent on raising taxes and slapping regulations on their firms. The result is a kind of nervous paralysis of executives pining for a centrist nominee like Michael Bloomberg while realizing such an outcome is unlikely from a party veering sharply to the left. [...] "
"Merkley Calls for FBI Perjury Probe into Homeland Secretary Nielsen After Child Detention Memo Leaked: After releasing a damning draft memo that showed the Trump administration planned to 'traumatize' migrant children with family separations and expedite deportation by denying asylum hearings, Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) on Friday called for an FBI investigation into whether Homeland Security Sec. Kirstjen Nielsen lied when she testified before Congress about the policy. In a letter sent to FBI Director Christopher Wray, the senator noted that "compelling new evidence has emerged revealing that high-level Department of Homeland Security officials were secretly and actively developing a new policy and legal framework for separating families as far back as December 2017.' 'Despite this fact,' Merkley continued, 'while testifying under oath before the House Committee on the Judiciary, Secretary Nielsen stated unequivocally "I'm not a liar, we've never had a policy for family separation."' Given the 'conflicting facts,' Merkley formally demanded an immediate investigation." It's interesting to wonder how and why the memo got released, but if you're trying to broadcast to the world that America is a bad place to go if you're not a blonde, you wouldn't want to keep it a secret, would you?
The internet ran wild with rumors that Bernie is ready to run. So here's a timely article in GQ called "The Unfinished Business of Bernie Sanders," which is actually pretty thoughtful. "Indeed, passing the torch could actually be liberating for Sanders — and not just because it would give him more time to spend with his seven grandchildren. 'I do think his DNA, where he's been over the course of his life, is he really likes agitating,' says the senior Democratic strategist. 'There's a freedom to it: the freedom of being an agitator versus the weight of being a standard-bearer. If you're a standard-bearer, you have to start making compromises.' And yet the idea of passing the torch has obvious downsides. For one thing, would any of the Bernie 2.0's — to say nothing of the more centrist candidates, like Cory Booker or Kirsten Gillibrand or Kamala Harris, who are now singing from the Bernie hymnal — be as committed to his issues as Sanders is himself? 'If Bernie's not on the debate stage, the center of gravity shifts,' says one Sanders adviser. 'How much will others stick to issues we care about if they don't feel the need to compete with us?' What's more, even if the other candidates were true believers, would they be as good at spreading the gospel as Sanders? 'No one articulates these issues in the same way as him,' says the Sanders adviser."
Rasmussen, "Voters Mixed on Harris, Don't See Her as 2020 Nominee: California Senator Kamala Harris has announced her intention to run for president, but voters aren't paying the California Democrat much heed. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 37% of Likely U.S. Voters have at least a somewhat favorable opinion of Harris, including 16% who view her Very Favorably. Forty percent (40%) view Harris unfavorably, including 27% with a Very Unfavorable opinion of the former San Francisco District Attorney. Another 24% don't know enough about Harris to offer an opinion. "
Matt Taibbi, "Has the Government Legalized Secret Defense Spending? While a noisy Supreme Court fight captivated America last fall, an obscure federal accounting body quietly approved a system of classified money-moving. October 4th, 2018, was a busy news day. The fight over Brett Kavanuagh's Supreme Court nomination dominated the cycle. The Trump White House received a supplemental FBI report it said cleared its would-be nominee of wrongdoing. Retired Justice John Paul Stevens meanwhile said Kavanaugh was compromised enough that he was 'unable to sit as a judge.' #NationalTacoDay trended on Twitter. Chris Evans told the world production wrapped on Avengers 4. The only thing that did not make the news was an announcement by a little-known government body called the Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board — FASAB — that essentially legalized secret national security spending. The new guidance, 'SFFAS 56 — CLASSIFIED ACTIVITIES' permits government agencies to 'modify' public financial statements and move expenditures from one line item to another. It also expressly allows federal agencies to refrain from telling taxpayers if and when public financial statements have been altered."
I have my concerns about both Bernie's and Harris' plans to end money bail. It's absolutely necessary we do that, but I don't want to see it replaced with just another way judicial wisdom or some formula that works against the poor can be used to have the same effect - or worse.
Taibbi, "Taibbi: Forget the Memo — Can We Worry About the Banks? A classic circular kerfuffle in congress this week shifted eyes away from rare bipartisan cooperation on spying powers and bank reform. [...] Predictably, there have been more concerning stories in recent weeks having to do with Republicans and Democrats agreeing, rather than trading dumb accusations. [...] All in all, this whole period has been a classic example of how congress operates. The parties fight publicly about something that's either irrelevant, inaccurate, or far from a resolution. Meanwhile, a quiet consensus pushes forward a handful of unsexy but important bills and amendments, usually economic or deregulatory in nature. Those issues tend to be the ones that demand, but rarely get, the most attention."
"'Historic Day for American Unions': Los Angeles Teachers Strike Earns Victory for Labor, Public Education: Los Angeles public school teachers at the nation's second-largest district ended a six-day strike late Tuesday after union members voted to approve a deal — hailed as a major victory for organized labor — that's designed to raise salaries, cap class sizes and charter schools, and direct more funding to schools for nurses, counselors, and other support staff positions."
"GOP Lawmaker Really Doesn't Want Rep. Rashida Tlaib to Let Lawmakers Know What Life Is Like in Occupied West Bank: Newly-elected Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) wants to offer members of Congress an alternative to the 'sugar-coated' junket to Israel the American Israel Public Affairs Committee-affiliated group offers members of Congress by leading a delegation to the West Bank. For a Republican lawmaker, however, giving lawmakers a view of life in the occupied territory is an 'exceedingly dangerous' plan that must be stopped. In letters he sent Thursday to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Democratic House committee heads, Rep. Brian Babin (R-Texas) laid out (pdf) his 'extreme concern' with Tlaib's proposal, first reported by The Intercept in December. Unlike the rite of passage for new Republican and Democratic congress members that some dub the 'Jewish Disneyland trip' — sponsored by American Israel Education Foundation (AIEF) — the proposed congressional delegation by the first Palestinian-American woman to serve in Congress would focus on 'Israel's detention of Palestinian children, education, access to clean water, and poverty,' the news outlet reported at the time."
Steny Hoyer needs to go, but that has been true since the very beginning of his career when, to our horror, he replaced Gladys Spellman upon her death. It has nothing to do with how old he is or how long he's served - he has never been any better than he is.
"A Swelling Tide of Major Teacher Strikes Is Shifting Our Politics Against the Charter Agenda: When charter schools pull funding from a public school, it damages the school's ability to educate the students who remain. In the latest teacher strike in Los Angeles, the nation's second-largest school system, some 30,000 teachers walked off the job saying unchecked growth of charter schools and charters' lack of transparency and accountability have become an unsustainable drain on the public system's financials. The teachers have included in their demands a cap on charter school growth, along with other demands, such as increased teacher pay, reduced class sizes, less testing, and more counselors, nurses, librarians, and psychologists."
Briahna Gray in The Intercept, "A Problem for Kamala Harris: Can a Prosecutor Become President in the Age of Black Lives Matter? [...] She's running for president as a progressive, but as attorney general of California, she criminalized truancy — making it a crime for kids to be late for school, and dragging into the criminal justice system even more disproportionately low income, predominantly black and latino families. She's overlooked the misconduct of her prosecutors and fought to uphold their wrongfully secured convictions. She defended California's choice to deny sexual reassignment surgery to a trans inmate, and in 2014, appealed a federal judge's holding that the death penalty was unconstitutional. [...] Journalist Jill Filipovic argued on Twitter recently that she judges Harris's history less harshly because black women 'shoulder additional burdens' compared to white men, and because women have to prove that they are 'tough.' Filipovic acknowledges that Harris's race and gender don't 'excuse' her record, but, she insists, 'context matters.' It's difficult to understand, though, how the context matters here except to provide some kind of excuse. I'm not without sympathy for the additional pressures exerted on Harris because she is a black woman — after all, unlike Filipovic, I am one too. But those sympathies do not eclipse the concern I have for the black women who bore the consequences of Harris's prosecutorial misjudgment. Importantly, if Harris had to be tougher on crime because she is black, it wasn't for the sake of some higher ideal. It was because her personal ambitions demanded it. [...] Perhaps the most enduring lesson of Sen. Bernie Sanders's 2016 presidential campaign — during which he earned votes of 43 percent of Democratic Party primary participants despite starting with name recognition in the teens, enduring a corporate media blackout, and declining to take corporate PAC money — is that the traditional rules around how much you have to sell out to get ahead were wrong. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and myriad candidates who won or over-performed in last year's midterms understood this, as do the leaders of the 2020 field, who have largely sworn off corporate PAC money, and who have adopted the bulk of Sanders's 2016 platform. As it turns out, doing the right thing is actually a winning proposition."
Teodrose Fikre is celebrating good journalists, with "Evoking Muckrakers: Hannah Giorgis's Devastating Critique of Senator Kamala Harris." Giorgis' article, in The Atlantic, reviews a book. "Kamala Harris's Political Memoir Is an Uneasy Fit for the Digital Era: The senator's new book shows the difficulty of translating short-form virality into a substantive text," she says, noting that Harris' woke-sounding tweets and self-revelation neither explain her history nor are supported by it. "But unlike Harris's many viral #resistance moments and meticulous snapshots of relatability, the memoir itself is a meandering work that lacks verve. More significantly, given far more than 280 characters to deliver a cohesive message, Harris doesn't meaningfully reconcile her punitive track record as a California prosecutor with her more recent activist-adjacent positioning as a national Democratic darling." Harris' purported reason for serving in office has to do with wanting to fight for social justice But, as many have observed, her time in office has shown her to be not merely absent from that fight, but working for the other side. "It is, according to many of her supporters, an admirable goal. And for a career prosecutor, it's a fairly understandable worldview. But the lofty language is a tough fit with Harris's policy track record. As others have noted, her tenure as California's so-called top cop reveals a series of choices that are often incongruous with the social-justice-inflected rhetoric of The Truths We Hold. Under District Attorney Kamala Harris, the overall felony-conviction rate in San Francisco rose from 52 percent in 2003 to 67 percent in 2006, the highest seen in a decade. Many of the convictions accounting for that increase stemmed from drug-related prosecutions, which also soared, from 56 percent in 2003 to 74 percent in 2006. As California's attorney general, Harris pushed a punitive initiative that treated truancy among elementary schoolers as a crime for which parents could be jailed. In 2014, she attempted to block the release of nonviolent second-strike offenders from overcrowded state prisons on the grounds that their paroling would result in prisons losing an important labor pool. The following year, she defended the California state prosecutor Robert Murray after he falsified a defendant's confession that was used to threaten a sentence of life in prison, and sided with state prison leaders in contesting a transgender inmate's bid for gender-confirmation surgery. Twice in 2016, she brought criminal charges related to human trafficking against Backpage.com, an online classified website frequently used by sex workers, and later, as a senator, she co-sponsored federal bills that led to the site's seizure, a move that sex workers and activists said threatens their survival." Giorgis also compares this book with Harris' first, and notes that they seem to contradict each other, with no bridge between them. Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor's Plan to Make Us Safer was a book from Kamala the Top Cop, who showed no interest in the injustice of rounding up loads of people (disproportionately of color, naturally) for non-violent drug crimes and wrecking their lives unnecessarily. This pre-presidential Harris wants us to think she has a history of caring about those effects — particularly on people of color — yet one still has the impression she's really only interested in protecting Perry Mason's clients - falsely accused innocents, respectable, and white. "For those already inclined to find her highly tweetable brand of #resistance rhetoric appealing, the memoir offers up palatably anti-establishment quotes for possible tote-bag screen-printing. If only it presented a holistic political foundation instead."
David Dayen and Rebecca Burns have a new book out, Fat Cat: The Steve Mnuchin Story, and they gave Bill Scher an interview on it. How did a Wall Street executive and 'foreclosure king' like Steve Mnuchin become the Treasury Secretary for a populist like Donald Trump, and what is he doing to the country now that he's there? David Dayen and Rebecca Burns tackle those questions in their book Fat Cat: The Steve Mnuchin Story (Strong Arm Press, 2018). They trace Mnuchin not-so-humble origins and his recurring presence in companies impacted by the 2008 market crash, which prompted Sen. Elizabeth Warren to call him 'the Forrest Gump of the financial crisis.' They argue that as Treasury Secretary, he has pursued policies that betray Trump's claim to the populist mantle, rolling back bank regulations and performing lax enforcement. And they criticize the tax reform bill that Mnuchin championed, asserting that it helped the wealthy at the expense of the middle-class."
"Michelle Alexander explodes an open secret in the 'NYT': progressives keep quiet about Palestine out of fear for their careers: Everyone is talking about one thing this morning, the outstanding piece by Michelle Alexander in the New York Times, yes, the New York Times, titled, 'Time to Break the Silence about Palestine,' in which she says she can't be quiet about Palestine any longer. The author of 'The New Jim Crow' is a regular columnist now, and she has changed the discourse about Palestine in one explosive swoop, stating that progressives have been silent about Palestine partly because of fear for their careers, but the time has come to end that silence.
The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy says, "The U.S. Needs a Federal Wealth Tax: A federal wealth tax on the richest 0.1 percent of Americans is a viable approach for Congress to raise revenue and is one of the few approaches that could truly address rising inequality. As this report explains, an annual federal tax of only 1 percent on the portion of any taxpayer's net worth exceeding the threshold for belonging to the wealthiest 0.1 percent (likely to be about $32.2 million in 2020) could raise $1.3 trillion over a decade. Many working families know that a large part of their wealth is their home, which is subject to an annual property tax at rates that, in some states, approach or even exceed one percent. The homes of the very rich typically make up a much smaller share of their overall wealth, meaning state and local property taxes have little effect on them.[1] A federal wealth tax could ensure that the net worth of the very rich is treated more like the wealth held by the middle-class."
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Local Ohio blogger Tim Russo reminds us of "That Time In 2005 Paul Hackett Got Sherrod Brown To Let His Mask Slip-- Here We Go Again: Word on the street here in Ohio is that Sherrod Brown has reverted to factory settings as he prepares to run for president in 2020. What are Sherrod Brown's factory settings? Sherrod don't like primaries, that's what. [...] Since Brown benefitted from his bad behavior in 2005-2006, instead of facing a cost, he is repeating it. I can report that today, Sherrod is not content with rigging the Ohio Democratic Party; Brown is now actually attempting to rig processes outside the Democratic Party, in progressive groups naturally leaning toward Bernie Sanders in 2020. Brown is reaching into the internal decision making of every Ohio progressive group he can, to stunt and halt any organizing for anyone who isn't Sherrod Brown. Brown's 2019 efforts seem based entirely on geography-- that everyone in Ohio simply must support fellow Buckeye Sherrod. In short, it's Paul Hackett all over again. Thus, it is highly likely that every establishment Democrat 2020 prospect is repeating this same approach with their own geographic base. Perhaps not with the same...er...fervor that Sherrod displayed in 2005 (and is no doubt unleashing today), but certainly the same intent. Democrats simply cannot stop attempting to rig primaries. They have learned precisely nothing from 2016." Meanwhile, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul went to Canada for surgery.
Common Dreams, "Sherrod Brown: Medicare for All Not 'Practical.' Progressives: 'OK. Thank You, Next.': 'Fight for single-payer or get kicked out of Washington trying.' [...] 'I know most of the Democratic primary candidates are all talking about Medicare for all. I think instead we should do Medicare at 55,' Brown said during a question and answer session at the Chamber of Commerce in Clear Lake, Iowa. Brown said that reducing the age or letting people over 55 buy into the existing Medicare system early would have a better chance of getting through Congress. [...] While all the Democratic 2020 candidates will ultimately be pressed on their solution to the nation's ongoing healthcare crisis, Dr. Carol Paris, former president of Physicians for a National Health Program, which advocates for a single-payer system like Medicare for All, told Think Progress this week that anyone who runs must demonstrate they understand that only Medicare for All — a system with "No co-pays, no deductibles, no need for supplemental policies, no private insurance" — has the ability to confront the current system's inherent failure."
Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone, "Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Crusher of Sacred Cows: With its silly swipes at AOC, the American political establishment is once again revealing its blindness to its own unpopularity. [...] There's a reason aides try to keep their bosses away from microphones, particularly when there's a potential for a question of SAT-or-higher level difficulty in the interview. But the subject elected officials have the most trouble staying away from is each other. We've seen this a lot in recent weeks with the ongoing freakout over newcomer Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Lest anyone think any of the above applies to 'AOC,' who's also had a lot to say since arriving in Washington, remember: she won in spite of the party and big donors, not because of them. That doesn't make anything she says inherently more or less correct. But it changes the dynamic a bit. All of AOC's supporters sent her to Washington precisely to make noise. There isn't a cabal of key donors standing behind her, cringing every time she talks about the Pentagon budget. She is there to be a pain in the ass, and it's working. Virtually the entire spectrum of Washington officialdom has responded to her with horror and anguish. [...] I have no idea if Ocasio-Cortez will or will not end up being a great politician. But it's abundantly clear that her mere presence is unmasking many, if not most, of the worst and most tired Shibboleths of the capital. Moreover, she's laying bare the long-concealed fact that many of their core policies are wildly unpopular, and would be overturned in a heartbeat if we could somehow put them all to direct national referendum.
Branko Marcetic in Jacobin, "The Shape-Shifter: Kirsten Gillibrand's name is being floated as a progressive 2020 presidential candidate. But her record shows she's a poor tribune for anti-Trump resistance.Gillibrand — who has consciously positioned herself as an elite face of 'the Resistance' in the wake of Trump's election — has some good spots on her record. She led efforts to curb sexual assault in the military, pushed to get the 9/11 first responders bill passed, campaigned to end Don't Ask, Don't Tell and the Defense of Marriage Act, and has been advancing a paid family leave bill for years. But if we're going to remember Gillibrand's voting record on Trump appointees in 2020, we should also remember some of the less laudable aspects of her political career. [...] Before her appointment to the Senate, Gillibrand was a Blue Dog Democrat through and through. Representing a House district in Upstate New York, she backed the Bush tax cuts and voted to expand government surveillance every chance she got (this continued to 2015, with CISA, a bill that allowed companies to pass their customers' data to the government). She opposed gay marriage and bragged that her voting record was 'one of the most conservative in the state.' As late as 2009, she was referred to as an 'ostensibly non-liberal Democratic congresswoman' and a 'conservative Democrat.' Gillibrand's record on immigration deserves special mention. Before taking up her Senate post, Gillibrand came out against giving undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship and opposed then — New York governor Eliot Spitzer's plan to allow undocumented immigrants access to drivers licenses. In 2007, she cosponsored the SAVE Act, which significantly beefed up border patrols, required all employers to check the immigration status of their employees through a flawed computer database, established monetary rewards for anyone who helped catch an undocumented immigrant trying to obtain falsified documents, and turned local police into an arm of federal immigration enforcement.She supported financially penalizing sanctuary cities, the same thing now on Trump's wish list. And she wanted to make English the United States' 'official language.'" And she's bad on Israel, of course, as well as being tight with Wall Street.
Paul Street at Counterpunch, "'If Bernie Runs?' Wrong Question: [...] Bernie's statements that the Wall Street (neoliberal) agenda 'made Trump possible' is accurate. 'Wall Street Democrats' have repeatedly demobilized and antagonized the majority working-class electorate and thereby opened the ugly barn door to the ever more dangerously reactionary and racist Republican Party. It is thanks in large part to the dismal, dollar-drenched Democrats' corporate neoliberalism that two noxious George Bushes and the terrible Trump have held the White House." But there's a BUT.
Atrios says, "Assert: DC is wired for Republicans and reporters get very confused indeed when they aren't in charge of everything. It's why Newt became President in 1995, and Speaker of the House Bachmann (Tea Party) ran Congress from 2009-2011. Reporters always say that Democrats are just bad at the game of kicking the soccer ball that they all chase, which could be true, but I'd also think that reporters could, you know, not see their role as being manipulated by two teams like a fucking soccer ball. But if it is a game, then Pelosi and the House Dems should be out there pulling crazy shit stunts every damn day. Also serious stuff too! Maybe combine them sometimes. Reporters gotta write about something."
"'We've dug ourselves a really deep hole' — David Neiwert on the rise of the far right: Neiwert has reported on the US far right for decades and watched as the conservative movement has steadily adopted its outlook and ideas." This is an interview in the Guardian with our old friend. Most of it is what we've seen him say before, but also this: "One important step to challenge this would be media reform. He says that the internet and corporate ownership of local media have 'basically gutted the ability of local newspapers to cover local news, gutted the ability of larger newspapers to do consumer and investigative reporting'. Social media, a paradise for conspiracy theorists, is filling the gap." And he goes on to say that the Democratic Party has to get more progressive. Oh, yes, they really have to.
There seems to be a new wave of organized H8% anti-Bernie trolling on Twitter. If you're looking for a source for verbal karate, you might find an answer to some of the complaints about how Bernie was disrespectful to Clinton in Guy Saperstein's 2015 piece about why she didn't deserve so much respect, "The Racial Justice Failures That Hillary Clinton Can't Ignore."
"This just tells people to stay home." Michael Moore on the death knell of democracy as demonstrated by the 2016 Democratic primaries and convention.
Paul Street knew who Barack Obama was before he even ran for the Senate - a deeply conservative, ambitious man who didn't believe in activism or democracy. He wrote about that before Obama was elected, but here he is in 2014 on Tell Somebody discussing the difference between the myth of Obama, and the man, and the truth about modern "progressives". Good explanation of how Democratic leaders have made "liberalism" useless and senseless - and made sure nothing can be improved. (And it's really nice to hear that someone beside me thought Obama was a boring speaker.)
November, 1985, and The Washington Post introduces you to the new rulers of the Democratic Party: "Democrats' New Centrists Preen for '88." Unfortunately, one of them had enough charisma to eventually be elected to the presidency, and it's been downhill ever since. Reading this stuff is so oddly bland and chilling at the same time. "This prospect may distress some, but it delights others. "The vote of Sen. Kennedy for that amendment is one of the most hopeful signs of an evolutionary process that is going on in our party . . . as we cross, however uncertainly, into some post-New Deal configuration," says Babbitt. [...] On his own, each of these '88 "mentionables" would have some trouble filling a firehouse with potential voters outside his home base. So they've banded together, along with the likes of Govs. Bruce Babbitt of Arizona, Charles S. Robb of Virginia, Bill Clinton of Arkansas and Sen. Dale Bumpers (Ark.), into a sort of political road show -- a touring company of like-minded presidential and vice-presidential long shots. They call themselves the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), and since midsummer, they have been following the imperatives of the Electoral College map with a series of headline-grabbing campaign-style swings through Texas, Florida, California and North Carolina. [...] They freely acknowledge that they are a long way from defining, issue by issue, exactly where the center is. But one year after the Democrats' 49-state presidential drubbing, these moderates seem poised to capture the soul of their beleaguered party on the strength of the idea of centrism. This is not a universally applauded development. "Unfortunately, the notion that we have to become a party of crypto-Republicans is selling like hotcakes," says Victor Fingerhut, a longtime labor-union pollster and strategist. "If the meek shall inherit the Earth, these timid voices will be land barons," adds Jim Hightower, the Democratic commissioner of agriculture in Texas, who argues that an out-of-power party makes a strategic mistake when it tries to recapture the national agenda with an offering of me-too-isms. He is one of a band of Democrat populists who want their party to build a new platform around good old-fashioned little-guy-versus-big-guy economic conflicts."
"A Cure For Cancer? Israeli Scientists Say They Think They Found One: [...] 'Our cancer cure will be effective from day one, will last a duration of a few weeks and will have no or minimal side-effects at a much lower cost than most other treatments on the market,' Aridor said. 'Our solution will be both generic and personal.'"
RIP: Comedian Jeremy Hardy dies of cancer aged 57: "Hardy, who featured regularly on BBC Radio 4 panel shows such as The News Quiz and I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue and wrote a column for the Guardian between 1996 and 2001, died on Friday." I'm really sorry to hear this, he was sharp and funny and coming from the right place.
RIP: "Blues musician Mike Ledbetter dies at 33: Blues fans are mourning the death of Mike Ledbetter, a singer and guitar player whose powerful vocals wowed audiences in the U.S., Europe and Russia. He was 33, according to friends. Mr. Ledbetter died of a sudden medical emergency Monday at his Elgin home, and his family is awaiting autopsy results, said his manager Gina McClain. 'He was scrupulously healthy,' said 'Monster' Mike Welch, his bandmate in the Welch-Ledbetter Connection. 'On and off, he was a bodybuilder. There's no lessons about the pitfalls of the road. This is a man who took care of himself, loved his kids, loved his girlfriend Kathy.' Trained in opera, he was 'truly the best vocalist. . . .He was just passionate about American music,' said Tina Terry, his agent. 'For the blues community, it's a huge loss.'" There's another obit at Blues Matters. But here's what you really want to know about him. He was good.
RIP: "Penny Marshall, 'Laverne & Shirley' Star, Director, Dies at 75. Marshall was the first woman to direct a film that grossed more than $100 million, the first woman to direct two films that made more than $100 million, and she was only the second woman director to see her film Oscar-nominated for best picture." To me, of course, she will always be Oscar Madison's secretary.
RIP: Charles Aznavour, French singing star, dies at 94. Yes, I know this was in October, but for some reason I didn't say anything at the time. I knew his name because it was the one my mother always named whenever someone asked if there were any famous Armenians. In those days, Aznavour and the Chipmonkian Ross Bagdasarian were pretty much all there was. (As my sister observed upon Aznavour's death, these days they are all infamous - Dr. Death and the Kardashians. I don't agree with her about Cher, she's still just a singer/actor, and not a bad one.
Mick West has scanned, and Graham West has uploaded to Dropbox, D. West's Fanzines in Theory and Practice. Meanwhile, Dave Langford has made a text version of West's Deliverance on the TAFF site.
Finally watched Ron Howard's Beatles movie, Eight Days A Week, and it choked me up.
"Vowing to Fight Corporate Power on Behalf of Working Families, Elizabeth Warren Announces 2020 Presidential Run: In a move seen as an official signal that she is entering the 2020 contest for president, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) on Monday sent an email to supporters and shared a video on social media announcing that she is forming an exploratory committee to examine her viability as a candidate in the next presidential race."
"Minnesota AG's report reveals big telcos are literally letting their infrastructure rot: More than a decade of foot-dragging on fiber rollout has left millions of Americans dependent on taxpayer-funded copper-line infrastructure for landlines and DSL, but it's not like the carriers are plowing their no-fiber savings into copper maintenance, instead, as a report released by Minnesota Attorney General Lori Swanson details, incumbent telcos are literally leaving their infrastructure to rot: wires are draped across customers' lawns (and over their propane tanks!), boxes containing key network gear are left smashed and rusting, and carriers' poles and other furniture are literally propped up with 2x4s, or have random logs placed against their wires to hold them in place. Swanson's investigation follows alarm-bells raised by the unionized telco maintenance staff and customers, who have filed more than 1,000 complaints against Frontier, Minnesota's incumbent carrier. The neglect is takes place in an environment of deregulation prompted by the rise of VoIP services, which gave the carriers and the FCC the excuse they needed to allow the telcos to self-regulate their copper-line infrastructure." Worth clicking just to see the photos.
Theresa May failed again to get her latest Brexit plan through, 432-202. May survived the vote of confidence but she only has until March to get it together, and so far she shows no signs of finding a way to do this thing. Meanwhile, some people wonder why Labour seems to have shown such half-hearted interest in defending Remain. It might help to read "Everything you need to know about Lexit in five minutes" - that's the long-standing left-wing case against the EU. Hint: It's about the ease with which employers can simply move companies or jobs to countries with lower wages and fewer worker protections.
"Federal Judge Strikes Down Iowa 'Ag-Gag' Law: DES MOINES, Iowa (CN) — Iowa's so-called 'ag-gag' law that makes it a crime for undercover journalists or animal-rights activists to investigate and report on animal abuse in livestock facilities is unconstitutional, a federal judge ruled Wednesday. U.S. District Judge James Gritzner in Des Moines struck down the 2012 statute passed by the Iowa Legislature aimed at preventing reporters or activists from entering livestock facilities under false pretenses to report animal abuse."
Maté, "Someone Finally Explained the Trump-Russia Story and It Will Make You Question Everything: I think what's going on is a sustained disinformation campaign in the West to convince people in the West that they are susceptible to a massive Russian disinformation campaign. I mean if you look at it, it's a joke. These so-called sophisticated posts that we are supposed to be afraid of are juvenile, stupid, clickbait content that nobody would be talking about and that nobody would even have noticed really unless every single corporate media outlet and all these government officials were making them such a big deal. I mean, it's ludicrous. [...] And what it actually reveals, I don't think people realise this, but it shows what contempt liberal elites have for average voters — this notion — that anybody could have been duped by these stupid juvenile ads, and this idea that these ads could sow discord. I am not joking, the latest headline on this front that I saw was this one from the site Qz: and this is the headline: 'Russian operatives were promoting sex toys on Instagram to sow discord in the US.' And what is amazing is how many grown adults in positions of influence in media and in politics are taking this seriously and are trying to present to us that we should be afraid of all this, when there are so many more problems — there are so many problems out there that decide elections, it's a joke."
David Dayen, Ryan Grim, and Aída Chávez, "Progressives Fought For Key Committee Spots, But Centrist New Dems Came Out On Top: REP. ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ failed in her long-shot bid for a seat on the powerful Ways and Means Committee, according to an announcement from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi Wednesday evening. Pelosi named a member of the New Democrat Coalition, the centrist wing of the party, to the seat instead, part of a sweeping set of wins by the Wall Street-friendly caucus."
"Angela Davis 'Stunned' at Award Revocation, But Still Coming to Birmingham: Activist, poet, academic and writer Angela Davis says she was 'stunned' to learn last Saturday that the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute had rescinded its invitation to honor her next month, in her hometown, with the Fred L. Shuttlesworth Award for Human Rights. However, in a statement released Monday, Davis revealed she is still coming to Birmingham. 'Despite the BCRI's regrettable decision,' she said, 'I look forward to being in Birmingham in February for an alternative event organized by those who believe that the movement for civil rights in this moment must include a robust discussion of all of the injustices that surround us.' [...] 'The Birmingham Civil Rights Institute (BCRI)'s decision to rescind an honor previously extended to Angela Davis is only the latest incident in a well-documented nationwide campaign to censor and punish critics of Israel. Davis joins a long list of scholars and activists who have been censored , fired , de-funded , defamed , harassed and targeted with frivolous litigation because of concerted efforts by the Israeli government and anti-Palestinian organizations in the U.S. to silence debate.'"
"The DNC Is Putting Its Thumb On The Scales Again — This Time In The Right Direction: DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL COMMITTEE Chair Tom Perez is setting a kind of cover charge to get onstage for the Democratic presidential primary debates, but not just any money will do. In addition to the usual polling metrics required to join the debate, candidates will also have to meet a to-be-determined criteria for 'grassroots fundraising.' Including small-dollar fundraising as a necessary element for debate participation would have two effects. First, it incentivizes candidates to invest — strategically, financially, and emotionally — in growing a small-donor base. Second, it will force potential billionaire self-funders like Michael Bloomberg, Tom Steyer, and Howard Schultz to demonstrate some level of popular enthusiasm for their campaigns, meaning they can't just flash their own cash and buy their way onstage. This is a remarkable decision for any political party, and it reflects a growing shift in how campaigns are run and won. It also previews what will be an important way to measure the success of candidates in the Democratic primary: not just looking at how much money candidates raise, but how much of their money comes from small-dollar donors."
"In Major Move, Census Bureau Offers Up Citizenship Data For Redistricting: In what could be a major change for voting rights and the distribution of political power between urban and rural areas, the Census Bureau signaled Friday that it is willing to work with state and local officials charged with drawing voting districts if they want citizenship data for the redistricting process. [...] The decision prompted alarm by voting rights activists, civil rights advocates and policy wonks. They believe it will depress the participation of immigrant communities on the census — causing an undercount that would shift political power and resources away from those populations — while also leading to exclusion of non-citizens in legislative redistricting altogether in some states and localities." But a federal court disagreed, though the Supremes might step in to give it the go-ahead again.
Matt Taibbi, "Return of the Neocons! The new 'Bulwark' is the latest signpost on the road back to power for America's most disgraced brand of politics: Neoconservatives, the architects of the War on Terror, are the political version of Jason in Friday the 13th: You can never bank on them being completely dead. They just hide under a log until the next funder appears. The neocon media tribune, the Weekly Standard, did indeed fold recently. In no time they had a new voice: The Bulwark, edited by former Weekly Standard and current NBC/MSNBC contributor Charlie Sykes, with Weekly Standard founder Bill Kristol listed as 'editor at large.' [...] Because they started this Middle East disaster on a lie and even bragged about doing so — 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality' — they undermined faith in a smorgasbord of American institutions, from the news media to the presidency to the intelligence community to their own party. This was a huge reason for the rise of Trump, who ran against 'elites' and capitalized on voters' loss of trust in institutions like the press. Conveniently, neocons had already begun tacking back to the Democrats by then. [...] o, longtime Democratic Party advisers are once again triangulating against their party's own progressive wing, which was the core strategy of the original 'Third Way' Democrats in the early Nineties. Party leaders now want to kick out populist, antiwar liberals in the same way Frum once wanted to excommunicate antiwar conservatives. This overlaps nicely with neocons' efforts to stake out the same turf between Trump and Sanders. This is becoming a little like watching two people pretending not to be attracted to one another even though everyone knows they make each other horny. I'd say the Bulwark neocons and their Democratic allies need to get a room, except they already have MSNBC (as noted by recently resigned reporter William Arkin, who complained the network had become a forum for a 'single war party'). As Glenn Greenwald noted in the Intercept last year, the 'most extreme and discredited neocons' began uniting with Democrats 'long before the ascension of Donald Trump.' [...] If you're not concerned about undead neocons making a comeback while Trump is in office, that's understandable. Many people will take allies against Trump from wherever they can. Just don't be surprised if 'liberal interventionists' are sitting in the White House once Trump leaves the scene. These are determined revolutionaries who've been scheming for years to throw a saddle on the Democratic Party after decades in bed with Republicans. Sadly, they have willing partners over there."
David Dayen at Vice, "Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Plan to Tax the Rich Is the Opposite of Radical: Her idea of a 70 percent tax on income above $10 million isn't wild, and wouldn't pay for everything the left wants. But that's the wrong way to think about it. Some politicians can move previously fringe ideas into the forefront of the debate without even trying. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's suggestion on 60 Minutes of a 70 percent top marginal tax rate for Americans earning over $10 million has people thinking again about what America could look like rather the oligarchy it currently is. But the real purpose of these ideas has been obscured amid a tired and one-sided argument about balanced budgets: As Ocasio-Cortez would likely tell you, there's a big difference between trying to find revenues and trying to deliver progress to the country. [...] But musing about how to raise money assumes that such revenue is required to 'fund' government operations. We know that Ocasio-Cortez finds such assumptions dangerous. She subscribes to modern monetary theory, which argues that any country with its own currency isn't constrained by federal debt. Just last week, Ocasio-Cortez voted against the House rules package because it contained a 'paygo' requirement that all new spending must be offset by budget cuts or tax increases. In her conception, meeting public needs deserves a much higher priority than the budget deficit. So why, then, would Ocasio-Cortez suggest higher tax rates on the rich? Maybe it's because they could discourage runaway compensation at the top that has triggered skyrocketing income inequality. When the US had a 91 percent top marginal tax rate in the 1950s, hardly anyone actually paid it. But CEOs made far less than they do today; why would they ask for a heavy raise if the government was going to grab most of it anyway? [...] So when you look at Ocasio-Cortez's suggestion on taxes, you shouldn't think about it solely in terms of raising money. Think about it as perfecting our union."
"Sweden Has a 70 Percent Tax Rate and It Is Fine [...] One thing missing from the discussion so far is the point that a 70 percent top tax rate exists, not merely in midcentury US tax codes or in academic papers, but also in the real world right now. Sweden has a 70 percent marginal tax rate and it kicks in, not at $10 million like AOC proposes, but at around $98,000. AOC's proposal is quite modest by comparison."
Wonkette, "Why Are We All Yelling About 'Pay-Go?' [...] First off, let's be clear: Paygo IS a really stupid relic of deficit hawkery. It requires that any legislation be paid for, either by cuts to existing government programs or by new revenues. But it's a damn sight better than what Republicans had in place when they held the House, which was "cut as you go" (or "Cutgo" -- an anime character with a razor), which only allowed the use of budget cuts in one area to offset new spending -- no new revenues of any sort. And of course, the Rs cheerfully waived it when it came to passing its $1.5 trillion Tax Cuts For Rich Fuckwads Act. [...] Ah, this is where it gets complicated: You see, in addition to the House rule, paygo is also enshrined in federal law, as Progressive Caucus co-chair Mark Pocan explained on the Twitter boxes: It sucks, and Dems should get rid of it when they have the Senate and the presidency, but until that's the case, it's better for the House to control how new spending will be paid for, because under the existing law, the executive branch can institute cuts to balance out any deficit spending. This would not be a good thing!"
Matt Stoller, "Congressional Staffing for Dummies: The Pay Go Dispute: There are a lot of people arguing about this thing called Pay Go. Here's my attempted explanation of what Pay Go is and how it intersects with stuff you care about. [...] Well now that I've gotten through the basics, here's what the fight is about. In 2010, the Obama administration and a Democratic Congress passed a law to ensure Congress would be 'fiscally responsible. Nancy Pelosi was the Speaker in 2010 when Congress passed the statute, and she is proud of being fiscally responsible. This law says that if Congress doesn't go through a PayGo process for its aggregate spending and taxing in the full fiscal year, the White House's Office of Management and Budget gets to choose a bunch of programs to cut in a process known as sequestration. Sequestration is in law. It was a law that sort of made sense at the time, because Obama was President and Democrats didn't so much mind if a Democratically controlled OMB got to make a bunch of important decisions. But guess what? Trump is now President, which means he's the one that gets to decide the cuts that happen if Congress doesn't use a PayGo decision-making process."
Ryan Grim and Aida Chavez, "Behind The Pay-Go Battle Is A Central Contradiction That Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez And Her Allies Will Need To Resolve: IN THE FIRST vote of the 116th Congress on Thursday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., was one of just three Democrats who split with their party and voted against a rules package introduced by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and backed by the leadership of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Ocasio-Cortez's political career so far has been largely defined by her willingness to break from the pack, but her dissenting vote alongside just two others highlights the paradox of her position in the House: Her high-profile platform allows her to shape the national conversation, but the same energy that fueled her rise can be met with a very different reaction inside the walls of the Capitol."
Ryan Grim has a blog, by the way, where he has other pieces about Pay-Go, immigration, and that nasty AIPAC bill that's not only reared its ugly head again, but is actually the first bill the new Senate has brought up.
"Russian news may be biased — but so is much western media: Manipulation of the news for propaganda purposes is not the prerogative of the west's enemies. It's vital to look at all media, including the UK's, with a critical eye." The difference between Russian media and Western media, as always, is that Russians know they are seeing propaganda, and westerners are oblivious.
I missed this last month - "Every Single Member of US Congress Approved Crushing Sanctions on Nicaragua: After defeating a violent US-backed coup attempt, Nicaragua's elected government faces the NICA Act. The bill aims to force the Sandinistas from power by ratcheting up economic despair." I hoped that headline really meant the House, but no, "On November 27, amendments for the combined legislation were approved with unanimous consent in the Senate. Then on December 11, the changes were unanimously approved in the House without objection."
Great episode of Citations Needed on The Neoliberal Optimism Industry: On this episode, we take a look at the ideological project of telling us everything's going swimmingly, how those in power cook the books and spin data to make their case for maintaining the status quo, and how The Neoliberal Optimism Industry is, at its core, an anti-intellectual enterprise designed to lull us into complacency and political impotence. Our guest is Dr. Jason Hickel."
The first show of the year was pretty good, too, and makes some great points about how bravely Liz Warren faced the Washington establishment. (Worth remembering, again, it took a lot of backbone to steadfastly refuse to endorse a candidate in the 2016 primaries despite enormous pressure from Clinton and the party to give in to her early.) News w/ MR Team - MR Live - 1/2/19
Sirota's tweets and article on Beto O'Rourke's campaign donation sources and record upset Neera Tanden, with the result that long, hateful threads toward Sirota ensued on Twitter. It's not hard to agree with the TYT crowd about this. But the good news is that The Houston Chronicle itself took the article seriously, saying, "Beto and Bernie debate raises questions about Texas' oil economy: Politicians across the spectrum should face this moment as an opportunity to organize their best ideas and smartest policies and present them to the American people. What would an effective carbon tax look like? What would a Green New Deal mean for Houston's refinery workers?"
And Katie Halper interviewed Sirota, "The Factual Reporting About Beto by David Sirota That Stirred Epic Freakout [...] Right. And I think it really speaks to is something very sad about our politics, which is that there's an authoritarian tendency to our politics. I do think that there are a lot of people out there on both the right and in the Democratic party who just want a coronation. They don't necessarily believe in the basic fundamentals of democracy. One of the basic fundamentals of democracy is that there are contested primaries. Candidates go back and forth and they debate their policies and they debate their records and this is healthy. This is a healthy discourse and I think there are a lot of people who buy into the argument that it would be better if we just appointed two nominees, had the two nominees run against each other, and that would be it. If I have an ideology, I'm ideologically opposed to the idea that we must coronate candidates and just have uncontested elections where we don't debate the issues. I think that they're terrified off scrutiny. They're terrified of what's going to be revealed." (Note to David: The ceremony is called a coronation but the act is to crown, not to "coronate".)
It's worth reading this one for the little history lesson, "Democrats rev up to offend most of their base, again: Don't you dare look at Beto's voting record! The commonly accepted explanation for Hillary Clinton's 2016 loss was that anyone and everyone who did not vote for her was influenced by a Russian Internet troll farm funded by Putin. The trolls sent out thousands of Facebook and Twitter lies (some of which were true like the DNC's treatment of Bernie Sanders and his supporters) and everyone who failed to support Clinton believed these lies because they're all morons. There's no similar explanation for how Clinton lost to Obama in 2008."
Amazingly, this is from Politico, "Democrats Aren't Moving Left. They're Returning to Their Roots. Many on both sides are worried about the party's leftward swing. They say it's a deviation from the mainstream. It's not. [...] But there's something wrong with this historical interpretation: Truman strongly supported single-payer health care. Moynihan supported a universal basic income in the 1960s. Dating back to World War II, Democrats sought to make a government-paid education available to as many Americans as possible. If Democrats are marching to the left, that road leads directly back to platforms and politicians who, in their day, commanded wide support and existed firmly in the mainstream of political thought."
From The Forward, "Bernie Sanders Isn't Just Another White Male Candidate. His Nomination Would Be Historic. Sanders is white, yes, but he's also Jewish, and last time around he got closer to the presidency than any Jew in history ever had. Based on his standing in early polls, he has a real shot to win the nomination this time. But the response to that history-making prospect, among Jews and non-Jews alike, has been decidedly muted. [...] In February 2016, the New York Times ran an article about the subject, entitled 'Bernie Sanders Is Jewish, but He Doesn't Like to Talk About It,' which began by quoting a New York rabbi who expressed dismay that Sanders had described himself as 'the son of a Polish immigrant who came to this country speaking no English and having no money.' The article went on to describe the contours of Sanders's Jewish identity: the son of an immigrant whose family was murdered in the Holocaust on one side and the grandson of immigrants on the other, Sanders is entirely Ashkenazi Jewish, was born and raised in Brooklyn, does not regularly attend synagogue, is married to a Catholic, defines himself by the struggle for social justice on behalf of all oppressed peoples, and has a left-leaning view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He is, in short, probably not very different from a lot of Forward readers."
Norman Solomon, "Corporate Democrats Are Already Punching Left Ahead of 2020 [...] Such calculated nonsense indicates just how panicky some powerful corporate Democrats are about Sanders' likely presidential campaign — and just how anxious they are to protect corporate-oriented candidates from public scrutiny. The quest is to smother meaningful discussions of vital issues that should be center stage during the presidential campaign."
People keep asking me who I would support for president other than Bernie Sanders. Understand, I still think Sanders is the best choice, but the list of other people who have any time in office and aren't awfully far to the right is really pretty short. I probably wouldn't have to hold my nose to vote for this guy in the general, though: Jeff Merkley's full speech at the 2016 Democratic National Convention.
"It's Time to Bring Back the Corporate Death Penalty: When big companies engage in criminal harm to the public, they deserve serious punishment [...] The good citizens of California have been wondering out loud who killed 86 of their citizens in the Camp Fire, along with dozens of other Californians over the years in other fires. Now both federal and state prosecutors are focusing on a likely suspect: Pacific Gas and Electric. California's largest private, for-profit corporate utility appears to have killed a number of people over the years, in many cases because of negligence apparently prompted by a desire to jack up corporate profits. As a corporation, they play by different rules than you or I. [...] When a corporation does business ethically and legally, it serves its local community, its employees, its customers, and its shareholders. For over a century, American corporations were held to this very reasonable standard."
"Bernie's Plan for Racial Justice: The micro-scandals alleging that Bernie Sanders doesn't take racism seriously won't end any time soon. We should call them what they are: cynical attacks on a politician whose commitment to racial justice is intertwined with fighting economic inequality." The Daily Beast gave the H8% some ammo; Meagan Day clears it up.
Alex Pareen joined The Majority Report's year-end review and Sammy asked the magical question: Why didn't some ambitious DA go after Trump's mob long ago?
"US-funded police linked to illegal executions in El Salvador: The United States has quietly funded and equipped elite paramilitary police officers in El Salvador who are accused of illegally executing gang members, CNN has learned. Successive US administrations have pumped tens of millions of dollars into Salvadoran law enforcement and military to shore up the government's 'Mano Dura' or Firm Hand program, first launched in 2003 but redoubled in 2014 to tackle the country's rampant gang problem."
"After McDonogh 35 vote, New Orleans will be 1st in US without traditionally run public schools: Following a hotly contested 5-2 vote on one school's future by the Orleans Parish School Board on Thursday night, New Orleans is slated to become the first U.S. city with virtually all of its public schools run by charter organizations starting next school year. As a packed room of community members chanted, shouted and waved signs in protest, the board gave a thumbs-up to a plan announced earlier in the day by Superintendent Henderson Lewis Jr. to have InspireNOLA, a high-performing charter operator, temporarily run McDonogh 35 Senior High School, which has been the city's only non-charter public high school." Which means there are now no public schools in New Orleans.
"DNC Chair Tom Perez goes to war with state parties: Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez launched an attack on his own party's state organizations Saturday with a long and angry email over the future of the party's most valuable asset — its voter data file. Just days before an important Tuesday meeting in D.C. on the future of the data operation, Perez sharply criticized a new proposal from state party leaders and singled out prominent state officials by name. [...] The DNC wants to gather all the data points on voters into a new, massive for-profit database but needs to convince state parties on the idea. The state parties have been wary, accusing the DNC of conducting a power grab that could financially benefit a few elite party figures."
"A Texas Elementary School Speech Pathologist Refused to Sign a Pro-Israel Oath, Now Mandatory in Many States — so She Lost Her Job: A CHILDREN'S SPEECH PATHOLOGIST who has worked for the last nine years with developmentally disabled, autistic, and speech-impaired elementary school students in Austin, Texas, has been told that she can no longer work with the public school district, after she refused to sign an oath vowing that she 'does not' and 'will not' engage in a boycott of Israel or 'otherwise tak[e] any action that is intended to inflict economic harm' on that foreign nation. A lawsuit on her behalf was filed early Monday morning in a federal court in the Western District of Texas, alleging a violation of her First Amendment right of free speech. [...] In order to obtain contracts in Texas, then, a citizen is free to denounce and work against the United States, to advocate for causes that directly harm American children, and even to support a boycott of particular U.S. states, such as was done in 2017 to North Carolina in protest of its anti-LGBT law. In order to continue to work, Amawi would be perfectly free to engage in any political activism against her own country, participate in an economic boycott of any state or city within the U.S., or work against the policies of any other government in the world — except Israel." 26 US states have passed laws requiring state employees to take this oath, and 13 others have such legislation pending.
David Dayen, "Sen. Jeff Merkley Wants To Stop Congress Members From Insider Trading By Banning Them From Owning Stocks: SEN. JAMES INHOFE, an Oklahoma Republican recently elevated to chair the Senate Armed Services Committee after the death of John McCain, was implicated recently in what looked to be an insider trading scandal. A few days after meeting with President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis to successfully advocate for a military budget increase, Inhofe purchased between $50,000 and $100,000 of stock in defense contractor Raytheon, which stands to profit from additional defense spending. [...] When compared to corporate insiders, members of Congress are exposed to a much broader array of insider information which implicates a wide range of companies. Given that members of Congress hold a unique position of public trust, Sens. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., and Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, both potential Democratic presidential candidates, want to put a stop to all the trading. Last week, they introduced legislation that would permanently ban members of Congress and senior staff from trading individual stocks. 'We should not be in the position of thinking about legislation in the context of personal investment,' Merkley told The Intercept in an interview. 'As long as you own stocks, it's hard to rule out of your mind. And the public sees it as a conflict of interest.' Under the Ban Conflicted Trading Act, all members would have six months after enactment to divest their shares. New members would get six months from their entry into Congress to divest. Members and senior staff could also opt to transfer stocks to an independent blind trust, or hold them for as long as they served in government, as long as they do not sell or buy more stocks. Diversified mutual funds or exchange-traded funds would still be allowed. [...] Another section of the bill prohibits members from serving as officers on corporate boards, which amazingly is not already disallowed. Rep. Chris Collins, R-N.Y., was indicted earlier this year for advising friends and family to dump shares of the biopharmaceutical company Innate Immunotherapeutic after learning that a clinical trial for the company's key multiple sclerosis drug failed. Collins knew about the failure before it was public, because he sat on the company's board. Currently, Senate ethics rules ban members and staff from serving as board members of publicly traded companies, but House rules do not. Even the Senate rules permit board membership of tax-exempt organizations. Merkley believes codifying into law a full prohibition on members of the House or Senate serving on corporate boards would be beneficial."
David Dayen at The American Prospect, "Sears Adds Further Insult to Its Workers -- Bankruptcy Bonuses for Execs: Amazingly, a bankruptcy judge has approved $25 million for 334 senior executives, while tens of thousands of ordinary employees face layoffs. Sears and Kmart workers still have no idea whether they'll have a job after the holidays, as the once-mighty retailer slogs through bankruptcy. But the federal bankruptcy court working through the case has nonetheless delivered a Christmas miracle for one important constituency: the company's executives. Late on Friday, U.S. Bankruptcy Court Judge Robert Drain approved $25 million in year-end bonuses for Sears' top managers, as the company had requested. Nineteen executives would get about one-third of that money, around $8.4 million, if Sears hits certain financial targets in the next six months, or even if it merely pronounces itself on track to reach those goals. Another $16.9 million would be distributed to 315 senior employees in 'retention bonuses,' so they don't leave to join other retailers. [...] This is definitely a situation where the scandal is what's legal. It's common for executives to get bonuses approved during bankruptcy proceedings. The same thing happened at Toys 'R' Us, before the company was liquidated. 'It's an example of how our bankruptcy laws are broken,' said Carrie Gleason, policy director and campaign manager of the Rise Up Retail campaign, which has assisted current and former Sears workers. But the decision from Judge Drain comes just a week after U.S. bankruptcy trustee William Harrington, responsible for overseeing the Sears case on behalf of the government, formally objected to Sears' proposal to pay out the bonuses. Harrington wrote that the idea of enriching a tiny elite at the top of Sears' organization while the rest of the company scrambles would be improper. 'Against the backdrop of running going out of business sales, the shuttering of hundreds of stores, and the presumed termination of thousands of rank-and-file and hourly employees,' Harrington argued, 'the Debtors are seeking authority to pay significant bonuses to their most senior executive officers … many of whom received pay raises on the eve of the bankruptcy filing.' Viewed this way, the bonuses do not feel like an effort to retain top talent through a difficult period, but a final extraction of cash before the ship sinks."
Read the full version of David Sirota's article at Capital & Main, "Beto vs. Democrats: Texas Lawmaker Frequently Voted to Help Trump and GOP: A rising Democratic star has voted for GOP bills that Trump critics say have aided big banks, undercut the fight against climate change and supported the president's anti-immigrant agenda. Following Beto O'Rourke's spirited run for the U.S. Senate, powerful voices in the Democratic Party establishment have touted the outgoing Texas congressman as a 2020 presidential candidate who, as the party's standard-bearer, would offer a vision of America contrasting against that of Republicans. However, a Capital & Main review of congressional votes shows that even as O'Rourke has represented one of the most Democratic congressional districts in the entire country, he has in many instances undermined his own party's efforts to halt the GOP agenda, frequently voting against the majority of House Democrats in support of Republican bills and Trump administration positions. Capital & Main reviewed the 167 votes O'Rourke has cast in opposition to the majority of his own party in the House during his six-year tenure in Congress. Many of those votes were not progressive dissents alongside other left-leaning lawmakers but were instead votes to help pass Republican-sponsored legislation. In many cases, Democratic lawmakers said that those measures were designed to help corporate interests dismantle Obama administration programs and regulations." A somewhat edited version is at the Guardian, and it also appeared in Newsweek.
"Ringing in a Christian Nationalist 2019 With an Even Larger Legislative Playbook: A Christian nationalist coalition, including the Congressional Prayer Caucus Foundation, has published a new state legislative playbook for 2019 that's 30 percent larger, and 100 percent as committed to a nation that reflects its sectarian values."
"Politicians have caused a pay 'collapse' for the bottom 90 percent of workers, researchers say: Political decisions by elected officials are largely responsible for a 'collapse in pay for the bottom 90 percent' of the labor market since 1979, according to a new analysis of wage stagnation by the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank. While many economists pin much of the blame for wage stagnation on impersonal market forces, such as free trade and technological change, EPI's Josh Bivens and Heidi Shierholz contend that specific policy decisions — including efforts to weaken unions, the decay of the minimum wage and monetary policy that prioritizes low inflation over full employment — are responsible for tilting the balance of power away from workers and toward their employers."
From Current Affairs, "Why Is The Center For American Progress Betraying The Left? As the left tries to fight against inequality and exploitation, the main 'progressive' think tank joins forces with right-wing free market capitalists.... The Center for American Progress is one of the largest and most important think tanks in Washington, certainly the preeminent 'progressive' think tank. It describes its agenda as promoting 'bold, progressive ideas' and releases a number of extremely useful reports and fact sheets. In 2008, TIME branded it 'Obama's idea factory.' CAP has strong ties with both Obama and the Clintons — it was founded by close Clinton confidante John Podesta and its president, Neera Tanden, previously worked for both Bill and Hillary Clinton. The New Republic has described it as 'stuffed to the gills with staffers who have either worked in previous Democratic administrations or will go on to work in future ones.' [...] The Center for American Progress does not just accept shady donations. It also gives them. Journalist Andrew Perez reported that according to financial disclosure forms, CAP donated $200,000 last year to the American Enterprise Institute. The AEI is a right-wing free-market think tank perhaps best known as the longtime home of racist social scientist Charles Murray. " When they asked Neera Tanden what was up with that, she directed them to their website. "Naturally, Current Affairs gladly accepts the invitation to focus on CAP's collaboration with the AEI. I looked at two of the 'reports' that they have produced together so far. First, it is still unclear why CAP is giving AEI $200,000. The reports Tanden links to are a few pages each, more like extended op-eds than scholarly works, and involve no original research. They both focus not on 'authoritarianism' as Tanden says, but on what they call 'authoritarian populism.' This is important, because while Tanden suggests that nobody could object to 'defending democracy from the rise of authoritarianism,' we know that to the American Enterprise Institute, 'democracy' and 'authoritarianism' do not necessarily mean what they mean to you and me. When the AEI speaks of democracy, it means 'laissez-faire capitalism' and when it speaks of 'authoritarianism' it means 'minimum wage laws' or any mildly redistributive social policies that could threaten American Enterprise. Tanden wants to wave away concerns about the collaboration, because after all everyone agrees democracy is good. But the question is — what are we actually 'defending' here?"
Kos was stirring up crap on Twitter again last week. Kos and Armando seem to have made it their mission to denigrate the left in social media lately, so perhaps Dan O'Sullivan's article from early last year is timely again: Requiem for a Lightweight: Markos Moulitsas was once the face of American progressivism. That shouldn't happen again."
Mike the Mad Biologist, "TEH SOCIALISMZ!!! AAAIIIEEE!!!!: With the win of Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (full disclosure: I donated to her campaign), there has been a lot of talk about socialism, which led to this hilarious self-own by Sean Hannity, where he displayed the horror that is her platform" [...] But on a more serious note, I'm genuinely puzzled as to how this is any different from what used to be called liberal Democrats (before and during the 1990s — and who were mostly purged from power by the Clinton era New Democrats) would propose. Looking at her site, as well as the DSA site, I'm not seeing anything about the nationalization of companies. No establishment of an activist wealth fund, in which the government has voting shares and uses them — Norway does this, for example. Other than for skyrocketing drug prices (and perhaps rent increases), there are no widespread calls for price controls. So it's really hard to see how what is currently referred to as socialism would differ from Hubert Humphrey's economic proposals."
"Self-Presentation in Interracial Settings: The Competence Downshift by White Liberals: Most Whites, particularly socio-political liberals, now endorse racial equality. Archival and experimental research reveals a subtle but reliable ironic consequence: White liberals self-present less competence to minorities than to other Whites — that is, they patronize minorities stereotyped as lower status and less competent. In an initial archival demonstration of the competence downshift, Study 1 examined the content of White Republican and Democratic presidential candidates' campaign speeches. Although Republican candidates did not significantly shift language based on audience racial composition, Democratic candidates used less competence-related language to minority audiences than to White audiences. Across five experiments (total N = 2,157), White participants responded to a Black or White hypothetical (Studies 2, 3, 4, S1) or ostensibly real (Study 5) interaction partner. Three indicators of self-presentation converged: sophistication of vocabulary selected for an assignment, competence-related traits selected for an introduction, and competence-related content of brief, open-ended introductions. Conservatism indicators included: self-reported political affiliation (liberal-conservative), Right-Wing Authoritarianism (values-based conservatism) and Social Dominance Orientation (hierarchy-based conservatism). Internal meta-analyses revealed that liberals — but not conservatives — presented less competence to Black interaction partners than to White ones. The simple effect was small but significant across studies, and most reliable for the self-reported measure of conservatism. This possibly unintentional but ultimately patronizing competence-downshift suggests that well-intentioned liberal Whites may draw on low-status/competence stereotypes to affiliate with minorities."
Have a read of the Editor's Note at the top of this article, and the comments below it, which caused it to be edited after the fact. "Why the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire Makes for a Complicated History: Charged with manslaughter, the owners were acquitted in December 1911. A Smithsonian curator reexamines the labor and business practices of the era." The original title of the article was "Was History Fair to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Owners?" and the article implied that they couldn't really be blamed. Not unnaturally, readers were a little peeved. Twitter had a field day.
Also for the notebook, but from this week, Matt Yglesias says "Beto O'Rourke's voting record is more conservative than the average Democrat's: It's about what you'd expect from someone running a statewide campaign in Texas." This is based mainly on his DW-Nominate stats, but there's nothing else in his record that suggests he is more progressive than those stats would make it appear. It's a reasonable point to make about a three-term member of Congress who just lost a state-wide election bid but for some reason is being talked up as the progressive standard-bearer for 2020.
"Defying Trump, US Senate votes to end US support for Yemen war: The final vote of the Yemen resolution was 56-41, with seven Republicans breaking with their party to vote in support of the measure. [...] Due to tactics used by the Republican leadership in the House, the lower chamber will not take up the Senate measure before adjourning, leaving the matter unresolved until the new Congress convenes in January." Well, it wasn't simply due to Paul Ryan's tactics - it was also that five Democrats used those tactics as an excuse to vote the wrong way - they were Jim Costa, Al Lawson, Collin Peterson, Dutch Rupperberger, and David Scott. Peterson's explanation for his vote is priceless. Co-sponsors of the resolution to stop supporting the Yemen atrocity were Senators Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), and Mike Lee (R-Utah).
"Abrams' New Voting Rights Org, Fair Fight Georgia, Files Suit: Charges Kemp "grossly mismanaged" election and "unconstitutionally purged" Georgia's voter rolls: Stacey Abrams, who refused to officially concede defeat in her bid for Governor, filed suit today in federal court in Atlanta charging the entire election process was hopelessly tainted. Abrams, who has formed a non-partisan voter protection organization, Fair Fight Georgia, cites, among other racially biased attacks on the rights of citizens to vote, the wrongful mass purge of voters by Secretary of State Brian Kemp — who was Abrams' opponent and the presumptive winner."
"Congress may have accidentally freed nearly all banks from the Volcker Rule: A few double negatives buried in legislative text may have inadvertently freed nearly all U.S. banks from a regulation known as the Volcker Rule, which sought to curb risky behavior in response to the 2008 financial crisis. The text in question comes from a package bill passed in May that pared back portions of the Dodd-Frank post-crisis financial regulatory framework. One of the many provisions of the bill offered an exemption from the Volcker Rule to smaller community banks that policymakers felt were burdened by the regulation, which limited banks' proprietary trading, or trading for their own accounts." Hm, "accidentally", "inadvertently", I wonder....
"Supreme Court sides with Planned Parenthood, declines to take case: The Supreme Court on Monday refused appeals from two states looking to end funding to Planned Parenthood, striking a blow to abortion foes. The decision leaves in place lower court rulings that blocked Louisiana and Kansas from banning Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers from the states' Medicaid programs. [...] Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justices Neil Gorsuch and Samuel Alito, dissented, writing that the court should have taken the cases. Justice Brett Kavanaugh did not sign on to the dissenting opinion."
"'Infuriating': Trump FCC Refusing to Release Data Showing If Telecom Industry Being Truthful About Internet Speeds: 'Without this information, consumers who are lucky enough to have a choice of broadband providers won't be able to make informed decisions about which broadband provider to choose.' Under Trump-appointee Ajit Pai, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has continued a program to track whether major companies like AT&T;, Comcast, Spectrum, and Verizon are providing their promised internet speeds, but has failed to publish any of its findings — concealment that has raised alarm among tech reporters and former agency officials. 'The only reason I can think of is that the data doesn't promote the chairman's narrative that broadband industry investment and performance allegedly suffered when it was subject to net neutrality rules grounded in Title II of the Communications Act,' former agency lawyer and adviser Gigi Sohn told Motherboard, referencing Pai's defense of a party-line vote that repealed the rules last year."
"In Stunning Power Grab, Wisconsin Republicans Pass Bill Weakening New Governor: Wisconsin's lame-duck, Republican-controlled state Legislature passed on Wednesday a host of measures designed to kneecap Gov.-elect Tony Evers, other Democrats elected to statewide offices and hurt the Democratic Party in general, sending the legislation to the GOP governor Evers defeated ? Scott Walker ? for his signature. One part of the package would prohibit municipalities from allowing more than two weeks of early voting. That presumably would cut down on voter turnout, which generally helps Republicans. Other provisions would give the Legislature full control of a state economic development agency, block the governor's ability to write regulations and allow the Legislature to hire its own lawyers to file lawsuits on behalf of the state. Walker, who narrowly lost to Evers, is expected to sign the package into law. Democrats are already threatening to fight the measures in court." They shouldn't wait for that - they should block a quorum by going into hiding. This didn't work in Texas because, although the Dems managed to hold out for a month, there was no time limit and they couldn't do that indefinitely. In this case, however, there is indeed a time limit, so it could work. (Here's the same story from Mother Jones.) Hear the Ari Berman interview on this at the Majority Report: Republicans Lose, So They Mount Coups w/ Ari Berman - MR Live - 12/4/18.
Sam actually got David Dayen into the studio to discuss all the stuff about AOC and the new kids going for the important committees and how Joe Crowley's parting shot to undermine Barbara Lee ended up with Pelosi finding space for Lee and the progressive freshies.
"Charlottesville: James Fields guilty of murder for driving car into crowd: A jury has found 21-year-old James Alex Fields Jr guilty of first-degree murder for intentionally driving his car into a crowd of counter-protesters at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, killing one woman and injuring dozens. Fields was convicted in the August 2017 crash that killed 32-year-old Heather Heyer. Her death came after police forced a white nationalist rally to disband after participants clashed with counter-protesters. The jury of seven women and five men began deliberating on Friday morning and took just over seven hours to reach the guilty verdict. [...] Jurors also convicted Fields of eight other charges, including aggravated malicious wounding and hit and run. [...] Fields faces 20 years to life in prison. The jury is set to return on Monday to determine his sentence. He has also been charged with federal hate crime counts, which could carry the death penalty."
"Tennessee Supreme Court rules Cyntoia Brown must serve 51 years in prison before she's eligible for release: The Tennessee Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that Cyntoia Brown, who was 16 years old when she killed a man who solicited her for sex, must serve 51 years in prison before being eligible for release. [...] Brown said she shot and killed her victim, 43-year-old Johnny Mitchell Allan, after she resisted his advances, and after she believed he was reaching for a gun. She then took a gun out of her purse and shot and killed Allan. [...] The unanimous ruling against Brown, who was sentenced to life in prison in 2004, followed a lawsuit in which she argued that her sentence was unconstitutional.
Brown had pointed to a 2012 Supreme Court opinion from the U.S. Supreme Court to argue in the suit that being sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for juvenile offenders violated the Constitution. The court denying the motion said she hadn't received a life sentence without parole and was just handed a life sentence instead."
"Ammon Bundy Quits Militia Movement in Solidarity With Migrant Caravan" Ammon Bundy is best known as a leading light of the American militia movement (a motley coalition of various different flavors of firearms enthusiasts who hate the federal government). He's famous for getting into armed standoffs with federal agents and violently occupying bird sanctuaries. His friends are the kind of folks who co-chair pro-Trump veterans groups; his father is the kind of man who says, 'I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro' — and proceeds to explain why black people were 'better off as slaves.' So, this being 2018, Bundy naturally just disavowed the militia movement in solidarity with the migrant caravan, suggested that nationalism is actually the opposite of patriotism, and said that Trump's America resembles nothing so much as 1930s Germany." Well, that was certainly unexpected.
Dean Baker at Beat the Press, "Trump and China: Going with Patent Holders Against Workers: While most of us don't have access to the inner workings of the Trump administration to know exactly what is going on with its negotiations with China, given the public accounts and statements, it seems workers have clearly lost. Trump seems to have made the concerns of companies like Boeing, who want more help maintaining their control over technology, his top priority. The impact of an under-valued Chinese currency, which has led to a large U.S. trade deficit, seems to have been dropped from discussion. [...] Most of the media cover this as though Trump is pursuing a genuine national interest in pressing this issue, as opposed to the interest of a small number of large corporations. This is seriously wrong. In fact, if Trump is successful to pushing his 'anti-intellectual property theft' agenda with China, it will actually be bad for most of the nation's workers."
Matt Taibbi, "The French Protests Do Not Fit a Tidy Narrative: The yellow vest protests are more nuanced than American pundits want to admit. 'What's wrong with elitism?' asked Washington Post columnist Max Boot this week on Twitter. Boot posed this in a discussion about the merits of centrism, raised in the context of the 'yellow vest' protests against the government of Emmanuel Macron in France." The confusion about French outrage at rich people imposing austerity on those who can't afford it isn't just for long-time right-wing pundits. Here's alleged "liberal" Neera Tanden on Twitter: I don't understand why any progressive is cheering French protesters who are amassing against a carbon tax." Because it's so hard to figure out that a tax on working people who can't afford it will not even cause any change in the behavior of the corporations who are most responsible for the pollution that is implicated in climate change, and it's just one more straw in a long list of grievances that have increased wealth inequality in France, silly. Matt Taibbi talked to Michael Brooks about this, too.
"Secret Scottish-based office led infowars attack on Labour and Jeremy Corbyn: On the surface, the cryptically named Institute for Statecraft is a small charity operating from an old Victorian mill in Fife. But explosive leaked documents passed to the Sunday Mail reveal the organisation's Integrity Initiative is funded with £2million of Foreign Office cash and run by military intelligence specialists. The 'think tank' is supposed to counter Russian online propaganda by forming 'clusters' of friendly journalists and 'key influencers' throughout Europe who use social media to hit back against disinformation. But our investigation has found worrying evidence the shadowy programme's official Twitter account has been used to attack Corbyn, the Labour Party and their officials."
David Dayen, "White Nationalist Steve King May Have Won, But Iowa Race Shows Republicans Are Losing Ground In Rural Areas: ELECTION ANALYSTS HAVE zeroed in on Donald Trump's weakness in well-educated suburban districts to explain the outcome of the 2018 midterms, in which Democrats won back more than 30 House seats. But the biggest losses of the night for Republicans, in terms of raw vote share, actually happened in rural districts, long presumed to be GOP territory."
"New Election After Republicans Were Caught Trying To Steal A House Seat In North Carolina?: By the end of last month, it was already obvious that North Carolina Trumpist, Mark Harris, had stolen both the GOP primary that ousted Robert Pittenger and then the general election in which he-- against all odds-- beat Blue Dog Dan McCready. The final 538.com forecast omg November 6, showed Harris with just a 12.1% chance to win (1 in 8). [...] In an exclusive interview, McCready told Joe Bruno that he thinks Harris not only knew what McCrae Dowless was doing but that he was bankrolling 'criminal activity.' [...] Dallas Woodhouse, executive director of the North Carolina Republican Party, was also on CNN where he hinted that the state party might support a new election if allegations of fraud are proven true and if it impacted the outcome of the race. If allegations of fraud are proven true, the perps shouldn't be allowed to participate in a new election unless it's from a prison cell. Woodhouse: 'This has shaken us to the core. We are not ready to call for a new election yet. I think we have to let the board of elections come show their hand if they can show that this conceivably could have flipped the race in that neighborhood, we will absolutely support a new election.'"
"Wanted: Candidates To Take On Top 2020 Congressional Targets: Bernie is going to need a progressive Congress to help pass his platform in 2020 when he becomes president-- more members like Alexandria Ocasio, Ro Khanna, Raul Grijalva, Pramila Jayapal, Ted Lieu, Rashida Tlaib, Jamie Raskin, Mark Pocan, Mark DeSaulnier, Ayanna Pressley, Katherine Clark, Jim McGovern, Adriano Espaillat... and fewer Blue Dogs and New Dems from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party, faux Democrats who oppose Bernie programs like Medicare-for-All, free state colleges, Job Guarantee, the Green New Deal, etc. They will vote with the Republicans against these proposals-- which is why the 2020 cycle primaries, some of which are starting right now-- are so important." By my lights, no matter who wins the presidency in 2020, we need people in Congress who won't cave to right-wing demands, whether they come from Republicans or Democrats.
* * * * *
"Trump Moves to Deport Vietnam War Refugees: The White House again wants to expel certain groups of protected immigrants, a reversal after backing away from the policy months ago."
Zaid Jilani at Current Affairs, "What Does Beto O'Rourke Actually Stand For? What makes anyone think O'Rourke should be president? He is neither a bold progressive nor a distinguished legislator. "
"How Did The Dems Win 7 Red GOP Seats? Ben Ray Lujan And His Band Of Incompetents Want The Credit— But Kevin McCarthy (And Trump) Did More Than The DCCC Did. [...] The DCCC has been running around trying to claim credit for the California wins, where they deserve none at all. Their presence in the state made it more difficult for Democrats and nearly cost the party several districts. The reason for the wins has more to do with Ted Lieu's fundraising strategies for the candidates combined with the immense dislike for Trump and the bumbling of Republican Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, another Californian who himself is lucky the DCCC gave him a pass, allowing a hapless joke candidate to run against him.
"Joe Crowley'S Parting Shot: Ousted By Ocasio-Cortez, He Undermined Barbara Lee In House Leadership Race: THE ELECTION OF Rep. Hakeem Jeffries as House Democratic Caucus chair on Wednesday represented a symbolic and substantive comeback for the wing of the party that had suffered a stunning defeat last June, when Rep. Joe Crowley was beaten by primary challenger Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Jeffries, who represents a Brooklyn district next door to Crowley's, bested Rep. Barbara Lee of California, who had the support of the insurgent movement that had ousted Crowley. A protege of Crowley's, Jeffries is heavily backed by big money and corporate PACs. Less than 2 percent of his fundraising comes from small donors, who contribute less than $200, according to Federal Election Commission records. [...] Crowley, though, wasn't going gently into the night. In the run-up to the vote, he told a number of House Democrats that Lee had cut a check to Ocasio-Cortez, painting her as part of the insurgency that incumbents in Congress feel threatened by, according to Democrats who learned of the message Crowley was sharing. There was a kernel of truth in the charge. Lee's campaign did indeed cut a $1,000 check to the campaign of Ocasio-Cortez, but did so on July 10, two weeks after she beat Crowley. Since then, Reps. Steny Hoyer, Raúl Grijalva, and Maxine Waters, as well as the PAC for the Congressional Progressive Caucus, have all given money to Ocasio-Cortez's campaign committee. It's not an unusual phenomenon — a way to welcome an incoming colleague — but Crowley's framing of it linked Lee to the growing insurgent movement, despite her decades of experience in Congress. "
I keep hoping this will go away, but oh, those "progressive Democrats" are keeping it alive. "Senators Working To Slip Israel Anti-Boycott Law Through In Lame Duck: DEMOCRATIC SEN. BEN Cardin is making a behind-the-scenes push to slip an anti-boycott law into a last-minute spending bill being finalized during the lame-duck session, according to four sources familiar with the negotiations. The measure, known as the Israel Anti-Boycott Act, was shelved earlier amid concerns about the infringement of free speech, after civil liberties groups argued that the original version would have allowed criminal penalties for Americans who participate in a political boycott of Israel. Some of the more aggressive elements of the provision have been removed under pressure, but the American Civil Liberties Union, which spearheaded the initial opposition to the bill, is still strongly opposed."
"CNN Submits to Right-Wing Outrage Mob, Fires Marc Lamont Hill Due to His 'Offensive' Defense of Palestinians at the U.N. CNN ON THURSDAY afternoon fired its commentator, Temple University Professor Marc Lamont Hill, after right-wing defenders of Israel objected to a speech Professor Hill gave at the U.N. on Wednesday in defense of Palestinian rights. CNN announced the firing just twenty-four hours after Hill delivered his speech. Hill's firing from CNN is a major victory for the growing so-called 'online call-out culture' in which people who express controversial political views are not merely critiqued but demonized online and then formally and institutionally punished after a mob consolidates in outrage, often targeting their employes with demands that they be terminated. Hill's firing, conversely, is a major defeat for the right to advocate for Palestinian rights, to freely critique the Israeli government, and for the ability of journalism and public discourse in the U.S. generally to accommodate dissent. Conservatives claimed to be offended, traumatized and hurt by Hill's political views on Israel and Palestine, which they somehow construed as being anti-semitic, and demanded that CNN fire him as punishment for the expression of those opinions. CNN honored the demands of those claiming to be victimized by exposure to Hill's viewpoints by firing him as a political analyst."
"Ocasio-Cortez Gunning For Powerful Committee, Setting Up Showdown With Long Island Democrat: ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ is making a push for a seat on the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, according to people familiar with her decision. It's a panel whose jurisdiction over taxes and revenue puts most of the economy within its mandate. For that reason, freshmen are almost never given spots on the panel, but the midterm elections upset the balance of power in the House. Sixty-three new representatives have joined the Democratic caucus, and some 43 Republicans either lost their seats or retired — so there is an unusually large number of vacancies to fill. By custom, New York City effectively has at least one reserved seat on Ways and Means, and Ocasio-Cortez is looking to claim it. Its former occupant was Rep. Joe Crowley, whom Ocasio-Cortez beat in a primary election. Any major piece of legislation — whether it's 'Medicare for All,' a 'Green New Deal,' or free public college — would involve some level of revenue, putting it squarely in the domain of Ways and Means, which makes it a key spot for a legislator looking to have an impact. Ocasio-Cortez is routinely asked how she plans to pay for her aggressive economic agenda, and the first answer begins with securing a spot on the House's key tax-writing committee."
Rep. Marc Pocan (D-WI 2), "'No Labels' Needs A Warning Label [...] Look, I get it. No Labels is slick, and I got duped. But no other current or newly elected member of Congress should fall for its shtick. No Labels is a centrist, corporate organization working against Democrats with dark, anonymous money to advance power for special interests. Period."
"At elite gala with ex-Bush official, Obama implores Wall Street to thank him for making them so much money: Barack Obama urged bankers to thank him for helping make them so much money during his tenure as president. He also boasted of turning the US into the world's largest oil producer, while surrounded by wealthy Republicans in tuxedos. Obama made these appeals for elite adulation at a lavish gala hosted by former Secretary of State James Baker. His comments came just a few hours after he met with former Republican President George H. W. Bush at his home in Texas. [...] 'I know we're in oil country, and we need American energy,' Obama said. 'And by the way, American energy production — you wouldn't always know it — but it went up every year I was president. And that whole, 'Suddenly America is the biggest oil producer' — that was me, people.'" Which is a pretty funny thing to say after delivering lip-service to doing something about climate change. But it seems like just last month, everyone was laughing at Trump for saying he was grateful for himself, and now here's Obama telling Wall Street they should be grateful to him. He's right, too. The rest of us should probably tar and feather them both.
This was probably not supposed to be the funniest story I read all week, but it is. Danielle Paquette in The Washington Post, "Workers are ghosting their employers like bad dates: Economists report that workers are starting to act like millennials on Tinder: They're ditching jobs with nary a text. 'A number of contacts said that they had been 'ghosted,' a situation in which a worker stops coming to work without notice and then is impossible to contact,' the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago noted in December's Beige Book, which tracks employment trends. [...] Keith Station, director of business relations at Heartland Workforce Solutions, which connects job hunters with companies in Omaha, said service workers in his area are most likely to skip out on low-paying service positions. [...] Some employers in Nebraska are trying to avoid unfilled shifts with apprentice programs that guarantee raises and additional training over time." Well, gosh, it seems some of these innovative entrepreneurs have... invented the raise.
"The Ignored Legacy of George H.W. Bush: War Crimes, Racism, and Obstruction of Justice [...] The inconvenient truth is that the presidency of George Herbert Walker Bush had far more in common with the recognizably belligerent, corrupt, and right-wing Republican figures who came after him — his son George W. and the current orange-faced incumbent — than much of the political and media classes might have you believe."
Read this Will Stancil thread about the miracle of black kids going to Ivy League colleges and doing just fine, even though they were just ordinary kids. (via)
Richard Eskow at Common Dreams, "Wall Street Is Leading the Attack on Pelosi — Steny Hoyer Is the Real Barrier to the Progressive Agenda: A Hoyer speakership would be a catastrophe for the left. [...] The anti-Pelosi insurgency is not a movement. It's a cabal, orchestrated by the appropriately hashtagged #FiveWhiteGuys, a group of self-self-interested players with big money behind them. These white males resemble nothing so much as the next-generation terminator played by Robert Patrick in Terminator 2: Judgment Day. They're cunning, aggressive, shape-shifting, and so reflective that anyone who looks at them sees only a distorted image of themselves."
Dave Lindorf in The Nation, "Exclusive: The Pentagon's Massive Accounting Fraud Exposed: How US military spending keeps rising even as the Pentagon flunks its audit.: On November 15, Ernst & Young and other private firms that were hired to audit the Pentagon announced that they could not complete the job. Congress had ordered an independent audit of the Department of Defense, the government's largest discretionary cost center — the Pentagon receives 54 cents out of every dollar in federal appropriations — after the Pentagon failed for decades to audit itself. The firms concluded, however, that the DoD's financial records were riddled with so many bookkeeping deficiencies, irregularities, and errors that a reliable audit was simply impossible."
"Officers pry 1-year-old from Brooklyn mom's arms during arrest; police investigating: BOERUM HILL, Brooklyn (WABC) -- Two peace officers from the Human Resources Administration will be placed on modified duty after shocking video showed an excruciating tug of war between a group of officers and a mother trying to hold on to her baby. It all apparently started because there was nowhere for the young mother to sit. [...] Eyewitness News was told the city agency was slow and crowded, so there were no chairs available, and Headley sat on the floor with her son to wait her turn. [...] Nyasia Ferguson took the video and confirms that both Headley and her son were not blocking any doors or passageways. When security guards ordered Headley to stand, Eyewitness News is told the mother refused because there were no seats and she had her baby. A supervisor was called - and then police."
RIP: "William Blum, Renowned U.S. Foreign Policy Critic, Dead at 85. I know I should remember him, since he was the founder of The Washington Free Press, but I really don't recall ever actually seeing him. "William Blum died in Virginia early this morning on December 9, 2018. He was surrounded by friends and family after falling in his Washington D.C. apartment and sustaining serious wounds 65 days ago. He was 85 years old. [...] in London in the mid-1970s, Blum collaborated with ex-CIA officer Philip Agee and his associates 'on their project of exposing CIA personnel and their misdeeds.'"
This is from 2016, but an interesting contribution. "Yes, Immigration Hurts American Workers: Here's the problem with the current immigration debate: Neither side is revealing the whole picture. Trump might cite my work, but he overlooks my findings that the influx of immigrants can potentially be a net good for the nation, increasing the total wealth of the population. Clinton ignores the hard truth that not everyone benefits when immigrants arrive. For many Americans, the influx of immigrants hurts their prospects significantly. [...] Both low- and high-skilled natives are affected by the influx of immigrants. But because a disproportionate percentage of immigrants have few skills, it is low-skilled American workers, including many blacks and Hispanics, who have suffered most from this wage dip. The monetary loss is sizable. The typical high school dropout earns about $25,000 annually. According to census data, immigrants admitted in the past two decades lacking a high school diploma have increased the size of the low-skilled workforce by roughly 25 percent. As a result, the earnings of this particularly vulnerable group dropped by between $800 and $1,500 each year. We don't need to rely on complex statistical calculations to see the harm being done to some workers. Simply look at how employers have reacted. A decade ago, Crider Inc., a chicken processing plant in Georgia, was raided by immigration agents, and 75 percent of its workforce vanished over a single weekend. Shortly after, Crider placed an ad in the local newspaper announcing job openings at higher wages. Similarly, the flood of recent news reports on abuse of the H-1B visa program shows that firms will quickly dismiss their current tech workforce when they find cheaper immigrant workers. But that's only one side of the story. Somebody's lower wage is always somebody else's higher profit. In this case, immigration redistributes wealth from those who compete with immigrants to those who use immigrants — from the employee to the employer."
Norman Solomon, "The 'Pelosi Problem' Runs Deep: Whether our concerns involve militarism, social equity, economic justice, civil liberties, climate change or the overarching necessity of a Green New Deal, the Democratic Party must change from the bottom up."
"Criminalisation of sex work normalises violence, review finds: Sex workers three times more likely to experience violence from client where trade is criminalised, data shows: Sex workers are more likely to suffer poor health, violence and abuse in countries where their trade is criminalised, a major review has found. The review, by researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, found that sex workers suffering repressive policing — including arrest, imprisonment and extortion by officers — were three times more likely to experience sexual or physical violence from a client and were twice as likely to have HIV or another sexually transmitted infection as those who lived in countries where sex work was tolerated. Sex workers who fear that they, or their clients, may be picked up by the police are more likely to engage in risky encounters, unable to take the time to talk to a client before getting into a car or negotiate terms in advance, the researchers found."
Glen Ford in Black Agenda Report, "Bernie Sanders Puts Forward a Program That Could Split the Democratic Party: Bernie Sanders has opened his 2020 campaign with a 10-point program that could bust the Democratic Party wide open — which would be best thing Bernie could do for the world. Bernie Sanders last week unveiled a 10-point legislative agenda that he believes will galvanize the Democratic base in much the way that Newt Gingrich's 1994 'Contract With America' propelled the GOP to its biggest electoral sweep since 1946 . The Vermont senator's wish list is genuinely impressive in sweep , a full-blown progressive domestic platform for his expected second run for the presidency in 2020. But the immediate obstacle to Sanders' proposals for Medicare-For-All, tuition-free public higher education, expanded Social Security, a $15 an hour minimum wage, 'bold action' on climate change, fixing the criminal justice system, comprehensive immigration reform, progressive tax reform, a $1 trillion infrastructure overhaul and cheaper prescription drugs, is not Donald Trump's GOP troglodytes -- it's Nancy Pelosi and her corporate Democrats, who answer to a much higher power: big capital."
One of the less interesting criticisms I've heard from the alt-center of Bernie Sanders is that his use of the term "revolution" portends violence and horror. This is a deliberate and specious misreading of the word, but it's funny none of them had this criticism of the 1992 Democratic platform.
Time to start the war against Bill O'Reilly's war on Christmas, so happy Advent and some traditional music to set the mood and the North Pole Advent Calendar (which now lets you cheat) while you're waiting. I like the funky little jigsaw puzzles.
"Jill Stein wins Election Reform in PA: Today, Green Party 2016 Presidential nominee Jill Stein announced the formal settlement of her 2016 lawsuit against the state of Pennsylvania. The lawsuit called for an end to the use of paperless voting machines known to be vulnerable to hacking, tampering and error, and for the reform of unworkable recount procedures that prevent verification of the vote. The settlement guarantees that Pennsylvania will provide new voting systems using paper ballots by 2020, followed in 2022 by automatic robust audits after every election to confirm the accuracy of the vote before results are certified."
"Senate defies White House on Saudi support in Yemen: The Senate delivered a stunning rebuke to the Trump administration on Wednesday, voting overwhelmingly to advance a measure yanking U.S. support for Saudi-backed forces at war in Yemen. The 63-37 vote, in which 14 Republicans joined every Democrat in voting to move forward on the bipartisan Saudi resolution, came hours after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis failed to sway key undecided senators with an appeal to hold off lest they upset progress of nascent talks on a cease-fire in Yemen." Or as Ben Norton tweeted: This Sanders/Murphy/Lee resolution would force a withdrawal of US support for this unauthorized war, which created Earth's largest humanitarian crisis and pushed millions into famine." We are all amazed to see that no Democrat actually voted against this bill. All the bipartisanship came from the other direction, for a change - and it's the first bipartisan bill to pass the Senate in a long time that is an unmitigated good. It's reasonable to hope the House may pass it, but if Trump vetoes it, it's unlikely to get past the next Senate.
"Taxpayers — not Big Pharma — have funded the research behind every new drug since 2010: A sweeping study of drug R&D; funding shows the public pays for the crucial foundations of medical breakthroughs. So why not let the public have access to them? Something odd happened when the Trump administration submitted the original version of its latest pro-corporate budget: Big Pharma didn't like it. The problem wasn't a tax hike or new regulations: the problem was that the budget included deep cuts to the budget of the National Institutes of Health. If those cuts had gone through, they would have exposed one of the biggest lies told about Big Pharma: that the current system of patents and price-gouging is just an unfortunate necessity to cover the cost of all their brave and noble R&D; work. Trump's original spending proposal for fiscal year 2019, released last month, included major cuts to not just to the NIH, but the National Science Foundation as well. It is those two publicly funded entities — not Big Pharma — that support the bulk of the country's basic research into diseases and pathways to new treatments. That's why the cuts were especially unwelcome in the executive suites of drug and biotech companies. Their business models depend on Washington subsidizing expensive, high-risk basic research, mostly through the vast laboratory network funded by the NIH.
Juan Cole at Informed Comment, "Trump cuts Palestinians off at Knees, Ending $5 bn in US AID Support: The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has announced that all operations in the West Bank and Gaza will close by early 2019. Half of the agency's staff are expected to be let go in the coming weeks. USAID is one of the largest aid organizations in the region, supplying around US$5.5 billion to the occupied Palestinian territories for infrastructure, medical and social services, and humanitarian aid. There is currently no alternative in sight. Some US$215 million that the United States was to invest in humanitarian aid and development in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip has been withheld, according to an analysis for the U.S. Congress. U.S. financing for UNRWA has also been blocked as part of President Trump's blackmail tactics against the Palestinians."
"Ukraine Bans All Russian Men, Raising Tensions: Adding to growing tensions between Ukraine and Russia, and the broad Ukrainian hostility toward all things Russian, President Petro Poroshenko announced on Friday that he is banning all Russian men between the ages of 16 and 60 from the country. Officials are trying to tie this to last weekend's maritime incident with Russia, and Poroshenko is claiming it is to prevent Russian soldiers from sneaking into the country to 'destabilize' Ukraine before a war. In reality, it feels like a continuation of Poroshenko's anti-Russia policies which included harsh restrictions on the use of the Russian language, the sort of policies which fueled secessionist fervor in the mostly ethnic-Russian east. In the near term, the impact is mostly economic and cultural. Russian soloist Andrei Merkuriev, from the Bolshoi, reported that he was forbidden from attending a ballet in Odessa, a show which he was staging in the first place. Beyond this, Poroshenko announced new crackdowns on the Russian Orthodox church, ordering raids against important religious sites in the country. This comes amid his government's push to emphasize the independence of the Ukrainian Orthodox church."
RIP: "Director Nicolas Roeg dies aged 90." I think I only saw The Man Who Fell To Earth a couple of times, but I can't even begin to tell you how many times I've seen Performance. A friend who worked at the theater slipped me in to see it the first several times ("You gotta see this movie!"). I couldn't stop watching. (Still one of the best soundtracks ever.)
* * * * *
From Down With Tyranny! "New Series: The Worst Democraps Who Want To Be President-- Part I, Tulsi Gabbard [...] In Hawaii, she earned a reputation among her former colleagues in the State Legislature as one of their most bigoted contemporaries. She defined her local career as an outspoken anti-gay and anti-reproductive rights politician. Volumes of official records from the Hawaii State Legislative Reference Bureau tell Tulsi's story in her own words. Here, Tulsi, then Representative Tamayo, presents a floor speech against a measure supported by local hospitals that resolved to study the needs of LGBTQ students, who suffered the highest rates of suicide in the state...."
"The Worst Democraps Who Want To Be President-- Part II, Kirsten Gillibrand [...] Trump and the GOP will be spending hundreds of millions of dollars eviscerating anyone the Democrats run in 2020. But Gillibrand would be their easiest target to destroy, since she's laid so much of the groundwork herself."
This is from September but kept forgetting to post it, even though I've listened to it several times since then. Matt Taibbi on The Michael Brooks Show, TMBS - 58 - Ten Years Of Not Jailing Bankers. I particularly liked the parts where they tear up Jamie Dimon (welfare queen) and Ben Bernenke.
Matt Taibbi, "Who Will Fix Facebook? In its effort to clamp down on fake news, Russian trolls and Nazis, the social media giant has also started banning innocent people, proving again it can't be trusted to regulate itself [...] We could have responded to the fake-news problem in a hundred different ways. We could have used European-style laws to go after Silicon Valley's rapacious data-collection schemes that incentivize clickbait and hyper-partisanship. We could have used anti-trust laws to tackle monopolistic companies that wield too much electoral influence. We could have recognized de facto mega-distributors as public utilities, making algorithms for things like Google searches and Facebook news feeds transparent, allowing legitimate media outlets to know how they're being regulated, and why. Instead, this story may be turning into one of the oldest narratives in politics: the misuse of a public emergency to suspend civil rights and concentrate power. One recurring theme of the fake-news controversy has been a willingness of those in power to use the influence of platforms like Facebook, rather than curtail or correct them. Accused of being an irresponsible steward of information, Facebook is now being asked to exercise potentially vast and opaque new powers."
The colors change, the pages turn, and everything gets harder. There's no way I could ever tell you how grateful I am to you for still being here with me, but believe me, I am.
At this writing, all of the Senatorial elections have been called with the exception of the special election in Mississippi, where Mike Espy (D) and Cyndy Hyde-Smythe (R) are tied at 41% each. Dems picked up AZ and NV, and the GOP picked up FL, IN, MO, and ND.
"Iowa Democrat loses race by 7 votes — but officials refuse to count 29 absentee ballots from left-leaning county [...] 'About 29 absentee ballots from left-leaning Winneshiek County weren't counted. One of those was Liam's, and he says his ballot was mailed ahead of deadline,' tweeted Senapathy. While the ballots may have been mailed by the date, some post offices didn't postmark the ballots, so there was no verification of when the ballot was received. 'Here's where it gets disturbing. According to @52101news (Decorah Iowa News) Winneshiek County Auditor says the 29 ballots without a postmark will NOT be included in the vote totals because of specific rules about how mailing dates may be verified,' Senapathy went on. 'Meanwhile, as Liam explained to me, in neighboring, right-leaning Fayette County, ballots that weren't postmarked were 'accidentally' counted. This is against policy, but the claim is that it's too late to do anything about it. This is some rank BS.'"
Ari Berman in Mother Jones, "These Unheralded Democratic Wins Could Reshape Voting Rights Across the Country: Democrats took control of secretary of state jobs in Arizona, Colorado, and Michigan. Kyrsten Sinema's narrow victory in Arizona's US Senate race may have gotten all the attention, but Katie Hobbs' even narrower victory, declared five days later on Saturday, might say more about the future of the emerging purple state — and of voting rights across the country. Hobbs, a Democrat, will become Arizona's first Democratic secretary of state since 1995. The position is second-in-command to the governor, and it's a common stepping stone to the governor's mansion: Four of Arizona's last nine governors were previously secretaries of state, according to the Phoenix New Times. Just as important, Hobbs campaigned on an expansion of voting rights, and she will now oversee the state's elections, with the potential to reshape the electorate by improving access to the ballot for minority, young, and low-income voters. She was one of three Democrats who took over secretary of state jobs previously held by Republicans, joining Democratic victors in Michigan and Colorado. These races were unheralded next to congressional and gubernatorial races across the country, but these officials now have the power to enforce state voting laws in 2020, advocating and implementing practices that will make it easier to vote in critical swing states. [...] There's still one big secretary of state race outstanding, in Georgia, the epicenter of the fight over voter suppression in 2018. Rep. John Barrow, the last white Democrat from the Deep South in the House of Representatives, who lost his seat in 2014, is running to succeed Kemp. He trailed on Election Day by just 19,000 votes, so he's now in a runoff against Republican State Rep. Brad Raffensperger that takes place on December 4, with early voting beginning next week. Barrow has criticized Kemp's voter registration restrictions as 'plainly illegal' and has been an outspoken opponent of gerrymandering after Georgia Republicans redrew his district to oust him from Congress. 'Any thing we do that makes it harder than necessary for honest citizens to register, stay registered, or vote undermines their right to vote,' he wrote in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Monday."
"House Progressives Are Facing An Unexpected Problem In The Quest For Committee Power [...] And yet, it's a precarious situation for the CPC. Several key retirements and the blue wave adding between 38 and 40 House Democrats has led to an unprecedented number of open slots on the money committees. The unsettled race for speaker provides a unique opportunity for influence. But if progressives cannot find the warm bodies willing to fill committee slots, they'll have put their reputation on the line in a bid for power, without being able to follow through."
Here's a nightmare scenario: "155 Democrats back Hoyer's bid for majority leader. This amidst complaints about Pelosi from the left while right-wing Democrats attack from the right. Those hot young Blue Dogs want a chance at her seat that they won't get if the party won't move farther to the right.
"Amazon Is Kicking All Unauthorized Apple Refurbishers Off Amazon Marketplace: Amazon told independent refurbishers that it will now only allow "authorized resellers" to sell Apple products on Amazon Marketplace. [...] Aaron Perzanowski, a law professor at Case Western Reserve University and coauthor of The End of Ownership, told me in an email that this decision is a dangerous infringement of ownership rights. 'Wow. This is a very troubling development,' he said. 'Given Amazon's dominance as an online retail marketplace, its decision to disregard the first sale rights of resellers will significantly limit consumer choice. The fact that this move was demanded by Apple makes it even more problematic. What we see here are the world's two most valuable companies engaging in a coordinated assault on the lawful resale of consumer devices.'"
Sirota, "Will New York Fund Amazon Subsidies or Student Debt Relief? New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo made headlines begging Amazon to site its second headquarters in the state. Now, however, prominent Democrats in the state Senate and Assembly have slammed the idea of offering taxpayer subsidies to the retail giant. [...] Democratic Assemblyman Ron Kim announced that he will introduce legislation to slash New York's economic development subsidies and use the money to buy up and cancel student debt — a move he said would provide a bigger boost to the state's economy. The legislation, says Kim, would halt any Cuomo administration offer of taxpayer money to Amazon, which could reap up to $1 billion in tax incentives if it moves to Long Island City. The deal is a goodie bag for Amazon: It includes everything from a $325 million cash grant to a promise that taxpayers will help secure a helipad for Amazon executives."
Okay, this one is actually from National Review? "Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Is Right about Amazon's Corporate Welfare: After a long process, Amazon finally announced that it will locate its new headquarters in New York and Virginia. Following the announcement, Representative-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted that 'Amazon is a billion-dollar company. The idea that it will receive hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks at a time when our subway is crumbling and our communities need MORE investment, not less, is extremely concerning to residents here.' As a result of her tweet, conservative commentators all over twitter and on shows like Fox Business's Varney & Co. are making fun of her. They argue that her reaction is yet more evidence that she doesn't get economics and that doesn't want New Yorkers and Virginians to get the thousands of jobs that will be created there thanks to the new headquarters. I can't believe I'm saying this, but Ocasio-Cortez is mostly correct on this matter, and her conservative critics are wrong. Handouts like this to Amazon and other prominent companies are appalling in their cronyism, pure and simple. I agree that she doesn't understand economics and that her socialist ideal is a recipe for fiscal and economic disaster. But her conservative critics reveal their own economic misunderstanding when they support targeted tax breaks as a means of creating jobs.
Derek Thomson in The Atlantic, "Amazon's HQ2 Spectacle Isn't Just Shameful — It Should Be Illegal: Each year, local governments spend nearly $100 billion to move headquarters and factories between states. It's a wasteful exercise that requires a national solution. [...] Every year, American cities and states spend up to $90 billion in tax breaks and cash grants to urge companies to move among states. That's more than the federal government spends on housing, education, or infrastructure. And since cities and states can't print money or run steep deficits, these deals take scarce resources from everything local governments would otherwise pay for, such as schools, roads, police, and prisons. [...] But there are three major problems with America's system of corporate giveaways. [...] Corporate America is getting all the help it doesn't need. You and I may not like it. But executives such as Jeff Bezos have no reason to care. They are winning by the rules of a broken game."
"Georgia Legislator, Arrested At Work, Says She Was 'Singled Out As A Black Female Senator': Georgia state Sen. Nikema Williams (D-Atlanta) was arrested along with more than a dozen other protesters at the Georgia State Capitol on Tuesday afternoon at a demonstration asking the state to 'count every vote' from last week's gubernatorial election. Protesters shouted 'Let her go!' as Williams was handcuffed while the General Assembly was in session. [...] One of Williams' white male colleagues, state Rep. David Dreyer (D-Atlanta), went to the same protest with Williams for the same reason and was not arrested. He stood outside the jail after her arrest and spoke out about Williams' unfair treatment by Capitol police. Dreyer said he went down to the Capitol about the same time as Williams, 'but for some reason, Sen. Williams was treated differently than I was treated.'
"Ohio House passes 'Heartbeat Bill' restricting abortion after detection of fetal heartbeat: By a vote of 59 to 35, the Ohio House of Representatives once again passed the 'Heartbeat Bill.' The bill, considered by among the most restrictive abortion bills in the country, would ban abortion at the first detectable fetal heartbeat. That could come within the first six weeks of pregnancy. [...] The bill would first have to be voted on in the Senate, something Senate leaders have not yet decided on."
"Abortion clinics on edge after woman who shot Kansas doctor is released from prison: Abortion clinics across the country were taking extra precautions Wednesday after the anti-abortion activist who shot Wichita physician George Tiller in 1993 and committed a string of clinic attacks in several states was released from prison. Rachelle 'Shelley' Shannon, the Oregon woman whose actions once triggered a federal investigation into the possible existence of a national conspiracy of anti-abortion terrorists, had been living in a halfway house in Portland, Ore., since May. She has spent 25 years in custody. [...] News of Shannon's release has clinic operators on edge. In addition to showing no remorse for her actions, they say, Shannon has been visited in prison by several activists who believe that killing abortion doctors is an act of justifiable homicide. Clinic supporters also note that Tiller, a regular target of abortion protesters because he was one of a handful of doctors in the country who performed late-term abortions, was shot to death in 2009 by Kansas City-area anti-abortion extremist Scott Roeder, who had admired Shannon and visited her many times in prison.
Lee Fang and Nick Surgey in The Intercept, "Lobbyist Documents Reveal Health Care Industry Battle Plan Against 'Medicare For All': NOW THAT THE midterms are finally over, the battle against 'Medicare for All' that has been quietly waged throughout the year is poised to take center stage. Internal strategy documents obtained by The Intercept and Documented reveal the strategy that private health care interests plan to use to influence Democratic Party messaging and stymie the momentum toward achieving universal health care coverage.
Right-wingers and Dem Donuts alike love to attack Bernie Sanders because his wife's attempt to save a failing college was not successful, and five years after the event, the head of Trump's presidential campaign complained about it to the FBI. There is actually news on this front that probably still won't shut them up: "Adviser says Bernie Sanders' wife cleared in college land deal investigation: A top adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders said Tuesday that the Vermont independent's wife, Jane Sanders, has been recently told by the US attorney in Vermont that they have closed an investigation into a land deal involving Burlington College during Jane Sanders' presidency." This is exactly the kind of nonsense Ken Starr pulled on the Clintons, but it had even fewer legs. What's weird is not that some right-wingers tried to talk it up, but that Democrats were doing the same thing, which is about like believing that Hillary Clinton killed Vince Foster.
I hate to admit it, but not only is Maureen Dowd right, but it's an article that needed to be written. "Who's the Real American Psycho? [...] Even for Washington, the capital of do-overs and the soulless swamp where horrendous mistakes never prevent you from cashing in and getting another security clearance, this is a repellent spectacle. War criminals-turned-liberal heroes are festooned with book and TV contracts, podcasts and op-ed perches. Those who sold us the 'cakewalk' Iraq war and the outrageously unprepared Sarah Palin and torture as 'enhanced interrogation,' those who left the Middle East shattered with a cascading refugee crisis and a rising ISIS, and those who midwifed the birth of the Tea Party are washing away their sins in a basin of Trump hate. The very same Republicans who eroded America's moral authority in the 2000s are, staggeringly, being treated as the new guardians of America's moral authority. They bellow that Trump is a blight on democracy. But where were these patriots when the Bush administration was deceiving us with a cooked-up war in Iraq? How do you like your norms broken? Over Twitter or in a torture memo? By a tinpot demagogue stomping on checks and balances he can't even fathom or a shadowy authoritarian expertly and quietly dismantling checks and balances he knows are sacred? Before we had Trump's swarm of bloodsucking lobbyists gutting government regulations from within, we had Cheney's. Before Trump brazenly used the White House to boost his brand, we had Cheney wallowing in emoluments: He let his energy industry pals shape energy policy; he pushed to invade Iraq, giving no-bid contracts to his former employer, Halliburton, and helping his Big Oil cronies reap the spoils in Iraq. The movie opens at Christmas, but it's no sugary Hallmark fable. It's a harrowing cautionary tale showing that democracy can be sabotaged even more diabolically by a trusted insider, respected by most of the press, than by a clownish outsider, disdained by most of the press."
"Secret CIA Document Shows Plan to Test Drugs on Prisoners: Thanks to an ACLU victory in federal court, we know much more about how CIA doctors violated the medical oath to 'do no harm.' One of the most important lessons of the CIA's torture program is the way it corrupted virtually every individual and institution associated with it. Over the years, we have learned how lawyers twisted the law and psychologists betrayed their ethical obligations in order to enable the brutal and unlawful torture of prisoners. Now we've won the release of a 90-page account of the CIA's Office of Medical Services role in the CIA torture program — a secret history written by the top CIA medical official, whose identity remains classified."
Death of HHS official Daniel Best is ruled a suicide: WASHINGTON, D.C. - The Nov. 1 death of Daniel Best , a pharmaceutical executive from Bay Village who led U.S. Department of Health and Human Services efforts to lower prescription drug prices, has been ruled a suicide, officials in Washington, D.C., said Thursday. [...] The city's Office of the Chief Medical Examiner on Thursday said Best died from "multiple blunt force injuries" and it ruled his death a suicide. It would not release further information." What, he clubbed himself to death?
"Jónasson: The Icelandic Minister who refused cooperation with the FBI [...] What happened was that in June 2011, US authorities made some approaches to us indicating they had knowledge of hackers wanting to destroy software systems in Iceland. I was a minister at the time. They offered help. I was suspicious, well aware that a helping hand might easily become a manipulating hand! Later in the summer, in August, they sent a planeload of FBI agents to Iceland seeking our cooperation in what I understood as an operation set up to frame Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. Since they had not been authorised by the Icelandic authorities to carry out police work in Iceland and since a crack-down on WikiLeaks was not on my agenda, to say the least, I ordered that all cooperation with them be promptly terminated and I also made it clear that they should cease all activities in Iceland immediately. It was also made clear to them that they were to leave the country. They were unable to get permission to operate in Iceland as police agents, but I believe they went to other countries, at least to Denmark. I also made it clear at the time that if I had to take sides with either WikiLeaks or the FBI or CIA, I would have no difficulty in choosing: I would be on the side of WikiLeaks."
"There Are 200 California Inmates Fighting the Camp Fire. After Prison, They Likely Won't Be Allowed to Become Firefighters: California's licensing laws mean inmates can risk their lives for less than $2 per day, but can't earn a living after they get out of prison.: About 200 inmates are among the thousands of firefighters still doing battle with the massive wildfire that has destroyed the town of Paradise, California, and killed at least 31 people. Once they are released from prison, however, most of them will be prohibited from joining the fire crews that they currently work alongside. It's a cruel irony that demonstrates just how difficult life can be for the formerly incarcerated — even those with needed, practical skills — who continue to be punished long after they have paid their debt to society, and bad policy that effectively prevents the state from calling upon well-trained, experienced firefighters when wildfires erupt."
Seems I missed it in September when the California legislature passed a bill to help protect PG&E; from wildfire damage suits. "It was a balancing act, the Democratic senator from Napa said after months of furious lobbying over whether lawmakers were going too far in helping PG&E; with what critics called a bailout for a utility that has been accused of putting profits before safety."
@StephenKinzer tweeted: I posted my @GlobeOpinion column about #Bolsonaro and #Brazil on @facebook a week ago. Now I see that beneath it is this notice: "This post goes against our Community Standards, so no one else can see it." Here's the column, what standards does it violate?" The column is called "Jair Bolsonaro threatens us all."
RIP: Stan Lee, 95. I don't even have to tell you, do I?
RIP: "William Goldman, screenwriter of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and All The President's Men, has died aged 87. Goldman, who received Oscars for both of those films, also wrote Marathon Man, Magic and The Princess Bride, which he adapted from his own novels. His memoir Adventures in the Screen Trade is famous for his memorable declaration that "nobody knows anything" about the movie business. He was also a noted "script doctor" who worked uncredited on many features. Born in Highland Park, Illinois in 1931, Goldman started out as a novelist before breaking into movies with 1965 spy caper Masquerade. He followed that with The Moving Target, also known as Harper, in which Paul Newman played a laconic private eye."
Some fascinating history of court decisions, some of which were passed for thoroughly racist reasons but later became the basis of civil rights actions (and decisions) - and civil rights decisions that were later used specifically to undermine civil rights: "Public Education, SCOTUS , & The Battle for the American Mind w/ Justin Driver - MR, on The Majority Report.
Matt Taibbi, "Bernie Sanders Opens Up About New Democrats in Congress, Taking on Trumpism [...] I absolutely believe that from day one, the Democrats in the House have got to come out with a progressive agenda that speaks to the needs of working people. And that leads to — as you know, the Medicare-for-all bill I introduced, which is to be implemented over four years, lowers the eligibility age from 65 to 55, covers all of the children, and lowers the cost of prescription drugs. My guess is that about 80-percent of the American people would support a proposal like that. It's wildly popular. And that's what the Democrats have got to do. They've got to raise the minimum wage to 15 bucks an hour, they've got to make public colleges tuition-free and they've got to lower student debt. All of these proposals are enormously popular. And they're good public policy. And here's what I think, Matt, that maybe nobody else in the world believes. As you know, Trump is a 100-percent political opportunist, who has no political views other than how he can win elections." I adored Bernie's response to being told that The Washington Post advised Democrats to avoid "fire-breathing" progressives and to stick to moderates.
Matt Taibbi, "Forget 'Conventional Wisdom': There Are No More Moderates: Beware the latest call to 'move to the center' — which is just the same old tune, re-packaged [...] Voters are not skittish, brainless creatures afraid of strong policy proposals. That more accurately describes the politicians and corporate donors who are invested in things staying as they are. Most actual people are living on the edge financially, are angry, and will take policy help from anywhere they can get it."
Libby Watson at Splinter News, "House Democrats Balk at Prospect of Being Good [...] Meanwhile, on the financial end of things, Nancy Pelosi endorsed a list of changes to House rules, including a rule to 'create a supermajority requirement to raise individual income taxes on the lowest-earning four-fifths of taxpayers.' That is a disastrous idea. Alan Essig, executive director of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, noted the rule 'could make it difficult, as a practical matter, to raise taxes — on the rich — without making the tax code a complicated mess. This is because few changes in the federal income tax would affect no one in the bottom 80 percent.' Such rules have also been disastrous at the state level, and tax rates in states with supermajority rules are comparable to those without them. But more importantly, it sends entirely the wrong message: that taxation is among the gravest, most serious things Congress can do. Congress doesn't need a supermajority to declare war, but it should have one to raise taxes? If we're going to play this game, there are tons of other things Democrats could require a supermajority for — cutting Medicare or Social Security, for example, or selling off any new public lands. All this does is affirm Republicans' world view that taxation is among the most vicious evils the government can force on its citizens. "
Lordy, Alex Pareene in The Washington Post, of all places, "Political power never lasts. Democrats need to use theirs while they have it. [...] With Democrats about to control the House of Representatives again, I have been thinking about that last majority: what it achieved, what it was too cautious to attempt and what that caution actually bought. Because we may be asking the same questions about the next Democratic majority sooner than we think. The lesson of the careful restraint that Democrats showed the last time they controlled either chamber of Congress — and of the Republican ferocity since then — is simple: Your job is not to win power and then maintain it. Your job is to win power and then use it, with the knowledge that you won't have it forever or even, most likely, for very long at all." (via)
And Pareene in the HuffPo, "In Journalism About Race, A Tinge Of Denial: The only appeal the conservative movement has left is white panic. Why is that story still so hard to tell? As the midterms hurtle to an astonishingly racist close, the nonpartisan political press has continued to rely on the old 'racially tinged' euphemisms, taking care not to draw any conclusions about the party doing all the race-baiting. Call it denial-tinged journalism."
Is it really possible that more people wanted to vote for every other elective office than wanted to vote for US Senator in Broward County?
Pierce, "Democrats Can't 'Work With' Republicans Until Republicans Return to Reality: There are two things to remember as we go forward. First, there is absolutely no reason for Democratic congresscritters to assume good faith on any subject on the part of their Republican colleagues. Second, the most notable thing about the Problem Solvers Caucus is that it never has solved a single problem."
David Atkins at The Washington Monthly, "Counting All the Votes Is Not a Surprise or a Rollercoaster: We need to change the way elections are reported in America. [...] But at the end of the day, TV networks want to send their viewers to bed with answers, journalists need definitive copy for the Wednesday morning edition and op-ed writers must deliver their scheduled smart takes. The result is that election night coverage is considered the default version of events, and ballots counted in the days and weeks afterward an afterthought or exciting aberration. States like California that make expansive efforts to count every eligible vote and give voters maximum opportunities to make their voices heard are resented as disrupters of the natural order, inconveniences to the unity of the narrative. So when results change in close races several days after Election Tuesday, it is treated as a remarkable phenomenon. Headlines describe lead changes as 'roller coasters' and 'dramatic comebacks.' Unsurprisingly, when Republicans find themselves as usual on the short end of such reversals their politicians and media outlets increasingly insinuate dark allegations to their base about voter fraud and ballot stuffing. After all, why else would these late results continually go against them? They feel that contests rightfully won on election night are being taken from them. And the press generally does the truth no favors in this regard. If a race is too close to call and hundreds of thousands of mostly urban and provisional ballots remain outstanding, the press will treat the race as an open question even when the Republican is behind, leaving conservatives to believe that results could go either direction even when they invariably will not. Just yesterday an NPR show in Southern California nonsensically suggested that despite the widening lead for Democrat Harley Rouda against Republican incumbent Dana Rohrabacher, in California's 48th congressional district, Rohrabacher could still 'come back' to retake it based on the (mostly Democratic-leaning) precincts and provisional ballots remaining. This type of electoral coverage must change. Readers, viewers and listeners deserve the truth and an accurate prediction of reality."
Luke Savage in Jacobin, "American Politics Could Use More Conflict: Decrying 'tribalism' is a favorite pastime of American elites, but the real problem is the unity among them. [...] Conflict of this kind ultimately has little to do with noxious debates broadcast on cable news or with a political class that theatrically stages them while tapping the same corporate donors and casually dishing about Social Security privatization across the tables of opulent D.C. restaurants. The fact is that beneath the facade of intra-elite camaraderie amid televised partisan rancor, there remain deep and abiding political disagreements between Americans that will only be resolved when one side is defeated or lays down arms. This is, I believe, the main reason elites and members of the intelligentsia broadly invested in status quo ultimately see salvation in a mythic kingdom without conflict or meaningfully distinctive parties to institutionalize it. It's also why so many of them seem determined to pathologize political differences as random sociological spasms rather than expressions of genuine grievances, progressive or prejudicial as the case may be: plenty of them, whether they care to admit it or not, privately pine for a place where the interests they share can be safely negotiated unfettered by the irritants of democratic politics or the headaches they tend to create."
"Here's the real reason health care costs so much more in the US [...] Per capita, the U.S. spent $9,403. That's nearly double what the others spent. This finding offers a new explanation as to why America's spending is so excessive. According to the researchers at the Harvard Chan School, what sets the U.S. apart may be inflated prices across the board. In the U.S., they point out, drugs are more expensive. Doctors get paid more. Hospital services and diagnostic tests cost more. And a lot more money goes to planning, regulating and managing medical services at the administrative level. In other areas, despite conventional wisdom, there seems to be less discrepancy between the U.S. and other countries than commonly thought. Experts have previously suggested high utilization rates could explain high spending in the U.S. But looking at hospital discharge rates for various procedures, such as knee and hip replacements and different types of heart surgeries, the researchers found that use of care services in the U.S. is not so different compared to other countries. In fact, compared to the average of all the nations, Americans appear to go to the doctor less often and spend fewer days in the hospital after being admitted. [...] The real difference between the American health care system and systems abroad is pricing."
"This Is the Amount of Money You Need to Be Happy, According to Research: Money really can buy happiness, as it turns out — but you might not need as much as you think. A large analysis published in the journal Nature Human Behavior used data from the Gallup World Poll, a survey of more than 1.7 million people from 164 countries, to put a price on optimal emotional well-being: between $60,000 and $75,000 a year. That aligns with past research on the topic, which found that people are happiest when they make about $75,000 a year. But while that may be the sweet spot for feeling positive emotions on a day-to-day basis, the researchers found that a higher figure — $95,000 — is ideal for 'life evaluation,' which takes into account long-term goals, peer comparisons and other macro-level metrics. [...] Money really can buy happiness, as it turns out — but you might not need as much as you think. A large analysis published in the journal Nature Human Behavior used data from the Gallup World Poll, a survey of more than 1.7 million people from 164 countries, to put a price on optimal emotional well-being: between $60,000 and $75,000 a year. That aligns with past research on the topic, which found that people are happiest when they make about $75,000 a year. But while that may be the sweet spot for feeling positive emotions on a day-to-day basis, the researchers found that a higher figure — $95,000 — is ideal for 'life evaluation,' which takes into account long-term goals, peer comparisons and other macro-level metrics."
"Revolutionary Socialism And The Black Panther Party [...] As Fred Hampton of the esteemed Chicago chapter stated, 'You don't fight racism with racism. We're gonna fight racism with solidarity. You don't fight capitalism with Black capitalism; you fight capitalism with socialism.' [...] At the same time, these were the same revolutionaries whose party motto was: All power to the people! Black power to Black people! Brown power to Brown people! White power to white people! Panther power to the Black Panther Party!"
Palast has been screaming for months about Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp's illegal voter roll purges in an election where he was running for governor, which historically has meant resigning from the seat in the name of fairness. But this is a Republican election fraudster. Similarly, he's been after Kris Kobach, who was Trump's fraudster-in-chief. Those are two races I was particularly paying attention to, but in the last few weeks Palast was tweeting warnings in far more states, telling people to check their registrations. I couldn't even begin to keep track of all the problems I saw being tweeted about as Tuesday night went on, all over the country, including Brooklyn, New York. Utterly outrageous behavior on the part of election officials working hard to disenfranchise voters. Ari Berman in Mother Jones, "Voters Are Making an Unprecedented Number of Calls to Report Election Problems: Broken voting machines in New Jersey. Absentee ballots that never arrived in Florida. Voters being asked for the wrong forms of photo ID in Mississippi. A call center at a law firm in New York is fielding complaints from around the country of voting irregularities, and voters are reporting a wide range of barriers to voting in a midterm election that will determine control of Congress and the fate of President Donald Trump's agenda." Even Berman's list is not comprehensive, and the implication is that a lot of it was lack of preparedness for unusually high turnout for a mid-term election, but a lot of these are issues that only happen if you're trying to make it hard for people to vote. There should not be four-hour lines, ever.
Democrats took the House Tuesday (and got rid of Pete Sessions), picked up the Senate seat in Nevada but lost seats for Indiana, Missouri, and North Dakota. So much for the idea that running to the right helps Democrats, I guess. Presumed rising stars Randy Bryce (WI 1st Congressional district) and Beto O'Rourke (for the Texas Senate seat) failed to win their bids, so Ted Cruz is still in the Senate. On the bright side. Kris Kobach, major election fraudster, lost the Kansas gubernatorial race to Democrat Laura Kelly. Dems did flip more governorships than they lost (Scott Walker lost WI, and Maine finally got rid of LePage), and New York finally dumped its Republicans. Of course, with Maryland Democrats supporting the Republican governor, Ben Jealous lost by a decisive margin to Larry Hogan. But once again, we lost more right-wing Dems from office, which gives us the option of building a better Democratic position in those areas.
Some important races haven't actually been called yet, and the Gillum and Abrams races may be headed for recounts. Fingers crossed and all that, but so far it seems like the election frauds may have won.
Someone told me the Texas Board of Education flipped blue. That would be a big deal, since Texas seems to control textbooks all over America. However I couldn't find a story on that.
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I think I actually missed this last year when it was posted, but now that I've found it, you should read it.
As Democrats stare down eight years of policies being wiped out within months, it's worth looking at why those policies did virtually nothing for their electoral success at any level. And, in the interest of supporting a united front between liberals and socialists, let me start this off with a rather long quote from Matt Christman of Chapo Trap House, on why Obamacare failed to gain more popularity:
There are parts to it that are unambiguously good — like, Medicaid expansion is good, and why? Because there's no fucking strings attached. You don't have to go to a goddamned website and become a fucking hacker to try to figure out how to pick the right plan, they just tell you 'you're covered now.' And that's it! That's all it ever should have been and that is why — [Jonathan Chait] is bemoaning why it's a political failure? Because modern neoliberal, left-neoliberal policy is all about making this shit invisible to people so that they don't know what they're getting out of it.
And as Rick Perlstein has talked about a lot, that's one of the reasons that Democrats end up fucking themselves over. The reason they held Congress for 40 years after enacting Social Security is because Social Security was right in your fucking face. They could say to you, 'you didn't used to have money when you were old, now you do. Thank Democrats.' And they fucking did. Now it's, 'you didn't used to be able to log on to a website and negotiate between 15 different providers to pick a platinum or gold or zinc plan and apply a fucking formula for a subsidy that's gonna change depending on your income so you might end up having to retroactively owe money or have a higher premium.' Holy shit, thank you so much.
This point has been made before on Obamacare, but the tendency behind it, the tendency to muddle and mask benefits, has become endemic to center-left politics. Either Democrats complicate their initiatives enough to be inscrutable to anyone who doesn't love reading hours of explainers on public policy, or else they don't take credit for the few simple policies they do enact. Let's run through a few examples.
[...]
This shouldn't even be a liberal-socialist divide, although it seems to have become one in recent years. When society decided citizens should be able to read, we didn't provide tax credits for books, we created public libraries. When we decided peoples' houses shouldn't burn down, we didn't provide savings accounts for private fire insurance, we hired firefighters and built fire stations. If the broad left takes power again, enough with too-clever-by-half social engineering. Help people and take credit.
Now go read the rest — and then send it to any Dem reps you might have, and anyone else you think might benefit from having this drilled into them.
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This CNBC interview with Sherrod Brown is interesting. I mean the way he talks, it's so different from the way pretty much every other candidate is talking. I have my problems with him but seeing the way he talks about trade and never once attacks Trump even while disagreeing with how he went about it, I think I can see why he's doing so well. Brown won re-election to the Ohio Senate quite comfortably Tuesday.
Capital-D Democratic darling "Cory Booker uses anti-Semitic massacre as an excuse to dismiss Palestinians rights: New Jersey Senator Cory Booker says that the Pittsburgh massacre has led him to support the Israel Anti-Boycott Act. He becomes the first politician to use the killings of 11 Jews to take a racist position against Palestinian rights. His move should be described exactly that way, as a cynical use of real antisemitism as an excuse to dismiss Palestinian rights so as to further his political career."
Glen Ford at Black Agenda Report, "Fascism is Real, But the 'Resistance' is Mostly Fake [...] I have no problem labeling Trump a fascist, and Bolsonaro appears to have no problem being called one. My problem is with a phony 'resistance' that defines fascism so narrowly that it applies, domestically, only to Donald Trump and his most crazed followers. For Democrats, the fascist label is mere political epithet, a demon-word hurled for election purposes."
Margaret Sullivan, former "public editor" at the NYT — the good one — has a new job as "Media Columnist" at the WaPo. "Defensive, caravan-fixated and Trump-obsessed, the media blow it again. Just not as badly." Of course, the media that reported on every hysterical word about the caravan conveniently forgot it as soon as the election was over, just like the White House and the rest of right-wing media seem to have done.
"LA Times Publishes Completely Different Political Endorsements in English and Spanish: LOS ANGELES — Why would the same newspaper, with a mainstream version in English and another version in Spanish covering the same geographical area and diverse communities, endorse different candidates for the same federal, state and local elections in each language? [...] The English version of the LA Times suggests you re-elect U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein because she comes from a more 'civil and productive era of governance' and has accomplished a great deal like that. The editorial casts doubt on the effectiveness of her challenger, state senator Kevin de León who seems 'unwilling to compromise.' LA Times en Español, however, has a different take. According to its editorial, de León is the best choice because he seems pragmatic and effective enough and knows the immigrant community best. And, after all, 'Dianne Feinstein has been in the Senate since 1992' and that's 'too long. A generational change is needed.'"
Thomas Ferguson, Benjamin Page, Jacob E. Rothschild, Arturo Chang, and Jie Chen at the Institute for New Economic Thinking have a new paper out, "The Economic and Social Roots of Populist Rebellion: Support for Donald Trump in 2016" (.pdf), which they introduce in "Economic Distress Did Drive Trump's Win" this way: "Contrary to the dominant media narrative, social issues like racism and sexism on their own can't explain Trump's success. [...] Economic factors mattered at both stages. Moreover, in the general election — in contrast to the primaries — leading social factors actually tended to hurt rather than help Trump. While agreeing that racial resentment and sexism were important influences, the paper shows how various economic considerations — including concerns about imports and job losses, wealth inequality, social welfare programs, and starved infrastructure — helped Trump win the Republican primary and then led significant blocs of voters to shift from supporting Democrats or abstaining in 2012 to voting for him. It also presents striking evidence of the importance of political money and senators' 'reverse coattails' in the dramatic final result." (Lee Fang has the short version at The Intercept, "Donald Trump Exploited Long-Term Economic Distress To Fuel His Election Victory, Study Finds.")
Lynn Parramore, also at INET, interviews Adolph Reed in light of the new paper, "Cheap Talk on Race and Xenophobia Keeps Americans from Confronting Economic and Political Peril: Adolph Reed, who researches race and politics, warns that 'identitarian' politics can conceal the structural inequities of capitalism. [...] I had a very sharp and studious black undergraduate student wholly inside a race-first understanding of politics. When I mentioned the white people who had voted for Obama once if not twice who also voted for Trump, his response was, well, of course you can't say that voting for Obama means that you're not a racist. I said, yes, that's true, but by the same token you can't say that voting for Trump means you are a racist, right? Which they don't want to accept.
"Start the Voter Suppression Hearings Now and Don't Stop [...] The House can hold hearings on voter suppression. They can start immediately. They can subpoena every fucking Republican secretary of state who can reasonably be judged to have assisted in the suppression of minority voters. They can subpoena law enforcement officials. They can subpoena campaign staffers. They can subpoena poll workers. They can call in all types of political science professors and statisticians and sociologists to explain in detail what is happening. They can invite Michelle Alexander to read the entirety of The New Jim Crow into the Congressional record. They can draw attention. They can make noise. They should, and they must. The more you let the overt oppression slide, the more it will be seen as the standard playbook for the next election." Personally, I'm not getting behind abolishing the Senate until House reps can only have 30K constituents.
The DC City Council has no Republicans, but, "Yep, They Did It — D.C. Council Repeals Initiative 77: The D.C. Council has now officially repealed Initiative 77, the measure approved by voters in June that would have gradually eliminated the tipped wage. What began as a protracted and oftentimes contentious battle during the primary season ended with a whimper in legislative session on Tuesday. The vote was 8-5, with the same councilmembers who voted against the measure two weeks ago similarly opposing the second vote: Ward 1's Brianne Nadeau, Ward 3's Mary Cheh, Ward 6's Charles Allen, and At-large Councilmembers Robert White and Elissa Silverman. In addition to repealing Initiative 77, the Tipped Wage Workers Fairness Amendment Act of 2018 also requires employers of tipped workers to be trained on the topics of sexual harassment and wage-theft laws, and to use a third-party payroll system that submits data to D.C.'s Department of Employment Services. That employment agency must also create a website with information about the city's wage and hour rules, and the mayor must set up a tip line for workers to report wage theft. Now, the repeal needs the mayor's signature, which Mayor Muriel Bowser has said she will provide, and a standard 30-day Congressional review period to become law. While 55 percent of voters came out in favor of Initiative 77 during the June primary, the council moved quickly towards repealing the measure, which faced strong opposition from the restaurant industry."
So, a guy tried to bomb some prominent Democrats who, just by coincidence, are constant hate figures of the right wing, including right-wing television, radio, and Trump. But David Dayen noticed an interesting bit of the guy's back story, "Cesar Sayoc's Home Was Foreclosed On By Steve Mnuchin's Bank, Using Dodgy Paperwork: CESAR SAYOC, THE Donald Trump-loving Floridian who was taken into custody in relation to pipe bombs mailed to prominent Democrats, was foreclosed on in 2009 by a bank whose principal owner and chair is now Trump's treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin. The documents used to enact the foreclosure were signed by a prominent robo-signer and seemingly backdated. Nonetheless, the evidence was good enough for the famously inattentive Florida foreclosure courts to wave the case through. Years later, Sayoc became a supporter of Trump, who came into office and appointed a treasury secretary who ran the bank that snatched Sayoc's house. [...] It's a bizarre twist to a story that has captured America's attention this week. Thirteen pipe bombs were sent by mail to high-profile Trump critics: former President Barack Obama, former Vice President Joe Biden, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Sens. Cory Booker and Kamala Harris, Rep. Maxine Waters, former Attorney General Eric Holder, actor Robert DeNiro, financier and Democratic donor George Soros, among others. None of the bombs exploded. In yet another irony, Soros was one of the investors in the bank that executed the foreclosure on Sayoc's home. [...] The story is a lesson about the toxicity of the foreclosure crisis and how it upended millions of lives. It's also a lesson about how the failure to uphold the rule of law can reverberate in unforeseen directions, and how a combination of ignorance and partisan passions can make people believe their assailants are their saviors."
Surprisingly, a strong article in Politico that's very positive, "Bernie Sanders Is Quietly Remaking the Democrats' Foreign Policy in His Own Image: The gadfly senator suddenly finds himself in an unfamiliar role: consensus-builder. [...] Van Jackson, a foreign policy expert and adviser to the Pentagon during the Obama administration, described Sanders' global-minded makeover: 'I'm a progressive but couldn't bring myself to vote for Sanders in 2016 because I thought he wasn't serious about national security. He was basically silent on it. ... Not only does Sanders now seem to take national security seriously — he's literally the only politician accurately diagnosing the threat landscape America faces,' he wrote in an email."
I saw "centrists" saying that if Bernie Sanders went to South Carolina only 15 people would show up. This looks like more than 15 people. (Sanders' speech starts about halfway through the video, but it's interesting seeing the local speakers and Nina Turner rabble-rousing first, too.)
"US votes against UN resolution condemning gay sex death penalty, joining Iraq and Saudi Arabia: The US is one of just 13 countries to have voted against a United Nations resolution condemning the death penalty for having gay sex. Although the vote passed, America joined countries such as China, Iraq and Saudi Arabia in opposing the move. The Human Rights Council resolution condemned the 'imposition of the death penalty as a sanction for specific forms of conduct, such as apostasy, blasphemy, adultery and consensual same-sex relations'. It attacked the use of execution against persons with 'mental or intellectual disabilities, persons below 18 years of age at the time of the commission of the crime, and pregnant women'. It also expressed 'serious concern that the application of the death penalty for adultery is disproportionately imposed on women'. The US supported two failed amendments put forward by Russia, which stated the death penalty was not necessarily 'a human rights violation' and that it is not a form of torture, but can lead to it 'in some cases'. And it abstained on a 'sovereignty amendment' put forward by Saudi Arabia, that stated 'the right of all countries to develop their own laws and penalties'."
Bill Mitchell has depressing news in his summary of his meeting with John McDonnell in London: It is Wednesday and I am reverting to my plan to keep my blog posts short on this day to give me more time for other things. Today, I will briefly outline what happened last Thursday when I met with Shadow British Chancellor John McDonnell in London. As I noted yesterday, I was not going to comment publicly on this meeting. I have a lot of meetings and interactions with people in 'high' office which remain private due to the topics discussed etc. But given that John McDonnell told an audience in London later that evening that he had met with me and that I thought the proposed fiscal rule that Labour has adopted was 'fine', I thought it only reasonable that I disclose what happened at that meeting. I did not think the rule was fine and I urged them to scrap it and stop using neoliberal constructs." It seems Labour has bought the deficit lie and is talking austerity.
"Even janitors have noncompetes now. Nobody is safe.: One of the central contradictions of capitalism is that what makes it work — competition — is also what capitalists want to get rid of the most. That's true not only of competition between companies, but also between them and their workers. After all, the more of a threat its rivals are, and the more options its employees have, the less profitable a business will tend to be. Which, as the Financial Times reports, probably goes a long way toward explaining why a $3.4 billion behemoth like Cushman & Wakefield would bother to sue one of its former janitors, accusing her of breaking her noncompete agreement by taking a job in the same building she had been cleaning for the global real estate company but doing it for a different firm."
Sirota, "Noble Energy Pumps Unregulated Cash Into Fight Against 112: In a last-ditch attempt to defeat one of the most far-reaching environmental measures on the 2018 ballot, a fossil-fuel giant is blanketing Colorado television with election-focused political ads that it now claims are outside the purview of all state campaign-finance laws. The maneuver — which pioneers a novel way for corporations to circumvent disclosure statutes and inject money directly into elections — has been blessed by the office of Colorado Secretary of State Wayne Williams, who has led a Republican political group bankrolled by the same fossil-fuel corporation that is airing the ads."
"I Bought Used Voting Machines On Ebay For $100 Apiece. What I Found Was Alarming [...] Surely, I thought, these machines would have strict guidelines for lifecycle control like other sensitive equipment, like medical devices. I was wrong. I was able to purchase a pair of direct-recording electronic voting machines and have them delivered to my home in just a few days. I did this again just a few months ago. Alarmingly, they are still available to buy online. If getting voting machines delivered to my door was shockingly easy, getting inside them proved to be simpler still. The tamper-proof screws didn't work, all the computing equipment was still intact, and the hard drives had not been wiped. The information I found on the drives, including candidates, precincts, and the number of votes cast on the machine, were not encrypted. Worse, the 'Property Of' government labels were still attached, meaning someone had sold government property filled with voter information and location data online, at a low cost, with no consequences. It would be the equivalent of buying a surplus police car with the logos still on it. [...] This year, I bought two more machines to see if security had improved. To my dismay, I discovered that the newer model machines — those that were used in the 2016 election — are running Windows CE and have USB ports, along with other components, that make them even easier to exploit than the older ones. Our voting machines, billed as 'next generation,' and still in use today, are worse than they were before — dispersed, disorganized, and susceptible to manipulation.
Poynter, "About 1,300 U.S. communities have totally lost news coverage, UNC news desert study finds." Many newspapers that still exist are publishing little if any local news, but in many parts of the US, there are simply no newspapers at all. Some local stations are still trying hard to cover local news and issues, but for many people, there is no local broadcast news and no local coverage.
Jay Rosen says, "Next time you wonder why New York Times people get so defensive, read this." And goes on to say that now that the journalists are forced to get more feedback, and the paper now depends more closely on subscriptions rather than advertising for income, readers are making them nervous. This seems like an awfully sympathetic position to take for a paper that chose to fill its op-ed page with right-wingers in one of the most liberal markets in America. I feel bad for journalists who want to write the Who, What, Where, When, and Why and instead find themselves having to juggle both-siderism with stratospherically insane claims from the "other side", but that's on their bosses, not on the readers.
Robert Kuttner, "Sears Didn't 'Die.' Vulture Capitalists Killed It. If you've been following the impending bankruptcy of America's iconic retailer as covered by print, broadcast and digital media, you've probably encountered lots of nostalgia and sad clucking about how dinosaurs like Sears can't compete in the age of Amazon and specialty retail. But most of the coverage has failed to stress the deeper story. Namely, Sears is a prime example of how hedge funds and private equity companies take over retailers, encumber them with debt in order to pay themselves massive windfall profits, and then leave the retailer without adequate operating capital to compete." On that same subject, Sam Seder talked to Marshall Steinbaum about The Sears Bankruptcy & Private Equity Raiders on The Majority Report.
"Wrongfully convicted by non-unanimous jury, I spent 15 years in prison for crime I didn't commit [...] In any other state, we wouldn't have been wrongfully convicted and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, probation, or suspension of sentence. Louisiana is one of only two states that allow people to be convicted of felonies with non-unanimous jury votes. After the Civil War, when the 14th Amendment mandated that black men be allowed to serve on juries, Louisiana took action to maintain our second-class status. In 1898, the state changed its constitution so that a less than unanimous vote by a jury could convict a defendant of a felony. The purpose was to make sure that black jurors could be outvoted by a majority of white jurors. The official statements made at the 1898 Constitutional Convention stated that the intention was to 'perpetuate the supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon race in Louisiana.' On November 6, Louisiana will have a chance to overturn this expressly racist jury rule. A proposal on the ballot asks voters if they want to end the state's split-jury statute and the unfair practice of convicting people of a felony without the unanimous consent of a jury."
David Dayen in The New Republic, "The Essential Difference Between Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren: The potential 2020 candidates are often portrayed as identical progressives. A closer look proves otherwise. [...] They have markedly different approaches to empowering the working class. In the simplest possible terms, Warren wants to organize markets to benefit workers and consumers, while Sanders wants to overhaul those markets, taking the private sector out of it. This divide — and where Warren or Sanders's putative rivals position themselves on it — will determine the future of the Democratic Party for the next decade or more."
"Group Purchasing Organizations, Health Care Costs, and Drug Shortages [...] In 1972, Congress enacted the Anti-Kickback Statute as part of the Social Security Act Amendments that banned kickbacks, bribes, or rebates in return for furnishing items or services; the statute was intended to protect patients and federal health programs from the inherent conflict of interest. However, in 1987, group purchasers were granted an exception to the antikickback law, known as the safe harbor exemption. The exemption allowed creative strategies for GPOs to increase their profits. Today, GPOs ask manufacturers to pay them undisclosed vendor fees as a condition to have their products placed in the GPO catalogs. This issue can be problematic when GPOs go further and invite a manufacturer to pay a premium fee to become a sole supplier, allowing the manufacturer that is the highest bidder to essentially purchase market share, rendering hospitals and patients dependent on a single manufacturer's supply chain. Hospitals in turn are sometimes asked to enter into contracts with GPOs that offer greater discounts for longer, more exclusive contracts. One potential result of these contracting interactions is that only 1 or 2 manufacturers may be responsible for an entire regional or national supply chain. This reliance on a narrow supply chain can have an adverse effect on hospital inventories if a factory has production problems. A 2016 US Government Accountability Office study concluded that there was a strong association between critical drug shortages and a decline in the number of drug suppliers.2 Furthermore, GPOs were a significant focus in a US House of Representatives report on drug shortages, which stated that 'the GPO structure reduces the number of manufacturers producing each generic drug.'3 This association between drug shortages and the number of drug suppliers was likely a contributing factor when hospitals faced a nationwide shortage of intravenous saline bags after Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico and damaged the manufacturing plant of Baxter International, which has dominated the US saline bag market.4 Although there is limited evidence to support the direct link between GPOs and drug shortages, the vendor fee model of GPOs has the potential to create barriers to market entry for manufacturers by rewarding fewer, larger manufacturers and thus increasing dependence on fewer supply chains."
"The Growth of Sinclair's Conservative Media Empire: The company has achieved formidable reach by focussing on small markets where its TV stations can have a big influence. [...] There are regulations that prevent any single company from controlling too large a share of the press, in order to protect competition and the free exchange of ideas. Sinclair has achieved its formidable reach by exploiting loopholes in these regulations. During the past few decades, it has bought small and midsized television-station operators and then circumvented regulations by setting up shell companies that on paper appear to be separate entities but over which Sinclair exerts almost total control. Sinclair's stations — there are often several in the same broadcast area, branded as local ABC, CBS, NBC, or Fox affiliates — enjoy the trust of viewers because they appear independent, even though much of the content is dictated at a national level. A former news director at a Sinclair-owned station told me that Smith 'purposely went in and bought a whole bunch of stations in mid-America — i.e., Trump kinds of towns. Places where they could have a big influence.' She added, 'I don't care what your politics are — the bottom line is, they hatched a plan to have an effect on the majority of this country. And, when you look at it, I'm positive the right-wing commentaries, in small markets, had an effect on the election.'"
Haaretz, "$6 Billion of Iranian Money: Why Israeli Firm Black Cube Really Went After Obama's Team: When it was revealed earlier this year that the commercial spy firm was targeting members of the Obama administration, it was assumed it was working for the Trump team. But official company documents leaked to Haaretz reveal a far more lucrative target — the seizure of Iranian cash worldwide"
Andrew O'Hehir at Alternet, "Donald Trump Didn't Start the Fire: Here Are Things the Midterms Can't Fix: An appalling week of mail bombs, Trump tweets and Megyn Kelly overload should remind us: Politics won't fix America [...] Let's say instead that for many powerful and well-insulated Americans near the top of the cultural pyramid, from the center-left to the center-right — including at least some penitent conservatives in the Max Boot and Tom Nichols mold — a potential Democratic congressional majority in 2019 carries a special significance. It represents a symbolic Restoration of the old order, something like installing Charles II on the throne in 1660 after the disastrous experiment of Oliver Cromwell's Puritan regime. It's one last chance to reassert sanity and normalcy — which in this case signifies a government operated by spooks and wizards with Ivy League degrees — before we plunge off the cliff into the bottomless troll-hole of dumbass fascism. It's time, in this worldview, for ideological enemies to set aside our differences and join in a 'Coalition of Normals,' to quote Salon contributor Bob Cesca, devoted to restoring our republic and enforcing 'presidential' conduct on the presidency. To this particular fantasy I say, with respect and affection and some lingering nostalgia: LOL whatever. This 'normal' that you speak of: When was that, and where is it to be found? The Benghazi hearings? The drone war and the secret 'kill list' that included American citizens? The birther controversy and the 'death panels'? Potential vice president Sarah Palin? The Iraq war and the 'unknown unknowns'? The Lewinsky scandal and the 'meaning of is'?"
"@emarvelous: Fifty years ago today, two American Olympians showed what it meant to champion justice and equality. It would cost them their careers, test their sanity, and earn them the scorn of their fellow citizens. Their protest inspired multitudes and left a legacy that transcends sport." Of course, everyone knows the iconic photo of Tommie Smith and John Carlos with their fists raised at the Olympic podium. The third athlete, the Australian Peter Norman, also suffered for his solidarity with his fellows, but times have changed. I was touched by this detail: "The other monument was erected in 2005 on the campus of Smith's and Carlos's alma mater, San Jose State University in California. For this piece, the second-place podium was left empty. Norman had declined to be depicted, to allow visitors to stand in his place in solidarity with the two Americans instead."
A correction in The New York Times: "An obituary on Wednesday about Alex Spanos, the owner of the Chargers, misstated the location of Stockton, Calif., where he was born. It is about 80 miles east of San Francisco, not west" Via Fark.
I'm so old, I can't remember whether I've seen this video before or not. It seems familiar, and yet, I dunno, maybe I just never really watched it that hard before. "Help!"
"Pointing the Finger at Jeff Bezos Worked: Jeff Bezos raised Amazon's starting wage to $15 because of pressure from workers and Bernie Sanders — showing how, even when workers and socialists are weak, we can win against the most powerful people in the world."
"Bezos Bows To Pressure On $15/hr. Keep Pressuring Him. Keep Pressuring Them All. In a move that is being widely attributed to pressure from activists and Bernie Sanders' famous Stop BEZOS Act, Amazon has announced a pay increase for all workers inside the US to $15 an hour as of next month. Which is of course a good thing. It is a good thing that the aggressively anti-union Amazon, which is owned and operated by the planet's wealthiest man Jeff Bezos, is finally taking a step in the direction of treating its workers like human beings after the sound of sharpening guillotine blades began to echo off the walls of its warehouses. But that isn't something people should be grateful for, let alone something that causes them to ease up the intensity of the fight against plutocracy. You don't thank a man for ceasing to punch you in the face, especially not while he's still stabbing you in the chest."
"Amazon jumps out ahead of its rivals and raises wages to $15: NEW YORK (AP) — Amazon, the business that upended the retailing industry and transformed the way we shop for just about everything, is jumping out ahead of the pack again, announcing a minimum wage of $15 an hour for its U.S. employees that could force other big companies to raise their pay. The online giant also said it will push Congress to increase the federal minimum wage, now at $7.25. Given Amazon's size and clout, the move Tuesday is a major victory for the $15-an-hour movement, which has organized protests of fast-food, gas station and other low-paid workers. Already, several states and cities have raised their minimum wages above the federal one."
But wait! "Amazon cuts to bonuses leads to questions about wage hike: A spokesperson for Amazon said the ending of stock vesting plans and bonuses makes compensation 'more immediate and predictable.'" Make no mistake, by highlighting the workers' action against Amazon, Senator Sanders helped push the company into raising its wages. But Amazon has reasons for preferring to raise wages rather than continue issuing stock bonuses. "Sanders said in an emailed statement in response to questions about the stock and bonus programs that he hopes Amazon's change does not end up hurting veteran workers. 'Our understanding is that the vast majority of Amazon workers are going to see wage increases, including some very significant increases as the minimum wage goes up to $15 an hour,' Sanders said. 'I would hope that as a result of Amazon's new policy, no worker, especially long-time employees, sees a reduction in total compensation. Amazon can afford to make all workers whole and should do that.'"
"'Too Big to Fail, Too Big to Exist': Sanders Introduces Bill to Break Up Nation's Largest Wall Street Banks [...] With Wall Street banks as big and profitable as ever ten years after their reckless criminality sparked the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) introduced legislation on Wednesday that would break up Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, and other so-called "too big to fail" financial institutions that pose a major systemic risk to the American economy. "No financial institution should be so large that its failure would cause catastrophic risk to millions of Americans or to our nation's economic well being," Sanders said in a statement. "We must end, once and for all, the scheme that is nothing more than a free insurance policy for Wall Street: the policy of 'too big to fail.':Titled "The Too Big to Fail, Too Big to Exist Act," Sanders' legislation would break up any bank that has a total exposure of more than three percent of the nation's gross domestic product (GDP) — the equivalent to $584.5 billion in today's dollars."
"Bernie's New Internationalist Vision: Right-wing populism is advancing across the world. Bernie Sanders wants to fight back. [...] Sanders's speech yesterday, titled 'Building a Global Democratic Movement to Counter Authoritarianism' and adapted from an editorial he wrote in the Guardian last month, was a yardstick measuring his progress in this task to date. In it, he spelled out a dual opposition to authoritarianism and oligarchy. Sanders emphasized throughout his speech that economic inequality and wealth concentration are corrosive to democracy, and in turn to civil rights — a refrain we've heard from him many times in the domestic context. We must develop a global movement against unaccountable state and corporate power, which are mutually reinforcing, he said."
Trump has started a new campaign lying about Medicare for All. Robert Weissman at Common Dreams had the first fact-check I saw, "Trump Is Dead Wrong on Medicare-for-All: Lies and deceptions from Trump are nothing new. Lies and deceptions from Trump about Medicare-for All are new, so it's worth correcting his USA Today column attacking such a system. One reason his attacks on Medicare-for-All are new is that he probably has supported it in the past. But whatever, there's no reason to think Trump particularly believed what he said then, or what he says now."
"Facebook Accused of 'Full-Frontal Suppression of Dissent' After Independent Media Swept Up in Mass Purge: The massive shutdown affected many progressive sites devoted to covering war, police brutality, and other issues neglected by the corporate media. After Facebook announced on Thursday that it shut down and removed hundreds of pages and accounts that it vaguely accused of spreading "spam" and engaging in "inauthentic behavior," some of the individuals and organizations caught up in the social media behemoth's dragnet disputed accusations that they were violating the platform's rules and raised alarm that Facebook is using its enormous power to silence independent political perspectives that run counter to the corporate media's dominant narratives."
Adam Serwer in The Atlantic, "The Supreme Court Is Headed Back to the 19th Century: The justices again appear poised to pursue a purely theoretical liberty at the expense of the lives of people of color. [...] The justices did not resurrect Dred Scott v. Sandford's antebellum declaration that a black man had no rights that a white man was bound to respect. Rather, they carefully framed their arguments in terms of limited government and individual liberty, writing opinion after opinion that allowed the white South to create an oppressive society in which black Americans had almost no rights at all. Their commitment to freedom in the abstract, and only in the abstract, allowed a brutal despotism to take root in Southern soil. The conservative majority on the Supreme Court today is similarly blinded by a commitment to liberty in theory that ignores the reality of how Americans' lives are actually lived. Like the Supreme Court of that era, the conservatives on the Court today are opposed to discrimination in principle, and indifferent to it in practice. Chief Justice John Roberts's June 2018 ruling to uphold President Donald Trump's travel ban targeting a list of majority-Muslim countries, despite the voluminous evidence that it had been conceived in animus, showed that the muddled doctrines of the post-Reconstruction period retain a stubborn appeal. [...] The lesson of the post-Reconstruction Supreme Court is that a determined Court majority can prove stubbornly resistant to short-term swings of political fortune. Even if Democrats win the next election cycle, and the one after that, an enduring conservative majority on the Supreme Court will have the power to shatter any hard-won liberal legislative victory on the anvil of judicial review. It will be able to reverse decades-old precedents that secure fundamental rights. It will further entrench the rules of a society in which justice skews toward the wealthy, and the lives of those without means can be destroyed by a chance encounter with law enforcement. It will do all these things and more in the name of a purely theoretical freedom, which most Americans will never be able to afford to experience."
"Brazil's Bolsonaro-Led Far Right Wins a Victory Far More Sweeping and Dangerous Than Anyone Predicted. Its Lessons Are Global. FOR THE PAST THIRTY YEARS, Congressman Jair Bolsonaro was a fringe extremist in Brazilian politics, known mostly for outlandish, deliberately inflammatory quotes in which he paid homage to the most notorious torturers of the 1964-1985 military regime, constantly heralded the 1964 coup as a 'defense of democracy,' told a female socialist colleague in Congress that she was too ugly to 'deserve' his rape, announced that he'd rather learn that his son died in a car accident than was gay, and said he conceived a daughter after having four sons only due to a 'moment of weakness.' [...] As a result of last night's truly stunning national election in Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro has been instantly transformed from marginalized clown into the overwhelmingly dominant force in the country's political life. Bolsonaro himself fell just short of winning the 50% needed to win the presidency without a run-off. But given the margin of victory, he is the overwhelming favorite to win on October 28 against the second-place candidate, ex-São Paulo Mayor Fernando Haddad. Haddad is the previously unknown, hand-picked successor anointed by Lula, the ex-two-term President who had been leading all polls until he was convicted on dubious corruption charges and quickly imprisoned so as to bar his candidacy, then silenced by Brazil's right-wing judiciary with a series of remarkable prior restraint censorship orders barring all media outlets from interviewing him."
I'm so old I can remember when if a reporter for The Washington Post, or even a lesser paper, were murdered, or suspected of being murdered, under circumstances like Jamal Khashoggi's, it would be a top headline for at least two or three days.
Public Citizen: "How the New NAFTA Text Measures Against the Essential Changes We Have Demanded to Stop NAFTA's Ongoing Damage: Text of a revised North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was made public on September 30. This initial analysis measures the released text against the changes that Public Citizen has long demanded that are necessary to stop NAFTA's ongoing damage. Almost one million American jobs have been government-certified as lost to NAFTA, with more outsourced to Mexico every week. New NAFTA Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) attacks on environmental and health policies are being regularly filed after $392 million has been seized from taxpayers to date by corporations using NAFTA's ISDS regime. The text includes key improvements for which we have long advocated, as well as the addition of damaging terms found in other agreements that we have long opposed. It also reveals that more work is needed, especially with respect to ensuring the swift and certain enforcement of labor standards and environmental standards."
Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party conference speech in full [...] We have also been raising more money for our party. But not a penny of our funds came from a dodgy donor or a shady businessmen's club. Our money comes from hundreds of thousands of people across our country who believe in what we stand for. So I don't have to play tennis with an oligarch to keep our party organisation running. Labour trades in hope for the many, not favours for the few. [...] You may have noticed that not everyone is entirely happy about all this. It turns out that the billionaires who own the bulk of the British press don't like us one little bit.
Now it could be because we're going to clamp down on tax dodging. Or it may be because we don't fawn over them at white tie dinners and cocktail parties. Or it could even be because Tom Watson has been campaigning for the second part of the Leveson media inquiry to be set up - something the last Prime Minister promised, but failed to deliver. We must, and we will, protect the freedom of the press to challenge unaccountable power."
Max Blumenthal, "How an American Anthropologist Tied to US Regime-Change Proxies Became the MSM's Man in Nicaragua: It might seem cavalier for an academically credentialed anthropologist to assert political influence on the population he is supposed to be studying; however, Goette-Luciak's activities fit within a long tradition." One guy who only talks to one side is your "expert". "MANAGUA, NICARAGUA — (Investigation) The Guardian, The Washington Post, the BBC and NPR have assigned an American anthropologist with no previous journalistic experience to cover the crisis in Nicaragua. The novice reporter, named Carl David Goette-Luciak, has published pieces littered with falsehoods that reinforce the opposition's narrative promoting regime change while relying almost entirely on anti-Sandinista sources."
Great episode of Citations Needed, "'Populism' - The Media's Favorite Catch-All Smear for the Left: But what exactly is populism? How is a term that allegedly applies to Hugo Chávez and Bernie Sanders also casually used to describe fascists and far-right forces? Under the thin, ideology-flattening definition of populism, the term is more often than not used as a euphemism for demagogic cults of personality and fascism and as the ultimate horseshoe theory reduction to lump together movements for equity and justice on the Left with those of revanchism, nationalism and explicit racism on the Right. We are joined on this episode by writer and historian Thomas Frank."
Vincent Chatworth on Facebook: "Kamala Harris was one of the driving forces behind #SESTA and #FOSTA, the legislation that shut down the websites that sex workers use to feed their families and stay safe. Since the shut down of #backpage and other websites, screening clients had gotten way more difficult. The websites we use to report abusers have had to change to the point that they are now useless to us. So many women had to go back out on the street after BP shut down and just in the past couple months, two sex workers (that we know of) have been murdered in Seattle. [...] Kamala Harris was THE prosecutor who went after BP before she was elected to the senate. She was the driving force behind SESTA/FOSTA but kept her involvement very hush hush to the point that she didn't even put her name as a co sponsor up until it was almost done. That bill made internet platforms criminally liable for the things it's users write AND gives the government and law enforcement the power to shut down and prosecute the owners of any website they deem to be 'promoting human trafficking'. The definition of suspected human trafficking is so vague, that it basically allows them to shut down whatever they want without due process. The two top industries that funded her campaign are lawyers/law firms and tv/movies/music. Time warner was her top contributor. These are two industries which stand to profit HEAVILY from SESTA. Lawyers get more work because there are more people being arrested w much more serious charges. Companies like Time Warner and Comcast have already gotten a huge boost from the demise of #netneutrality (basically they can choose to slow down your internet speeds if you visit a website that they do not own making it much harder for independent content creators to be seen). With the passage of SESTA/FOSTA, internet providers now have even more control through that hand of Senator like Harris."
Sean McElwee tweeted: A team of intrepid economists just perpetrated a giant version of the Sokal Hoax, call it Sokal Cubed. They proved that for $1,500 an hour, economic models can be manipulated into defending literally anything, including anti-competitive corporate mergers." The article, from Jesse Eisinger and Justin Elliott at Pro Publica, is "These Professors Make More Than a Thousand Bucks an Hour Peddling Mega-Mergers: The economists are leveraging their academic prestige with secret reports justifying corporate concentration. Their predictions are often wrong and consumers pay the price." Imagine my surprise at seeing this: "ONE EVENING IN 1977, University of Chicago law professor Richard Posner hosted a colleague from the economics department and a young law student named Andrew Rosenfield at his apartment in Hyde Park. The leading scholar of the 'Law and Economics' movement, Posner wanted to apply rigorous math and economics concepts to the real world." So many evil things can be traced back to these people.
But I missed Adam Liptak's "An Exit Interview With Richard Posner, Judicial Provocateur" last year when it came out upon Posner's retirement, and it does refer to a phenomenon I have noticed and remarked on before — the increasingly more sensible and less nasty positions Posner seemed to be taking of late. He doesn't go into it in much depth, but he certainly seems to have had a change of heart late in life. "'About six months ago,' Judge Posner said, 'I awoke from a slumber of 35 years.' He had suddenly realized, he said, that people without lawyers are mistreated by the legal system, and he wanted to do something about it."
Shamus Khan tweeted: "Thread on my thoughts re: elites: I think elite schooling can help develop real talents in people. But here's the thing: the idea that those talents are 'inherent' vs 'cultivated as a result of investments' is where I take serious issue. The consequences are really important" Now go read the thread.
"'That's a hell of an act. What do you call it?' Fuzzy-edged though differences between generations are, surely one difference between people of my own age and those born after 9/11 is their experience of 'security.' I never went through a metal detector in school; never in my wildest dreams would I have thought this country would come to that. And as for airports! Anyhow, this Zeitgeist Watch anecdote that a friend threw over the transom starts out being about security. But there's a plot twist!"
"Americans Strongly Dislike PC Culture: Youth isn't a good proxy for support of political correctness, and race isn't either. [...] Whites are ever so slightly less likely than average to believe that political correctness is a problem in the country: 79 percent of them share this sentiment. Instead, it is Asians (82 percent), Hispanics (87percent), and American Indians (88 percent) who are most likely to oppose political correctness. [...] The one part of the standard narrative that the data partially affirm is that African Americans are most likely to support political correctness. But the difference between them and other groups is much smaller than generally supposed: Three quarters of African Americans oppose political correctness. This means that they are only four percentage points less likely than whites, and only five percentage points less likely than the average, to believe that political correctness is a problem."
"How Bill Clinton Remade the Democratic Party by Abandoning Unions: An Arkansas Story: Much has been made in the recent campaign about the alienation of working-class whites from the Democratic Party. Michael Pierce shows this is a path long traveled; Bill Clinton undermined the budding multi-racial labor coalition in 1970s Arkansas. In a horrendous election night for the Hillary Clinton, the only bright spot was Nevada, where Culinary Workers Union Local 226's massive get-out-the-vote operation ensured that the state's six electoral votes went into the Democratic column. Not only did the local get their Hispanic, Asian, African-American, and white members to the polls but its sophisticated operation also rallied other members of Nevada's diverse working-class. In much of the rest of the country, the working-class voters — especially white ones — stayed home, alienated from both a Democratic candidate who made little effort to address their economic concerns and a Republican candidate who stirred up hate. Class-based union-led mobilization operations like the one in Nevada have become rare, but they were central to the Democratic Party's successes from the 1930s through the 1980s even in what are now deep red states like Arkansas. The irony is that the decline of such mobilization efforts can be traced back to Bill Clinton and his activities in 1970s Arkansas, when he and his allies began undermining the labor movement and its efforts to educate working-class voters and get them to the polls on behalf of the Democratic Party. Not only did Bill Clinton refuse to support efforts to strengthen unions at a time when local companies like Walmart and Tyson Foods were becoming more aggressive in their 'union avoidance' methods, but he also began to bait the labor movement to gain electoral advantage. He would ride his Arkansas strategies into the White House in 1992, transforming the Democratic Party along the way."
I'm not sure whether I linked this in 2014 when it first appeared, but it seems apropos of the moment and in my continuing mission to remind people of just what a disaster the Obama-Geithner administration was for us, here's Matt Stoller's review of Geithner's book Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises, "The Con-Artist Wing of the Democratic Party: The most consequential event of this young century has been the financial crisis. This is a catchall term that means three different things: an economic housing boom and bust, a financial meltdown, and a political response in which bailouts were showered upon the very institutions that were responsible for the chaos. We will be seeing the fallout for decades. Today, in Europe, far-right fascist parties are on the rise, climbing the unhappiness that the crisis-induced austerity has unleashed. China is looking away from the West as a model of development. In the US, Congress is more popular than certain sexually transmitted infections* but little else, and all institutions of national power are losing their legitimacy. At the same time, the financial system did not, in the end, collapse, and there was no repeat of the Great Depression. [...] I'll address both of these, since they are intertwined. For as I read the book, and compared the book with what was written at the time and what was written afterwards, I noticed something odd, and perhaps too bold to say in polite company. As much as I really wanted to hear what Geithner had to say, I quickly realized that I wasn't getting his actual side of the story. The book is full of narratives, facts, and statements that are, well, untrue, or at the very least, highly misleading. Despite its length, there are also serious omissions that suggest an intention to mislead, as well as misrepresentations of his critics' arguments. As I went further into Geithner's narrative, even back into his college days, I got the sense that I was seeing only a brilliantly scrubbed surface, that there were nooks and crannies hidden away. It struck me that I was reading the memoirs of an incredibly savvy and well-bred grifter, the kind that the American WASP establishment of financiers, foundation officials, and spies produces in such rich abundance. I realize this is a bold claim, because it's an indictment not just of Geithner but also of those who worked for him at Treasury and at the Federal Reserve, as well as indictment of the Clinton-era finance team of Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, Alan Greenspan, Michael Barr, Jason Furman, and other accomplices. That's why this review is somewhat long, as it's an attempt to back up such a broad and sweeping claim. I will also connect it to what Geithner is doing now: working in the same kind of financial business that made Mitt Romney a near billionaire."
But lest we forget, the Democratic Party was deciding to enable the Republicans just as the right-wing was putting forward it's radical plans to destroy democracy, "The Integration of Theory and Practice: A Program for the New Traditionalist Movement" is an old document that is chilling to read now. "Our movement will be entirely destructive, and entirely constructive. We will not try to reform the existing institutions. We only intend to weaken them, and eventually destroy them. We will endeavor to knock our opponents off-balance and unsettle them at every opportunity. All of our constructive energies will be dedicated to the creation of our own institutions."
Umar Haque, "The Big Crunch: Why Predatory Capitalism is Exploding into Fascism, in Every Corner of the Globe: I've often said that the rise of global fascism would be the defining event of our adult lifetimes — and, understandably, I guess, considering Americans and their need to feel superior, I was often met with skepticism, if not outright derision. Yet here it is. Like dominoes: America — where genuine Nazis now sit in government — in Italy, Poland, Turkey, Hungary. Neo-Nazis marching in Germany. Even in Sweden, a kind of absurd, pathetic extremist nationalism is surging."
Howard Zinn, October 21, 2005, "Don't Despair about the Supreme Court [...] It would be naive to depend on the Supreme Court to defend the rights of poor people, women, people of color, dissenters of all kinds. Those rights only come alive when citizens organize, protest, demonstrate, strike, boycott, rebel, and violate the law in order to uphold justice. The distinction between law and justice is ignored by all those Senators--Democrats and Republicans--who solemnly invoke as their highest concern "the rule of law." The law can be just; it can be unjust. It does not deserve to inherit the ultimate authority of the divine right of the king. The Constitution gave no rights to working people: no right to work less than twelve hours a day, no right to a living wage, no right to safe working conditions. Workers had to organize, go on strike, defy the law, the courts, the police, create a great movement which won the eight-hour day, and caused such commotion that Congress was forced to pass a minimum wage law, and Social Security, and unemployment insurance. The Brown decision on school desegregation did not come from a sudden realization of the Supreme Court that this is what the Fourteenth Amendment called for. After all, it was the same Fourteenth Amendment that had been cited in the Plessy case upholding racial segregation. It was the initiative of brave families in the South--along with the fear by the government, obsessed with the Cold War, that it was losing the hearts and minds of colored people all over the world--that brought a sudden enlightenment to the Court. [...] No Supreme Court, liberal or conservative, will stop the war in Iraq, or redistribute the wealth of this country, or establish free medical care for every human being. Such fundamental change will depend, the experience of the past suggests, on the actions of an aroused citizenry, demanding that the promise of the Declaration of Independence--an equal right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness--be fulfilled."
It started like this: "Dianne Feinstein Withholding Brett Kavanaugh Document From Fellow Judiciary Committee Democrats: DEMOCRATS ON THE Senate Judiciary Committee have privately requested to view a Brett Kavanaugh-related document in possession of the panel's top Democrat, Dianne Feinstein, but the senior California senator has so far refused, according to multiple sources familiar with the situation." It soon transpired that a woman said Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when she was in high school. It then instantly developed that the GOP just happened to have a letter signed by 65 women who purported to know him then and claimed he had always been a perfect gentleman with them. You know, I went to a public high school and for one year I went to an all-girls school, and I don't think I could find 65 women I knew from high school. Brett Kavanaugh went to Georgetown Prep, a boys' school. (Kavanaugh also recently claimed to have grown up in a rough neighborhood. That would be Bethesda, Maryland, which never had any rough neighborhoods.) Atrios has the next ridiculous chapter.
Yes, okay, Kavanaugh cemented his reputation as a serial perjurer and should be impeached. (If you need some catharsis, I recommend Sam Seder's interview with Judy Gold on Friday's Majority Report.) Meanwhile....
"With Nation Transfixed By Kavanaugh Monstrosity, House GOP Votes to Give Rich Another $3 Trillion in Tax Cuts: 'This is yet another shameful tax law that would swindle working families and siphon even more funding from the programs that help our communities thrive.' [...] Three Democrats— Reps. Conor Lamb (Penn.), Jacky Rosen (Nev.), and Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.) — voted for the GOP-crafted measure, which would permanently extend the individual tax cuts under the current Republican tax law."
Voter turnout in New York was enormous and though Cynthia Nixon lost, she did get more votes than Cuomo won with in the previous election. Sadly, Zephyr Teachout also lost in her bid to be State AG. Curiously, there were many "Reports of Widespread Voter Suppression in New York State Democratic Primary" and we wonder if that explains the results, since we're not hearing it from Cuomo voters. But the good news is that most of the right-wing Dems who'd been caucusing with the Republicans (IDC) lost their seats, so Cuomo may have a harder time preventing progressive change in the future.
If you ever doubted that Michael Bloomberg is a creep (though I don't see how you could), he's obviously afraid Bernie will win this time and is already making noises about exploring a presidential bid himself. For Liberty, Fraternity, Plutocracy, "Bloomberg would be less than a month from turning 79 when inaugurated. Also $50 billion is $50 million times 1000. If he runs I do expect him to become the darling of reactionary centrists and Third Way doofi, who collectively make up 2.72% of the U.S. population and 38.67% of all elite media pundts." Only a few months younger than Sanders, too. He threatened a third-party run last time if Sanders got the Democratic nomination. He might actually do it this time and grab the H8% vote.
David Dayen, "The Fake Public Comments Supporting A Bank Merger Are Coming From Inside The House: COMMENTS SUBMITTED TO a top banking regulator supporting a 2015 merger between OneWest Bank and CIT Bank were attributed to people who never sent them, according to documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and reviewed by The Intercept. The fake comments appear to be tied directly to Joseph Otting, the head of the regulatory agency himself. The documents reviewed by The Intercept show that the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the main bank regulator for nationally chartered banks, knew about the fake comments at the time, before it approved the merger. But the OCC appears to have done no meaningful investigation of the matter, and even cited public support for the merger when approving it." So, "the public" is his sock puppet.
"Sen. Ted Cruz Calls Rival Beto O'Rourke 'Quick' To Blame Dallas Cop Who Killed Botham Jean. Beto says the officer who seems to have misplaced her own apartment, and instantly killing the tenant of the one she was trying to get into when he opened the door, should be fired. This sounds fair considering how unprofessional her behavior was, but Cruz has a novel approach to employee termination policy: "'The individual ... was at home in his apartment and found himself murdered,' Cruz said, using a bizarre choice of words. Guyger 'may have been in the wrong. She's facing legal proceedings, and if a jury of her peers concludes that she behaved wrongly, then she'll face the consequences.'" The jury can decide whether she goes to jail, but I've never heard of anyone getting a jury of their peers to decide whether they should be fired - that responsibility is in the hands of your bosses, not your peers.
"The Senseless Legal Precedent That Enables Wrongful Convictions: A federal appeals court has ruled that prosecutors can withhold evidence that may prove defendants innocent before they plead guilty. [...] Prosecutors are obligated under what's known as the Brady rule to disclose any evidence in the government's possession that may benefit a defendant's case. The rule takes its name from the landmark 1963 case Brady v. Maryland, where the Supreme Court held that withholding exculpatory evidence violated a defendant's right to due process under the Fourteenth Amendment. But the lower courts are divided on whether that also applies to the plea-bargaining process. The Supreme Court itself has never ruled on the matter." But how can they be divided on whether they should proceed with a prosecution when they aren't reasonably sure they have the guilty party in the first place - especially when there may be exculpatory evidence? What kind of thinking is even going on there?
I don't have a pull-quote from this one, but Matt Taibbi talked to Noam Chomsky, and some of you will be happy to know it's text, not video.
"Labour To Vote On Bringing Back 'Clause Four' Pledge To Nationalise Industries: Labour is set to vote on restoring the party's historic Clause Four pledge to nationalise key industries following a grassroots campaign by activists, HuffPost can reveal. The commitment to 'common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange' was famously axed by Tony Blair when he created New Labour in the 1990s. But local constituency parties have now tabled motions for its restoration that will guarantee the issue appears on the agenda at the party conference."
"Rejected Applicant Sues Law Schools for Violating Magna Carta [...] According to the complaint, the plaintiff applied to at least 24 law schools, or tried to, but was not admitted to any. While there may well have been other reasons for that, it was enough that Plaintiff had refused to take the LSAT, which most if not all schools require. [...] What exactly did the defendants do wrong, you are probably asking. Well, first, the ABA has apparently broken a promise it made to Eleanor Roosevelt in 1947 to the effect that it and its members would comply with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. (Which was adopted in 1948, but it could have promised her before that.) Beyond that — not that anything else is really necessary — Plaintiff alleges that not admitting him to law school constituted various torts including trespass, 'trespass on the case,' intentional infliction of emotional distress, bad faith, trover (!), and the best of the formal causes of action, 'failure to provide a Republican form of government.'"
@MMFlint has a new movie out, and Glenn Greenwald reviews it at The Intercept. "Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 11/9 Aims Not at Trump But at Those Who Created the Conditions That Led to His Rise: Fahrenheit 11/9 the title of Michael Moore's new film that opens today in theaters, is an obvious play on the title of his wildly profitable Bush-era Fahrenheit 11/9 but also a reference to the date of Donald J. Trump's 2016 election victory. Despite that, Trump himself is a secondary figure in Moore's film, which is far more focused on the far more relevant and interesting questions of what — and, critically, who — created the climate in which someone like Trump could occupy the Oval Office. For that reason alone, Moore's film is highly worthwhile regardless of where one falls on the political spectrum. The single most significant defect in U.S. political discourse is the monomaniacal focus on Trump himself, as though he is the cause — rather than the by-product and symptom — of decades-old systemic American pathologies. Personalizing and isolating Trump as the principal, even singular, source of political evil is obfuscating and thus deceitful. By effect, if not design, it distracts the population's attention away from the actual architects of their plight. [...] Embedded in the instruction of those who want to you focus exclusively on Trump is an insidious and toxic message: namely, removing Trump will cure, or at least mitigate, the acute threats he poses. That is a fraud, and Moore knows it. Unless and until the roots of these pathologies are identified and addressed, we are certain to have more Trumps: in fact, more effective and more dangerous Trumps, along with more potent Dutertes, and more Brexits, and more Bolsonaros and more LePens."
From the NYT Opinion page, "The Truth in Trump's Law-Enforcement Hypocrisy: As a public defender, I'm not mad at how well Manafort and Cohen have been treated. I just want that same treatment for my clients. [...] Needless to say, Mr. Trump's apparent justice renaissance has nothing to do with how our criminal justice system actually operates, and has always operated, for communities of color and people living in poverty, the vast majority of those who face arrest and prosecution in this country. No, he is outraged by how the system treats his friends. Still, it would be a mistake to dismiss his outrage over the government's ability to turn a person's life upside down as mere hypocrisy. I understand President Trump's outrage. It is remarkable that people, presumed innocent, are locked up before being convicted of any crime. It is deeply unfair that mere accusations can lead to devastating, lifelong consequences. It is alarming that, in a system theoretically built around transparency and truth seeking, police and prosecutors have such outsize power to surveil, search, detain, bully, coerce and nearly destroy a person without producing evidence sufficient to secure a conviction."
Dean Baker, "NYT Is Badly Mistaken: China Has Many Many Options in Trade War with Trump: The NYT erred badly with an article that told readers, "China Once Looked Tough on Trade: Now Its Options Are Dwindling." The article claims that China is running out of ways to retaliate against Trump's tariffs because it imports so much less from the United States than the United States imports from China. In fact, China has many other ways to retaliate. The most effective would probably be to stop paying attention to patent and copyright claims of US corporations. It can encourage domestic Chinese companies to make millions of copies of Windows-based computers, without paying a penny to Microsoft. It can do the same with iPhones and Apple. In fact, it can encourage Chinese companies to export these unauthorized copies all over the world, destroying Microsoft's and Apple's markets in third countries. It can do the same with fertilizers and pesticides, making Monsanto and other chemical giants unhappy. And, it can do this with Pfizer and Merck's drugs, flooding the world with low-cost generic drugs. Even a short period of generic availability may do permanent damage to these companies' markets."
I'd been wondering where Hillbots were getting claims of the Sanders campaign keeping lots of illegal funds, and now I know: Hillary Clinton Supporters Filed A Complaint Against Bernie Sanders — And Lost [...] The complaint alleged that Sanders, an independent, and his campaign treasurer, Susan Jackson, accepted excessive contributions. Under Title 52 of federal campaign finance rules, no individual can make a contribution to a candidate in excess of $2,700. The FEC's decision was addressed to Brad Woodhouse, founder of the American Democracy Legal Fund and president of the pro-Clinton super PAC Correct the Record. Both the ADLF and the super PAC were founded by prominent Clinton supporter and Media Matters founder David Brock. 'On April 20, 2017, the Federal Election Commission reviewed the allegations in your complaint received on April 8, 2016, and on the basis of the information provided in your complaint, and information provided by Bernie 2016 and Susan Jackson in her official capacity as treasurer, the Commission voted to dismiss the allegation that the Committee violated 52 U.S.C. § 30116(f),'" It's even funnier when you read how tiny the amounts were - it looks like a few people lost track of how many $27 contributions they'd sent in and sent one or two more than they should have. The campaign sent it back as required by law, so no big deal. It's hard to believe the Clinton campaign could be so petty.
"Aaron Maté is a Beast! This statement was admiringly blurted out by political vlogger Jamarl Thomas on his program The Progressive Soapbox last week. What he was talking about was a recent interview that Aaron Maté, producer, journalist and on-air talent at Paul Jay's Real News Network, did with veteran journalist James Risen, currently of The Intercept. What did they discuss? The jailing of Reality Winner — Risen's source for a leaked NSA document about potential Russian digital interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential primary." Risen was perfectly comfortable with talking about how ridiculous it was that Winner was jailed — without any trial — for exposing what should just have been an ordinary public service advisory in any case. But the moment Maté started discussing the actual content of the material Winner released, Risen got his back up. Now, you can say it's not surprising that there's a bit of nervousness about the topic after The Intercept's mishandling of publishing the information in such a way that it was they who exposed Winner by publishing raw code from her communication without redaction, but that didn't seem to be Risen's problem. Maté wanted to talk about just how small a bombshell Winner's leak really was, nowhere in proportion to the reaction it got. Curiously, Risen was so offended by the idea that Winner's leak was only the flimsiest evidence that a phishing expedition from a Gmail account was evidence of a Russian plot that he threatened to terminate the interview in a huff. Do watch the video, it's brow-furrowing, and Maté deserves the kudos for his handling of Risen.
David Dayen in In These Times, "Retrospectives of the Financial Crisis Are Leaving Out the Most Important Part — Its Victims: Because I'm a masochist, I've read as many retrospectives as I could about the 10th anniversary of the fateful failure of Lehman Brothers, the emblematic event of the financial crisis. And I can't help but notice a gaping hole in the narratives. I've heard from Lew Ranieri, the Salomon Brothers trader who invented the mortgage bond in the 1980s, and now regrets it. I've heard bailout architects Ben Bernanke, Hank Paulson, and Tim Geithner justify their beliefs in doing whatever it took to save the banks. I've endured you-are-there narratives about bankers and policymakers racing to rescue the financial system. Wonks, pundits, and reporters have all offered thoughts on the crisis' origins, the response, and its ultimate meaning. It seems the only people not consulted for their perspective were those most powerfully affected by the crisis' impact — the millions of families who suffered foreclosure and eviction."
"Neoliberal epidemics: the spread of austerity, obesity, stress and inequality [...] In our new book, we draw on an extensive body of scientific literature to assess the health effects of three decades of neoliberal policies. Focusing on the social determinants of health — the conditions of life and work that make it relatively easy for some people to lead long and healthy lives, while it is all but impossible for others — we show that there are four interconnected neoliberal epidemics: austerity, obesity, stress, and inequality. They are neoliberal because they are associated with or worsened by neoliberal policies. They are epidemics because they are observable on such an international scale and have been transmitted so quickly across time and space that if they were biological contagions they would be seen as of epidemic proportions."
"Deregulation of Wall Street Is Plain and Simple Corruption [...] These sweeping attacks on financial and consumer protections won't make America greater. They'll make it crater, setting the stage for the next Wall Street crisis and very likely another round of taxpayer-funded bank bailouts."
Historical Note: Let's not have any more mythology about who gave us CHIPS. March 14, 1997, in The New York Times, after Bill Clinton had gutted the much better AFDC/TANF provision, "Hatch Joins Kennedy to Back a Health Program: Senator Orrin G. Hatch, a conservative Republican, today embraced a major Democratic effort to provide health insurance for half of the nation's 10 million uninsured children, saying he would become the chief sponsor of the legislation. Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, wrote much of the bill, which would increase the Federal tax on tobacco products to finance health care for children."
"I Wrote Some of the Stolen Memos That Brett Kavanaugh Lied to the Senate About: He should be impeached, not elevated. [...] No, Kavanaugh should be removed because he was repeatedly asked under oath as part of his 2004 and 2006 confirmation hearings for his position on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit about whether he had received such information from Miranda, and each time he falsely denied it."
Chuck Schumer is a menace who should be removed from leadership immediately. David Dayen describes the idiot Senator from New York's latest "deal-making" at The American Prospect, "Schumer Surrenders: The Democrats' Senate leader lets Mitch McConnell pack the courts. [...] None of this has anything to do with how liberal Schumer or his caucus either is or isn't. It's all about tactics. In the minority, McConnell made life miserable for Senate Democrats, minimizing their output. Schumer has simply not stepped up with the same aggression. As a result, McConnell has been able to outmaneuver his counterpart repeatedly, with wide-ranging consequences for all Americans. Where have you gone, Harry Reid? Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you."
"Nancy Pelosi Promises That Democrats Will Handcuff The Democratic Agenda If They Retake The House: IN THE FIRST outline of the legislative agenda House Democrats would pursue if they take the majority in November, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi has made the public a big promise, vowing to handcuff her party's progressive ambitions, including in the event that a Democratic president succeeds Donald Trump, by resurrecting the 'pay-go' rule that mandates all new spending is offset with budget cuts or tax increases. Along the way, she is playing into the hands of Republican strategists eager to warn voters that Democrats' top priority is raising taxes. Forcing budget offsets for every piece of legislation would make it more difficult for Democrats to pass a host of liberal agenda items, from 'Medicare for All' to tuition-free public college. It continues a trend of Democrats caring far more about deficits than Republicans, constraining the activist impulses of liberal policymakers while giving conservatives free rein to blow giant holes in the tax code."
"Andrew Gillum scores stunning victory in Democratic nomination for Florida governor: The progressive mayor of Tallahassee overwhelmed his rivals in Miami-Dade, Broward and Duval counties -- all key battlegrounds. TALLAHASSEE — Democrat Andrew Gillum rode a surge of liberal support from young people and African-Americans to a stunning primary victory Tuesday and the historic opportunity to be the first black governor in Florida's history." Some of his tweets in the ensuing week, however, have taken the shine off.
"Ayanna Pressley defeats 10-term incumbent Mike Capuano in Democratic primary in Massachusetts: It's another upset for insurgent left, which has had its biggest successes when people of color embrace progressive ideology. [...] She appears to have done it by turning out young people and people of color, neither of whom typically vote in party primaries. With more than 90 percent of precincts reporting, Pressley had 58.4 percent, or 50,917 votes, to Capuano's 41.6 percent, or 36,234 votes."
"Democratic Party Mailer Associating Cynthia Nixon With Anti-Semitism Backfires: On the eve of Rosh Hashanah, just days before New York's gubernatorial primary on Thursday, a mailer sent by the New York Democratic Party misrepresenting Cynthia Nixon's views on Israel and accusing her of ignoring anti-Semitism has inspired widespread condemnation, forcing Governor Cuomo to assert that he did not approve it." Claims from Cuomo that he had nothing to do with it are hard to believe. Remembering a much earlier Cuomo campaign against Ed Koch, the Majority Report crew reversed and revised their slogan to, "Vote the Homo, not Cuomo."
"Bernie Sanders introduces 'Stop BEZOS Act' in the Senate: Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Wednesday introduced a Senate bill — the "Stop BEZOS Act" — that would require large employers such as Amazon.com and Walmart to pay the government for food stamps, public housing, Medicaid and other federal assistance received by their workers. The bill's name is a dig at Amazon chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos and stands for 'Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies Act.' It would establish a 100 percent tax on government benefits received by workers at companies with at least 500 employees, the former presidential candidate said Wednesday. "In other words, the taxpayers of this country would no longer be subsidizing the wealthiest people in this country who are paying their workers inadequate wages," Sanders said at a news conference announcing the bill. "Despite low unemployment, we end up having tens of millions of Americans working at wages that are just so low that they can't adequately take care of their families.""
"LePage files court-ordered plan to expand Medicaid in Maine — and asks feds to reject it: The LePage administration complied with a court order Tuesday and finally submitted required documents to the federal government to expand Medicaid to 70,000 Mainers — but there's a catch. Gov. Paul LePage, an expansion opponent, is asking federal officials to deny the application. [...] Voters approved Medicaid expansion by a 59 to 41 percent margin in November 2017, and the law passed at the ballot box required the state to file a State Plan Amendment in April. But the LePage administration has refused to implement it. The expansion, a key component of the Affordable Care Act, would provide health insurance for low-income Mainers earning up to 138 percent of the federal poverty limit, or $34,638 for a family of three and $16,753 for a single person. Expansion has been approved in 34 states."
Zaid Jilani, "Republicans Who Oppose Teacher Protests Are Losing Their Primaries, Even In Red States: WEST VIRGINIA REPUBLICAN state Sen. Robert Karnes felt pretty confident about opposing the longest teachers strike in the state's history. A longtime opponent of the state's teachers unions, he told a local newspaper that he wasn't worried about any political ramifications of the strike. 'I can't say that it will have zero effect, but I don't think it'll have any significant effect because, more often than not, they probably weren't voting on the Republican side of the aisle anyways,' he said of the state's teachers. Essentially, Karnes bet against his constituents' interest in education funding. And they called him on it. Karnes lost his May primary election, winning only 3,749 votes compared to Republican Del. Bill Hamilton's 5,787 votes. Hamilton was an opponent of right-to-work laws and expressed sympathy for the teachers strike. He secured the support of labor groups like the West Virginia AFL-CIO and the West Virginia Education Association Political Action Committee; altogether, organized labor contributed around $10,000 to his campaign." And similar stories in Kentucky and Oklahoma.
"'Cruel and vicious': Palestinian officials condemn Trump's closure of DC office: Palestinian leaders have condemned a decision by Donald Trump to shutter their diplomatic mission to Washington as part of a 'cruel and spiteful' campaign they say represents collective punishment against Palestinians. The move follows a year of US action that includes cutting hundreds of millions of dollars in humanitarian aid to Palestinians and recognising Jerusalem, a city that is territorially contested, as Israel's capital."
Dean Baker, "NYT Is Mistaken on NAFTA Negotiations: Trump is Threatening Ford and GM with Auto Tariffs, not Canada: Donald Trump is very confused about trade and it seems the confusion has spread to the NYT. Its article on the trade negotiations between the United States and Canada told readers that Trump is threatening with tariffs on the cars it exports to the United States. Canada doesn't pay tariffs on cars exported to the United States. The companies that import the cars to the United States would be the ones that pay the tariffs. This would primarily be Ford and General Motors, although there may also be some foreign auto companies that bring cars in from Canada. In Trump World it seems that trade is a battle between countries, with the ones that have the largest trade surplus being the winners. In reality, many U.S. corporations have benefited hugely from the imports that have been associated with the U.S. trade deficit. They have taken advantage of lower cost labor (not really true in Canada) in other countries to reduce costs. The basic story is that trade is about class, not country. Our patterns of trade were put in place to redistribute income upward. When Trump threatens to disrupt the patterns of trade established over the last quarter century he is most immediately threatening U.S. corporations. While there may also be some negative effects for workers in other countries, the direct targets are U.S. corporations. Trump may not understand this fact, but the NYT should."
Unfortunately, they are still in the education business. I hope this time they actually consult real educators instead of their rich-people genius. At least this one doesn't sound as bad as the last one. So far. "With $92 Million in Grants, Gates Foundation Launches Newest Strategy to Improve K-12 Schools. [...] "Rather than coming in with a bright, shiny new idea, we're asking districts, schools, and intermediaries to look at investments they've already made, and we're trying to make that last-mile investment that enables them to connect their work, to set the strategies or data that will enable them to be successful for students," said Robert Hughes, the foundation's director of K-12 education in a telephone press call with reporters."
"Bernie Sanders Is Officially Getting Under Jeff Bezos'S Skin [...] In statement after statement, the progressive senator from Vermont has decried Amazon, claiming that the $954 billion company doesn't pay enough workers a living wage — especially those who toil in its more than 100 fulfillment centers across the country. Many of the attacks have been personal: 'It is completely unacceptable that ordinary Americans should be subsidizing the wealthiest people in the world like Jeff Bezos when they pay their employees such inadequate wages,' he tweeted earlier this week. 'Count to ten,' he wrote in another tweet. 'In those ten seconds, Jeff Bezos, the owner and founder of Amazon, just made more money than the median employee of Amazon makes in an entire year.' Not content to bludgeon the company from the confines of Twitter, Sanders's office has also appealed directly to Amazon employees: 'Have you used public assistance, such as food stamps, Medicaid or subsidized housing, in order to make ends meet?' asks a form on his Web site. By now, these sorts of accusations are commonplace. But Amazon's response was not. Instead of brushing off the claims with a boilerplate statement or an internal memo, as Bezos did in response to a damning New York Times story in 2015, the company published an entire blog post on Wednesday devoted to debunking Sanders's claims. [...] The company added that it had offered Sanders a tour of its fulfillment centers, and invited its workers to respond with their positive experiences. Its post was later updated to include one worker testimonial." But there are a lot more testimonials to the contrary elsewhere.
Bruce Dixon explains "Why the Blue Wave Missed Missouri's 1st CD [...] The first is the black church, which is ridden with local, and since the advent of Bush's and Obama's faith based initiative, federal patronage. Black churches are often tied hand and foot to local politicians for everything from real estate deals to charter school contracts, and their leaders are often fixtures in local Democratic party affairs, even public officials themselves. The second is the nonprofit industrial complex, a literal army of advocacy groups sometimes doing housing and homeless activism, sometimes feeding the hungry, sometimes doing worker centers, womens health, tenants rights, LBGTQ activism, environmental stuff. There's another section of the nonprofit industrial complex which can't even be called nonpartisan with a straight face, offshoots of the NAACP and the Movement 4 Black Lives. These forces are tied to the political preferences of their corporate philanthropic funders. Executive directors of nonprofit organizations who don't find a way to support the right Democrats in primary season and all Democrats in general election put their careers, the livelihoods of all their employees, and the outfit's good works in jeopardy. And there are the unions — heavily public sector and disproportionately people of color, again all tied to the most right wing established Democrats on the local, state and federal level."
RIP: "The Village Voice Is Officially Dead: Three years after buying The Village Voice, and a year after the paper shut down its print edition, owner Peter Barbey told the remaining staff today that the publication will no longer be posting any new stories."
Briahna Gray, "Beware The Race Reductionist [...] If you're #online, like I am, you're probably already familiar with the main argument. It goes something like this: If a policy doesn't resolve racism 'first,' it's at worst, racist and at best, not worth pursuing. [...] Notice that this trick is aimed at policies which would threaten significant corporate or entrenched interests: the insurance industry, the banking industry, the energy sector, lenders. As the University of California, Berkeley, law professor and leading scholar on race Ian Haney-López observed as we discussed the motives behind this framing, mainstream Democrats, like Republicans, 'are funded by large donors. Of course they're concerned about the interests of the top 1 percent.' It's almost as if the real agenda here isn't ending racism, but deterring well-meaning liberals from policies that would upset the Democratic Party's financial base. [...] So will 'Medicare for All' cure racism? No. Will it completely eliminate point-of-care discrimination? It won't. But neither will doubling down on the status quo. Those who admonish these broad economic policies on the grounds that they won't end bigotry rarely, if ever, propose alternatives that will; nor do they suggest reforms to make flawed universal programs more perfect. This fact, more than anything, exposes the bad faith motives of at least some race reductionists.
Howie Klein on "What Happens AFTER The Wave? What Can Democrats Accomplish? [...] The DCCC is making the same mistake they made-- so disastrously-- in 2010 by letting the Republicans define Democratic candidates while they sit on their asses doing nothing but figuring out how of a rake-off from campaign donations their pals can get. Ryan's SuperPAC "is already unloading blistering attack ads on Democratic nominees in 15 key districts," while the DCCC is still spending their energy and resources against progressives and ignoring Republicans."
Why Philanthropy Is Bad for Democracy: Anand Giridharadas, author of Winners Take All, on how well-meaning liberals paved the way for Trump [...] I would love to tell you I figured it out within two minutes, but these things are seductive. It was a drip-drip-drip-drip of moments where you thought, 'Wait a second, why are we sitting in the Koch building? Why is this event funded by Monsanto, and by Pepsi, which seems to be changing the world by fattening kids? Why is Goldman Sachs a sponsor of our annual summer retreat?' The reality of the world outside kept getting worse and worse, and the people in the fellowship, and the sponsors, seemed to be the very people sucking most of the juice of progress. What I started to realize was that giving had become the wingman of taking. Generosity had become the wingman of injustice. 'Changing the world' had become the wingman of rigging the system."
Pierce, "It Turns Out Mike Pence Has Been Working on Being Unlikable for Decades: The late great Indiana political blogger Doghouse Riley used to call Mike Pence "the Choirboy," and hipped us all to the fact that this was a walking haircut stuffed with piety, ignorance, and not a whole lot else. Comes now CNN with a profile, and we learn from the people with whom he went to college that Pence has been practicing to be an unlikable and thoroughgoing prig for decades now. [...] This is the guy who is about four Diet Cokes, one clogged coronary artery, and/or a massive rage-tweet-induced aneurysm away from the presidency of the United States. And, again, it did not take Donald Trump to make Mike Pence a twisted, god-bothering, judgmental and successful political reptile. All that took was the Republican Party."
David Dayen says Tim Geithner was the "resistance" inside the Obama administration: "Last week, in an anonymous New York Times op-ed, a senior Trump official attempted to reassure the public that members of the administration were actively impeding their boss's wishes. One member of the public wasn't soothed: Trump's predecessor. 'The claim that everything will turn out okay because there are people inside the White House who secretly aren't following the president's orders, that is not a check,' Barack Obama said in a speech. 'That's not how our democracy's supposed to work. These people aren't elected. They're not accountable.' It was interesting timing for Obama to condemn executive branch defiance. This week marks the tenth anniversary of the fall of Lehman Brothers, seen as the emblematic event of the financial crisis. And early in Obama's first term, as he struggled to prevent further collapse, he faced similar insubordination from a key official: Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. According to credible accounts, Geithner slow-walked a direct presidential order to prepare the breakup of Citigroup, instead undertaking other measures to nurse the insolvent bank back to health. This resistance to accountability for those who perpetrated the crisis, consistent with Geithner's demonstrated worldview, had catastrophic effects — including the Trump presidency itself. [...] Today, some may welcome the internal dissension in the Trump administration. But Geithner's actions to protect banks from the president he served, and the anger it bred at a 'rigged' system, diminished the public's faith in government intervention and helped install Trump in the White House. Ten years later, Geithner's one regret, as he put it in the Times, was that regulators don't have as much power now as he had then to bail out banks. But he wasn't given that power unilaterally; he took it, and America is still dealing with the consequences."
Ryan Cooper in The Week, "The biggest policy mistake of the last decade: In the great economic battle of the past decade, the winner is the tried and true — in a rout. After the 2008 financial crisis, old-fashioned Keynesians offered a simple fix: Stimulate the economy. With idle capacity and unemployed workers, nations could restore economic production at essentially zero real cost. It helped the U.S. in the Great Depression and it could help the U.S. in the Great Recession too. But during and immediately after the crisis, neoliberal and conservative forces attacked the Keynesian school of thought from multiple directions. Stimulus couldn't work because of some weird debt trigger condition, or because it would cause hyperinflation, or because unemployment was "structural," or because of a "skills gap," or because of adverse demographic trends. Well going on 10 years later, the evidence is in: The anti-Keynesian forces have been proved conclusively mistaken on every single argument. Their refusal to pick up what amounted to a multiple-trillion-dollar bill sitting on the sidewalk is the greatest mistake of economic policy analysis since 1929 at least. Let's take the culprits in turn."
A book review from Jennifer Szalai, "Crashed Connects the Dots From 2008 Crisis to Trump, Brexit and More [...] [...] On the apparent Democratic distaste for conflict, Tooze is quietly scathing. 'Rather than seeking to mobilize the indignation simmering in American society,' the Obama administration sought to tamp it down, offering 'one technocratic fix after another.' Putting it another way, Democratic centrism won the (financial) war but lost the (political) peace. To judge from Trump's ascendancy, along with the historical evidence so scrupulously marshaled in 'Crash,' Tooze is right. [...] One of the great virtues of this bravura work of economic history is how much attention it devotes to issues of power. 'Who was being hurt?' Tooze writes of the 2008 crisis. 'Who was included in the circle of those who needed to be protected? And who was not?' He reckons that in their bid to paper over such fundamental political questions with technical solutions, neoliberal centrists inadvertently answered them. Incremental tweaking did little to address the grief and suffering caused by the crisis, making political power more visible. By laying bare who would be sacrificed when the tide went out, they left a ragged hole for the likes of Trump and Bannon to walk through."
Harper's Index:
• Average number of months by which Republican-appointed judges sentence blacks to longer jail terms than whites : 7.8
By which Democratic-appointed judges do : 4.8
• Estimated percentage of US adults exonerated of crimes who are found to have falsely confessed : 10
Of juveniles : 38
• Percentage of heterosexual men without a high school diploma who changed their last name when they were last married : 10
Of heterosexual men with a college degree who did : 2
Nick Hanauer is sounding the alarm to his fellow zillioniaires, "The Pitchforks Are Coming — For Us Plutocrats [...] If we don't do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn't eventually come out. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It's not if, it's when." Also, when I scrolled past the end, I found another warning from Joseph Stiglitz on The Myth of America's Golden Age. He says the same thing, only shorter.
Matt Stoller tweeted: Tim Geithner, Ben Bernanke, and Hank Paulson argue in the New York Times that our main political problem is insufficient authority to bail out banks. I mean, just, speechless. And then he "tweeted, "1. Ok, time to address this piece by Hank Paulson, Tim Geithner, and Ben Bernanke on the need for more bailout authority to address financial crises. It is a surprisingly interesting but hidden political argument." Go read the thread.
RIP: Bill Daily, Major Healey in I Dream of Jeannie, Dies at 91: Bill Daily, the affable TV actor who starred as Major Roger Healey in I Dream of Jeannie as well as on The Bob Newhart Show, died Sept. 4 in Santa Fe, N.M., his son J. Patrick Daily confirmed. He was 91."
Sirota at the Guardian, "Yes, let's wipe out Trump. But take neoliberal Democrats with him, too: [...] Recounting this sordid record is not to dispute Democrats' occasional successes. Some blue locales continue to periodically pass progressive initiatives, most recently on climate change, net neutrality and minimum wages. These are undoubtedly important, but they have for the most part been incremental at a time when the economic and ecological crises we face demand far more radical action. The current iteration of the Democratic party has proven time and again that it is not merely uninterested in that kind of radicalism, but actively opposed to it. Party powerbrokers and multimillion-dollar MSNBC pundits would prefer an election focused exclusively on the palace dramas surrounding Trump's boorish outbursts and outrageous personal behavior. They don't want an election focused on the bipartisan neoliberalism that has wrought the desperation and mayhem unfolding outside the palace walls."
If you ever wonder what's wrong with Bob Woodward's journalism, you normally can't check his sources to find out what really happened. But one time, he didn't have that protection, because he wrote a regrettable book where sources weren't speaking confidentially and no state secrets were involved, and someone checked it out. Tanner Colby on the troubling things he learned when he re-reported Woodward's book about John Belushi.
This is a few years old, but I get tired of hearing right-wingers (especially the "centrists") pretending it was all some instant reaction from the religious right against Roe v. Wade. But that didn't happen. There was no reaction from the religious right at the time because they didn't care about that. It was manufactured. "The Real Origins of the Religious Right"
Eventually, if I keep looking, everything turns up on YouTube. Meeting of Minds, first episode, in which Steve Allen talks to dinner guests Teddy Roosevelt, Cleopatra, Thomas Paine, and Saint Thomas Aquinas.
Elizabeth Warren's press release for her Accountable Capitalism Act is nicely put together and provides some good background:
"For most of our country's history, American corporations balanced their responsibilities to all of their stakeholders - employees, shareholders, communities - in corporate decisions. It worked: profits went up, productivity went up, wages went up, and America built a thriving middle class.
"But in the 1980s a new idea quickly took hold: American corporations should focus only on maximizing returns to their shareholders. That had a seismic impact on the American economy. In the early 1980s, America's biggest companies dedicated less than half of their profits to shareholders and reinvested the rest in the company. But over the last decade, big American companies have dedicated 93% of earnings to shareholders - redirecting trillions of dollars that could have gone to workers or long-term investments. The result is that booming corporate profits and rising worker productivity have not led to rising wages.
"Additionally, because the wealthiest top 10% of American households own 84% of all American-held shares - while more than 50% of American households own no stock at all - the dedication to "maximizing shareholder value" means that the multi-trillion dollar American corporate system is focused explicitly on making the richest Americans even richer.
"Verizon refused to un-throttle a California fire department's 'unlimited' plan during wildfires: Although calling out wireless carriers is a frequent pasttime here at BGR, sometimes a story comes along that sounds so cartoonishly villanous that you assume something in the story is wrong. But in this case, there are emails, and what they reveal is that Verizon's big talk about supporting emergency services apparently doesn't work in the real world. Ars Technica's Jon Brodkin found a series of emails between the Santa Clara County Fire Department and Verizon discussing the fire department's supposedly unlimited plan, how it was being throttled while on scene trying to battle a wildfire, and what could be done about it." This is shameful; if they're going to say a plan is "unlimited", it should damned well be unlimited, fire department or not. Their claim of support for emergency services sounds like pure fabrication.
"The Facebook blackout 'glitch' censored independent media, but left the mainstream media untouched: Facebook has initiated a massive purge of independent media content. This blackout includes barring multiple independent media sites from posting links to their own site on their Facebook page, deleting independent media posts without warning or reason, marking independent media posts as spam so ordinary members of the public can't share them, and deleting ordinary people's posts without reason. This issue has impacted multiple left-leaning independent media sites like Another Angry Voice, Evolve Politics, Vox Political, People's Campaign for Corbyn, EU Citizens for an Independent Scotland, and many others. With pages left unable to post links to their own articles. Facebook have tried to dismiss the independent media blackout as a "glitch" but interestingly the Facebook pages of mainstream media outlets were unaffected by the "glitch". Mainstream media outlets that have been able to continue posting articles throughout the blackout include the Daily Mail, The S*n, Evening Standard, The Times and Sunday Times, The Guardian, The Spectator, Daily Mirror, Daily Express, Sky News, BBC News, and BBC Politics. Additionally the hard-right Guido Fawkes blog was also allowed to continue posting links to their vile echo chamber of hate throughout the Facebook blackout. The fact that a select few pages were allowed to continue posting throughout the Facebook blackout suggests that there's some kind of Facebook 'whitelist' protecting them from whatever measures they've been taking against independent media sources. So a range of left-wing, pro-independence, anti-Tory, pro-Corbyn, anti-fracking independent media pages were barred from sharing links, while mainstream media outlets and hard-right blogs were completely unaffected."
"Reality Winner, who pleaded guilty to leaking secret U.S. report, gets 63-month sentence: AUGUSTA, Ga. -- A former government contractor who pleaded guilty to mailing a classified U.S. report to a news organization was sentenced to more than five years Thursday as part of a deal with prosecutors, who called it the longest sentence ever imposed for a federal crime involving leaks to the media. Reality Winner, 26, pleaded guilty in June to a single count of transmitting national security information. The former Air Force translator worked as a contractor at a National Security Agency's office in Augusta, Georgia, when she printed a classified report and left the building with it tucked into her pantyhose. Winner told the FBI she mailed the document to an online news outlet."
"Wells Fargo-- The Anti-Medical Marijuana Bank-- Strikes Again [...] 'They told me my account was being flagged because of my political platform,' Fried said during a news conference at the Capitol. She lists greater access to medical marijuana as one of the main issues of her campaign."
'Incredible': New Poll That Shows 70% of Americans Support Medicare for All Includes 84% of Democrats and 52% of Republicans: Don't tell anyone but, uh, we're gonna win. [...] With such levels of popularity, as an accompanying article exploring some of the tensions within the party makes clear, Democratic leaders are being told they ignore the push for Medicare for All at their own peril. [...] While the Reuters article focused mainly on the question of whether progressive leaders like Sanders and congressional candidates like New York's Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Nebraska's Kara Eastman can convince voters to support progressive proposals, the news agency's polling showed that centrist Democrats, who claim they are trying to appeal to so-called "moderates," are actually alienating the vast majority of potential voters on key issues." This means that the percentage of Republican voters who support M4A is higher than the percentage of Democrats in Congress who do.
"California Could Soon End Money Bail, But At What Cost?: The passage of Senate Bill 10 would decimate the bail industry, but many advocates say it falls short of true reform. [...] In earlier drafts of the bill, all defendants would have appeared before a judge with a presumption of release. To detain someone, prosecutors would have had to make a case with convincing evidence that there was no way to release the person while ensuring his or her next court appearance and protecting public safety. This month, however, a new draft of the legislation began making the rounds that vastly altered its vision and scope. While abolishing cash bail and mandating the release of most people arrested for nonviolent misdemeanors within 12 hours of being booked, the new draft gives county judges wide-ranging discretion over which defendants deemed 'medium risk' could be detained pretrial."
And Gaius reminded me recently of this four-year-old interview Sam Seder did with Philip Mirowski, author of Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown., on the history and continued evil of neoliberalism.
George Monbiot in the Guardian, "A despot in disguise: one man's mission to rip up democracy: James McGill Buchanan's vision of totalitarian capitalism has infected public policy in the US. Now it's being exported. [...] He explained how attempts to desegregate schooling in the American south could be frustrated by setting up a network of state-sponsored private schools. It was he who first proposed privatising universities, and imposing full tuition fees on students: his original purpose was to crush student activism. He urged privatisation of social security and many other functions of the state. He sought to break the links between people and government, and demolish trust in public institutions. He aimed, in short, to save capitalism from democracy."
Even Forbes admits it: "America's Real Economy: It Isn't Booming: Ostensibly, for the past ten years, our economy has been recovering from the 2008 collapse. During the past few years, our comeback seems to have gained momentum. All the official indicators say we're back in boom times, with a bull market, low unemployment and steady job growth. But there is an alternative set of data that depicts a different America, where the overlooked majority struggles from month to month." The story gets the data right (Thanks to The Nation and TomDispatch), but then, alas, descends into prescriptions that come straight from the centrist playbook. "What's genuinely astonishing to me is that the private sector doesn't see the immense danger in all this — not simply the prospect of a collapse from enormous household debt loads, but the prospect of civil unrest after another huge correction like the one in 2008. Our current course is unsustainable. And for all the proposals for changes in public policy to ameliorate income inequality, only the private sector can get the nation on a better track by raising wages, increasing benefits and investing in new ventures and expanded markets." While it's true that raising wages is certainly a necessity, the private sector is not going to do any of this unless public policy forces them to. The constant refrain that we need more and more education — now supplied by the private sector — is ludicrous since we already have an educated populace that is out of work. The only thing the private sector can actually do at this point is reverse course on pressuring government to make their lives so easy, and start telling government to restore the regulations and enforcement that used to make them pay better wages, treat their workers better, and quit moving production abroad. Government has to go back to making business work, and it has to start spending real money again in the real economy and taxing the hell out of the rich.
Just when I was about to go to bed I see this tweet from Sam retweeting David Dayen retweeting a Will Sommer tweet posting a screen capture of a tweet from Lionel ("One of the leading promoters of the QAnon conspiracy theory") bragging about the honor of going to the White House to meet Trump. Lionel, as David points out, is "literally the guy who replaced @SamSeder on Air America." But in the ensuing thread I found a 2010 video I'd never seen, "Sam Seder on TYT Network (Why Air America Fell, Obama & Much More!)," posted because it includes Sam talking about the end of Air America Radio not long after it's official demise, but before that an amazingly prescient interview with Chris Hayes about how the failure of Obama and the Democratic Party to seize the populist moment could easily lead to right-wing "populism" - and the situation we have now.
RIP: "Aretha Franklin, 'the queen of soul', dies aged 76: Regarded as one of the greatest singers of all time, Aretha Franklin has died of advanced pancreatic cancer" Everybody has the same headline, because what else could it be? The Guardian used a video of "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman" in it's obit, but it's longer tribute gives you more. Okay, I teared up, but still, she had a great run - she got to be Aretha.
* "When Aretha Franklin Offered To Post Bail For Angela Davis: Aretha Franklin, who died today at the age of 76 in her home in Detroit, was known for her unbelievable musical talent and majestic career, but the Queen of Soul was also a longtime warrior in the fight for social justice. A close friend of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who visited her in her final days, Franklin was a vocal supporter of civil rights movements, often performing at benefits and encouraging voter registration. But her private and church-based work — including stepping in to financially support Martin Luther King Jr.'s movement, the families of incarcerated people, and black activist ministers — was largely under the radar, Jackson told the Detroit Free Press recently."
RIP: Mark Perkel. "On August first, one of the coolest people you've probably never heard of died. Before there was a Netroots Nation or bloggers commonly called bloggers way back in 2000, Mark Perkel founded the liberal voices on the web — people like Bartcop, Brad Friedman and me — and offered us free hosting and eternal digital protection." -- Tammy, delivering a quick obituary on phone call to The Majority Report. (That's a direct section link.)
If you listen to the earlier parts of that Sam Seder video, you'll hear that some YouTube algorithm knocked him off his live feed Friday. It's funny how these social media censors have such a problem with comedy. But they have trouble with other things, too, and it's curious that Facebook has a problem with Venezuelanalysis: "Venezuelanalysis is the only independent English language website covering news and analysis on Venezuela from a progressive perspective, & which platforms leftist grassroots voices from within Venezuela. It is run by committed journalists, authors and academics, & praised by renowned journalists and intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky, John Pilger, Marta Harnecker, Oliver Stone, and so on. We cannot help but feel that the removal of our page is related to an attempt to stifle the alternative and progressive perspectives that we feature on Venezuela." (Here's another story at Global Research.) Still no explanation from FB. And AntiWar.com is reporting on suspensions and bannings, too. It seems strange that all this cross-platform de-platforming has happened at once.
Matt Taibbi, "Censorship Does Not End Well: How America learned to stop worrying and put Mark Zuckerberg in charge of everything [...] Two weeks ago, we learned about a new campaign against 'inauthentic' content, conducted by Facebook in consultation with Congress and the secretive think tank Atlantic Council — whose board includes an array of ex-CIA and Homeland Security officials — in the name of cracking down on alleged Russian disinformation efforts. As part of the bizarre alliance of Internet news distributors and quasi-government censors, the social network zapped 32 accounts and pages, including an ad for a real 'No Unite the Right 2' anti-racist counter-rally in D.C. this past weekend. [...] Last week, we saw another flurry of censorship news. Facebook apparently suspended VenezuelaAnalysis.com, a site critical of U.S. policy toward Venezuela. (It was reinstated Thursday.) Twitter suspended a pair of libertarians, including @DanielLMcAdams of the Ron Paul Institute and @ScottHortonShow of Antiwar.com, for using the word 'bitch' (directed toward a man) in a silly political argument. They, too, were later re-instated. [...] And yet: I didn't celebrate when Jones was banned. Collectively, all these stories represent a revolutionary moment in media. Jones is an incidental player in a much larger narrative. Both the Jones situation and the Facebook-Atlantic Council deletions seem an effort to fulfill a request made last year by the Senate Judiciary Committee. Last October, Facebook, Google and Twitter were asked by Hawaii Senator Mazie Hizono to draw up a 'mission statement' to 'prevent the foment of discord.' [...] Now that we've opened the door for ordinary users, politicians, ex-security-state creeps, foreign governments and companies like Raytheon to influence the removal of content, the future is obvious: an endless merry-go-round of political tattling, in which each tribe will push for bans of political enemies."
Leaving aside the usual creebing about college liberals, which is wrong and beside the point, Peter Van Buren's argument in The American Conservative is fairly strong, in "I Was Banned for Life From Twitter: I became persona non grata after a heated exchange over the media's complicity with the government. The mob won."
Dean Baker, "Jake Tapper' Dishonest Fact Check On Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Medicare for All: I already did a tweet on this, but thought it was worth posting here. Jake Tapper did a completely dishonest fact check on Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez over their claim that a study by a right-wing think tank showed that Medicare for all would save the country $2 trillion over a decade (roughly 0.8 percent of GDP). Tapper misrepresented their comments to say that they claimed the study would save the government $2 trillion. He then points out that the study showed Medicare for all would hugely increase the cost of healthcare to the government. Of course, the cost to the government will increase if it takes responsibility for the bulk of healthcare payments in the country. No one is contesting this point. The question is what happens to the cost of healthcare to the country as a whole. Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez were accurately citing one of the scenarios in the study on this point. Tapper owes it to Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez, and more importantly to his audience, to correct himself on this one. It's a straightforward point and he really should be able to get it right." More specifically, the study, in its main body, discussed the costs under Sanders' actual, existing Medicare for All bill. The other scenario the study mentions occurs only in an appendix and is sheer conjecture about what it might otherwise contain.
Michelle Goldberg on "The Debt-Shaming of Stacey Abrams: Our pernicious double standard on politicians who owe money. [...] It's going to be a tight race: Abrams and Kemp are currently tied in the polls. But Republicans think they can damage Abrams by going after her on the issue of her personal debt, which totals more than $200,000. Last week, an ad from the Republican Governors Association hit her for lending money to her own campaign while owing $54,000 to the Internal Revenue Service, describing her as 'self-serving' and 'fiscally irresponsible.' Kemp himself made a baseless suggestion that Abrams might have violated the law: 'Instead of paying more than $50,000 in back taxes, she gave $50,000 to her campaign. If that's not criminal, it should be.' This line of attack throws a pernicious political dynamic into high relief. The financial problems of poor and middle-class people are treated as moral failings, while rich people's debt is either ignored or spun as a sign of intrepid entrepreneurialism."
With the Accountable Capitalism Act, says Charlie Pierce, "Elizabeth Warren Put a Stake in the Ground. We Should Pay Close Attention. If corporations want to be treated like people then they should be punished like them, too." The idea is to have a federal charter system for big corporations and make them live up to being good citizens that contribute to the public good.
"Author Reza Aslan threatened by Israeli Border Authorities with Family Separation: BETHLEHEM (Ma'an) — Shin Bet, Israel's internal security agency, detained Iranian-American writer, Reza Aslan, as he was entering Israel through Jordan, with his family. Reza Aslan, 46, took to his Twitter account, where he said that the Shin Bet used police state tactics against him and his family. Aslan arrived in Israel with his wife, children, and in-laws after a visit to Jordan. Upon his arrival, he was separated from his family at the border and detained by the Shin Bet, which repeatedly threatened him . He wrote in his Twitter post that the Shin Bet interrogator threatened him by repeatedly saying 'we can make it so you don't see your kids for a long time.' Aslan mentioned that 'the police state part began in earnest: Write down names of journalists you associate with. Write down names of Palestinian organizations you support.' According to Aslan, he tried to cooperate as best as he could, but was accused of lying after answering each question. The Shin Bet interrogator warned Aslan not to enter the Palestinian territories, not to meet with or speak to any Palestinians or any Israeli troublemakers and warned him by saying that 'we are watching you,' Aslan wrote. Aslan concluded his tweets by saying that 'this was my 4th trip to Israel in ten years and every time it's gotten worse. It's becoming unrecognizable as a democracy. It is becoming a full-blown police state.'"
Ellis Winningham, "Public Purpose Spending is Not Socialism — It's the Job of the Federal Government: There is an immense problem with the term 'socialism', especially in the United States, where the word is abused endlessly by right-wing politicians, 'free market' enthusiasts and now, even liberals have joined the red-baiting bandwagon, labeling former Sanders supporters, many of whom are now Stein supporters as 'socialists' and any proposed economic initiatives as 'socialism'. This is the result of a successful long-term propaganda campaign of intentional misinformation which causes the general public to view any public purpose spending as socialism and so, they irrationally fear the public purpose. Meanwhile, the 1% reaps the benefits through continued abuse of an unwitting public, allowing them to profit at the expense of the national economy and society. Let me assure you that there isn't an academic definition of socialism for those of us who possess degrees and then an entirely different one for the general public. It doesn't work that way. There is only one definition of socialism and we will discuss it today, because the nonsense needs to stop."
Ryan Cooper in The Week, "The treachery of Tom Perez: Tom Perez is chair of the Democratic National Committee because wealthy centrist liberals — above all then-President Barack Obama — needed a convenient stooge to keep the party machinery out of the left's hands. He's serving his big donor masters loyally, and in the process failing his party, the United States of America, and humanity as a whole. Most egregiously, he recently reversed a ban on the party accepting donations from fossil fuel corporations, with the limp excuse that "[w]e're not a party that punishes workers simply based on how they make ends meet." The man is an obstacle to human flourishing. [...] It takes a special kind of incompetence to sell out the party's activist base and not even be able to raise good money off it."
"The New Old Democrats: It's not the 1990s anymore. People want the government to help solve big problems. Here's how the Democrats must respond."
"Democrats Must Reclaim the Center — by Moving Hard Left: America needs a centrist party that actually represents the economic center, not just zillionaires like me. [...] There once was a time when both parties vied to occupy the majoritarian center, an era when American politics was more a struggle over means than of ends — until, after three decades of unprecedented and broad-based post-war prosperity, the Republican Party lurched violently to the right, and the age of New Deal centrism came to a close. Supply-side tax cuts, attacks on unions, a crusade against 'big government' and other tactics of the Reagan revolution helped put us on the road to a new Gilded Age. And while Republicans certainly led the way, we wouldn't have gotten here as quickly had Democrats not kept driving in the same direction every time we managed to get our hands on the wheel."
"There Is No Such Thing As A Moderate Mainstream Centrist [...] This is what passes for the American political 'center' today. Two mainstream parties, both backed to the hilt by the entirety of corporate media from coast to coast, arguing with each other over who is doing more to help advance cold war aggressions between two nuclear superpowers. They're not arguing about whether or not the world should be destroyed, they're arguing over who gets to push the button.
Yves Smith on Why We Didn't See the 2008 Crash Coming [...] One point that is often lost is the Bush administration courteously left $75 billion in the TARP for the Obama administration to use to pay for mortgage modifications, which they never used. Obama had an opportunity when he came in. The country was desperate and frightened. He could've done an FDR. He could've done almost anything. And yet, the die was cast when he appointed Timothy Geithner as his Treasury secretary. That was announced in mid-November. I mean, Obama is basically don't-rock-the boat. He may be center-left on social issues, but he's basically center-right on economic issues. [...] We have this fallacy that normal people should be able to save for retirement. If public pension funds, which can invest at the very lowest possible fees, can't make this work, how is Joe Mom-and-Pop America gonna be able to do this? Again, it's back to the stagnant worker wages. So, great, we're not paying people enough, housing prices are very inflated. We've got this horrible medical system that costs way too much, and how are people supposed to put any money aside when their real estate and their rents and their health costs are going up? Why do you think we have Trump? I mean, even though he did a big bait-and-switch, as we all know, there were a lot of people that lost their homes, their community wasn't what it used to be, particularly if they lived in the Rust Belt. And then you have these people on the coast saying, 'Oh, they should go get training. It's disgusting.' I mean, let them eat cake is let them get training. What you hear from these coastal elites: People over 40, even over 35, are basically unhirable. Are you gonna train them? They're gonna waste their time thinking they can get a new job? I mean, that's just lunacy.
"The Explicable Mystery of the National Debt [...] The mystery is, while all this perpetual haggling and hand-wringing is happening, no one seems to be knocking on America's door asking to be repaid. Unlike Greece and Italy who are constantly being squeezed by the E.U. central bank and the IMF to repay their debts, no one seems to be squeezing the U.S. at all. Unlike Spain, which gets an earful from Germany if it even whispers about increasing its national borrowing, the U.S. hears nothing from anybody (except its own politicians and pundits) when it votes to raise the beanstalk one cap higher. How can that be? It's almost as if — weirdly — there isn't anyone out there expecting to get paid back. [...] First, the U.S. 'national debt' is functionally not a debt at all. It is simply a tally of the U.S. Treasury bonds which the government has issued and then traded for U.S. dollars which already existed in the private sector. These Treasury bonds are in effect interest-paying, time-deposit savings accounts for the bond holders. You personally may have traded some of your retirement dollars for one of these 'savings accounts' and you know, firsthand, they definitely contain real money! The 'national debt,' then, is really a 'national savings account.'"
Nice xkcd on computerized voting. Paper ballots, hand-counted in full public view on the night, y'all.
"Clinton Democrats Embrace Losing Strategy To Combat 'Sanders-Style Socialism' In Midterms: Democratic Party elites are increasingly concerned the midterm elections will be a 'base election' and make their centrist politics even more irrelevant, as insurgent candidates like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez garner widespread support. The think tank, Third Way, recently held a conference in Ohio with Democrats, who primarily adhere to the politics of President Bill Clinton, and new recruits, who they hope will counter 'Bernie Sanders-style socialism.' They also intend to defend corporate executives and wealthy people from condemnation for their attacks on poor and working class Americans. 'Right now, in the Democratic Party, there is only one option on the table: Sanders-style socialism. That's the main option on the table. We're doing this now because the party's got to have a choice,' Jon Cowan, one of the presidents of Third Way, declared. 'It's going to matter a hell of a lot in 2020, and so while 2020 may feel a ways off, in our mind it isn't. And the ideas primary starts now.'"
"Would Corporate Democrats Rather Lose Than Include Progressives? [...] What the DNC and the centrist-corporatists who control it still refuse to accept is that anti-Republicanism — even anti-Trumpism — is not now, nor will it ever be, enough to lure the progressive populist left to the polls. Against history, against the 2016 election results, they assume that the default mode of a left-leaning voter is Democratic."
"'Absolute Failure': DNC Passes Perez Resolution Reversing Ban on Donations From Fossil Fuel PACs: Just two months after the Democratic National Committee (DNC) was celebrated by environmentalists for banning donations from fossil fuel companies, it voted 30-2 on Friday to adopt a resolution from Chair Tom Perez that critics said effectively reverses the ban and represents 'an absolute failure by the DNC.'"
Ryan Cooper in The Week, "America for sale: Let's review some news from the first half of the week [...] This is modern American politics, folks: rotten to its very marrow. Corruption is eating the United States alive. As the Numidian King Jugurtha supposedly said of the Roman Republic: 'Yonder lies a city put up for sale, and its days are numbered if it finds a buyer.'"
David Dayen, "The CEO Circle of Trust: About a year ago, CEOs enlisted PR underlings to send out strongly worded press releases distancing themselves from President Trump's allyship with hate in Charlottesville. A year later, five members of business advisory councils that were shuttered after Charlottesville sat down to dinner with the president. Because in the end, they want power on their side. Having power on your side can lead to fun things like secretly running a cabinet agency. Three Trump cronies from Mar-a-Lago, including Marvel Entertainment chairman Ike Perlmutter, are effectively setting policy for the Department of Veterans Affairs. I've just going to attribute the useless VA hotline to them. By the way, Perlmutter keeps a grip on this power by... having dinners with Trump. I don't know the dining schedule of the CEOs of Nucor and U.S. Steel, but as long as they keep close to Trump, they can maximize monopoly power by rejecting requests for exemptions to foreign steel tariffs. (by the way I called this one.) And if you're a CEO who's really in tight with Trump, you can just get your own cabinet agency outright, like demonstrable grifter Wilbur Ross, who until just weeks ago still had major investments in shipping companies while running the Commerce Department, whose logo has a ship on it. We're seeing a fusion of business and the state that only has precedent if you take the word "fascism" literally. Corporate titans are learning that kissing the president's ring for the next 2-6 years is the way to get ahead in life. And now that the SEC wants a word with Elon Musk over his obvious chicanery in tweeting about taking Tesla private, he may want to book a room in the Trump hotel in D.C. too."
Another own-goal when "The Koch Brothers Commissioned A Survey Of Americans And Found Most Like A $15 Minimum Wage, Free College, And Universal Health Care: DURING THE MONTH of July, the marketing and communications group In Pursuit Of — launched by the Koch brothers in 2017— conducted a survey of Americans on a range of issues. The poll was later written up by RealClearPolitics, which spun the results as favorable to the Koch network. RealClearPolitics noted that on a set of vague values questions, Americans appeared to take the conservative or libertarian side of political arguments. For instance, RealClearPolitics noted that the survey found that 86 percent of Americans said the right to personal property is key to a free and just society. Okay, sure." (Did anyone mention the difference between "personal property" and "private property", I wonder?) Short version: Despite the fact that the Kochs have put millions of dollars into convincing Americans that we don't want more regulation of Wall Street, free college, a living wage, and a lot of other things that the Kochs don't like, Americans still think they'd be an improvement over what we have now.
A pretty straightforward chart accompanies this article, "'X' Marks the Spot Where Inequality Took Root: Dig Here [...] The graphic below tells three stories. First, we see two distinct historic periods since World War II. In the first period, workers shared the gains from productivity. In the later period, a generation of workers gained little, even as productivity continued to rise. The second message is the very abrupt transition from the post-war historic period to the current one. Something happened in the mid-70's to de-couple wages from productivity gains. The third message is that workers' wages — accounting for inflation and all the lower prices from cheap imported goods — would be double what they are now, if workers still took their share of gains in productivity." I kept getting the feeling there was something he was trying not to say, though.
Lauren Windsor had a few choice words for the opportunist debutentes in, "Polishing Turds at Third Way: A few weeks ago, I debunked the spin out from CNBC that Sen. Mark Warner is being pressured by major Democratic donors to run for president in 2020 as a moderate counter to liberal Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren -- according to my source, "he is indeed running" and has been pitching the idea since at least September of 2017. It's worth noting that CNBC did not name any of these big donors, and I suspect that's because they hail from the likes of centrist, establishment DC think tank Third Way, which has been burned in the past for launching broadsides against Warren." These people think if they can just find the right PR, they can keep sailing this stuff by us all.
Margaret Kimberly, "The United States Destroys Venezuela's Economy [...] Sanctions are war by other means, invisible to most eyes. [...] In 2015 Barack Obama issued an executive order declaring Venezuela to be 'an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.' That decree is necessary in order to impose economic sanctions. But sanctions do not only mean that American corporations and individuals cannot do business with the targeted country. Any country that conducts economic transactions with Venezuela will also be subject to sanctions. Even in its state of decline the United States is the 800-pound financial gorilla that can't be ignored."
"They stood up to hatred" — They came back from defeating the fascists only to find them at home. The 43 Group, including a young Vidal Sassoon, took their outrage to the streets. Years later, they contributed to this oral history. Watch A Rage In Dalston.
Film review of "The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution [...] One thing that I loved about this documentary was that it told a piece of the story of the Panthers from the perspectives of a number of the major leaders, including Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale, Eldridge Cleaver, David Hilliard, Kathleen Cleaver, Ericka Huggins, Emory Douglas, Fred Hampton and others, but it also told the history from the perspectives of the rank and file members — people like the Freeman brothers, William Calhoun, Wayne Pharr, Steve McClutchen, Tarika Lewis, Blair Anderson, Jamal Joseph, Landon Williams and others."
Mark Evanier posted an episode of Firing Line in which William F. Buckley interviewed Groucho Marx, which he introduces by reposting something he wrote about Buckley earlier. It's all true.
So many evils can be traced back to Richard Nixon. "Did you know that before 1973 it was illegal in the US to profit off of health care. The Health Maintenance Organization Act of 1973 passed by Nixon changed everything. In 1973, Nixon did a personal favor for his friend and campaign financier, Edgar Kaiser, then president and chairman of Kaiser-Permanente. Nixon signed into law, the Health Maintenance Organization Act of 1973, in which medical insurance agencies, hospitals, clinics and even doctors, could begin functioning as for-profit business entities instead of the service organizations they were intended to be. And which insurance company got the first taste of federal subsidies to implement HMOA73 ... *gasp* ... why, it was Kaiser-Permanente! What are the odds?" Now, if only we can explain why the so-called liberal champion of health care, Edward Kennedy, proposed this piece of crap.
I'm not going to post the details, but so far nearly half of the Our Revolution types have been winning primaries and elections. Considering the fact that most of them are running against establishment picks and incumbents, that's actually a pretty remarkable record.
"Even Libertarians Admit Medicare for All Would Save Trillions: A new study from a libertarian think tank admits that Medicare for All would save a whopping $2 trillion." Of course, the headline buried the lead on every story about this, but this Koch-funded study tried to make M4A sound more expensive than what we have now and still couldn't, despite underestimating the likely costs of continuing the way we are and the potential savings of the proposed program.
RIP: Another guy I would have loved to vote for once, for president: "Ron Dellums, Forceful Liberal in Congress for 27 Years, Dies at 82. Ron Dellums, the son of a longshoreman who became one of America's best-known black congressmen, a California Democrat with a left-wing agenda that put civil rights and programs for people ahead of weapons systems and warfare, died early Monday at his home in Washington. He was 82."
RIP: Joel Silberman, activist, organizer, performer, and show biz mensch. We were hopeful when Joel's doctors said they thought they'd caught his pancreatic cancer early enough, but though he fought and continued to run workshops and keep on doing what he did right up to the end, he finally had to admit defeat and say farewell to us. I will always treasure the reports, clips, and musings he posted for his friends during that journey, and I was pleased to see a statement on Joel's passing from Rep. Barbara Lee.
"Should Republican Billionaires Be Picking Democratic Candidates The Way They Already Pick GOP Candidates? Let's start with some news: Last week, Fox News' James Rupert Murdoch, a British billionaire, put half a million dollars into one of Nancy Jacobson's shady No Labels SuperPACs that aims to fill Congress with candidates from the Republican Wing of the Democratic Party. Their current goal is a smear campaign against Alan Grayson. Most recently, Jacobson pulled off the same filth against Marie Newman in Illinois' 3rd District House primary, spending $931,600 to spread absolute lies against Newman while bolstering anti-Choice Blue Dog Dan Lipinski."
We're number one! "US the 'Worst Place in the World' to Give Birth: USA Today Investigation [...] "Deadly Deliveries," the result of a four-year investigation, references federal data showing that more than 50,000 women are 'severely injured' and roughly 700 die during childbirth each year. Perhaps even more staggering is that "half of these deaths could be prevented and half the injuries reduced or eliminated with better care," the investigation found."
Never in my life did I expect Devin Nunes to do what I've been waiting for Democrats to do for 18 years: "House Intel chair calls for ban on electronic voting systems: House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) called for a ban on electronic voting systems in an interview that aired Thursday on Hill.TV's Rising. 'The one thing we've been warning about for many, many years on the Intelligence committee is about the electronic voting systems,' Nunes told Hill.TV's Buck Sexton, who sat with the lawmaker on Wednesday. 'Those are really dangerous in my opinion, and should not be used. In California — at least in the counties that I represent — they do not use an electronic system,' he continued. 'I think anybody that does that, and that's communicating over the web, it's going to be a challenge. So you have to make sure that you limit that as much as possible, and we need a paper trail so that you can go back in case you have to do a manual recount,' he said."
OK, this one makes no sense at all. I can't see millions of Trump voters saying, "Yes, make my car get fewer miles to the gallon! And since most states have stricter standards than the federal requirements already, and car-makers are having no trouble meeting those standards, who the hell is this for? "To Nix Obama Fuel Standard, WH Argues That Better Gas Mileage Is Dangerous."
Dismayingly, John Oliver seems to have fallen for the establishment story on Venezuela, but none of it is true. (We've already noticed media stories showing empty supermarket shelves - without mentioning that those shelves are not in Venezuela, but in the United States. We're also not told that the reason some popular products are not on the shelves at the moment is that the companies that sell those products are deliberately withholding them to try to give the appearance of food shortages - but, in fact, people are eating just fine. And that's just one little thing.)
Lee Fang and Nick Surgey, "Health Care Lobbyists Secretly Secure Democrats' Opposition To 'Medicare For All,' Internal Documents Show [...]
The Healthcare Leadership Council has closely tracked what its lobbyists have described as the 'leftward movement' within the Democratic Party. In Hawaii and other states, the lobby group wanted to know if ideas popularized by Sen., Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. — such as aggressive proposals to reduce the cost of pharmaceuticals and institute a single-payer health care system modeled on Medicare — were taking hold. The council, which spends over $5 million a year on industry advocacy and brings together chief executives of major health corporations, represents an array of health industries, including insurers, hospitals, drugmakers, medical device manufacturers, pharmacies, health product distributors, and information technology companies. The group's focus on competitive open seats around the country — like Hawaii's 1st Congressional District — is aimed at shaping the next generation of lawmakers' views on health care policy.
"Next 100 Days: In the Era of Trump, NYS is Out of Step and In the Crosshairs [...]
'By 2040, 70 percent of Americans are expected to live in the 15 largest states, which are also home to the overwhelming majority of the 30 largest cities in the country. By extension, 30 percent of Americans will live in the other 35 states. That means that the 70 percent of Americans get all of 30 Senators and 30 percent of Americans get 70 Senators,' Birdsell says." So, most people will be crammed together in a few states, and the minority will be in control of Congress, which means cities will have very little say in what goes on.
It's hard to tell whether Forbes is cheering or trying to horrify me with this story. "An Unlikely Group Of Billionaires And Politicians Has Created The Most Unbelievable Tax Break Ever [...] Too good to be true? 'The incentive needs to be powerful enough that it can unlock large amounts of capital, aggregate that capital into funds and force the funds to invest in distressed areas," says Parker, the original Facebook president whose think tank, the Economic Innovation Group, created the policy and helped press it into law. Instead of having government hand out pools of taxpayer dollars, you have savvy investors directing money into projects they think will succeed.' The heart of this new law: Opportunity Zones, or "O-zones,' low-income areas designated by each state. Investors will soon be able to plow recently realized capital gains into projects or companies based there, slowly erase the tax obligations on a portion of those gains and, more significantly, have those proceeds grow tax-free. There are almost no limits. No limits on how much you can put in, how much tax you can avoid and, for most of the country, the types of taxes you can avoid, whether federal, state or local. No limits on how long those proceeds compound tax-free. And precious few limits on what types of investments you can make." Right, instead of the government putting money into projects in poor communities, they give it to investors to... Wait, haven't we heard all this before?
Dday, "The Obamacare cover story: Spikes in insurance premiums on the Obamacare exchanges never gets foregrounded as a reason for the 2016 election outcome. Here are a few examples: 17 percent in Michigan. 43 percent in Iowa. 50 percent in Minnesota. It's an October surprise hard-wired into the electoral calendar, in one of the more abominable decisions in liberal history. And those premium rises may have soured people on the signature achievement of the Democratic era, and moved a few undecideds. But never mind that, because a shiny new narrative has been constructed that Donald Trump's sabotage of the exchanges, not their rickety structure to begin with, has set the table for Medicare for All."
Naomi Klein at The Intercept, "Capitalism Killed Our Climate Momentum, Not 'Human Nature': THIS SUNDAY, THE entire New York Times Magazine will be composed of just one article on a single subject: the failure to confront the global climate crisis in the 1980s, a time when the science was settled and the politics seemed to align. Written by Nathaniel Rich, this work of history is filled with insider revelations about roads not taken that, on several occasions, made me swear out loud. And lest there be any doubt that the implications of these decisions will be etched in geologic time, Rich's words are punctuated with full-page aerial photographs by George Steinmetz that wrenchingly document the rapid unraveling of planetary systems, from the rushing water where Greenland ice used to be to massive algae blooms in China's third largest lake. The novella-length piece represents the kind of media commitment that the climate crisis has long deserved but almost never received. We have all heard the various excuses for why the small matter of despoiling our only home just doesn't cut it as an urgent news story: 'Climate change is too far off in the future'; 'It's inappropriate to talk about politics when people are losing their lives to hurricanes and fires'; 'Journalists follow the news, they don't make it — and politicians aren't talking about climate change'; and of course: 'Every time we try, it's a ratings killer.' None of the excuses can mask the dereliction of duty. It has always been possible for major media outlets to decide, all on their own, that planetary destabilization is a huge news story, very likely the most consequential of our time. They always had the capacity to harness the skills of their reporters and photographers to connect abstract science to lived extreme weather events. And if they did so consistently, it would lessen the need for journalists to get ahead of politics because the more informed the public is about both the threat and the tangible solutions, the more they push their elected representatives to take bold action. [...] That's also why it is so enraging that the piece is spectacularly wrong in its central thesis."
"What's This? A Genuinely Left Wing Panel on Cable TV?! Last night, MSNBC's All In with Chris Hayes broadcast something that is almost unprecedented in our modern era: four left wing people on TV, speaking about politics. Whoa. The panel was made up of The Majority Report's Sam Seder, New York Times opinion columnist Michelle Goldberg, and The Intercept's Senior Politics Editor Briahna Gray. They were there to talk about conservative media's reaction to the surprise primary victory of New York City congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez." (Video included.)
Atrios: Is the idea (widespread, but wrong) that these are 'unskilled' jobs because they are often low paid and therefore you can just throw anyone into them. Almost all the job categories listed are stereotypically work for women, which is one reason they are so low paid, but aside from that I don't know why people think you can just throw anybody into 'early childhood education' or 'after-school care' or 'childcare' generally."
They sound like opportunist Republicans who just switched their R to a D for electoral advantage, but Third Way are now calling themselves "Opportunity Democrats", yet another tone-deaf phrase from people who have lost the plot. Sara Jones at The New Republic reports on their latest roll-out with, "There Is No Silent Centrist Majority: The base of the Democratic Party is much further to the left than moderates recognize." You can tell who you're hearing from by the fact that they regard people who want health care and living wage, a majority of Americans, as "far-left".
Really, you can't make this stuff up. "Undaunted Democratic Centrists Ready to Fight Trump and Bernie at Same Time [...] The new economic platform leans heavily on words like 'earn' and 'opportunity,' and away from demonizing tycoons — 'For most Americans, billionaires and millionaires are not next door, or part of their lived experience,' Cowan said in his opening speech. The policy backbone of the pitch includes an American Investment Bank designed to back 'Main Street, not Wall Street' entrepreneurs, a 'Boomer Corps' part-time national-service program for senior citizens whose earnings would be tax-free (on top of their Social Security), a massive state-driven apprenticeship system, and universal private retirement savings accounts funded by employers." They still think the "swing voters" are in the "middle of the road" and that's who they are pitching to. They have no clue that they lost the middle years ago. 'Everybody's got a camera on their phone. That never worked, but it really doesn't now: You can't just go and say one thing to one group and another to another group,' said Jason Kander, the former Missouri secretary of state who last month opted to run for Kansas City mayor rather than president, making the case onstage that you lose both the base and swing voters if you try to differentiate between them." Oh, and watch out for Mitch Landrieu, who they seem to like a lot.
"Centrism Is Dead: The left has already won the debate over which ideas should animate the Democratic Party."
"Judge's ruling invalidates FEC regulation allowing anonymous donations to 'dark money' groups: A U.S. District Court judge on Friday issued a ruling invalidating a Federal Election Commission regulation that has allowed donors to so-called dark-money groups to remain anonymous, the latest development in a years-long legal battle that could have major implications for campaign finance. Judge Beryl A. Howell ruled the FEC's current regulation of such groups, including 501(c) 4 non-profits, fails to uphold the standard Congress intended when it required the disclosure of politically related spending."
Ecuador Will Imminently Withdraw Asylum for Julian Assange and Hand Him Over to the U.K. What Comes Next? ECUADOR'S PRESIDENT Lenin Moreno traveled to London on Friday for the ostensible purpose of speaking at the 2018 Global Disabilities Summit (Moreno has been using a wheelchair since being shot in a 1998 robbery attempt). The concealed, actual purpose of the president's trip is to meet with British officials to finalize an agreement under which Ecuador will withdraw its asylum protection of Julian Assange, in place since 2012, eject him from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, and then hand over the WikiLeaks founder to British authorities. Moreno's itinerary also notably includes a trip to Madrid, where he will meet with Spanish officials still seething over Assange's denunciation of human rights abuses perpetrated by Spain's central government against protesters marching for Catalonian independence. Almost three months ago, Ecuador blocked Assange from accessing the internet, and Assange has not been able to communicate with the outside world ever since. The primary factor in Ecuador's decision to silence him was Spanish anger over Assange's tweets about Catalonia. [...] The consequences of such an agreement depend in part on the concessions Ecuador extracts in exchange for withdrawing Assange's asylum. But as former Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa told The Intercept in an interview in May, Moreno's government has returned Ecuador to a highly 'subservient' and 'submissive' posture toward western governments. It is thus highly unlikely that Moreno — who has shown himself willing to submit to threats and coercion from the U.K., Spain and the U.S. — will obtain a guarantee that the U.K. not extradite Assange to the U.S., where top Trump officials have vowed to prosecute Assange and destroy WikiLeaks."
Is Trump about to lower drug prices? David Dayen at The American Prospect, "Trump Eliminates the Middleman: His administration takes aim at the heretofore legal kickbacks to prescription drug distributors — but leaves the drug companies themselves untouched. [...] The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Food and Drug Administration, both led by drug company veterans, have started with pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), the middlemen who negotiate prices with drug companies on behalf of health plans and reimburse pharmacies after sale. PBMs exploit an information advantage in this multi-sided market to skim as much as one in every five dollars out of every prescription drug purchase, harming pharmacies, health plans, and consumers alike."
And DDay at The Intercept, "The 'Mulvaney Discount': Trump'S Consumer Protection Czar Is Shrinking Fines For Law-Breaking Companies [...] After pausing enforcement work when Acting Director Mick Mulvaney took over, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has been on a relative tear, announcing five civil settlements of cases begun under Mulvaney's predecessor, Richard Cordray. But in at least three of them, CFPB has explicitly reduced the fine handed down against corporate offenders to a fraction of the initial amount. The smaller fines mean softer punishment for violations of law and, in some cases, less restitution to victims of the misconduct."
Naturally, the "centrist" Dems are having trouble making themselves enthusiastic about supporting Ben Jealous in the Maryland election. The sticking point seems to be that he is insufficiently supportive of letting Amazon headquarter in the state - no doubt a wiser move than they're prepared to admit. This story, of course, appears in the newspaper owned by Jeff Bezos.
"Bernie Sanders And Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Went To War With Partisanship In Kansas [...] Though the first of two rallies held Friday was ostensibly in support of James Thompson, a candidate for Kansas's 4th Congressional District, the gestalt of the day's remarks was something bigger than any one race. The speeches — particularly Sanders's — announced a unifying theme that felt too coherent to have been thrown together for a House primary or two. Individually, the remarks were compelling. Together, they comprised an unabashed declaration of post-partisan movement building — a rebuke to those in power who fetishize every identity-based division in order to diffuse the largest coalition in the country: the working class."
Dean Baker, "Trump's 'Victory' in Trade War: Like many economists I have been puzzled over the likely end game in the trade war that Donald Trump has initiated with most of our major trading partners. He has escalated his rhetoric and put together a large list of imports to be hit with tariffs. His demands are vague and continually shifting. This doesn't look like the way to win a trade war. But then I remembered we are talking about reality TV show host Donald Trump. Winning a trade war for this reality TV show star doesn't mean winning a trade war in the way that economists might envision. It's not a question of forcing concessions from trading partners that will improve our trade balance and the overall health of the economy. It's a question of being able to hold something up that allows Trump to declare victory. That doesn't require much."
I like the way it's framed in The New York Times, complete with a photo of Bernie at the top, "'Modern Day Debtors' Prisons': The time has come to end cash bail, a major factor in inequality in the court system. Despite releasing a comprehensive and remarkably radical criminal justice reform agenda in 2015, Senator Bernie Sanders was accused throughout his presidential campaign of being insufficiently concerned with the topic, and of habitually changing the subject to economics. The reality is that Mr. Sanders has the clearest insight into the connections between criminal justice issues and economic inequality of any major politician today. And nowhere, perhaps, are those connections more obvious than in the instance of cash bail."
Not sure whether I posted this article when it came out in 2009, but whenever I think about this stuff, I want to smack Bill Clinton and his little friends around the room. "How Congress Rushed a Bill that Helped Bring the Economy to Its Knees: n the waning days of the 106th Congress and the Clinton administration, Congress met in a lame-duck session to complete work on a variety of appropriations bills that were not passed prior to the 2000 election. There were other, unmet pet priorities of some lawmakers that were under consideration as well. One of those pet priorities was a 262-page deregulatory bill, the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. Tucked into a bloated 11,000 page conference report as a rider, with little consideration and no time for review, this bill would be viewed only eight years later as part of the failure of our political system abetting a financial storm that brought the world to its knees."
"The Elite Fixation With Russiagate: Does a broader public share this sense of crisis?" The public seems less concerned with Russia than with bread & butter issues, Trump is even being harsher toward Russia than Obama was, and no one meddles with our foreign policy like that great puppeteer, Bebe Netenyahu.
"Russiagate Covers Up Black Vote Theft: The corporate media and their friends in the Democratic Party are whipping up so much hatred and disinformation that it is almost impossible to discuss Russia or its president, Vladimir Putin. Putin is a multi-purpose villain. He is blamed for the vote theft conducted by white Americans against black people that resulted in the Donald Trump presidency. What is clear is that the Republicans stole the 2016 election for Donald Trump with a combination of voter suppression and outright theft directed against black people. Trump supposedly won the state of Michigan) by a 10,000 vote margin, but more than 75,000 votes cast in majority black cities Flint and Detroit went uncounted because of 'malfunctioning' voting machines. An additional 449,000 voters in that state were purged from the rolls through the infamous Crosscheck system."
Taibbi, "Taibbi: An Ode to the Feeble Corporate Apology: Some of America's biggest capitalist entities are begging for forgiveness on TV — while barely acknowledging their sins [...] There are times when corporate apologies are appropriate and can be taken at face value. After the Tylenol murders in the '80s, for instance, Johnson & Johnson created a new standard in introducing safety caps and the brand (rightfully) survived. That scandal wasn't the company's fault, but it did the right thing anyway. The three companies apologizing now are a little guiltier."
In Dissent, "The Right-Wing Firestorm That Rages On: A new documentary reveals how the right-wing attack on the national, grassroots anti-poverty group ACORN was a dress rehearsal for our current toxic political culture."
"The Big Tent Is Really No Tent: Why the Democrats' Old Guard Has to Get Out of the Way: It's time for the party to follow the people and back a set of progressive policies and candidates that put people first. 'The nearly complete defeat of the centrist, corporate Democrats over the last four decades should have made it obvious that the age of the DLC centrists has been coming to an end for some time."The Democratic Party's leadership would phrase it differently. Something like, 'Their go our people. We must stop them, or they will make us give up our triangulating centrism,' or more likely, '...they will make us give up our corporate campaign contributions.'"
Thomas Frank, "Can liberals please work out how to win back the working class? I'm taking a pause from journalism — while I'm gone, can someone please tell the Democrats that they need to stop betraying the movements that support them. [...] Still, as we are reminded at every turn, this flawed organization is the only weapon we have against the party of Trump. And as the president's blunders take a turn for the monumental and public alarm grows, the imperative of delivering a Democratic wave this fall grows ever more urgent. Make no mistake: it has got to happen. Democrats simply have to take one of the houses of Congress this fall and commence holding Trump accountable. Failure at this baseline mission is unthinkable; it will mean the Democratic party has no reason for being, even on its own compromised terms."
"America's heart of darkness [...] We're about there, I think — perhaps not every single one of us, perhaps not just yet, but the conditions are right and the summer is long. The entire 2016 episode has been, in some sense, an introspective journey into America's own innermost parts, with Donald Trump's victory prompting a nervous self-inventory of what we value, whether our institutions work and to what degree we ought to trust one another. The full contents of that inward odyssey have yet to unfold. But on the question of institutional functioning, the news is unequivocally grim. Like Marlow, even after this particular chapter has ended, we are likely to find ourselves changed by what we've seen."
Here's Mark Ames talking about his experiences in Russia and giving his analysis of what's going on now. Boris Yeltsin in his five years in office dragged Russia into a war in which about 100,000 people were killed, and they lost. The average life expectancy of a Russian male plummeted from 68 years to 56 years. It had a death to birth ratio perhaps never seen in the 20th century, even during war times. People were just dying like flies everywhere. There was no state support, just pure banditry starting with Yeltsin at the top, all the way down. So he had actually — unlike Putin — say what you will about him — but I think even his enemies agree he is very popular. They might blame it on the propaganda, but he is popular. His ratings are still in the 80th percentile range, and he's always been popular. With Yeltsin you had to perform a miracle. This guy was absolutely hated and is still one of the probably two or three most hated Russians in modern history for what he did to the country. And so it was a tough job, and Clinton was also running for re-election that year [1996], and Clinton did not want to be known as the president who 'lost Russia' if Yeltsin's communist opponent won. [...] I didn't see the anger really explode until we bombed Kosovo in 1999. Then suddenly all these Russians turned against us, and it all kind of started make sense to them, but before then you had the most equal society where the privileged people had a somewhat nicer dacha or the really privileged ones maybe had a car, or the super, super privileged had a car and a driver, but no one was a billionaire, and there certainly weren't millions and millions of people starving in the streets or half starving in the streets. So you went from the world's most equal society to the world's most unequal society in a very short period of time. It was incredibly traumatic, and so Putin was brought in. When he first appeared there was this great relief, I think, for a lot of Russians because he was a guy who a) didn't drink, and b) seemed serious, and he seemed like somebody who was more seriously interested in not doing any more experiments on the country. The Russians kept saying, 'We don't want to be experimented on anymore,' and the American attitude was: 'OK we experimented on you, and you died on the operating table. Clearly it's your fault. We need a better patient than you.' Certainly by the end of the 1990s democracy was a bad word in Russia. It was just equated with stealing from everybody."
Richard Eskow, "While Democrats Chase Russians, Republicans Keep Rigging Elections: What does it tell us when leading Democrats are more upset about alleged Russian election-rigging than they are about proven Republican election-rigging? After all, American oligarchs like the Koch Brothers have no more right to undermine our democracy than Russian oligarchs do."
Jonathan Cohn reviews Fear City: New York's Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics [...] Fear City focuses on New York City's 1973 financial crisis, the result of which was a steep retrenchment of city government -- which no longer provided the robust public services that it had by mid-century. As Phillips-Fein observes, contrary to the neoliberal mantra of "there is no alternative," there were many alternatives at every step of the way leading to New York's near-bankruptcy. Many of the roots of the crisis were out of New York City's hands, instead the results of federal policies that incentivized out-migration into suburbia and state policies that hamstrung the city's ability to raise tax revenue."
"How American Economics is Ruining Your Life [...] It's almost impossible to overstate just how uniquely bad American life is — school shootings, medical bankruptcies, young people trying to crowdfund insulin, skyrocketing suicide rates, opioid epidemics, one year olds on trial. These things don't happen anywhere else in the world, really. Not even poor countries. And yet Americans live uniquely wretched and ruined lives not because the hand of fate fell — but largely because American economics destined them to. "
You know, it really does seem like Debbie Wasserman Schultz is bad for Florida. She's not bringing home the bacon for the state and she's even refusing to spend money the voters made available to clean up the local environment. You just might think she's corrupt.
"Boz Scaggs Processes The Past And Rebuilds For The Future [...] Out of the Blues includes covers of songs by Bobby "Blue" Bland, Jimmy Reed and Samuel "Magic Sam" Maghett, as well as a cover of Neil Young's "On the Beach." The Young song deals with loss and despair, which Scaggs faced directly when his house and all its contents burned in the Napa, Calif., wildfires last year. "It simply all is gone," he says. "It has you reaching for all sorts of answers and conclusions and ways to take it in.""
Bernie Sanders held a CEOs vs Workers Town Hall. Donut Twitter* went insane with tweets to the effect of, "How dare he talk about unimportant stuff like this when Trump had a lousy press conference in Russia!"
"How to Survive America's Kill List: When a U.S. citizen heard he was on his own country's drone target list, he wasn't sure he believed it. After five near-misses, he does — and is suing the United States to contest his own execution." There's an irony here. This guy spent a couple of hours trying to explain that "democracy" in America has nothing to do with policy, that Americans have little or no input into what an administration might actually do, that a majority of Americans are not necessarily in favor of droning Muslim weddings. The person he was explaining it to was an Al Queda leader, and that "association" is very possibly why this American citizen is being targeted for murder by our government.
"Charges Dropped Against Remaining J20 Inauguration Day Protesters: Federal prosecutors dropped all charges against the 38 remaining defendants arrested and charged with rioting during the Disrupt J20 protests on Donald Trump's Inauguration Day. The dismissal brings an end to the nearly 18-month saga that saw 234 protesters threatened with as much as 60 years in prison for their alleged roles in the destruction of property on January 20, 2017."
"AT&T promised lower prices after Time Warner merger — it's raising them instead: AT&T is raising the base price of its DirecTV Now streaming service by $5 per month, despite promising in court that its acquisition of Time Warner Inc. would lower TV prices. [...] Just two months ago, AT&T said in a court filing that buying Time Warner would allow it to lower TV prices. The US Department of Justice tried to stop the merger, arguing that it would raise prices for consumers, but a federal judge sided with AT&T. The merger was completed on June 15. AT&T scoffed at the Justice Department's argument that the merger would raise prices. The telecomm giant wrote in its post-trial brief that the merger will 'enabl[e] AT&T; and Time Warner to reduce consumer prices.'"
"Federal judge dismisses suit over literacy rights in Detroit: A federal judge has dismissed an unprecedented civil lawsuit filed on behalf of Detroit students fighting to establish literacy is a U.S. constitutional right.
In the suit filed in 2016 through a California public interest law firm, the youths alleged the conditions of their schools are so poor and inadequate they had not received the best education and were denied access to literacy on account of their races, violating their rights under the due process and equal protection clauses of the 14th Amendment. But attorneys for Gov. Rick Snyder and state education officials have said no fundamental right to literacy exists for Detroit schoolchildren. The lawyers had asked the judge to reject what they have called an 'attempt to destroy the American tradition of democratic control of schools.'" This is unpardonable, Rick Snyder should be arrested for fraud against taxpayers, and judges like this should be locked in a room and forced to read the Preamble over and over until they understand what "promote the general Welfare" means.
"U.S. Opposition to Breast-Feeding Resolution Stuns World Health Officials: A resolution to encourage breast-feeding was expected to be approved quickly and easily by the hundreds of government delegates who gathered this spring in Geneva for the United Nations-affiliated World Health Assembly. Based on decades of research, the resolution says that mother's milk is healthiest for children and countries should strive to limit the inaccurate or misleading marketing of breast milk substitutes. Then the United States delegation, embracing the interests of infant formula manufacturers, upended the deliberations."
"A $1 billion Gates Foundation-backed education initiative failed to help students, according to a new report — here's what happened: [...] The initiative, called the Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching, didn't improve student graduation rates or schools' ability to retain effective teachers." What really happened is that two people who thought because they were rich they were also "smart" on issues they knew nothing about could just inject themselves and their money into a vital area and, as a result, helped to completely wreck our educational system. They were not educators and had no reason at all to think they knew more than experienced teachers knew, but they just jumped right in and gave the whole charter school movement the boost it needed to be saleable to people who were unwise enough to think that there is any better way to get good student outcomes than to have experienced teachers who are rewarded with a living wage and pension teaching those students. Experience, you see, is the best teacher.
"California Democratic Party Snubs Feinstein, Endorses de León in Senate Race: Longtime California Senator Dianne Feinstein lost the California Democratic Party's endorsement, in a stunning vote Saturday night at the party's executive board meeting in Oakland. Though the vote was expected to be close, state Senator Kevin de León rather easily crossed the 60 percent threshold necessary for endorsement."
"The Dialysis Industry Is Putting Profits Over Patients. A California Democratic Party Official Is Quietly Helping Them: EARLIER THIS WEEK, the California Democratic Party announced that it would no longer accept contributions from the private prison industry, and that it would donate the $160,000 it received from the top two prison operators — GEO Group and CoreCivic — to organizations that assist immigrants and ex-offenders. It was a heartening reversal of pay-to-play politics, made possible by an organized activist movement capitalizing on financial disclosure. But pay-to-play still has a role within the party. According to financial statements, party vice chair Alex Gallardo-Rooker received $30,000 in the first quarter of this year from opponents of a controversial ballot measure that would cap patient payments at outpatient dialysis facilities. She waited several weeks to make a written disclosure of this relationship, contravening the party bylaws. And critics claim that she continues to stay quiet about her role as a paid consultant, even while attempting to persuade party members to oppose the initiative. It's unclear whether Gallardo-Rooker continued receiving payments after March; second-quarter financial statements have not yet been released."
"Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Democratic Primary Opponent Will Remain on the Ballot Because of Some Bullshit [...] If you are wondering why in the fuck this is happening, you can thank New York's byzantine election laws and the stubbornness of bad men. As the New York Times explains, Crowley received the endorsement of the Working Families Party, a group of labor unions and activists that has also backed New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo's primary challenger, Cynthia Nixon. But after Ocasio-Cortez's primary win, Bill Lipton, the state director of the Working Families Party, reached out to Crowley's team and asked that he vacate the line. Crowley, however, declined. This means he'll remain on the ballot, which is certainly a curious decision to make!"
Pareen, "Haim Saban Is Bad For Democracy: Last month, twelve Democratic senators signed a letter from the office of Sen. Bernie Sanders to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, asking the Trump administration 'to do more to alleviate the ongoing humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip.' The letter was sent following a series of protests by Gazans that were met with overwhelming, deadly force by Israel, which has had Gaza under a punishing blockade for more than a decade. [...] In response, Haim Saban, a billionaire media mogul and longtime 'megadonor' to the Democratic Party, wrote a pissy email to each of those senators (sent to some of their personal addresses, probably just to make the point that he had their personal email addresses), listing, in syntax and tone typical of conservative chain emails, various reasons why Israel's treatment of Palestinians, and Gazans in particular, must never, ever be criticized. It doesn't even address the actual issues and concerns laid out in the letter to Pompeo; it is merely a collection of braindead talking points."
I'm not sure I can quite unpack all of this, but Marcy Wheeler is "Putting A Face (Mine) To The Risks Posed By GOP Games On Mueller Investigation [...] I'm making this public now because a David Ignatius report Thursday maps out an imminent deal with Russia and Israel that sounds like what was described to me within hours of the election. This deal appears to be the culmination of an effort that those involved in the Russian attack worked to implement within hours after the election." She talked with Sam Seder about this on The Majority Report.
Zaid Jilani at The Intercept, "Health Care Blunder Reveals Michigan Candidate For Governor's 'Progressive' Branding Is False Advertising." There are three people in this race — one who seems to be the genuine article, one who looks like a guy with too much money who is pandering as a "progressive", and one who is the corporate-backed establishment candidate (and is in the lead because the progressive vote is being split).
Libby Watson at Splinter, "Tim Geithner Is Living His Best Post-Obama Life by Running Scam to Bleed Poor People Dry: Sorry if you had anyone else winning in your Most Hideous Career After Leaving the Obama Administration bracket, because Tim Geithner just blew the competition out the water. The Washington Post has a detailed and devastating report, published Sunday evening, about the predatory lending activities of Mariner Finance, a company 'owned and managed by a $11.2 billion private equity fund controlled by Warburg Pincus,' of which Geithner is president. Cool job, Tim!"
Briahna Gray, also commenting on the Abrams-Evans race in Georgia, says, "Fetishizing 'Identity Politics' Could Cost Democrats In 2020 [...] IT'S NECESSARY, HERE, to define 'identity politics,' since a failure to do so is at the root of most of the controversy around the subject. Critics on the right generally define identity politics as any reference to racial, sexual, or gender identities, whether as calls to solidarity or a recognition of the particular harms those groups face because of their identities. This is wrong. But critics from the left don't generally question the political or cultural relevance of identities, or the extent to which they serve as important axes for political mobilization. Instead, the leftist critique condemns the 'weaponization' of identity — the cynical emphasis on personal identity over political beliefs in order to advance candidates whose interests are inapposite to the needs of the groups they're presumed to represent. See, for example, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders's claim that Democrats who 'support women's empowerment' but critique Gina Haspel's nomination for CIA director are 'hypocrite[s].' Or the idea that Kamala Harris, a former prosecutor who once criminalized truancy and oversaw the country's second largest non-federal prison population as the attorney general of California, is necessarily a good standard bearer for political justice reform."
"Why Did the Rhode Island Democratic Party Endorse an Alt-Right Supporter Over a Progressive Incumbent? Walsh has since been a progressive voice in the legislature and supports increasing the minimum wage and marijuana legalization. She also caused a stir in March when she said in a radio interview that there was an 'insane amount of drinking' among legislators at the statehouse. All this might go some way towards explaining why the state Democratic Party has endorsed her opponent in the upcoming primaries — a man who appears to have once been a vocal supporter of Donald Trump and alt-right figures."
"Patreon Is Suspending Adult Content Creators Because of Its Payment Partners: The subscription crowdfunding platform Patreon confirmed that they are increasing efforts to review content, due to payment processor pressure. [...] 'This is bigger than us & Patreon. It's a world wide crack down on freedom of expression, on women, on marginalised people, on sex and sex work, on non conventional forms of labour that counter the status quo: the domination of corporations and patriarchy. On dissent,' Ashley wrote. 'Just to be clear what is at stake, this is my whole income, my livelihood.'"
Ryan Cooper in The Week, "How the capitalist class is strangling the American economy [...] Why the capitalist class does this is something of a mystery. Don't they love growth? Well, they do, but only under the right circumstances. They present themselves as concerned with growth, productivity, and output above all else, but it turns out they are in reality a lot more concerned with high profits and a politically quiescent working class. A big economic boom is fine, but a tight labor market requiring wage increases that come out of the capitalist share of the corporate surplus — or worse, workers confident that they can get another job organizing union drives — is horrifying to them. Our capitalist overlords think they deserve easy profits and beaten-down workers who will take crappy wages and bad benefits without a peep or protests, and mobilize politically to rig the economy to make that happen."
Also Ryan Cooper, "The new Republican Gilded Age [...] The basic idea is to reconfigure the American state to serve only the interests of business: forbidding as much regulation of industry as possible, and using violent state power to suppress the inevitable backlash from the rest of society. America once had much of its democratic nature cored out by rapacious capitalists. It could happen again."
"Yes, Normal Republican Elites Are a Threat to Democracy [...] In its mission to undermine popular government — so as to insulate the policy preferences of reactionary elites from majoritarian opinion — elected Republicans have received the indispensable aid of normal conservative jurists like Brett Kavanaugh. Over the past decade, the Roberts court has worked to systematically increase the influence that concentrated wealth can exert over American politics, while vetoing democratically enacted attempts to either constrain that influence, or else to buck the substantive preferences of the Republican donor class. The court's efforts on this front include abolishing virtually all restrictions on corporate spending in American elections; overturning an Arizona law that attempted to counter such spending by providing candidates with public funds; legalizing most forms of political bribery; and gutting anti-trust law. In sum: The modern Republican Party has demonstrated a commitment to suppressing voter participation; reducing the influence of majorities over electoral outcomes; and subordinating the policy preferences of its own constituents to those of reactionary elites. It has further demonstrated a willingness to achieve the latter end by lying to its own base about its intentions for public policy; obfuscating the policy-making process to limit public awareness of the government's activities; appointing activist judges who will veto democratically enacted legislation on dubious grounds; and stoking the most incendiary cultural divisions in American life.
Hamilton Nolan at Splinter, "This Is Just the Beginning: Do you think that being asked to leave a restaurant, or having your meal interrupted, or being called by the public is bad? My fascism-enabling friends, this is only the beginning. One thing that people who wield great power often fail to viscerally understand is what it feels like to have power wielded against you. This imbalance is the source of many of the most monstrous decisions that get made by powerful people and institutions." I like this approach even though I disagree that they don't understand how it feels. I think they love knowing they can make you feel that way and you can't do anything about it. What they underestimate is that even in this society, you can still damage those people if you really come to believe you have nothing to lose.
From Tom Scocca at Gawker, an interesting essay On Smarm [...] But why are nastiness and snideness taken to be features of our age? One general point of agreement, in denunciations of snark, is that snark is reactive. It is a kind of response. Yet to what is it responding? Of what is it contemptuous? Stand against snark, and you are standing with everything decent. And who doesn't want to be decent? The snarkers don't, it seems. Or at least they (let's be honest: we) don't want to be decent on those terms."
Here's an interesting development: "'Tea Party Liberal' Promises To Bring A Blue Wave To West Virginia: Richard Ojeda joined the Army because he says it seemed like the most reasonable choice he had growing up; his alternative options, he says, were to 'dig coal' or 'sell dope.' So he chose the Army, where he spent more than two decades. But when he came home to Logan County, W.Va., he was stunned. "I come home from spending 24 years in the United States Army and I realize I got kids in my backyard that have it worse than the kids I saw in Iraq and Afghanistan," he shouts into the microphone during an interview."
My favorite 4th of July moment, of course, was Therese Okoumou climbing the base of the Statue of Liberty to demand that immigrant children be reuinted with their parents. The police, of course, "rescued" her with a choke-hold, but hey, that's freedom in America. I mean, she's black, whaddaya expect?
RIP: "Ed Schultz, Former MSNBC Host, Dies at 64." I had my problems with this guy, but he didn't like being pushed into being partisan-no-matter-what, and I gotta respect that. Here's an interesting interview he did with a guy from The National Review in which he talks about how MSNBC wouldn't let him cover Bernie Sanders and why he prefers working for RT America.
It's always good to remember that Tim Geithner should take much responsibility as the architect of our current woes. He wrote an autobiographical book to "explain" how he, in indifferent student who grew up entirely ordinary just happened to become the hero of the 2007 financial crisis, and, as Matt Stoller noted, nothing about that story rings true. The Con-Artist Wing of the Democratic Party: The most consequential event of this young century has been the financial crisis. But is the party of Obama ready to come to terms with its own role in the disaster? [...] You see the same rhetorical tricks and traps as we move to Geithner's tenure as president of the New York Federal Reserve, which began in 2003. Much of the discussion of Geithner's book and his time in office is essentially a rehash of the strategies pursued during the bailouts. As with the hot money flows, Geithner pretends he was part of the solution, not the cause of the problem. But Geithner also played a huge role in the run-up of leverage in the financial system, a role he lies about when discussing his time at the Fed. Geithner served at the New York Fed until 2008, and this region was the center of the financial universe, the place where profits from the boom were husbanded and collected. The New York Fed regulated Citigroup, a massive systemic risk requiring multiple bailouts and obscure financial supporting arrangements. Thus, lying about his tolerance for this run-up in leverage, and about his distance from the financial industry, is critical in painting a later portrait of a cautious but savvy crisis manager." Countries that took Geithner's advice did poorly, and those who ignored it did just fine. And then Obama put him in charge of our economy.
David Dayen's "Inhuman Resources" at The Huffington Post is a harrowing tale of a decent guy on Wall Street who tried to help a colleague who was the victim of harassment and became one himself, but I'd personally like to slap whoever coded the page so that it flutters around when you page to the next section. I hate these sliding sections and giant illustrations all over the place. Someone should make it stop.
Mark Evanier has A Harlan Ellison story and promises more. By actual count, there are 8,448,329 anecdotes about Harlan Ellison, 7,609,224 of which are actually true. This is one that fits into both categories and it involves a man named Julius Schwartz who was an important editor for DC Comics and a semi-important figure in the science-fiction community. Julie and Harlan had an extremely close relationship that some would describe as "father-son." Some would also tell you that at times, Julie — though he was nineteen years older than Harlan — was in the "son" role. Most of the time though, Julie was the obstreperous adult and Harlan, the even-more-obstreperous child. Every Wednesday morning for a very long time, Julie (in the DC offices in New York) would phone Harlan (in his home in Southern California) and they'd talk about anything and everything. One day around 1971, the topic somehow ventured to the notion of Harlan, who had done very little writing for comic books, writing a Batman story. Julie Schwartz was the editor of Batman and Detective Comics at the time. Harlan did not want to do it with any sort of deadline but he said he would come up with something in the near future.
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Badass: Stagecoach Mary Fields: Up until her death in 1914 at the age of 82, Old West badass "Stagecoach" Mary Fields had a standing bet at her local saloon: Five bucks and a glass of whiskey said she could knock out any cowboy in Cascade, Montana with a single punch."
It's amazing what you can find by accident on the intertubes. Here's Peter Tatchell and me on The James Whale Show talking about the gay age of consent back when we were trying to get it changed. (Our bit starts about halfway through.) Alas, they cut out some of my favorite lines.
See, here's what happens: I start thinking I'd better hurry up and upload this latest post I'm working on, and if I can just get that last link on the primaries I can post, and then Sam Seder says Anthony Kennedy has just announced his retirement, and I'm, "Oh, no," and then I think, okay, just that one more, and then Roz sends me her latest poem and I see the first line and I'm, blinking at the screen and "What? Harlan died?" Okay, we all know there were troublesome things about him, though I have to say he was always nice to me, but I'd seen him be not so nice, too. I think Cory said it best for me about all that ambivalent feeling he provoked, but my eyes still got wet. He was a lot of things, and he stood up for civil rights and women's rights, and sometimes he wasn't the best person he could be, you bet - and as with everything else, he did that big and public, too. But you can check out Variety, Guardian, and I see File770 has a whole bunch more. Oh, and Mark Evanier, of course.
And then there was that shooting at the Capital Gazette, and as if I didn't feel shell-shocked enough, half the links I tried to grab tell me they are suddenly no longer available in Europe.
That Majority Report link has a lot of material about the NY primary before the sudden interruption by Kennedy's retirement announcement, including Joe Crowley's concession featuring his surprisingly good performance of "Born to Run". And Thursday's show was on SCOTUS Apocalypse & Organizing Post-Janus w/ Ian Millhiser & Jane McAlevey.
Most of the media seemed not to have heard of her before she won the primary, and gave her no coverage, but one exception was The Intercept, which, among other things, did this interview with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, which gives you a good sense of the candidate. (At one point she tweeted some photos under her caption, "A girl has no name," with headlines from newspapers that announced Joe Crowley's loss to a "challenger" without even using her name. Joy Reid actually tweeted that she - and most of her colleagues - were having to do remedial study of who she was. And then the alt-center all ran to the media to explain why this win doesn't mean anything. Tammy Duckworth even claimed that AO-C was fine for the Bronx but her priorities couldn't win in the midwest - that'd be the same midwest that voted for Bernie but not for Hillary.)
While I was waiting for the polls to close, I read, "97%:Why Incumbents Are So Hard to Defeat, and What It Means That a Working Class Latina Candidate Might Just Do It to One of the Most Powerful Political Bosses in the Country: In my time working and volunteering for political campaigns, I learned why 97% of incumbent politicians won re-election in 2016. I want to go into this phenomenon, noting every advantage incumbent candidates have, at least the ones that I've noticed, to underscore how dramatic the odds that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is facing are, and how historic a win by her would be. The support she's gotten is already close to unheard of." In New York they make it especially hard, by the way - you have to come back to vote for your nominee for governor separately, in September, - so no coat-tails, either.
Later: She wiped the floor with him. "Rep. Joe Crowley, one of the top Democrats in the House of Representatives, lost his New York primary in a shocking upset on Tuesday night to community organizer Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Crowley, having fundraised nearly $3 million for the race in New York's 14th District, fell easily to a first-time candidate with a viral introduction video, a Democratic Socialists of America membership card, and a proudly leftist agenda. She ran on Medicare-for-all, a federal jobs guarantee, and getting tough on Wall Street. The race was called just before 10 pm for Ocasio-Cortez." Looks like 58%-42%. I'm going to bed, too sleepy to post.
Meanwhile, in another race we were watching, Emily Sirota won Colorado's 9th District, 54.29%-45.71, but I can't find a story to link to yet. Well, I saw some headlines that wouldn't let me in, so this is the best I can do.
Also, Maryland could elect its first African-American governor this fall: Democrats nominated Ben Jealous in their primary on Tuesday. [...] Despite being a first-time political candidate, Jealous dominated a crowded fight for the Democratic nomination, triumphing over a wide range of political veterans including a former adviser to Hillary Clinton and a Maryland state senator. Polls had Jealous and Baker in close range of one another ahead of Tuesday's election."
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Eric Levitz in New York Magazine, "In Hindsight, Democrats Really Mishandled That Merrick Garland Thing [...] But one can also sprinkle a scintilla of blame on whoever convinced the last Democratic administration to nominate a middle-aged, white male centrist to the Supreme Court — and to then argue for his confirmation on grounds of procedural norms, rather than ideological goals. [...] In hindsight, it's hard to argue that Democrats did everything in their power to increase the salience of such questions. For example, imagine if Barack Obama had nominated the first African-American woman to the Supreme Court — one who was young, and unabashedly progressive in her jurisprudence. When McConnell subsequently vetoed her appointment — and thereby nullified Obama's attempt to give a modicum of representation in the halls of high power to the Democratic Party's most loyal constituency — wouldn't it have been easier to mobilize the Democratic base in outrage, than it was to rally them behind Merrick Garland?"
"The Supreme Court may have just killed public unions: The case, Janus v. AFSCME, dealt with the fees that public unions can collect from non-members. In a 5-4 decision, the justices ruled that people who aren't union members but are represented by a public union cannot be forced to pay fees because fees violate their freedom of speech. Instead, union dues must be opt-in only."
"In 'Severe Blow' to Voting Rights, Supreme Court Preserves GOP Gerrymanders in Texas and North Carolina: In a victory for "GOP racial gerrymanders everywhere" and a significant loss for voting rights, the Supreme Court's conservative majority on Monday overturned a lower court ruling and revived electoral districts drawn by Texas Republicans that many experts say are blatantly designed to discriminate against minorities. Compounding what has already been a rough several days for activists and legal experts working to combat gerrymandering nationwide, the Supreme Court also decided to send a major North Carolina partisan gerrymandering case back to a lower court, leaving intact congressional maps that rights groups argue were drawn to discriminate against Democratic voters."
This should scare you: "Younger generations make up a majority of the electorate, but may not be a majority of voters this November [...] It's difficult to predict who will turn out to vote in the upcoming 2018 midterm. A reasonable scenario might be that eligible voters would turn out as they have, on average, in past midterm elections. Gen Xers and Millennials have consistently underperformed in terms of voter turnout in midterm elections, compared with Boomers when they were the same age. Millennials have had the opportunity to vote in four midterm elections (2002, 2006, 2010 and 2014). Among Millennials who were between the ages of 18 and 24 during these elections, 20% turned out to vote, on average. By comparison, 26% of Boomers in that same age range turned out to vote in midterm elections between 1978 and 1986."
"Democrats are losing the millennial vote and need to change message: Millennials are at best soft Democrats. Many got enthused and mobilized by Barack Obama in 2008 and largely hung around for Obama in 2012 and, even less, Clinton in 2016. But many seem to have had enough. And who could blame them? Clinton's campaign mainly targeted the illusive 'moderate Republican', the white, middle-aged middle class. And since her shock defeat, many prominent Democrats have pivoted towards the cliched 'Trump voter' as defined by the liberal media, ie a middle-aged to older white, working-class male."
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Public Policy Polling says that voters like gun control and the DREAM Act, don't want to arm teachers in schools, and don't like the wall. And you'll never guess who the favorite against Trump in the next presidential election is so far... er, yes, you will.
Q35 If the candidates for President next time were Democrat Kirsten Gillibrand and Republican
Donald Trump, who would you vote for?
Kirsten Gillibrand ..............42%
Donald Trump ....................40%
Not sure ........................18%
Q36 If the candidates for President next time were Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump, who would you vote for?
Kamala Harris ...................43%
Donald Trump ....................39%
Not sure ........................18%
Q37 If the candidates for President next time were Democrat Bernie Sanders and Republican Donald Trump, who would you vote for?
Bernie Sanders ..................55%
Donald Trump ....................39%
Not sure .........................6%
Q38 If the candidates for President next time were Democrat Elizabeth Warren and Republican Donald Trump, who would you vote for?
Elizabeth Warren ................51%
Donald Trump ...................40%
Not sure ........................9%
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"Trump Administration Won't Say How A Random CBP Agent Would Know Of A Reporter's Personal Travel: The Justice Department says an apparent Customs and Border Protection agent identified as Jeffrey Rambo was not involved in its leak investigation. [...] In June 2017, Rambo, whose official role CBP also refuses to explain, contacted national security reporter Ali Watkins, identified himself as a government agent and implied that he could be a source, according to The Washington Post. But when they met, he grilled her about her work and her personal life, noting the dates and locations of international trips she took with James Wolfe, then the director of security for the Senate Intelligence Committee, whom she was dating. Rambo didn't give Watkins his name, but he mentioned that the Trump administration was aggressively investigating journalists and their sources. But Customs and Border Protection is not normally involved in investigations of national security leaks. The Justice Department, which handles such matters, says it didn't ask Rambo for help."
"MOVE Member Debbie Africa Released: Philadelphia — In the early morning of June 16, after nearly 40 years of unjust imprisonment by the state of Pennsylvania, political prisoner and MOVE 9 member Debbie Sims Africa was granted parole and released from the State Correctional Institution-Cambridge Springs. [...] This Aug. 8 marks the 40th anniversary of the all-out assault by thousands of police on the MOVE house in 1978. When the family still refused to leave their home, police launched an early morning raid, using thousands of rounds of munitions, water cannons and tear gas to destroy the compound and drive the family out. During the raid, Philadelphia Police Officer James P. Ramp was killed by a shot to the back of the head. All MOVE 9 members were convicted of third-degree murder and conspiracy, even though no evidence linked any of them to the shooting. In fact, by immediately razing the entire property, police destroyed any potential evidence that would have helped the MOVE 9 prove their innocence. Police made no efforts to preserve the crime scene or measure for ballistic angles."
Even The American Conservative seems to be to the left of the Democratic Party leadership. "The Conservative Case for Universal Healthcare: Don't tell anyone, but American conservatives will soon be embracing single-payer healthcare, or some other form of socialized healthcare. Yes, that's a bold claim given that a GOP-controlled Congress and President are poised to un-socialize a great deal of healthcare, and may even pull it off. But within five years, plenty of Republicans will be loudly supporting or quietly assenting to universal Medicare. And that's a good thing, because socializing healthcare is the only demonstrably effective way to control costs and cover everyone. It results in a healthier country and it saves a ton of money."
"Russiagate's 'Core Narrative' Has Always Lacked Actual Evidence: The unprecedented allegation that the Kremlin 'attacked America' and 'colluded' with its president in order to elect him is based on two documents devoid of facts or logic. [...] Intentionally or not — one former intelligence officer called it a 'deliberate misrepresentation' — the ICA, by using the term 'Community,' gave the impression that its findings were the consensus of all '17 US intelligence agencies,' even though it was signed by only three (the CIA, the FBI, and the NSA) and by the overseeing director of national intelligence, James Clapper. This canard was widely deployed by pro-Clinton media and by her campaign until The New York Times belatedly corrected it in June 2017. But even then, anti-Trump forces continue to deploy a deceptive formulation, insisting that the ICA narrative was 'a consensus of the intelligence community.' That was false on two counts. Clapper subsequently admitted he had personally selected for the ICA analysts from the three agencies, but we still do not know who. No doubt these were analysts who would conform to the 'core narrative' of Kremlin-Trump collusion, possibly even one or more of the FBI officials now exposed for their 'bias.' Second, on one crucial finding, the NSA had only 'moderate confidence,' not the 'high confidence' of the CIA and FBI. This has yet to be explained. Still more, the ICA provided almost no facts for its 'assessment.' Remarkably, even the Times, which has long been a leading promoter of the Russiagate narrative, noticed this immediately: 'What is missing,' one of its lead analysts wrote, is 'hard evidence to back up the agencies' claims.' Even more remarkable but little noticed, the ICA authors buried at the end this nullifying disclaimer about their 'assessment': 'Judgments are not intended to imply that we have proof that shows something to be a fact.' What did that mean? Apparently, that after all the damning and ramifying allegations made in the report, the authors had no 'proof' that any of them were a 'fact.'"
"Here's Why the Hope of a 'Blue Wave' in November Is Dangerous to Democracy [...] Given the uphill climb for congressional representation that Democrats have in front of them (especially for the progressive subset of the party) it's clear that the midterms will largely be decided by the people who find a reason to vote. Pew Research shows Republicans generally have higher turnout than Democrats. Democrats might reconsider any 'we got this' conclusions or talk of blue waves. Overconfidence cost them in 2016, and for democracy's sake, they can't let themselves fall into the same trap."
The "Resistance" — or "The Assistance", as we call them — has decided they love them some Adam Schiff as one of their choice alternatives to the evil Bernie Sanders. He is frequently on the list of bright young Dems who should replace the old guard. A virulent Russia conspiracy theorist, there are reasons not to think he's a good choice. "Resistance leader? Not really. Democratic congressman Adam Schiff personifies the link between foreign policy hawks and deep-pocketed defense contractors."
Haaretz, "Israel Is Gunning for Its Gatekeepers" A bill that would in effect let cabinet members choose their ministries' legal advisers is part of the coalition's program to eliminate checks on its power. [...] The 'selection committee' would exist in name only, a way to whitewash the complete politicization of the position of ministry counsel. In the name of governability, Shaked seeks to eliminate the gatekeeper function of the legal adviser, protecting human and minority rights and fighting corruption and damage to proper public administration."
"After 2 Months of Unrest, Nicaragua Is at a Fateful Crossroads [...] How did it begin? Nicaragua has a backstory of violence: the revolutionary struggles of the 1970s against the repressive Somoza dictatorship, followed by the US-financed Contra war against the revolutionary Sandinista government in the 1980s (the US role in that war was condemned by the World Court in 1986 as a violation of international law). Electoral defeat for the Sandinistas in 1990 brought peace, but at the expense of 16 years of corrupt, neoliberal government that undid many of the gains of the revolution. Daniel Ortega's election win in 2006 led to a decade of renewed social investment. Poverty fell by almost half between 2005 and 2016, according to World Bank data, from 48 percent to 25 percent. Nicaragua won praise for its low crime rate, limited drug-related violence, and community-based policing. Nor could the private sector complain: Nicaragua's per-capita GDP increased by 38 percent — more than for any of its neighbors. [...] It seems clear that repression of the initial student demonstration was a grave error of judgment by the police. But there is growing evidence that subsequent events were manipulated so as to magnify discontent. For example, according to a reliable eyewitness, before the ransacking of a supermarket in Managua those doing it were seen to be given Sandinista T-shirts to wear. Burning of buildings is routinely ascribed to Sandinistas, even when it is party officials' houses that are destroyed, or in city streets under the opposition's control. Police in Managua apprehended a known criminal nicknamed 'The Viper' who confessed to plotting with the protesters to carry out armed attacks on shops and FSLN offices. Even the evidence against the police for the shooting at the opposition march on Mother's Day has been called into question, in an open letter to Amnesty International by a former prisoner of conscience. The fact that gunmen are working with the opposition was confirmed by the attempted assassination of Leonel Morales, a student leader who strongly criticized the protesters. On June 12 he was kidnapped, shot, and left for dead in a ditch, an incident at first ignored by the right-wing media, then ascribed to robbery."
REST IN PEACE: "Dick Leitsch, Whose 'Sip-In' Was a Gay Rights Milestone, Dies at 83: Dick Leitsch, who in 1966 led a pioneering act of civil disobedience to secure the right of gay patrons to be served in a licensed bar, helping to clear the way for gay bars to operate openly in New York State, died on Friday at a hospice center in Manhattan. He was 83."
ROT IN PERDITION: "A Lover Of Death Gets His Wish: Neocon Charles Krauthammer Dead At 68: Fox News contributor, Washington Post columnist and neoconservative thought leader Charles Krauthammer has died of cancer, and there is a mad media rush of establishment eulogies scrambling to canonize him as a great man in the eyes of the public before anyone can step back and take stock of what this man's legacy actually is. This is perfectly understandable, because if social consciousness cements into history what a wheelchair full of toxic human waste Krauthammer actually was, it will make things much more difficult for them to manufacture support for their neoconservative wars going forward."
Nathan J. Robinson says in Current Affairs, "There Is Still Only One Clear Way To Get Rid Of Trump: Let's be honest: running Bernie in 2020 is the best shot the Democrats have at beating Trump... [...] Needless to say, if your party contains a wildly popular politician, with an enthusiastic fan base of young activists, who is adept at speaking to the concerns of the 'Rust Belt' states that lost you the election the last time around, it would seem criminally foolish not to nominate that person as your presidential candidate."
"When Both Men and Women Drop Out of the Labor Force, Why Do Economists Only Ask About Men? That's what New York Times readers were wondering when they saw Harvard Economics Professor Greg Mankiw's column, 'Why Aren't Men Working?' The piece notes the falloff in labor force participation among prime-age men (ages 25 to 54) for the last 70 years and throws out a few possible explanations. We'll get to the explanations in a moment, but the biggest problem with explaining the drop in labor force participation among men as a problem with men is that since 2000, there has been a drop in labor force participation among prime-age women also.
Interviewed at Truthout, Noam Chomsky on Fascism, Showmanship and Democrats' Hypocrisy in the Trump Era: "The coverage has been quite instructive, in part because of the efforts of the Democrats to outflank Trump from the right. Beyond that, the coverage across the spectrum illustrates quite well two distinct kinds of deceit: lying and not telling relevant truths. Each merits comment."
Back in March, Ryan Grim wrote about What The Dan Lipinski-Marie Newman Democratic Primary In Illinois Means. A lot of things are going to go this way because the "centrists" have deep pockets, but sometimes you have to run more than once to win. And the more people know that Lipinski was one of only two Democrats to vote for the Hyde Amendment, the more his seat will be in jeopardy.
Margaret Kimberly in Black Agenda Report, "No Protest for Black People: Donald Trump is certainly a motivator for white liberals. That group was quiescent when other presidents committed human rights abuses and war crimes, but they spring into action when Trump does something they don't like. It is commendable that thousands of people converged on airports in 2017 to protect victims of the Trump travel ban against seven Muslim nations. Now the outrage over the official policy of immigrant family separation has produced another groundswell of protest. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) offices have been blockaded, ICE employees are outed online and presidential staff are chased from restaurants by angry people. To be clear, the anger is justified and the protest is necessary. But where is this level of outrage when black people are victimized by this system?"
"Telecom-Backed Democrat in California Just "Mutilated" Nation's Strongest State Net Neutrality Bill: 'These California Democrats will go down in history as among the worst corporate shills that have ever held elected office. Californians should rise up and demand that at their Assembly members represent them.' Following a "major win" for open internet advocates in the California Senate last month, State Assemblyman Miguel Santiago provoked widespread outrage on Wednesday when he 'rammed through' amendments that critics say 'eviscerate' what 'would have been the best net neutrality bill in the country.' 'It is, with the amendments, a fake net neutrality bill," declared state Sen. Scott Wiener of San Francisco, who introduced the original legislation. Wiener said Santiago's amendments 'mutilated' Senate Bill 822, which had passed the higher chamber despite fierce lobbying by the telecom industry."
David Dayen in The New Republic, "The AT&T-Time Warner Merger Is Already What the Government Feared: It's been quite a week for AT&T.; One of the largest providers of wireless, internet, and cable TV in America, it closed a $85.4 billion deal last Thursday to acquire Time Warner, one of the biggest entertainment companies in the world, after a federal court blessed the merger over the Justice Department's objections. Judge Richard Leon, of the U.S. District Court for D.C., had rejected the government's argument that AT&T; would lessen competition by leveraging Time Warner's 'must-have' television content to drive rival customers to its products. Within one week, AT&T announced a plan to use Time Warner's television content to drive rival customers to its products. It's just one of several announcements from the new conglomerate that show the government was right: AT&T is determined to use its economic and political power to expand its reach and dominate markets."
Zach Carter at The Huffington Post says that, "Stephanie Kelton Has The Biggest Idea In Washington: Once an outsider, her radical economic thinking won over Wall Street. Now she's changing the Democratic Party." But clearly, not fast enough: "Why do Democrats love pay-go? House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer on Wednesday both said they'll back pay-go rules if they regain control of the House this fall, meaning that all proposed legislation will have to be deficit-neutral." This may be the stupidest thing they could say in public.
On a similar note, The Hill reports that Pelosi said that, "'Medicare for All' should be 'evaluated' if Dems win House." This sounds like a non-promise to begin with (yeah, well "evaluate" the excuses for why we can't do it), but of course if they actually campaigned on it, people might even believe they mean it. Also, it might help them win.
This National Tracking Poll for June 7-10 says a number of things you already know but the Democrats have managed to weaken themselves where they should be strongest and if they actually wanted to win, they'd be worried.
The Hill, "Sanders gets best reception at early 2020 audition [...] More than a thousand energetic attendees gathered at the We the People Summit to hear from some top potential 2020 contenders: Sens. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and Kamala Harris (D-Calif.). But it was Sanders who won the most applause from the crowd of progressive and labor activists."
Bernie wants to save the postal service. One of the people he wants to save it from is Joe Manchin, one of Trump's Democrats.
"The Unofficial Gag Order of Jamil Al-Amin (H. Rap Brown): 16 Years in Prison, Still Not Allowed to Speak" — Al Amin had a gag order placed on him during his original trial, but something very odd has happened, all these years later, and suddenly a paranoid-sounding FBI report got him hidden away at grave threat to his health. As for the original crime, the only evidence that was used against him did not implicate him at all. Funny, that.
It's important to remember that the phrase "Blue Dogs" is not an adjective to describe conservative Democrats, though it could be. The "Blue Dogs" is a formal organization. You pay dues, elect officers, go to meetings, split up bribes from Big Business interests eager to purchase influence inside the Democratic caucus, etc. In order to be endorsed by the Blue Dogs, you have to apply and pass a written test proving you are a corrupt conservative. Many of their worst candidates-- like Jay Hulings (TX), Brad Ashford (NE), JD Huffstetler (VA) and Jim Grey (KY)-- have already been defeated by more progressive candidates in primaries this year. This is the garbage that's left:
• Anthony Brindisi (NY)
• Paul Davis (KS)
• Gretchen Driskell (MI)
• Mel Hall (IN)
• Chris Hunter (FL)
• Brendan Kelly (IL)
• Kathy Manning (NC)
• Ben McAdams (UT)
• Matt Reel (TN)
• Max Rose (NY)
• Clarke Tucker (AR)
• Denny Wolff (PA)
• Jeff Van Drew (NRA-NJ)
For the fun of it, I bolded every Blue Dog candidate who is in a district that was won by Bernie in the 2016 primary. So what's so bad about the Blue Dogs that I would urge readers to not vote for them in primaries and consider carefully if you want to vote for a lesser-of-two-evils candidate in the general? Let's go back a few years when the Blue Dogs were bragging about how they were powerful enough to have scuttled the public option. Not a single House Republican voted for the Affordable Care Act-- and all the negotiating was internal, between Democrats. The Blue Dogs held the bill hostage, threatening to vote with the Republicans to kill it.
[...] ProgressivePunch has graded every Blue Dog's record "F." These are the 7 worst Democrats in Congress based on this cycle's votes. All of them have voted more frequently with the Republicans on crucial roll calls than with the Democrats. Walter Jones (R-NC) votes with the Democrats more than they do. And Justin Amash votes against the GOP than all but one of the stinkin Blue Dogs. This year, worst of all has been Collin Peterson, who has voted with the Democrats 28% of the time. Kyrsten Sinema-- Blue Dog chairwoman who Schumer has chosen to run for the Senate-- has voted with the Democrats (from a safe blue seat) 32% of the time. Jim Costa, also in a safe blue district, voted with the Dems 32%, as have 2 more from safe blue seats, Jim Costa (CA) and Henry Cuellar (TX). Josh Gottheimer- 39%, Tom O'Halleran- 40%, Stephanie Murphy- 42%. Horrible. And if you say, we need them to win, you are absolutely wrong. In fact, the opposite is true. History proves that most of them will likely lose their seats in the 2022 midterms when Democratic core voters realize what they are and stay away from the polls.
* * * * *
Eric Levitz says Democrats are more focused on bread-and-butter issues than people think, but "The Democratic Party Has an 'MSNBC Problem' [...] In truth, the Democratic Party is quite focused on promoting a progressive critique of the GOP's positions on taxes, health care, and social spending, because it knows that Republicans are deeply vulnerable on those issues. MSNBC, CNN, and the broader mainstream media, however, are obsessed with the White House's myriad scandals — because they know that a federal investigation into the American president's potential ties to the Kremlin (and/or porn stars and/or white-collar crime) is ratings gold — while daily broadcasts reiterating the regressive implications of the GOP's tax law and health-care plans would be anything but."
"Supreme Court allows Ohio, other state voter purges: WASHINGTON (AP) — States can target people who haven't cast ballots in a while in efforts to purge their voting rolls, the Supreme Court ruled Monday in a case that has drawn wide attention amid stark partisan divisions and the approach of the 2018 elections. By a 5-4 vote that split the conservative and liberal justices, the court rejected arguments in a case from Ohio that the practice violates a federal law intended to increase the ranks of registered voters. A handful of other states also use voters' inactivity to trigger processes that could lead to their removal from the voting rolls."
"ICE Came for a Tennessee Town's Immigrants. The Town Fought Back. Agents conducted one of the biggest workplace raids since President Trump announced a crackdown on illegal immigration, detaining 97 workers in Morristown. But for residents, these workers were their neighbors."
This almost makes me laugh, but "Eric Holder May Be Considering A Presidential Run. But Has His Time Passed? If Holder's DOJ showed little mercy to drug offenders and whistleblowers, his DOJ was tender and mild with big banks after the financial asset bubble collapse. 'There were no subpoenas, no document reviews, no wiretaps' is how one DOJ source described Holder's approach to Wall Street crime. At the end of 2014, Columbia Journalism Review business reporter Ryan Chittum observed that 'Holder leaves office having been far outclassed by the Bush administration even in prosecuting corporate criminals, despite overseeing the aftermath of one of the biggest orgies of financial corruption in history.' [...] We surely haven't seen the last of prosecutor politicians who grandstand and indict their way into cable news glory and donor-class cocktail parties. But a little light bulb is going on over an increasing number of Americans' heads that ambitious prosecutors in the most carceral country on the planet are perhaps not the best people to put in charge of fixing our justice system, much less running our government."
Theresa May was doing this crap when she was still Home Secretary. She is sympatico with Trump and it's a joke to hear her pretending she finds Trump's behavior worthy of condemnation.
RIP: Clint Walker, Star of TV Western Cheyenne, Dies at 90: For seven seasons from 1955-61, he played Cheyenne Bodie, a rambunctious wanderer in the post-Civil War West, on the ABC series Cheyenne. (He also guested as the character on Maverick.)" Yeah, we watched all those westerns at our house when I was a kid. I didn't even notice this until I saw Langford had mentioned him in the Ansibleobits for his genre credits.
Ryan Cooper in The Week, "The presidential delusions of Democratic billionaires: Howard Schultz announced Monday that he's stepping down as CEO of Starbucks and immediately sparked speculation that he is going to run for president. Business-friendly news outlets got his friends (that is, other CEOs) to vouch for him, and he started talking up an issue to seem like a serious political player. Naturally, it was a lot of claptrap about the national debt. But he's not alone. Other billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg, Mark Cuban, Elon Musk, and Michael Bloomberg (who may be getting the itch to purchase himself another high political office, as he did the New York City mayoralty) have also invited speculation about running. The modern robber barons of our Second Gilded Age already have a death grip on the commanding heights of the economy, and Donald Trump seemingly cruised to the presidency on his billions, so why shouldn't they try the same trick? [...] All that aside, the political appeal of deficit phobia today is nil, and nobody but a billionaire (or, just possibly, Chuck Schumer) could fail to notice it. No coddled, inept rich guy limply whining about borrowing and how Medicare is too expensive is going to beat Trump delivering xenophobic tirades to the baying ride-or-die partisans of the Republican base. Of course, in the age of President Donald J. Trump, one must always include the caveat that the future is an unknowable void from hell, and anything bad that can happen probably will. Maybe one of these plutocrats will discover his inner Mussolini and cruise to victory. But I fear it is more likely that one will mount a vanity third-party run, only to bleed enough votes from the Democratic candidate in 2020 to give Trump another term." Remember Bloomberg threatening to make an indy run if Sanders was the Democratic nominee? Yeah.
"The Surprising Popularity of 'Far Left' Policies: Supposedly radical ideals are actually embraced by large swaths of the American public." — It's just amazing who can get called "far left" by The Washington Post.
Josh Barro in Business Insider, "Why does Trump get away with corruption? Because Bill and Hillary Clinton normalized it [...] Here's one reason the Trump corruption scandals aren't connecting as much as they should: Before Democrats spent the past 18 months telling everyone this is not normal, they spent years reassuring voters that this was normal."
Branko Marcetic, Jacobin, "From the Jaws of Victory: We've read Chasing Hillary so you didn't have to. The Clinton campaign was even worse than we thought." Here's one to start: After flirting with running in 2016, former vice-president Joe Biden ultimately declined to jump in due to what many believed was grief over his son's death. Yet Chozick argues he was nervous about the prospect of crossing the Clintons to begin with. 'You guys don't understand these people,' Biden had allegedly told the White House press corps off the record one day. 'The Clintons will try to destroy me.'"
Shaun King,, "How Bernie Sanders Evolved on Criminal Justice Reform [...] In meeting Krasner, Sanders found someone who approaches problems in a manner very similar to his own — but is actually getting stuff done. I don't mean that as a slight to Sanders, but as a progressive U.S. senator in a Republican-controlled Congress with Donald Trump as president, it's almost impossible to pass progressive reforms. Krasner has only been in office for six months and is radically changing everything about the inner processes of justice in Philadelphia. It was a light bulb moment. Real Justice helped elect Krasner, as well as other reform candidates across the country, and Sanders now wanted to know how he could help. [...] 'It's disgusting, Shaun, that our country is basically criminalizing poverty. I'll be honest with you. I really didn't know this was happening. I had no idea hundreds of thousands of Americans, particularly African-Americans, were being held in jail, for months or years, even though they've never been convicted of a crime, simply because they can't afford bail,' Sanders told me in a tiny dressing room backstage before the event. 'I've learned a lot,' he continued. 'I see the racial disparities clearer than ever. I want to help — just tell me how I can best help and we'll do it.'"
Also Shaun King, "You don't really know who Bernie Sanders was in the 1960s. Why it mattered then and why it matters in 2018 [...] Bernie hates telling these stories and has resisted using them for political capital across the years — even when advisors and others have told him it would boost his profile — he has refused. He does what he does because he cares. When I introduced Bernie at a rally in Los Angeles by sharing many of these stories, his own family came to me in tears saying that even they had never heard them before. He has always felt that what he did during the sixties paled in comparison to those who were beaten or lost their lives — and so he has kept some powerful stories to himself."
I see people keep asking what "Donut Twitter" is. It's the proud tradition of the alt-center snubbing the left: "Repeatedly, establishment Democrats have infantilized and derided the progressive wing of the party."
Why American Life is Traumatizing Americans But They Don't Know it [...] I hope by now you are beginning to see what I see. American life is becoming one long, daily, repeated exercise in trauma. Americans are being traumatized according to the textbook definition, by the institutions, structures, and habits of daily life under predatory capitalism, which demands that they live at the edge of survival, of just being, at the very brink of being annihilated, mostly so that the economy can 'grow'. Americans have become accustomed to being at the edge of life and death — but that is what trauma is."
Raven Onthill at Advice Unasked, on "A Well Regulated Militia: The genesis of the piece was some decades ago research into the Second Amendment and the militia. One of the works I read was the commonly-cited-by-firearms — advocates 1698 'A Discourse of Government with Relation to Militias' by Andrew Fletcher. The 'Discourse' contains what may be the first use of the phrase 'well-regulated militia;' certainly one of the earliest uses. But how did this phrase make it into the Constitution? What was Fletcher doing writing about militia anyway? And what does it all mean for us, now?"
Fallstream holes look like a portal in the sky to another dimension.
I've always wondered what Brian Boitano thought about his appearances in South Park, and it just occurred to me that someone must have interviewed him about it, and, indeed, they have.
Cristian Farias in New York Magazine, "The Supreme Court Has Decided to Shut Workers Out of the Courthouse for Good [...] So high were the stakes in Epic, that during the hearing for the case — which saw lawyers for employers, workers, the Department of Justice, and the National Labor Relations Board all squaring off with everyone else — Justice Stephen Breyer openly wondered if a ruling for the employers would effectively cut out 'the entire heart of the New Deal.'" RBG calls on Congress to fix the mess. Everyone else should, too.
"Democrats join Koch group to revamp veterans programs: WASHINGTON
Democrats for years have seen the conservative Koch brothers as political enemies. Former Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid even called them "un-American." But Wednesday, Senate Democrats teamed up with Republicans to pass major veterans health care legislation championed by the Kochs. The Koch-funded Concerned Veterans for America celebrated a big victory with the passage of the VA MISSION Act, a sweeping bill that overhauls how the Department of Veterans Affairs gives patients access to private-sector doctors. It's a big win for the once-obscure advocacy group backed by conservative billionaires Charles and David Koch. The group helped write the bill, which sailed through the Senate by a 92-5 vote after also passing the House overwhelmingly. It got broad support from politicians and veterans groups across the political spectrum, and President Donald Trump is expected to sign the bill into law soon." Of the Democratic caucus, only Merkley, Sanders, and Schatz voted No.
"Prosecutors Withheld Evidence That Could Exonerate J20 Inauguration Protesters, Judge Rules: CHIEF JUDGE Robert E. Morin of the D.C. Superior Court found on Wednesday that federal prosecutors suppressed potentially exculpatory evidence against six Inauguration Day protesters. In a motion filed late last night, attorneys for the defendants accused the government of withholding evidence that could have exonerated their clients — a serious violation of pretrial discovery rules. Attorneys allege that the state withheld evidence by editing a video of a protest planning meeting. Defense attorneys called on the court to sanction Assistant U.S. Attorney Jennifer Kerkhoff for 'blatant hiding of evidence' and requested that the indictment against their clients be dismissed. At pretrial hearing Wednesday afternoon, Morin agreed that the prosecution had violated the 'Brady rule,' which governs the state's pretrial obligations to disclose exculpatory evidence, but declined to rule on the defense's motions to dismiss the indictment or suppress the evidence. Morin will rule on those sanctions next week."
The Clintonati like to claim Bernie Sanders said Planned Parenthood was "the establishment", which is a mischaracterization, but maybe if he had he wouldn't have been wrong. "Planned Parenthood Is Asking Donald Trump's Labor Board For Help Busting Its Colorado Union: COLORADO PLANNED PARENTHOOD executives, with help from President Donald Trump's labor board appointees, are fighting their health center workers' unionization efforts in a case that could set a precedent for workers' rights nationwide. The case is Rocky Mountain Planned Parenthood Inc. v. SEIU. Staff for Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains, in coordination with SEIU Local 105, won the election for their union in December 2017. But shortly after the vote to unionize, Planned Parenthood leadership, instead of recognizing the new unit, turned to the Republican-controlled National Labor Relations Board to challenge the outcome. The Planned Parenthood bosses won the first round, and the appeal will now move to the full five-member labor board." (Interestingly, PP doesn't appear to be supporting Medicare for All, either.
"The Supreme Court just quietly handed a big victory to abortion opponents: Trump's judges just got a clear signal that they can chop away at abortion rights and get away with it. The Supreme Court announced on Tuesday that it will not hear Planned Parenthood of Arkansas v. Jegley, despite the fact that the lower court's opinion in this case is at odds with the Court's 2016 opinion striking down a Texas anti-abortion law.
The first two Episodes of The Appeal Podcast are up, on "District Attorneys Are The Most Powerful People You've Never Heard Of. With guest Josie Duffy Rice" and "The Misplaced Sanctimony of Criminalizing Sex Work. With guest Melissa Gira Grant".
"Blue-state Democrats have a new cause: Helping millionaires [...] On the heels of the new Republican tax law, state Democrats, who until recently were advocating higher taxes on the rich, are suddenly fighting to protect their own members of the top 1 percent from higher taxes. Some Dems are even proposing both — raise taxes on the wealthy with one hand and help them with the other."
"How an arcane, new accounting standard is helping reporters follow the money [...] In Fulton County, the largest of nine counties in the Atlanta metro area, officials were trying to comply with the new disclosures and had hired Ernst & Young to help. As the accountants spoke, Niesse peppered them with questions. At one point, the accountants left the room to discuss the accuracy of their numbers. 'When they came back out, they agreed they needed to present the information in a clearer way,' Niesse recalls. That's when Niesse noticed an extensive spreadsheet on an accountant's laptop, open on the conference room table. Unlike the PowerPoint, the spreadsheet was crystal clear: it showed the parcel IDs and property taxes not paid on every recent development in Fulton County."
"The Right-Wing Millennial Machine: Conservatives are building an army of fired-up young people. How? By offering them salaries. [...] Progressives aren't just out of sync with their own need to recruit and retain young people. They're also lagging behind conservative interests. A 2017 study found that between 2008 and 2014, conservative donors gave three times more to millennial outreach groups than liberal donors. Much of that funding, Thompson says, went to things like paid fellowships, travel stipends and study grants ? creating the feeder system that will guide young people into actual jobs with political campaigns and think tanks. 'The Republicans are building an army, while the Democrats are still paying you in "making the world a better place,"' said Carlos Vera, the executive director of Pay Our Interns, a watchdog group. 'I've had older people say to me, 'Well, I did unpaid internships and I was fine.' Then you ask them when that was and they say, '1972.' You could work your way through college back then. That simply is not the case anymore.'"
The Hill, "WikiLeaks's Assange reportedly offers to show Schiff 'there was no collusion': WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is willing to meet with Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, to prove there was "no collusion," according to an intermediary who spoke with MSNBC. [...] Schiff reportedly said that he would talk to Assange but only if he were in U.S. custody. Assange is currently residing in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London to avoid arrest and possible extradition to the U.S. on allegations of espionage." Schiff doesn't want to hear evidence of no collusion, so of course he's willing to talk to Assange only under conditions Assange would have to be suicidal to agree to.
Interesting article from David Adler in The New York Times, of all places. "Centrists Are the Most Hostile to Democracy, Not Extremists [...] Some of the most striking data reflect respondents' views of elections. Support for 'free and fair' elections drops at the center for every single country in the sample. The size of the centrist gap is striking. In the case of the United States, fewer than half of people in the political center view elections as essential." [graph] Of course, the concept of 'support for democracy' is somewhat abstract, and respondents may interpret the question in different ways. What about support for civil rights, so central to the maintenance of the liberal democratic order? In almost every case, support for civil rights wanes in the center. In the United States, only 25 percent of centrists agree that civil rights are an essential feature of democracy. [...] One of the strongest warning signs for democracy has been the rise of populist leaders with authoritarian tendencies. But while these leaders have become more popular, it is unclear whether citizens explicitly support more authoritarian styles of government. I find, however, evidence of substantial support for a 'strong leader' who ignores his country's legislature, particularly among centrists. In the United States, centrists' support for a strongman-type leader far surpasses that of the right and the left."
Sean McElwee in the NYT, "The Rising Racial Liberalism of Democratic Voters: In response to both the election of Barack Obama in 2008 and the backlash in favor of Donald Trump in 2016, analysts and commentators have focused mostly on racial attitudes on the right. Both scholarship and journalistic accounts of American politics have drilled down on the increased opposition to immigration and high levels of racial resentment among Obama opponents and Trump supporters. But few have investigated the countervailing trend on the left, the increasing racial liberalism of Democratic voters, which I've been thinking about for a while."
Dday has "Fears of the Next Recession: What will it do to the many millions of Americans who still haven't recovered from the last one? [...] Oil prices aside, other economic indicators suggest a recession in the not-too-distant future, perhaps by the last year of Trump's current term in 2020. There are obvious political ramifications to that. Trump currently gets relatively high marks on the economy; a slump during a presidential election year would damage hopes of a second term. But it would also damage all the 'forgotten men and women' who have been put further and further behind with each cycle of recession and recovery. Bard College economist Pavlina Tcherneva constructed the best visual depiction of this phenomenon, with a chart showing the distribution of post-recession gains. In the 1940s and '50s, the bottom 90 percent of income earners enjoyed at least two-thirds of the benefits. In the 1980s and '90s, they saw only 20 percent of the gains, and in the recovery after 9/11, that number fell to 2 percent. After the financial crisis of 2007, the bottom 90 percent saw negative gains — that is, they lost ground during the recovery."
RIP, "It is my sad duty to note the passing of Gardner Dozois today, Sunday May 27, at 4:00 p.m. The cause was an overwhelming systemic infection. Gardner had been hospitalized for a minor illness and was expected to be released shortly. The decline was swift. He died surrounded by his family." — posted by Michael Swanwick on FB, It's the anniversary of that Memorial Day weekend when I met them all at Disclave for the first time — Gardner, Sue Caspur, Piglet (George Alec Effinger), Swanwick, GRRM, Dave Harris, Pat Cadigan, Tess Kissinger, et al. Gardner and Sue in particular were a big part of my fandom. This breaks my heart.
RIP: Eddy Clearwater, blues guitarist, at 83: "Grammy-nominated Chicago blues guitarist Eddy 'The Chief' Clearwater has died of heart failure at age 83, his label, Alligator Records, announced. He was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 2016 and had received two Blues Music Awards. His Grammy nod came when his 2003 album Rock 'N' Roll City appeared in the Best Traditional Blues Album category."
Matt Taibbi, "The Battle of Woodstock: What does it mean when the biggest threat to upstart Democrats is the national Democratic Party? [...] Beals goes on to suggest that there's an even more nefarious motive for the defeatist analyses. Successfully spreading the idea that the party can't reach certain voters not only absolves the national bureaucracy of any need to change, but reduces campaigning to a blunt-force fundraising contest, a place where they're comfortable. 'This is where things get dark, but I think there are a lot of people who want you to think we can't win those votes,' he says. 'They want us to just get back to focusing on the fundraising, and keep the cash cow going.'"
Ryan Cooper in The Week, "The Democratic Party is flying blind on economics [...] I found no evidence that anyone in the Democratic Party, in the leadership or out, had been promulgating a strategic party doctrine on this question, or even discussing it much. On the contrary, if anything there were strong indications that the old background radiation of austerity and deficit phobia has continued to beam through their collective political unconscious."
Matt Stoller in The Baffler, "Lords of Misrule: How the legal profession became Wall Street's helpmeet: IN 1937, FUTURE SUPREME COURT JUSTICE Robert Jackson gave a toast at the New York State Bar Association on the civic responsibilities of the legal profession. 'No other people have submitted so generally to lawyer leadership,' he said. Yet, he argued, 'There is no constitutional protection for our lawyer monopoly.' Jackson was referring, in a tone of populist outrage, to the new wave of big law firms that were then vehemently opposing Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and its crackdown on Wall Street in the wake of the 1929 crash. 'We must rely solely on the record of a trust well fulfilled to perpetuate lawyer control.' Jackson was the last Supreme Court Justice not to graduate from law school, and he hated the corruption of the craft of lawyering via the growth of corporate law, centered then in the American Bar Association. Jackson believed that the professionalization of the law and the resulting priority of financial over ethical considerations among lawyers have been toxic for American democracy. [...] Seeing the ethos of federal enforcement collapse under all these pressures, it's hard not to be enraged at the entire legal profession, from self-satisfied judges like Kaplan to corporate defense attorneys like Mary Jo White who collect millions and construct an ethical system designed to help their friends steal from all of us. [...] It's abundantly clear, in other words, that the decision to refrain from prosecuting important actors in the corporate world was Obama White House policy, and this policy was part of an overall ideological shift away from allegiance to democracy itself, to rule by the people."
"Yes, There is a Civil War Within the Democratic Party — it's Just Not What You Think: The popular narrative about the Democratic Divide is all wrong and it's important that we realise the truth — before it is too late. [...] So yes, Mainstream Media and political pundits, there is a 'civil war' raging within the Democratic Party, but the rebels are not the Berniecrats. The true revolutionaries are the Clintonian apostates who have been trying for 20 years to overturn and reverse the greatest achievements of the Democratic Party, programs that help the poor, the working class and the middle class; programs that protect the people from the cruel vicissitudes of the Market and the sociopathic machinations of those whom FDR called 'the Economic Royalists.' The current Democratic Establishment is run by those self-same Economic Royalists; the robber barons whose hatred FDR welcomed are now met with open arms and warm receptions by the revolutionary Leadership that has seized control of the Democratic Party. These radicals have taken the Party of FDR, JFK, LBJ, RFK and turned it into the Democratic Party of Goldwater, Nixon and Reagan."
David Dayen in The New Republic, "A Fitting End to Paul Ryan's Fraudulent Political Career: The Republican House of Representatives has become an unruly mob, and the speaker has no one to blame but himself. [...] Ryan's speakership has become untenable. House members are roping in Trump on a plan to depose Ryan this summer, putting the House in the hands of Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy. It's unclear whether the Freedom Caucus would go along. They have circulated a letter to get Jim Jordan, one of their leaders, to run for speaker, so the McCarthy plan to bring order to the House may only create greater disorder, and no speaker in charge for months."
The Guardian, "Exclusive: how rightwing groups wield secret 'toolkit' to plot against US unions: Internal documents obtained by the Guardian reveal a nationwide drive to persuade union members to quit and stop paying dues. [...] Documents obtained by the Guardian reveal that a network of radical conservative thinktanks spanning all 50 states is planning direct marketing campaigns targeted personally at union members to encourage them to quit. The secret push, the group hopes, could cost unions up to a fifth of their 7 million members, lead to the loss of millions of dollars in income and undermine a cornerstone of US progressive politics."
I'm not sure what to make of this, but, "Wikipedia Is An Establishment Psyop." Hm, the Herald seems to have the story, too. The Canaryhas been a victim. It seems obvious that "Philip Cross" is more than one person with a mission to make Wikipedia less friendly to leftier voices.
Did we mention that Google is officially evil now? "Google Removes 'Don't Be Evil' Clause From Its Code of Conduct: Google's unofficial motto has long been the simple phrase 'don't be evil.' But that's over, according to the code of conduct that Google distributes to its employees. The phrase was removed sometime in late April or early May, archives hosted by the Wayback Machine show."
David Dayen and Ryan Grim in The Intercept, "Party Leaders Are Not Strategic Geniuses, They Just Really Like Moderates, New Research Finds: THE BATTLE BETWEEN grassroots Democratic activists and Washington-based party leaders continued to unfold Tuesday night, with the national party notching some rear-guard victories and local forces delivering the party its second high-profile setback in as many weeks. Through all of these contests, national party leaders have argued that their decision-making is not personal or ideological. They believe in the same progressive values as the grassroots activists, goes the argument, but more moderate candidates are needed to be able to win the general election and take the House back from Republicans. [...] A paper in this month's edition of the peer-reviewed Legislative Studies Quarterly analyzes a decade's worth of federal elections, finding that party organizations boost moderate candidates across the board, whether the general election is expected to be competitive or a long shot. In other words, party support for moderates does not appear to be strategic, but sincere. 'They're not doing this to have a better shot at winning elections,' said the paper's author Hans Hassell, assistant professor of politics at Cornell College in Iowa."
David Dayen's Tiny Letter on how "Wells Fargo Makes Pope Francis Sad: "We are a much better company today than we were a year ago, and I am confident that this year Wells Fargo will be even better," said Wells Fargo CEO Tim Sloan in January. We now know that at that precise moment, employees in the wholesale unit of Wells Fargo were altering information on client forms without their knowledge. Wells Fargo needed to supply this information as part of an anti-money laundering consent order, and when faced with the deadline, they just broke the law and forged the forms. And the bank acknowledged this took place in late 2017 and early 2018. This comes on the heels of Wells Fargo admitting that, also in 2017, they kept fee rebates intended for public pension funds. It was called a "system set-up error." Both of these incidents occurred years after being caught issuing fake accounts, after illegally repossessing cars, after the dozen-odd other scandals for which Wells Fargo has made a show of penitence. When punishment is not meaningful, offenders get the message that they can continue to offend. Anyone with a 2 year-old child understands this, yet we continue to let banks like Wells Fargo escape without real accountability."
* At a later Tiny Letter, David has a whole bunch of good links to too many stories by himself and others for me to individually link to them all, but you may want to check them out
"The trouble with charitable billionaires: More and more wealthy CEOs are pledging to give away parts of their fortunes — often to help fix problems their companies caused. Some call this 'philanthrocapitalism', but is it just corporate hypocrisy? [...] Essentially, what we are witnessing is the transfer of responsibility for public goods and services from democratic institutions to the wealthy, to be administered by an executive class. In the CEO society, the exercise of social responsibilities is no longer debated in terms of whether corporations should or shouldn't be responsible for more than their own business interests. Instead, it is about how philanthropy can be used to reinforce a politico-economic system that enables such a small number of people to accumulate obscene amounts of wealth."
Matt Taibbi, "Seymour Hersh's Memoir Is Full of Useful Reporting Secrets: The best of his generation writes a how-to that undermines the industry of Access Journalism [...] When it comes time for the next generation of journalists to re-discover what this job is supposed to be about, they can at least read Reporter. It's all in here."
Also, Jon Schwarz, "Seymour Hersh'S New Memoir Is A Fascinating, Flabbergasting Masterpiece [...] If Hersh were a superhero, this would be his origin story. Two hundred and seventy-four pages after the Chicago anecdote, he describes his coverage of a massive slaughter of Iraqi troops and civilians by the U.S. in 1991 after a ceasefire had ended the Persian Gulf War. America's indifference to this massacre was, Hersh writes, 'a reminder of the Vietnam War's MGR, for Mere Gook Rule: If it's a murdered or raped gook, there is no crime.' It was also, he adds, a reminder of something else: 'I had learned a domestic version of that rule decades earlier' in Chicago."
The Hill, "Court orders Iran to pay billions to 9/11 victims and families: A federal judge on Tuesday ordered Iran to pay billions of dollars in damages to the families of victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks." It's unlikely they will actually pay it, but the very idea that Iran should have to pay for an attack by Saudi Arabians is pretty appalling.
"Call Congress's 'Blue Lives Matter' Bills What They Are: Another Attack On Black Lives: ON WEDNESDAY, THE House of Representatives passed the Protect and Serve Act of 2018 by a vote of 382 to 35. The act — a congressional 'Blue Lives Matter' bill — would make it a federal crime to assault a police officer. The Senate version of the bill, which also has broad bipartisan support, goes even further, framing an attack on an officer as a federal hate crime. The bills exemplify the very worst sort of legislation: at once unnecessary and pernicious. [...] A number of commentators have stressed the superfluousness of making police attacks a federal crime. There's not a state in the country that doesn't already treat assaulting or killing an officer with the heaviest of penalties. With the laws that are already on the books at the state level, it's already a safe assumption today that any convicted cop killer will be sentenced to life without parole." 162 Democrats voted for this piece of garbage. Out of 193.
Jonathan Cohn, "House Republicans, with Some Democratic Help, Vote in Favor of Discrimination and Deregulation in Latest Attacks on Federal Watchdogs: This week, the Republican House of Representatives continued to work on one of their favorite lobbies: gutting financial regulation. On Tuesday, the House voted to repeal a 2013 Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) guidance that laid out steps indirect auto lenders should take to ensure that they are operating in compliance with the fair credits laws as applied to dealer markup and compensation policies. In other words, the CPFB wanted to help curb discrimination against consumers on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, sex, marital status, and age, all prohibited by the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA). Racial discrimination in auto lending is a well-documented phenomenon. The vote was 234 to 175, with Vern Buchanan (FL-16) voting present. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (IL-27) was the only Republican to vote against the repeal. 11 Democrats joined the GOP: Jim Cooper (TN-05), Lou Correa (CA-46), Jim Costa (CA-16), Henry Cuellar (TX-28), Vicente Gonzalez (TX-15), Gene Green (TX-29), Stephanie Murphy (FL-07), Collin Peterson (MN-07), Kurt Schrader (OR-05), David Scott (GA-13), and Filemon Vela (TX-34)."
Socialist-Backed Candidates Sweep Pennsylvania State House Primaries: Four Pennsylvania state House candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) won their Democratic primaries, marking another milestone in the radical left's march into electoral politics. The wins by the four candidates — all women unseating men — were the product of a variety of political forces and groups. But in a country where 'socialist' remains an epithet in certain quarters, the growing electoral success of a once-marginal socialist organization is an especially notable political development." There are also two Berniecrats from Nebraska who won primaries for seats in the US House, and in state legislatures, ten in PA, one in Nebraska, two in Oregon and two in Idaho.
* The story in In These Times, "Socialists and Progressives Just Trounced the Democratic Establishment: On Tuesday, insurgent challengers beat out their opponents in races across the country by running on bold left platforms."
David Dayen, "Bill Aimed At Saving Community Banks Is Already Killing Them: AFTER INITIAL RELUCTANCE, House Republicans have finally reached an agreement to move forward on a bipartisan bank deregulation bill that the Senate passed in March. Its stated aim — to help rural community banks thrive against growing Wall Street power — appears to have been enough to power it across the finish line. But banking industry analysts say the bill is already having the opposite effect, and its loosening of regulations on medium-sized banks is encouraging a rush of consolidation — all of which ends with an increasing number of community banks being swallowed up and closed down."
Symbolic victory in The Hill, "Senate votes to save net neutrality rules: The Senate on Wednesday voted to reinstate the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) net neutrality rules, passing a bill that has little chance of advancing in the House but offers net neutrality supporters and Democrats a political rallying point for the midterm elections. Democrats were able to force Wednesday's vote using an obscure legislative tool known as the Congressional Review Act (CRA). CRA bills allow Congress, with a majority vote in each chamber and the president's signature, to overturn recent agency moves."
"Police Realizing That SESTA/FOSTA Made Their Jobs Harder; Sex Traffickers Realizing It's Made Their Job Easier: For many months in the discussion over FOSTA/SESTA, some of us tried to explain how problematic the bills were. Much of the focus of those discussions were about the negative impact it would have on free speech on the internet, as the way the bill was drafted would encourage greater censorship and more speech-chilling lawsuits. But as we heard from more and more people, we also realized just how incredibly damaging the bill was going to be to those it was ostensibly designed to protect. Beyond the fact that it was passed based on completely fictional claims about the size of the problem, those who actually were victims of sex trafficking began explaining -- in fairly stark terms -- how SESTA/FOSTA would put them in greater danger and almost certainly lead to deaths." And they were right.
Matt Stoller notes that the new FTC Commissioner is sounding like the real deal.
"1. I mentioned this last night, but this memo by new FTC Commissioner @chopraftc is really worth reading. It is a bad-ass and extremely important statement on corporate crime and has significant implications for Facebook.
"2. First, some context. This memo is about recidivism, or committing a crime again once you've been caught. In 2011, Facebook was caught in 2011 engaging in 'unfair and deceptive' practices, and the FTC stated the company 'violated federal law.' Today's scandal is a repeat crime.
"3. 'FTC orders are not suggestions.' [] That's how law enforcer Chopra says it. And he footnotes that showing that the cost can be $41,484 per violation. Facebook has 87 million violations in the Cambridge Analytica scandal. This is a company killer.
"4. @chopraftc comes close to saying Zuckerberg should be fired and Facebook broken up. Violations of consent decrees should result in firing 'senior management and board directors," "outright bans on adjacent business practices, and closure of appropriate business lines.'
"5. What shows @chopraftc is serious and bipartisan about this is that he critiques Obama's failed law enforcement regime. He goes after the failure to do anything about HSBC for money laundering, and Wells Fargo for fraud. This is a defense of the rule of law.
"6. Now, here's why this matters. The FTC almost always has unanimous enforcement opinions, which gives individual commissioners sway to shape them. This is not a random shot across the bow, it's a signal to FTC staff to really propose aggressive remedies for Facebook violations."
Matt says it's worth looking at the memo yourself. ProPublica's article is here.
* * * * *
Jeremy Scahill is exactly right, Haspel belongs in jail and Obama should have put her there, but thanks to him, she now looks set to be head of the CIA. Here he is on Democracy NOW!, saying, "Obama Paved Way for Haspel to Head CIA by Failing to Hold Torturers Accountable [...] And, you know, Amy, the CIA is generally prohibited from engaging in operations inside of the United States, and also prohibited from engaging in propaganda aimed at the American people. And yet, to me, this whole Gina Haspel nomination really seems like a CIA operation itself. You know, the CIA, throughout history, from its origins — and this was the case with its predecessor, the OSS — has had a mastery of coups and interventions and interfering in affairs of other nations and waging propaganda battles. Gina Haspel, when she was nominated for the CIA, was the recipient of an enormous amount of support from the CIA's social media accounts, Twitter and others. And it was a propaganda campaign that was aimed at all of us, at the American people. It was aimed at lawmakers, it was aimed at journalists, where they sort of tweeted a — and they did it over and over and over, and they even did it once Haspel was technically in charge of the CIA, where they're giving her biography, making her sound like some combination of like Lara Croft, Tomb Raider, with Jack Bauer. I mean, it was really kind of incredible."
And here is Scahill on Intercepted, "Just Following Orders: Donald Trump loves Gina Haspel, particularly because of her role in torture." (Also an interview with Matt Taibbi on "Trump, Russia, Putin, Stormy Daniels, and the Liberal Embrace of Authoritarianism," and "Reporter Sarah Jaffe on the Teachers Strikes Across the U.S., the Fight For Unions, and the Rebellion of Low Wage Workers." Good stuff, transcripts included.)
* * * * *
"Sanders Institute Launches Voter Registration Initiative: In November 2016, there were more than 224 million citizens over the age of 18 in the United States, yet only around 157 million were registered to vote. Even fewer actually voted."
"There are some prisoners who have served their sentences but who refuse to leave this prison facility." Again, the headline says it all.
"Black activist jailed for his Facebook posts speaks out about secret FBI surveillance: Rakem Balogun spoke out against police brutality. Now he is believed to be the first prosecuted under a secretive US effort to track so-called 'black identity extremists' [...] Investigators began monitoring Balogun, whose legal name is Christopher Daniels, after he participated in an Austin, Texas, rally in March 2015 protesting against law enforcement, special agent Aaron Keighley testified in court. The FBI, Keighley said, learned of the protest from a video on Infowars, a far-right site run by the commentator Alex Jones, known for spreading false news and conspiracy theories. The reference to Infowars stunned Balogun: 'They're using a conspiracy theorist video as a reason to justify their tyranny? That is a big insult.'"
"How To Organize A Prison Strike: Organizers inside and outside of the penitentiary walls are teaming up — and getting creative — to fight for reform."
"There's No Good Excuse For The Racist Impact Of Michigan's Medicaid Proposal: The plan's architects say they didn't mean to disadvantage black cities, but they had easy ways not to. Michigan Republicans are pushing a new, Donald Trump-inspired bill that would require Medicaid recipients in the state's mostly black cities to work to keep their health benefits, but exempt some of the state's rural white residents from the same requirement.
David Dayen on "The Downfall of a Grifter: I was part of a small subset of people who were infuriated by Eric Schneiderman before Monday night. So welcome to the rest of the nation for catching up. I had no idea he was a notorious alcoholic and abuser of women until the New Yorker profile. But I did witness his tendency to be a con artist, with his public persona not matching up with the private actions. Zach Carter tells this story very well so I don't have to, and the rest of it is in my book. The short version is that the guy came in making a lot of promises on taking down the banks and then sold out so he could get a good seat at the State of the Union. He wanted the glory without doing the work. In a real sense he didn't know how to do the work - the big lawsuit he filed against JPMorgan Chase right before the 2012 elections, entirely to show a pose of "getting tough" on Wall Street, was ripped off from a staffer and could have been filed years earlier. As co-chair of the vaunted "task force" on bank fraud, he never issued a single criminal subpoena."
Also from Dday, "American Telephone and Telegraft: [...] AT&T;'s lead lobbyist has now been encouraged to take an early retirement, and the CEO is "very sorry" any of us found out about the Cohen payment. But their real failure lies in not working the influence industry the right and honorable way. Like LiveNation did when they had Rahm Emanuel's brother on their board when they purchased Ticketmaster. Or the way American Airlines used Rahm and a bunch of other Democratic cronies to move through the USAirways merger. AT&T; doesn't deserve Time Warner until they can prove they can bribe officials responsibly and effectively. That's how the game is played, Politico Playbook (sponsored by Goldman Sachs) wants you to know, and really you're very silly for thinking it outrageous. It's a cesspool but it's our cesspool."
"How Walmart is Helping Prosecutors Pursue 10-Year Sentences for Shoplifting [...] In Tennessee, as in many states, shoplifting items under $1,000 is a misdemeanor. But, in the past few years, the Knox County district attorney's office has been prosecuting people like Lawson under the burglary statute, which under Tennessee law is defined as 'unlawfully and knowingly entering a building without the consent of the owner and committing a theft.'"
David Menschel (@davidminpdx) tweeted "In NYC, police arrest black people for marijuana at 8x the rate of white people. NYPD say this is because they get more complaint calls about marijuana in black neighborhoods, but NYT found that that was false." The story, in The New York Times, "Race Remains a Key Factor in Marijuana Arrests, Analysis shows."
"Colorado bans solitary confinement for longer than 15 days: DENVER — Inmates in state prisons can't be held in solitary confinement for more than 15 days, the Colorado Department of Corrections announced on Thursday in the latest effort to overhaul a practice criticized as 'torture' by the agency's chief. The changes also require that inmates who are held in solitary confinement at the discretion of prison officials get at least four hours per day outside a cell for recreation or group classes."
Jon Schwarz, "New Bipartisan Bill Could Give Any President The Power To Imprison U.S. Citizens In Military Detention Forever [...] But now, incredibly enough, a bipartisan group of six lawmakers, led by Sens. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., and Tim Kaine, D-Va., is proposing a new AUMF that would greatly expand who the president can place in indefinite military detention, all in the name of restricting presidential power. If the Corker-Kaine bill becomes law as currently written, any president, including Donald Trump, could plausibly claim extraordinarily broad power to order the military to imprison any U.S. citizen, captured in America or not, and hold them without charges essentially forever."
* * * * *
Julian Assange may be a jackass, but he's also the face of the real free press, and the neocons and neoliberals all hate him and want him permanently silenced. At the moment, his former protector, the state of Ecuador, seems to be hinting that it may hand him over to Britain and the US.
On March 28, under immense pressure from the governments in the US, Britain and other powers, Ecuador imposed a complete ban on Assange having any Internet or phone contact with the outside world, and blocked his friends and supporters from physically visiting him. For 45 days, he has not been heard from. Ecuadorian Foreign Minister Maria Fernanda Espinosa stated in a Spanish-language interview on Wednesday that her government and Britain 'have the intention and the interest that this be resolved.' Moves were underway, she said, to reach a 'definite agreement' on Assange.
If the United States government gets its hands on Assange, they might torture and even kill him, but it's fairly certain they will try to make sure he never has access to the press again. I know there are those who think Trump would like to reward Assange for helping him out in the election, but Trump doesn't actually reward loyalty or pay his debts, so that seems like a fantasy to me. And I sincerely doubt that, even if Trump decided to pardon Assange just to piss off the Clintonites, the right-wing authoritarians he surrounds himself with would let any such document land on his desk. (We know Trump can't write it himself, which is the only way I can imagine him slipping that one by them.)
* * * * *
"How Did Benghazi Become a Ruin? NYT Ignores US Role — in Multiple Media: New York Times Cairo bureau chief Declan Walsh went to Benghazi, Libya, which is in ruins, to find out how it got that way. 'When I went to Benghazi, I was guided by one main question: How did the city come to this?' he declares in his multimedia presentation, which combines text, audio, video and large-format photography. One thing that's not conveyed via any medium, though: Seven years ago, the United States and its allies used military force to overthrow Libya's government. The country has been in almost continual civil war since then, which you would think would be crucial in explaining 'how the city came to that.' But apparently you don't think like a New York Times bureau chief. The thing is, when President Barack Obama — egged on by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — called for an attack on Libya, the justification they offered was that Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi would otherwise destroy Benghazi. So the fact that military intervention actually turned out to lead to the destruction of Benghazi seems like something you might want to tell Times readers, or Times consumers of multimedia, anyway."
Matt Stoller, "Bigger Corporations Are Making You Poorer: A wave of new research shows how as corporations get bigger, the share of money out there going to actual workers declines." (Matt also did a good thread full of interesting links that is unrolled here.)
"Soul Snatchers: How the NYPD's 42nd Precinct, the Bronx DA's Office, and the City of New York Conspired to Destroy Black and Brown Lives (Part 1) [...]
'Stop and frisk has been banned, but police in the 42nd precinct are actually doing something far worse. They are setting quotas and goals for the number of people each officer must arrest. If you don't meet or exceed the quotas, you feel the wrath of your supervisors. Instead of rejecting the quotas, some officers are embracing them and rounding up people, particularly teenage children, for crimes they know good and well they didn't commit — locking them away sometimes for days, weeks, months, or even years at a time — then simply dismissing the charges. This isn't just a few rogue cops, but an entire precinct is doing this and they are partnering with the Bronx District Attorney's Office to make it happen. With threats, and even brute force, kids are being coerced to identify and testify against people they don't even know. Officers are terrorizing families, snatching kids out of their beds, not a few times, but dozens of times per child, sometimes arresting them on false charges, sending them to Rikers, then releasing them months later. Cops think they can do anything they want and it appears they can. Pedro is being framed. They tried to frame him over and over again before this case. And other kids are being framed too. And the kids and families who've been victimized by this scandal are hollow shells of their former selves. The Police Commissioner, the Comptroller, and the Mayor all know about this and are doing nothing.'"
Eric Levitz in New York Magazine, "Democrats Paid a Huge Price for Letting Unions Die: The GOP understands how important labor unions are to the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party, historically, has not. If you want a two-sentence explanation for why the Midwest is turning red (and thus, why Donald Trump is president), you could do worse than that. [...] With its financial contributions and grassroots organizing, the labor movement helped give Democrats full control of the federal government three times in the last four decades. And all three of those times — under Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama — Democrats failed to pass labor law reforms that would to bolster the union cause. In hindsight, it's clear that the Democratic Party didn't merely betray organized labor with these failures, but also, itself." I think this article is too generous to Democrats, since they have also spent part of that time actively undermining unions.
Rachel M. Cohen at The Intercept: "Democrats In A New York County Refuse To Pledge Loyalty To Candidates Just Because Party Endorses Them: A COUNTY DEMOCRATIC committee in New York voted down an extreme proposal on Tuesday night that would have required all members to pledge loyalty to candidates endorsed by the state, local, or national party. Progressives on the committee in Chemung County, on the Pennsylvania border, viewed the proposed loyalty pledge as an attempt by establishment Democrats to silence their dissent; they spent the week leading up to the meeting organizing opposition from members of the 20-person committee. At the meeting, the committee voted down the oath in its current format, but did not get rid of it entirely."
"Bernie Sanders Is Quietly Building a Digital Media Empire [...] The Vermont senator, who's been comparing corporate television programming to drugs and accusing it of creating a 'nation of morons' since at least 1979 — and musing to friends about creating an alternative news outlet for at least as long — has spent the last year and a half building something close to a small network out of his office in the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill."
Joe Cirincione and Guy Saperstin in The Nation, "Progressives Need a New Way to Talk About National Security: Voters say they support cuts in defense spending — Democrats should, too." I can go along with this, but I still maintain that our real national security is economic security for everyone.
Zach Carter and Arthur Delaney, "How The ACORN Scandal Seeded Today's Nightmare Politics: Breitbart led the charge, but Democrats delivered the killing blow. Has anyone really learned?" This is one of many pernicious examples of Democrats helping Republicans dismantle the progressive infrastructure that helped the party as a whole, The jury is still out on just how much of a creep Obama was regarding Shirley Sherrod, and whether Democrats keep voting to fund abstinence-only sex "education" out of stupidity or puritanism (or just a desire to funnel more money into the right-wing gravy train), but I still wish I could ask Bill Clinton what the hell he thought the outcome of "ending welfare as we know it" and turning the criminal justice system into a meat-grinder for minorities and the poor would be - and whether he did it out of malice or stupidity. And don't get me started on the Telecommunications Act.
Aalya Ahmad, "Working for the Weekend: The labour movement should renew its demands for a shorter workweek: Our communities are crumbling under capitalism and the obscene inequalities it creates. Income inequality has steadily risen in Canada over the past 20 years. The threat of climate change is becoming ever more obvious while environmental policies progress more slowly than melting glaciers. While workers in Canada are waging vital campaigns such as the Fight for $15 to improve wages for those who are paid the least, the mobilization around fairer compensation is just one part of the struggle to resist workers' exploitation. One of the oldest rallying cries of the labour movement is to reduce the time that workers spend working."
"How Clintonites Are Manufacturing Faux Progressive Congressional Campaigns [...] For it seems that progressive candidates aren't the only ones who learned the lesson of Bernie Sanders in 2016; the neoliberal Clintonites have too. So, while left-wing campaigns crop up in every corner of the country, so too do astroturf faux-progressive campaigns. And it is for us on the left to parse through it all and separate the authentic from the frauds."
Norman Solomon at Common Dreams, "Why the DNC Is Fighting WikiLeaks and Not Wall Street: Willingness to challenge Wall Street would alienate some of the Democratic Party's big donors." Gosh, I wonder why that is?
Michelle Cottle in The Atlantic, "Hillary Clinton's High Profile Is Hurting the Democrats: She dismisses those who tell her to step aside, but at this rate she will harm her political future and aid the GOP. [...] You know how Donald Trump seems weirdly, almost pathologically, obsessed with Clinton, despite the election having occurred nearly a year and a half ago? He is not alone. The Republican base (as hosts at Fox News can attest) still hates Clinton with the heat of a thousand suns. Is that rational? No. Is it a super-effective way for the GOP to fire up its base with high-stakes midterms approaching? To quote that great political sage Sarah Palin, you betcha!"
"For Democrats, the Russian Investigation Is Not Just Patriotic — It's Smart Politics: After a year of #RussiaGate, the Democrats have both their base and the entire country right where they want them." Democrats and independents increasingly believe in the myths around Russiagate, including that somehow the "dank memes" of Russian bots are what swung the election for Trump (God knows how), even though there is no evidence for any of it. Oh, and it provides a platform to attack Sanders as a Russian dupe or colluder, as well.
"Wrong-way Democrats: Will a 'blue dog' blue wave pave the way for future disaster?: Democrats will win big this fall (probably). But are they just repeating the mistakes of the Clinton-Obama era? [...] One especially trenchant observer on this front is activist, blogger and longtime music exec Howie Klein, who has repeatedly expressed his frustration with the Democratic Party's efforts to intervene in the midterms, and the way the struggle has been covered in the media. Klein discussed the Southern California races recently on his Down With Tyranny! blog, writing that DCCC-favored candidates "are always conservatives and never independent-minded agents of change.' A day before that: 'The DCCC has 38 candidates on their Red To Blue list so far. I count three who are worth voting for —' and I'm not even 100% sure about one of the three. At least nine of them are outright Blue Dogs. ... And 21 of them are admitted New Dems.'"
An Al Jazeera reporter went undercover to look for the much-touted anti-semitism of the British left, but mainly found a state-sponsored PR campaign to promote the idea that criticizing Israel's policies is anti-semitism. "Al Jazeera Investigations exposes how the Israel lobby influences British politics. A six-month undercover investigation reveals how Israel penetrates different levels of British democracy."
Jonathan Cook, "Anti-Semitism. Orchestrated Offensive against Jeremy Corbyn in the UK: For months, a campaign has been aimed at destabilising British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, accused of anti-Semitism. The right-wing party, Tony Blair's heir, and pro-Israel circles are targeting both Corbyn's left-wing line and his support for the Palestinian people."
I might be inclined to agree with a lot of Michelle Goldberg's "How the Online Left Fuels the Right" if she didn't screw it up by talking about people like Ben Shapiro as if they are prepared to argue in good faith . They're not, and anyway, that's not the point. Call-out culture on the left just isn't very good at making friends, period.
"Another Side of Feynman: Nine letters by Freeman Dyson portray his relationship with the Nobel Laureate."
Read this scary thread from @ArshyMann. (And, while on the one hand, I've been acutely aware, and most women at least sense, that this kind of projection exists and is dangerous to us, I admit I never would have predicted it as a proud identity.) "For the past little while, I've been working on a piece about Toronto's relationship to the alt-right, especially the "manosphere." Unfortunately that research has become relevant. I'm going to share as much as I can here for people who may not be familiar with these movements."
"Portland Burgerville workers approve federally recognized union: Workers at a Burgerville in Southeast Portland overwhelmingly approved the formation of a federally-recognized union, making them the first to do so since a fast-food labor fight erupted nationally five years ago."
"Electronics-recycling innovator is going to prison for trying to extend computers' lives: A Southern California man who built a sizable business out of recycling electronic waste is headed to federal prison for 15 months after a federal appeals court in Miami rejected his claim that the "restore discs" he made to extend computers' lives had no financial value, instead ruling that he had infringed on Microsoft Corp. to the tune of $700,000." This is basically corporate prosecution of a private citizen to prevent him from helping people save a bit of money.
David Dayen says, "Whether America Can Afford A Job Guarantee Program Is Not Up For Debate: SEN. BERNIE SANDERS'S endorsement of a guaranteed job for anyone who wants one, joining previous supporters such as Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand and Cory Booker, reinvigorated a debate that has been roiling within economics Twitter and academic circles for a long time. Those more partial to a universal basic income untethered to work clash with job guarantee supporters from the left; those who see the job guarantee as a dangerous slip into socialism attack from the right. And mainstream Democrats not running for the presidency don't really want to talk about it. Those fresh to the debate, meanwhile, instinctively ask what feels like an intuitive question: How on earth can we pay for that? But if we're going to have an honest debate about whether the government should be spending hundreds of billions of dollars so that people can obtain jobs, we should acknowledge that the government already does. Officials at the local, state, and federal levels push enormous amounts of money toward this stated purpose — they just channel it through corporations, in the form of special tax breaks and 'economic development' subsidies. It's not clear that businesses actually use all that money to create jobs, rather than just enjoying the subsidies and tax cuts for themselves, so if the true purpose really is to create work for people, the new jobs guarantee debate offers a much simpler — and probably much cheaper — approach to the same end."
It would be nice to believe they would do this stuff if they ever got back in control of Congress: "Kirsten Gillibrand Unveils A Public Option For Banking: The idea would provide a low-cost alternative to payday loans -- and it might just save the Postal Service, too." It would also be nice to think the Dems would get rid of that stupid requirement to fund all Post Office pensions 75 years in advance, which is the very thing we have to save the Post Office from.
"Speaker Ryan Firing Chaplain Conroy Is True Attack on Religious Liberty: Fr. Patrick J. Conroy, a Jesuit priest who served as Chaplain to the US House of Representatives, has been fired by Speaker Paul Ryan. Though the Speaker declined to justify his action, Fr. Conroy told the New York Times that Ryan had admonished him after a public prayer for the poor, 'Padre, you just got to stay out of politics.' As clergy who, like Fr. Conroy, have taken vows to preach the Word of God, we do not see how you can read the Bible and stay out of politics. Isaiah 10 speaks directly to lawmakers: 'Woe unto you who legislate evil and rob the poor, making widows and orphans your prey.' Jeremiah received a Word from the Lord in chapter 22, saying, 'God down to the palace of the king and declare, 'Do what is just and right. Rescue from the hand of the oppressor the one who has been robbed. Do no wrong or violence to the foreigner, the fatherless or the widow, and do not shed innocent blood in this place.' These are not only the public priorities of the Hebrew prophets. In Matthew's Gospel, Jesus says he will judge nations — not individuals — by asking, 'When I was hungry, did you feed me? When I was thirsty, did you give me something to drink?' The epistle of James makes clear that God opposes anyone who prevents workers from receiving a living wage..."
David Dayen, "Ryan's Hope [...] Nobody deserved to go out in shame more than Ryan did; I'm sad it didn't come when he lost his Speaker's gavel or, worse, when he lost his seat. (I don't buy that "see I'm popular!" poll he released showing him up 21 points on Randy Bryce, but even if it were true, a 55% re-elect for a 20-year Congressman and national leader isn't that good). He deserved to go out the way Thomas Foley did in 1994, after he was targeted by Newt Gingrich and doomed to defeat in his eastern Washington district. Ryan was a con man and a liar armed with terrible, unpopular ideas that he somehow grifted the national media into thinking were responsible. His budgets were innumerate, hiding the class warfare and mass suffering they would have caused with phony numbers. His philosophy was bankrupt, hated by those who actually divined its intentions. His concern for anyone who couldn't buy him a $350 bottle of wine was fake, and his great dream in live was to take away their safety net as they crashed to Earth. And he was actually a bad politician, swinging his home state and even his home district further away from Republicans when he became the vice presidential nominee. But make no mistake: Ryan won. His sensibilities matched the pain demands of the Washington Post editorial board, who joined his call to starve the poor. And while he didn't reach his cherished goals of crushing Social Security and Medicare, he did force a Democratic administration into the smallest percentage of public investment since the Eisenhower era. He did deliver one of the most imbalanced, gimmicky, gift-style tax cuts to corporate America in history. He did preserve most of the last giant tax cut, which was more larded on the rich. Because Washington can be amoral and stupid, Paul Ryan was seen as its one-eyed king, its boy wonder. And the inequality statistics don't lie as to his success. We'll spend the next generation burying the Ryan era."
Alex Pareene, "If We Had a Liberal Media We Wouldn't Have Had a Paul Ryan [...] The sheer admiration the political press has shown for him since then can't even be explained by something like his popularity — he is deeply unpopular, almost entirely because his ideas are deeply unpopular, and that is in spite of a years-long campaign by our liberal media to launder those ideas. If longtime Washington journalists treat plans to literally end Medicare, among the most popular programs in the history of American governance, as not just 'serious' but arguably necessary, by what possible definition can the elite media be said to be 'liberal'?"
David Dayen, "The Art of the Let Me Back in That Deal: The thing about lacking any core beliefs is that it's liberating. Donald Trump, who spent the entire presidential campaign calling the Trans-Pacific Partnership the worst trade deal ever written, now is openly musing about re-joining it. The flip-flop is rooted in desperation. Trump has managed to figure out that China's retaliatory tariffs slam farm states, and he's digging up any policy he can find to keep them happy, including going back to New Deal-era farm supports! Trump as FDR! Like I said, liberating. TPP is part of that mix, not only as an alleged opening of new markets (which it isn't, as the U.S. already has bilateral agreements with countries representing the overwhelming majority of TPP economies) but as another provocation to China, as a pretext to get them to bargain.It's also true that the TPP agreed to by the other eleven nations is substantially different than the one negotiated by President Obama, particularly on intellectual property for pharmaceuticals. That's good news for the global poor who won't be held up by multinationals for life-saving medications, but bad news for the multinationals who urged the U.S. to sign TPP. Those nations aren't interested in re-opening that can of worms, even as Trump conditioned re-entry on a "substantially better" deal. Of course, none of this is going to happen. The tariffs and this TPP play are all fodder for some negotiated settlement with China. I'm not sure that'll come about either. But Trump's not a very good bluffer. And he's betrayed the workers he incited with TPP opposition in the process. All in a day's work."
Ryan Grim, "National Democrats created a competitive primary in New York, infuriating the local party. Another case where the DCCC tries to overrule the grassroots by recruiting a loser to run against their candidate. "In Syracuse, New York, a heavily Democratic city, things didn't go quite as well. The party's nominee for mayor, Juanita Perez Williams, lost in a landslide to an independent candidate, even managing to lose her own neighborhood by two to one. In some lines of work, a failure so complete might earn somebody a demotion, a period of probation, or a rethinking of whether the career path and the skillset are a perfect marriage. But this is Democratic Party politics, where consequences are for the people, not the politicians. And so, the performance earned her an invitation to the headquarters of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, touching off another intraparty saga that would go on to pit the national party against grassroots activists.
Within just a few days of the loss, Perez Williams was in Washington, D.C., sitting down with top-tier Democratic operatives who saw, in her failed campaign, the makings of a promising 2018 congressional candidate."
Uh oh, it's the Judean People's Front versus the People's Judean Front versus the People's Front of Judea... Benjamin Studebaker, "The Left is Not a Church [...] You know how the religious right became a big deal in the United States? It stopped acting like a bunch of churches. It stopped caring whether you were Catholic or Protestant, whether you were Evangelical or Mainline. It stopped caring if you were Mormon. It even stopped caring if you went to church. All the religious right cares about is whether your policies work for them and whether you have a realistic strategy for implementing those policies. If you're anti-abortion you can have three wives, cheat on all of them constantly, never go to church, and brag about abusing women. You can be Donald Trump. It doesn't matter. The religious right sees itself as trying to save millions of people from being brutally murdered by their own mothers. It will subordinate all petty theological disputes to the overarching goal of putting a stop to the killing. They are relentless. They take their goals seriously."
Ryan Grim at The Intercept, "Democrat claimed independent status in election filings, but records show he was a Republican [...] Butner was recruited to run in California's 50th Congressional District by the Democratic leaders, yet his progressive opponent, Ammar Campa-Najjar, has won the endorsement of the state Democratic Party and the bulk of the activist groups in the district." He has a remarkably spotty voting record, but it's all Republican. "Elsewhere around the country, the Democrat leadership's zeal for veterans to run for office has led them to back other former Republicans. In Texas's 21st Congressional District, Joseph Kopser was previously registered as a Republican, having grown up in a conservative family. In Virginia's 2nd Congressional District, the party's chosen candidate, Elaine Luria, voted for her own Republican opponent not once, but twice. Gil Cisneros, a candidate in California's 39th District, is a Navy veteran and former Republican who had registered as a Democrat in 2015, after three years as an independent. He was named on Wednesday to the DCCC's Red-to-Blue program, tantamount to an endorsement. Butner came under fire earlier in the campaign for insisted that military service should be a prerequisite for a run for Congress."
David Dayen and Ryan Grim, "Democratic Party-Backed Candidate Leaves Groggy Voicemail Warning For Opponent: 'I'm Gonna Go Negative On You': WHEN KAREN THORBURN checked messages on her home answering machine on a Wednesday evening in early April, one of them was not like the others. It was a groggy-sounding voice, leaving a short but to-the-point message for her husband, Andy, who is running for Congress in California's 39th District. 'Hi Andy. It's Gil Cisneros. I'm gonna go negative on you,' the man said, before going silent for an awkward four seconds and hanging up. [...] The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee recently named Cisneros to the list of candidates it's supporting in races around the country. He is running to replace incumbent Republican Ed Royce, who is retiring. The crowded district was recently featured in a New York Times article about the party's interventions in California primaries, which the DCCC laments have been forced upon it by events outside its control. But a closer look at the district finds a mess very much of the party's own making."
Conor Lynch at Salon, "Bernie Sanders criticizes Democrats, they flip out (again): Has politics become team sports? Sanders' comments about Democratic failures aren't even controversial. But for some partisans, he's the enemy [...] It is not so much the message but the messenger that infuriates them. It's also true, however, that the idea Sanders represents — namely, that principles should come before party, and that politics should not be treated like a team sport — is anathema to these committed partisans. [...] Another interesting finding in Mason's research is that those who identify as 'conservative' demonstrate 'significantly less issue-based constraint.' As she notes, this is consistent with the research of Christopher Ellis and James Stimson, who find that 'American conservatives tend to be relatively left-leaning in their issue-based preferences, while liberals also hold left-leaning attitudes.' In other words, so-called conservatives are even more likely to be driven by group identity than liberals, even though they might actually agree with liberal or progressive positions on many issues. It's no wonder, then, that Sanders, who talks about the issues and offers progressive solutions that are popular with the broader public, while avoiding overheated partisan, has appeal not just to liberals and young people in blue states but to many voters in traditionally Red states. Though identity-based ideology has grown more pervasive over the past few decades, there is still a strong underlying desire for issue-based candidates."
"The Democratic Party is paying millions for Hillary Clinton's email list, FEC documents show: HEADING INTO THE 2018 midterms, with Democrats hoping to take back the House of Representatives and even make a run at the Senate, the party has spent more than $2 million worth of campaign resources on payments to Hillary Clinton's new group, Onward Together, according to Federal Election Commission filings and interviews with people familiar with the payments. The Democratic National Committee is paying $1.65 million for access to the email list, voter data, and software produced by Hillary for America during the 2016 presidential campaign, Xochitl Hinojosa, a spokesperson for the DNC, told The Intercept. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has paid more than $700,000 to rent the same email list. Clinton is legally entitled to rent her list to the party, rather than hand it over as a gift, but in 2015, Barack Obama gave his email list, valued at $1,942,640, to the DNC as an in-kind contribution. In 2013 and 2014, OFA had similarly made in-kind contributions exceeding $3.4 million for uses of the list that cycle." Of course, the party is even more cash-strapped than it was back then. Irritatingly, the Clintonites spent months bashing Bernie Sanders for not handing over his email list for free.
The Pied Piper strikes again. "Dems Meddle In WV To Boost Ex-Con Coal Baron In GOP Senate Primary: National Democrats have been not-so-quietly hoping that controversial ex-con and coal baron Don Blankenship wins the West Virginia GOP Senate primary in a few weeks, seeing him as by far the easiest opponent for Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV). Now, they're stepping up to try to make that happen."
"Why we can always afford a war: Patricia Pino and Christian Reilly discuss Government 'debt' and explain why politicians never ask 'how are you going to pay for it?' when it comes to war."
Robert Fisk at the Independent: "The search for truth in the rubble of Douma — and one doctor's doubts over the chemical attack: [...] As Dr Assim Rahaibani announces this extraordinary conclusion, it is worth observing that he is by his own admission not an eyewitness himself and, as he speaks good English, he refers twice to the jihadi gunmen of Jaish el-Islam [the Army of Islam] in Douma as 'terrorists' — the regime's word for their enemies, and a term used by many people across Syria. Am I hearing this right? Which version of events are we to believe?"
"American media wrong on Syria coverage" — Mark Crispin Miller makes the point that while people assume that Russia Today is propaganda, Americans don't understand that the same is true of the "free press" in the United States.
And that goes for Britain as well, where in true MSNBC fashion, the narrative of the elites is the only one that matters at the Guardian, who aren't interested when a seasoned and accomplished war reporter actually goes to Douma and tries to make sense of events, only to be dismissed like an unfounded rumor, in favor of people whose "expertise" is based on not being there and being pro-regime change.
"Eyeless in Gaza: Write down: I, Uri Avnery, soldier number 44410 of the Israel army, hereby dissociate myself from the army sharpshooters who murder unarmed demonstrators along the Gaza Strip, and from their commanders, who give them the orders, up to the commander in chief."
Poor beleaguered Andrew Cuomo is at war with the evil teachers' union. "Andrew Cuomo rips teacher unions as selfish 'industry' more interested in members' rights than student needs: A passionate Gov. Cuomo upped his war with the teacher unions on Thursday, charging that they represent themselves — not the students." It's funny how much he sounds like a Republican. I hope Cynthia Nixon wipes the floor with him She already has the Working Families Party endorsement (won with 91% of the committee vote). I never thought I'd be endorsing a candidate named "Nixon", but jeez she's good! Look at this: "Cynthia Nixon Puts Legalizing Marijuana Front and Center of Campaign: Cynthia Nixon on Wednesday made legalizing recreational marijuana the first policy plank of her campaign for governor, framing it as a necessary step toward reducing racial inequities in the criminal justice system — and, in doing so, bringing to the forefront an issue that may help her make inroads into Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo's robust support among black voters. [...] In a brief homemade video posted to Twitter on Wednesday, Ms. Nixon, seated in her living room, speaking over a faint but steady hum of background noise, said 80 percent of New Yorkers arrested in connection with marijuana use were black or Latino, despite roughly equal rates of use among white people and communities of color. [...] The simple truth is, for white people, the use of marijuana has effectively been legal for a long time. Isn't it time we legalize it for everybody else?"
Cuomo also hasn't been that kind to immigrants, but at least he knows he's in a fight this time around, and he's making everyone laugh with his attempts to cash in on other people's identities. "Andrew Cuomo Keeps Calling Himself 'Undocumented,' Which, Hmmm [...] During a union rally last Wednesday, Cuomo proclaimed that he was 'raised by poor immigrants from South Jamaica.' (South Jamaica is a neighborhood in Queens. His father, Mario Cuomo, was born in New York, and his mother, Matilda Cuomo, was also born in New York.) A day later, the governor said in the same vein, 'I'm an Italian-American, I came from poor Italian-Americans who came here. You know what they called Italian-Americans back in the day? They called them wops. You know what wop stood for? Without papers. I'm undocumented. You want to deport an undocumented person, start with me, because I'm an undocumented person.'" Well, no, it didn't, and he isn't, and his farther was the Governor of New York.
Tom Sullivan at Hullabaloo, "What else have they gotten wrong?" - This is really about what the GOP and libertarians and "centrists" have gotten wrong about regulations and business, but the interesting thing is that, "This month, Washington Monthly looked at a libertarian economist Alex Tabarrok of George Mason University's Mercatus Center. Tabarrok went looking for the effects of federal regulation on "economic dynamism" expecting to find support for the conservative dogma that government regulation harms the economy. He found none. What is remarkable is he published the paper anyway."
Branko Marcetic at Jacobin, "The Two Faces of Kamala Harris: Kamala Harris has matched every one of her progressive achievements with conservative ones." At first I was thinking, "Hm, maybe she's better than she seems...." And then I read further.
Teodrose Fikre, "I Don't Give a Damn about the First (Insert Identity Here) CEO or President: Do you know what literally repulses me these days? Hearing about the first so and so to get accepted into the exclusive club of the aristocracy. Frankly, I don't give a damn about the latest first black president or first woman CEO. Who cares! I don't know how we have arrived at this notion where we measure the wellness of humanity not based on the well being of the least of the citizenry who suffer in silence but based on the accumulation of the wealthiest among us. This annoyance of mine got revved up to full blown peeve two days ago when I heard a report of how Kamala Harris has a chance to become the first black woman president."
Valerie Tarico at AlterNet, "Here's Why Some Progressives Are Tearing Each Other Apart: Progressives are telling two different stories about the world we live in and the future we are trying to create. In important ways, they clash."
Smári McCarthy, "Universal coverage is good economics: Healthcare costs less and performs better when societies pull together. Unfortunately, Icelandic conservatives want American inefficiencies."
Democracy in Exile: The Rise of the Defense Intellectual w/ Daniel Bessner — Really interesting interview by Michael Brooks on The Majority Report looking at the history of how what started as a noble goal in the wake of the Nazi horror developed into the antidemocratic force for evil that the foreign policy community is today.
Reminders still always needed: "How the Koch brothers helped dismantle the Democratic Party: For over 20 years I have reported on the mostly unnoted role played by the Democratic Leadership Council dismantling the Democratic Party, disconnecting it from its New Deal and Great Society past and turning it into Republican Lite. [...] Such a partnership — between something called the Democratic Leadership Council and the Koch Brothers — goes a long way to explaining why our last two Democratic presidents have been so disloyal to their party's traditions. And why Obama is pushing something as atrocious and anti-American as the secret TPP agreement. Bipartisanship may be gone on Capitol Hill, but it's still flourishing in the checks that are written for politicians."
Here's a worthy project: putting data in the hands of advocates. "Democratic party leaders believe that Americans are more conservative than they actually are, and believe that supporting progressive candidates will hurt them electorally." But the data doesn't support this belief, and apparently if legislators see that their constituents support progressive policies, they are more likely to move toward those policies. And here's the article that sums it up, from Sean McElwee at Vice, "If Democrats Listened to Their Voters, They'd Be Moving Left: The Democratic base overwhelmingly supports progressive positions. It's time for the party to pay attention."
Jeff Spross in The Week, "Bernie Sanders has conquered the Democratic Party: Bernie Sanders' bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016 was not universally welcomed, to put it mildly. His basic argument was that Democrats could assemble a cross-ethnic and cross-class coalition by offering big universal public programs like Medicare-for-all and free college tuition. But large portions of the party dismissed him as an interloper, a naive radical, or even just another entitled white male. Which makes developments since the 2016 election rather interesting: Quietly but steadily, the Democratic Party is admitting that Sanders was right."
Damon Linker, "Why can't liberals accept the truth about Hillary's 2016 failure? [...] I have no idea if Sanders would have fared better against Trump than Clinton did. But I do know that Clinton was the worst possible person to answer the angry accusations of a populist insurgency from either the protectionist right or the socialist left. She was too much a contented representative and beneficiary of the very political and economic establishments against which Trump directed his fire. She was the Davos candidate, the woman who defied the advice of her handlers to accept six-figure speaking fees from investment banks at events where she wooed rooms full of potential donors by dreaming of a world of open borders - a world in which the last remaining businesses to pay a decent wage in the Rust Belt would be given the green light to flee in pursuit of ever-higher profits. To counter that Trump-the-corrupt-real-estate-mogul is just as much a member of the nation's economic elite misses the political point entirely. A populist defines himself by those he attacks, and Trump attacked those in power. Who did Clinton attack? The "deplorable" voters who were tempted to vote for Trump - and she did it, of course, at a big-ticket fundraiser, before a room full of wealthy liberal donors." (I didn't think this article answered the question in the title, though.)
Umair Haque, "Why We're Underestimating American Collapse: The Strange New Pathologies of the World's First Rich Failed State" — I have to take issue with the idea that it's the "first rich failed state". All those places in the Bible that God smote were pretty big deals with lots of wealth concentrated at the top, and they failed, too.
Speaking of that, the neoliberals have been remarkably successful at convincing some people that the New Deal was nothing but a racist gift to white people and did nothing for black America. This would be false even if not a single penny of it went directly to any black people, since it brought a lot of money into the real economy at the lowest levels, which benefited everyone - but it's also not true that New Deal money only went directly into white people's hands. There is absolutely no question that, yes, some important parts of the New Deal blocked help for black Americans (and don't even get me started on red-lining), but even if you leave aside the fact that the programs we still have were since expanded to include them, there was also the Works Progress Administration (WPA).
* I also found this amusingly prescient prediction of the future from 1967 at the History site.
This is just a neat old picture of Arthur Thomson drawing direct to stencil that Rob Hansen found in someone's old photo collection. Arthur once asked me why everyone called him "ATom" in print instead of just "Atom", which is what he thought he was writing. He didn't seem to realize his signature came across that way.
Despite the best efforts of the Democratic leadership to protect Paul Ryan, someone is finally challenging him and, whoops! Not so safe anymore! So, not surprisingly, "Paul Ryan will not seek re-election in 2018 midterms amid Republican fears of losing House and Senate: The 2012 Vice Presidential candidate is said to have grown increasingly frustrated working with the president." Or maybe the fact that everyone hates him and no one wants him in office could have swayed him, and he knows he can go on to bigger things in some cushy corporate pay-back job.
David Dayen, "Save the VA: The power struggle inside the Department of Veterans Affairs burst into the open this week with the firing of David Shulkin, replaced by a blank slate who served as the president's doctor. But this has been simmering for some time as a war between a Koch Brothers-funded front group that wants to privatize the VA health system, the overwhelming mass of veteran's groups that don't, and a president who doesn't know or care much about the details but is easily led. Shulkin's post-firing op-ed lays out the battle lines."
Dean Baker, "We Win Trade War! China Goes Generic Big Time: Donald Trump has proved the skeptics wrong, it seems that the American people stand to be big winners as a result of his trade war. The Chinese government announced a major initiative to promote the manufacture and use of generic drugs. The reason this is potentially a big deal for the United States is that it could mean that China intends to push the envelope in replacing drugs protected by government-granted patent monopolies with drugs sold at free market prices. While the TRIPS provisions of the WTO do require members to respect patents and copyrights, there are flexibilities, such as compulsory licensing, to allow far more competition that what we see in the United States market."
"Supreme Court rules police officer cannot be sued for shooting Arizona woman in her front yard: The Supreme Court on Monday blocked a lawsuit an Arizona woman tried to bring against a Tucson officer who shot her four times in her front yard in May 2010. In an unsigned opinion, the court said the officer, Andrew Kisela, was entitled to qualified immunity in the shooting of Amy Hughes. [...] The court's decision Monday reverses a 9th Circuit Court ruling in favor of Hughes. The lower court said Kisela had used excessive force in violation of the Fourth Amendment. The Supreme Court, however, said Kisela was entitled to qualified immunity because there is no prior case setting a precedent that his use of force in this situation would be excessive. [...] In a scathing dissent, which Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg joined, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the court has never required a factually identical case to satisfy the 'clearly established' precedent standard. 'It's decision is not just wrong on the law; it also sends an alarming signal to law enforcement officers and the public,' she wrote. 'It tells officers that they can shoot first and think later, and it tells the public that palpably unreasonable conduct will go unpunished.'"
"The Growing Divorce Between American Jewish Youth and Israel [...] When you find that those in society who are most anti-Semitic, like neo-Nazi Richard Spencer of the alt-Right, Steve Bannon, Le Pen, Geert Wilders, Nick Griffin of the BNP, Pastor John Hagee and assorted racists and fascists all love Israel whilst, at the same not liking Jews then it begins to occur to young Jews that Israel is not all that it is cracked up to be. In addition a Jewish state suggests that Jews don't belong in America. It is therefore not surprising that in this survey of the Bay Area district in California, only 11% of Jews between 18 and 34 were 'very attached to Israel'. Even better only 40% of young American Jews are 'comfortable with the idea of a Jewish state.' It is becoming ever clearer that it isn't Jews but racist non-Jews who most love Israel. In Fire & Fury it describes how Jared Kushner felt Steve Bannon's support for Israel was a cover for his anti-Semitism. Today the normal response from anti-Semites is that they love Israel.
"
Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept, "The $500,000 GoFundMe Charity Campaign for Wealthy Ex-FBI Official Andrew McCabe Is Obscene" — It's a bad joke when "The Resistance" makes heroes of security state agents who have not been acting in our best interests and even turns them into "our" charity beneficiaries when real poverty and desperation are going unaddressed - and should be what we are focused on.
Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone, "Is the Two-Party System Doomed? A new study shows us what observation should already have made clear: a messy restructuring of America's political parties is coming [...] Papers like Piketty's are a warning that if the intellectuals in both parties don't come up with a real plan for dealing with the income disparity problem before someone smarter than Donald Trump takes it on, they're screwed. Forget nativists vs. globalists. Think poor vs. rich. Think 99 to 1. While Washington waits with bated breath for the results of the Mueller probe, it's the other mystery — how do we fix this seemingly unfixable economic system — that is keeping the rest of the country awake at night."
"Sanders condemns killing of Palestinian protesters: The killing of Palestinian demonstrators by Israeli forces in Gaza is tragic. It is the right of all people to protest for a better future without a violent response."
Mehdi Hasan in The Intercept, "Israel Kills Palestinians and Western Liberals Shrug. Their Humanitarianism Is a Sham. 'IF THE CONCEPT of intervention is driven by universal human rights, why is it — from the people who identify themselves as liberal interventionists — why do we never hear a peep, a word, about intervening to protect the Palestinians?' That was the question I put to the French philosopher, author, and champion of liberal (or humanitarian) interventionism, Bernard-Henri Lévy, on my Al Jazeera English interview show 'Head to Head' in 2013. The usually silver-tongued Levy struggled to answer the question. The situation in Palestine is 'not the same' as in Syria and 'you have not all the good on one side and all the bad on the other side,' said Levy, who once remarked in reference to the Israeli Defense Forces, or IDF, that he had 'never seen such a democratic army, which asks itself so many moral questions.' I couldn't help but be reminded of my exchange with the man known as 'BHL' this past weekend, as I watched horrific images of unarmed Palestinian protesters at the Gaza border being shot in the back by the 'democratic army' of Israel. How many 'moral questions' did those Israeli snipers ask themselves, I wondered, before they gunned down Gazan refugees for daring to demand a return to their homes inside the Green Line? On Friday, the IDF shot an astonishing 773 people with live ammunition, killing 17 of them. Yet a spokesperson for the IDF bragged that Israeli troops 'arrived prepared' and 'everything was accurate. ... We know where every bullet landed.' On Sunday, Israel's hawkish defense minister, Avigdor Lieberman, roundly rejected calls from the European Union and the United Nations for an independent inquiry into the violence and insisted that 'our soldiers deserve a commendation.'"
Forbes, "60% Of House Democrats Vote For A Defense Budget Even Bigger Than Trump's [...] There are currently 240 Republicans and 194 Democrats in the body, with 1 vacancy. Out of the Republicans, 227 voted in favor and 8 voted against this bill, making 230, with 10 apparently missing in action. Of the 194 Democrats, 117 voted for the bill and 73 voted against, with 4 not voting. In other words, of the party that supposedly opposes rampant military spending and the Trump administration, 60% voted for this bill." Most of this article is of the "We spend too much on the military and not on other things" school, but the point still stands: Democrats are making a pretty poor showing of being "The Resistance". Maybe they should call themselves, "The Assistance".
* * * * *
I'm not even going to describe the latest crazy "Bernie is a racist" crap that emanated from his panel with Mayor Lumumba, but it was actually a really good event and well worth watching, especially if you've been hearing the nonsense about what he said. U.S Senator Bernie Sanders and Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba Town Hall Meeting 'Examining Economic Justice 50 Years Later'. Strangely, this entire crowd of mostly black people in an 85% black city were unable to detect the terrible racism of Sanders when he pointed out that the Democratic Party screwed up. (Warning: There's a lot of stuff in the beginning that doesn't really have clear audio but isn't actually part of the discussion, which doesn't start until about the 25-minute mark.)
Briahna Joy Gray was there, and what she saw is very different from what the Twitter trolls, the H8%, were saying about it. "Bernie Sanders in the Deep South: Last week, I joined Bernie Sanders in Memphis, Tennessee, and Jackson, Mississippi, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination. Sanders was overwhelmingly well received by both passersby and the local audiences who came to hear him speak. But so far, the media coverage of his trip has revolved around a brief aside, in which Sanders faulted the Democratic Party for its recent legislative failures [...] In fact, if Beale Street could talk, it would tell a very different story about Bernie Sanders than the now-familiar critique that he is insufficiently sensitive to racial issues. As I walked with Sanders down Memphis's famous thoroughfare, his popularity, including among the predominantly black crowd attending the commemorative festivities, was self-evident. The senator was stopped every few feet by selfie-seekers and admirers. Yes: Perhaps this is to be expected of any politician with a national profile, but given his poor showing in Mississippi during the 2016 Democratic primary, in which he secured less than 17 percent of the black vote, I had thought the senator and his small cohort might go unnoticed. I was wrong."
There is, however, one worrying thing going around where Bernie really put his foot in it, and frankly, I'm very surprised that he didn't already know it. It happened three years ago but I never heard this until now: "In a September meeting with Campaign Zero, a movement formed out of the Ferguson protests, activists asked Sanders why, in his opinion, there were a disproportionate amount of people of color in jail for nonviolent drug offenses. Sanders, seated across the table, a yellow legal pad at hand, responded with a question of his own, according to two people present: 'Aren't most of the people who sell the drugs African American?' The candidate, whose aides froze in the moment, was quickly rebuffed: The answer, the activists told him, was no. Even confronted with figures and data to the contrary, Sanders appeared to have still struggled to grasp that he had made an error, the two people present said." That seems like shocking ignorance, but illegal drugs have never been his issue so I suppose it's not surprising that he never thought it through, but of course, the reason there are more arrests of black people for drugs is that the police go after black people for drugs, and carefully avoid confronting kids in white suburban neighborhoods where there is far more dealing and using going on. So I put a simple little primer thread up on Twitter. I hope it comes to his attention.
PS. I could only find a record of three politicians who endorsed Jesse Jackson when he ran for president. Two were US Senators, Paul Wellstone (D-MN) and Ernest Hollings (D-SC). The third was the Mayor of Burlington, VT, Bernie Sanders. Jackson won 55% in the Michigan primary and was the frontrunner until Dukakis pulled ahead, but the media was so quiet about Jackson's momentum that you never would have guessed he was in the running.
PPS. The canard that Sanders never released his taxes is still going around amongst the Clintonati. It's not true. Note the date on the article is 16 April.
Matt Bruenig at Jacobin, "How Did Private Property Start? Libertarians tend to get flummoxed when confronted with this simple question. Perhaps the most interesting thing about libertarian thought is that it has no way of coherently justifying the initial acquisition of property. How does something that was once unowned become owned without nonconsensually destroying others' liberty? It is impossible. This means that libertarian systems of thought literally cannot get off the ground. They are stuck at time zero of hypothetical history with no way forward."
The usual suspects have been claiming that high-schooler David Hogg is against the Constitution because he wants restrictions on guns after seeing his fellow students shot to death. But their view of the 2nd Amendment is extremely modern and is not how it was interpreted until very recently. In fact, even the Supreme Court's ruling in Heller (2008) did not grant an unlimited right to own and bear arms (although this article completely misconstrues "the common defense" as being against "tyrannical governments", which it wasn't - taking up arms against the U.S government was clearly defined as treason in the Constitution). George Washington had become acutely aware that unregulated and untrained militias were pretty useless for repelling invaders, which is what the 2nd Amendment's language is about and was always interpreted to mean prior to Heller. Moreover, English common law continued to be the rule where gun ownership and carry were concerned.
Zaid Jilani and Ryan Grim at The Intercept, "Centrist Group Backed Anti-Abortion, Anti-LGBT Rep. Lipinski Because His Opponent Supported Bernie Sanders, Emails Reveal: EARLIER THIS YEAR, Rep. Dan Lipinski, D-Ill., was facing a surprisingly robust primary challenge from Marie Newman, a progressive Democrat backed by some of the many constituencies that Lipinski has clashed with over the years. Lipinski represents a solidly Democratic seat, but has become one of the most conservative Democrats in the House, with his opposition to legal abortion and hostility toward marriage equality and immigration rights. Eventually, Lipinski narrowly defeated Newman in the March 20 primary — thanks in part to support from the centrist political alliance No Labels. Lipinski is a member of the group's House Problem Solvers Caucus, an informal collection of representative who work to, well, solve problems. [...] Jacobson replied with her reasoning for the group's intervention, explaining that part of the opposition to Newman was related to her endorsement by Bernie Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont. 'I see a whole new crop of Democratic challengers — like Marie Newman — who see Bernie — WHO IS NOT EVEN A DEMOCRAT — as a model worthy of emulation,' Jacobson wrote, all-caps in the original, denigrating Sanders for not labeling himself a Democrat. 'But I don't think we need more people in Congress on either side who rile up their bases and then actually achieve nothing.'"
RIP: Steven Bochco, creator of Hill Street Blues, dies at 74." Some people say he remade television by giving his characters story arcs at a time when other evening television shows were always stand-alone episodes where the characters and settings always went back to zero in time for next week's show.
So, I was watching this conversation where everyone was talking about "Republicans" and how awful they and their ideology are. And, I admit, I have started to get a little irritated with that discussion because it doesn't seem to me that covers the ground. So I asked a question:
Are you talking about rank-and-file Republicans who identify as "conservative" mainly because they (a) are lifelong-Republicans and (b) think of themselves as "sensible", having absorbed a lot of misleading rhetoric that sounds good on the surface, or are you talking about the Congressional delegation and their political manipulators?
When I look at the polls, what I see is that a substantial percentage of people who identify as "Republican" or "conservative" are actually fairly mainstream and:
• a) want government to do the same things we want it to do — keep the air and water clean, provide disaster relief, take care of our veterans, educate our kids, provide Social Security (most oppose cutting it), maintain infrastructure, etc.
• b) recognize that Democrats have not been doing these things and are hypocritical about caring about or providing for these things. And, yes, that includes racial issues, which Democrats may give a lot of lip-service to but actually work in the other direction to exacerbate.
• c) are confused about how to accomplish these goals because they've heard a lot of rubbish — most off it carried as much by Democrats as by Republicans — about why these things aren't being done.
When you talk to most ordinary Republicans, what you find is that they believe a lot of the same lies you'll hear from Democratic leaders. (Did you catch Kamala Harris responding to a call to abolish ICE by talking about how we need people to deal with violent crime? — as if that wasn't already handled by the police?) Most egregiously, Democrats continue to behave like the Budget Act is some sort of Constitutional or even natural law that can't be changed. Everyone (even Bernie Sanders, who must know better) talks like there is a finite amount of money available and we have to balance our checkbook. We "can't afford" nice things. Health care is "a pony". (By the way, I looked this up: At the cost of most people's annual premiums, they could buy several ponies a year and many people could get a pony at least monthly.)
Conservatives want to keep the good things they have — or had — and don't want to "innovate" them away. I know a lot of Democrats who consider themselves liberal like to think that all they are unhappy about losing is something called "white privilege", but a lot of black people have also seen many good things "modernized" out from under them — like having their homes stolen, facing a job market that barely even offers bad jobs to people, let alone decent work. The fact that something unfair happens more often to black people than to white people doesn't mean it is somehow "fairer" when it happens to white people. If it's okay for it to happen to white people, then why isn't it okay if it happens to black people? The fact is, the sense of unfairness is natural and legitimate and everyone feels this way about these things when they see them happening to themselves and their friends, and they shouldn't be happening to any people. Here is your choice: Work three jobs to maintain your home, let your kid enlist in the military and come back broken or in a box. These didn't used to be our choices and a lot of people can still remember that. Some are even aware that Democratic Presidents made great strides in making these things become our choices and making sure no one did anything to stop it. Carter, Clinton, and Obama were supposed to ameliorate the damage but instead eased the progression downward.
People say they are "fiscal conservatives" because they think they understand that there is only so much money to go around and we have to "tighten our belts" on some things so we can do the things that have to be done. Although, to some, endless wars are the only thing that "have to" be done, many others assume that the better things that have to be done are what's consuming our resources and we just have to cut something else out.
At the top end, though, there are plenty of people who understand that it's all rhetoric and what they want is power and control. They don't just want to protect themselves, they want to make other people squirm, they want to make decent people have to beg them for any kind of mercy, for jobs, for a few crumbs. They like being able to put people in a tight spot so they have to agree to things they find morally repugnant in order to make a crust. They like being able to screw people gratuitously just to see them realize there is nothing they can do about it. And they also know that given the opportunity, increasing numbers of their victims would cheerfully kill them in their beds, so they like having a large, militarized police force to make sure they can't do that. They even like selling products and having policies that kill and imprison them so there are fewer of them in a position to do so.
And there is a class of people just under them who have internalized the kiss-up/kick-down nature of success in such a system and they have cast their lot with the bullies on top. And some of them are the Democrats who run the party. And if you listen to them, they sound an awful lot like the bullying Republicans, even though they may couch it in finer language (or, like Rahm Emanuel, don't). We have spent decades hearing it, every time they say, "Where else are they gonna go?" They love making us vote for them just because the only other option is even worse. They laugh when they say it.
I look at some of the things my liberal friends say on Facebook and I'm often appalled at the meanness and human insensitivity of what they say. Yes, they really do sound like they believe men and white people are not entitled to an opinion. Yes, they really do seem to think that only they suffer ordinary human discomforts during the day. Yes, they really do gleefully celebrate that poor people in the south who may have voted for Trump, maybe didn't vote — or, a fact they seem to ignore, may even have voted for Clinton — will suffer because their states voted red.
I was working on the city desk at the Baltimore Sun when David Simon came to work there. They sat him right next to me. And Baltimore was still a nice city to live and work in, back in those days, even if you were black. Our black reporters were not coming in reporting racist indignities that were foisted on them constantly. The maids who were the mothers of my friends were not worrying that their kids were going to get shot just walking to the corner shop, and they expected their kids' lives to have opportunities, to be better than theirs had been. And those kids were not walking around fearfully, terrified that they'd come to the attention of a cop. They were, just like the white kids, looking to choose between the opportunities that were on offer to them. It took very few years of Reagan and then Clinton to change that. I did not recognize the Baltimore David Simon wrote about. I had walked down those streets and they were not like that. Comfortable, clean, middle-class black neighborhoods with pristine front stoops now just look like part of some nightmare. That's not progress.
Do not tell me that we keep taking steps forward. And don't tell me we have "incremental change" for the better. We have had rapid change for the worse on almost every measure.
Ordinary liberal Democrats know the Republican leadership are liars. But what they don't get is that ordinary mainstream Republicans also know that Democratic leaders are liars. Republicans are less likely than ever to hide their cruelty, but Democrats still try to convince themselves, or at least their voters, that they are not also being cruel.
Supposedly "liberal" Democrats gave us the Budget Act.
Supposedly "liberal" Democrats ended "welfare as we know it" and made it normal to imprison school kids for what used to be minor infractions, privatized prisons, created Three Strikes, militarized the police, destroyed banking regulations that had prevented another depression, allowed banks to steal people's homes with impunity and virtually wiped out most black wealth.
Democrats lied all the time about what they were doing, what needed to be done, what they would do, what couldn't be done, and what the results would and must be. That's why they keep being voted out.
What's the ideology of the Democratic Party? From what I can see, it's just, "Vote for Democrats."
* * * * *
Bernie Sanders' Inequality in America: A National Town Hall, with Senator Elizabeth Warren, economist Darrick Hamilton, and filmmaker Michael Moore, wasn't too bad, but the audio on the video clips wasn't very clear. Also, the lead-in to the video takes about five minutes, which is just barely enough time to turn it on and make popcorn before it actually starts.
"In Chicago primaries, a string of defeats for the Democratic establishment at the hands of progressive Democrats: Four Democratic challengers backed by United Working Families (linked with the progressive Working Families Party) have successfully challenged establishment Dems backed by Chicago's legendarily unassailable "Democratic machine," effectively winning their offices at the same time, because the Democrat candidate always gets elected to those offices, thanks to Republicans not bothering to field candidates (leaving a vacuum that is sometimes filled by Holocaust-denying Illinois Nazis). [...] It's not all good news, though. Dan Lipinski kept his candidacy, despite having inherited his Congressional seat from his father and having voted against a $15 minimum wage, against abortion on demand, for mass surveillance and endless war, and against basic railroad safety rules that would have affected one of his largest campaign donors, a rail industry PAC. Lipinski was being challenged by Marie Newman, who ultimately outraised him with small-money donations from Sanders Democrats, and who lost the primary by a razor-thin margin. That's something of a victory -- Lipinksi had been considered unassailable and he only won by a handful of votes -- but it still seems like Lipinski will return to Congress as a Democrat-in-name-only. But the closeness of the race may inspire other primary challengers to establishment Dems in other seemingly unassailable positions." She came so close to beating him it almost breaks your heart, but I bet it scares the hell out of the alt-center. Or — wait! — is that what really happened? Marie Newman was ahead until her vote-count suddenly went down rather than up. How does that happen? Shades of Volusia County, FL.
Jeff Hauser and Kurt Walters in The Hill, "17 Senate Dems broke their contracts with their voters [...] Needless to say, a third of Senate Democrats siding with Trump to deregulate big banks damages the credibility of this message. And let's not kid ourselves about what's going on: They're voting for the bill, raising money from the industry and hoping no one notices. Schumer himself bears a great deal of responsibility, and progressives rightly suspect him of actually wanting the bill to pass. He voted against it but didn't fight against it either. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), a member of Schumer's leadership team, no less, came under withering attack from fellow Democrats for having the audacity to inform the American public which members of the Senate voted for S. 2155."
As we may recall, George H.W. Bush referred to the Cheney-Rumsfeld crew as "the crazies" — maybe okay to do some work and fill some spots, but not the sort of people you'd put in charge of policy. His son put them in charge of policy, but they had their own fringies who were useful for some things but not people you wanted making decisions. One of their most significant crazies was John Bolton. But none of the people who were mad enough, credulous enough, or just plain stupid enough to support the invasion of Iraq have paid a price for it. That fact doesn't please Ryan Cooper any more than it should please the rest of us. "Why America is asking for more wars [...] After the Iraq cataclysm, what America desperately needed was an honest debate about its bloody imperial bungling. What we got was, by and large, a lot of evasive mumbling about how "no one could have predicted," and how we need to "turn the page" and "look forward, not backward." The result is a Republican administration full of people who would still be in prison for war crimes in a country that took the rule of law seriously, and an opposition party too full of idiots and/or cowards to present a united front against war. Just last week, 10 Senate Democrats provided the crucial swing votes that allowed Trump to keep backstopping the genocidal Saudi war in Yemen. I have little confidence there will be a party-wide attempt to stand up to Bolton and Trump when the time comes.
Ari Berman in Mother Jones, "Kris Kobach Just Got Humiliated in Federal Court: The Kansas secretary of state wanted to prove his claims of widespread voter fraud. Instead, he was repeatedly embarrassed."
"Capitalism Eats a Co-op [...] True Value is a chain of more than 4,000 hardware stores around the world. It is a cooperative, meaning simply that it is collectively owned by the individual retail store owners, rather than being owned by, for example, a faceless outside investment firm who cares about nothing but the bottom line. This does not mean that True Value hardware is the vanguard of the socialist revolution, but it does go to show that a thoroughly middle American company can operate at large scale, for many decades, under a decentralized cooperative ownership model. It is simply a living demonstration of the fact that capitalism need not operate in its most rapacious and inhuman form; it can, instead, with collective agreement, be operated in a somewhat less horrible way, in which individual small business owners are empowered. Ah... cancel that. True Value has been sold to a private equity firm."
Sarah Jones at The New Republic, "The Pinkertons Still Never Sleep: The notorious union-busting agency has resurfaced in a telecommunications labor dispute, revealing how it has adapted to the 21st century. Workers at the telecommunications company Frontier Communications have been on strike for 20 days in West Virginia and Virginia. Their grievances are familiar ones: Workers want more protection from layoffs, better health care coverage, and the return of contracted work to the bargaining unit. The workers' union, Communications Workers of America, says the company is refusing to meet workers even part-way and has brought in replacement workers, or scabs. Furthermore, Frontier has hired some muscle: the Pinkertons.
David Dayen in The Nation, "How Mortgage Companies Might Finally Be Held Accountable: A former congressman has come up with an ingenious new approach. Brad Miller's been tracking his particular white whale for over a decade. But he hadn't found the right harpoon with which to slay it. Until last week. Miller is a former congressman from North Carolina, who co-authored the legislation creating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Since leaving Congress, he's been working on litigation to finally bring to justice the mortgage companies that damaged millions of lives during the foreclosure crisis. And last week, he filed an innovative lawsuit against Ocwen, one of the nation's largest mortgage-servicing companies. (A servicer operates as an accounts-receivable department for home loans. This is the company you make your check out to.)
Shuan King at The Intercept, "Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner Promised a Criminal Justice Revolution. He's Exceeding Expectations. WHEN LIFELONG CIVIL rights attorney Larry Krasner was elected in a landslide this past November to become the new district attorney of Philadelphia, to say that his fans and supporters had high hopes would be an understatement. Anything less than a complete revolution that tore down the bigoted and patently unfair systems of mass incarceration would be a severe disappointment. Across the country, talking the talk of criminal justice reform has gotten many people elected as DA. Once in office, their reforms have often been painfully slow and disappointing. Krasner was the first candidate elected who publicly committed not just to intermittent changes, but a radical overhaul. So far, having been in office less than three months, he has exceeded expectations. He's doing something I've never quite seen before in present-day politics: Larry Krasner's keeping his word — and it's a sight to behold."
"Paul Ryan sold shares on same day as private briefing of banking crisis: Vice-presidential candidate denies he profited from a 2008 meeting with Fed chairman in which officials outlined fears for financial crisis" — That's straight-up insider trading, y'all. What are the chances he'll be prosecuted?
Alyssa Rosenberg in The Washington Post, "The most radical part of Anderson Cooper's interview with Stormy Daniels [...] But as a cultural milestone, the most radical thing Cooper did was refuse to treat Clifford as if she was irresponsible or immoral, or as if she were less than credible simply because of what she does for a living."
Ryan Cooper in The Week, "How Democrats can wipe out the GOP and fix America." There are some good ideas in here, but he glossed a little on foreign policy. And I still wish people would talk about abolishing the Budget Act.
James Banford in The New Republic, "Anti-Intelligence: What happens when the president goes to war with his own spies? [...] Former intelligence chiefs who, a few years ago, were justly chastised by much of the mainstream media for lying and violating civil liberties are now featured in the press as purveyors of truth and justice. Among them is former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who was roundly criticized for what many view as his lying under oath before Congress regarding the NSA's illegal domestic spying; former NSA Director Michael Hayden, who secretly ordered his agency to begin that spying; and former CIA Director John Brennan, who purportedly ran the agency's program of targeted killing of Americans and tried to prevent the Senate from releasing its voluminous investigation into the CIA's torture program. In November, Trump attacked Clapper and Brennan as 'political hacks.' The next day, the pair appeared on CNN to defend the intelligence community. 'Considering the source of the criticism,' Brennan said of Trump's comments, 'I consider that criticism a badge of honor.' [...] Ironically, much of the danger Trump poses can be laid at the feet of Barack Obama. Assuming that past norms would be future norms, Obama created the most powerful surveillance state the world has ever seen. Over eight years, he spent more than $100 billion on everything from eavesdropping satellites encircling the globe, to a million-square-foot building in the Utah desert for storing massive troves of intercepted data, to secret taps on the hundreds of thousands of miles of undersea cables that carry everything from tweets to Google searches to endless chatter. He also unleashed fleets of killer drones around the world, authorized the assassination of Americans without trial, and jailed more whistleblowers than all previous presidents combined. What Obama apparently never considered was that the Orwellian surveillance tools he created, and the precedents he set of killing and jailing Americans, could one day fall into the hands of a mountebank, demagogic president unrestrained by norms and perhaps even untethered from reality. One who may see them as preapproved weapons in his war to delegitimize his own government and attack political opponents, innocent Americans, and the press, which he has labeled 'the enemy of the American people.'"
Interesting wrinkle: I've been keeping my mouth shut about this whole story because my instincts were just up in the air. Everyone - and I mean everyone - just takes for granted that, well, Putin is vindictive and it's just the kind of thing he would do. But that presents a problem, because everyone does know it, and that means it's very easy to put him in the frame. And there are a lot of people who are getting really good at blaming their designated bad guy for stuff we even know they didn't do, and they all seem to be people who are dedicated to making Putin the Bad Guy of the Decade and pointing all the weapons in Russia's direction. And we have no reason to trust those people. So there's always a question of why, at a time like this, Putin would be dumb enough to do something that is so in character with the villain those people need him to be. (Yes, yes, he's an oligarch and thug and authoritarian, but that doesn't mean he's stupid.) And then there's this story: "Skripal 'regretted being double agent': A former classmate says the spy told him he wrote to Vladimir Putin asking to come back to Russia. Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia are in a critical condition after being poisoned by a nerve agent in Salisbury on 4 March. Vladimir Timoshkov was speaking exclusively to the BBC." Moscow says they never got that letter. They also claim they had nothing to do with the attack on the Skripals. Maybe, maybe not. It would have been in their interest to say that they'd seen the letter and were considering it, if they really want to deny their involvement. A lot of claims have been made that the Skripals were poisoned by a uniquely Russian nerve agent, but no experts are willing to support those claims and they seem to be sheer propaganda. (Much like with the "Russian hacks" story, ridiculous claims are made about the supposedly "uniquely Russian" origins of things that are already out there and can't actually be traced to source anymore. It's like saying Germans developed modern aspirin so it must be Germans who are responsible for an aspirin overdose. It's rubbish.)
"Making Profits on the Captive Prison Market [...] Some jails, for instance, have removed in-person family-visitation rooms to make way for 'video visitation' terminals, provided by private firms, which can charge as much as thirty dollars for forty minutes of screen time. One prison phone company, Securus Technologies, says in its marketing materials that it has paid out $1.3 billion in these so-called commissions over the past ten years."
In Gentleman's Quarterly, of all places, "The Great Lie of Conservatism [...] I grew up during the downfall of the Soviet Union, so I understand why men from the generation before me are so wary of Communist and socialist ideas, and why they endlessly worship Reagan for helping precipitate its downfall (one author created a set of Reagan-style bedrock principles, and they are as equally blind and dated as the others). I am a greedy capitalist at heart, and I do not like the prospect of a Commie Russia endgame any more than they did. But these guys were so obsessed with how liberalism might go sour that they seem to have never once considered how their own philosophy could do likewise."
Richard Eskow in Common Dreams, "The Resistance Needs Better Heroes: A movement is defined by its heroes. The Resistance can find better heroes than the ones some of its members have chosen — and it should."
Michelle Chen in The Nation, "Worker Cooperatives Are More Productive Than Normal Companies: When maximizing profits isn't the only goal, companies can actually work better. [...] By prioritizing worker autonomy, co-ops provide more sustainable long-term employment, but not only because worker-owners seek to protect their own livelihoods. If a company runs into economic distress, Perotin says, co-ops are generally more adept at preserving jobs while planning longer-term adjustments to the firm's operations, such as slowing down expansion to maintain current assets — whereas traditional corporations may pay less attention to strategic planning and simply shed jobs to tighten budgets."
"Why Black Americans Stay Poor: The education gap with whites has narrowed, but not the wealth gap. [...] In many areas -- college education, two-parent families, employment -- black families made progress toward closing the gap with whites from 1989 to 2013 (the earliest and latest data available). But the wealth gap ended up larger than ever." Well, sure, you can't put redlining on steroids and then steal all those homes — homes, that's where most families' wealth is — and not lose ground.
Just for grins, a review in the National Catholic Reporter says, "Douthat's Francis book is poorly sourced, inadequate journalism: Let's start with the compliments. Ross Douthat's latest book, To Change the Church: Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism, exhibits a writing style that is admirable and enviable, and his command of the English language is exemplary, his ability to turn a phrase exceptional. And, like his columns, there is an almost lawyerly logic to his writing, as he moves from fact to argument and from argument to thesis. And, like all great spiritual writing, Douthat does not hold back: His personal wrestlings are there upon the page for all to see. But I come to bury Douthat not to praise him, for his facts are nonsense, his arguments tendentious, and his thesis so absurd it is shocking, absolutely shocking, that no one over at Simon & Schuster thought to ask if what he writes is completely or only partially unhinged. I incline to the former adverb."
REST IN PEACE: Dave Bischoff, 15 December 1951-19 March 2018 — He was my friend, part of the old University of Maryland sf group crew, a contributor to Thrust back when it was just a fanzine, and he once made me an incidental character in one of his books just because I'd mentioned liking one of his short stories. The obits I've seen talk about his Star Trek work but don't give a cause of death or any other personal information. He was 66.
REST IN PEACE: "Groundbreaking Journalist & Newsday Columnist Les Payne Dies at 76. Payne was a champion for racial equality and a groundbreaking journalist who exposed racial injustice from Long Island, New York, to apartheid South Africa. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his work on a 33-part series entitled 'The Heroin Trail,' in which he and other reporters traced the drug from the poppy fields of Turkey to the streets of U.S. cities. Les Payne was a founding member and former president of the National Association of Black Journalists. For years, he's been working on an unfinished biography of Malcolm X. This is Les Payne, reading his essay 'The Night I Stopped Being a Negro,' about his experience hearing Malcolm X speak at Bushnell Memorial Hall in Hartford, Connecticut, in June 1963. At the time, Payne was one of only 60 African-American students at the University of Connecticut — out of 10,000 enrolled students."
ROT IN PERDITION: Pete Peterson, deficit fear-monger whose "philanthropy" was largely aimed at impoverishing any American who didn't get rich during their working life. "As a fiscal watchdog, he created a well-financed foundation that addresses a spectrum of fiscal issues and holds conferences that draw America's top financial and political leaders. He wrote a half-dozen books laying out his vision for economic prosperity while critiquing, and criticizing, entitlement spending, the Social Security system and the impact on the economy of partisan politics in Washington." Gee, they make it sound so harmless, but it would be difficult to overstate what a terrible, destructive monster he was. Robert Kuttner has a much better take with his "Pete Peterson Meets St. Peter: The late private equity billionaire has some trouble at the Pearly Gates."
ROT IN PERDITION: Zell Miller, 86, former Georgia governor and US Senator, bigot, homophobe, and Fox News Democrat who famously refused to endorse the party's nominee, Bill Clinton, and was therefore denied a speaking spot at the Democratic Party convention and incessantly whined ever after that they wouldn't let him talk because he was anti-abortion, and was also the keynote speaker at the 2004 Republican Party convention. He was happy to go everywhere and complain that, "I didn't leave the Democratic Party, it left me" - but not because it had turned against the New Deal, and merely because it was less inclined to accept his overt bigotry on "social issues". His erratic slides to left and right earned him the nickname "Zig-Zag Zell", but his trajectory soon became consistently toward the far right.
Charlie Pierce, "Conor Lamb's Victory Matters, and Paul Ryan Should Be Scared: Republicans had the money. They had the gerrymandering. They still couldn't do it. In his victory speech, which came before anyone had called the race, which MSNBC's Brian Williams couldn't resist telling his audience, Lamb interestingly leaned very hard on thanking the support he'd received from organized labor. In fact, he talked more — and more sincerely — about unions in that speech than any candidate I've heard since the beginning of Bernie Sanders' campaign back in 2015. This is beyond encouraging. I am sure that Lamb is going to take some positions that are going to make me crazy. (If he takes a dive on guns in this historical moment, or if he really becomes part of an effort to make, say, Tim Ryan the speaker of a newly elected Democratic House, the shebeen will not be pleased.) But telling labor that he owes his victory largely to its effort, and actually meaning it, is a very welcome — and an extremely shrewd — move for a rookie, and it evinces the kind of awareness that he's going to need to win re-election in whatever district he has to run in when this one disappears."
Ryan Cooper in Common Dreams, "Can Democrats Think Strategically About Trump Country? If Democrats are going to win in places like western Pennsylvania, they have to formulate an ideological and political stance that reverses the last generation of weak and elitist neoliberal Democratic Party policy."
"Philadelphia's New Top Prosecutor Is Rolling Out Wild, Unprecedented Criminal Justice Reforms: Philadelphia's newly minted district attorney, Larry Krasner, was meeting constituents in a packed church in West Philadelphia earlier this month to discuss his plans for the job. The meeting was unique in that it quickly revealed to community members what local civic leaders and officials have already learned about Krasner: He is making good on his promise to revolutionize the job of district attorney and, in the process, offering an extraordinary experiment in criminal justice reform at the municipal level that could serve as a national model. [...] On Tuesday, Krasner issued a memo to his staff making official a wave of new policies he had announced his attorneys last month. The memo starts: 'These policies are an effort to end mass incarceration and bring balance back to sentencing.' The most significant and groundbreaking reform is how he has instructed assistant district attorneys to wield their most powerful tool: plea offers. Over 90 percent of criminal cases nationwide are decided in plea bargains, a system which has been broken beyond repair by mandatory minimum sentences and standardized prosecutorial excess. In an about-face from how these transactions typically work, Krasner's 300 lawyers are to start many plea offers at the low end of sentencing guidelines. For most nonviolent and nonsexual crimes, or economic crimes below a $50,000 threshold, Krasner's lawyers are now to offer defendants sentences below the bottom end of the state's guidelines. So, for example, if a person with no prior convictions is accused of breaking into a store at night and emptying the cash register, he would normally face up to 14 months in jail. Under Krasner's paradigm, he'll be offered probation. If prosecutors want to use their discretion to deviate from these guidelines, say if a person has a particularly troubling rap sheet, Krasner must personally sign off."
David Dayen at The Intercept, "Democrats offer last-minute, pretend defense of fair lending laws, as they prepare to weaken them: IN A FINAL indignity, Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., has offered an amendment essentially striking a controversial provision from bipartisan bank deregulation bill S.2155 that would limit tools prosecutors use to detect mortgage lending discrimination, while acknowledging that the amendment probably wouldn't get a vote — and wouldn't be necessary for his ultimate support. At issue is Section 104, which exempts all banks and credit unions issuing 500 mortgages or less a year from enhanced Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, or HMDA, data requirements used to identify lending discrimination. This would cover 85 percent of all regulated mortgage lenders from the new requirements, which were part of the Dodd-Frank Act."
David Dayen at The New Republic, "The Government's Taxes on Citizens' Free Time: The Trump administration's latest shenanigans add to the growing, everyday burden of being an American. [...] Why must Americans become part-time accountants, just to follow the rules of society? Both parties are responsible for layering these responsibilities on citizens, choosing complication over simplicity and offloading that complexity onto the individual."
Zaid Jilani at The Intercept, "States That Have Decriminalized Marijuana Should Expunge Prior Pot Convictions, Activists Say: A GROUP OF legal activists is calling on district attorneys in eight states that have legalized or decriminalized marijuana to take the next logical step: expunge the records of people charged with misdemeanors related to marijuana possession. The Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, an advocacy group, sent letters to 201 officials in eight states: Alaska, California, Massachusetts, Maine, Nevada, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington last week, pointing out that current procedures to expunge convictions for misdemeanor marijuana possession are cumbersome. The committee encouraged the district attorneys to follow the lead of San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón, who announced in January that he would expunge and then dismiss thousands of misdemeanor and felony marijuana possession cases going back to 1975.
"Nancy Pelosi Just Endorsed a Congressman Who Opposes Abortion and Gay Rights: Dan Lipinski even voted against Obamacare. Illinois Democratic Rep. Dan Lipinski's career is on life-support. The seven-term congressman from the Chicago area, who inherited his seat from his father, is facing a formidable primary challenge from businesswoman Marie Newman, whose campaign has been fueled by progressive anger at Lipinski's opposition to reproductive rights, LGBT rights, and Obamacare. EMILY's List, the national organization that supports pro-choice women candidates, has backed Newman and, along with a host of progressive groups — including Planned Parenthood and the pro-LGBT rights Human Rights Campaign — has spent heavily on ads against Lipinski Elected Democrats — including New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and fellow Chicago-area Rep. Jan Schakowsky — have waded into the primary to back Newman. And in an unusual step for a race with a Democratic incumbent, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee had declined to endorse Lipinski. But on Thursday, less than three weeks before the March 20 primary, Lipinski did pick up one notable supporter: House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi."
"U.S. judges see 'epidemic' of prosecutorial misconduct in state: The hearing seemed largely routine until a state prosecutor approached the lectern. Deputy Atty. Gen. Kevin R. Vienna was there to urge three judges on the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to uphold murder convictions against Johnny Baca for two 1995 killings in Riverside County. Other courts had already determined that prosecutors had presented false evidence in Baca's trial but upheld the verdicts anyway. Vienna had barely started his argument when the pummeling began."
Ryan Cooper in The Week, "The subtle racism of centrist Democrats: Quisling Senate Democrats are collaborating with congressional Republicans and President Trump to roll back the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill. So far they have broken a filibuster, and the bill looks set for passage. It's an immensely horrible idea that significantly raises the risk of a future financial crisis. However, it should also be emphasized that this deregulation package is racist both in specifics and in general effect. It's a perfect demonstration of how centrist Democrats sell out their most loyal voting bloc to predatory Wall Street banks." (I actually don't think it's all that subtle, myself. To me, all this deregulating and defending the banks has always screamed, "Steal black wealth!" to me. Yes, steal a lot of white wealth, too, but there have been numerous structural means used longer than my lifetime to make it harder for black people to get "real property" than it is for whites, and since having that land and home make an enormous difference to the success of a family, allowing the financial industry to continue to make both acquiring and keeping real property especially difficult for black people is a blatant and direct racist attack on black America.)
"If You Care About Sex Trafficking, Trust People in the Sex Trades — Not Celebrities: When I use my writing platform to discuss my sex work history and advocate for people who are currently in the sex trades, one of the occupational hazards I resent the most is the demand that I prove my legitimacy by reliving past traumas. Another is the unending task of learning the ins and outs of misleadingly labeled federal legislation that would be disastrous for sex workers. But learn it, I do, and you should too as a horrific bill, the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act of 2017 (SESTA), inches closer to a Senate vote."
"The article removed from Forbes, 'Why White Evangelicalism Is So Cruel' [...] There is still today a Southern Baptist Church. More than a century and a half after the Civil War, and decades after the Methodists and Presbyterians reunited with their Yankee neighbors, America's most powerful evangelical denomination remains defined, right down to the name over the door, by an 1845 split over slavery. Southern denominations faced enormous social and political pressure from plantation owners. Public expressions of dissent on the subject of slavery in the South were not merely outlawed, they were a death sentence. Baptist ministers who rejected slavery, like South Carolina's William Henry Brisbane, were forced to flee to the North. Otherwise, they would end up like Methodist minister Anthony Bewley, who was lynched in Texas in 1860, his bones left exposed at local store to be played with by children. Whiteness offered protection from many of the South's cruelties, but that protection stopped at the subject of race. No one who dared speak truth to power on the subject of slavery, or later Jim Crow, could expect protection. Generation after generation, Southern pastors adapted their theology to thrive under a terrorist state."
The Hill, "Sanders: DCCC primary attacks on other Dems 'not acceptable': Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said on Wednesday that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee's attacks on a progressive House candidate in Texas were "appalling" and 'unacceptable.'" I still get bugged by Clinton's claim that the "long primary" hurt her in the general. It wasn't a long primary. It started more than a whole summer later than the primaries for the 2008 election, which didn't hurt Obama at all in the general.
Also at The Hill, Brent Budowsky says, "A Sanders-Warren ticket could win big in 2020 [...] Whether one supports Sanders or any other potential candidate in 2020, the case is clear that a strong progressive program and message would give Democrats a decided advantage in any campaign against the scandal-ridden and crony-capitalist-dominated presidency of Trump and his GOP allies in Congress."
"The CIA Democrats: Part one: An extraordinary number of former intelligence and military operatives from the CIA, Pentagon, National Security Council and State Department are seeking nomination as Democratic candidates for Congress in the 2018 midterm elections. The potential influx of military-intelligence personnel into the legislature has no precedent in US political history. If the Democrats capture a majority in the House of Representatives on November 6, as widely predicted, candidates drawn from the military-intelligence apparatus will comprise as many as half of the new Democratic members of Congress. They will hold the balance of power in the lower chamber of Congress. If the Democrats capture a majority in the House of Representatives on November 6, as widely predicted, candidates drawn from the military-intelligence apparatus will comprise as many as half of the new Democratic members of Congress. They will hold the balance of power in the lower chamber of Congress."
The California Democrats did not endorse Diane Feinstein this year, so it's hardly a surprise that Sanders won't endorse Feinstein, either.
Elizabeth Bruenig in, amazingly, The Washington Post, says, "It's time to give socialism a try: In the United States, we've arrived at a pair of mutually exclusive convictions: that liberal, capitalist democracies are guaranteed by their nature to succeed and that in our Trumpist moment they seem to be failing in deeply unsettling ways. For liberals — and by this I mean inheritors of the long liberal tradition, not specifically those who might also be called progressives — efforts to square these two notions have typically combined expressions of high anxiety with reassurances that, if we only have the right attitude, everything will set itself aright. Hanging on and hoping for the best is certainly one approach to rescuing the best of liberalism from its discontents, but my answer is admittedly more ambitious: It's time to give socialism a try."
Matt Taibbi, "Russiagate may have been aimed at Trump to start, but it's become a way of targeting all dissent [...] If you don't think that the endgame to all of this lunacy is a world where every America-critical movement from Black Lives Matter to Our Revolution to the Green Party is ultimately swept up in the collusion narrative along with Donald Trump and his alt-right minions, you haven't been paying attention."
Dave Johnson at Seeing the ForestOn Trump's Steel/Aluminum Tariffs And So-Called 'Trade' Generally: I agree with the tariffs, but not the way it is being done. It should have been planned, phased in, coordinated with US industry and, most important, part of a comprehensive US economic/trade/industrial policy. The latter just isn't going to happen under Trump nor under a Wall Street dominated economy even with Democrats running things."
In The Nation, It's Time to Abolish ICE: A mass-deportation strike force is incompatible with democracy and human rights."
Max Sawicky reviews Fair Shot: BY THE STANDARDS OF FACEBOOK'S TITANS, co-founder Chris Hughes was an also-ran. His payout from early participation in the company's launch, which stemmed from the good fortune of having been Mark Zuckerberg's college roommate, was only $500 million. To his credit, Hughes — a former fundraiser for Barack Obama now best known for his short-lived reign as The New Republic's would-be Silicon Valley savior — is preoccupied with the injustice of his windfall and has investigated how best to give an appreciable chunk of his money away, in the service of good causes. This turns out to be a difficult project. One of his solutions is to devote himself to the advocacy of a new program to guarantee income for all Americans. He could have done worse." Max reckons Hughes makes a nice start at batting away some of the worst myths in opposition, but has a long way to go.
RIP: "Rep. Louise Slaughter, progressive champion of women's rights, dies at 88." This is pretty sad news, because she was one of that small handful who had real accomplishments, fought the good fight, and wasn't just in it for herself. She was also a champion of net neutrality and was never a trusting neoliberal. "When President Bill Clinton asked for her support on NAFTA, she famously replied, 'Why are you carrying George Bush's trash?'"
RIP: "Former Black Panther Herman Wallace dies days after judge overturns murder conviction that saw him serve 41 years in solitary confinement: A former Black Panther who served 41 years in solitary confinement has died days after a US federal judge overturned his conviction for the murder of a prison guard. Herman Wallace was freed on Tuesday after Judge Brian Jackson ruled his 1974 trial had been 'unconstitutional' and ordered his immediate release. He was suffering from terminal liver cancer and died with supporters by his side early this morning. He was 71."
RIP: Peter Nichols, write, editor, and longtime critic and historian of science fiction, best known as the creator-organizer of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, presumably of Parkinson's. He was 79.
RIP: Stephen Hawking, renowned theoretical physicist, Star Trek fan, and not a big fan of Sheldon, at 76. And who can forget that endearing moment when right-wingers who never figured out that it was Hawking's voice machine, and not him, that had the American accent, and who actually used him as an example of the merits of the American system — and Hawking's rejoinder was that he would have died without the UK's National Health Service.
Apart from a few scenes in Bowling for Columbine, this is an explanation you won't hear very much. Military spending is the lifeline of virtually every federally-elected politician in the country. You've been to trained seal shows where the animals get a fish every time they perform? The same principle works with members of Congress and defense contracts.
The U.S. is more dependent than ever on a quasi-socialistic system that redistributes tax dollars to defense projects in even fashion across both Republican and Democratic congressional districts. A few times a year, you'll spot a news story about someone in the Pentagon trying to refuse a spending initiative, only to be told to keep building by Congress.
Yes, I remember Michael Moore being the only public figure I have ever seen asking this important question about the simple fact that while other countries have guns, they don't have all this shooting people going on. And why is that? Isn't it the constant ginning up of fear and hate our own mass media has dedicated itself to?
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I am so bored with Russian bots. Seems they tweeted or Facebooked everyone, but the Clintonites are of course out in force saying, "Bernie benefited from Russian bots and he should answer for this!" or similar. It's annoying. The whole story gets stupider by the day. They also seem to think they have "proof" that Putin was elevating Jill Stein, although the bots gave Clinton at least as much of a boost as they gave Stein. 13 bots sent out memes saying, among other things, "Hillary is a Satan" (they also sent out pro-Clinton posts and retweeted the hell out of Joy Reid), and this supposedly swung Clinton voters away from voting for her, which is an interesting theory about the minds of potential Clinton voters. Anyway here's a good comment from Atrios on the subject.
At a blog that bears a mysterious resemblance to Billmon's Whiskey Bar, we learn "'Russian bots' — How An Anti-Russian Lobby Creates Fake News: The U.S. mainstream media are going nuts. They now make up and report stories based on the uncritical acceptance of an algorithm they do not want to understand and which is known to produce fake results. [...] In other words — the "Twitter accounts suspected of having links to Russia" were following the current news just as cable news networks do. When a new sensational event happened they immediately jumped onto it. But the NYT authors go to length to claim that there is some nefarious Russian scheme behind this that uses automated accounts to spread divisive issues. [...] The real method the Hamilton 68 group used to select the 600 accounts it tracks is unknown. The group does not say or show how it made it up. Despite that the NYT reporters, Sheera Frenkel and Daisuke Wakabayashi, continue with the false assumptions that most or all of these accounts are automated, have something to do with Russia and are presumably nefarious."
I sometimes find Jimmy Dore a bit over-the-top but this clip gives you a more accurate picture of what's really going on than any of our more "responsible" coverage provides. It's embarrassing to see people like Ari Melber repeating nonsense about how Sanders (but not Clinton) has to answer for the social media junk that apparently supported the campaign.
"Hyping the Mueller Indictment: Do the charges against Russian individuals and organizations really describe the 'second-worst foreign attack on America'? [...] Neoconservative pundit Max Boot decries 'the second-worst foreign attack on America,' after 9/11, one that 'may be even more corrosive.' According to liberal Jonathan Alter, the Russians have launched 'an attack that — but for the loss of life — is as bad as Pearl Harbor.' Democratic Representative Jerrold Nadler concurs, explaining to MSNBC: 'They didn't kill anyone but they're destroying our democratic process.' Not in the amount of violence, but in the seriousness, it is very much on par.'" You could just bang your head against a wall.
Norman Solomon at Truthdig, "Is MSNBC Now the Most Dangerous Warmonger Network? [...] In effect, the programming on MSNBC follows a thin blue party line, breathlessly conforming to Democratic leaders' refrains about Russia as a mortal threat to American democracy and freedom across the globe. But hey — MSNBC's ratings have climbed upward during its monochrome reporting, so why worry about whether coverage is neglecting dozens of other crucial stories? Or why worry if the anti-Russia drumbeat is worsening the risks of a global conflagration?"
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Haaretz, "To Leave Gaza, Israel Asks Palestinian Minors to Commit They Not Return for a Year: Israel imposes harsher restrictions on Gazan kids leaving the Strip for abroad, demanding they sign an agreement to stay away. On January 24, 17-year-old Hadil and her three younger siblings arrived at the Erez Checkpoint between Israel and the Gaza Strip. A day earlier, they'd received an Israeli permit to leave Gaza through Israel via the Allenby Bridge to Jordan. Since Israel didn't let their oldest brother accompany them on the trip to see their father, who lives in Sweden, Hadil got the job of being the responsible adult. At Erez, a representative of Israel's Coordination and Liaison Office asked all four to sign a commitment not to return to Gaza during the next year, adding that they wouldn't be allowed to leave if they didn't sign. Having no choice, Hadil signed for all of them. Hadil never dreamed that her signature on this commitment would result in the Liaison Office issuing more stringent instructions to its Palestinian counterpart, the Palestinian Civil Affairs Committee, and in the latter defying the new rules."
"West Virginia Teachers Are Now Out on a Wildcat Strike. The Labor Movement Should Follow Their Lead. In a bright spot among an otherwise bleak landscape for labor, over 15,000 teachers and school support employees in all 55 West Virginia counties have been out on strike for seven days, as they and supporters from around the state continue to flood the capitol in Charleston, W.V., demanding higher pay and affordable healthcare. Bucking a deal struck between the West Virginia Education Association (WVEA) and the state government, school workers have defied both union leadership and state law, which affords them no right to strike and does not recognize their right to collectively bargain. These restrictions haven't stopped West Virginia educators from leading what may be one of the most important labor actions in years."
"Sanders Introduces Bill to End Catastrophic US War in Yemen: Three years of U.S.-Saudi war has turned Yemen into the worst humanitarian crisis on Earth. Senators Bernie Sanders and Mike Lee introduced a bipartisan bill to end the U.S. role in the war — Ben Norton reports."
There is something really twisted about admitting that you think people shooting each other is healthier than masturbation. I mean, seriously. In "NRA vs. Exxxotica", our friend Mark Kernes explains why the Dallas city council has decided that a weapons-dealers' trade show is good enough for their convention center, but a return of the successful and popular Exxxotica is not.
"At Yale, we conducted an experiment to turn conservatives into liberals. The results say a lot about our political divisions. [...] Conservatives, it turns out, react more strongly to physical threat than liberals do. In fact, their greater concern with physical safety seems to be determined early in life: In one University of California study, the more fear a 4-year-old showed in a laboratory situation, the more conservative his or her political attitudes were found to be 20 years later. [...] But if they had instead just imagined being completely physically safe, the Republicans became significantly more liberal — their positions on social attitudes were much more like the Democratic respondents. And on the issue of social change in general, the Republicans' attitudes were now indistinguishable from the Democrats. Imagining being completely safe from physical harm had done what no experiment had done before — it had turned conservatives into liberals."
Max Sawicky, "Is That All There Is? How Full Is Our 'Full Employment'? There's more than one reason to get jacked up over the Republicans' epic deficit orgy of 2017-18. One that deserves closer scrutiny is the view that since the economy is at full employment, this is the wrong time for deficits to increase. The temptation to lambaste the G.O.P. for its deficit perfidy may be overwhelming, but it could also be both bad economics and bad politics."
One of the running themes of this sucky blog is much of what is generally described as the "political center" is not and "moderate politicians" are not. Such "centrism" is mostly about issues and votes which have no constituency where Democrats are willing to join with Republicans (yay, bipartisan!). Or, at least, no constituency of voters. They're things which, usually, have a constituency of big donors. They aren't our principled deal-making "last honest people of Washington." They're our most corrupt.
Thinking otherwise allows corrupt Dems to join with equally corrupt Republicans to do things like this, and con people into thinking it's about "principled moderation" and that (in some cases) they're just representing their red state voters. Crazy liberals can't win in Missouri! Only principled moderates can!
No voters in Missouri want to eviscerate banking reforms. The most you can say with respect to electoral viability is that by pleasing big money, you prevent big money from going after you at election time. That might be true. But that's because they're going to run ads about other issues (the laundry list of Liberals Are Bad), not because supporting bank regulations is going to turn off independent minded swing voters.
I question the utility of being squishy on abortion rights and gun control, but it's fair to say that positioning might actually get some votes. Voting for future bank bailouts? Nah.
There was a time, one I can remember from when I was growing up (the 1950s and 60s), when being a liberal meant you wanted certain rights and benefits for everyone, at least ostensibly. We had Social Security because everyone should have a basic pension when they retire, and all disabled people need to be cared for. Freedom of speech was for everyone, even those horrible Nazis in Skokie. Liberals wanted national health insurance so everyone could afford medical care, but settled for Medicare, a universal program for seniors. Protestors like me were not against the rhetoric of universalism but the hypocritical practice, where blacks, Mexican and Filipino farmworkers and poor single moms were denied their share. That was then.
Now, liberals are concerned about minorities and the poor. They are against privilege, which is defined as not being a minority or poor. Public programs are designed to give assistance to the most oppressed and not waste their resources on those who have the privilege to fend for themselves. A poster child for the new politics is higher education. Liberals want bigger subsidies, like more Pell Grants, for the poorest students and those who self-select by enrolling in community college. They were distraught at Bernie Sanders' call for free public higher ed for all, since that would siphon off scarce resources for the benefit of privileged, nonpoor families. From their perspective, this was proof that Bernie and his ilk were unwoke: unaware of the scourge of privilege, they even wanted public support for it.
In fact, nothing is more important for the future of progressive politics than a return to universalism. If you doubt this, read this powerful reportage in the New York Times on the divisions opened up by Obamacare. It describes two women, one working part-time and living below the poverty line who gets ample, free health coverage, the other working full-time in a middle class job who is stuck with monthly $1000 premiums and a big deductible. That's not a bug but a feature: the program was set up to focus its support on those at the bottom and charge full freight for everyone else.
The effect is to divide the working class into two groups, poor winners and nonpoor losers. The politics are toxic, as you might expect. (Yes, the reporter found a Democrat to represent women below the poverty line and a Republican for women above it, which gives it an unfortunate air of exaggeration, but the logic of the comparison remains compelling.) It is also bad social policy, since at the margin households making $80,000 a year (the middle class example) can also skimp on care if the financial pinch is too much.
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Pankaj Mishra, "Why do white people like what I write? [...] Compared to these internationalist thinkers, partisans of the second black president, who happen to be the most influential writers and journalists in the US, have provincialised their aspiration for a just society. They have neatly separated it from opposition to an imperial dispensation that incarcerates and deports millions of people each year — disproportionately people of colour — and routinely exercises its right to assault and despoil other countries and murder and torture their citizens. Perceptive about the structural violence of the new Jim Crow, Coates has little to say about its manifestation in the new world order. For all his searing corroboration of racial stigma in America, he has yet to make a connection as vital and powerful as the one that MLK detected in his disillusioned last days between the American devastation of Vietnam and 'the evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society'. He has so far considered only one of what King identified as 'the giant American triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism' — the 'inter-related flaws' that turned American society into a 'burning house' for the blacks trying to integrate into it. And in Coates's worldview even race, despite his formidable authority of personal witness, rarely transcends a rancorously polarised American politics of racial division, in which the world's most powerful man appears to have been hounded for eight years by unreconstructed American racists. 'My President Was Black', a 17,000-word profile in the Atlantic, is remarkable for its missing interrogations of the black president for his killings by drones, despoilation of Libya, Yemen and Somalia, mass deportations, and cravenness before the titans of finance who ruined millions of black as well as white lives. Coates has been accused of mystifying race and of 'essentialising' whiteness. Nowhere, however, does his view of racial identity seem as static as in his critical tenderness for a black member of the 1 per cent."
"Why are Democratic party thinktanks still not backing universal healthcare?" Well, the last time there was a roll toward some kind of single-payer-ish program, the American Enterprise Institute created a monstrosity that became RomneyCare and then Obamacare to head it off. They've shot their wad, looks like it's time for the faux "progressives" to take a shot.
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Howie Klein, "DCCC Comes Out Of The Closet As The Progressive-Hating Attack Machine It's Been For Over A Decade. Nancy Pelosi gave a very strange interview the other day, but "Her theory behind the races exploded yesterday in Houston when the DCCC did something publicly that it usually only-- and always-- does behind the scenes where no one can watch. It viciously attacked a progressive candidate, Laura Moser, to benefit an establishment corporate shill in the primary."
Lee Fang, Ryan Grim, David Dayen. "DCCC goes nuclear, slams Dem candidate as corrupt for same behavior it engages in regularly: ON THURSDAY EVENING, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee took the extraordinary step of publicly attacking a prominent Democratic candidate in a contested Texas primary. The party committee's move was made all the more jarring given the background of the candidate, Laura Moser, who in 2017 became a hero of the Trump resistance movement as the creator of Daily Action, a text-messaging tool that channelled progressive anger into a single piece of activism per day."
For the record, the Democratic Party does not have a page like this listing their election wins and losses. And while it's true that Our Revolution appears to have lost more than they've won, they've had some interesting victories, often in deep red country. You might want to save this link for the next time someone claims otherwise.
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"Supreme Court limits protections for corporate whistleblowers: The Supreme Court sharply limited the legal protections for corporate whistleblowers on Wednesday, ruling they are not shielded from being fired under a federal law unless they have reported a potential fraud to the Securities and Exchange Commission. The justices conceded their ruling might gut the whistleblower protections that were adopted after the Wall Street collapse in 2008. Lawmakers had said they wanted to break the "corporate code of silence" that prevented employees from revealing wrongdoing inside their companies. But the high court, in an unanimous decision, said the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 defined a protected whistleblower as someone who reported a potential fraud "to the commission," referring to the SEC."
Senator Kirsten Gillibrand Calls Out Big Pharma For Opposing Legal Marijuana: "'To them it's competition for chronic pain, and that's outrageous because we don't have the crisis in people who take marijuana for chronic pain having overdose issues,' Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York said. 'It's not the same thing. It's not as highly addictive as opioids are.'"
"Let Them Eat Experience: Until last month, almost all unpaid internships were technically illegal. Now it's open season for employers who want free labor."
Dday also tells us about a publishing project he will be contributing to, of small "books" on DC-related subjects. "My friend and Intercept colleague Ryan Grim has co-founded a publishing company called Strong Arm Press. They produce investigations of major figures in the Trump orbit, a sort of field guide to the people running the world these days. The books are expansive enough to really delve into a subject but much smaller than a book, about 10,000 words or so. They are sold cheaply, like $5 or $10, mostly as ebooks. Ryan has asked me to contribute to one such exposé of Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who I've written about once or twice. We have a terrific reporter, Rebecca Burns, working hard on this project. So, you can buy the in-depth reporting, but you can also help fund it if you have a few extra pennies to throw in.
"If Police Don't Have to Protect the Public, What Good Are They? The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed, most recently in 2005, that police have no constitutional duty to protect members of the public from harm. [...] Police have shot and killed Americans of all ages — many of them unarmed — for standing a certain way, or moving a certain way, or holding something — anything — that police could misinterpret to be a gun, or igniting some trigger-centric fear in a police officer's mind that has nothing to do with an actual threat to their safety. In recent years, Americans have been killed by police merely for standing in a 'shooting stance,' holding a cell phone, behaving oddly and holding a baseball bat, opening the front door, running in an aggressive manner holding a tree branch, crawling around naked, hunching over in a defensive posture, wearing dark pants and a basketball jersey, driving while deaf, being homeless, brandishing a shoehorn, holding a garden hose, and peeing outdoors." But they didn't do a thing against the Parkland shooter. And, don't get me wrong, that was the smart thing to do — they would have ended up dead. But the police seem to have become the most dangerous gang on the streets while contributing increasingly less value to the community.
Lee Camp at Truthdig. "Six Ways the 'Resistance' Gave Trump a Dictator's Toolkit: My longtime arch-nemesis, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) — which I thought we had vanquished after years of stabbing, kicking and choking it — may now be rising from the dead like a zombie, like a vampire, like a Jeff Sessions. And this is yet another sign that the so-called Democratic 'Resistance' is a joke so big it has to buy two airplane seats. [...] What does this have to do with the so-called Democratic 'resistance'? Well, there's a reason Trump has such an outsize trade authority — a reason your mainstream media would rather you forget. Obama handed this trade authority to Trump on a silver platter. Back in 2015, Congress, under pressure from the Obama administration, voted to give the president, any president, unlimited trade authority for the next six years. This means Congress cannot change a word of any trade deal Trump approves."
Beat the Press, "Hey Folks, Looks Like Corporate America Hasn't Heard About the Trump Tax Cuts: News must travel slowly to corporate headquarters these days. How else can we explain the fact that corporate America isn't rushing out to invest in response to the big tax cut Congress voted them last year? [...] If the tax cuts matter for investment, then companies like GE, Microsoft, and Amazon were making plans as soon as it became clear that the Republican majority in Congress was serious about passing a tax bill. The fact that we are seeing zero evidence of an uptick in investment suggests that tax cuts don't have much impact on investment. Rather than being about promoting economic growth that would lead to productivity gains and higher wages for ordinary workers, the tax cuts were actually just another way to redistribute more money upward. As Speaker Ryan always says: #RichPeopleNeedTaxCuts."
CONGRATULATIONS: "Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Associate Publisher, is now also Vice President and Editor-in-Chief of Tor Books, reporting to me. Patrick's 29 years at Tor, coupled with his encyclopedic knowledge of the industry and his award-winning editing skills, make him perfect for this key role that will help us to continue to grow the business."
REST IN PEACE: "Barry Crimmins, Comedian and Activist, Dead at 64 [...] Crimmins was a stalwart in the Boston stand-up scene during the Eighties and became known for his powerful monologues and scathing political satire. Along with performing, he founded two clubs, the Ding Ho and Stitches, where he produced an array of shows that featured burgeoning comics like Goldthwait, Steven Wright, Kevin Meaney and Paula Poundstone." There are some videos there at The Rolling Stone's article and more at the Guardian. Longtime readers of The Sideshow will remember that Barry was a mainstay of the liberal web in the days of Bartcop, Media Whores Online. and the early blogging days.
Tom Sullivan, "This is what more looks like: Want to know one reason why Democrats get no traction in the Plains States? I tried to email Kansas, South Dakota, and Montana counties yesterday and got pissed off. The white counties in otherwise red-shaded states are either unorganized or have no email or Facebook contact information on the state party websites (and probably not even a Facebook page not listed there). That's 40 percent of Kansas counties, half of Montana, and 70 percent of South Dakota. That's counties, not population, naturally. Okay, very rural, low-density areas I have the luxury of not trying to organize. And maybe it is because there are no Democrats out there. Even so. Those states elect U.S. senators. If Democrats don't show up to play, they forfeit. Look at south-central Georgia. So, I don't want to hear "This is the most important election of our lifetime" again. Ever. Because if you think short-term, you never invest in the future. As they say around the office, "Why is there never time to do it right, but always time to do it over?" Democrats do it over — and over — on a two-year cycle, in many places starting each time from scratch."
"Depressed? Anxious? Blame Neoliberalism. [...] Throughout the day, some of the country's most important scientists spoke about their research into these problems. Yet, as the day went on, something baffled me. If all you knew about depression, anxiety and addiction was what was presented at this day-long conference, you would have thought these conditions were caused by malfunctions in people's brains. We looked at pictures of brain scans and talked about internal brain mechanisms. One group of scientists said they aimed to eradicate depression by 2050 — but the focus of their research was entirely biological. [...] As Margaret Thatcher put it when I was a kid, 'There's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.' Neoliberalism poses many problems, but perhaps the most neglected is that it has supercharged our current crisis of depression and anxiety. All human beings have natural psychological needs: to feel we belong, to feel we are secure, to feel we are valued, to feel we have a secure future we can understand. These are ingrained in us all. Neoliberalism does a very poor job of meeting these psychological needs, in part because its theory of human nature doesn't match with human nature.
Last month's weird story about a raid on Newsweek/IBT offices was followed by David Sirota's announcement that he was resigning the publications. It seems management was playing a bit fast and loose with the laws on fraud and money laundering. "Newsweek's Top Editors and a Reporter Let Go Amid Turmoil: Less than a week after both the chairman and finance director of Newsweek Media Group stepped down, several of the publication's top editors and reporters are also out. While some were let go, at least one has resigned. Bob Roe, editor in chief of Newsweek since August, and Ken Li, the publication's executive editor, were dismissed Monday. It's not clear yet why they were let go. Celeste Katz, who had been reporting on a Manhattan District Attorney's office probe of the Newsweek Media Group, was also dismissed. 'I'll sleep well tonight — and I'm looking for a job!' she tweeted late Monday. Another reporter who had been looking into the company, Josh Keefe, tweeted, 'I have not been fired, although that was very clearly the plan.' Matthew Cooper, who's worked twice for Newsweek, first in the 1990s and again since 2014, resigned. 'I've never seen more reckless leadership,' Cooper wrote in his resignation letter to NMG CEO Dev Pragad, which Cooper published to Facebook, adding 'I'm resigning from Newsweek at the end of the business today. Perhaps that's moot since the staff has been sent home and the magazine, for all we know, doesn't exist.' This morning, another Newsweek and IBT reporter, David Sirota announced his resignation from the company." And then there's this story: "Newsweek Editors Blast Exec to His Face: 'What You're Doing Is Bulls**t. You Don't Understand Journalism.': During an increasingly ugly meeting, the company's CCO refused to answer whether money laundering allegations were true and blamed staff for undermining the business." Anyway, David Sirota is looking for a job and health care for his family.
"Abolition of death penalty gets closer to reality as bill clears Washington state Senate: Efforts to eliminate Washington's death penalty in the 2018 legislative session continued to break new ground Wednesday when a bill banning the practice passed the Senate. The 26-22 vote marks the latest — and what some lawmakers say is the strongest — push to repeal the death penalty as a possible punishment for aggravated first-degree murder. That punishment would be replaced with life without parole if the bill is signed into law."
Jonathan Cohn, "Without the Votes of these 12 Dems, the House GOP's Assault on the ADA Would Have Failed: On Wednesday, House Republicans celebrated Valentine's Day by attacking consumer protections and financial regulations. The next day, amidst the national mourning following the tragedy in Parkland, Florida, House Republicans voted to turn the clock backwards on civil rights. Just like Social Security and Medicare 'reform' often means dismemberment, so, too, was ADA Education and Reform Act of 2017 about weakening this landmark law protecting the rights of those with disabilities."
"How To Root The Republican Fakers Out Of Democratic Primaries-- Joseph Kopser Just Made It Very East In TX-21: The Texas primaries are coming up in just under 3 weeks-- followed by primary runoffs on May 22. And those primaries-- with so many vulnerable red seats and so many seats Republican incumbents are abandoning-- are crowded. TX-21 is a super-gerrymandered district that starts up in West Campus and the Drag in Austin, skirts the state Capitol, takes in Downtown before crossing the Colorado River to encompass Travis Heights, South Lamar and Sunset Valley before heading down through Buda, the western part of both San Marcos and New Braunfels before hitting Alamo Heights, Olmos Park, Terrell Hills, Fort Sam Houston and Government Hill in San Antonio. To the west of that skinny corridor from south Austin to north San Antonio is a big chunk of less populated Hill Country that includes Boerne, Frederickcburg, Bandera, Medina way out to Camp Wood on the Nueces River. May back last April we started warning our friends in San Antonio-- people in Austin already knew-- that one of the Democratic candidates, Joseph Kopser, was really a Republican trying to pass himself off as a Democrat." You know what comes next, right?
David Dayen at The Intercept, "After Boasting About Lowering Black Unemployment, Donald Trump Undermines The Federal Unit Defending Against Housing Discrimination: DURING THE PRESIDENTIAL campaign, Donald Trump's pitch to the black community was direct: 'What the hell do you have to lose?' On Tuesday night, he stood before the nation and boasted about the lowest unemployment rate on record for African-Americans. But just hours before his State of the Union address, his lieutenant and handpicked head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Mick Mulvaney, told staff in an email that he was seizing control of the unit responsible for policing anti-lending-discrimination laws. CFPB Acting Director Mulvaney, in a previously unreported move, said that he would be putting the Office of Fair Lending and Equal Opportunity, or OFLEO, under his direct control, startling consumer protection and civil rights advocates, and raising concerns that the office would be unable to carry out its mission — and that, indeed, that was the very purpose of the shift." As a side note, The Washington Post seems to be grabbing credit for this story although their version looks remarkably like David's, which was published first.
"'Socialist' Judge, Refusing To Evict Tenants, Rankles City Landlords: PITTSBURGH (KDKA) — Luxury apartment buildings are going up, rents are going up, and guess what else? Evictions are going up as more and more people are being tossed out of their apartments for non-payment of rent. 'We have a crisis in housing in this city. Poor people are being forced out of the city,' said Mel Packer, an affordable housing advocate. Recently-elected District Justice Mik Pappas ran on a platform of stemming that tide by making landlords more accountable in court."
Dday at In These Times, "Cities Scrambling to Attract Amazon Because It 'Creates Jobs' Are Being Sold a Lie: Using Bureau of Labor Statistics data, EPI researchers Ben Zipperer and Janelle Jones analyzed what happens to employment in a county once Amazon builds a fulfillment center. Though warehousing and storage jobs do increase, the net effect is close to nil, as new jobs are offset by losses elsewhere in the county. The findings mean that all the money poured into Amazon on the promise of job creation is essentially a waste. 'It doesn't increase overall private sector employment,' Jones, an economic analyst with EPI, tells In These Times. 'No matter how much you slice this data, it's just not there.'"
"ICE lawyer in Seattle charged with stealing immigrants' IDs: The chief counsel for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Seattle has been charged with stealing immigrants' identities. Raphael A. Sanchez, who resigned from the agency effective Monday, faces one count of aggravated identity theft and another of wire fraud in a charging document filed Monday in U.S. District Court."
Zaid Jilani, "Democrats Anonymously Target Muslim Candidate, Questioning His Eligibility To Run For Michigan Governor: ON THE SAME day that he unveiled an urban agenda that highlights public transportation, affordable housing, and criminal justice reform, Michigan gubernatorial candidate Abdul El-Sayed came under fire in what he has described as a 'birther'-like campaign questioning his eligibility to run for governor. El-Sayed, a lifelong Michigander whose campaign has raised nearly $2 million, could be the first Muslim-American governor in the United States. He is considered the most serious challenger to Democratic frontrunner Gretchen Whitmer ahead of the August primary. And on Monday, Bridge, a Michigan magazine, published an article saying the stint El-Sayed spent as a medical student and professor at Columbia University in New York between 2013 and 2016 could be used against him, writing that 'questions surrounding El-Sayed's candidacy are an open secret among Democrats, particularly in southeast Michigan.'" This is pure bollocks, since he never gave up his Michigan residence and has consistently voted there, but I can't help wondering where these "Democratic" heroes were when Dick Cheney illegally stood as George W. Bush's runningmate in 2000, even though they were both residents of the same state.
James Risen, "U.S. Secretly negotiated with Russians to buy stolen NSA documents — and the Russians offered Trump-related material, too: THE UNITED STATES intelligence community has been conducting a top-secret operation to recover stolen classified U.S. government documents from Russian operatives, according to sources familiar with the matter. The operation has also inadvertently yielded a cache of documents purporting to relate to Donald Trump and Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. Over the past year, American intelligence officials have opened a secret communications channel with the Russian operatives, who have been seeking to sell both Trump-related materials and documents stolen from the National Security Agency and obtained by Russian intelligence, according to people involved with the matter and other documentary evidence. The channel started developing in early 2017, when American and Russian intermediaries began meeting in Germany. Eventually, a Russian intermediary, apparently representing some elements of the Russian intelligence community, agreed to a deal to sell stolen NSA documents back to the U.S. while also seeking to include Trump-related materials in the package. The CIA declined to comment on the operation. The NSA did not immediately respond to a request for comment."
"Israeli police recommend indicting Netanyahu for corruption: report: Israeli police chiefs will recommend to the country's attorney general that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu be indicted on corruption charges, according to reports in local media. The Times of Israel reported Wednesday that police chiefs, including the general commissioner of Israel's police force, were in 'unanimous agreement' that Netanyahu should be indicted for allegedly accepting bribes and receiving lavish gifts from wealthy benefactors, including Israeli-born Hollywood producer Arnon Milchan."
"After Annie Rice's Victory, Democrats Weigh Punishing Her Supporters: Last night, Annie Rice won a resounding victory, with nearly 60 percent of 8th ward voters choosing her to represent them on the city's Board of Aldermen. But later this month, the Democratic Central Committee will weigh a bylaw change directly aimed at punishing Rice's supporters. If members approve the proposed amendments, anyone who "supports or endorses" candidates like Rice "shall be subject to censure." Committee members who follow in Rice's footsteps and run for office without the party's blessing could face removal. The ugly situation says a lot about the mutinous mood — and old guard pushback — roiling the St. Louis Democratic Party these days. Progressives have taken aim at the Democratic establishment in recent years, winning some key victories (Bruce Franks Jr. for state rep) and coming tantalizingly close in others (Tishaura Jones for mayor). In St. Louis, it's no longer enough to ask whether someone is running as a Democrat; the real question is whether they're allied with the upstart progressive wing or the establishment one allied with the powers that be and the party's longstanding donors (developers, lawyers, lobbyists)."
"Home Depot destroys 1 million pounds of supplies in wake of hurricane: ST. THOMAS, Virgin Islands — A trip along the winding mountain countryside in Saint Thomas reveals scenes that are not scattered across network news shows anymore. [...] The company crushed one million pounds worth of goods, according to Waste Management records obtained by Channel 2 Action News. They were sent to a local landfill and claimed on the company's insurance — rather than sorted for hurricane survivors."
Atrios on bipartisan compromise: "I think it's a bit... out of date... but I at least get why members of Congress used to blather on about bipartisan this and bipartisan that. And, yes, of course sometimes compromise is necessary and it's nice if people can work together, though the outcome is the thing, not the process (This is the part our political press does not understand. It does not matter if TipnRonnie have beers, it matters what they do before and after). The scary thing is some senators really... believe it? They think they've been elected to form gangs and go the gym together or whatever. Strange people. I'm looking at you Claire McCaskill. Stop it."
Atrios on the Shutdown: "John Kelly is as big a racist xenophobe as Stephen Miller, if perhaps for different reasons, and you can't make a deal with bestest boy Donald about immigration (or anything) because they'll run interference and get him to "reconsider." The New York Times reporters spent all last night (in their shitty newspaper and on the twitters) blaming Democrats for the shutdown, because it's always their fault, so cancel your subscriptions. Please. I am so sick of this shitty newspaper destroying our politics. From Whitewater to Iraq to Clinton Cash to Emails to Maggie when will people learn. It is a bad newspaper. Local media is often horrible but at least they cover things that nobody else does so give your guilt money to them instead."
"Kept out: How banks block people of color from homeownership: PHILADELPHIA (AP) — Fifty years after the federal Fair Housing Act banned racial discrimination in lending, African Americans and Latinos continue to be routinely denied conventional mortgage loans at rates far higher than their white counterparts. This modern-day redlining persisted in 61 metro areas even when controlling for applicants' income, loan amount and neighborhood, according to millions of Home Mortgage Disclosure Act records analyzed by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting."
RIP: John Perry Barlow, Internet Pioneer, 1947-2018. Most of the obits I've seen so far concentrate on his life and work as a founder of the Electronic Frontiers Foundation (EFF), but we first heard of him as a songwriting collaborator with his friend Bob Weir. JPB introduced the Grateful Dead to Tim Leary back in the Millbrook days. He was still a charismatic guy when I met him in the '90s when Feminists Against Censorship was working with other groups concerned with internet censorship.
"The Butcher Builders: How Western Journalists Helped Create a Monster in Russia: The Soviet Union's collapse left Russia in disarray, but key figures in the administration of President Boris Yeltsin — namely deputy prime minister Yegor Gaidar and privatization chief Anatoly Chubais — had plans to transform the country's failing economy into a robust free market. This presented a unique business opportunity for western capitalists. The Clinton administration needed no convincing, eagerly sending economists from the Harvard Institute for International Development (HIID) under the direction of professor Andrei Shleifer to advise the Russian government in its transition. What ensued was 'shock therapy' — rapid deregulation, easing price controls, and privatization of state assets including social services, occurring in two waves: a voucher program and later the notorious 'loans-for-shares.' In the end, the effort failed. Shleifer, his wife, Nancy Zimmerman, and his colleague Jonathan Hay were embroiled in a scandal for using their position to personally enrich themselves, and had to settle with the U.S. government. Russia was left in ruins. The attempted transformation had left a small class of oligarchs (including Chubais) enriched, and had plunged the country into a deep depression that lasted from 1991 until the millennium (although its impact lasted well into the '00s). Large amounts of wealth exited the former Soviet Union, the ruble hyperinflated, pensions became worthless, job security disappeared, and GDP plummeted by orders of magnitude — by some estimates as much as 40 percent between '91 and '98. Organized crime was rampant, fueled by oligarchs, and street violence became commonplace. Adult mortality rose at a rate one study described as 'unprecedented in a modern industrialised country in peacetime.' By 2009, roughly 7 million Russians had died."
I have a problem with an assumption in this article that progressives (or whoever) who concentrate on economic issues (and particularly Bernie Sanders), are people who have "a class analysis and not a race analysis." I believe that if you start with a race analysis you will, like Dr. King and Malcom X, eventually come to see the economic analysis as vital. After all, most of us did start with a race analysis first, and that led to all the broader issues. (Hillary Clinton wasn't one of them. How could someone who claims to care about racial issues have thought ending "welfare as we know it" and militarizing the police, privatizing prisons, and creating harsher laws could do anything but exacerbate the already perilous position of the black community? Although, since structural racists have always understood the importance of preventing black Americans from having wealth and freedom, maybe she knew perfectly well — she was, after all, a Goldwater Girl while MLK was talking about class.) So this article has it backwards — that too many people haven't made the connection yet that you aren't going to get anywhere addressing race alone and overlooking class. But maybe having it spelled out this way will help them do that. "How Can Democrats Connect 'Identity Politics' to Economics?"
Ian Welsh, "How To Solve London's Housing Problems (And Canada's): So, two lovely facts about London's housing market. First:
Londoners spend 72% of their income on rent.
Second:
Overseas buyers snap up majority of exclusive London homes
These two facts are related.
This is a problem with an obvious solution, do not allow non residents to buy housing in your country. Do not allow housing to be empty more than 3 months a year. If it is, and renovations are not actively ongoing (physically check to see if it is), then tax them at punitive rates (30% of the property value or more) and if after a year it still isn't, simply expropriate it, with no compensation."
I think Ryan Cooper still gives too much credit here to neoliberals, but it's still a useful read. "Somewhere in Between: The rise and fall of Clintonism [...] In the context of postwar politics, the upper class accommodated itself to a truce in the class war, for about three decades. But when the system came under strain, the elites launched a renewed class war, leveraging stagflation to destroy and devour the welfare state. Clintonism could work in the early stages of that process, buoyed by the economic bubble of the 1990s. But when the inevitable disaster struck, it would become an anchor around the neck of the Democratic Party — and it remains one to this day."
"Democrats Can't Run and Win on the Fact That Trump's an Idiot: Voters Want an Alternative, Not Someone to Blame. [...] Polls show that the major reason eligible voters gave for not voting was that they were not interested in the issues being pushed in the campaigns or they disliked the candidates. And this makes sense, given that there's been a decades long campaign by the oligarchy to discredit government and glorify the private sector, using wedge issues, sophisticated marketing and branding strategies, and lots of money."
In The Nation, a consideration of the work of Lynne Segal (a founding member of Feminists Against Censorship), Feminist Living [...] "To hold fast to this version of feminism in the Trump era is a bit like clinging to a pile of dynamite in the middle of a forest fire. Yet it's the only feminism that some women have ever known, and it's no easy feat to convince them that the individual power a woman might amass through self-involvement and self-promotion — and almost inevitably at the expense of other, less advantaged women — is not synonymous with true liberation. Now 73, and having devoted nearly her entire adult life to prioritizing collective triumph over individual, Segal confronts a devastating possibility: 'Have we feminists wasted our time on politics?'"
"In 1990, a homeless man looked me in the eye and said, 'You aught to do a story about me.'
I asked him why.
'Because I've played in three Super Bowls.'
Now, finally, here's the entire story, 28 years in the making.
"The search for Jackie Wallace"
Thanks as always to CMike and Mark for helping me out here. And helping me get through the winter, for that matter. And by the way, that last Laundry novel was seeming all too real when it was explained that agents of the Eldritch Horrors were responsible for the privatization of the Post Office.
"6 Senate Democrats put confirmation of Trump HHS nominee with fringe views over the top: Six Dems voted for an anti-choice candidate who once helped big pharma game patents for profit." Note that the vote was 55-43.
* But there is always worse to come. The other day Jonathan Cohn tweeted: Fun fact: Democrats actually had a majority in the Senate today. Three Republicans were absent, making the body 49-48. But don't worry -- Democrats still allowed Trump's nominees to sail through!"
"President Trump Slaps Tariffs on Solar Panels in Major Blow to Renewable Energy [...] The U.S. will impose duties of as much as 30 percent on solar equipment made abroad, a move that threatens to handicap a $28 billion industry that relies on parts made abroad for 80 percent of its supply. Just the mere threat of tariffs has shaken solar developers in recent months, with some hoarding panels and others stalling projects in anticipation of higher costs. The Solar Energy Industries Association has projected tens of thousands of job losses in a sector that employed 260,000. The tariffs are just the latest action Trump has taken that undermine the economics of renewable energy. The administration has already decided to pull the U.S. out of the international Paris climate agreement, rolled back Obama-era regulations on power plant-emissions and passed sweeping tax reforms that constrained financing for solar and wind. The import taxes, however, will prove to be the most targeted strike on the industry yet."
"Ex-Justice Dept. lawyer offered to sell secret U.S. whistleblower lawsuits to targets of the complaints: Jeffrey Wertkin had a plot to bring in business and impress his new partners after joining one of Washington's most influential law firms. As a former high-stakes corporate-fraud prosecutor with the Department of Justice, he had secretly stockpiled sealed lawsuits brought by whistleblowers. Now, he would sell copies of the suits to the very targets of the pending government investigations — and his services to defend them. Wertkin carried out his plan for months, right up until the day an FBI agent arrested him in a California hotel lobby."
"Satanic Temple Beats Missouri In Showdown Over Abortion Rights [...] JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. — On Wednesday, Missouri's Solicitor General D. John Sauer declared ultrasounds are not required to obtain an abortion in Missouri, according to a press release from the Satanic Temple. The move comes after a showdown in the Missouri Supreme Court after a group called the Satanic Temple fought the state's abortion restrictions on behalf of an anonymous woman."
"NSA Deletes 'Honesty' And 'Openness' From Core Values [...] On January 12, however, the NSA removed the mission statement page — which can still be viewed through the Internet Archive — and replaced it with a new version. Now, the parts about honesty and the pledge to be truthful have been deleted. The agency's new top value is 'commitment to service,' which it says means 'excellence in the pursuit of our critical mission.'"
"Ned Lamont Jumps Into Connecticut Governor's Race: ed Lamont, the Greenwich millionaire who rose to national prominence when he defeated then-Sen. Joseph Lieberman in a 2006 Democratic primary, is entering the crowded contest to become Connecticut's next governor, his second bid for the office." This is a story I hope no one has forgotten, because leadership Dems tried hard to beat Lamont, but when he won anyway and became the Democratic nominee, they joined up with Republicans to make sure he lost.
Here's Howie Klein talking about how the Democratic leadership screws the Democratic Party and the country. Well, it's not called that, but that's what it's about — how Republicans beat us because the Democratic leadership is spending so many resources beating back progressives that they even recruit Republicans to help them do it. Honest to gods, it's a scandal.
* Howie also spoke to Nicole Sandler on the same subject. He's been writing about this, of course.
Lee Fang and Ryan Grim have been talking to Howie after watching the Democratic fifth column in action, and they have a detailed piece in The Intercept on just this phenomenon. "The Dead Enders: Candidates Who Signed Up to Battle Donald Trump Must Get Past the Democratic Party First. [...] In his farewell address, President Barack Obama had some practical advice for those frustrated by his successor. 'If you're disappointed by your elected officials, grab a clipboard, get some signatures, and run for office yourself,' Obama implored. Yet across the country, the DCCC, its allied groups, or leaders within the Democratic Party are working hard against some of these new candidates for Congress, publicly backing their more established opponents, according to interviews with more than 50 candidates, party operatives, and members of Congress. Winning the support of Washington heavyweights, including the DCCC — implicit or explicit — is critical for endorsements back home and a boost to fundraising. In general, it can give a candidate a tremendous advantage over opponents in a Democratic primary." A fundamental component of the DCCC's losing strategy: "James Thompson, who lost a close special election in Kansas and is again running for the Wichita seat in 2018, said the DCCC is specific about why it wants candidates to raise money. 'They want you to spend a certain amount of money on consultants, and it's their list of consultants you have to choose from,' he said. Those consultants tend to be DCCC veterans. A memo the party committee sent to candidates in December lays out some of the demands the DCCC made around spending."
Marcy Wheeler thinks Glenn Greenwald's take is different from her own, but she sees other problems with the Russia story, in All Glenn Greenwald's Women," where she notes that, "A big profile of Greenwald neglects to cite even one woman — thereby missing crucial nuance in the story of Russia's meddling in the 2016 election."
"Despite Liberalizing Marijuana Laws, the War on Drugs Still Targets People of Color: THE HUGE FAILURE we know as the 'war on drugs' is back in full force under the Trump administration, thanks in no small part to Attorney General Jeff Sessions's retrograde tough-on-crime approach to drugs. It's not hard to understand why someone like Sessions, with a history of racism, would love the war on drugs: In reality, it was always a war on a very particular set of people — and you can probably guess who those people are. And yet despite Sessions's best efforts, there's been a lot of progress on legalizing marijuana; opinions are changing and, in a lot of places, so are laws. At the intersection of these pushes to legalize weed and the so-called war on drugs, there are a bevy of major scandals unfolding, all of which are ravaging communities of color. And here's the thing about these scandals: They can't simply be blamed on President Donald Trump and his team. Instead, they're deeply rooted in a bipartisan type of anti-blackness."
Niko House is convinced that Bernie Sanders will run in 2020, and I wish he'd use a spell-checker, but I think most of what he says in "No, Bernie 2020 Will Not Be The Same As 2016" is on the mark. This is addressed to questions some of his crankier supporters have expressed about why he endorsed Clinton and made other noises they didn't like, and whether he should run as a third-party candidate. House doesn't address the age question (but with Biden throwing his hat in the ring, why should he?); however, "Bernie Sanders is not the perfect candidate. He is not the perfect human being. We may not even like all of his decisions. But there is no one else in his position that is speaking about universal healthcare at nationally televised town hall meetings. There is no one else telling the media that we need to get out of the middle east and stay out. There is no one else who speaks of ranked choice voting and election reform. And there is without a doubt no one else who has chained themselves to a Black woman in a valiant display of courage during the civil rights movement who is still preaching those same values today."
"Racism May Have Gotten Us Into This Mess, But Identity Politics Can't Get Us Out [...] My ultimate quibble with Coates's piece is with its pessimism — the presumption that the union between rich and poor whites, forged in the heat of antebellum anti-black antipathy, is America's destiny as well as its past. Coates argues that admitting race, rather than class, was the proximate cause of Trump's electoral victory would mean that leftists 'would have to cope with the failure, yet again, of class unity in the face of racism.' But that presupposes that class unity was attempted by the Democratic Establishment in 2016. Tragically, it was not. Perhaps, if it had been, there would be no need to address the phenomenon of our 'first white president.' We'd be discussing our first female president instead."
JUST MARRIED; Capt. Daniel Hall and Capt. Vincent Franchino, Apache helicopter pilots, "on Jan. 13 in the Cadet Chapel at the United States Military Academy in West Point, N.Y., where they are believed to be the first active-duty, same-sex couple to exchange vows at the legendary Army post."
RIP: "Ursula K. Le Guin, Acclaimed for Her Fantasy Fiction, Is Dead at 88: Ursula K. Le Guin, the immensely popular author who brought literary depth and a tough-minded feminist sensibility to science fiction and fantasy with books like The Left Hand of Darkness and the Earthsea series, died on Monday at her home in Portland, Ore. She was 88." She was our inspiration and our mentor and a lot of things. We owe her so much. And we loved her. Roz Kaveney wrote an obituary for TLS.
RIP: "Mort Walker, Creator of 'Beetle Bailey' Comic Strip, Dies at 94 [...] Mr. Walker had the longest tenure of any cartoonist on an original creation, King Features, which began its syndication of 'Beetle Bailey' in 1950, said in a statement. 'Little did I know when I was drafted that I was going to get almost four years of free research,' Mr. Walker recalled in his collection 'The Best of Beetle Bailey' (1984)."
RIP: Robert Parry, 68, after a series of strokes and pancreatic cancer. Parry, founder of Consortiumnews, covered the Iran-Contra scandal for AP and Newsweek and popularized the phrase "October Surprise" after discovering the roots of Iran-Contra went all the way back to the 1980 presidential campaign. Consortiumnews was a vital part of the liberal internet from its inception in 1995, and as longtime readers of The Sideshow may recall, got links here from the very beginning. He was an inspiration to us old-school bloggers.
Buffalo Springfield, "Expecting to fly"
Sometimes I can't believe how pretty this song is.
But it all amounts to nothing if together we don't stand
Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept, "The Same Democrats Who Denounce Donald Trump as a Lawless, Treasonous Authoritarian Just Voted to Give Him Vast Warrantless Spying Powers [...] LEADING THE CHARGE against reforms of the FBI's domestic spying powers was Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee who, in countless TV appearances, has strongly insinuated, if not outright stated, that Trump is controlled by and loyal to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Indeed, just this weekend, in an interview with CNN's Jake Tapper, Schiff accused Trump of corruptly abusing the powers of the DOJ and FBI in order to vindictively punish Hilary Clinton and other political enemies. Referring to Trump's various corrupt acts, Schiff pronounced: 'We ought to be thinking in Congress, Democrats and Republicans alike, beyond these three years what damage may be done to the institutions of our democracy.' Yet just two days later, there was the very same Adam Schiff, on the House floor, dismissing the need for real safeguards on the ability of Trump's FBI to spy on Americans. In demanding rejection of the warrant requirement safeguard, Schiff channeled Dick Cheney — and the Trump White House — in warning that any warrant requirements would constitute 'a crippling requirement in national security and terrorism cases.'"
Senator Bernie Sanders spoke to Sam Seder about what was happening Friday in the government shut-down, on The Majority Report.
"Time's running out for Cuomo to call meaningful Senate special election: Editorial: Gov. Andrew Cuomo's Jan. 3 State of the State address took about 92 minutes; his delivery at the Capitol was accompanied by a 374-page booklet. And yet, Cuomo whispered nary a word about calling a special election to fill the two Senate and nine Assembly seats now vacant." One of the weirder things hardly anyone ever seems to notice is that the New York legislature is controlled by Republicans. And it's thanks to Cuomo and "Democrats" like him that we have this situation. It's not a natural consequence of the desires of the citizens of the state of New York. The details of the current situation are... curious.
This is just weird. "Newsweek's headquarters just got a visit from the police: Cops came to the headquarters of Newsweek and IBT Media at 7 Hanover Square this morning." There's no clear explanation for why this happened. Cops took pictures of their servers. They seem to have been sent by the DA's office as part of an "investigation" but no one knows what they were investigating.
Luke Barnes at Think Progress, "IRS paid private debt collectors $20 million to recoup $6.7 million from low-income Americans: Math does not appear to be their strong suit." But that's not an IRS decision, it's a higher-level policy decision about who the IRS chases. It used to be taken for granted that there was more to be gained by going after wealthy tax-evaders, who were usually holding out on lots of money. There are much bigger returns on going after a billionaire than there are on going after a slew of ordinary households that might have held out on less money than the audit costs to pursue. Going after rich people annoys rich people, so the Bush administration reversed this policy. I don't recall hearing anything about Obama reverting to the previous norm, so now it's an ongoing waste of money and time — or at least, it is if you think the IRS is about collecting money to be used for the running of the federal government and its services. But it isn't. A policy of harassing the hoi polloi while letting the wealthy skate on much larger infractions is a values judgment, not a fiscal calculus. It tells you straight up that taxation isn't about paying for the government.
Black Agenda Report, "Donkey In A Hole: Don't Expect Democrats To Change Much in 2018 [...]
And given the corporate media coverage of Trump and 'the Donalds' low popularity ratings, relegating Trump to a one-term Presidency should be a relatively easy task. However, few signs show that the Democratic Party can complete the task in a period marked by instability and crisis. Polls indicate Trump maintains a slightly higher approval rating than the entire Democratic Party. That's because the Democratic Party spent eight years under Obama waging an assault on workers and poor people in the US, especially its most loyal base of support in Black America. Black American wealth plummeted , and poverty increased exponentially under the first Black President. War, austerity, and police-state politics defined the Obama era."
CMike provides a link to a story from November, "19 more Colorado cities and counties vote in favor of city-owned internet, while Fort Collins approves $150 million to move forward: The 19 join nearly 100 others that have gained the right to explore whether municipal broadband is feasible. Voters in Vail, Louisville and 17 other Colorado cities and counties Tuesday voted to take internet service into their own hands in a move that could lead to providing citizens an alternative to the entrenched cable internet provider. Fort Collins voters, who voted to do so two years ago, passed a measure to finance exploration of a city-owned broadband utility. According to the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, which has tracked broadband votes for years, the 19 cities and counties join about 100 others in the state that previously opted out of Senate Bill 152. That bill, passed in 2005, restricts local governments from using taxpayer dollars to build their own broadband networks. 'These cities and counties recognize that they cannot count on Comcast and CenturyLink alone to meet local needs, which is why you see overwhelming support even in an off-year election,' Christopher Mitchell, director of the Community Broadband Networks initiative at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, said in a statement. Passage, however, doesn't mean cities and counties will start offering their own broadband internet service. In 2005, cable and internet providers campaigned to stop cities from offering internet service. At the time, Steve Davis, an executive at Qwest, which is now CenturyLink, told The Rocky Mountain News, 'I think it's inappropriate for public tax dollars to be invested in competitive businesses. At minimum, taxpayers should have the opportunity (to vote on the matter).'"
This is from FiveThirtyEight last January but it's worth paying attention to, because white racists don't usually make much noise (or make much headway when they do) if most people are getting reasonable rewards for their work and seeing a decent future for themselves and their families ahead. They don't piss and moan and wave torches around if black and other funny-colored people are doing well if they are also doing well. But even if you have a reasonably secure situation yourself, you feel economic anxiety when you look around and see a lot of foreclosed houses in your area, a lot of shops that seem to be permanently closed, know a number of people who've been foreclosed on and lost their homes, and your kid — who is better educated than you were — sees only joining the military to fight endless wars as a career option (and many of your friends have lost kids in our military adventures already, or have kids returned to civilian life to languish in their parents' homes with physical injuries and severe emotional problems), that's a whole other thing. Maybe you've even already seen your best friends grieving because their grandchild came back from deployment in a box, and you know that in an earlier time, that kid would have gone to college (maybe even for free) and gotten a good job that didn't put them in harm's way. You don't have to be conscious of even knowing this, just know that this isn't how it used to be, this isn't how it was supposed to be. And you'd be right, because an evil change has come over America. And you can claim all you want that it's the Republicans and their official policies that created this disaster, but when some of the worst excesses were directly caused by Carter, Clinton, and Obama, you might not be crazy to blame the Democrats, whose rhetoric you'd swear means they have something against white men just for being white men and they only want to help poor black women. You don't realize that they don't help poor black women, because what you hear is that that's who they want to help and they for sure don't want to help you. (Meanwhile, you should hear how a lot of black military guys who would never ever vote for a Republican talk about how badly the military was treated under Obama.) "Stop Saying Trump's Win Had Nothing To Do With Economics." Oh, and one more thing: Clinton may have won the lower economic strata, but she also won up at the top, too.
Barbara O'Brien has also been writing about this, in "Democrats: Big Tent, Yes, but With Parameters [...] I'm arguing that in many parts of the country that voted for Trump, the economic anxiety fuels racism and keeps it as alive as if the past 50 years hadn't happened. Otherwise, a lot of it might have dissipated by now."
"Garbage collectors open library with abandoned books:
A library in Ankara gives new meaning to the notion that books are timeless. Garbage collectors in the Turkish capital have opened a public library comprised entirely of books once destined for the landfills."
Paul Street reviews Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama, "Obama: a Hollow Man Filled With Ruling Class Ideas [...] The irony here is that one can consult Rising Star to determine the basic underlying accuracy of Reed's acerbic description. My foremost revelation from Rising Star is that Obama was fully formed as a fake-progressive neoliberal-capitalist actor well before he ever received his first big money campaign contribution. He's headed down the same ideological path as the Clintons even before Bill Clinton walks into the Oval Office. Obama's years in the corporate-funded foundation world, the great ruling and professional class finishing schools Columbia University Harvard Law, and the great neoliberal University of Chicago's elite Law School were more than sufficient to mint him as a brilliant if 'vacuous to repressive neoliberal.'".
A friend of mine started a blog and he's begun with telling a little story about having stumbled on an interesting little genealogical tidbit, with "The Death of William Van Meter — Part One" and Part Two.
SOLIDARITY: Yes, it really happened, although it had faded into legend for 20 years. In 1984, a small group of gay activists decided to support the families of striking coal miners and struck up a relationship with a mining community in Wales, much to the surprise of everyone. Many credit that relationship with the ultimate passage of gay rights in the United Kingdom. I urge you to google and find out more, and to see the whole 2014 docudrama about these people, but just the ending is enough to make many people cry: Pride. (Dominic West does a lovely job of playing Jonathan Blake, by the way. Blake talks about it all here.) For more to the story, here's a good interview that provides another poignant moment and a coda to the short life and magnificent project of Mark Ashton.
For many it is the Epiphany, and for others the final day of Christmas, also known as Twelfthnight. But it's Christmas for the Russian Orthodoxed Christians and for Armenians. My parents would have been in church today, singing "Loor Keeshair", a tune you know.
But Dean Baker says there are some silver linings in this cloud in "The Trump Tax Cuts' Secret Santa. No one should have any doubt about the main impact of the Republican tax cuts. These tax cuts are about giving more money to the richest people in the country. After four decades of the largest upward redistribution in the history of the world, the Republican tax cuts give even more money to the big winners. In TrumpWorld, that makes sense. Instead of spending money to rebuild our infrastructure, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, provide quality child care or affordable college, we're going to hand more money to Donald Trump and his family and friends. However, even in the cesspool known as the 'Tax Cuts and Jobs Act,' there are some changes for the better. These are worth noting and expanding upon when saner creatures gain power." I'm sure not going to complain that they doubled the standard deduction. There are also a few other surprises that are such a good idea you wonder how they got there.
Matt Bruenig, "What actually happened in Alabama? [...] But if you actually look at the exit polling, it is pretty clear that the real story of Jones's victory was not inordinate black turnout but rather inordinate white support for the Democratic candidate." Because black turnout and support for the Dem was not much different than in many races where the Dem lost. But whites voted for the Democrat enough to make up for the usual deficit — and it's a big one. "The white share of the electorate is virtually unchanged, but white support for the Democrat changes dramatically, rising all the way to 30 percent in the Jones-Moore election. This white swing towards the Democratic candidate is basically solely responsible for the fact that Jones won rather than losing by over 20 points, which is the typical outcome of a statewide Alabama election that features this level of black turnout."
Lead editorial in Haaretz, "Endless Detention: Israeli jurists and academics should speak out against the military courts' free hand with administrative detention orders, which allow Palestinians to be held without trial and can be renewed indefinitely. Last week the detention without trial of Palestinian MP Khalida Jarrar was extended by an additional six months. In July, a year after serving 14 months in prison — she had been convicted of incitement and of membership in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine — she was rearrested and placed under administrative detention for six months. [...] But there is room to ask the law schools, the Israel Bar Association, judges and even historians and sociologists to intervene. They must make themselves heard and remind Israeli society that denying a person's freedom without evidence and without a right to defense is one of the characteristics of dictatorships. Only if the voices of these professionals and social figures are heard will generals and military judges stop signing unlimited detention orders so easily."
"J20 Defendants Cleared of Charges in Trump Inauguration Arrests: Six people arrested during protests on Donald Trump's inauguration day and charged with rioting and destruction of property were acquitted Thursday, a good sign for the more 150 other so-called J20 protesters awaiting trial. The verdict, delivered by a D.C. Superior Court jury, followed a four-week trial that saw prosecutors attempt to pin blame for $100,000 worth of property damage on the six protestors. Though they admitted there's no evidence linking the defendants to the property damage, the Justice Department lawyers argued that they were part of the so-called riot anyway."
"Americans Support Expanding Social Security But The GOP is Still Trying To Cut It: Largely unreported in the negativity of this year's election is how united the American people are over Social Security. New data from Public Policy Polling confirms what multiple other polls have found: Irrespective of age, race, gender, or party affiliation, Americans support expanding, not cutting, Social Security. [...] In the real America, grandparents and grandchildren care about each other. American families know that we are stronger together. And the new polling shows that. It reveals that the effort to turn grandparents and grandchildren against each other has failed: 70 percent of 18-29 year olds, 65 percent of 30-45 year olds, 76 percent of 46-65 year olds, and 70 percent of Americans over 65 all support expanding, not cutting, Social Security. The story is very similar when it comes to race: 69 percent of whites, 82 percent of African-Americans, and 79 percent of Latinos are united in support of expansion. Party affiliation, too, makes little difference. The Republican Party has spent decades working to cut and privatize Social Security, but the Party's base disagrees: the majority of Republicans support expanding benefits, as do 87 percent of Democrats and 73 percent of Independents."
"Amazon is killing your mailman: Why its Sunday service is a labor travesty: The online retailer's newest service has created an underclass of postal workers. I should know — I'm one of them [...] With the USPS being financially burdened by congressionally mandated pre-funding for retiree healthcare packages (paying 80 plus years in advance at 100% compensation — a burden no private company has had to nor could endure), it has looked to find different avenues to help increase its profitability and fight to stay viable in this 'age of digital mail.' To help combat this huge economic disadvantage — along with the decrease in first-class mail volumes — the USPS management has attempted to implement many different approaches to their problem. They've tried ending Saturday delivery, contemplated neighborhood cluster boxes, which would oust door-to-door delivery, and of course, there's the tried and true elimination of positions, which the USPS has been engaged in since the unprecedented 2006 pre-funding mandate was established. Their latest solution is a relatively new business concept called the negotiated service agreement or NSA."
Meanwhile, even The Washington Post admits, "There's still little evidence that Russia's 2016 social media efforts did much of anything [...] All of that, though, requires setting aside what we actually know about the Russian activity on Facebook and Twitter: It was often modest, heavily dissociated from the campaign itself and minute in the context of election social media efforts." It was also badly targeted and didn't quite seem to have much of a grasp of what might actually work. For example, who, among Clinton's likely voters, was going to believe, let alone change their vote, over the (laughably false) claim that HRC was "soft" on Iran? Even the Republicans noticed there was something very odd about spending more in Maryland and DC than in any of the swing states Clinton lost. $300 was spent in Pennsylvania? Um, not a lot. And most of this was spent... during the primaries. "Facebook's own public numbers hint at how the ads were weighted relative to the campaign. Ten million people saw ads run by the Russian agents — but 5.6 million of those views were after the election."
"Price of 40-year-old cancer drug hiked 1,400% by new owners: Prices for a cancer drug called lomustine have skyrocketed nearly 1,400 percent since 2013, putting a potentially life-saving treatment out of reach for patients suffering from brain tumors and Hodgkin's lymphoma. Though the 40-year-old medication is no longer protected by patents, no generic version is available."
David Dayen in The American Prospect, "Big Tech: The New Predatory Capitalism: The tech giants are menacing democracy, privacy, and competition. Can they be housebroken? [...] 'What has the greatest collection of humanity and IQ and financial capital been brought together to accomplish?' Galloway asked the crowd. 'To save world hunger? To create greater comity of man? I don't think so. ... Their singular mission, simply put, it's to sell another fucking Nissan.' [...] After an unconscionable period of naive neglect, in which the public was dazzled by tech wizardry, Americans of all stripes have recognized that allowing Silicon Valley to take this much control was dangerous. Polls show the public still likes tech platforms but doesn't trust them. Conservatives think Big Tech stifles their voices; liberals think Big Tech hobbled our competitive economy; both think they've abused power, and both are right. Politics has grown interested in monopolies, and particularly tech monopolies, for the first time in decades."
When the Clintonites aren't busy attacking Bernie, they are busy hating Jill Stein, and now it looks like she's been roped in. "The Senate's Russia Investigation Is Now Looking Into Jill Stein: The Senate Intelligence Committee has asked Green Party candidate Jill Stein's campaign to turn over documents, which Stein is expected to release publicly in the future. Committee chair Richard Burr said investigators are looking into two general election campaigns in addition to the Trump campaign." There's a photograph of Stein sitting at the same table with Putin at an RT dinner, thus "proving" that she was colluding with Putin. Stein says she had hoped to talk to him about her agenda — climate change etc. — but never got the chance to talk to him at all. Jeremy Scahill interviewed Stein on the subject.
James Cardin in The Nation, "Russiagate Is Devolving Into an Effort to Stigmatize Dissent: An amicus brief to a lawsuit filed against Roger Stone and the Trump campaign raises troubling questions over the right to political speech. [...] Much of this has been said before. But where the briefers branch off into new territory is in their attempt to characterize journalism and political speech with which they disagree as acts of subversion on behalf of a foreign power. [...] In other words, a Russian 'cut out' (or fifth columnist) can be defined as those 'activists, academics, journalists, [or] web operators' who dissent from the shared ideology of the 14 signatories of the amicus brief."
"Vacant Units, San Francisco 2015" — "2012 ACS data indicates there are 30,057 vacant homes in San Francisco. A common residents per unit calculation is 2.8 persons, meaning that the city of San Francisco has empty homes capable of housing more than 84,000 more people than it does. [...] According to a 2013 comprehensive report on homelessness by the city of San Francisco, one of the wealthiest cities in the richest nation in the world, contains 6,636 homeless adults and 914 homeless children and transition-age youth, totaling 7,550 homeless persons. The Vacant Homes in San Francisco map yields another irony: two of the districts with the densest numbers of homeless persons also contain the most vacant homes. According to the homelessness report, census tract 6, which includes most of the Tenderloin and SOMA neighborhoods, contains over 3,000 homeless persons, as well as the highest density of vacant homes." One of the more interesting maps I've seen in a while.
Dave Johnson at Seeing the Forest, "Postal Workers And The Public Want A Postal Banking Public Option [...] Until 1967, the Postal Service (then called the Post Office) operated postal banking through the United States Postal Savings System. Reviving postal banking would be like offering a 'public option' for financial services. It would let people have accounts they could use to cash checks, get small loans, pay bills and even get prepaid debit cards. These services would enable lower-income Americans to avoid the exploitative 'payday lenders' and check-cashing 'services' that eat up working people's earnings."
"Sessions rescinds Obama-era letter to local courts on fines and fees for poor defendants: Attorney General Jeff Sessions is rescinding an Obama-era letter to local courts advising them to be wary of imposing stiff fees and penalties on poor defendants, The Washington Post reports. The move comes as Sessions revokes more than two dozen Justice Department guidance documents going back to the 1990s on various topics, the Post reports."
The War on People Who Aren't the Establishment continues with NPR (Nice Polite Republicans) attacking Lee Camp personally. Why? Because he's on RT America, so he must be a Russian stooge. Mr. Camp responds..
A great response to yet another claim that rich people create jobs, over at Stone Kettle Mountain, making Lemonade: "Every time old rich white men bring up the idea of trickle-down economics, or whatever they call this scam nowadays, the one question that never gets asked is this: Why? Why would rich people create jobs? Why? Why would rich people take their billions and create jobs? Because they're what? Feeling generous all of a sudden? Why? Take the Walton family, their wealth is nearly unimaginable. The amount they'll reap from this tax cut is astronomical. But they already can't spend what they have, even if they live another thousand years. And they don't spend their personal fortune on building new Walmarts anyway, that's what investors are for. And if they did, well, there's nothing stopping them from doing so now, without a tax cut, they've got plenty of money. But they don't. Why? They could use their personal fortune to improve the lot of their employees, but they don't. They could use their fortune to give their employees a living wage, healthcare, benefits, overtime. But they don't. Why? Why should they? What's in it for them? What's the incentive? Altruism? Ha ha! Hilarious. Giving rich people more money just gives rich people more money." The author does not seem to know that the government still has all the money it needs to pay for schools and roads and health care and anything else we need, but on the question of why the rich would create jobs just because we give them more money — well, that's a question that should be asked any time someone suggests that giving them more money would do anything to create jobs.
Susan McWilliams in The Nation, "This Political Theorist Predicted the Rise of Trumpism. His Name Was Hunter S. Thompson [...] What made that outcome almost certain, Thompson thought, was the obliviousness of Berkeley, California, types who, from the safety of their cocktail parties, imagined that they understood and represented the downtrodden. The Berkeley types, Thompson thought, were not going to realize how presumptuous they had been until the downtrodden broke into one of those cocktail parties and embarked on a campaign of rape, pillage, and slaughter. For Thompson, the Angels weren't important because they heralded a new movement of cultural hedonism, but because they were the advance guard for a new kind of right-wing politics. As Thompson presciently wrote in the Nation piece he later expanded on in Hell's Angels, that kind of politics is 'nearly impossible to deal with' using reason or empathy or awareness-raising or any of the other favorite tools of the left."
Last year, Adolph Reed made "The Case Against Reparations: Randall Robinson's argument for pursuit of reparations hinges on this view of the black American population — lucky petit bourgeois people like himself excepted, of course — as defective and in need of moral and psychological repair. The idea resonates with middle class noblesse oblige and a commitment to a racial politics that ensconces a particular guiding role for upper class blacks. Those are, after all, the people who can conduct the finely calibrated analyses that determine what forms and magnitude just compensation should take; they are the people who would stand to administer whatever compromise palliatives are likely to ensue from this activity. But the question of compensation opens a plethora of technical problems. Should payments go to individuals or to some presumably representative corporate entity? If the former, who qualifies as a recipient? Would descendants of people who had been enslaved elsewhere (for instance, Brazil or the Caribbean) be eligible? And what of those no longer legally black people with slave ancestors?" Michael Brooks interviewed Reed about this and other things on The Michael Brooks Show.
Sam Seder did another great interview with David Dayen, about the tax bill and other things, on The Majority Report.
Sammy also did an interesting interview on The Battle for Veterans' Healthcare w/ Suzanne Gordon — illuminating info about America's best health care system — and one that provides data and develops treatments the whole world uses.
ProMarkets tweeted out their hits of the year in a thread that promises some interesting reading, here. I thought this title sounded particularly promising: "The Rise of Market Power and the Decline of Labor's Share: A new paper argues that the decline of the labor and capital shares, as well as the decline in low-skilled wages and other economic trends, have been aided by a significant increase in markups and market power." (Also fascinated by Posner's slow move toward the reality. If he could live long enough, he might be full-on lefty by the time he finished his evolution from the far-right.)
RIP: "Rose Marie, actress and showbiz legend, dies at 94." She sang for three presidents (two of whom were dead before I was born, and frankly, I was surprised to learn that Coolidge was still alive in my lifetime), but we all loved Sally Rogers on Dick van Dyke. One day I was watching an old movie and saw her original child star incarnation as Baby Rose Marie. Mark Evanier, of course, has a nice obituary for her, but he's written a lot about her in the past, too (some of it probably still linked on this page). "Like a lot of you, I first became aware of Rose from her appearances on The Dick Van Dyke Show. She was great on that program — and while no one thought this way at the time, that was an important role in the history of on-screen females. She wasn't there to play somebody's wife or somebody's mother or somebody's girl friend. She was a full-fledged working woman with a career and an income and a job that was equivalent to a man's. I mean, you just know Sally Rogers got the same money as Buddy Sorrell. Name me another character on TV before her who got equal pay as a guy — or as many good lines. She scored with every one of them."
RIP: This is embarrassing, but I completely missed somehow that Kate Millett died last September at 82, from a heart attack,
Every time I go back to show someone this video, I find another one. There were really quite a lot of them that I didn't even know about. In some ways it's heartening to see how much creativity they inspired. Wish someone had put them all on TV. Which just proves that "the left" is still good at this, it's just that it's not allowed on TV anymore.
Bill Moyers says Farewell: "BillMoyers.com will continue to serve as the archive of the television journalism my colleagues and I have produced over the past 44 years. I hope you find it useful. The site will go into archive mode on Wednesday, Dec. 20."
Stiglitz in the Guardian, "Globalisation: time to look at historic mistakes to plot the future: Trade deals were hammered out in secret by multinationals at the expense of workers and citizens. Benefits must be shared if the global economy is to work. [...] To someone like me, who has watched trade negotiations closely for more than a quarter-century, it is clear that US trade negotiators got most of what they wanted. The problem was with what they wanted. Their agenda was set, behind closed doors, by corporations. It was an agenda written by, and for, large multinational companies, at the expense of workers and ordinary citizens everywhere."
Top Pennsylvania Republicans Are Fighting Like Hell To Keep Gerrymandering Secret: Two court cases could reveal how the GOP took over the state's congressional delegation. Two of Pennsylvania's top Republicans are fighting hard to conceal information about how Republicans drew the state's 2011 congressional redistricting plan, now the subject of lawsuits in both state and federal court. At stake is the public's chance to see how Pennsylvania lawmakers in 2011 used technology and detailed voter information to reset the state's electoral map. The voters bringing these cases argue that the districts were deliberately drawn to secure Republicans' domination of the state's congressional delegation and that the process violated the U.S. and Pennsylvania constitutions."
Matthew Cole and Jeremy Scahill in The Intercept, "Trump White House Weighing Plans for Private Spies to Counter 'Deep State' Enemies: The Trump administration is considering a set of proposals developed by Blackwater founder Erik Prince and a retired CIA officer — with assistance from Oliver North, a key figure in the Iran-Contra scandal — to provide CIA Director Mike Pompeo and the White House with a global, private spy network that would circumvent official U.S. intelligence agencies, according to several current and former U.S. intelligence officials and others familiar with the proposals. The sources say the plans have been pitched to the White House as a means of countering 'deep state' enemies in the intelligence community seeking to undermine Donald Trump's presidency. The creation of such a program raises the possibility that the effort would be used to create an intelligence apparatus to justify the Trump administration's political agenda.
"
Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic, "A Police Killing Without a Hint of Racism: Daniel Shaver begged officers not to shoot him. What role will his death play in the push for law-enforcement reforms?" Nothing seems to be able to stop this train. "
Even if Black Lives Matter critics were right that police killings in America are not racially suspect, that would not be a sufficient argument against police reforms. It would still remain the case that American police officers kill many more people overall — and many more unarmed and mentally ill people in particular — than do police officers in other democratic countries. Why isn't that enough to warrant serious, systemic reform?" The video hadn't been released at the time the article was written, but if you have the stomach for it, it's here.
"JUST IN: Alabama to Jail Hundreds of Voters for Switching Parties: Alabama just slapped its citizens with nasty news concerning voter fraud. The Republican Secretary of State John Merrill has officially threatened to jail up to 674 Alabamans who he believes committed voter fraud by switching parties for the September 26th run-off election. Alabama Governor Kay Ivey (R) signed a law in May 2017 prohibiting the act of 'crossover voting.' Crossover voting occurs when voters switch their minds to vote for a candidate who isn't affiliated with their party. Merrill wants to slap all 674 'crossover voters' with the maximum prison sentence of 5 years and a $15,000 fine." They couldn't find any voter fraud so they made their own!
Tess Townsend, "Can Silicon Valley's Pro-Antitrust Congressman Navigate His Monopoly-Friendly District? [...] So far, Khanna doesn't seem particularly concerned that his comments will offend his constituents. On the antitrust issue that might be the most pressing to Silicon Valley in particular — the AT&T-Time; Warner merger, opposition to which observers like investor Mark Cuban say could be turned on Facebook and Google — Khanna has been outspoken: 'Every American should be concerned that a few major corporations control the flow of news and information,' he tweeted in November. 'The AT&T-Time; Warner deal must be rejected.' But he said that blocking it shouldn't cause concern for tech companies. 'You cannot compare telecom companies that control access to the internet with those that provide a platform [or] content,' the Democrat told Select All last month."
Pushback from Zephyr Teachout on Al Franken being pushed out of the Senate, "I'm Not Convinced Franken Should Quit: I care passionately about #MeToo. Women are routinely demeaned, dismissed, discouraged and assaulted. Too many women's careers are stymied or ended because of harassment and abuse. In politics, where I have worked much of my adult life, this behavior is rampant. I also believe in zero tolerance. And yet, a lot of women I know — myself included — were left with a sense that something went wrong last week with the effective ouster of Al Franken from the United States Senate. He resigned after a groundswell of his own Democratic colleagues called for him to step down. Zero tolerance should go hand in hand with two other things: due process and proportionality. As citizens, we need a way to make sense of accusations that does not depend only on what we read or see in the news or on social media."
An editor at The Houston Chronicle wrote this remarkable editorial in response to the GOP's tax bill, recommending an alternative plan of his own: "Mintz: A modest tax proposal: End payroll taxes, hire IRS goons and bring back the guillotine [...] Taxes are even more complicated. There are seven different brackets. Under my plan, we'll cut this down to size and replace the whole thing with just one, single easy bracket. All income over $200,000 will be taxed at 95 percent." And replace the estate tax with the guillotine. I like it!
"Prophecies and politics: How US evangelical Christians pushed for Jerusalem move: Religious conservative groups have lobbied for policy relocating US embassy to Jerusalem from biblical standpoint. [...] President Donald Trump went against the advice of allies and warnings of foes and announced on Wednesday plans to move the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. The US religious right was a driving force behind the move, which left Washington isolated on the world stage, analysts say." Yes, that's right, they want to speed the way to the apocalypse and this is a first step. Israeli leadership is becoming even more belligerent and fascist in the wake of Trump's decision.
Gaius Publius: "Deficit Talk Is a Trap. Will Democrats Fall Into It? A budget surplus on the government side is a budget deficit on the economy's side. — A fact you'll rarely hear spoken on big-donor-owned media. [...] As they did in the 1980s, Republicans are laying a 'deficit trap' for Democrats. As they did before, they're blowing up the budget, then using deficit scares to force Democrats to 'be responsible' about cutting social programs — 'because deficits matter.'"
"There is No Debt to Have a Ceiling: The debt ceiling debate looms once again as Congress paints itself into a familiar corner; feigning horror at the big scary number that records all outstanding government bonds while simultaneously expressing the gravest of concern that a default would be unthinkable, precipitating a global economic catastrophe. Default would, in fact, be an unconscionable act of irresponsibility, because financial default is not possible for the U.S. government unless our politicians foolishly choose to default for no reason. Why? The simple answer is that we issue our own sovereign currency and, as such, we can always afford to make any payment that is due in US dollars. We left the gold standard and global fixed exchange rate system a long time ago — it's time we updated our thinking.
•We have no debt in other nations' currencies.
•We make no promises to convert our currency to other currencies.
•We allow our currency to float in exchange.
•Our central bank, not financial markets, decides how much interest bond holders will receive.
"There Are No Real Republican 'Deficit Hawks.' Here's Why. Strategy: Republicans Create Deficits, Stoke Deficit Fear, Then Campaign Against Government Spending. Here's the thing. There are no real Republican 'deficit hawks.' Republicans stoke deficit fear, and then say they are opposed to budget deficits. But they always, always increase deficits. On purpose. There's a reason."
Jonathan Cohn, "These 27 Democrats Voted to Side with Predatory Billionaires over Low-Income Homeowners: While Senate Republicans worked on finalizing their Christmas gift to the 1 percent, House Republicans took their own steps to reward predatory billionaires. The House today took up the deceptively titled Preserving Access to Manufactured Housing Act, which, contrary to its title, does nothing to preserve access to manufactured housing ('mobile homes'). So what does the bill actually do? First, it changes the definition of a 'mortgage originator' so that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau rule on marketing and documenting consumer financial transactions wouldn't apply to mobile home retailers offering credit to borrowers. And second, it would increase the thresholds for specific rates and fees that trigger Home Ownership and Equity Protection Act (HOEPA) protections. This would have exempted more than half of mobile home loans in 2013, according to Consumer Bureau data. In short, it removes vital protections for low-income homeowners to encourage predatory practices by the rich. And one of the biggest culprits is the Warren Buffett, who, contrary to what some Democratic elites like to say, is not your billionaire friend. He's just as predatory as his peers. [...] Maxine Waters hammered this point further in a passionate floor speech: 'This bill makes it easier for financial titans like billionaire Warren Buffett to earn even more profits, at the expense of the most vulnerable consumers in this country.'"
Lee Fang and Nick Surgey, "Koch Brothers' Internal Strategy Memo on Selling Tax Cuts: Ignore The Deficit: The billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch spent much of the eight years of the Obama presidency stoking fears about the budget deficit. Their political network aired an unending cascade of campaign advertisements against Democratic politicians, sponsored several national bus tours, and paid organizers in communities across the country to mobilize public demonstrations, all focused on the dangers of increasing the deficit. One such ad even warned that government debt would lead to a Chinese takeover of America — which, for many voters, is a concern linked to debt. Another effort, also quietly bankrolled by the Koch network, used Justin Bieber memes to try to reach millennials about too much government borrowing.
Now that Republicans control all levers of power in Washington and the Koch brothers are poised to reap a windfall of billions of dollars through tax cuts, they have a new message: Don't worry about the deficit."
David Dayen, "Trump'S Acting Directors Are Quietly Dropping 'Acting' From Their Titles: THE FIGHT OVER the leadership of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is assumed to be about President Donald Trump's intent to deregulate finance. But it's also part of a larger fight about separation of powers and the expanding authority of the executive, made clear by the Trump administration's use, and abuse, of the law the president relied on to attempt to install Mick Mulvaney as acting director. Trump doesn't just want to undermine consumer financial protection with Mulvaney; he wants to end-run the Senate and install unaccountable loyalists throughout the government by executive fiat. Across the government, acting directors who were installed without Senate approval are quietly dropping the 'acting' title from their name, suggesting they have every intention of overstaying their legal welcome."
"Proposed rule would protect employers who steal workers' hard-earned tips: Today the Trump administration took their first major step towards allowing employers to legally take tips earned by the workers they employ. The Department of Labor released a proposed rule rescinding portions of its tip regulations, including current restrictions on 'tip pooling — which would mean that, for example, restaurants would be able to pool the tips servers receive and share them with untipped employees such as cooks and dishwashers. But, crucially, the rule doesn't actually require that employers distribute pooled tips to workers. Under the administration's proposed rule, as long as the tipped workers earn minimum wage, the employer can legally pocket those tips."
"Philadelphia write-in candidate: I won with one vote." Not "by one vote" — with only one vote. "They say that one vote doesn't matter, but I literally wrote in my own name and won an election because I guess no-one else ran/voted for this position."
Fallout: MSNBC, in an unsurprising act of cowardice, let Cernovich's smear campaign against Sam Seder win the day after unearthing an old 2009 tweet in which Sam was sarcastic about liberals who defended Roman Polanksi's involvement with underaged girls on the grounds that he was a great filmmaker. "MSNBC to Cut Ties With Sam Seder After Roman Polanski Rape Joke (Exclusive): MSNBC has decided not to renew its contract with contributor Sam Seder after an old tweet emerged in which Seder joked about Roman Polanski raping his daughter, TheWrap has learned. Seder's contract ends in February and he has no scheduled appearances between now and then, a spokesperson for MSNBC told TheWrap. 'Don't care re Polanski, but I hope if my daughter is ever raped it is by an older truly talented man w/a great sense of mise en scene,' wrote Seder in the now deleted tweet from 2009." But there was outrage from almost everyone from New York Magazine ("Sam Seder's Firing Proves, Once Again, That Corporations Like MSNBC Can't Stop Getting Rolled by the Far Right"), so MSNBC reversed itself and offered Sammy his job back, which he accepted, appearing on the network again that very night.
"FOIA Docs Show FDA's Data on Kratom Deaths is Complete Propaganda: As the FDA fearmongers over alleged Kratom associated deaths, documents on these deaths reveal that the American people are being lied to. [...] But that's not all, as TFTP reported last month, in order to understand why this push for a ban is happening, we can simply look at who is spearheading it: FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb. For those unaware, before he was appointed as the commissioner of the FDA, Gottlieb was a resident fellow at the neoconservative think tank, the American Enterprise Institute. AEI has long pushed for the war in and US occupation of Afghanistan — which, since the US invasion, has become the world's number one source of poppies. AEI's officers and board members are made up of warmongers like Dick Cheney, as well as Big Pharma insiders like Raymond Gilmartin, former CEO of Merck & Co., and mega bankers like Harvey Golub, the retired chairman and CEO of the American Express Company."
One of the ways life could be better is if the DCCC Dems would stop protecting one of the most odious Republicans in Congress. "Can A Progressive Former Marine Colonel Dislodge Republican Crook Darrell Issa? The slimiest of California's "Democratic" political consultants, slate vendor and ping-pong player Parke Skelton, is being paid a great deal of money to undermine Doug Applegate, in effect, guaranteeing that Darrell Issa retains his seat. I don't know exactly who's paying him but first, let's look at a little background. Issa, a former car thief and the richest member of Congress, was first elected in 2000. [...] The DCCC had never been remotely interested in challenging Issa and has studiously avoided the district. In 2014 the candidate was Dave Peiser and Issa creamed him 98,161 (60.2%) to 64,981 (39.8%) a race that saw Issa spending $1,749,467 to Peiser's $85,321. The DCCC spent zero, as usual. But last year a remarkable candidate jumped in against Issa, former Marine Colonel Doug Applegate. The DCCC ignored, ignored, ignored... until Applegate started raising some real money and making some significant headway in the polls. The DCCC kept waiting and watching and making nice noises about Applegate. [...] Applegate and his grassroots army of supporters decided early to finish what they had started and defeat Issa in 2018. However several multimillionaires have other ideas, thinking it looked so easy. One Pelosi crony who never lifted a finger to defeat Issa, a transplanted failed politician and fixer from Virginia, Ira Lechner, persuaded a friend of his, Mike Levin, to run. Members of Skeltons staff say it is Lechner who has been paying Skelton to undermine Applegate, primarily by having Levin run around with Issa's discredited opposition smears as though they were new."
"Orange County's Informant Scandal Yields Evidence of Forensic Science Deception in Murder Trials [...] 'Should it really take an informant scandal to find out that the key forensic expert in two murder cases switched her opinion?' Sanders asked. 'It's been almost 10 years since Hong did this, so obviously, she was content to let these defendants die in prison without ever revealing what she had done. It's beyond sick. [In] how many other cases has she adjusted her opinion so it could work for the prosecution?'"
"Destruction Of Black Wealth During The Obama Presidency: The People's Policy Project is proud to release its first formal paper. Co-authored by Ryan Cooper and Matt Bruenig and designed by Jon White, it uses data from the Survey of Consumer Finances to track the evolution of African-American wealth during the Obama presidency, and how that wealth was affected by housing policy choices made by the administration. The paper finds that while President Obama had wide discretion and appropriated funds to relieve homeowners caught in the economic crisis, the policy design his administration chose for his housing program was a disaster. Instead of helping homeowners, at every turn the administration was obsessed with protecting the financial system — and so homeowners were left to drown."
* Bruenig and Cooper, "How Obama Destroyed Black Wealth: The nation's first African-American president was a disaster for black wealth."
* Ryan Cooper discusses the paper on The Dig.
"Palestinians recognize Texas as part of Mexico: JERUSALEM — In response to US President Donald Trump's recognition of Jerusalem as the Israeli capital, the Palestinian National Authority has announced that it will recognize Texas as a state of Mexico since it was violently annexed by the United States in the 1840s."
"Bernie Sanders nominated for a Grammy: Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) could be adding Grammy winner to his resumé — the 2016 White House hopeful just garnered his first Grammy nomination. The former presidential candidate and actor Mark Ruffalo were nominated Tuesday in the spoken word category for the audiobook of Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In, Sanders's 2016 tome."
"Annie Lennox first female chancellor of Glasgow Caledonian: Singer-songwriter and social activist Annie Lennox is to become the first ever female Chancellor of Glasgow Caledonian University. Lennox will succeed anti-poverty and Nobel Peace Prize winner Professor Muhammad Yunus in the position on Friday. The role of Chancellor involves formal and ceremonial duties, conferring degrees on students and supporting and promoting the University's ambitions and vision. The university said Lennox, who has been honoured for her humanitarian work, 'embodies the mission and values of Glasgow Caledonian University'.The former Eurythmics singer said she is looking forward to the role."
RIP: "Former religion professor, activist John Raines dies at 84: The professor emeritus served as a religion professor for nearly 50 years and was most known for breaking into an FBI field office in 1971. [...] Raines and other political activists — including his wife Bonnie Raines — broke into an FBI field office in Media, Pennsylvania on March 8, 1971. The group, which named itself the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI, stole documents that would expose the abuse within J. Edgar Hoover's FBI administration, and John Raines drove the getaway car, The Temple News reported in 2014. The stolen documents included information about COINTELPRO, the FBI's domestic surveillance operation to spy on prominent political organizers and sabotage any 'anti-government' movements, The Temple News reported in 2014."
Umair Haque, "The Life and Death of an Economy: How Economies Commit Suicide, Starring America and Britain as Romeo and Juliet [...] Today, the UK — we'll get to the US, the world, and the future, but let's begin here — released some genuinely stunning economic 'numbers.' It forecast the economy basically never to grow again, and for incomes not to rise to 2008 levels until 2028. But of course the contradiction is that if the economy will never grow again, then incomes are hardly likely to rise, so we are seeing the death of a modern economy. But it isn't the first, it is the second: the first death was the USA, which is now something like a post-economic country, nominally rich, but plagued by things like mass school shooting and medical bankruptcies, which don't even happen really in Delhi or Bangkok."
"Cornel West Doesn't Want to Be a Neoliberal Darling: After nearly a year of the Trump presidency, do you regret your criticisms of Barack Obama? Oh, no. I told the truth. When I said drone strikes are crimes against humanity, when I said Obama bailed out Wall Street rather than Main Street — I shall forever support that. I was just speaking to the reality that people are hurting, and we have to do the same thing under Trump as we did under Obama."
Kevin Carty, Leah Douglas, Lina Khan, and Matt Stoller in New York Magazine, "6 Ideas to Rein in Silicon Valley, Open Up the Internet, and Make Tech Work for Everyone:
- 1. Stop Facebook From Spying on Its Competitors
- 2. Jail Bosses Who Use Contracts to Lock Down Workers
- 3. Stop Amazon From Selling Books — or Anything Else — Below Cost
- 4. Stop Mastercard From Robbing Main Street
- 5. Stop Amazon From Selling Groceries
- 6. Stop Google From Steering You to Its Own Apps
Atrios linked to a song called "Eschaton." His readers disagreed on its quality. I kinda liked it.
I don't know if FireRTC works over here, but across the pond it gives you free phone calls "to any US, Puerto Rican, or Canadian cell phone or land line!" I'd like to use it, since it doesn't require the person you're calling to be using the same service, and it also sends an identifier to your recipient instead of "unknown". The call recorder is part of it, rather than an add-on, as well. It looks like I may be able to use it to call other FireRTC users, though. Doesn't say anything about from.
It may surprise you to know that the only thing I have to say right now about all the sexual harassment scandals is that FOR GOD'S SAKE CONGRESS IS DESTROYING OUR ECONOMIC SYSTEM, OUR JUDICIAL SYSTEM, AND THE INTERNET, AND WTF ARE YOU PEOPLE PLAYING AT?!?!?!?!, but here's that old Saturday Night Live Anita Hill hearings clip, which never really seemed that funny to me, but I'd already heard Lenny Bruce talking about how the prosecutors and judges at his obscenity trial seemed to be going out of their way to keep repeating the words he was being prosecuted for saying.. No, wait, I think I pretty much agree with Atrios. The world is full of people who make annoying jokes. In fact, the world is full of people who make annoying jokes you've had to put up with on a weekly basis as if they are the first person you've ever heard that joke from. They make these jokes if you are tall or short, skinny of fat, voluptuous or flat, and every damn time they think it's a big chortle. But resigning just because the opposition party wants you out of the way (because you are effective!) misses the whole point of that "democracy" thing, and god knows we've got precious little of that left.
Interestingly, even Forbes is worried. "GOP Tax Bill Is The End Of All Economic Sanity In Washington: If it's enacted, the GOP tax cut now working its way through Congress will be the start of a decades-long economic policy disaster unlike any other that has occurred in American history." They're right that the bill is insane, but they really don't seem to be worried about the right things. Everyone who points out that the bill will enlarge the deficit is right, of course, but the deficit isn't what matters. What matters is an even greater transfer of wealth from the American people to the top 0.001% and their ability to acumulate it endlessly.
"Detained Saudi Arabia princes are being tortured by American mercenaries, UK paper claims: In a recent crackdown ordered by Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, some of the country's most powerful figures were arrested this month. The Saudi elite -- princes and billionaire businessmen -- recently arrested in a power grab are reportedly being tortured and thrashed by American private security contractors, according to a report by Daily Mail." You can find the Daily Mail's original story here if you want to, but it's the Daily Mail..
Eric Schneiderman, "An Open Letter to the FCC [...] Specifically, for six months my office has been investigating who perpetrated a massive scheme to corrupt the FCC's notice and comment process through the misuse of enormous numbers of real New Yorkers' and other Americans' identities. Such conduct likely violates state law — yet the FCC has refused multiple requests for crucial evidence in its sole possession that is vital to permit that law enforcement investigation to proceed." Hm, I wonder who could have fabricated those comments, because there just aren't that many people who favor repeal of net neutrality.
* WaPo, "Investigation of fake net neutrality foes has been stymied by the FCC, New York attorney general says."
"Verizon and the Death of the Internet: There are two stories here, one about net neutrality — which Trump's FCC is about to terminate — and one about a corruption of the process by which the FCC arrives that decision."
"A Conservative Plan to Weaponize the Federal Courts: Even though there's been nothing subtle about the current push to fill dozens of judicial vacancies kept open by the Republican-controlled Senate during the final years of the Obama administration, a document now making the rounds inside the Beltway is head-snapping. It is a proposal by a leading conservative constitutional scholar to double or even triple the number of authorized judgeships on the federal Courts of Appeals, now fixed by law at 179. Why so many, and why now? The author, Steven G. Calabresi, a law professor at Northwestern University, a founder and the current board chairman of the conservative Federalist Society, declares his goal boldly: 'undoing the judicial legacy of President Barack Obama.'"
This article in The Atlantic looks at "The Very Bad Arguments for Killing the Estate Tax" and then takes a side trip into silly arguments for ending it before returning to the case against ending it. But it doesn't say that billionaires need to be taxed out of existence as quickly as possible, not allowed to build dynasties that control the government.
Jordan Weissmann at Slate, "The Most Egregious Gift to the Wealthy In the Republican Tax Plan." But this is pretty egregious: "Killing the estate tax is an egregious move on its own. There is little to no economic rationale for it — some economists have argued the tax discourages savings by the wealthy on the margins and could hurt investment, but that's not really much of a public policy concern when the capital markets are flooded with money. Meanwhile, nixing the tax will allow wealth to concentrate in the hands of the richest families while discouraging charitable bequests. It's a win for the top 0.1 percent, at the expense of philanthropy and the federal budget. But when you drill down to the specifics of the GOP's plan, it looks even worse. While they do away with the estate tax, Republicans would leave in place the rules that currently spare heirs from paying capital gains taxes when they sell off the assets they inherit. Essentially, they're turning death into a supercharged tax avoidance strategy for country's most loaded families."
"St. Louis police shut down entire mall to violently arrest black lawmaker for protesting racial injustice: Police in St. Louis shut down a large shopping mall on 'Black Friday' to arrest activists protesting police violence. The arrests included a state Rep. Bruce Franks Jr. (D), a black lawmaker who could be heard screaming in pain in video that shows multiple officers on top of the handcuffed lawmaker, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported."
David Dayen at The Intercept, "A Week After Virginia Election Sweep, Democrats Join Republicans for More Bank Deregulation [...] The measure would roll back several key financial regulations, including sections of the Dodd-Frank Act. It does so under the cover of offering consumer protections and coming to the aid of community banks — though the financial institutions that benefit have not-so-obscure names, like American Express, SunTrust, and BB&T.; Four Banking Committee Democrats — Joe Donnelly, D-Ind., Heidi Heitkamp, D-N.D., Jon Tester, D-Mont., and Mark Warner, D-Va. — negotiated the bill with committee chair Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, after ranking Democrat Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, broke off talks on a compromise bill with Crapo just last month. Warner's Virginia colleague Tim Kaine, last year's vice presidential nominee, signed on as an original co-sponsor of the bill, along with Joe Manchin D-W.Va., Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., Gary Peters D-Mich., and Angus King, I-Maine, who caucuses with Democrats. The Democratic support would give the legislation enough support to break a filibuster, if all Republicans signed on."
"The Pig That Burst The Keystone Pipeline: Yesterday, the Keystone pipeline cracked and dumped 210,000 gallons of oil onto the South Dakota prairie. Here's the reason the pipeline burst: the PIG didn't squeal. The PIG, the Pipeline Inspection Gauge, is sent through the Keystone to check for evidence of any leak, failure, or corrosion that will cause it to burst. But the PIG didn't squeal a warning. Why not? Because, as disclosed in my investigation for Britain's investigative TV series Dispatches in 2010, the PIG has been silenced, its software jacked and hacked by a company that provides PIGS. The software is deliberately set to reduce the warning signals and thereby cut costs of replacement and repair by billions of dollars on the Keystone and other pipes."
Jeff Spross in The Week, "Killing the AT&T-Time Warner deal would be radical. Good. Let's do it. n Monday, the U.S. Justice Department officially filed a lawsuit to block AT&T's $85 billion acquisition of Time Warner. The two sides may still eventually settle out of court. But it sounds like they're headed for trial. AT&T general counsel David McAtee declared the lawsuit a "radical and inexplicable departure from decades of antitrust precedent." He's right. But in a just world, the DOJ should prevail. This merger should be killed."
"Serving Extra Years in Prison, and the Courthouse Doors Are Closed: WASHINGTON — It is one thing for a new administration to switch sides in a legal dispute. That is merely unusual. It is another to urge the Supreme Court to deny review in a case that would test whether the government's new position is correct. In a Supreme Court brief filed last month, the Justice Department tried to have it both ways. It told the justices that it no longer believed that some federal prisoners serving longer prison terms than the law allowed were entitled to challenge their sentences in court." It's hard to believe this is even a question. I mean, yes, even now, it's hard to believe.
The Talking Dog has done another interview with another frustrated individual who has tried to ameliorate the disaster of Guantanamo, Mark Fallon: "In his more than thirty years as an NCIS special agent and counterintelligence officer, Mark Fallon has investigated some of the most significant terrorist operations in US history, including the first bombing of the World Trade Center and the 2000 attack on the USS Cole. Soon after the September 11th attacks, Fallon was named Deputy Commander of the newly formed Criminal Investigation Task Force (CITF), created to probe the al-Qaeda terrorist network and bring suspected terrorists to trial. Mr. Fallon is the author of Unjustifiable Means: The Inside Story of How the CIA, Pentagon, and US Government Conspired to Torture, where he describes his experience in his role with CITF, and makes a number of other observations from his unique perspective, including the evolution of "enhanced interrogation techniques" (torture) into the American interrogation program and his and others' heroic efforts of many to thwart it that were ultimately not successful. On November 10, 2017, I had the privilege of interviewing Mr. Fallon by e-mail exchange."
"America Is Regressing into a Developing Nation for Most People: A new book reveals that the U.S. is becoming two distinct countries, with separate economies, politics and opportunities. [...] The two sectors, notes Temin, have entirely distinct financial systems, residential situations and educational opportunities. Quite different things happen when they get sick or when they interact with the law. They move independently of each other. Only one path exists by which the citizens of the low-wage country can enter the affluent one, and that path is fraught with obstacles. Most have no way out."
'Hasidic Brooklyn Neighborhood Has Lead Poisoning Rates Triple That of Flint, Michigan: Since last year, Reuters has obtained neighborhood-level blood lead testing results for 34 states and the District of Columbia. This data allows the public its first hyper-local look at communities where children tested positive for lead exposure in recent years. The newly identified communities with high rates of elevated childhood lead levels include a historic district in Savannah, Georgia, areas in Rutland, Vermont, near the popular skiing mountain Killington, and a largely Hasidic Jewish area in Brooklyn. The areas where the most children tested high are in Brooklyn, including neighborhoods with historic brownstones and surging real estate values, where construction and renovation can unleash the toxin. The worst spot — with recent rates nearly triple Flint's — was in a Hasidic Jewish area with the city's highest concentration of small children."
Max Blumenthal asks an interesting question about the push by The Washington Post and others to treat RT America as a foreign agent when APAIC isn't.
Matt Stoller in 2012 on Why Politicians Don't Care That Much About Reelection: Most activists and political operatives are under a delusion about American politics, which goes as follows. Politicians will do *anything* to get reelected, and they will pander, beg, borrow, lie, cheat and steal, just to stay in office. It's all about their job. This is 100% wrong. The dirty secret of American politics is that, for most politicians, getting elected is just not that important. What matters is post-election employment. It's all about staying in the elite political class, which means being respected in a dense network of corporate-funded think tanks, high-powered law firms, banks, defense contractors, prestigious universities, and corporations. If you run a campaign based on populist themes, that's a threat to your post-election employment prospects. This is why rising Democratic star and Newark Mayor Corey Booker reacted so strongly against criticism of private equity — he's looking out for a potential client after his political career is over, or perhaps, during interludes between offices. Running as a vague populist is manageable, as long as you're lying to voters. If you actually go after powerful interests while in office, then you better win, because if you don't, you'll have basically nowhere to go. And if you lose, but you were a team player, then you'll have plenty of money and opportunity. The most lucrative scenario is to win and be a team player, which is what Bill and Hillary Clinton did. The Clinton's are the best at the political game — it's not a coincidence that deregulation accelerated in the late 1990s, as Clinton and his whole team began thinking about their post-Presidential prospects."
RIP: "David Cassidy, 'Partridge Family' Star, Dies at 67." I was strangely saddened by this, although he'd been ill and was also suffering from dementia. He'd had problems with drinking and his liver got him. But looking at his picture, I remembered how pretty he was. how he could sometimes blast exuberant life out of the TV screen. He had come from a showbiz family (Jack Cassidy and Shirley Jones) and made his name in a show that was based on another showbiz family (The Cowsills), but you forgot all that when you saw him bouncing around on screen.
RIP: "AC/DC Guitarist Malcolm Young Dies at 64," so soon after the death of his brother George, leaving Angus as the surviving Young brother involved with the band.
Judging by the messes we make when we cut cakes around here, maybe we could use one of these.
I'd give you everything I got for a little peace of mind
At the polls, it was a good night for Dems.
"Democrats make significant gains in Virginia legislature; control of House in play: The Democratic wave in Virginia on Tuesday wiped out the Republican majority in the state House of Delegates, throwing control of the chamber in play for the first time since 2000 and putting Republicans in blue-tinged districts across the country on alert for next year's elections. Democrats snared at least 15 seats in an upset that stunned members of both parties and arrived with national implications."
Manassas: "Democratic Socialists Just Won a Huge Victory in Virginia: Lee Carter's (D) election victory was a shocking upset for experts, who predicted that Republican incumbent Jackson Miller would likely win. Carter ran unapologetically on pursuing a single payer healthcare system for Virginia and limiting corporate influence in politics, echoing policy positions taken by Sen. Bernie Sanders in last year's Democratic primary. Carter, an IT specialist and Marine veteran, now represents Virginia's 50th District, which includes the city of Manassas and part of Prince William County." Miller was the VA House Majority Whip, so that's a big shot Republican he ousted.
* "How a Socialist Beat One of Virginia's Most Powerful Republicans: Is Lee Carter's shocking victory a sign of things to come across America?"
"Democratic Socialism Is Having a Very Good Year at the Ballot Box: They're singing 'Solidarity Forever' and winning elections in states across the country. [...] From Peekskill, New York, to Moorhead, Minnesota, from to Pleasant Hill, Iowa, to Knoxville, Tennessee, and Billings, Montana, DSA-backed candidates won town-council and city-council seats, school-board seats, and even a judgeship. The list of democratic-socialist victories was striking — the longest in decades. But it was not unprecedented."
Virginia Election Results: Northam Defeats Gillespie in Governor Race: Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam, a Democrat, won a decisive victory in the race for governor of Virginia, defeating his Republican rival, Ed Gillespie, on Tuesday. Mr. Northam was propelled by liberal and moderate voters who were eager to send a message to President Trump in a state that rejected him in 2016 and where he is deeply unpopular." 53.9% to 45.0.
"Democrat Vi Lyles makes history in Charlotte mayoral win: Casting herself as a unifier after two years of tumult, Democrat Vi Lyles easily defeated Republican Kenny Smith on Tuesday to become Charlotte's first African-American female mayor. Lyles took about 58 percent to Smith's 42 percent in unofficial returns. She carried precincts throughout the city, including a handful in south Charlotte. Despite being heavily outspent, she won on a night Democrats flexed their muscles not only in Charlotte but in Virginia and New Jersey, where they swept state races."
In Philly, "'Completely Unelectable' Progressive Larry Krasner Wins DA's Race: He beat Republican Beth Grossman by more than 40 percentage points. [...] Most of Krasner's opponents, including Grossman, were longtime prosecutors. Krasner, on the other hand, has never worked for the DA's office a day in his life. He is a civil rights and defense attorney who has represented Black Lives Matter and Occupy Philly. He's also sued the police department and City Hall more than 75 times, and promised never to seek the death penalty or bring cases based on illegal searches. Krasner once joked that he'd 'spent a career becoming completely unelectable.'"
"How did Democrat Phil Murphy win the New Jersey gubernatorial race? Democrat Phil Murphy was elected governor of New Jersey with strong support from his party's base, including women, younger voters, and by making inroads with some less traditionally Democratic groups, such as independents and white voters. Murphy defeated the state's lieutenant governor, Republican Kim Guadagno, who was hurt by her association with current Governor Chris Christie, CBS News exit polling shows."
"In a City of Firsts, Hoboken Elects a Sikh as Mayor [...] And now the city of some 55,000 people on the Hudson River can boast another first: Councilman Ravi Bhalla on Tuesday became the first Sikh elected mayor in New Jersey, and one of only a few Sikhs to become mayor of an American city."
A few more highlights: Democrats also made significant down-ballot gains in Virginia. Justin Fairfax won the lieutenant governor's against Republican Jill Holtzman Vogel, a state senator known for her sponsorship of a 2012 bill that would have required women seeking abortions to undergo vaginal ultrasounds. Social issues were prominent in another statewide race, where Democratic attorney general Mark Herring defeated Republican challenger John Adams, who has hit Herring for his refusal to defend Virginia's same-sex marriage ban in court. And Chris Hurst, whose girlfriend Alison Parker was the Virginia TV reporter killed on live television in 2015, won a seat in the Virginia House of Delegates"
"The Secret to Progressives' Electoral Success? They didn't just say NO to Trump, they offered a serious, affirmative agenda." Some really great victory stories here, including a lefty winning in a town most people would assume would be red forever.
Mike Lux, "Democrats Face an Intersection: We Won Big, Thank Goodness: But How Do We Keep It Going? [...] An economic populism with a bold agenda that doesn't ignore the needs of either communities of color or white working class folks, that is conscious and purposeful in reaching out to and embracing both, is the path that leads to Democrats to victory in the years to come. But Democrats face an intersection: we can embrace this path forward together, or we can continue to chase moderate voters and kowtow to the 1% at the expense of everyone else. The former can lead us to a lot more victories in 2018 and 2020, the latter will keep us stuck in the past."
* * * * *
"A Billionaire Destroyed His Newsrooms Out of Spite It is worth being clear about exactly what happened here, so that no one gets too smug. DNAinfo was never profitable, but Mr. Ricketts was happy to invest in it for eight years, praising its work all along. Gothamist, on the other hand, was profitable, and a fairly recent addition to the company. One week after the New York team unionized, Mr. Ricketts shut it all down. He did not try to sell the company to someone else. Instead of bargaining with 27 unionized employees in New York City, he chose to lay off 115 people across America. And, as a final thumb in the eye, he initially pulled the entire site's archives down (they are now back up), so his newly unemployed workers lost access to their published work. Then, presumably, he went to bed in his $29 million apartment. Of all the lies spouted during the DNAinfo-Gothamist anti-union campaign, none was more transparent than a spokeswoman's assertion that the union was a 'competitive obstacle making it harder for the business to be financially successful.' The company never made money before it was unionized, but more important, the new union hadn't made a single demand yet." That's the NYT opinion piece — the news story is "DNAinfo and Gothamist Are Shut Down After Vote to Unionize."
"House to vote on giving Amazon $53 billion deal to become main Pentagon supplier: Members of the US House of Representatives and Senate Armed Services committees announced Wednesday that they have reached agreement on the proposed $700 billion National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the annual defense spending bill. This astronomical figure — an $80 billion increase over spending in 2016 and roughly $26 billion more than was requested by President Donald Trump — is a clear signal that the US will expand its ongoing wars around the world and is preparing to engage in far broader conflicts potentially involving North Korea, Iran, Russia, and China."
Elizabeth Warren Warns: Navient Deal A Danger To Student Loan Borrowers: U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren warned Wednesday that the nation's largest student loan servicer has positioned itself to stealthily strip consumer protections from unwitting borrowers across the country. In an interview with International Business Times, she also said the loan servicer, Navient, should not be permitted to be a government contractor handling student loans on behalf of the U.S. Department of Education. The Massachusetts Democrat was sounding an alarm about Navient's recent acquisition of online lender Earnest. She said the transaction opened up the possibility that the company will try to boost its profits by selling debtors on refinancing their current federal student loans with the company's own private loans — the kind that she said to do not necessarily permit income-based repayment options."
"With New D.C. Policy Group, Dems Continue to Rehabilitate and Unify With Bush-Era Neocons: One of the most under-discussed yet consequential changes in the American political landscape is the reunion between the Democratic Party and the country's most extreme and discredited neocons. While the rise of Donald Trump, whom neocons loathe, has accelerated this realignment, it began long before the ascension of Trump and is driven by far more common beliefs than contempt for the current president. A newly formed and, by all appearances, well-funded national security advocacy group, devoted to more hawkish U.S. policies toward Russia and other adversaries, provides the most vivid evidence yet of this alliance. Calling itself the Alliance for Securing Democracy, the group describes itself as 'a bipartisan, transatlantic initiative' that 'will develop comprehensive strategies to defend against, deter, and raise the costs on Russian and other state actors' efforts to undermine democracy and democratic institutions,' and also 'will work to publicly document and expose Vladimir Putin's ongoing efforts to subvert democracy in the United States and Europe.' [...] Democrats often justify this union as a mere marriage of convenience: a pragmatic, temporary alliance necessitated by the narrow goal of stopping Trump. But for many reasons, that is an obvious pretext, unpersuasive in the extreme. This Democrat/neocon reunion had been developing long before anyone believed Donald Trump could ascend to power, and this alliance extends to common perspectives, goals, and policies that have little to do with the current president."
"What are the Paradise Papers? The Paradise Papers are a huge leak of financial documents that throw light on the top end of the world of offshore finance. A number of stories are appearing in a week-long expose of how politicians, multinationals, celebrities and high-net-worth individuals use complex structures to protect their cash from higher taxes. As with last year's Panama Papers leak, the documents were obtained by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, which called in the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) to oversee the investigation. BBC Panorama and the Guardian are among the nearly 100 media groups investigating the papers. The Paradise Papers name was chosen because of the idyllic profiles of many of the offshore jurisdictions whose workings are unveiled, including Bermuda, the HQ of the main company involved, Appleby. It also dovetails nicely with the French term for a tax haven — paradis fiscal. Then again, the Isle of Man plays a big part." Hmm, it seems Charles has been a naughty boy.
"UN: Yemen facing massive famine if blockade not lifted: Millions of people will die in Yemen, in what will be the world's worst famine crisis in decades, unless a Saudi-led military coalition ends a devastating blockade and allows aid into the country, the United Nations has warned." The media is either ignoring complete or misrepresenting this situation, because the bad guys in this story are the US, the UK, and our good buddies in Saudi Arabia.
Thomas Frank, "Why have we built a paradise for offshore billionaires? [...] For decades Americans have lashed out against taxation because they were told that cutting taxes would give people an incentive to work harder and thus make the American economy flourish. Our populist leaders told us this — they're telling us this still, as they reform taxes in Washington — and they rolled back the income tax, they crusaded against the estate tax, and they worked to keep our government from taking action against offshore tax havens. In reality, though, it was never about us and our economy at all. Today it is obvious that all of this had only one rationale: to raise up a class of supermen above us. It had nothing to do with jobs or growth. Or freedom either. The only person's freedom to be enhanced by these tax havens was the billionaire's freedom. It was all to make his life even better, not ours."
Bernie Sanders in Politico, "How to Fix the Democratic Party: It's time we come together to enact real reform — only then can we defeat Donald Trump and retake the country. [...] An economic populism with a bold agenda that doesn't ignore the needs of either communities of color or white working class folks, that is conscious and purposeful in reaching out to and embracing both, is the path that leads to Democrats to victory in the years to come. But Democrats face an intersection: we can embrace this path forward together, or we can continue to chase moderate voters and kowtow to the 1% at the expense of everyone else. The former can lead us to a lot more victories in 2018 and 2020, the latter will keep us stuck in the past."
Meanwhile, from the Department of Doubling Down on Stupid: "Joe Biden Positions Himself as the 'Anti-Bernie': Biden, like many mainstream liberal Democrats, seems intent upon not understanding the real lessons of 2016." I still would argue with that "liberal" label. Biden has been a handmaiden of the aristocracy for some time. "By failing to formulate an alternative to the failed foreign and economic policies of the past, which he has done much (more than most politicians) to shape, Biden showed that he remains wedded to the tenets of liberal interventionism and free-trade orthodoxy that have served the citizens of this country so poorly over the past quarter-century."
* * * * *
"Donna Brazile's bombshell about the DNC and Hillary Clinton, explained: A former Democratic National Committee chair on Thursday revealed the existence of a previously secret agreement that appeared to confirm some of Bernie Sanders supporters' fears about the 2016 Democratic primary. Donna Brazile, a longtime Clinton ally who stepped in as DNC chair last year in the wake of Debbie Wasserman Schultz's resignation, published an excerpt of her upcoming book in Politico in which she disclosed the details of a fundraising agreement between the DNC and the Clinton campaign reached in August 2015. 'The agreement — signed by Amy Dacey, the former CEO of the DNC, and [Clinton campaign manager] Robby Mook with a copy to [Clinton campaign counsel] Marc Elias- specified that in exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC, Hillary would control the party's finances, strategy, and all the money raised,' Brazile wrote in the story under the headline 'Inside Hillary Clinton's Secret Takeover of the DNC.' Brazile added of the deal: '[Clinton's] campaign had the right of refusal of who would be the party communications director, and it would make final decisions on all the other staff. The DNC also was required to consult with the campaign about all other staffing, budgeting, data, analytics, and mailings.'" Naturally, she's getting the hate treatment from the Clintonians, and mostly for saying things that are true, or for things she didn't say at all.
Ryan Grimm, "Angry About The DNC Scandal? Thank Obama. [...] All that is fodder for a good flamewar, but walking away rather unscathed is the man who set the blaze in the first place: former President Barack Obama. 'Nobody wanted to out the fact that Obama had let it get so bad,' said the DNC official. [...] Raising money for a bland outfit like the DNC isn't easy in the best of times, but with Obama offering little to no help, and clinging to his invaluable email list, Wasserman Schultz was set up to fail, even if she would have done so on her own. Obama instead reasoned that he could become the party, his dynamic and charismatic personality carrying it at the national level. Obama was re-elected, but the party itself went on a historic losing spree, ultimately shedding nearly 1,000 seats across the country. Even after Democrats lost the Senate in 2014, and the DNC continued spending money on consultants at an eye-popping rate, Obama decided not to make a leadership change. Instead, he left it saddled with debt — debt the Clinton campaign would later agree to pay off in exchange for control. [...] Obama finally became interested in the party after the 2016 loss. His final gift to the party apparatus was Tom Perez, his labor secretary, who he recruited to stop Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., from winning the race for DNC chair. Obama and Perez won. DNC funding has been anemic, and it recently had to add to its roughly $3 million in debt."
The use of rumors and innuendo to gin up furious emotional responses through a community before facts and corrections can catch up; the use of letters of denunciation; the reflexive charge that dissenting thoughts aid a foreign enemy — does no one recognize this? Has no one out there read a history book?
[...]
But that is what's so weird. Why bother monkeying around with rules, when you're going to win anyway?
Why not welcome Sanders and the energy he undoubtedly would (and did) bring into the party, rather than scheme to lock him and others out?
There are a lot of people who are going to wonder why so much time is being spent re-litigating the 2016 campaign. It sucked, it's over: Who cares?
It does matter. That race is when many of the seeds of what will be the defining problems of our age first began to be sown.
[...]
This is when establishment Democrats began to openly lose faith in democracy and civil liberties and began to promote a "results over process" mode of political thinking. It's when we started hearing serious people in Washington talk about the dangers of "too much democracy."
[...]
The point of the Brazile story isn't that the people who "rigged" the primary were afraid of losing an election. It's that they weren't afraid of betraying democratic principles, probably because they didn't believe in them anymore.
If you're not frightened by the growing appeal of that line of thinking, you should be. There is a history of this sort of thing. And it never ends well.
Helaine Olen's op-ed in the NYT, "Choosing a Health Insurance Plan Is Not 'Shopping' [...] No surprise, reviewing our health insurance options doesn't score high on the fun-o-meter. A 2016 Harris Poll discovered almost half of the employees they questioned always found choosing an insurance plan stressful. A similar number told Aflac they would rather talk to an ex or walk across hot coals than enroll in a health insurance plan. And yet another United Healthcare survey found more than a quarter of respondents would rather lose their credit card, smartphone or luggage, not to mention suffer a flat tire, than review their health insurance options during open-enrollment periods."
Umair Haique, "(Why) The English-Speaking World is the New Soviet Union [...] The best way to understand what has gone wrong with the Anglo world, and America in particular, is simply to think of it as a staggeringly ironic repeat of history. A few short decades ago, the Soviet Union fell, after thirty or so years of stagnation, which its complacent, pampered leaders, utterly divorced from lived reality, vociferously denied could ever be happening to begin with. That steadfast denial opened up the possibility of sudden collapse, and collapse it did: into authoritarianism, extreme inequality, superstition, cults of personality, tribalism, vendetta, violence, corruption, and kleptocracy. That is exactly what is happening to America, from the denial to the pampering to the sudden shock. Falling life expectancy, flat incomes, a shrinking middle class — short of war, or a giant meteor striking the earth, more severe indicators of collapse simply don't exist. So. What led to the collapse?"
Why You've Never Heard of a Charter as Important as the Magna Carta: The Charter of the Forest was sealed 800 years ago today. Its defence of the property-less and of 'the commons', means the Right would prefer to ignore it — and progressives need to celebrate and renew it. Eight hundred years ago this month, after the death of a detested king and the defeat of a French invasion in the Battle of Lincoln, one of the foundation stones of the British constitution was laid down. It was the Charter of the Forest, sealed in St Paul's on November 6, 1217, alongside a shortened Charter of Liberties from 2 years earlier (which became the Magna Carta). The Charter of the Forest was the first environmental charter forced on any government. It was the first to assert the rights of the property-less, of the commoners, and of the commons. It also made a modest advance for feminism, as it coincided with recognition of the rights of widows to have access to means of subsistence and to refuse to be remarried. The Charter has the distinction of having been on the statute books for longer than any other piece of legislation. It was repealed 754 years later, in 1971, by a Tory government. In 2015, while spending lavishly on celebrating the Magna Carta anniversary, the government was asked in a written question in the House of Lords whether it would be celebrating the Charter this year. A Minister of Justice, Lord Faulks, airily dismissed the idea, stating that it was unimportant, without international significance. Yet earlier this year the American Bar Association suggested the Charter of the Forest had been a foundation of the American Constitution and that it was more important now than ever before. They were right."
I can't believe I missed this last year. "What Democrats Still Don't Get About George McGovern: The party took all the wrong lessons from his landslide loss to Richard Nixon in '72." Establishment Democrats vowed to make sure McGovern lost in the general, and it sure worked. "Democratic leaders' response to McGovern's defeat was swift and unequivocal. From the ashes of McGovern's loss rose a group of disaffected Democratic campaign staffers and elected officials, soon dubbed the 'neoliberals,' who promised to put the Democratic Party back on the winning track, which invariably lay to the right. The neoliberals and their biggest stars, such as Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis and California Governor Jerry Brown, called for a full-scale repudiation of not only McGovernism, but also the 'New Deal ethic' that had animated Democratic politics since FDR. On foreign policy, they claimed that Democrats needed to reestablish their toughness and willingness to use the military to confront enemies abroad. On social issues like busing and gay rights, the neolibs urged Democrats to strike a more conservative tone, even if it meant shunting aside the very groups that McGovern had worked so hard to court. On economic issues, McGovern's greatest sin in the eyes of the neolibs was precisely what had most worried the Nixon White House — his populism. The neolibs argued that economic growth, not income inequality, needed to be Democrats' primary concern. The entrepreneurial class, they claimed, needed to replace the working class as the Democrats' idée fixe — a shift that not coincidentally would make the party a more welcome home for the donations of big business and rich individuals." And when all these neolibs lost, we were told that they were lefties who lost. (And anyway, Nixon ran as far left as McGovern on major issues, promising to end the war and soak the rich, and running an anti-austerity policy.)
Matt Taibbi, "The Great College Loan Swindle: How universities, banks and the government turned student debt into America's next financial black hole [...] America as a country has evolved in recent decades into a confederacy of widescale industrial scams. The biggest slices of our economic pie — sectors like health care, military production, banking, even commercial and residential real estate — have become crude income-redistribution schemes, often untethered from the market by subsidies or bailouts, with the richest companies benefiting from gamed or denuded regulatory systems that make profits almost as assured as taxes. Guaranteed-profit scams — that's the last thing America makes with any level of consistent competence. In that light, Trump, among other things, the former head of a schlock diploma mill called Trump University, is a perfect president for these times. He's the scammer-in-chief in the Great American Ripoff Age, a time in which fleecing students is one of our signature achievements. "
Jane Ward, "Thinking Bad Sex [...] But the rush to meme-ify sexual harassment and assault with our righteous rage, and to reduce our thinking to the level of 'what will straight people think??!' is hardly our best way forward. For me the question is, as always, how do we draw upon decades of feminist and queer activism and theorizing to see our way through the complexities of sex and its intersections with violence?"
Michael Kempster said this on Facebook: "Corporate governance, in particular, is to my mind very much like Soviet: the stockholders (proletariat) own the company (country), but have little if any say. The board of directors (central committee of the Communist Party) runs things, largely to the end of its own profit, power and continuity of office. The CEO (general secretary) oft becomes the focus of a cult of personality. The board (committee) usually deliberates in secret. Succession to higher posts is usually governed by secret actions, which are the object of profuse speculation. On and on--the more I go on, the more exact the analogy."
Good interview on Majority Report in which David Dayen explains to Sam Why Deregulation Made Air Travel Hell. Dday's article on this, in The American Prospect, is "Unfriendly Skies: It's time to admit that airline deregulation has failed passengers, workers — and economic efficiency." You'll never guess who have to blame for the fact that airline travel has become such a nightmare. I really can't bear to get on a plane anymore. I may never see my family again. "But the real outrage should be directed at the fact that abuse of passengers is the logical endpoint of a 40-year trend since the government liberated the airline industry. Until 1978, air travel was heavily regulated. In that year, some of the nation's most celebrated liberals joined conservatives in trusting free markets. A brief rush of competition in the 1980s gave way to consolidation and monopoly power, at the expense of workers and passengers alike. Today, four carriers control 80 percent of all U.S. routes."
RIP: D. Potter, fanzine writer, apahack, former denizen of the building at Broadway Terrace she called "Broadway Terrors", blogger at Onyx Lynx, and commenter to this blog. She was a co-founder and OE of ALPS (The Amateur Long-Playing Society) and of course an original member of A Woman's APA. She called herself "Nina Razrushen" in print and her fanzines were Tall Black Woman With One Blond Shoe Productions. She was my friend for nearly my entire adult life, and I loved her. I'm going to miss her a lot. (I'd completely forgotten that I wrote that bio of her for Balticon. Every word is true.)
One of the funniest and most erudite comedians in the world, Bill Bailey's Remarkable Guide to the Orchestra (2009). The "extremely versatile and strangely attractive" Beeb's concert orchestra must have had so much fun doing this.
"House Democratic Whip Resists Effort to End U.S. Involvement in Yemen War: The bipartisan push to end U.S. support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen has gained political momentum but faces resistance from the No. 2 Democratic lawmaker in the House, Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md." Just in case anyone forgot how much of a piece of garbage Steny Hoyer is.
Rachelle Hampton in The New Republic, "The most underplayed story of the 2016 election is voter suppression." It's amazing to me that the Democratic Party can make so much more noise about the dubious value of Russian "interference" with our elections than they can with this blatant, home-grown and documented interference that's happening in plain sight.
Matt Bruenig, "Capping 401k Tax Benefits Is Generally A Good Idea: According to Jim Tankersley at the New York Times, Republicans are thinking about reducing the amount of income workers can shelter from taxation through 401k retirement account contributions [...] This proposal is similar to the Obama plan to scrap the tax benefits associated with 529 college savings accounts. Tax benefits for 401k and 529 accounts flow overwhelmingly to rich people and do not apparently incentivize people to save much more (if any) than they would in the absence of the tax breaks. [...] Overall, the Republican tax reform effort is pretty bad. But this proposal, like the Obama-era effort to scrap 529 tax benefits, is a good one."
"Telecom Lobbyists Fund Lawmaker Who Sponsors Bill To Ban Municipal Broadband: A freshman Michigan state representative introduced a sweeping bill last week that would ban any city and town in the state from using public funds to provide municipal broadband service — publicly owned internet infrastructure. An International Business Times review of state campaign finance and lobbying records found that the representative's campaign was heavily financed by telecommunications companies and trade associations. She also dined with trade association lobbyists in the months leading up to introducing the bill."
"Female homicide rate dropped after Craigslist launched its erotic services platform: Sex workers have long argued that online erotic services platforms make their jobs safer. A new study proves it. [...] The September 2017 study, authored by West Virginia University and Baylor University economics and information systems experts, analyzes rates of female homicides in various cities before and after Craigslist opened an erotic services section on its website. The authors found a shocking 17 percent decrease in homicides with female victims after Craigslist erotic services were introduced."
Stiglitz in The Nation, "America Has a Monopoly Problem — and It's Huge [...] Let's begin with a simple question: Is there any reason why US telecom prices should be so much higher than in many other countries and service so much poorer? Much of the innovation was done here in the United States. Our publicly supported research and education institutions provided the intellectual foundations. It is now a global technology, requiring little labor — so it cannot be high wages that provide the explanation. The answer is simple: market power."
Interestingly, the NYT seems to have discovered Stephanie Kelton, having given her an op-ed early in October ("How We Think About the Deficit Is Mostly Wrong") in early October and now a discussion with Paul McCulley, "The Fed Chair Should Be a 'Principled Populist'." It sounds like Yellan should be that person, because she cares. "McCulley: Of course the Fed should care. The more skewed national income is toward the rich, the more difficult it is to maintain a robust aggregate demand growth. Rich people spend a lot, absolutely, but they have a lower marginal propensity to spend than less-affluent citizens. Put differently, give a rich man another dollar, and he'll spend very little of it. Give a man living paycheck to paycheck another dollar, and he'll spend all of it."
I've never thought "didn't campaign in Wisconsin" had much to do with Clinton's loss. She made some mistakes with Wisconsin, but I really don't think that was significant. I mean, I lived the entire first half of my life in the DC area and I don't think I ever saw any signs on the ground that campaigning was going on. We saw what was on our TV news, and TV news might have been from anywhere. The same is true of The Washington Post that arrived on our doorstep every morning — if the candidate allegedly said something interesting, be it in Virginia or Baltimore or Los Angeles, it might be in the paper with the venue itself barely noticeable. The ads the Clinton campaign ran in the final weeks of the campaign might have been a factor, but the fact that she wasn't physically present wouldn't really have mattered unless you'd actually been expecting to have her to tea during her visit. But one significant factor was one Democrats as a party should have been working on non-stop since long before the Clintons came along. Ari Berman in Mother Jones, "Rigged: How Voter Suppression Threw Wisconsin to Trump: And possibly handed him the whole election. [...] According to a comprehensive study by MIT political scientist Charles Stewart, an estimated 16 million people — 12 percent of all voters — encountered at least one problem voting in 2016. There were more than 1 million lost votes, Stewart estimates, because people ran into things like ID laws, long lines at the polls, and difficulty registering. Trump won the election by a total of 78,000 votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. [...] After the election, registered voters in Milwaukee County and Madison's Dane County were surveyed about why they didn't cast a ballot. Eleven percent cited the voter ID law and said they didn't have an acceptable ID; of those, more than half said the law was the 'main reason' they didn't vote. According to the study's author, University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist Kenneth Mayer, that finding implies that between 12,000 and 23,000 registered voters in Madison and Milwaukee — and as many as 45,000 statewide — were deterred from voting by the ID law. 'We have hard evidence there were tens of thousands of people who were unable to vote because of the voter ID law,' he says." Understand, I still blame the Democratic Party for either ignoring or actively suppressing any attempt to address this issue. Whining about Russians is just more deflection. Throughout my lifetime, we have known that the segregationists were doing everything they could to prevent black Americans from voting. The Voting Rights Act stopped some of the more overt efforts, but that's gone now, and they've got vote-prevention laws busting out all over, just aside from some mighty suspicious vote counts and GOP-owned voting machines you can't audit. After the 2000 selection, anyone who talked about these things was written off as a conspiracy theorist. Makes you wonder why the Democratic Party wants to keep losing, doesn't it?
* Ari Berman discussed this with Sam Seder on The Majority Report.
"APNewsBreak: Georgia election server wiped after suit filed: A computer server crucial to a lawsuit against Georgia election officials was quietly wiped clean by its custodians just after the suit was filed, The Associated Press has learned. The server's data was destroyed July 7 by technicians at the Center for Elections Systems at Kennesaw State University, which runs the state's election system. The data wipe was revealed in an email sent last week from an assistant state attorney general to plaintiffs in the case that was later obtained by the AP. More emails obtained in a public records request confirmed the wipe. The lawsuit, filed July 3 by a diverse group of election reform advocates, aims to force Georgia to retire its antiquated and heavily criticized election technology. The server in question, which served as a statewide staging location for key election-related data, made national headlines in June after a security expert disclosed a gaping security hole that wasn't fixed six months after he reported it to election authorities." Well, that's not at all suspicious, is it?
"NYC's Board of Elections will admit it purged more than 200,000 voters from city rolls." 127,000 of purged voters are from Bernie' home borough of Brooklyn. I'm still unclear about whether this was a routine purge of people who hadn't voted for the last six years or something else, but the question remains of why it seems to have been only this area and nowhere else.
"RT reveals its top promoted tweets during US election campaign, & the results may surprise you [...] In his Senate testimony, Twitter's Sean J. Edgett explained his company's decision to ban RT from advertising on Twitter by referencing RT's supposed 'low-quality content.' RT's head of communications, Anna Belkina, responded: 'Somehow the quality of our content was just fine while Twitter pushed for a giant, Election-targeting ad buy from RT, which RT refused.'"
Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing, "The DNC picked a bunch of sleazy lobbyists as superdelegates, can't figure out why no one is donating: The 2018 "superdelegates" to the Democratic National Convention will include lobbyists for Rupert Murdoch's Newscorp, CITGO petroleum, Citigroup, and other large corporations. Superdelegates are unelected party favorites who get to vote for the party leader in primaries. The DNC was sued for dirty tricks in the 2016 primaries, and in its defense, DNC leaders insisted the party could "pick candidates in smoke-filled back-rooms" and ignore the votes of party members. In what is certainly unrelated news, the DNC is in a panic because its donations are way, way down heading into the 2018 elections.
Ryan Grim at The Intercept, "Democratic Party Drama Puts Deputy Chair Keith Ellison in a Tough Spot [...] On Thursday, four long-serving DNC officials who had backed Ellison's bid to be DNC chair were removed from their positions. Ray Buckley, James Zogby, and Barbra Casbar Siperstein were bounced from the executive committee, and Buckley was also taken off the rules committee, on which he served as well. Alice Germond lost her at-large appointment. 'I think Tom is putting Keith in a tough spot,' said Claire Sandberg, the digital organizer for Sanders's 2016 campaign. 'He's been working in good faith to convince grassroots progressives not to give up on the Democratic Party and its institutions. But that will be a much more difficult task now.'"
David Dayen, "The drug industry hustle is bigger than one obscure law: Journalism can still work to produce change. The Washington Post/60 Minutes exposé about the DEA getting robbed of its tools to fight the opioid crisis is a great window into how Washington works. But the focus on the 2016 law that finished the job — under the noses of everyone, including the Obama White House, which is astounding — is unfortunate, as the story outlines a much bigger problem. The whistleblower in the piece, Joe Rannazzisi, was getting high-level pushback for his efforts to target drug distributors for pushing giant numbers of opioid pills into communities years before any bill passage. Obama's DoJ was already captured and preventing the "suspicious orders" crackdown that attempted to keep these pills off the street. By the time Congress got involved DEA was already working under serious constraints, fueled by lobbyists and lawyers who previously worked at the agency. The second misimpression is that this was about the manufacturers of the drugs themselves. No, it was the distributors, a small but vital cog in the pharmaceutical supply chain. And like practically every link in that chain, the distributors are an oligopoly. McKesson, Cardinal Health and AmerisourceBergen control between 85-90% of the whole business. That magnified the decision they made to let the opioids flow and ignore their responsibility under federal law. The Teamsters and other groups have been going after distributors for years on this point. The lack of competition for distribution, and pharmacies and pharmacy benefit managers, creates powerfully bad incentives and ripple effect that, in this case, cost thousands of lives."
"Did Obama's Stimulus Hurt The Planet? How Trump Could Revive Homegrown Solar [...] The U.S. International Trade Commission recommended Tuesday that the president impose tariffs on imported solar panels in order to counter the financial harm caused by a mix of seemingly unrelated economic trends — and the unintended consequences of President Barack Obama's economic stimulus package — which have pushed the U.S. solar manufacturing industry to the brink of extinction."
It's unfortunate that "Black Critics Shake Their Heads at Ta-Nehisi Coates" appears where it does, because it automatically makes people, including me, wonder what it's doing there. And yet, it rings entirely true.
David Atkins in The Washington Monthly, "Are Third Way's Focus Groups Valid Research? Much attention has been lavished on this Molly Ball piece in The Atlantic on the centrist think tank Third Way's listening tour across America. In it, Ms. Ball subtly fillets the Third Way's domestic anthropologists in their search for answers that already align with the group's preconceptions about a fundamentally centrist, moderate America that wants small government, local control and even-tempered politicians in line with the preferences of the group's corporate donors. Per her story, the focus groups seemed to show one thing, but the conclusions from Third Way showed another. But the reason I write this is to highlight something more disturbing from the piece that speaks to the Third Way's methodology in doing the research." (By all means follow the link to Molly Ball's piece.)
RIP: "Fats Domino: Rock and roll legend dies aged 89: [...] The New Orleans singer sold more than 65 million records, outselling every 1950s rock and roll act except Elvis Presley. [...] Elvis Presley referred to Fats Domino as "the real king of rock n roll" and Paul McCartney reportedly wrote the Beatles song Lady Madonna in emulation of his style."
Michael Gray in the Guardian, "Fats Domino obituary: giant of American music: Rock'n'roll star who was crucial in breaking down the musical colour barrier and proved enormously influential."
We Can Have Nice Things: "We CAN have nice things. We can provide a well-paying job for anyone who wants one. Medicare-for-All. Child care. Tuition-free public college and excellent public schools. Modern infrastructure including high-speed rail from city to city. We CAN have nice things that make our lives better. The US government issues its own currency. That means We the People can spend on what we want and need without worrying about 'how to pay for it.' We just pay for it by issuing money. The government can't go bankrupt."
Apparently, the Trump administration's trade reps are doing a better job than you'd expect. You know this because: "Chamber calls many Trump administration NAFTA proposals 'dangerous'" And the Chamber is against those changes for the usual reasons, too. "In an unusual turn, the AFL-CIO — which on Thursday gave the Trump administration an "F" for the openness of the negotiations — came to the defense of U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, who is spearheading the NAFTA talks. 'The U.S. Chamber's negative reaction to even discussing creative trade solutions reveals a lot about how much corporate CEOs benefit under the NAFTA status quo,' AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said in a statement Friday. He also accused the business group of trying to keep 'the same old broken trade rules' at the expense of working people."
I've always found the "libertarians" a good place to get a bitter laugh, not least because of their ludicrous argument that the right to bear arms will protect us from tyranny. Never mind that hundreds of years of history already show that tyrants can take over without ever troubling about citizens with guns — the Russian people had guns, as did the German people — but they still say this as if it had any foundation at all. (It's not even the reason for the Second Amendment, which had more to do with George Washington's disgust at how badly untrained and unregulated militias performed, and the founders' hope that well-regulated local militias would prevent the existence of standing armies. Alas, no.) But with the data showing that guns aren't much use for self-defense and a stadium full of people with guns would only have resulted in more deaths rather than fewer in the most recent high-profile shooting tragedy, Matt Taibbi says, "The Gun Lobby Is Down to Its Last, Unconvincing Excuse: Las Vegas rips apart the "good guy with a gun" justification, leaving only a flawed constitutional take to justify the madness. [...] Here's my question about that. Where were all these heroic tyrannophobe gun owners during the unprecedented expansion of police and surveillance powers that took place after 9/11? Answer: nowhere. We didn't hear them shrieking about habeas corpus becoming a joke in the Bush years, or torture and extrajudicial assassination becoming standard practices. We didn't hear them protesting the vast expansion of the classification of government documents, or complaining about the widespread abuse of material witness statutes, the national security letter provision of the Patriot Act, or a hundred other problems. Nor did they ever protest aggressive new domestic enforcement policies like stop-and-frisk and predictive policing, for the obvious reason that those programs were mostly directed against minorities in poor neighborhoods." It's even weirder than that, when you consider how much they hated Obama and kept talking about what a fascist dictator he was — and he even declared himself to have the right to kill American citizens without trial, and did so — but they didn't exactly overthrow the tyrant, did they?
Zach Carter, "Trump's Tax Plan Is An Act Of Political Domination By The Rich: But at least we don't have to pretend it isn't. Most Americans suffer from the unfortunate delusion that economic problems are violations of some mathematical order. When recession, severe inflation or other hard times engulf society, it is because the sacred equations have been angered. If we adjust the right variable just so, a set of very important numbers will respond appropriately, and a process of mystical, self-sustaining prosperity will begin. Knowledge of these secret statistical potions is closely guarded, and its practitioners deploy sophisticated abstractions to explain away common-sense calls for reform. Why do so many people work 60-hour weeks for poverty wages while a few luxuriate in the fabulous returns of interest-bearing assets? Why are the citizens of Puerto Rico threatened by a deadly social collapse while the fruit of the island's labor is shipped to Wall Street bondholders? The answer surely cannot be that some wealthy members of our society are exercising political power over the lives and incomes of others. We must consider growth, productivity, liquidity, gross domestic product and the debt-to-GDP ratio. But at the heart of every important economic issue are simple and straightforward power relationships. When you are in debt, someone else has financial power over the ordering of your affairs. Wealth enables rich people to buy their way out of troubles that overwhelm the lives of the poor. For much of our history, the American government granted some people the right to own other people. Economic problems are political problems. They have always been so; they can never be otherwise."
Zack Carter and Ben Walsh, "Congress Is Doing A Huge Favor For BofA While No One Else Watches: WASHINGTON ? House and Senate committees will consider an obscure bill called the 'Fair Access to Investment Research Act' on Thursday. It will not be a major media event. The bill, which will likely sail through Congress, will not cause a new financial crisis, bar millions from accessing health insurance or undermine any foreign policy alliances. But it will help one company — Bank of America — make money by avoiding lawsuits. [...] But even if Democrats do stop it ? Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has filed an amendment that would eliminate one of the most glaring problems with the bill ? the fact that a favor for Bank of America is the source of bipartisan cooperation on Capitol Hill speaks volumes about congressional priorities." The bill passed in the House.
"The U.S. Voted Against a U.N. Resolution Condemning Death Penalty for LGBTQ People: President Donald Trump's administration is facing strong backlash from civil rights groups after voting against a U.N. resolution that condemns using death penalty to punish 'consensual same-sex relations.' The U.N. Human Rights Council approved the measure on Friday with a 27-13 vote, with seven countries abstaining. The United States, led by Amb. Nikki Haley, voted for an amendment to the resolution that said the death penalty was not necessarily a human rights violation, and voted against amendments urging countries to stop using experimental drugs in executions. [...] The Trump administration's vote is nothing new — presidents from both parties have long objected to U.N. resolutions critical of capital punishment. In December 2016, for example — in the final weeks of Obama's presidency — the U.S. voted against a resolution urging states not to execute minors, pregnant women, and the intellectually disabled.
Russ Feingold in the Guardian, "Will the fate of America's democracy be decided by this US supreme court case? On Tuesday, the US supreme court hears oral arguments in Gill v Whitford. This will open the door for a potentially precedent-setting ruling on the constitutionality of partisan gerrymandering — the process of redrawing electoral districts in order to favor one party over another."
"Common Cause challenges partisan gerrymandering in NC: In a potentially landmark lawsuit, Common Cause and the N.C. Democratic Party Friday launched the nation's latest challenge to partisan gerrymandering. The suit, filed in a federal court in Greensboro, follows a long parade of redistricting litigation in North Carolina. It's also one of several suits around the country contesting the use of partisanship in drawing political boundaries."
"Early Medicaid Expansion Associated With Reduced Payday Borrowing In California: We examined the impact of California's early Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act on the use of payday loans, a form of high-interest borrowing used by low- and middle-income Americans. Using a data set for the period 2009-13 (roughly twenty-four months before and twenty-four months after the 2011-12 Medicaid expansion) that covered the universe of payday loans from five large payday lenders with locations around the United States, we used a difference-in-differences research design to assess the effect of the expansion on payday borrowing, comparing trends in early-expansion counties in California to those in counties nationwide that did not expand early. The early Medicaid expansion was associated with an 11 percent reduction in the number of loans taken out each month. It also reduced the number of unique borrowers each month and the amount of payday loan debt. We were unable to determine precisely how and for whom the expansion reduced payday borrowing, since to our knowledge, no data exist that directly link payday lending to insurance status. Nonetheless, our results suggest that Medicaid reduced the demand for high-interest loans and improved the financial health of American families. "
David Dayen in The Nation, "Special Investigation: How America's Biggest Bank Paid Its Fine for the 2008 Mortgage Crisis — With Phony Mortgages!: Alleged fraud put JPMorgan Chase hundreds of millions of dollars ahead; ordinary homeowners, not so much. [...] Here's how the alleged scam worked. JPMorgan moved to forgive the mortgages of tens of thousands of homeowners; the feds, in turn, credited these canceled loans against the penalties due under the 2012 and 2013 settlements. But here's the rub: In many instances, JPMorgan was forgiving loans on properties it no longer owned."
* Sam Seder discussed the story with Dday on The Majority Report.
* Charlie Pierce asked, "How Is This Not Fraud?" Charlie, it is fraud.
PDF of "FINANCIAL SERVICES COMMITTEE DEMOCRATS: THE MEGABANK ACCOUNTABILITY AND CONSEQUENCES ACT: Running a federally-chartered or federally-insured bank is a privilege, not a right. When megabanks repeatedly exhibit indifference toward consumer protection and demonstrate that they are incapable of complying or unwilling to comply with U.S. laws and regulations, they should be promptly shut down. To date, the federal prudential banking regulators (The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and the Federal Reserve Board) have neglected to fully exercise their authorities to shut down such a megabank and hold culpable executives and board directors individually accountable. To that end, Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-CA), Ranking Member of the Committee on Financial Services, is introducing the Megabank Accountability and Consequences Act to require the federal prudential banking regulators to fully utilize existing authorities — such as the ability to shut down a megabank and ban culpable executives and directors from working at another bank — to stop megabanks that clearly and repeatedly engage in practices that harm consumers. The bill also clarifies and enhances the enforcement tool kit to ensure that megabanks and their executives will be held accountable for repeatedly breaking the law and harming consumers."
"IMF: higher taxes for rich will cut inequality without hitting growth: Analysis supports tax strategy of Jeremy Corbyn's Labour in UK — and undermines that of Donald Trump in US. Higher income tax rates for the rich would help reduce inequality without having an adverse impact on growth, the International Monetary Fund has said. The Washington-based IMF used its influential half-yearly fiscal monitor to demolish the argument that economic growth would suffer if governments in advanced Western countries forced the top 1% of earners to pay more tax. The IMF said tax theory suggested there should be 'significantly higher' tax rates for those on higher incomes but the argument against doing so was that hitting the rich would be bad for growth. But the influential global institution said: 'Empirical results do not support this argument, at least for levels of progressivity that are not excessive.' The IMF added that different types of wealth taxes might also be considered."
"Brazil's President Michel Temer Says Rousseff was Impeached for Refusing His Economic Agenda: Brazilian President Michel Temer let an open secret become explicitly clear during a speech to business and foreign policy leaders yesterday in New York. The country's elected and now-removed President, Dilma Rousseff, was impeached because of her position on economic policy, rather than any alleged wrongdoing on her part, her installed successor admitted. Temer's stunning, and seemingly unscripted, acknowledgement will surely bolster the view of impeachment opponents that Dilma's removal was a 'parliamentary coup d'etat.'"
I can't believe the number of hate threads that were generated by the announcement that one of the speakers on the first night of the women's convention would be Bernie Sanders. Sanders is not the only male speaker, and the headliner is Maxine Waters, but when some news outlets put out the story, you'd have thought he was the only speaker invited, to see some of the ridiculous nuttery on Twitter. (Hillary Clinton had already declined to attend.)
William Lazonick in The Harvard Business review, "Profits Without Prosperity: Five years after the official end of the Great Recession, corporate profits are high, and the stock market is booming. Yet most Americans are not sharing in the recovery. While the top 0.1% of income recipients — which include most of the highest-ranking corporate executives — reap almost all the income gains, good jobs keep disappearing, and new employment opportunities tend to be insecure and underpaid. Corporate profitability is not translating into widespread economic prosperity. The allocation of corporate profits to stock buybacks deserves much of the blame. Consider the 449 companies in the S&P; 500 index that were publicly listed from 2003 through 2012. During that period those companies used 54% of their earnings — a total of $2.4 trillion — to buy back their own stock, almost all through purchases on the open market. Dividends absorbed an additional 37% of their earnings. That left very little for investments in productive capabilities or higher incomes for employees."
"How military outsourcing turned toxic: new Propublica logoIn August 2016, an inspector from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency arrived at Barksdale Air Force base in Louisiana, a nerve center for the U.S. military's global air combat operations, to conduct a routine look at the base's handling of its hazardous waste. Barksdale, like many military bases, generates large volumes of hazardous materials, including thousands of pounds of toxic powder left over from cleaning, painting and maintaining airplanes. For years, Barksdale had been sending a portion of its waste to an Ohio company, U.S. Technology Corp., that had sold officials at the base on a seemingly ingenious solution for disposing of it: The company would take the contaminated powder from refurbished war planes and repurpose it into cinderblocks that would be used to build everything from schools to hotels to big-box department stores — even a pregnancy support center in Ohio. The deal would ostensibly shield the Air Force from the liability of being a large producer of dangerous hazardous trash. The arrangement was not unique."
"The Scariest Thing About Trump's Presidency Is How Little Has Actually Changed [...] This is the very best advice I could give anyone who's trying to piece together an intelligent worldview in an information age that is saturated in establishment propaganda: ignore the stories and watch events. Ignore the rude tweets, the Russia hysteria, the partisan feuds, the wedge politics etc., and look instead at who gets richer, who gets poorer, what actually happens to all the money, how that money influences politics, the legislation that actually gets passed, the military budget which continually expands, the military interventionism which marches on unimpeded, the surveillance network which continues to encircle the globe with an ever-tightening fist, the governments which fall into alignment with America and what happens to the governments that don't, etc. This will tell you everything you need to know about what's really happening in your world, who your real enemies are, and what humanity is really up against."
"A Review of What Happened by an Author Who Insists He Has Never Heard of Hillary Clinton or the 2016 Election [...] We saw it happen not because Hillary Clinton is particularly wretched or terrible — no one person is so consequential — but because the depravity of our empire is straining under its own weight. Because it is barely able to tolerate its contradictions anymore. Hillary Clinton is not singularly responsible for any of this, but this book is not about Hillary Clinton, not really. It's about power. I meant that. It's about what you have to believe if you believe that an adequate response to the present moment consists of trusting the experts, recalibrating the polling computer, and returning the Democratic Party to power. It's about what to do if you missed what happened, if you forgot what happened, if you want all of this to happen again."
Adam Johnson at FAIR, "Media's Grim Addiction to Perseverance Porn [...] These stories are typically shared for the purposes of poor-shaming, typically under the guise of inspirational life advice. 'This man is proof we all just need to keep walking, no matter what life throws at us,' insisted Denver ABC7 anchor Anne Trujillo, after sharing one of those stories of a poor person forced to walk thousands of miles a year to survive. A healthy press would take these anecdotes of 'can do' spirit and ask bigger questions, like why are these people forced into such absurd hardship? Who benefits from skyrocketing college costs? Why does the public transit in this person's city not have subsidies for the poor? Why aren't employers forced to offer time off for catastrophic accidents? But time and again, the media mindlessly tells the bootstrap human interest story, never questioning the underlying system at work. [...] Journalism is as much — if not more — about what isn't reported as what is. Here a local reporter is faced with a cruel example of people falling through the cracks of the richest country on Earth, and their only contribution is to cherry-pick one guy who managed — just barely — to cling on to the edge. [...] It's part of a broader media culture of anecdotes in lieu of the macro, moralizing 'success' rather than questioning systemic problems. Perseverance porn may seem harmless, but in highlighting handpicked cases of people overcoming hardship without showing the thousands that didn't — much less asking broader questions as to what created these conditions — the media traffics in decidedly right-wing tropes. After all, if they can do it, so can you — right?"
Bill Black, "Is Politico or Third Way More Divorced from Reality? [...] I have written several times and documented that Third Way is a creature of, and devoted to, Wall Street's CEOs. Third Way's con is describing itself as 'centrist.' Wall Street CEOs are not centrist. They include the world's most powerful and destructive predators and parasites. The 'left, right, center' metaphor does not apply to a group like Wall Street's CEOs. The latest media sucker to fall for Third Way's con is Politico. Politico fell whole hog, calling Third Way a 'center-left think tank.' Fortunately, Google's recent purge of New America Foundation scholars has proved that 'think tanks' financed by elite corporate CEOs are oxymorons run by regular morons. The one thing you can never do as a scholar at a faux 'think tank' like Third Way is actually think — and then make public the perfidy of the corporate CEOs that fund the non-think tank. Third Way is Wall Street on the Potomac, so it is preposterous to call it 'center-left.' It keeps its corporate funders secret to maximize their corrupting influence. It is one of many Pete Peterson front groups."
"These are the Facebook posts Russia used to undermine Hillary Clinton's campaign: Russian Facebook and Twitter accounts masqueraded as pro-Trump Americans when they took aim at Clinton." The idea that anyone who would otherwise have voted for Clinton would have paid attention to this stuff is just completely laughable.
"'We Are Not the People We Have Been Waiting For': Prominent Progressive Resigns from State Central Committee [...] So many young people were involved. Tech savvy and invested. There was no hiding from mistakes and the doors were wide open on everything. They were reading state party constitutions and by-laws. They came to meetings prepared after sharing information on how things were supposed to be done only to find that nothing was done the way it was written on most occasions. People that had been involved for a long time took this to be an 'invasion' of the party. A huge divide started that was much larger than the 'Bernie v Hillary' thing but everyone likes to blame it on that and continue to do that to this day. Do you see it? Do you see it that way? Or is it just still a 'Bernie v Hillary' thing to you? We play our own game of 'the rules apply only to those outside our circle'"
This is from last March, a tweetstorm Teresa compiled together in a single post for Making Light, on Wealth, risk, and power.
RIP: "Tom Petty, a Mainstay of Rock With the Heartbreakers, Dies at 66 [...] Tony Dimitriades, Mr. Petty's longtime manager, said in a statement that Mr. Petty suffered cardiac arrest at his home in Malibu, Calif., early Monday morning and was taken to the U.C.L.A. Medical Center, where he could not be revived. He was pronounced dead at 8:40 p.m. with family members, friends and bandmates present at the hospital, Mr. Dimitriades said." There was a long period on Monday night when There was some confusion about whether the artist was actually dead, after a premature announcement by the local police apparently beginning while he was still on life support though showing no brain function. It was later announced that he was taken off life support but there was no announcement that he had died, leading to a Twitter thread on Schroedinger's Tom Petty. But it was clear from the first announcement that a third chair was empty for the Travelling Willburys, Roy Orbison and George Harrison having gone on before, leaving only Bob Dylan and Jeff Lynne.
See the trailer for The Brainwashing of My Dad. "As filmmaker Jen Senko tries to understand the transformation of her father from a non political, life-long Democrat to an angry, Right-Wing fanatic, she uncovers the forces behind the media that changed him completely: a plan by Roger Ailes under Nixon for a media takeover by the GOP, The Powell Memo urging business leaders to influence institutions of public opinion, especially the universities, the media and the courts, and under Reagan, the dismantling of the Fairness Doctrine."
Atrios linked this and I thought, "That's perfect." Prince, Tom Petty, Steve Winwood, Jeff Lynne and others, "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" (And, my god, that boy sure looks like his dad.)
Charlie Savage, "E.P.A. Threatens to Stop Funding Justice Dept. Environmental Work: WASHINGTON — Scott Pruitt, the Environmental Protection Agency administrator who has aggressively pushed to dismantle regulations and downsize the organization, is threatening to reach outside his agency and undermine the Justice Department's work enforcing antipollution laws, documents and interviews show."
"House votes to curb asset seizures: The House voted Tuesday to curb the law enforcement practice of seizing cash and property from people who are suspected of illegal activity but who have not necessarily been charged. A bipartisan group of lawmakers pushed an amendment to a government-spending package for 2018 that would prohibit the Trump administration from using funds to remove restrictions on the use of asset forfeiture. The practice allows law enforcement to seize cash and property and keep at least part of the proceeds."
"New Fed Data: Black Wealth Cratered Under Obama: The Federal Reserve released the 2016 Survey of Consumer Finances today. This is the first wealth survey of its kind since 2013. By comparing the 2007 and 2016 versions of the SCF, we can see roughly how the various racial groups fared under Obama. What you see in the below graphs is that the top 2 percent of black families improved their position; the top 2 percent of Latino families improved their position; and the top 22 percent of white families improved their position. Virtually everyone else was worse off in 2016 than in 2007 in terms of their family's net worth." (The graphs make sense if you mouse over them.)
"How Bernie Sanders got Democrats to stop worrying and embrace single-payer [...] Over the past several months, Sanders has convinced 24 of the biggest liberal advocacy organizations and nearly one-third of Senate Democrats to co-sponsor his updated Medicare-for-all bill. It is a sharp reversal for the party that once relegated the idea to its radical fringe: Just two years ago, Sanders couldn't find a single co-sponsor for his bill. [...] The combined result of Sanders's carrot-and-stick approach — the implicit threat of criticism from the outside, the concessions from within — is a single-payer bill that 15 Senate Democrats have publicly said they will support, and an abrupt transformation in a political party's health care policy position that almost nobody could have guessed even a few months ago. "
But "Democratic leaders keep distance from Sanders single-payer plan: Democratic support for a single-payer health-care system has grown by bounds this year, attracting more lawmaker endorsements than any time in the past. But one group is conspicuously not on board: party leaders. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Tuesday previewed the much-anticipated release of Sen. Bernie Sanders's (I-Vt.) 'Medicare for all' bill by taking the notable step of refusing to throw their weight behind it. 'Right now I'm protecting the Affordable Care Act,' Pelosi told a group of reporters in the Capitol."
Back in September, Gaius Publius was saying that the sudden emergence of Democrats signing on to Sanders bill was open rebellion that forced our enemies to show us where they stand rather than the usual "closed rebellion" where everything is done quietly behind closed doors so that the establishment can be protected from being seen for what they are by the public. "If you keep these points in mind as the debate evolves, you'll be well-positioned to understand what ensues," he wrote at the time. Howie Klein's "The Third Way Has Always Been A Fancy Excuse For Politicians Taking Massive Special Interest Bribes is almost a companion piece toward the end, with details confirming that sentence. And also reminding people of what a disgusting piece of crap Tony Blair is, I'm happy to say.
* Howie also notes that while even the worst Democrats are not quite as bad as the worst Republicans, it just isn't true to say that every Democrat is better than any Republican.
Dean Baker, "Why Don't Normal Liability Rules Put Equifax Out of Business? [...] In terms of breaches, we don't know how much damage people will suffer from the most recent one but suppose we just give a nominal amount, say $100, to each of the 140 million victims. This would come to $14 billion. If people suffer serious damage in the form of stolen identities leading to phony credit charges and stolen assets, the damages would be hugely higher. The revenue (not profits) of the three credit agencies is $10 billion a year, If these companies faced liability in accordance with the actual harm caused by preventable errors, it is difficult to see how they could stay in business. This raises the question of what sort of legal liability the credit agencies face."
Ryan Cooper in The Week, "Trump made his very first halfway smart political move. Too bad it's too late. The federal debt limit, an archaic holdover from a century ago, needs to be raised again soon. Remarkably, President Trump has reached an agreement with congressional Democrats not just to raise it, but to look into abolishing it altogether — drawing the fury of the congressional Republican leadership. What is perhaps most surprising is that it took this long for Trump to try this tactic — and long past when it would have possibly worked. Folks — and by the way, everyone is saying this, you'd be surprised — the president is stupid."
Republicans claim that passing their health care bill "keeps campaign promises" — but it doesn't look much like the campaign promises Trump made. Fortunately, it all fell apart again when they couldn't get the votes.
Sam Seder had Marcy Wheeler on to explain the latest state of play. She seems more convinced than I am that Guccifer is with the Russians, but even she admits it's only what they say, and not what we can see.
* Sammy also had Stephanie Kelton on again for another tutorial on Modern Monetary Theory and how it works.
David Dayen in The Nation, "Did President Trump Really Strike A Deal That Screwed Republicans?: The whole question revolves around whether Democrats actually want to play hardball. [...] All that said, Republican leaders might see this turn of events as positive, regardless of what they are saying in public. They had a packed schedule to deal with in September, and this allows them to put off some major decisions. Plus, they can place the blame with President Trump instead of themselves. It takes some pressure off leadership from the rank and file. To see this as truly good for Democrats, you have to believe that there's some endgame for which Chuck and Nancy are willing to hold out. Do people really think that Democrats would play games with the full faith and credit of the US government? I simply don't see them being that ruthless; this is a difference between the parties. Democrats generally aren't interested in crippling the government, but that's what they'd have to be willing to risk in order to succeed in the negotiations."
Alice Speri, "Israel Security Forces Are Training American Cops Despite History of Rights Abuses: It's not uncommon for residents of America's most heavily policed neighborhoods to describe their local cops as 'an occupying force.' Judging by where many U.S. police forces get their training, the description seems apt. Thousands of American law enforcement officers frequently travel for training to one of the few countries where policing and militarism are even more deeply intertwined than they are here: Israel."
Ari Berman, in Mother Jones, "A New Study Shows Just How Many Americans Were Blocked From Voting in Wisconsin Last Year [...] The study's lead author, University of Wisconsin political scientist Kenneth Mayer, says between roughly 9,000 and 23,000 registered voters in the reliably Democratic counties were deterred from voting by the ID law. Extrapolating statewide, he says the data suggests as many as 45,000 voters sat out the election. 'We have hard evidence there were tens of thousands of people who were unable to vote because of the voter ID law,' Mayer told me. "
Matt Stoller in The Nation, "How America Could Collapse: Supply chain shocks have already led to shortages of videotape and auto parts. Could food or medicine be next?"
Bloomberg, "Obama Goes From White House to Wall Street in Less Than One Year [...] But Jeff Hauser, who studies political corruption as head of the Revolving Door Project in Washington, said Obama should play by the same rules as other politicians because of his ongoing work with the Democratic Party. 'He's continuing to exercise the authority,' Hauser said, citing Obama's support for the party's redistricting committee and the push he gave Tom Perez in the race to head the Democratic National Committee. If he wants to play a role, 'he ought to forgo a few hundred thousand here and maybe a half-million there.'"
"Obama: 'The world has never been healthier, wealthier or less violent': Former president urges optimism and focus on progress at Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation conference, despite shadow cast by Trump's UN speech." And despite the shadow cast by how these neoliberals have made the world a poorer and more violent place.
Dday in The New Republic, "Why You Should Side With Google Against an Anti-Sex Trafficking Bill: People of all political stripes now argue for regulation that treats these companies as public utilities, like the telephone industry, or for stronger antitrust regulation — that is, to break up these giants. The first real legislative test amid this more hostile atmosphere comes Tuesday at a hearing in the Senate Commerce Committee. Tech firms, in particular Google, are being criticized for quietly opposing a bipartisan bill that would let victims of sex trafficking sue websites that facilitate it. The companies contend that, while they oppose sex traffickers like Backpage.com, the bill would create a slippery slope toward limiting or removing all user-generated web content, the lifeblood of sites like YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook. It's hard to be coolly rational about heinous crimes like forced prostitution. But on the merits, this bill would have troubling implications for free speech online. As this backlash against Silicon Valley grows, we need to be careful that a desire to constrain tech monopolies doesn't harm the rest of us."
Democratic pollster, Stanley Greenberg, on "How She Lost [...] The campaign's approach senselessly and increasingly drove up Trump's margin in white working-class communities, tipping Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Florida. The analytics model built around these assumptions was so simple-minded it portended disaster. Despite overwhelming evidence that the Democratic base wasn't consolidated or excited, the campaign believed Trump's tasteless attacks and Clinton's identification with every group in the rainbow coalition would produce near universal support. Thus, they stopped trying to persuade voters and measured only the probability of support for Hillary. The campaign's task was turning out those Clinton voters, and they fell frustratingly short."
"A massive new study reviews the evidence on whether campaigning works. The answer's bleak: In general elections, campaigns' attempts to win swing voters appear to not work at all. [...] This doesn't mean that political campaigns never matter. Kalla and Broockman find that these activities can persuade voters in primary elections and during ballot-initiative campaigns. Campaigns can still effectively turn out voters whose minds are already made up about a candidate, and voters can and do change their opinions when prompted by politicians they already support (something a previous study of Broockman's confirmed)."
"The Boring Story of the 2016 Election: Donald Trump did not win because of a surge of white support. Indeed he got less white support than Romney got in 2012. Nor did Trump win because he got a surge from other race+gender groups. The exit polls show him doing slightly better with black men, black women, and latino women than Romney did, but basically he just hovered around Romney's numbers with every race+gender group, doing slightly worse than Romney overall. However, support for Hillary was way below Obama's 2012 levels, with defectors turning to a third party. Clinton did worse with every single race+gender combo except white women, where she improved Obama's outcome by a single point. Clinton did not lose all this support to Donald. She lost it into the abyss. Voters didn't like her but they weren't wooed by Trump.
Shock Tactics: In the most detailed study ever of fatalities and litigation involving police use of stun guns, Reuters finds more than 150 autopsy reports citing Tasers as a cause or contributor to deaths across America. Behind the fatalities is a sobering reality: Many who die are among society's vulnerable — unarmed, in psychological distress and seeking help."
"Democrats are losing their most loyal voters: black women. [...] These voters aren't running into the arms of Republicans, of course — just one percent of respondents said the GOP best represents them. But the percentage of black women who said neither party represents them jumped from 13 percent in 2016 to 21 percent in 2017. Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, a Texas Democrat in the Congressional Black Caucus, addressed the news after the poll's release at the Washington Convention Center. 'I respect independents. I understand independents,' she told the crowd, arguing that her party needs to do more to communicate its values. 'I've never said I'm in the Democratic Party because I like to party,' she said. 'I'm in there because of values.'"
Pierce, "You're Not Supposed to Say This Out Loud: Deficits are just a talking point when Democrats are in power."
* Atrios said much the same thing, "Nobody Ever Cared About The Deficit: The simplest proof of the fact that almost every political reporter was either dumb as rocks, happy to be lied to, or, most likely, was on board with the ideology that government spending money on anything except war is bad, was that they took deficit concerns seriously. Nobody cares about the deficit (and, mostly, they shouldn't!). [...] They don't care. They never cared. Republican presidents run up the deficit and Democratic ones bring it down, and after decades of this the Republicans are still the party of fiscal responsibility according to political journalists. Republicans hate spending any money for nice things and love tax cuts for rich people. That's it. I am a dumb blogger and I know this. You all get paid big salaries by our leading media outlets and you are stupid or liars."
RIP: Charles Bradley, soul singer, at 68: Sam Cooke sang about a change that was gonna come. It spread optimism to black Americans. Charles Bradley, on the other hand, sang of moral corruption and turning to love to survive, because who knows when change will finally come."
RIP "Hugh Hefner: Playboy magazine founder dies aged 91: Playboy Enterprises Inc said he passed away peacefully at home in Los Angeles, from natural causes." (Playboy's own obit for Hefner is here.) A lot of feminists won't say this, but I will: Playboy was a great contributor to the sexual revolution, supporting reproductive rights and making sex something you could actually discuss and ask questions about. The Playboy Advisor I read when I was a teenager and young adult was thoughtful and not sexist at all, often giving truly useful advice to men and women alike. (I noticed in later years that he'd been replaced by someone else who wasn't nearly as good.) Its support for civil rights was undoubtedly a helpful addition to the discourse. Yes, famously, when an Ursula Le Guin story was published in its pages, she appeared as "U.K. Le Guin", but Playboy paid top dollar for science fiction stories (!), even to someone named "Ursula", as well as publishing, every month, some of the best interviews on topical issues of every kind. In 1965, Martin Luther King gave his longest interview ever to Alex Haley for Playboy; in a 1968 issue of Playboy, Haley interviewed George Lincoln Rockwell, the founder of the American Nazi Party. (They had already published his interview with Malcolm X in 1963.) And of course, Playboy was there with it's timely interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, which had already been scheduled for publication, by sheerest coincidence, to appear just after Lennon's murder. Hefner's fight to force the US Post Office to carry Playboy to subscribers through the mails was a major victory for free speech which still has impact today on both what's delivered to your front door and what is on the internet. And Hefner was there with the money Dick Gregory needed to pressure the FBI to find the bodies of three murdered civil rights workers. He wasn't the father of the sexual/revolution by any means, but he brought it to the public and fought to preserve it, and made civil rights a moral imperative for many who had probably given it little thought. That's no small thing.
Jay Rosen "Getting granular with the claim that Trump is some media wizard: That our President is a master of media manipulation is a view commonly expressed by American journalists. I doubt it." I've long wondered about this. What is it about journalists that makes them so willing to dance to Trump's tune?
This article is terrible framing and has some of the worst sentences I've seen on the subject. I really wish people wouldn't do this stuff. It's not illuminating and it just implies something that isn't true. Stoppit! And here's an article by someone else who doesn't like these sorts of articles. "Ta-Nehisi Coates, however, illustrates the debilitating limits of what 'identity politics' has now come to represent, something far from the radical and coalitional practice of the Combahee River Collective: a moralizing discourse which monopolizes the discussion of race, yet fails to propose either a coherent theory of racial oppression or a viable program for eliminating it. Coates deploys his considerable erudition and rhetorical flourish in service of sheer obfuscation — the story of whiteness as magic and Trump as sorcerer. Despite the gingerly placed historical references, in Coates's telling whiteness has no history. It is a malevolent force which surges from the netherworld in moments which can only be identified by the intensity of Coates's own feelings — the American Dream become Coates's personal nightmare."
Beat the Press, "Washington Post News Article Argues It is Better to Tax Work Than Vacant Property in London: Economists usually argue that it's best to tax the things you want discourage, like cigarettes, alcohol, and gasoline, not things you want to encourage, like work. That is why it is striking that the Washington Post could not find one economist who thought that a plan in London to tax vacant housing units is a good idea."
Alex Pareen, "You Are Jonathan Chait's Enemy [...] Something that is well-known to people who've read Chait for years, but may not be apparent to those who just think of him as a standard-issue center-left pundit who is sort of clueless about race, is that he is engaged in a pretty specific political project: Ensuring that you and people like you don't gain control of his party. I say 'you' because his conception of the left almost certainly includes you. He is not merely against Jill Stein voters and unreconstructed Trotskyites and Quaker pacifists. He means basically anyone to the left of Bill Clinton in 1996. If you support a less militaristic foreign policy, if you believe the Democratic Party should do more to dismantle structural racism and create a more equitable distribution of wealth, if you think Steve fucking King is a white supremacist, Chait is opposed to you nearly as staunchly as he is opposed to Paul Ryan."
Sam Seder did an interesting interview with George Monbiot about Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis on The Majority Report.
Paul Jay of Reality Asserts Itselftalked with Thomas Frank about how the Democratic Party hates the base and has been trying to purge us since Clinton.
"The Jones Act: The Law Strangling Puerto Rico [...] After World War I, America was worried about German U-boats, which had sunk nearly 5,000 ships during the war. Congress enacted the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, a.k.a. the Jones Act, to ensure that the country maintained a shipbuilding industry and seafaring labor force. Section 27 of this law decreed that only American ships could carry goods and passengers from one United States port to another. In addition, every ship must be built, crewed and owned by American citizens. Almost a century later, there are no U-boats lurking off the coast of Puerto Rico. The Jones Act has outlived its original intent, yet it is strangling the island's economy. Under the law, any foreign registry vessel that enters Puerto Rico must pay punitive tariffs, fees and taxes, which are passed on to the Puerto Rican consumer. [...] The foreign vessel has one other option: It can reroute to Jacksonville, Fla., where all the goods will be transferred to an American vessel, then shipped to Puerto Rico where — again — all the rerouting costs are passed through to the consumer."
Katherine Krueger, "Hillary Clinton Will Never Understand What Happened [...] 'When someone shows you who they are, believe them,' Clinton said again and again on the campaign trail. Unfortunately for her, this goes both ways. Through decades of being a Washington insider, Clinton has shown herself to be a foreign policy hawk, a capitalist of the highest order, and an opportunist who's been tarred with the 'slime' of many scandals even she recognizes can never be fully washed away. Above all, Clinton has relentlessly embraced the notion that politics must bend to the world as it is — no matter how sordid — rather than imagine the world as it could or should be. It is this quality that she defends perhaps most zealously in What Happened, despite the fact that her unapologetic embrace of that ethos helped create the world that gave us Donald Trump. In 2016, Clinton showed people who she was. Voters in the crucial states that decided the race believed her, and rejected her. In What Happened, she shows us again. Nearly a year later, the image hasn't changed."
Sam Kriss in The Huffington Post, "What Should Have Happened In Hillary Clinton's Useless Book: An artless and inauthentic memoir, written by the absence of Clinton. [...] Vagueness seeps everywhere. Discussing her decision to launch a second presidential bid, Clinton protests that she wasn't simply after power. 'I wanted power to do what I could to help solve problems and prepare the country for the future. It's audacious for anyone to believe he or she should be President, but I did.' What problems? Solve them how? The answers reveal a strange antinomy of her liberal-centrist leadership cult. Clinton's policy team started using data and focus groups to work out what problems Americans were concerned with, and started scouring think tanks for solutions. Clinton is not partisan or ideological. She simply follows the facts. In other words, she did something that absolutely anyone else should be capable of doing. She is an exceptional individual who deserved to be president, precisely because she's just another cog in the bureaucratic machine. In the counter-democratic universe of establishment managerialism, elections are just another interview process for another government job; the winner should be the person with the most gold stars on their résumé, and we can trust that they're embedded enough in the mechanisms of government to use their authority properly. It's a politics of systems and social control: Power is always a question of efficiency and problem-solving, never one of justice. Trump, too, is a member of the New York ruling classes. He is also blissfully unencumbered by any cohesive ideology, preferring 'deals' (read: bipartisanship) and 'answers' (read: solutions). He is also someone who wanted power; not to do anything in particular with it, but because he thought he deserved it."
Bryce Covert in The New Republic, "Deadbeat Democrats: How Bill Clinton set the stage for the GOP's war on the poor. [...] In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan's talk of lazy 'welfare queens' and 'strapping young bucks' buying expensive steaks on the government's dime had turned welfare into a dirty word. By 1989, two-thirds of Americans thought welfare made people dependent and 'content' to stay poor. Feeling hemmed in by white voters who had responded to Reagan's racemongering about the shiftless poor guzzling up government benefits, Clinton decided to make a sort of Faustian bargain: He would 'reform' welfare in a way that would detoxify the politics around it, gambling that the move would create more support for a strong safety net in the long run. 'Once taxpayers started viewing the poor as workers, not welfare cheats, a more generous era would ensue,' The New York Times observed in 2000, summing up the rationale for Clinton's wager on welfare reform. 'Harmful stereotypes would fade. New benefits would flow.' Celebrating the law's passage in 1996, Clinton repeated his Reaganesque justification for sweeping change. 'The current welfare system undermines the basic values of work, responsibility, and family,' he declared, 'trapping generation after generation in dependency.' In the end, though, Clinton never succeeded at getting more generous benefits for the poor. And his bet on 'reform' turned what was once a helping hand into a slap in the face — and an utter disaster for the vulnerable. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act ended the Great Society promise of cash benefits for all families in need. It imposed work requirements on recipients of welfare benefits, and allowed states to erect further barriers to aid. And it plunged millions into even deeper poverty. In 1996, nearly 70 percent of poor families received benefits. Today it's less than 25 percent. And that's not because they all found decent jobs and developed the sense of 'personal responsibility' and 'self-sufficiency' that Clinton loved to preach about. According to a study of low-income single mothers, more than 20 percent go for months at a time with neither employment nor benefits. Since 1995, the number of Americans living on $2 or less a day has nearly tripled — including some three million children."
"Centrism.biz: Scathing New Parody Site Rips Mask Off 'Zombie Neoliberalism' [...] But what about an online home for the dedicated centrists: for those who prefer small ideas to large ones; for those who oppose both fascism and universal healthcare; for those who take money from the murderous Saudi regime and still claim to value human rights? Centrists, the wait is finally over: Centrism.biz is the brand new, one-stop shop for all things 'moderate.'"
"What sex workers want should be a vital part of feminist politics [...] Whether or not sex work should be considered a job or a form of violence against women is a question that has featured in feminist debates for decades. Those who fully advocate decriminalising sex work do so because they believe that granting sex workers the support, labour rights and legal protections of any other type of employment is the best way to help them stay safe."
Was Malcolm in the Middle actually a socialist masterpiece? "Malcolm in the Middle showed that the promises of neoliberalism had always been false."
"Orange is the new green: How orange peels revived a Costa Rican forest: PRINCETON, N.J.--In the mid-1990s, 1,000 truckloads of orange peels and orange pulp were purposefully unloaded onto a barren pasture in a Costa Rican national park. Today, that area is covered in lush, vine-laden forest. A team led by Princeton University researchers surveyed the land 16 years after the orange peels were deposited. They found a 176 percent increase in aboveground biomass -- or the wood in the trees -- within the 3-hectare area (7 acres) studied. Their results are published in the journal Restoration Ecology."
Dept. of Google Doing Evil:
Note: Barry C. Lynn mentioned herein is a different fellow from Barry W. Lynn of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Both are normally referred to only as "Barry Lynn". * NYT: "Google Critic Ousted From Think Tank Funded by the Tech Giant: WASHINGTON — In the hours after European antitrust regulators levied a record $2.7 billion fine against Google in late June, an influential Washington think tank learned what can happen when a wealthy tech giant is criticized. The New America Foundation has received more than $21 million from Google; its parent company's executive chairman, Eric Schmidt; and his family's foundation since the think tank's founding in 1999. That money helped to establish New America as an elite voice in policy debates on the American left and helped Google shape those debates. But not long after one of New America's scholars posted a statement on the think tank's website praising the European Union's penalty against Google, Mr. Schmidt, who had been chairman of New America until 2016, communicated his displeasure with the statement to the group's president, Anne-Marie Slaughter, according to the scholar. [...] Ms. Slaughter told Mr. Lynn that 'the time has come for Open Markets and New America to part ways,' according to an email from Ms. Slaughter to Mr. Lynn. The email suggested that the entire Open Markets team — nearly 10 full-time employees and unpaid fellows — would be exiled from New America."
* Matt Stoller at The Huffington Post, "Citizens Against Monopoly: As Google aims to consolidate complete power over discussion and free expression, it is time to heighten public urgency and pushback. [...] In late June, the European competition authority handed down a decision against Google for monopolizing the search market and suppressing rivals. It was a classic case of anti-competitive behavior, and the EU made the right decision. What's interesting, however, is not the decision, but what happened next across the ocean in Washington, D.C. My group, the Open Markets Program at New America, researches and studies monopoly power. Barry Lynn began this research 15 years ago, and has been building the necessary intellectual and historical grammar to understand the deep dysfunction in our corporate and political sectors. In response to the EU decision, Lynn sent a statement lauding the action. In response, Google had our group kicked out of our parent think tank, New America. Ken Vogel at the New York Times did the story on the specifics of how this happened. The combination, of the misbehavior in the search market and the attempt to suppress research into how Google operates, shows that the actual issue at hand is one of political power."
* Matthew Yglesias at Vox, "A leading Google critic's firing from a Google-funded think tank, explained: Forget it, Jake. It's Washington. [...] Google seems to have implicitly or explicitly used its financial clout to pressure New America to dissociate itself from Lynn, and now Lynn and his team are leaving New America and (apparently with some funding in hand) creating a new organization — Citizens Against Monopoly. In this particular case, Google's heavy-handed tactics seem more likely than not to backfire. But the case sheds light on the growing tendency of companies to use think tanks as essentially stealth lobbyists, and underscores the ways in which their priorities can shape the research agenda in Washington, even if it typically happens in more subtle ways." As long as Google was on the side of the consumer against telecoms companies, things were cozy. "What makes Google somewhat unusual for such a big company is that it's fairly closely aligned with the Democratic Party. Dozens of people moved from jobs at Google to jobs in the Obama administration, and vice versa, over its eight-year span. Schmidt was a major Hillary Clinton donor. More tellingly, Schmidt owns a company called Civis Analytics that does an enormous amount of behind-the-scenes data work for Democratic Party campaigns. This alignment grows out of both cultural affinity between Democrats and Google on social issues, and also years of regulatory struggle that often saw Google, Democrats, and consumer groups on one side pitted against telecommunications industry incumbents." But when it comes to anti-trust, Google is clearly on the other side, and they don't like it.
* Zephyr Teachout at The Interecept, "How I Got Fired From a D.C. Think Tank for Fighting Against the Power of Google"
And anti-monopoly arguments are penetrating. Even The Wall Street Journal takes "A Provocative Look at the Harm From Corporate Heft [...] That can be good: size and scale can enable companies to reduce costs, invest in better products and compete globally. But a provocative new study concludes the opposite. It found that in recent decades a lack of competition has driven up prices, hurting U.S. growth, wages and labor-force participation.
Marshall Steinbaum at The Roosevelt Institute, "A Real Monopoly Moment: The news that Barry Lynn's Open Markets group has been evicted from its DC think tank home, New America, for crossing the interests of its major funder, Google, is a legitimately shocking development. This development crystalizes the concerns about monopoly power that we at Roosevelt have been pointing out these past few years — along with our like-minded colleagues who have set up shop at the new Citizens Against Monopoly. Evidence is mounting that market power is causing economic problems: stagnant growth, rising inequality, slack labor markets, and vacant storefronts and factories. It should surprise no one that this excess power is now threatens intellectual freedom and inquiry. Concentrated power does not appreciate being called out."
Here's a good 2013 article by Lynn, on an earlier era of anti-trust action, "Estates of Mind: The answer to America's techno-malaise is to force big corporations to compete more. And to open their patent vaults. [...] Or consider the business software giant Oracle. Its CEO, Larry Ellison, once said that acquiring another company was 'a confession that there's a failure to innovate.' Then in 2004 Ellison began to gobble up precisely those competitors most likely to force Oracle to innovate. This included PeopleSoft, Siebel, Sun Microsystems, and more than eighty other firms. The story is not much different at Google, which has vacuumed up more than 120 former competitors, along with their products, patents, and, often, their scientists and engineers. If you think of Google as an innovative company, remember that it was the smaller companies it swallowed that actually developed most of its key components. These include YouTube, DoubleClick, and the ITA airline reservation system, as well as ten search companies that no longer compete with Google because Google now owns them. Much the same is true of Intel, Corning, Pfizer, and Microsoft. These giants don't merely set standards for certain formats of semiconductors, glass, pharmaceuticals, and software. Their mastery over patents and markets empowers them to block or buy most any newcomer that might threaten their sovereignty. What technologies are developed, and how and where they are developed, is increasingly up to these small clubs of executives alone. [...] Nevertheless, problems soon emerged. By the mid-nineteenth century, American financiers had figured out how to use patent monopolies not merely to hobble rival innovators but also to erect corporate empires; by the turn of the twentieth century, they had largely perfected the art. One of the more notable instances saw J. P. Morgan grab control of the electrical patents of Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, and Nikola Tesla, and then use the resulting 'pool' to control the entire electrical industry. One lawyer of that era even penned a primer for businessmen. 'Patents are the best and most effective means of controlling competition,' he wrote. Sometimes, he added, patents 'give absolute command of the market, enabling the owner to name the price without regard to cost of production.' The first coherent reactions against such abuse of patents also date to this time. In 1900, political scientist Jeremiah Jenks proposed using antitrust law to compel giant companies to license their patents."
David Dayen at The New Republic, "Democrats Face an Important Anti-Monopoly Test: How the party treats Trump's pick for antitrust enforcement will speak volumes about its commitment to fighting corporate consolidation. [...] The authority to change those guidelines rests with the head of the DOJ's antitrust division. So the Delrahim nomination suddenly puts the Democrats' credibility on the line. It's highly unlikely Delrahim would upend the consumer welfare standard. He praised it in this 2003 speech from when he served in the Justice Department under George W. Bush, arguing that 'increased use of economic thinking has transformed federal merger analysis.' Analysts at Hughes Hubbard put Delrahim 'within the mainstream of the last several decades' antitrust orthodoxy.' That's just what Democrats, in A Better Deal, claim to want to break from."
David Dayen on how we are, "Canada's China: Buried amid NAFTA negotiations this week was a fun little nugget: we are Canada's China. Our corporate titan-backed rollout of "right to work" principles in state after state has denied a level playing field for Canadian manufacturers, which is all the U.S. ever says we want in trade negotiations. So Canada decided to call us on it."
Dday at The Intercept, "The Politics Of The Dream Act Seem Pretty Easy, But Some Democrats Are Still Screwing It Up: IF SENATE DEMOCRATS were united in 2010, undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children would already be on the path to citizenship. A vote on the DREAM Act held after the disastrous midterm elections got three Republican votes, enough to break a filibuster at the time if Democrats held firm. But six Democratic defections ' five no votes and one abstention ' sunk the bill, leading then-President Barack Obama to eventually establish the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, to protect the 'Dreamers.' [...] In other words, Congress is falling into two camps: not for and against a DREAM Act, but for and against voting on a DREAM Act by itself. And calling for a comprehensive immigration solution — which Congress has failed to agree on for decades, even when the parties were far less polarized — is pretty close to being against anything getting done. It's a cheap way to earn support and respect from a public that overwhelmingly supports DACA — 76 percent in favor of allowing beneficiaries to stay, including 69 percent of Republicans — without having to vote to keep them in the country."
Brent Budowsky in The Hill, "How Sanders could save the Democratic Party in 2018: Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is the conscience of the Democratic Party at a moment in history when it is crucial that Democrats stand for profiles in courage as a historically crucial midterm election effectively begins this week with the return of Congress from recess. [...] Democrats stand on the brink of being on the winning side of an anti-Trump wave election in the 2018 midterm elections. But it is possible for Democrats to win a wave election in the popular vote in 2018 without winning enough seats to gain control of the House of Representatives or the Senate, which would perpetuate one-party control in Washington after the midterm votes are counted. [...] What Sanders and his supporters have, and many Democratic insiders and large donors lack, is the passion and commitment of knowing that they speak for hugely important issues at a dangerous moment for American politics."
"Democrats Put Eric Holder, Best Friend of Wall Street Banks, in Charge of Winning Back Main Street America: Holder was a "double agent" for high finance while serving as America's top cop. [...] Eric Holder, the former U.S. Attorney General, is the chair of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, which promises to unfurl — a targeted, state-by-state strategy that ensures Democrats can fight back — when the political maps are drawn for U.S. House and state legislative races for the decade of the 2020s."
Late to the party, The New York Times appears to take vote-rigging seriously — but only if the Russians are in it. "Susan Greenhalgh, a troubleshooter at a nonpartisan election monitoring group, was alarmed. Most of the complaints came from Durham, a blue-leaning county in a swing state. The problems involved electronic poll books — tablets and laptops, loaded with check-in software, that have increasingly replaced the thick binders of paper used to verify voters' identities and registration status. She knew that the company that provided Durham's software, VR Systems, had been penetrated by Russian hackers months before." Let's see, where was the NYT 17 years ago....?
Ryan Cooper in The Week, "Did Kamala Harris just become a Bernie Bro? [...] Now Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), a centrist darling, has taken up the major proposal of the left, by becoming a co-sponsor of Bernie Sanders' Medicare-for-all bill. She may have become ... one of the Dread Bernie Bros. This is interesting, and not a little amusing, on multiple levels. But it's also a good opportunity to drive home the fact that the largest beneficiaries of an agenda of economic populism would be oppressed minorities, especially black and Latino Americans." (I was amused to see Cooper says the "centrists" who attacked him for an earlier article subjected him to a social media pile-on that was worse than he'd had from the Gamergate crowd. I tell ya, those HillBros are the worst. Meanwhile, Joy Reid is the poster child for deranged Clintonophilia.) "Jokes aside, what matters about this move is how it clarifies both recent history and the policy stakes. The problem with the argument about political success from Reid and Dean is that it's completely at odds with recent electoral results. Democrats just ran a compromising, centrist, big-donor candidate with a 3-2 money advantage and lost to the biggest buffoon in the history of presidential politics. Overall, the party is in its worst shape since 1928. If anybody is calling for a "purity test," it's people continuing to cling to such a world-historical failure."
"Best Looting of West Baltimore: The Hogan Administration Making Off with the Red Line Funds: It has been a shitty year for West Baltimore. But of all the crimes committed in 2015, nothing trumps Gov. Larry Hogan's decision to cancel the Red Line. The proposed subway-to-surface light-rail line — which had been planned for more than a decade and was supposed to break ground this year — would have linked impoverished West Baltimore to thousands of jobs and the rest of the city's transit system. To add insult to injury, the transportation funds that the O'Malley administration had been saving for the rail project were redistributed to wealthier, low-density counties for sprawl-inducing highway projects. Baltimore City literally received $0 from the 'savings.' So instead of providing life-changing access to employment, education, and health care to an area with the lowest car ownership in the state, that money is now going to projects such as widening roads in the middle of nowhere. And the $900 million the federal government was giving the MTA to cover its half of construction costs? That's now going somewhere other than Maryland, not to mention the millions of dollars already spent on planning and right-of-way acquisition. Even in a city known for crime, this is a heist for the history books."
"In Arizona, People Power Triumphs Over Dark Money in School Voucher Fight: In Arizona, people power just won a major victory over national dark money groups. In 90 days, more than 2,500 regular Arizona voters fanned out across the state, collecting more than 110,000 signatures to block a radical and highly controversial expansion of school vouchers pushed through by our GOP legislature and governor this spring. In a state that already ranks dead last in teacher pay and hovers just above last place for per-student spending, parents would now be able to take money out of local public schools to use toward private, home-school and religious education. With their signatures, 110,000 Arizona residents said 'enough.' Another cut to public school funding would be devastating. [...] Political insiders were quick to dismiss us. They said that the controversial law was more of the same, nothing to get hot and bothered about, and that Save Our Schools would turn out to a political blip in a state where residents are ready to walk away from their public schools. They were wrong.
"Federal Judge Bars Enforcement Of Texas' Voter ID Laws: The permanent injunction against the law follows years of litigation, but will be appealed. The Justice Department, which once backed the challengers to the state's voter ID law, reversed course once Trump took office — urging that recent amendments to the law eliminated its discriminatory effects."
"Emmanuel Macron's Waning Support Shakes Bid to Overhaul French Economy: PARIS — As Emmanuel Macron sets out to shake up France's rigid labor market, the young president is losing the public support he may need to weather protests by the country's powerful unions. [...] Unpopular budget cuts, accusations of an authoritarian approach and weeks of critical news coverage have sent Mr. Macron's approval ratings in a downward spiral. The latest poll, published in mid-August by public opinion firm Harris Interactive, found that 37% of voters approve of him, down from 51% in July and 59% in June. Given that drop, Mr. Macron will have to tread carefully in rolling out his labor reforms in September. For months, the 39-year-old president has been in talks with powerful labor unions in a bid to contain planned street protests. Now the prospect is growing that the ranks of those demonstrations could swell with students, retirees and other segments of French society unhappy with Mr. Macron's early steps." He wants to bust unions. He's going to be the Bill Clinton of France, wrecking the economy and calling it "reform".
This may be a bit late, but worth taking note of, from Jon Schwarz, "Happy Labor Day! There Has Never Been a Middle Class Without Strong Unions" points out a number of benefits of unions, including this one: "Dean Baker, co-director of a Washington, D.C. think tank called the Center for Economic and Policy Research, or CEPR, is arguably the only economist in the U.S. who both recognized the danger of the gigantic U.S. housing bubble in the mid-2000s and warned about it loudly. But Baker didn't appear out of nowhere. His first job in Washington was at the Economic Policy Institute, which was founded in 1986 with a five-year funding pledge from eight unions. His foothold there made it possible for him to eventually co-found CEPR and make his case on the housing bubble. (I know this about Baker because I briefly worked for CEPR long ago.)"
You can tell we've got a better pope. "U.S. Bishops' Labor Day message: 'Unions must retain and recover their prophetic voice': WASHINGTON (CNS) -- 'Excessive inequality' threatens cooperation among all people in society 'and the social pact it supports,' said Bishop Frank J. Dewane of Venice, Florida, in the U.S. bishops' annual Labor Day statement. In the message, Bishop Dewane cited the words of Pope Francis, who told factory workers in Genoa, Italy, 'The entire social pact is built around work. This is the core of the problem. Because when you do not work, or you work badly, you work little or you work too much, it is democracy that enters into crisis, and the entire social pact.' [...] Workers' legal rights to 'a just wage in exchange for work, to protection against wage theft, to workplace safety and just compensation for workplace injuries, to health care and other benefits, and to organize and engage in negotiations, should be promoted,' he added. 'Workers must be aided to come to know and exercise their legal rights. As an example, CCHD has supported the Don Bosco Workers in Westchester, New York, which has launched a successful campaign to combat wage theft. Persons returning from prison also need support to understand their legal rights as they seek new employment. CCHD has helped the Society of St. Vincent de Paul in Cincinnati and elsewhere as they work with returning citizens to find stable and meaningful jobs.' Labor unions play an important role in this effort, according to Bishop Dewane, as he quoted from Pope Francis' remarks in June in an audience with delegates from the Confederation of Trade Unions: 'There is no good society without a good union, and there is no good union that is not reborn every day in the peripheries, that does not transform the discarded stones of the economy into its cornerstones.'"
"What Can Trump Learn From Local Governments? How Not To Handle Infrastructure: Public-private partnerships are frequently portrayed, especially by President Donald Trump, as an easy infrastructure fix for cities and states with tight budgets. But horror stories of so-called 'P3s' gone wrong have been making headlines for the past decade, often as a result of contractual clauses that prove costly for governments or keep information from the public eye. They don't have to be that way." This article is actually too kind on several fronts, since it singles out a handful of egregious examples but fails to point out that it's not just a few examples but rather the norm. There was a time when government and the commercial sector could work together for a common goal, but that was before the sole goal was to ensure massive profits to commercial industry even if it meant high costs go government at the expense of public services. If, for example, the goal were to get everyone to work, you might get the commercial sector to pitch in with government to build the New York subway system. Today, the goal of getting everyone to work would be pretty much on the back-burner, with transport merely a gimmick for skimmers to make more money.
Marcy Wheeler, "The Arpaio Pardon: You're Not the Audience: Meanwhile, Brennan Center's Mike German has started to track a disturbing trend. I believe he, like me, thinks the FBI is generally adequate at infiltrating white supremacist groups to disrupt the most outrageous attacks. But what law enforcement is not doing is policing right wing violence at protests the same way it polices left protests." It's about cops.
Bernie Sanders in Fortune: "Why Medicare-for-All Is Good for Business" — for one thing, it cuts out 33% of costs from administration alone, not to mention the extortion to fatten insurance company exec's wallets.
Another day, another reframing of the CCES study of who voted how and why. As Lambert notes, the original framing was about Obama voters who jumped ship to vote for Trump, but this week's frame is Sanders supporters who did so — and caused the election of Trump, because they were a bunch of racists. The data don't actually say that, though, and there are plenty of reasons to think other factors were involved, even for these people who clearly had no intention to vote for a status quo candidate of either party. (It shouldn't be forgotten that of actual Democrats, more Clinton-supporting Democrats defected to McCain in 2008 than Sanders-supporting Democrats defected to Trump. That's a particularly interesting jump since, policy-wise, there was virtually no difference between the two Democratic candidates in 2008 beside sex and race. This was not the case in the 2016 race, where differences in the records and approaches of the two contenders for the Democratic nomination were significant.) The study seemed to use views on "trade" as an indicator of whether views on the economy or simple racism were the strongest motivators for these Trump voters, but, "Let me remark here that other factors that correlate with voting for Trump include poor credit scores, battlefield casualties, employment situation, and deaths of despair. These do not seem to have been considered by CCES, or if considered were not brought forward by Schaffner, and it is not clear to me that views on trade or race are adequate proxies for them."
Meanwhile, "Bernie Sanders, Nation's Highest Profile Socialist, Once Again Voted Most Popular [...] According to the poll — conducted online from Aug. 17-22 with 2,263 Democrats, Republicans, and registered Independents — Sanders is currently the only politician in the whole country who "a majority of Americans actually like." Among the respondents, 54 percent view Sanders favorably with just 36 percent taking the opposite view. Compared to others included in the survey — including Republicans like McConnell, President Donald Trump, and Vice President Mike Pence as well as top Democratic leaders like Hillary Clinton, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, and Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California — it wasn't even close. 'When it comes to the most popular demographics," Bustle reports, "the poll showed Sanders scored highest among millennials — people aged 18-34, who expressed a 62 percent approval rating. Furthermore, 58 percent of women registered to vote view Sanders favorably, as do 55 percent of men.'"
Sections leaked from Clinton's book attack Sanders. Bernie brushes off her contradictory and delusional claims as looking backward when there are more important things to be concerned with. "I'm working overtime now to see we overturn Trump's decision on DACA, pass a $15-an-hour minimum wage, and next week I'll be offering a Medicare-for-all single-payer system." Her claims are pretty strange, though — says he stole her ideas even though he'd actually introduced a bill ten months before she mentioned the subject, and a direct government employment infrastructure program is not merely "bigger" or less realistic than her infrastructure bank idea, it's different, better, more likely to result in actual restoration and expansion of infrastructure, and cheaper than a lot of over-financialization. The media is full of talk about Clinton's book, but as Sophia A. McClennen in Salon notes, Bernie has a book out, too, and it isn't being talked about much. Maybe that's because it's not about the 2016 election, about making things better.
Amber A'Lee Frost in Current Affairs, "How To Write About Nazis: When covering the far right, the media has a duty to deliver both facts and context, fearlessly and stoically..." The mainstream press, however, seems to be writing just the kind of pieces they want — either adoring profiles or alarmist nonsense that makes them seem far more mainstream and popular than they are. "Above all, keeps things in perspective. It's true that the far right are coordinating, but they are not on the precipice of seizing power — the traditional right (that old Republican base) already have that squared away. The brownshirts are not at the gates just yet, but if they ever get there, we're not going to beat them back if we lose our heads."
"St. Louis gave minimum-wage workers a raise. On Monday, it was taken away [...] St. Louis is not the first city to see its minimum-wage ordinances undercut by state legislatures. The issue is a divisive topic across America, and there are 25 states that have minimum-wage preemption laws — when state governments approve laws that prevent local governments from passing such measures — including Kentucky and Iowa, according to Paul Sonn, general counsel with the National Employment Law Group."
"Louisiana floods destroy home of Christian leader who says God sends natural disasters to punish gay people: A flood has destroyed the home of a Christian lobbyist who preached that God sends natural disasters to punish gays. President of the controversial Christian group Family Research Council, Tony Perkins, described a deluge of 'near biblical proportions' hitting his Louisiana home." (This story is actually a year old, but it just seemed timely.)
Peter reminds us that, though most Britons know that homosexual sex ceased to be a specific crime in 1967, 25 years later we were still campaigning to make more sense of the law and stop the campaign of harassment by the police. "The Myth of Homosexual Decriminalisation: On the 50th Anniversary of the ground breaking 1967 Sexual Offences Act, the campaigner Peter Tatchell takes a sceptical look at its impact on Britain's gay communities."
"How SB Nation Profits Off An Army Of Exploited Workers [...] Twelve years ago, SB Nation began as a do-it-yourself venture, by and for fans, more a community of communities than a journalistic endeavor. It has since evolved and rebranded itself and emerged as Vox Media, which was valued at $1 billion in 2015 after a $200 million round of funding from NBCUniversal. The SB Nation network itself, consisting of 319 team websites, has remained in place, a vast operation read by millions of people every month and powered by unpaid and underpaid labor."
Beat the Press, "Opposition to Trade Deals: Brad DeLong's "Socialism of Fools" Might Look Like Common Sense to Those Outside the Fraternity: The usually sensible Brad DeLong is very unhappy with those who oppose the agenda that has passed for globalization over the last three decades. He argues that people are foolish for believing that globalization has had a major impact on employment and the distribution of income in recent years. I'll take the side of Brad's 'fools' in this matter."
RIP: "Science fiction author Brian Aldiss dies aged 92: The prolific writer behind more than 80 books and editor of 40 anthologies died at his Oxford home after celebrating his birthday." Well, that's the way to do it — become a revered grandmaster of your craft, and then have a nice bash to celebrate your 92nd birthday, go to bed and die in your sleep.
"Bob Dylan Documentarian Murray Lerner Dead at 90: Oscar nominated filmmaker captured legendary performances at Newport Folk Fest, Isle of Wight." There's a nice little clip there of Mike Bloomfield talking about Sun House and Paul Butterfield.
RIP: "Richard Anderson, Six Million Dollar Man and Bionic Woman Actor, Dies at 91." Other genre credits include Forbidden Planet. He was on most of the regular evening shows in the late '50s and early '60s, including Zorro, The Untouchables, and Perry Mason, as well as having a role in The Fugitive.
My new favorite TV show is Braindead. Unfortunately, it was cancelled after one short season, but it was lots of fun, and when it says, "Previously on Braindead..." Jonathan Coulton sings the recap wonderfully. It can't have had much promotion, we stumbled on it by accident while rummaging through Amazon Prime, having never heard of it before.
119: Skiffle, The Beatles, and Billy Bragg — An interview that explains why George Harrison once said that if there was no Leadbelly there's no Lonnie Donnegan, and if there's no Lonnie Donnegan, there's no Beatles.
A lefty woman was murdered, and others injured, in a terrorist attack on counter-protesters of a Nazi action. Naturally, the fascists claim the "alt-left" was violent, too. For example, they claim they "saw" an antifa protester clubbing a cop. In fact, what they saw was a doctored photo from Greece in 2009.
Marcy Wheeler: "Three Times Donald Trump Treated Vehicular Manslaughter as Terrorism" — but not Charlottesville. "Donald Trump gave the weakest statement on Charlottesville today, even going so far as calling on Americans to 'cherish our history,' in response to a Nazi mob responding to the removal of Confederate symbols."
Ian Welsh, "Oppressive Precedents Used Against Nazis Will Be Used Against the Left." The sudden urge to censor Nazis can feel compelling, but history shows that laws that can be used against either side are more likely to be used against the left, even when they are inspired by a desire to suppress Nazis. Even the guy at who terminated a Nazi site's account isn't happy about doing it, and for good reason: No one should have that power.
Sarah Jones in The New Republic, "Liberals Helped Create Trump's New Bogeyman, the 'Alt-Left' [...] We shouldn't be surprised that Trump is unwilling to blame white supremacists for the fatal violence that struck Charlottesville on August 12, even when one of their cohort murdered an innocent woman, Heather Heyer, who was protesting their presence in her city. We shouldn't be surprised because his every deed and utterance has shown that he either holds similar views or is merely content to let them flourish. Nor should we be surprised by his use of the term 'alt-left.' The only way he can excuse the actions of violent racists is to create a false equivalence. The press, Trump rambled, had treated the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville 'very unfairly.' But we should be at least partly surprised by the origins of this misleading and corrosive term. It is beloved by the likes of Sean Hannity and former White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci, who have used it to denigrate Trump's opponents. And it has also been popularized — and legitimized — by red-baiting liberals who fear the rise of a progressive populist movement."
* Sam Kriss in Politico, "The Myth of the Alt-Left: It began as an epithet hurled from centrist liberals. Now it's backfiring."
* Stanislav Vysotsky in In These Times, "Drawing Equivalencies Between Fascists and Anti-Fascists Is Not Just Wrong — It's Dangerous: We must be very wary of any attempts to excuse or normalize white supremacy."
* "Stop Saying 'Alt-Left'"
* Liam Stack in The New York Times, "Alt-Right, Alt-Left, Antifa: A Glossary of Extremist Language [...] Researchers who study extremist groups in the United States say there is no such thing as the 'alt-left.' Mark Pitcavage, an analyst at the Anti-Defamation League, said the word had been made up to create a false equivalence between the far right and 'anything vaguely left-seeming that they didn't like.'"
It was odd, Steve Bannon decided for some reason to phone Robert Kuttner himself at The American Prospect and give him an on-the-record interview explaining his thinking and strategy. "Steve Bannon, Unrepentant: Trump's embattled strategist phones me, unbidden, to opine on China, Korea, and his enemies in the administration," is how the piece is headed, and although some of his thinking is convoluted, much of what he says rings true. He's certainly right that there is no military solution to Korea. And he's also right when he says, "The Democrats, the longer they talk about identity politics, I got 'em. I want them to talk about racism every day. If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats." Of course, the "centrist" concentration on ignoring — even encouraging — the economic immiseration of Americans of every race while focusing on the fortunes of a few female and minority rising stars of the Democratic right is not serving their party or the country very well. Meanwhile, if the Republicans can keep talking about protecting the American economy (and by implication, American jobs) from China, that's probably going to go down well with a substantial number of voters. It makes it sound like it's the GOP, not the Democratic Party, that wants to help Americans who are being pushed off of the economic ladder. And that appears to be why he lost his job. The Independent says, "The interview that got Steve Bannon fired: Mr Bannon was forced out of the White House after he revealed his ambition to 'crush' political opponents who take a stand against racism" — although it may have been his enemies within the administration who were worried about being "crushed". I certainly don't imagine Republicans in the White House had a problem with Bannon wanting to crush Democrats. Nor was Bannon saying he wanted to crush them because they "take a stand against racism". He was saying — quite rightly, I think — that if Democrats continue their self-destructive strategy of deflecting from the economy in favor of talking just about racism, they will lose. He may be a white supremacist nationalist, but he's not nearly as dumb as whoever wrote that subhead, or the Democrats who can't add 2+2 and see that we started losing as soon as Democrats started agreeing with Republican economic policies and promoting them.
Your typical centrists at work: "The real litmus test is whether pro-life democrats vote for pro-life legislation: Democratic political elites now publicly admit abortion extremism is costing Democrats the votes they need to compete nationally. We at SBA List welcome this admission. But will the Democrats really let pro-lifers' nose under the tent?" Everything in that is wrong. Democrats have always "let" anti-choicers into the party — indeed, even into the party leadership. There has never been a time when that was not so. And the idea that being pro-choice is "extreme" is one that comes from extremists, not from the mainstream of American thought, which largely supports Roe v. Wade.
"Elizabeth Warren fires back at centrist Democrats: ATLANTA — Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) took aim at centrist Democrats on Saturday in front of the one of the largest annual gatherings of progressives in the country. Two days after a new Democratic-aligned superPAC called New Democracy formed to push back against the party's ascendant left wing, Warren argued that Democrats would not be 'going back to the days of welfare reform and the crime bill.' 'We're not going back to the days of being lukewarm on choice,' Warren told a crowd of about 3,000 people at Netroots Nation. 'We're not going back to the days when universal health care was something Democrats talked about on the campaign trail, but were too chicken to fight for after they got elected.'"
"Sanders to Big Pharma: Stop making Americans pay twice While both political parties have denounced the rising cost of prescription drugs, neither Democrats nor Republicans have done much to address the problem. But this summer, a new tool to restrict the rising prices of drugs developed with taxpayer dollars has been introduced by the two U.S. senators who don't belong to either party."
"Tensions Flare as Cuomo Confronts Democratic Rift [...] That was all Senator Andrea Stewart-Cousins, the Senate minority leader who represents the suburbs of Westchester County, needed to hear. 'You look at me, Mr. Governor, but you don't see me. You see my black skin and a woman, but you don't realize I am a suburban legislator,' Ms. Stewart-Cousins said, according to the accounts of five people who were in the room. 'Jeff Klein doesn't represent the suburbs,' she said. 'I do.' Mr. Cuomo reacted in stunned silence."
"Bank of America to Pay $6 Million to Bankrupt Couple Evicted From Home." BoA's behavior was reprehensible, unsurprisingly, and I'm sure receiving this money will be a relief to the homeowners, but this is actually a win for the bank, who were originally supposed to pay $46 million.
Jeff Stein in Vox, "Inside Bernie Sanders's campaign to save Obamacare: On three separate occasions this July, staffers for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) began preparing for the rollout of his new single-payer health care bill. But every time they started to do so, Senate Republicans would improbably revive their push to repeal Obamacare — and Sanders's team would postpone the launch of their 'Medicare-for-all' campaign, according to aides to the Vermont senator."
Yves Smith, introducing Alexey Kovalev's "Why Explaining US Internal Strife Through 'Russian Influence' Is Lazy and Unhelpful" at Naked Capitalism: "Yves here. This is a well-argued debunking of various 'evil Rooskie' claims and is very much worth circulating. Stunningly, there actually are people asserting that white supremacists and the figurative and now literal hot fights over Confederate symbols (remember that Confederate flags have been a big controversy too?) are part of a Russian plot. Help me. Fortunately their views don't seem to have gotten traction outside the fever-swamp corners of the Twitterverse."
"Why Are Drug Prices So High? These Politicians Might Have The Answer [...] In 2016, Harvard University researchers found patents are one of the main reasons drug prices are so high in the United States. Those patents give drugmakers exclusive monopoly rights to produce a medicine — thereby insulating the pharmaceutical company from price competition."
"ACLU suing DC Metro for rejecting ads on abortion, PETA, Milo Yiannopoulos: The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is suing Washington's Metro for pulling or rejecting controversial ads, which the organization claims violates the freedom of speech. The ACLU is representing a 'diverse group of plaintiffs' in the new lawsuit, including an abortion provider, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and conservative firebrand Milo Yiannopoulos. [...] One of the rejected ads — from the ACLU itself — featured the text of the First Amendment in English, Spanish and Arabic, which the group proposed after President Trump escalated his feud with the media earlier this year."
"Police Are Killing Citizens at Highest Rate Ever While Govt and Media Ignore It: Police in the United States are breaking records in 2017 by killing a record number of the same people they claim to serve and protect, and there is no change in sight under the current administration. In 2017 alone, police have killed 746 people in the U.S., according to the Killed By Police database, which puts this year on pace to become the deadliest year on record. In contrast, in the first seven months of 2016, police killed 714 people; the number was slightly higher in 2015 with 725 killed; and it was noticeably lower in 2014 with 663 killed and in 2013 with 353 killed."
"Democrats Can Abandon the Center — Because the Center Doesn't Exist [...] It is difficult to overstate how thoroughly these developments discredited the baseline assumptions of a certain strand of mainstream punditry. We're living through a kind of Copernican revolution for the political universe: The old guard still insists that everything revolves around 'the center,' but the data keep saying otherwise."
David Dayen, "Trump's Opioid Commission Had Some Stunningly Good Recommendations. He Ignored Them for 80s Drug War Nostalgia. [...] If you were reminded of Nancy Reagan's cameo on Diff'rent Strokes, you're not alone. But 'Just Say No' didn't work as a policy 35 years ago — teenagers in programs, such as DARE, were as likely to use drugs as those who weren't. It also initiated the school-to-prison pipeline with the creation of 'drug-free schools' and other policies of overcriminalization. And it's particularly useless for an opioid epidemic where adolescents age 12-17 represent a little more than one-tenth of those affected."
"Who Are The Dozen Trumpiest Democrats In The House?" And in that article you'll find the DCCC's own purity test: "And this year Ben Ray Lujan has openly admitted the DCCC is recruiting Blue Dogs and anti-Choice candidates--and will finance their races-- and they appear to have an unofficial litmus test of their own: candidates who openly advocate Medicare-For-All, which is not backed by DCCC honchos like Lujan and almost his whole team, are getting the shitty end of the stick. It appears that, so far at least, the DCCC is encouraging candidates who don't commit to Medicare-For-All and giving candidates who do, the cold shoulder. So... whose side is the DCCC on? Not the same side I'm on, that's for sure."
Rachel Cohen in The New Republic, "This Is the Wrong Way to Fight Inequality: A new book proposes Americans should compete against each other for well being — so long as it's a "fair" contest." Needless to say, this is a terrible idea.
Carl Beijer, "Bankers and Big Pharma lawyers: We are the left! [...] This is the system that McKnight-Chavers wants to preserve: the system that has made her family wealthy, largely at the expense of some of the most vulnerable and marginalized people in our society. From her position of privilege, it's easy to call for "a fair capitalist system" where "capital will make its way into our communities" — because capital has made it into her community. But why are we making this voice of privilege an arbiter of the left? "
Jayati Ghosh in Naked Capitalism, "After Neoliberalism, What Next? [...] Whether we look at straws in the wind or green shoots in the ground, there is no doubt that there are incipient signs of change. But at this point there are many directions in which such change could go, and not all of them are progressive or even desirable. That is why it is important to get social and political traction for alternative trajectories that focus on more equitable, just, democratic and ecologically viable outcomes for most of humanity."
Robert Borosage, "Movements Are Driving Democratic Party Debate [...] Entrenched interests, policy gurus, political operatives, and big money all have a significant stake in defending business as usual. If Democrats are to meet the promise their leaders made in their 'Better Deal' platform to put forth a bold agenda that works for working people, a fierce debate isn't pernicious. It is utterly imperative."
"Fear, Loathing, and the Democratic Party" — It's odd watching the flurry of hate pieces against Nina Turner whenever she does anything. A lot of it is reminiscent of slurs against Sanders, pretending some insight into character flaws of the target that would require actual mind-reading to confirm. Meanwhile, every time Bernie Sanders does anything, there's a flurry of hate on Twitter for him. In this case, Sanders is the only one doing anything at all in reaction to Charlottesville, and of course the knives are out. Lawrence Tribe has become a national embarrassment: "Sen. Sanders just urged a resolution by Congress condemning Nazism & White Racism. Really? How about condemning TRUMP for his appeasement?" Of course, Sanders has been condemning Trump, but (a) it doesn't fit the narrative, and (b) apparently these people think we can just get rid of Trump and life will be peachy. It's hard to believe anyone is this stupid.
A kickass tweetstorm from Lana Del Raytheon: "as bipartisan centrists and liberals put donut emojis in their twitter names, let's review their political legacy over the last few decades:"
This is a blast from the past that I may have linked before, but I'm trying to remind people what The Democratic Party was back when it was winning. Adolph Reed, "Nothing Left: The long, slow surrender of American liberals: FFor nearly all the twentieth century there was a dynamic left in the United States grounded in the belief that unrestrained capitalism generated unacceptable social costs. That left crested in influence between 1935 and 1945, when it anchored a coalition centered in the labor movement, most significantly within the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). It was a prominent voice in the Democratic Party of the era, and at the federal level its high point may have come in 1944, when FDR propounded what he called 'a second Bill of Rights.' Among these rights, Roosevelt proclaimed, were the right to a 'useful and remunerative job,' 'adequate medical care,' and 'adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment.'"
"Why we lost the war in Afghanistan [...] Folks, if we can't do something as basic as pave Afghanistan's roads and convince the government to keep them safe and passable, we've lost. We have no business remaining there for one more minute. We should pack up all of our tanks and Humvees and MRAPs and Howitzers and helicopters, not to mention all of our bulldozers and earthmovers and asphalt-layers, and we should load all of our soldiers on C-130's and get the hell out of there. Russia learned this lesson. That's why one day they packed up their war making stuff and drove north across the border with Uzbekistan and never looked back."
"Mongolians protest as bulldozers threaten Beatles monument: AKIPRESS.COM — A statue of the Beatles in Ulaanbaatar could be at risk amid an alleged land grab, protesters say, as rapid development turns a city once famed for wide open spaces into a cluttered metropolis. Residents are protesting against plans to build commercial properties in an area known as Beatles Square, where a bronze bas-relief monument to the "Fab Four" commemorates the former Soviet satellite's transition to democracy in 1990, Reuters reported."
Mark Evanier on the wonderful Rose Marie, who we all loved as Sally on The Dick Van Dyke Show, and an upcoming biopic about her that he recently got to see an early screening of in the company of Van Dyke himself and Carl Reiner, who both agreed it was the best biopic they had ever seen: "Movie history was made in 1927 when The Jazz Singer starring Al Jolson opened at the Wintergarden Theater in New York. It was the first major "talkie," (film with sound) although it was partially a silent film with title cards. It was preceded that first evening at the Wintergarden by all all-talking, all-singing short. That short starred Baby Rose Marie." Now go read the rest.
RIP: Dick Gregory, Barrier-Breaking Comedian and Civil Rights Activist, Dies at 84. I always remember him saying that calendar on your wall is called the Gregorian calendar, and "You better be nice to me, or I won't let you use tomorrow." And also, "Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't mind paying my taxes if I knew it was going to a friendly country." Here he is in 1965 on police brutality.
RIP: Gregg Calkins, 82, fanzine publisher (Oopsla, 1952-1961), and letterhack — and, as File770 says, "In contrast to most of his generation, he was highly active in social media, frequently posting on Facebook where it was his pleasure to carry the conservative side of debates." And, to my surprise, although I had never had any contact with him before and never expected to, he sent me a friend request, and it was my pleasure to participate in that debate with him. Though we disagreed on many things, he was always friendly and respectful, even flattered me by saying he hoped the DNC didn't start listening to me because if they did we would be a real threat to the Republicans electorally. I already miss his contributions to my threads.
RIP: Glenn Campbell, first-class guitar player, former first-call sessions man, and popular country singer. He played sessions for everyone from Elvis to Nancy Sinatra to Jan & Dean. We first saw him on that summer version of the Smothers Brothers' show, and then were disappointed when he turned out to be kinda right-wing. But he sure could play guitar. In 2011 he announced that he had Alzheimer's, but no cause of death has been released. He was 81.
I'd never seen this photo before last week when Colin Hinz posted it. Chuch Harris, Rob Hansen, me, and Sue Harris, at Toad Hall in Minneapolis before the 1989 Corflu, all looking so very much like ourselves.
The last couple-few weeks have been a bit harrowing for me, and I already hadn't been particularly thrilled by dragging myself at a slower and slower pace to the hospital every day for treatments. First I had an allergic reaction to the creams they gave me to protect my skin after radiotherapy, with agonizing results, and then in the midst of this misery, three friends of mine, all younger than me, died in the same week. Oh, and by the way, this year we've had the most virulent mosquitos I have ever experienced in my life, and maybe it was worse because my resistance was down but these bites are like superbites, y'know? One even required a trip to the hospital and antibiotics. But enough about that, because I've got way too many links to get to....
Here's a nice, short video that kinda says it all about the magic money tree.
Democrats and Republicans, together in evil. "U.S. Lawmakers Seek to Criminally Outlaw Support for Boycott Campaign Against Israel: But now, a group of 43 senators — 29 Republicans and 14 Democrats — wants to implement a law that would make it a felony for Americans to support the international boycott against Israel, which was launched in protest of that country's decades-old occupation of Palestine. The two primary sponsors of the bill are Democrat Ben Cardin of Maryland and Republican Rob Portman of Ohio. Perhaps the most shocking aspect is the punishment: Anyone guilty of violating the prohibitions will face a minimum civil penalty of $250,000 and a maximum criminal penalty of $1 million and 20 years in prison. [...] The bill's co-sponsors include the senior Democrat in Washington, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, his New York colleague Kirsten Gillibrand, and several of the Senate's more liberal members, such as Ron Wyden of Oregon, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, and Maria Cantwell of Washington. Illustrating the bipartisanship that AIPAC typically summons, it also includes several of the most right-wing senators such as Ted Cruz of Texas, Ben Sasse of Nebraska, and Marco Rubio of Florida."
* But Gillibrand may be backing away after she was put on the spot in a town hall meeting.
Baltimore State's Attorney Dismisses 34 Cases After Officer Caught Allegedly Planting Drugs: [...] Baltimore State's Attorney Marilyn Mosby announced Friday, July 28, that over 100 cases are now under review following the release of police body camera footage from a January arrest that appears to show an officer planting drugs at a crime scene, The Baltimore Sun reported. She said 34 of the cases, which were all drug- or gun-related, would be thrown out, while 77 others are still being reviewed."
"64 Years Later, CIA Finally Releases Details of Iranian Coup: New documents reveal how the CIA attempted to call off the failing coup — only to be salvaged at the last minute by an insubordinate spy. [...] Declassified documents released last week shed light on the Central Intelligence Agency's central role in the 1953 coup that brought down Iranian Prime Minister Muhammad Mossadegh, fueling a surge of nationalism which culminated in the 1979 Iranian Revolution and poisoning U.S.-Iran relations into the 21st century. [...] Known as Operation Ajax, the CIA plot was ultimately about oil. Western firms had for decades controlled the region's oil wealth, whether Arabian-American Oil Company in Saudi Arabia, or the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in Iran. When the U.S. firm in Saudi Arabia bowed to pressure in late 1950 and agreed to share oil revenues evenly with Riyadh, the British concession in Iran came under intense pressure to follow suit. But London adamantly refused. So in early 1951, amid great popular acclaim, Mossadegh nationalized Iran's oil industry. A fuming United Kingdom began conspiring with U.S. intelligence services to overthrow Mossadegh and restore the monarchy under the shah. (Though some in the U.S. State Department, the newly released cables show, blamed British intransigence for the tensions and sought to work with Mossadegh.)"
Everyone made a big deal out of John McCain rising from his hospital bed to vote on the latest (at this writing) GOP health-destruction bill, but the media didn't notice The heroic Senator with severe cancer who interrupted treatment to vote... NO [...] Senator Mazie Hirono of Hawaii was just doing her job as a good politician, voting not to repeal the ACA so as to protect her constituents. She has Stage Four kidney cancer — that means scarce chances of survival — is recovering from a second surgery to remove part of a rib, and made sure she got to her seat in the Senate Chamber to vote 'no' to whatever Republican wealth-care crap was thrown at her."
* In any case, McCain surprised everyone by voting NO, along with Collins and Murkowski.
The strange case of Debbie Wasserman-Schultz's computer: "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." But when they took a laptop believed to be important to the case, DWS was strangely reluctant to let them keep it and "threatened the chief of the U.S. Capitol Police with 'consequences' for holding equipment that she says belongs to her "As one of eight members of the Committee on Appropriations' Legislative Branch subcommittee, Wasserman Schultz is in charge of the budget of the police force that is investigating her staffer and how he managed to extract so much money and information from members. In a highly unusual exchange, the Florida lawmaker uses a hearing on the Capitol Police's annual budget to spend three minutes repeatedly trying to extract a promise from the chief that he will return a piece of evidence being used to build an active case. [...] The investigation is examining members' data leaving the network and how Awan managed to get Members to place three relatives and a friend into largely no-show positions on their payrolls, billing $4 million since 2010. [...] When The DCNF asked Wasserman Schultz Monday if it could inquire about her strong desire for the laptop, she said 'No, you may not.' After The DCNF asked why she wouldn't want the Capitol Police to have any evidence they may need to find and punish any hackers of government information, she abruptly turned around in the middle of a stairwell and retreated back to the office from which she had come."
* Anyway, they finally caught the guy trying to fly to Pakistan. The story in Forbs is amusingly titled, "The Exploding DNC IT Scandal Is As Crazy As Fiction."
The Democrats either are or aren't rolling out a new agenda. Pelosi says it's not a new agenda, just new presentation. She may be right, because their sloganeering sounds an awful lot like the same stuff they used to sell NAFTA. And giving subsidies to employers for offering on-the-job training they should already be offering is a bass-ackwards way of creating jobs in a demand crisis — people aren't buying because they have no money, so just give people money; go back to welfare-as-we-used-to-know-it and maybe we'll start having an economy again. (Also: A real infrastructure program in which the government directly hires individuals to enhance and rebuild infrastructure, with no out-sourcing or contracting, just lots of employees in stable jobs creating institutional memory of how to do things right.) But c'mon, we all know it's been a long time since Democrats seemed to care about trust-busting. In fact, they seem to have decided during the Clinton administration that there's nothing better than letting Malefactors of Great Wealth get together and take over everything. But David Dayen thinks they may finally be getting it: Now, Democrats say they're putting down roots. They say they have ideas. They rolled out their 'Better Deal' agenda on Monday, and a shockingly large portion of the platform is dedicated to breaking corporate power, and in particular monopoly concentration. It's a credit to the emerging New Brandeis movement that these ideas have been embraced at the highest levels of a political party. But will Democrats have the credibility to get a hearing from the public on a problem even they acknowledge they helped create?" That's a good question, since they've never come out and admitted that Bill Clinton really screwed the pooch on this. (In my fantasy, Wolf Blitzer asked Hillary during the debates what the hell they were thinking when they decided it was okay to get rid of all the regulations that had been put in place to prevent another depression, which had been shown to be effective for five decades. I have a lot of debate questions like that.)
* On the other hand, Damon Linker thinks that, "Democrats don't need 'A Better Deal.' They need Bernie Sanders.." For the credibility: "Had he won the presidency in 2016, political realities and limited resources would have forced Sanders to prioritize among these and other goals. Compromises would have needed to be struck. But those who voted for him would have known exactly where he stood, and what he would choose to do if he could. That would be the ground from which he began to work toward a compromise, not a position that already represented a pre-emptive capitulation to the other side, which is what Democrats have been doing ever since they made their peace with the Reagan revolution."
[Linker also reckons Clinton's book will not answer the question of how she lost. "And the answer is: Because Hillary Clinton was a deeply flawed candidate who ran an atrocious campaign and should never have been anointed as the presumptive nominee by the Democratic National Committee in the first place. If Clinton wanted to run for president while under investigation by the FBI, that was her business. But why on Earth would the DNC and the party's "superdelegates" decide so far in advance that a candidate running with that kind of baggage should be considered the inevitable victor? Aside from the obstacles it placed in the way of her one serious challenger (Bernie Sanders), it helped to discourage many others (including Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren) from jumping into the race. Why bother when you know the party is standing against you?"]
"No 'litmus test': Desperate Democrats are now officially willing to back anti-choice candidates: The Democratic Party has decided to financially support candidates who oppose women's rights. [...] According to Rep. Ben Ray Lujan (D-NM), the chairman of the House campaign arm, Democrats are willing to do whatever they can to win back the House in 2018, even if it means electing Democrats who oppose abortion, The Hill reported." This is not the way to do it.
Dept. of Silver Linings: Cory Booker's buddy "Betsy DeVos Is Making 'School Choice' Toxic for Democrats: Conservatives frame privatization as a civil rights issue, but Trump's extreme agenda is energizing racial justice and public education advocates." "School choice", which means vouchers and charter schools, is touted as a plan to improve education but is really intended to use public funds to segregate schools by class instead of race. But they love to pretend otherwise. "Trump's education policy advocates for both, and in his controversial appointment of Betsy DeVos as education secretary, he elevated a longtime champion of the cause. Like her boss, she has pitched school choice as a solution to racial inequities in education, saying in February that historically black colleges and universities 'are real pioneers when it comes to school choice. They are living proof that when more options are provided to students, they are afforded greater access and greater quality.'" OK, sit back and cogitate on that quote for a moment. In what way does it have anything to do with "choice" as presented by vouchers and charter schools? Black universities were created precisely because existing colleges wouldn't admit black students at all. America's public schools admit everyone, that's not the problem. The problem is that the right-wingers in government have manipulated funding and regulations to make sure that the public school system is outrageously underfunded and then added the new burden of charter schools to suck more public money out of the system and into the hands of profit-seekers. Vouchers would make this problem even worse, and, not incidentally, funnel more of that money — and more students — into religious schools. "But some Democrats, particularly in cities, have embraced the full school choice agenda. Anthony Williams, the former Democratic mayor of Washington, D.C., appeared in an ad this year in support of DeVos, saying she 'fought by my side' for the District's voucher program. Senator Cory Booker supported charters and vouchers as mayor of Newark, New Jersey, and sat on the board of Alliance for School Choice with DeVos. (He voted against her confirmation this year, but so did every Democrat.) In general, Democrats have stayed in the good graces of public school defenders by limiting their support to 'public school choice.' But now that the Trump administration is promoting charters as part of a broader school choice agenda, and civil rights groups are increasingly leery of charters, Democrats are facing pressure to oppose all privatization schemes."
"Saudi Investor Pours Millions Into British News Site, The Independent: LONDON — A mysterious Saudi-based investor has plowed millions of dollars into a British news organization renowned for championing liberal causes, in a move that will enrage human rights and media freedom campaigners. Sultan Mohamed Abuljadayel, 42, listed in company records as a Saudi-based Saudi Arabian national, has acquired up to 50 percent of the Independent website, whose newspaper shook Britain's journalism establishment in the 1980s before struggling financially and ditching the printed word in 2016."
"What's the link between charter schools, political donations and teacher certification in New York?: In New York state, most teachers of publicly funded schools have to be certified through a state-run process. Now, that may change. Many of the state's publicly funded charter schools may soon have the right to certify their own teachers with their own processes. (In some states, charter school teachers don't have to be certified at all.) The specific proposal is being considered by the board of trustees of the State University of New York (SUNY) and a decision will be made shortly. The trustees oversee the SUNY Charter Schools Institute, which authorizes a good number of charter school operators in the state, including the well-known Success Academies charter network."
I mostly try to avoid paying much attention to the White House game of musical chairs, since it's tedious repeating that Trump has another horrible person working for him, but The Onion did not make up the quotes in Onion Fact Checks: Anthony Scaramucci's New Yorker Interview: "In an interview with The New Yorker earlier today, White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci leveled harsh criticism against the FBI and members of the Trump administration. The Onion fact-checks Scaramucci's claims."
"Fired/Rehired: Police chiefs are often forced to put officers fired for misconduct back on the streets: Since 2006, the nation's largest police departments have fired at least 1,881 officers for misconduct that betrayed the public's trust, from cheating on overtime to unjustified shootings. But The Washington Post has found that departments have been forced to reinstate more than 450 officers after appeals required by union contracts."
For some July 26th fun, "Republican Sen. Steve Daines to make Democrats vote on single payer: Sen. Steve Daines is proposing an amendment to the Republican healthcare bill that would implement a government-run, single-payer insurance system in the U.S. The Montana Republican doesn't support single-payer healthcare. But in a bit of political gamesmanship often seen in Congress, Daines wants to force vulnerable Democratic senators running for re-election in red states in 2018 to take a position on the liberal healthcare policy, which is gaining currency on the Left."
* But, "Bernie Sanders will foil Senate Republicans' single-payer trolling [...] 'The Democratic caucus will not participate in the Republicans' sham process. No amendment will get a vote until we see the final legislation and know what bill we are amending,' spokesperson Josh Miller-Lewis said in a text. 'Once Republicans show us their final bill, Sen. Sanders looks forward to getting a vote on his amendment that makes clear the Senate believes that the United States must join every major country and guarantee health care as a right, not a privilege.'"
Meanwhile, Shadowproof offers its own health care plan: Shadowproof is proud to contribute to the national health care debate by introducing our plan to transition the United States to a single-payer health care system. Our plan, the Medical Insurance and Care for All program (MICA), is a public health insurance program based on Medicare but open to all individuals. Employers will be required to buy their employees MICA or equally good private coverage. If one does not receive employer coverage, they will automatically be enrolled in MICA and charged for it in their taxes."
"Benjamin Netanyahu threatens to expel al-Jazeera from Israel: Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday said he would work to close the Jerusalem offices of al-Jazeera, accusing the Qatar-based television news network of inciting recent violence in the city."
Sharon Lerner in The Intercept, "100,000 Pages of Chemical Industry Secrets Gathered Dust in an Oregon Barn for Decades — Until Now: For decades, some of the dirtiest, darkest secrets of the chemical industry have been kept in Carol Van Strum's barn. Creaky, damp, and prowled by the occasional black bear, the listing, 80-year-old structure in rural Oregon housed more than 100,000 pages of documents obtained through legal discovery in lawsuits against Dow, Monsanto, the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Forest Service, the Air Force, and pulp and paper companies, among others. As of today, those documents and others that have been collected by environmental activists will be publicly available through a project called the Poison Papers. Together, the library contains more than 200,000 pages of information and 'lays out a 40-year history of deceit and collusion involving the chemical industry and the regulatory agencies that were supposed to be protecting human health and the environment,' said Peter von Stackelberg, a journalist who along with the Center for Media and Democracy and the Bioscience Resource Project helped put the collection online.
At Mother Jones, "North Dakota's Norway Experiment: Can humane prisons work in America? A red state aims to find out." I'm excited by the idea of this type of change being tried in the United States, under a chief of prisons who really gets why it needs to be done.
* In the Economist, "Too many prisons make bad people worse. There is a better way: The world can learn from how Norway treats its offenders [...] Norway has the lowest reoffending rate in Scandinavia: two years after release, only 20% of prisoners have been reconvicted. By contrast, a study of 29 American states found a recidivism rate nearly twice as high. This is despite the fact that Norway reserves prison for hard cases, who would normally be more likely to reoffend. Its incarceration rate, at 74 per 100,000 people, is about a tenth of America's.
The Hill, "Schumer: Dems, not Russia, are to blame for loss to Trump: When you lose to somebody who has 40 percent popularity, you don't blame other things — [James] Comey, Russia — you blame yourself. So what did we do wrong? People didn't know what we stood for, just that we were against Trump. And still believe that."
Dean Baker, "The Washington Post's War on Disability Programs Continues [...] The assertion that the program will go broke is extremely misleading. Even if Congress never did anything it could still pay will over 90 percent of projected benefits for more than two decades into the future and even at the end of the 75-year planning period it is still projected to be able to pay over 80 percent of scheduled benefits. This is an important point since many politicians have advocated cutting benefits to keep the program fully funded. If the point is to ensure to prevent benefits from being cut due to a shortfall, cutting benefits to make up the gap doesn't help."
"Researchers shut down AI that invented its own language: An artificial intelligence system being developed at Facebook has created its own language. It developed a system of code words to make communication more efficient. The researchers shut the system down as it prompted concerns we could lose control of AI."
Ian Welsh, "A World Without Poor People (Sort of)" — The price of homes and food and fuel shoots up dramatically, and yet the Fed tells us there's no inflation. How does that work, exactly?
"Joseph Stiglitz Says Standard Economics Is Wrong. Inequality and Unearned Income Kills the Economy [...] The trickle-down notion — along with its theoretical justification, marginal productivity theory — needs urgent rethinking. That theory attempts both to explain inequality — why it occurs — and to justify it — why it would be beneficial for the economy as a whole. This essay looks critically at both claims. It argues in favour of alternative explanations of inequality, with particular reference to the theory of rent-seeking and to the influence of institutional and political factors, which have shaped labour markets and patterns of remuneration. And it shows that, far from being either necessary or good for economic growth, excessive inequality tends to lead to weaker economic performance. In light of this, it argues for a range of policies that would increase both equity and economic well-being. [...] The term 'rent' was originally used to describe the returns to land, since the owner of the land receives these payments by virtue of his or his ownership and not because of anything he or she does. The term was then extended to include monopoly profits (or monopoly rents) — the income that one receives simply from control of a monopoly — and in general returns due to similar ownership claims. Thus, rent-seeking means getting an income not as a reward for creating wealth but by grabbing a larger share of the wealth that would have been produced anyway. Indeed, rent-seekers typically destroy wealth, as a by-product of their taking away from others. A monopolist who overcharges for her or his product takes money from those whom she or he is overcharging and at the same time destroys value. To get her or his monopoly price, she or he has to restrict production."
Steven Thrasher in the Guardian, "The Democrats' performance as an opposition party? Pathetic: Though Trump is historically unpopular for a president at this moment in his presidency, the opposition is not benefiting from this obvious opportunity. [...] When the poll came out saying that 'Democrats stand for nothing more than opposing' Trump, I thought to myself, 'If only that were true!'' But they can't even do that well. When House Democratic Caucus chairman Joe Crowley was asked by the Associated Press just what his party's core message was, he 'hesitated' and then said, 'That message is being worked on.' It was as tone deaf (but honest) an answer as when Mother Jones writer Kevin Drum — as sycophantic a representative of the Democratic party in the punditocracy as there is — wrote about how people would have to be 'crazy' not to 'have a reflective disgust' of people who are homeless and mentally ill. Considering homeless people are also disproportionately black, LGBT, disabled and, of course, poor, Drum managed to reveal the disdain the liberal elite has of wide swaths of Americans."
Margaret Kimberly in Black Agenda Report, "Freedom Rider: Kamala Harris and America's Oligarchs: California's new senator is actively being vetted as the 'next Obama, ' or 'Obama 2.0' -- a youngish, biracial corporate Democrat and a woman. Democratic honchos are betting that 'white people will consider her exotic enough to be acceptable and black voters will rally around her.' The oligarchic George Soros likes Harris, who did him a favor by refusing to indict one of his banks. Most importantly, Harris is all about 'form' -- not 'reform.'
"Why leftists don't trust Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and Deval Patrick: The contest for control of the Democratic Party between left and center is continuing apace. The latest battleground is over a handful of minority Democrats being groomed by the centrist establishment to run for office: Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), and former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick. If the center wants to win over a suspicious left, they can start by clearly explaining their policy orientation, particularly in areas where they might have fallen short by the supposed standards of the modern Democratic Party — which all three of the above candidates have done in various ways. If they want to deepen divisions, they can use cynical accusations of bigotry to try to beat back any leftist challenger." Maybe Kamala Harris can explain why she protected West One from prosecution for all its crimes, but I don't see how Deval Patrick can rid himself of his ties to Bain Capital, being managing director, and Cory Booker's entire career is backed by genuine right-wing Republicans who want to destroy education and the teachers' unions.
Here's a few highlights from Kamala Harris' record. From 2010, "Judge rips Harris' office for hiding problems: San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris' office violated defendants' rights by hiding damaging information about a police drug lab technician and was indifferent to demands that it account for its failings, a judge declared Thursday. [...] But in a scathing ruling, the judge concluded that prosecutors had failed to fulfill their constitutional duty to tell defense attorneys about problems surrounding Deborah Madden, the now-retired technician at the heart of the cocaine-skimming scandal that led police to shut down the drug analysis section of their crime lab. [...] Massullo wrote that top drug prosecutor Sharon Woo's Nov. 19 memo about Madden showed that prosecutors "at the highest levels of the district attorney's office knew that Madden was not a dependable witness at trial and that there were serious concerns regarding the crime lab.""
* From January of this year, "Treasury Nominee Steve Mnuchin's Bank Accused of 'Widespread Misconduct' in Leaked Memo [...] In the memo, the leaders of the state attorney general's Consumer Law Section said they had 'uncovered evidence suggestive of widespread misconduct' in a yearlong investigation. In a detailed 22-page request, they identified over a thousand legal violations in the small subsection of OneWest loans they were able to examine, and they recommended that Attorney General Kamala Harris file a civil enforcement action against the Pasadena-based bank. They even wrote up a sample legal complaint, seeking injunctive relief and millions of dollars in penalties. But Harris's office, without any explanation, declined to prosecute the case. [...] Why did her office close the case, deciding not to 'conduct a full investigation of a national bank's misconduct and provide a public accounting of what happened,' as her own investigators had urged?" Perhaps it was because, "Harris Was Only 2016 Senate Democratic Candidate to Get Cash From Mnuchin." Her non-explanation sounds like classic evasion to me.
* Either Harris had no idea what her own office was doing (and didn't care to find out), or she knew that lawyers for her office argued in court not to process parole release of non-violent offenders because the state wanted to use them as free fire-fighting labor. Harris purported to be shocked, but in that case, why didn't she already know?
"The One Word Guaranteed to Make the Corporate Pundit Class Squirm: 'Neoliberalism' isn't a left-wing insult but a monstrous political system of inequality. [...] Neoliberalism is not particularly hard to define. It's not only an ideology or a set of principles; it's a system of practices, and an era, the one we're living in now. What it means, over and above everything, is untrammeled ruling-class power, an end to the class-collaborationism of the post-war years and a vicious assault of the rich against the poor. This is achieved through market mechanisms, fiscal austerity and the penetration of capitalist relations into every possible facet of human life. It doesn't mean that the role of the state vanishes — an essential precondition for neoliberalism is the destruction of working-class power and collective bargaining, and this has to be achieved, often brutally, through laws and their enforcement. There isn't just "some role for market forces" either, but their invasion into every fathomable social situation."
Mike Konczal in Vox, "'Neoliberalism' isn't an empty epithet. It's a real, powerful set of ideas. [...] One highly salient conflict was the fight over free college during the Democratic primary. It wasn't about the price tag; it was about the role the government should play in helping to educate the citizenry. Clinton originally argued that a universal program would help people who didn't need help — why pay for Donald Trump's kids? This reflects the focus on means-tested programs that dominated Democratic policymaking over the past several decades. (Some of the original people who wanted to reinvent the Democratic Party, such as Charles Peters in his 1983 article 'A Neoliberal's Manifesto,' called for means-testing Social Security so it served only the very poor.) Bernie Sanders argued instead that education was a right, and it should be guaranteed to all Americans regardless of wealth or income. The two rivals came to a smart compromise after the campaign, concluding that public tuition should be free for all families with income of less than $125,000 — a proposal that is already serving as a base from which activists can build. This points to a disagreement as we move forward. Should the Democratic Party focus on the most vulnerable, in the language of access and need? Or should it focus on everyone, in the language of rights? [...] Another place we can see a break in the Democratic Party is in its view of full employment. Between 1944 and 1988, the phrase 'full employment' was found in every Democratic Party platform and was commonly mentioned in Democratic State of the Union addresses. As an excellent new report by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a group called Fed Up, and the Center for Popular Democracy underscores, full employment was also a core demand of the civil rights movement. Then it disappeared, and was only put back in the platform for the 2016 election. [...] Or take the general stance toward the business community. Another policy concern that has entered, and departed, the Democratic platform over time is the antitrust agenda — worries about the concentration of big business. The 2016 Democratic platform said: 'Large corporations have concentrated their control over markets to a greater degree than Americans have seen in decades' and that Democrats "will make competition policy and antitrust stronger and more responsive." Again, that marked a return of language that was prevalent in the mid-century period but that disappeared after 1988."
"The Great Recession never ended [...] Taken together, the American economy looks quite similar to that of around 1939 or so. Back then, the New Deal had partially fixed the Great Depression, but had failed to restore full employment due to anxious politicians (including FDR) flipping out about the budget deficit and turning to austerity. It took the stupendous mega-spending of war mobilization to break the political deadlock and restore full employment and production. In 1939 as today, many argued that limp performance was simply the best that could be done. But it turned out after the war the economy did not collapse back to its prewar levels. Instead (after a brief hiccup from demobilization) it rocketed up into its greatest boom in history. Without the war, it's easily possible that America would have continued stuck in a quasi-depression indefinitely — as we appear to be today. But conversely, there is every reason to at least try to smash the economy back up to trend with another very large stimulus. Without it, we're due to start our second Lost Decade next year."
From National Nurses United and The Sanders Institute, "Medicare for All vs. All the Healthcare That Each Can Afford [...] So what's stopping us? Supporters of our market-driven model typically sabotage efforts to provide Medicare for all by focusing on how we would pay for it. This is disingenuous. We are already paying for it; we're just not receiving it. Approximately two-thirds of U.S. healthcare expenditures already come from taxpayers in the form of federal, state, and local government spending.35 Healthcare in the U.S. costs more both because of administrative complexity and higher prices, rather than increased utilization. The comparisons of U.S. spending and health outcomes to other countries strongly suggest that there is enough money in our current system to provide healthcare for all, if we spend that money fairly and wisely. The key point is to demonstrate that there is enough money currently being spent on healthcare in the U.S. to provide Medicare for all, rather than specifying particular funding mechanisms."
Dean Baker in the Guardian, "How about a little accountability for economists when they mess up?: There must be a huge change in our attitude to economics. Needlessly complex work merely supporting the status quo must be halted. [...] The problem is not that modern economics lacks the tools needed to understand the economy. Just as with firefighting, the basics have been well known for a long time. The problem is with the behavior and the incentive structure of the practitioners. There is overwhelming pressure to produce work that supports the status quo (for example, redistributing to the rich), that doesn't question authority, and that is needlessly complex."
Emmett Rensin, "Left with rage: When Trump is gone, the bourgeoisie alliance will turn its full power on the left, and the real work will begin."
RIP: Alan Dorey (1958-2017). popular British sf fan and fanzine publisher, co-founder of Interzone, and more recently, a radio show host/DJ. I listened to a few of his shows on the web (though I can't seem to find them, now), they were pretty good. Alan had only very recently learned that he had a particularly aggressive throat cancer, and died before word had time to get around that he was ill. This was particularly shocking news since he didn't seem to be aging like the rest of us and we thought he had a painting in the attic.
RIP: Julie Gomoll, 1962-2017, well-known science fiction fan and digital pioneer, sister of Jeanne (who introduced us all to her), who wrote: "She sold one business and took a solo trip around the world with some of the proceeds. She built a world-renown design company. She enrolled in culinary school and became a master chef. She became an expert in advising folks, including the Tiptree Award, on social media strategies. Other times we'd talk about our family, about our businesses, about her adopted home-town and always about her beloved dogs." Jackie Dana wrote a nice tribute to Julie. There's more bio on this page for a memorial fund.
RIP: Jordin Kare (1956-2017), who I first saw on Usenet beginning sentences with, "Now, I'm no rocket scientist — oh, wait, I am," and who was highly-regarded among filkers but mainly I liked him and really enjoyed that Christmas he and Mary Kay spent with us, of cardiac problems.
RIP: June Foray, the great cartoon voice artist. Mark Evanier says, "She was Rocky the Flying Squirrel. She was Natasha Fatale. She was Nell Fenwick. She was Jokey Smurf. She was Cindy Lou Who. She was Granny, owner of Tweety. She was Witch Hazel. She was Chatty Cathy. She was thousands of others. [...] Everyone hired her because she was always on time, always professional and what she did was always good. It was her good friend, director Chuck Jones who said, 'June Foray is not the female Mel Blanc. Mel Blanc is the male June Foray.'" Mark also wrote a little more on the legendary June here. She would have been 100 in September.
Rick Perlstein, "Outsmarted: On the liberal cult of the cognitive elite [...] 'Thomas Jefferson once said the American people won't make a mistake if they're given all the facts,' Ronald Reagan liked to say. Thomas Jefferson, naturally, never said such a thing — and just as naturally, by 'won't make a mistake' Reagan meant 'won't disagree with Ronald Reagan.' Ronald Reagan once starred in a movie with a chimp. He was not 'smart.' Which was why, a Carter White House staffer once told me, Carter's strategists in 1980 were confident that if they could only get Reagan standing next to Carter for one head-to-head debate, they would have the election in the bag. They finally got that debate scheduled for a week before the election. At the time, the two candidates were running about neck and neck. Reagan, of course, ended up winning in a landslide. It's pretty remarkable how 'smart' people keep on making the same mistake. [...] How do you make it in America now? Everyone knows. You get 'smart': you apply yourself to education. Faith in the salvific power of education is an old story among Democrats. Lyndon Johnson, his White House aide George Reedy recalled, 'had an abnormal, superstitious respect for education. I believe he even thought it would cure chilblain.' I've always loved that quote. Now I better understand why: often, the cult of 'smart' is a superstition. In LBJ's time, to believe in it was 'abnormal.' Now, that belief is collective — quite nearly unanimous."
"The Unfinished Work of Alan Lomax's Global Jukebox [...] In 1983 Lomax established the Association for Cultural Equity, known as ACE, a nonprofit dedicated to addressing that tension, largely by making sure the communities he had recorded reaped some reward. This spring, the organization unveiled the Global Jukebox, a free, interactive web portal with recordings of more than 6,000 folk songs from around the world that Lomax recorded or acquired. Most have never been publicly available."
I don't agree with everything Lance says here, but he does illuminate a few interesting insights in "The warped, frustrated old and young men and women of Bedford Falls." Like that one person can make a difference, but nobody can do it alone, and that Bedford Falls is not the opposite of Pottersville.
Thanks to Mike and Mark and Rosa for the help, I'm really grateful. I think this is the first time anyone has actually noticed my Amazon wishlist. (And for the record, I prefer paperbacks and can take Kindle, but sometimes I unobservantly click on the first version of a title I see and don't take note of whether it's hardcover or paperback or digital, because I'm forgetful that way.)
Andrew Cuomo's cruelty for cruelty's sake: "'Those Visits Were Everything': How Prison Visitation Cuts Devastate Families: Buried in the New York state budget is a proposal to cut weekday visits for over 20,000 inmates. For families of incarcerated people, this could mean barely having any real contact with their loved ones." Weekend visits are already crowded and noisy to the point where people can't even hear each other. This would make it so, so much worse.
"How Andrew Cuomo Keeps the Left in Check: There is plenty of room to mount a progressive challenge against the Democratic governor. Why hasn't anyone stepped up? [...] What Cuomo has done in the Senate is the most prominent example of how he has undercut New York's progressive architecture and neutered opposition from his left flank. On a legislative level, the coalition between the GOP and the renegade Democrats — known as the Independent Democratic Conference — allows Cuomo to control the pace of the reform coming out of Albany. It has hobbled the ability of the Democratic Party, which technically won a majority in the state Senate in 2012 and 2016 (Republicans won the majority in 2014), to push for progressive policies in areas like health care, voting reform, reproductive rights, and immigration. And it precludes the threat of a Democratic Senate majority leader with clout."
Ryan Cooper, "Somebody primary Andrew Cuomo: This is because despite his self-presentation as an effective technocratic manager who "gets things done," Cuomo is staggeringly inept, practically speaking. He's a sort of effective politician, in a vicious and narrowly short-term sense — good at using deceit, betrayal, and conspiracy to gain power for himself. He would have been a passable courtier for Louis XVI. But only someone who was stupendously ill-informed would let the subway rot as he has."
"Outrageous Massachusetts Drug Bill Would Send You to Prison and Steal Your Car — No Drugs Needed: The proposed measure redefines reality to make a drug crime out of literally nothing. With the support of state law enforcement, a Massachusetts Democratic state representative has filed a drug war bill that would send violators to prison for a mandatory minimum two years (five years for a second offense) and allow police to seize their vehicles — all without the presence of any actual drugs.
"Quit Your Job for a Better One? Not if You Live in Idaho: BOISE, Idaho — Idaho achieved a notable distinction last year: It became one of the hardest places in America for someone to quit a job for a better one. The state did this by making it easier for companies to enforce noncompete agreements, which prevent employees from leaving their company for a competitor."
"New Research Shows Guccifer 2.0 Files Were Copied Locally, Not Hacked: New meta-analysis has emerged from a document published today by an independent researcher known as The Forensicator, which suggests that files eventually published by the Guccifer 2.0 persona were likely initially downloaded by a person with physical access to a computer possibly connected to the internal DNC network. The individual most likely used a USB drive to copy the information. The groundbreaking new analysis irrevocably destroys the Russian hacking narrative, and calls the actions of Crowdstrike and the DNC into question."
"GOP source of fraud allegation vs. Bernie Sanders' wife admits info was hearsay: MONTPELIER, Vt. (AP) -- A Republican lawyer who reported independent U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders and his wife to federal officials was passing on information he heard from a GOP lawmaker who said he didn't have direct knowledge of the allegations."
"How much legal trouble is Donald Trump Jr. in? Some other critics of the administration, including Sen. Tim Kaine, a Virginia Democrat who was Clinton's running mate, have suggested the President's son might have engaged in treason by dealing with a foreign adversary -- but that is a possibility that many legal analysts reject. Both Constitution and federal law covering treason provide the United States be actively at war with the foreign adversary for such a charge."
David Dayen, "More Trump Populism: Hiring a Bank Lawyer to Attack CFPB Bank Rules: President Trump and Republicans in Congress have broadcast their every intention to gut the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The president's budget attempted to defund it and leading Republicans have called for its director to be fired and replaced with a more Wall Street-compliant regulator. But much like the bulk of Trump's agenda, that assault remains in the aspirational phase, and the agency continues to do its work. Earlier this month, the CFPB released a major new rule, flat-out barring financial institutions from using forced arbitration clauses in consumer contracts to stop class-action lawsuits. Now, Trump has sent out his lead attack dog to overturn the arbitration rule — a former bank lawyer who has used the very tactic the CFPB wants to prevent."
"Award-Winning Journalist Who Broke Story of Jewish Women Barred From Chicago 'Dyke March' Removed From Reporting Duties: An award-winning journalist who broke the story of the group of Jewish women ejected from an LGBTQ march in Chicago last month has been reassigned to non-journalistic duties at the paper which ran the original report, the Windy City Times. Gretchen Rachel Hammond — whose June 24 story caused a national storm after she detailed how three women flying Jewish Pride flags embossed with the Star of David were instructed to leave the gathering by organizers from the Dyke March Collective — confirmed to The Algemeiner on Monday that while she was still employed by the paper, she was not presently engaged in its reporting and writing operations."
"NY Times Rewrites History of Iraq War, Painting U.S. as Noble Democracy-Lover, Iran as Sinister Imperialist: The paper of record advances an amazing feat of reality inversion. The New York Times' Tim Arango took what could have been an interesting topic for war journalism — Iran's increased role in Iraq — and morphed it into a revisionist history of American and Saudi involvement in the Middle East. In doing so, Arango paints the U.S. as a noble, freedom-loving nation on a mission to improve the lives of average Iraqis, and Iran as a sinister imperial force working to expand its sphere of influence across the region."
What makes this news is that it's in The Harvard Business Review. "Is the U.S. Ready for a Single-Payer Health Care System? Ironically, as congressional Republicans have been trying to replace the Affordable Care Act, the ACA's popularity is at an all-time high, and the majority of Americans now believe that it is the federal government's responsibility to provide health care for all Americans. This shift in sentiment suggests that a single-payer system — a 'Medicare for all' — may soon be a politically viable solution to America's health care woes."
"Facial Recognition Coming to Police Body Cameras" — instead of using the bodycams to make a record of police behavior, it's being turned into another way to destroy the anonymity of the crowd.
"These Obama voters snubbed Hillary Clinton — and 'they don't regret what they did': 'What we clearly see in the focus groups is they don't regret what they did.' 'They' are millennials of color who either didn't vote or voted third party. And for Cornell Belcher, the president of Brilliant Corners Research & Strategies, who was the pollster for the Democratic National Committee under then-Chairman Howard Dean and for both of Barack Obama's campaigns for the White House, this makes them the new swing voters the Democratic Party should be trying to win over."
"Contractor finds himself stuck in ATM, slips notes to customers: On Wednesday, police say the contractor was changing a lock inside the room that connects to the ATM. He managed to leave his phone in the truck, so he was unable to call for help when he found himself locked in. Since the ATM still works, people were stopping by to get cash, and the contractor decided to slip out notes through the receipt slot stating,'Please Help. I'm stuck in here, and I don't have my phone. Please call my boss.'"
"Hiding US Lies About Libyan Invasion: In 2016, when a British parliamentary report demolished the excuse for the U.S. and its allies invading Libya in 2011, it should have been big news, but the U.S. mainstream media looked the other way, reports Joe Lauria."
RIP: "James B. Nutter, Kansas City business and political power broker, dies at age 89: James B. Nutter, a titan in Kansas City's business and political circles, died on Friday. He was 89. Nutter, who founded home mortgage company James B. Nutter & Co. in 1951, was known as a businessman for his forward-thinking policies. James B. Nutter & Co. was among the first mortgage banking companies to offer Veterans Administration loans, extended loans in minority communities that other banks would overlook and eschewed the type of risky subprime loans that helped trigger the Great Recession. 'We lost market share because we didn't make those horrible loans, because it was wrong,' Nutter told The Star in 2012."
RIP: "Maryam Mirzakhani, first woman to win maths' Fields Medal, dies: The 40-year-old Iranian, a professor at Stanford University, had breast cancer which had spread to her bones. Nicknamed the "Nobel Prize for Mathematics", the Fields Medal is only awarded every four years to between two and four mathematicians under 40.
RIP: Martin Landau, star of Ed Wood and Crimes and Misdemeanors, dies aged 89. Before he began his acting career, Landau was a cartoonist, but I have always remembered him from the Outer Limits episode, "The Man Who Was Never Born". Of course, Mission Impossible was very nearly science fiction, and Space: 1999 was...well, something like that. He was an amazing actor and regarded by many as a great humanitarian.
Jon Schwarz, "The Incredible Lost History of How 'Civil Rights Plus Full Employment Equals Freedom' [...] Titled 'The Full Employment Mandate of the Federal Reserve: Its Origins and Importance' — WAIT, don't switch tabs and check Facebook! — it's a history of the economic policies of the civil rights movement, the movement's focus on capturing the Fed's power to generate full employment, how they partially succeeded, and why we have to fight right now to preserve their accomplishments. It deserves to be discussed and carefully studied by absolutely everyone on the left side of the political spectrum — Democrats, Greens, Hillaryites, Berners, Autonomous Collectives, and miscellaneous."
Matt Stoller in The New Republic, "The Return of Monopoly: With Amazon on the rise and a business tycoon in the White House, can a new generation of Democrats return the party to its trust-busting roots? [...] Amazon did not come to dominate the way we shop because of its technology. It did so because we let it. Over the past three decades, the U.S. government has permitted corporate giants to take over an ever-increasing share of the economy. Monopoly — the ultimate enemy of free-market competition — now pervades every corner of American life: every transaction we make, every product we consume, every news story we read, every piece of data we download. Eighty percent of seats on airplanes are sold by just four airlines. CVS and Walgreens have a virtual lock on the drugstore and pharmacy business. A private equity firm in Brazil controls roughly half of the U.S. beer market. The chemical giant Monsanto is able to dictate when and how farmers plant its seeds. Google and Facebook control nearly 75 percent of the $73 billion market in digital advertising. Most communities have one cable company to choose from, one provider of electricity, one gas company. Economic power, in fact, is more concentrated than ever: According to a study published earlier this year, half of all publicly traded companies have disappeared over the past four decades."
Lydia O'Neal and David Sirota in the IBT, "California Health Care Fight May Show Democratic Party Future In Trump Era [...] Amid calls for Democratic unity in the Trump era, the party's move in a deep blue state to block a health care initiative it previously supported has prompted labor movement protests — and promises of primary campaigns or recall efforts to unseat recalcitrant Democrats. More broadly, eight years after Barack Obama mounted a populist presidential campaign and then did not prosecute any major Wall Street executives, the episode has resurrected progressives' allegations that while Democrats may talk a good game, they are not nearly as committed to bold action as their rhetoric suggests."
Paul Street, "The Notion That White Workers Elected Trump Is a Myth That Suits the Ruling Class [...] Another difficulty with the white Trumped-proletarian narrative is that most whites without an allegedly class-defining college degree don't vote. Thanks in part to this silent election boycott, Trump got votes from approximately just a fifth of the 136 million white American adults who lack the higher ed diploma. The image of poor and working-class whites flocking to Trump is a media myth. Like fascist and other right-nationalist political movements of the past, Trump has drawn his main support from the more reactionary segments of the middle class and petite bourgeoisie. Trump Didn't Win the Working Class. The Democrats Lost It. The dismal Democrats have been losing white working-class votes for decades across the long neoliberal era because the party has abandoned workers' lunch-pail economic issues and the language of class in pursuit of corporate sponsorship and votes from the professional class. But there was no mass white working-class outpouring for Trump. Clinton's miserable, centrist campaign and Obama's neoliberal legacy depressed working- and lower-class voter turnout, opening the door for Trump to squeak by — with no small help from racist voter suppression in key states."
"If The DCCC Continues To Pick Congressional Nominees, Instead Of Voters, The Democrats Will Never Win Back Congress [...] Bob Poe has been a major Democratic donor from Florida who was once chairman of the Florida Democratic Party and got a taste of what the DCCC is all about when he ran for Congress last cycle and was successfully opposed by a Pelosi New Dem pick, Val Demings, who predictably, has turned out to be one of the worst Democratic freshmen in Congress. It was hard to get Poe to tell his story but he did share a few words he thought would be helpful for DWT readers to understand. 'From the day Democrats became the minority in the House of Representatives in 2010 until today, I have received literally thousands of emails from the DCCC asking, begging and pleading for contributions to defeat Republicans and regain the majority. Countless donors large and small have donated millions in pursuit of that noble effort. But, what most donors don't know is the dirty little secret that the DCCC spends a significant amount of their scarce resources not defeating Republicans but in defeating Democrats. Each cycle, the DCCC involves itself in Democratic primaries-- even in races that are safely Democratic regardless of who wins the primary. This practice is dishonest and it needs to stop.'"
Amazingly, this is from Matt Yglesias: "Democrats should take the class warfare message to upscale suburbs: It worked for Jeremy Corbyn, and the opposite failed for Jon Ossoff. [...] But there's no reason to believe that more affluent, suburban communities are averse to a strong, policy-based critique of Republican Party economics. The Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn, after all, made some of its strongest gains in upscale parts of London — winning the Borough of Kensington for the first time ever, for example — and it certainly didn't shy away from drawing a strong economic contrast. "
Brent Budowsky in The Hill, "Sanders triumphs over Trump in healthcare's battle of ideas [...] During the July 4 recess, it was strange to watch many Republican members of the House and Senate trying almost desperately to avoid meeting constituents in public town halls where they would have to answer questions from unhappy voters who are angry, frightened and alarmed by the pending GOP healthcare plans." I'll believe in a Democratic landslide when it happens — I know the party can screw this up.
"Pussy Riot Founder Says American Liberals Scapegoat Putin To Distract From Democrats' Problems: Tolokonnikova: I think just the narrative should be different. I have questions about current narrative Democratic Party defending themselves and defending wealthy people who they do represent. And I think your narrative should be how oligarchs all around the world, they do unite, and though sometimes they don't have a lot of things in common, they don't have common views, but they have just one thing that they really want to do together to protect their wealth. I think you need to look at Putin and Trump from this perspective."
"The New Working Class: The Democrats are ensnared in a dynamic that is wrecking center-left parties around the north Atlantic. Sometimes labeled Pasokification, after the pattern of collapse of the Greek socialist party PASOK, it was diagnosed by scholars on the left decades ago. As the political scientists Adam Przeworski and John Sprague explained in their 1986 book Paper Stones, social democratic parties, built on the assumption that the working class would grow steadily in size and power them to majority, instead were forced to face the unexpected stagnation and decline of their proletarian bases. The only route to future electoral majorities would be to broaden their appeal to encompass sections of the middle class, but this would require diluting the party program, demoralizing and demobilizing its working-class base. Key milestones in this process included Tony Blair's ascent in Britain and the abandonment of Labour's 'Clause IV' — its commitment to 'common ownership of the means of production'; Bill Clinton's welfare reform; and the Hartz plan for labor market liberalization under the German Social Democrats. In the final reckoning, this process could lead these parties to be not only aloof from their old sources of support, but complicit in their social liquidation — certainly, this became true for the Democrats. The near-term victories they won occurred because the effects of their changed class allegiances had not fully sunk in, allowing them to temporarily have their cake and eat it too."
People still don't get that Cory Booker can not sell out to the right wing and corporations, since it is the right-wing that created him in the first place. "How the Booker Window Explains Centrist Implosion: The close makes the man."
"Democrats are doubling down on the same vanilla centrism that helped give us President Trump [...] But they were ad-libbing on the defensive, instead of setting the agenda for their own meeting, or sharing a vision for how to make a unified push for single-payer healthcare. Demonstrators didn't come to see legislators talk about their collective helplessness — they wanted a plan of action."
"Clinton lost because PA, WI, and MI have high casualty rates and saw her as pro-war, study says: Last fall I winced whenever Hillary Clinton or her surrogates promised regime change in Syria. Don't these people get it? Americans don't want to be waging more wars in the Middle East. Now an important new study has come out showing that Clinton paid for this arrogance: professors argue that Clinton lost the battleground states of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan in last year's presidential election because they had some of the highest casualty rates during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and voters there saw Clinton as the pro-war candidate. By contrast, her pro-war positions did not hurt her in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and California, the study says; because those states were relatively unscathed by the Middle East wars."
"The Book That Predicted Trump's Rise Offers the Left a Roadmap for Defeating Him: Twenty years ago, Richard Rorty warned that 'a spectatorial, disgusted, mocking Left' would give rise to a populist demagogue. Is it ready now to take his advice? [...] Labor unions and unskilled workers will sooner or later realize that 'their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported,' he posited. And they will further realize that 'suburban white-collar workers, themselves desperately afraid of being downsized, are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.' At that point, 'something will crack,' he warned. 'The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking for a strongman to vote for — someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots.'"
"Back to Work: How Democrats can win over Americans left behind in the new economy: In the wake of Donald Trump's election, and amid the wilderness of uncertainty surrounding the presidential race in 2020, one thing is for sure: Democrats need to change the way they talk about the economy. Trump made sweeping promises about jobs that he almost certainly will not keep. 'We're gonna put our people back to work,' he told his supporters. 'I'm going to create jobs, great jobs,' he vowed. 'If you get laid off on Tuesday, I still want your vote. I'll get you a new job, don't worry about it.' Such vague and misleading assurances are almost impossible to combat — especially if Democrats stick to their normal, ineffectual script. Hillary Clinton promised a 'new bargain for the new economy' but she never actually pledged to give Americans what they need in this one. She vowed to provide tax relief to small businesses and invest in infrastructure, but she left it to voters to figure out how something as distant and programmatic as cutting taxes or building a bridge would get them a better paycheck. If Democrats want to win elections, they should imbue Trump's empty rhetoric with a real promise: a good job for every American who wants one. It's time to make a federal jobs guarantee the central tenet of the party's platform. This is the type of simple, straightforward plan that Democrats need in order to connect with Americans who struggle to survive in the twenty-first-century economy. And while a big, New Deal-style government program might seem like a nonstarter in this day and age — just look at the continuing battle over the Affordable Care Act — a jobs guarantee isn't actually so far-fetched.
"The Democratic Party's Deadly Dead-End [...] In 2002, when Margaret Thatcher was asked to name her 'greatest political achievement,' she smiled her best cat-that-swallowed-the-canary smile and purred, 'Tony Blair and New Labour.' The true measure of the Reagan-Thatcher counterrevolution was not how Reagan and Thatcher changed their own parties' policies but that they remade their opposition in their own image and thus marginalized progressive politics for a generation in both their countries, clearing the way for the neoliberal transformation of society." There's an error in the piece, though — the author says the DLC never had a female leader. That's not true, they did: In 2008, the leader of the DLC was Hillary Clinton. It's almost impossible to find references to this on the web now, her name has even been deleted from the list of former leaders on Wikipedia. When the DLC shut down in 2011, all of their historical records were purchased by the Clinton Foundation. Web Archive does show this page, though — note the rotating images of their leaders at the top.
"Until Democrats Can Start Winning Seats In Kansas Again, They'll Never Be A National Party Again : Trump won Kansas' 4th district-- around Wichita-- by a big margin: 60.2% to 33.0%. But KS-04 isn't really Trump country. In the caucuses, Cruz came in first 7,963 (58.3%) to Señor Trumpanzee's 3,012 (22.0%). That same day Bernie swept every district in Kansas. He won the 4th with 69.8%-- 6,588 votes to Hillary's 2,846-- but with more than twice as many votes as Trump got! Think about that for a moment. Many in Kansas saw Bernie as the answer to their hopes and their fears... but by November they ultimately judged Hillary as the greater evil compared to Trump. While Trump was coming up with his 60.2% of the vote in KS-04, the incumbent Republican congressman, Mike Pompeo, was being elected over Democratic challenger Dan Giroux 60.7% to 29.6%. But soon after the election Trump appointed Pompeo CIA director, triggering a special election in what was regarded one of the safest Republican districts in America. But it wasn't quite as safe as the GOP (and the DCCC) assumed. After beating a conservative anti-Choice, Republican-lite candidate in the primary, Jim Thompson, a Berniecrat, won Wichita (the biggest city in the state) and Sedgwick County outright. The district-wide total saw Estes with 64,044 (52.2%) and Thompson with a startling 56,435 (46.0%), the best showing a Democrat has had in this district since 1992."
Ryan Grim, "Democrat Beto O'Rourke Takes the Bernie Sanders Fundraising Model Local in Run at Ted Cruz [...] O'Rourke did it in a surprising, and for Cruz, concerning way: $0 from corporate PACs, 46,574 individual donations, and more than 80 percent of the money coming from genuine Texans. In other words, this is not a Jon-Ossoff-style phenomenon where people around the country are throwing money at O'Rourke. What's significant here is what it says about the future prospects of candidates like O'Rourke, who was first elected to Congress in 2012. [...] He won his seat by beating an incumbent Democrat, Sylvestre Reyes, a former border control guard, from the left. Reyes had fought against a resolution O'Rourke had pushed as a city councilman in El Paso that called on the federal government to contemplate legalizing marijuana as a way to tamp down violence on the border. O'Rourke responded by taking him out, and the primary was a pivotal moment in drug policy politics, as it showed politicians there could be electoral consequences for being too trigger-happy in the drug war — a previously unthinkable proposition. Moreover, O'Rourke is a backer of single-payer universal health care. He's ardently pro-choice. And he took on the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) at the height of the 2014 Israel-Gaza War, casting one of only eight votes against the Iron Dome rocket defense system. 'I tried to find him on the floor, but I couldn't,' then-Rep. Jim Moran, D-Va.,(who's had his own run-ins with AIPAC) later told the New Yorker. 'I wanted him to switch his vote. Now, he might not have switched it anyway, because — as shocking as it may be — he's in Congress solely to do what he considers to be the right thing. I'm afraid he may have a tough race in November.' O'Rourke did not have a tough race that November, despite electoral threats that were leveled at him after the vote."
"Bernie Sanders and the Progressive Left's Selfless Defense of Obamacare" I don't know if I buy this frame, since even if you didn't care about Obamacare you'd still find the included tax cuts and other clauses in the GOP bills unacceptable, and I really don't see any advantage in letting the GOP have their way, but it's an interesting way to look at it.
Remember when even Markos acknowledged the problem? "EXCERPT: Crashing the Gate: 'I don't get it. When a consultant on the Republican side loses, we take them out and shoot them. You guys -- keep hiring them.' --Nationally prominent Republican official"
"The iron law of online abuse: You could call it something like Cohen's Law — named, of course, for Nick Cohen, the seething thing in the middle pages of the Observer — or the Iron Law of Online Abuse. It goes something like this: every single pundit or journalist who goes on a moral crusade against left-wing social-media crudery will have, very recently, done the exact same things they're complaining against. They will have used insults, personal attacks, expletives, epithets, or unpleasant sexual suggestions; they will have engaged in bullying or spiteful little squabbles; they will have indulged in some form of racism, sexism, homophobia, or transphobia; they will have encouraged political repression, violence, or censorship; they will have threatened to contact someone's editor or boss or the police or otherwise have conspired to ruin their life. Chances are that they won't have been very good at it, but they will have been mean; they will have used invective. This is always — always — true."
Everyone will tell you radiotherapy is fatiguing. Oh, gods, it bloody is!
I still have idiots in my feeds making up nonsense about how "the left" and Bernie Sanders "ignore" race and gender issues or want to pretend they don't exist or something. These are often accompanied by pictures of either Hillary surrounded by black people or Bernie speaking to largely white crowds. A few weeks back I was sufficiently annoyed by this that I started googling around for pictures of Sanders around people who weren't white, and noticed an interesting thing: Even when he was speaking to black crowds, there were few press pictures of him with attendees. And what pictures the press had published were usually tight-focused on just his face. Are there even photos of him speaking at the Apollo? I never saw them. (Apparently, the press didn't go to the Apollo. They went to another event where he spoke the same day at which they felt more comfortable — one out in the 'burbs where all those big stadiums are, and the crowds are mostly white. Then they complained that the crowd was white.) It's not easy to find pictures of him when he spoke at the NAACP, either. But I did find a couple of shots worth keeping around to remind people that the "black people don't like Bernie" crowd is not reality-based. Like this one, and like this one.
* In any event, there's that other canard, the one about Sanders supporters, but there is already plenty to debunk "BernieBro" mythology, just as there was a year ago, such as, "Sanders supporters are the least racist."
People are disturbed that Trump wants personal loyalty. I thought it was pretty scary back in 2007 when people in the White House thought they swore an oath to the president. I wonder if they actually did. But let's not pretend this "loyalty" thing is new. Party operatives always act like loyalty to the president is more important than policy or the oath to the Constitution. It was overt with Bush, and it was an entire party culture with Obama. No reason Trump wouldn't want the same thing.
As if flying isn't horrible enough already, "New TSA Policy May Lead to Increased Scrutiny of Reading Material: The TSA is testing new requirements that passengers remove books and other paper goods from their carry-on baggage when going through airline security. Given the sensitivity of our reading choices, this raises privacy concerns."
"Elizabeth Warren: It's time for Democrats to run on single-payer health care: Elizabeth Warren suggests that the Democratic Party adopt the progressive agenda, including a single-payer plan. [...] 'President Obama tried to move us forward with health-care coverage by using a conservative model that came from one of the conservative think tanks that had been advanced by a Republican governor in Massachusetts,' she told The Wall Street Journal in an interview last week. 'Now it's time for the next step. And the next step is single payer.'"
I was delighted to see headlines the other day that four Barclays execs are being prosecuted. But I'm curious about how it's happening this late at all, what with statutes of limitations and all that. Still hasn't been explained to me, but Atrios asks the important question: "Who, exactly, did they piss off?"
Marcy Wheeler, "Democrats Need A Plan For National Voter Protection [...] The House Appropriations Committee just defunded the Election Assistance Commission, which is the only federal entity to help states prevent getting hacked. The head of Trump's 'Election Integrity' Commission, Kris Kobach — fresh off court sanctions for lying to a court — sent a letter to all the Secretaries of State, asking them for their voting rolls (including party affiliation). And then Trump named the loathsome Hans Van Spaskovsky, who has a history of suppressing the vote of people of color, to the Commission. It's probably no accident all this is happening as Trump and Mitch McConnell try to force through a massively unpopular change to ObamaCare. By making showy plans to cheat on a national scale, the Administration may be reassuring Republicans they can keep their job even by selling out their constituents in favor of a tax cut for the wealthy. They'll just do it by cheating even more obviously than they have in the past."
Atrios also quotes from a useful critique of the party leadership: "If you are a Democrat and think Ossoff blew an opportunity and fear more of the same in 2018, you need the DCCC's theory of the electorate to improve." (There's more.)
"Cops Sent Warrant To Facebook To Dig Up Dirt On Woman Whose Boyfriend They Had Just Killed: Everything anyone has ever said about staying safe while interacting with the police is wrong. That citizens are told to comport themselves in complete obeisance just to avoid being beaten or shot by officers is itself bizarre -- an insane inversion of the term 'public servant.' But Philando Castile, who was shot five times and killed by (now former) Officer Jeronimo Yanez, played by all the rules (which look suspiciously like the same instructions given to stay 'safe' during an armed robbery). It didn't matter. [...] To 'win' at killing citizens, you must start the spin immediately. Yanez spun his own, speaking to a lawyer less than two hours after killing Castile. Local law enforcement did the same thing. Documents obtained by Tony Webster show Special Agent Bill O'Donnell issued a warrant to Facebook for 'all information retained' by the company on Diamond Reynolds, Castile's girlfriend. This was to include all email sent or received by that account, as well as 'chat logs,' which presumably means the content of private messages. The warrant also demands any communications that may have been deleted by Reynolds, as well as metadata on photos or videos uploaded to Facebook. It came accompanied with an indefinite gag order. [...] The only upside -- and it's incredibly small given the surrounding circumstances -- is Facebook refused to hand over the information on the grounds that the indefinite gag order was unconstitutional. Faced with this pushback, Minnesota police withdrew the warrant. But in the end, Yanez was acquitted and Philando Castile is still dead -- a man who did nothing more than try to comply with an officer's orders."
A "study" was released that purported to "prove" that the $15 minimum wage in Seattle hurt employment. It used an unreliable control group and it completely ignored chains, but there you are. Econospeak debunks: "Words cannot describe the torment experienced by the data before they confessed what the University of Washington team got them to confess. I can only urge readers with an open mind to study Table 3 carefully. The average wage increase, from the second quarter of 2014 to the third quarter of 2016, for all employees of single site establishments was 18 percent. Eighteen percent! That is an annual increase of almost 8 percent. For two and a quarter years in a row. Not bad. And the number of hours worked of ALL employees of single site establishments? Up 18 percent in a little over two years. That too is an increase of almost 8 percent per annum."
Glenn Greenwald has been saying for months that it's important to wait for facts from reliable sources before running with a story. Just about everyone forgot to do that, caught up in a partisan frenzy. "CNN Journalists Resign: Latest Example of Media Recklessness on the Russia Threat: Three prominent CNN journalists resigned Monday night after the network was forced to retract and apologize for a story linking Trump ally Anthony Scaramucci to a Russian investment fund under congressional investigation. That article — like so much Russia reporting from the U.S. media — was based on a single anonymous source, and now, the network cannot vouch for the accuracy of its central claims." Of course, CNN is not alone among the establishment media in doing this non-journalism journalism.
Scott Ritter has his doubts: "Ex-Weapons Inspector: Trump's Sarin Claims Built on 'Lie'."
* "Why Won't the Media Tell the Real Story of Trump's Military Strike in Syria?: If you wish to understand the degree to which the supposedly free western media are constructing a world of half-truths and deceptions to manipulate their audiences, keeping us uninformed and pliant, there could hardly be a better case study than their treatment of Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh. All of these highly competitive, for-profit, scoop-seeking media outlets separately took identical decisions: first to reject Hersh's latest investigative report, and then to studiously ignore it once it was published in Germany last Sunday. They have continued to maintain an absolute radio silence on his revelations, even as over the past few days they have given a great deal of attention to two stories on the very issue Hersh's investigation addresses."
Jason Leopold, "Secret Report Contradicts US Position On Chelsea Manning Leaks: Prosecutors said WikiLeaks' disclosures about Iraq and Afghanistan posed a major threat to US national security. But it turns out the classified document they cited — newly obtained by BuzzFeed News — said almost the exact opposite. "
"Amazon Bites Off Even More Monopoly Power: Amazon on Friday announced plans to acquire Whole Foods, the high-end grocer. If approved by antitrust enforcers, the $13.7 billion deal would give Amazon control of more than 400 stores, an extensive supply chain and a new source of consumer data. Amazon will argue to federal authorities, most likely the Federal Trade Commission, that the deal should be blessed because the combined entity's share of the American grocery market will be less than 5 percent. But antitrust officials would be naïve to view this deal as simply about groceries. Buying Whole Foods will enable Amazon to leverage and amplify the extraordinary power it enjoys in online markets and delivery, making an even greater share of commerce part of its fief." They can wipe out the very people who were benefiting from the existence of Whole Foods.
* "The big consequence of the Amazon-Whole Foods deal no one's talking about: Amazon has proved its power to disrupt markets. Now its proposed purchase of Whole Foods has some small farmers and food producers worried that they could be next in line. So say organic activists, farmers' advocates and economists who are just beginning to process the potential ramifications of Amazon's bid to buy Whole Foods, the country's largest organic retailer."
"How the Student Loan Industry, Trump, and Neoliberals Are Creating a Nation of Serfs: Most of the discussion about student debt in the United States has centered on its excessiveness, the negative impact it has on home-buying for the next generation, various refinancing schemes, and (for the grossly uninformed) how borrowers simply need to 'pay what they owe.' However, the untold story of student loan debt in the United States is that it is being used as a form of economic terrorism designed to not only redistribute wealth from everyday Americans to the elite, but also to undermine and degrade American democracy as a whole."
"Chicago won't allow high school students to graduate without a plan for the future: CHICAGO — To graduate from a public high school in Chicago, students will soon have to meet a new and unusual requirement: They must show that they've secured a job or received a letter of acceptance to college, a trade apprenticeship, a gap year program or the military. Mayor Rahm Emanuel (D) said he wants to make clear that the nation's third-largest school system is not just responsible for shepherding teenagers to the end of their senior year, but also for setting them on a path to a productive future."
"Missouri Republicans Lower St. Louis Minimum Wage From $10 To $7.70:
If you thought the minimum wage only moved in one direction, then Missouri Republicans have a surprise for you. After St. Louis leaders raised the wage floor for workers within city limits, the state GOP recently passed what's known as a statewide 'preemption' law, forbidding localities from taking such matters into their own hands. On Friday, Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens (R) said he would let the law go into effect, thereby barring cities and counties from setting a minimum wage higher than the state level."
"Nina Turner on Why Ossoff Lost in Georgia Special Election [...] I think also the message was that people are not looking for folks to run 'Republican lite.' Either you are going to run on the values of the Democratic party, be authentic about those principles and those values, or you're not. But people don't want a substitute for the real thing, and that is what Mr. Ossoff was doing. He was being a substitute for what a real Republican is, and that district is a very strong Republican stronghold, no doubt about it."
Pareen, "This Is Normal: What most of the worst people in Donald Trump's administration have in common is that they are Republicans. This simple fact is obscured sometimes by the many ways in which Trump is genuinely an aberration from the political norm — like his practice of naked nepotism rather than laundering the perpetuation of class advantage through a 'meritocratic' process — and by the fact that many of the most vocal online spokespeople for 'the resistance' ignore the recent history of the Republican Party in favor of a Trump-centric theory of How Fucked Up Everything Is. But it is necessary for liberals, leftists, and Democrats to actually be clear on the fact that the Republican Party is responsible for Trump. The Democrats' longterm failure to make a compelling and all-encompassing case against conservatism and the GOP as institutions, rather than making specific cases against specific Republican politicians, is one of the reasons the party is currently in the political wilderness."
Blimey, Noam Chomsky in the NYT: "On Trump and the State of the Union [...] The Sanders campaign showed that a candidate with mildly progressive (basically New Deal) programs could win the nomination, maybe the election, even without the backing of the major funders or any media support. There's good reason to suppose that Sanders would have won the nomination had it not been for shenanigans of the Obama-Clinton party managers. He is now the most popular political figure in the country by a large margin."
"KING: We are losing the battle against police brutality in America: It's hard for me to write this, but we must be honest about our status in the fight against police brutality in America. We are losing. I have two primary metrics for that conclusion. First, 2017 is on pace to be the deadliest year ever measured for the number of people killed by police in our country. We can never claim to be winning the battle against police brutality if American police are killing more and more people. Period. Secondly, even the most egregious officers, in the most heinous cases of police violence, with the most overwhelming evidence, are still beating the charges against them."
"Texas Couple Exonerated 25 Years After Being Convicted of Lurid Crimes That Never Happened. The couple's prosecution in 1992 was part of a wave of cases across the country amid an episode of mass hysteria known as the Satanic Panic. Beginning in the 1980s, accusations flew that the childcare industry had been infiltrated by bands of Satanists hell-bent on brainwashing and sexually abusing young children. The Kellers' exoneration closes a decades-long chapter of profound injustice for a couple that paid an exceptionally high price for the credulousness of local law enforcement."
Remember Whitewater? Remember how Republican operatives turned what was no more than a failed financial decision into a federal case just to attack the Clintons? Well, Vermont has a rich, right-wing crackpot, too, and he has been doing his damnedest to turn a bad financial decision by Jane Sanders into a federal case, too. It shows every sign of being, as Bernie put it, "nonsense," but he's gotten the FBI involved and the difference between this and Whitewater is that Clintonite Democrats have been working right alongside him to promote the story of the vast corruption of Jane and Bernie. Interestingly, they are linking to the Politico story without having read it, or perhaps hoping no one will read past the headline.
"How Andrew Cuomo broke the New York subway [...] Cuomo, who has been governor since 2011, is basically the exact opposite of this visionary leader. Instead of recognizing the absolutely vital nature of the subway, he has been shockingly hostile to public transit in general, deliberately undermining and underfunding it from the beginning of his term. He has done nothing about the cost problem. Lacking both a price fix and sufficient outside revenue to stabilize its finances, the MTA has repeatedly resorted to fare hikes and borrowing to cover its spending, leading to a huge debt overhang. (On the other hand, Cuomo did spend billions on a lousy bridge after coring out all the transit additions that were supposed to go with it.)"
Juan Cole, "What Trump Didn't Know About Herat When He Barred Robotics Students From Visiting the U.S.: The U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, has denied visas to six Afghan high school students from the city of Herat to accompany their invention in robotics to the United States for a demonstration. The girls made the 500 mile journey from the western city to the capital of Kabul to apply for visitor visas. They were rejected. Their project, however, was accepted by First Global Challenge, which organizes events for teenage high school students."
"Centrist Democrats are now the great defenders of social justice? Please. [...] It follows that there is no way to achieve a full measure of justice for all downtrodden groups without a huge left-wing economic reform. Full employment and a completed welfare state would strike a massive blow against racism and sexism — and even protect against police brutality. Strong protections for workers' rights would help prevent abuse of immigrants. An attack on monopolies and Wall Street swindlers would help minority businesses and work against racist banking practices. Left-wing economics would not completely solve social justice problems, of course. Much else would need to be done. But it would help a lot — and better still, it would help virtually every oppressed group simultaneously."
"'Bipartisanship' means 'I don't understand what politics is': What is politics? Politics is a struggle between competing interests. What is politics not? Politics is not an ultimately unimportant game that you play in order to make friends. If you write about or participate in politics for living, please do not fuck this up."
Josh Barro has an interesting take, since no one can admit that no, we don't actually need to raise taxes on the working/middle-classes to pay for health care. It's probably the right take within the context of a discourse that still acts like we're on the gold standard. Of course, it is also based on an incorrect premise, since (a) Warren says we need to support Medicare-for-All and (b) Sanders doesn't actually oppose markets. But making a list of corporate practices that make life miserable and talking about putting a stop to them — well, that actually sounds like a good thing to do. "The formula Democrats need: less Clintonism, less Sandersism, more Warrenism. [...] Democrats should make a list of corporate practices that grind people's gears and ask whether there's a compelling economic rationale for them. If there isn't, they should propose to prohibit them, penalize them, or at least have the government stop subsidizing them. And they should explain how doing so will make it easier for people to buy the things they need to live the way they want, with their own earnings." It's still going to take some work — this is about a restoration of a lot of things we've lost in the last few decades, like those old post-Depression SEC regs, and taking antitrust seriously again. Selling it to the public shouldn't be that hard, though — I mean, everybody hates Comcast.
Ryan Cooper, "Kill the private health insurance industry before it kills you [...] Bill Clinton's experience convinced Democrats that they couldn't risk offending the health-care industry when attempting reform. But Barack Obama's effort to buy them off clearly didn't work either. ObamaCare and Medicaid are the most politically vulnerable parts of the health-care system. The former is vulnerable precisely because it has so many compromises and handouts for private insurance. But the moment Republicans took power, they immediately plotted to destroy those weak points, with the savings shoveled into the pockets of the rich."
Newsweek, "Democrats Want a Socialist to Lead Their Party More Than a Capitalist [...] The poll published this week from Morning Consult/Politico asked respondents what they thought of Pelosi's job performance. Forty-one percent of Democrats thought she should stay as minority leader while 27 percent thought she should be replaced. Thirty-six percent of Democrats thought things had gone mostly well for the party under Pelosi while 19 percent said mostly bad and 27 percent said neither good nor bad. But when asked if a hypothetical replacement should be a socialist or capitalist, more Democrats opted for socialism. Thirty-five percent said it's somewhat or very important the replacement be a socialist while 31 percent felt the same for a capitalist."
"Democrats are still obsessed with Jill Stein. They should start obsessing over nonvoters instead. [...] There are two categories of non-two-party votes in the contemporary American political climate, and they're regarded differently. The first is the third-party vote, which, especially on the left side of the aisle, is considered burglary. The second is total abstention, which is considered inevitable, and therefore hardly factors into the mainstream media's election postmortems. In neither scenario does the losing major party (in this case the Democrats) take responsibility for failing to move potential voters to act on its behalf. [...] If these are the only variables of interest to us — the number of ballots affirmatively cast for Trump, Clinton, Stein, and maybe Johnson — then yeah, the Stein-as-spoiler argument makes some sense. But here's another number, one that ought to change your perspective: 87,810. That's how many Michigan voters showed up to the polls, cast ballots, and declined to vote for a presidential candidate at all."
John Nichols in The Nation, "A Progressive Electoral Wave Is Sweeping the Country: The Trump-obsessed big media are mostly ignoring it, but Bernie-inspired activists are winning across the country — including in districts that went for Trump in 2016. [...] Too radical? Too bold? Not at all. Backed by a coalition that included veteran activists who fought segregation, along with newcomers who got their first taste of politics in Bernie Sanders's 2016 presidential campaign, Lumumba won 55 percent of the vote in a May Democratic primary that saw him oust the centrist incumbent mayor and sweep past several other senior political figures in Mississippi's largest city. A month later, he secured a stunning 93 percent of the vote in a general election that drew one of the highest turnouts the city has seen in years. [...] This is the frustrating part of Lumumba's 'shock waves around the world' calculus: His election should have sent a shock wave. The same holds true for the election of progressives in local races from Cincinnati to St. Louis to South Fulton, Georgia, in a season of resistance that began with the Women's March on Washington and mass protests against President Trump's Muslim ban but has quickly moved to polling places across the country."
Beat the Press, "Thomas Friedman Whines About His Lost TPP: Thomas Friedman, who is legendary for his boldly stated wrong assertions, got into the game again making absurd claims about the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the great loss the U.S. suffers from it going down.
Laura Flanders interview with Naomi Klein on No is Not Enough: Yes to the People's Movement. It's not enough to object to Trump, we have to be ready to promote positive policies to counteract the immoral proposals that are bound to come.
"Why the Democrats Won't Wake Up [...] Longtime sixth-district resident and scholar Billy Michael Honor nailed it in Huffington Post, observing that Ossoff's comfortably centrist and noncommittal message 'lacked any compelling progressive vision for the future. It also lacked any way to substantively convince the average politically uninterested citizen why they should give a damn about the Democratic Party. The message simply says, 'vote for us, we won't be as bad as the other group.'"
Weirdly, in Britain: "Top Tories in revolt against May over public spending Theresa May is facing a chorus of Tory demands for a radical overhaul of state funding for public services as cabinet ministers and senior Conservative MPs back higher pay for millions of NHS workers, more cash for schools and a 'national debate' on student debt. The prime minister's waning authority was highlighted as her health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, and education secretary Justine Greening lobbied for an easing of austerity and senior Conservative MPs insisted public services would be in growing peril without an urgent loosening of the purse strings."
I ran into this thing from the wayback machine with clips of Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Donald Trump at various times advocating single-payer (or some kind of real, national health care) — never mind what Jimmy Dore is saying, it's just a reminder of how much we forget.
"How Paul Robeson found his political voice in the Welsh valleys: African American star Robeson built his singing career in the teeth of racism in the early 1900s. But his radicalism was spurred on in Britain — by a chance meeting with a group of Welsh miners. [...] I knew that, in the winter of 1929, Paul had been returning from a matinee performance of Show Boat [in London] when he heard male voices wafting from the street. He stopped, startled by the perfect harmonisation and then by the realisation that the singers, when they came into view, were working men, carrying protest banners as they sang. [...] Some 50 years later, [his son] Pauli Robeson visited the Talygarn Miners' Rehabilitation Centre and met an elderly man who'd been present on that day in 1929. The old miner talked of how stunned the marchers had been when Robeson attached himself to their procession: a huge African American stranger in formal attire incongruous next to the half-starved Welshmen in their rough-hewn clothes and mining boots."
"Jimi Hendrix Park Opens at Last, With a Purple Flourish: SEATTLE — Jimi Hendrix's looping signature greets visitors at the park bearing his name, here in his hometown. The eye-catching purple script is among many personal touches that pay homage to the musician in Jimi Hendrix Park, which was formally christened in 2006 but didn't open until Saturday, after a decade of permit delays and financial woes."
RIP: Norman Pollack, 1933-2017: "Norman's legacy stands tall, from his days in the civil rights movement to his tenure at Yale and Michigan State University, he never stopped fighting for social justice."
RIP: Pete Shotton, 75, one of the original Quarrymen, the group formed by his best pal, John Lennon, which eventually became The Beatles. I missed this when it happened in April.
I was going to link to the Beatles' "No Reply" on YouTube here to go with the title of this post, but it seems to have been effectively purged, because all I could find were covers. *frowny face*
The idea that people who want expanded health care, reduced income inequality, fewer wars and more public services are "unrealistic" springs from an old deception in our politics.
For decades pundits and pols have been telling progressive voters they don't have the juice to make real demands, and must make alliances with more "moderate" and presumably more numerous "centrists" in order to avoid becoming the subjects of right-wing monsters like Reagan/Bush/Bush/Trump.
Voters for decades were conned into thinking they were noisome minorities whose best path to influence is to make peace with the mightier "center," which inevitably turns out to support military interventionism, fewer taxes for the rich, corporate deregulation and a ban on unrealistic "giveaway" proposals like free higher education. Those are the realistic, moderate, popular ideas, we're told.
But it's a Wizard of Oz trick, just like American politics in general. There is no numerically massive center behind the curtain. What there is instead is a tiny island of wealthy donors, surrounded by a protective ring of for-sale major-party politicians (read: employees) whose job it is to castigate too-demanding voters and preach realism.
This cannot be stressed enough: It does not matter what the Republicans say as long as the Democrats don't agree with them. If the Republicans claim that health care and public services are "extreme" or "communism" or "far-left" or "unrealistic" or "budget-busting", any meaningful opposition party must and will argue the case that they are wrong, that in fact these views are mainstream, democratic, supported by the vast majority of the country — which they are. That's the real reality-based approach to politics that our so-called "pragmatists" refuse to take. If Democrats want to pass good policy, they will argue for good policy, not constantly tell us why we can't have good policy.
"Jeremy Corbyn was just 2,227 votes away from chance to be Prime Minister: Winning seven Tory knife-edge seats could have put Labour leader in Downing Street" And that might have happened if the party had decided to devote resources to winning the marginals instead of only defending right-wing seats.
* As to young people's votes for Corbyn, they may not be that young. "Labour Won Much More Than The Under-25 Vote, Says YouGov: Only if you're 47-plus were you more likely to vote Tory." (This is much the same as in the US, where it was the 18-44 group that broke for Sanders in the primaries.)
This is actually from before the election, but good on Stiglitz for trying. "Austerity has strangled Britain. Only Labour will consign it to history: Neoliberalism was a creature of the Reagan and Thatcher era. Austerity is its death rattle. Before it does any more damage, Britain needs a plan for growth." I'm glad to see the Guardian finally decided to get on their own alleged team, too.
Meanwhile.... "Europe: the Danger of the Center: The good news out of Europe is that Marine Le Pen's neo-Nazi National Front took a beating in the May 7 French presidential election. The bad news is that the program of the winner, Emmanuel Macron, might put Le Pen back in the running six years from now. Macron pledges to cut 120,000 public jobs, reduce spending by 60 billion Euros, jettison the 35-hour workweek, raise the retirement age, weaken unions' negotiating strength and cut corporate taxes. It is a program that is unlikely to revive the morbid French economy, but it will certainly worsen the plight of jobless youth and seniors and hand the National Front ammunition for the 2022 election."
The NYT also published an outrageous article blaming the "violence" of "BernieBros" for a genuine lone-nut attempted assassination that appears to have come from someone who supported Sanders and didn't like Republicans very much. It's not exactly making amends, but the paper has now published an op-ed by the man himself, "Bernie Sanders: How Democrats Can Stop Losing Elections [...] If these results are not a clear manifestation of a failed political strategy, I don't know what is. For the sake of our country and the world, the Democratic Party, in a very fundamental way, must change direction. It has got to open its doors wide to working people and young people. It must become less dependent on wealthy contributors, and it must make clear to the working families of this country that, in these difficult times, it is prepared to stand up and fight for their rights. Without hesitation, it must take on the powerful corporate interests that dominate the economic and political life of the country."
* Bizarrely, the one media figure who got it right was Sean Hannity, who said, "I can't blame Bernie Sanders, he's a nice guy, his supporters aren't like that, it's just one guy."
"Total Surprise! People Love the Left's Ideas for Progress: I just can't believe what happened in the British elections. I can't get over the fact that when a politician with real convictions honed over 40 years of political life — generous and forward-looking convictions rooted in an understanding of how social progress for the many has actually been engineered in previous times — speaks out unencumbered by fraidy-cat image doctors, people actually respond enthusiastically. It's shocking, absolutely shocking."
Also from the Guardian just before the election, Thomas Frank, "From rust belt to mill towns: a tale of two voter revolts : On the eve of Britain's election, Thomas Frank, who anticipated the rise of Trump among white working-class voters in the US, visited the industrial heartlands of northern England to compare two momentous contests"
"Data on 198M voters exposed by GOP contractor: : A data analytics contractor employed by the Republican National Committee (RNC) left databases containing information on nearly 200 million potential voters exposed to the internet without security, allowing anyone who knew where to look to download it without a password. 'We take full responsibility for this situation,' said the contractor, Deep Root Analytics, in a statement."
"Flint water crisis: five officials charged with involuntary manslaughter: Five Michigan officials, including the head of the state health department, have been charged with involuntary manslaughter in connection with the crisis over lead poisoning in drinking water in Flint. [...] Attorney general Bill Schuette presented the charges as a turning point in the investigation into water contamination in Flint, which has continued for more than a year. He said investigators would now focus on trying 17 officials who face criminal charges."
"Cuomo To NYC's Suffering Subway Commuters: Drive A Car: No governor with an eye on the White House would possibly let the country's greatest mass transit network collapse on his watch, right? Well, you must not know Andrew Cuomo, to whom the city-dwelling car driver ranks slightly below an on-time budget and 'no new taxes' as things of the most paramount importance. As for the rest of us, however, those forced into aluminum cans in a sweltering heatwave, soon to be idled beneath the East River on account of fictional 'train traffic ahead of us,' we could truly go to hell (or the MTA's steamy approximation of it)."
"Why Are Drug Prices Going Up? Democratic Power Players Help Pharmaceutical Industry In Connecticut Battle: Wide majorities of voters want public officials to reduce American medicine prices, which are the highest in the world and have become a key driver of skyrocketing healthcare costs. And yet as politicians including Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders have continued to call for a crackdown, corporate power players have successfully blocked even minimal reforms — with the help, at times, of industry-connected Democrats, whose party portrays itself as a consumer-defending critic of the healthcare industry."
"Senator Elizabeth Warren joins the call for an investigation into TransDigm's business [...] "As a member of the Senate Committee on Armed Services, I have also been monitoring reports that suggest TransDigm WorldWide has used a variety of tactics to avoid sharing cost information with the government for parts for which it is the sole source supplier," Warren wrote in the letter to Acting Inspector General Glenn Fine at the U.S. Department of Defense on May 19, 2017. "These reports further show that TransDigm has unreasonably raised prices on many parts shortly after completing acquisitions of the companies that produce them."
Dday in The Intercept, "Trump Assigned Himself An Awful Lot Of Homework That Isn't Getting Done: The ceremonial signing of executive orders has become a trademark of the Trump presidency, with elaborate photo ops and presentations of the president's bizarre signature happening at a record-breaking rate. But in so doing, he has assigned himself — or, at least, the agencies and departments he ostensibly leads — a record amount of homework. It's not getting done."
"U.S. Treasury Secretary Mnuchin: China Bilateral Investment Treaty 'On Our Agenda': Trump administration is seeking to make progress on specific market-access issues first such as beef exports, Chinese rules on biotechnology imports and energy products." David Dayen explained last year that this is a job-killing deal. that "would facilitate more offshoring, and that could also give China, of all countries, effective veto power over domestic policy." Moreover, " 'It's pitched as a way to promote investment,' said Celeste Drake, trade and globalization policy specialist at the AFL-CIO. 'We're one of the top countries for foreign investment anyway. We don't need to give away rights for foreign investors.'
"A neo-Nazi with explosives and a framed photo of Timothy McVeigh is not a threat, judge rules: Brandon Russell is capable of making a bomb — and he admitted doing so. Officials believe he also participated in neo-Nazi chat rooms where he threatened to kill people and blow up places. Investigators found guns, ammunition and white supremacist propaganda in his bedroom, court records say. A framed photograph of convicted Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was on his dresser. Prosecutors believe those reasons should keep Russell behind bars while he awaits trial on federal charges. A judge, however, disagreed and decided that Russell can be released on bond."
David Dayen's tiny letter on how Republicans accidentally overturned a drug-testing rule they love. Also, David is upset by an interview with Ben Bernanke in which he, of course, makes excuses for the mess he helped make. Not surprising, given the recent Chicago Tribune feature on how, "the Cook County assessor systematically inflated prices on low-income housing and deflated prices for the wealthy's homes. [...] This stunning corruption, combined with the relative indifference to the suffering of foreclosure victims, paints a disturbing picture of establishment malevolence. They not only don't care about the plight of the rank and file, they feel unencumbered to actually steal from them. And yes, Bernanke's excuse-making sets the table for this type of greed engineering. The culture of impunity and the failure of accountability represent a large reason why we have the government we have today."
Also from Dday, "Republicans Can't Really Repeal Dodd-Frank: But they will pretend to try anyway." They have a ludicrous bill in Congress that the Senate is unlikely to pass, but they like the theater and making speeches.
Robbie Nelson in Jacobin, "The Stuff of Politics: Giving people stuff isn't a bad thing. In fact, it's the material basis of mass politics. [...] But HAMP's deficiencies should also be understood as a reflection of a more fundamental political failure: that of technocratic liberalism. This political ideology — currently dominant within the Democratic Party — embraces policies whose benefits are complex, means-tested, and often delivered through tax credits or the private sector. For the past several decades, technocratic liberalism has demonstrated its inability to solidify a mass electoral base by enacting policies that improve the lives of rank-and-file constituencies. This should be Politics 101 — when a party gains power, it uses that power to pass programs that visibly benefit its base in order to shore up their loyalty, as well as to attract potential new voters. The US Constitution makes this more difficult, with its over-abundance of veto points. So do gridlock and gerrymandering. But delivering tangible gains to workers and the poor remains the linchpin of any viable left politics. People need health care, housing, education, child care. They need something to vote for. They need to see what they get when they vote.
"Saudi Arabia is Destabilizing the World [...] This episode is especially alarming because Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim country, has long been one of its most tolerant. Indonesian Islam, like most belief systems on that vast archipelago, is syncretic, gentle, and open-minded. The stunning fall of Jakarta's governor reflects the opposite: intolerance, sectarian hatred, and contempt for democracy. Fundamentalism is surging in Indonesia. This did not happen naturally."
What's interesting to me about this piece is not so much that it is called, "Can Hillary Clinton Please Go Quietly into the Night?" and makes that case, but that it's written by someone who actually can say, "Throwing open our markets to China as much as we did — that looked wiser back then. So did deregulating the financial industry. So did pushing for three-strikes laws. So did the bailout of Mexico. So did focusing on deficit reduction. So did high levels of immigration. So did humanitarian interventions in the former Yugoslavia. So did welfare reform. Bill's calls, like all big calls, were controversial, but they were far more justifiable in light of the data we had at the time. But what about with the data we have now?" All the data we had then said these were terrible ideas that would lead to increased poverty, racism, and financial destabilization. The recent data merely confirms what we already knew, it was not a surprise to anyone who had a passing acquaintance with history.
Van Jones — not necessarily a reliable witness, but sometimes he just can't stop himself from telling the truth — says the Clinton campaign set a billion dollars on fire: "He blamed the same forces in the Democratic Party behind the Clinton campaign's defeat for continuing to divide the resistance to President Trump after the election. 'And now they want us to fight about whether black folks or white workers or Latinos or any other group should get the money,' Jones said. 'First of all, you need to give the money back to the people, period.' 'Quit getting rich off people's struggles,' Jones finished. The progressive CNN commentator has said before that Clinton's defeat signaled an end for that wing of the Democratic Party. 'This idea that we're going to be this moderate party that's going to move in this direction, that's going to throw blacks under the bus for criminal justice reform or for prison expansion, that's going to throw workers under the bus for NAFTA, those days are over,' Jones said in January shortly before Trump's inauguration."
"A 2016 Review: There's Reason to Be Skeptical of a Comey Effect [...] But it's now clear that Mrs. Clinton was weaker heading into Oct. 28 than was understood at the time. Several other polls were conducted over the same period that showed Mr. Trump gaining quickly on Mrs. Clinton in the days ahead of the Comey letter. And the timing of these polls — particularly the gap between when they were taken and when they were released — has probably helped to exaggerate the effect of Mr. Comey's letter on the presidential race."
Amazon just patented an antitrust violation: "Amazon granted a patent that prevents in-store shoppers from online price checking: Amazon's long been a go-to for people to online price compare while shopping at brick-and-mortars. Now, a new patent granted to the company could prevent people from doing just that inside Amazon's own stores. The patent, titled 'Physical Store Online Shopping Control,' details a mechanism where a retailer can intercept network requests like URLs and search terms that happen on its in-store Wi-Fi, then act upon them in various ways. The document details in great length how a retailer like Amazon would use this information to its benefit. If, for example, the retailer sees you're trying to access a competitor's website to price check an item, it could compare the requested content to what's offered in-store and then send price comparison information or a coupon to your browser instead. Or it could suggest a complementary item, or even block content outright."
Radley Balko reports on a reporter who spent "A day with 'killology' police trainer Dave Grossman," one of the most dangerous men in America, who trains cops to "bravely" take shooting people lightly. "Grossman and Glennon teach the most popular of these classes, but they have competitors. When it comes to teaching cops how to escalate, how to see the world as their enemy and how to find the courage to kill more people, more often, there's no shortage of options."
"Follow The Money: The Flow Of Funds In The Pharmaceutical Distribution System: About 10 percent of all health care spending is on prescription drugs, and the spending is growing at a rapid rate. This has prompted calls for government intervention to regulate drug prices or otherwise control their rapid increase. But any intervention should be predicated on a clear understanding of the economic forces that drive price increases, and the parties responsible for them."
"$15 for 15 minutes: How Courts Are Letting Prison Phone Companies Gouge Incarcerated People." Isn't it interesting how they come up with these clever ways of disintegrating the lives and families of people who are in prison? It's not simply that there is no thought of rehabilitation, it's that they make it impossible for people to maintain the connections to society that would allow them ever to recover from going to prison.
"Move Fast and Break Things by Jonathan Taplin review — the damage done by Silicon Valley: Taplin's starting point is the music of Levon Helm and the Band, but the fight against the spoiled brats of Google, Amazon and Facebook is much bigger. Personally, I thought Taplin omitted too much about the ludicrously low percentage of profits that the recording industry gives to creators, when he talked to Sam Seder about it.
"Time for Democrats to Unite Around Medicare for All: Contrary to how it is often portrayed, this is not some left-wing fantasy but an idea with widespread across-the-aisle support. An April survey from the Economist/YouGov showed that 60 percent of Americans support 'expanding Medicare to provide health insurance to every American,' including a majority of independents and nearly half of self-identified Republicans. Likewise, a Gallup poll conducted last month found that a majority of Americans would like to see a single-payer system implemented. (Given how deeply Medicare is woven into the fabric of our society, I prefer the term 'Medicare for all' over the wonky 'single-payer.')"
Shaun King, "KING: Why progressives and liberals continue to feel like unwelcome guests in the Democratic Party: Earlier this week in Virginia, two men who each voted for George W. Bush twice to become President of the United States won their primaries in the governor's race there. Ed Gillespie, a lifelong Republican, won the Republican primary and Ralph Northam, who has a record of voting Republican, won the Democratic primary. No, that's not a typo. It is, perhaps, the most relevant example, though, of why progressives and liberals in America are struggling to find a home in the same big tent." Of course, King mentions the now-famous
Greg Benford, "Escorting Vonnegut: For decades, starting in the 1970s, I was UCI's default escort for visitors and speakers a bit out of the ordinary. This usually meant science fiction writers with a large audience, though not always. I was an sf writer too, but with real-world credentials as a professor of physics, which some thought qualified me to mediate between the real and the imaginary. The most striking writer I hosted, in the early 1990s, was Kurt Vonnegut."
One of the most popular songs in Britain in the last few weeks was "Liar Liar GE2017 by Captain SKA. It's about Theresa May. It's not being played on the radio.
"My Country Too" by the Oyster Band: "This was written overnight in a fit of exasperation when Theresa May hijacked Brexit to call an opportunistic general election, breaking repeated promises not to; but that was just the catalyst. During the long Oysters3 tour in March we travelled around and had conversations with many people about the state of our country and about their doubts and frustrations. It felt, in a way, like a song people were wanting us to write.
I'm trying not to hold my breath for the results of the election tomorrow. I want Corbyn to win so much, but I know that even though he's looking better than Austerity Milliband did last time, it'd still take a miracle. But see below.
Great news for the survivors of the Kansas Catastrophe. "Kansas Gov. Brownback's tax experiment comes to end, as legislature overturns veto: When Kansas Governor Sam Brownback launched his experiment, he told Kansans that it would be an injection of adrenaline and that the economy would come roaring back to life. But after 5 years, the economy struggles and the state budget is a disaster. Speaking from the Senate floor tonight, Sen. Dennings (R-Overland Park) spoke out in favor of overturning the Governor's veto and ending the tax experiment. 'This was a mistake,' and noted that it was his mistake, and he was prepared to break out the mop and start cleaning it up. For Governor Brownback, the overturn of his tax plan represents the ultimate rebuke of a governor. Unlike Democratic governors in states with Supermajority Republicans who have faced veto override, Governor Brownback would assume immunity — the State House & Senate are both super majority Republican. But the Republicans have seen enough. Sen. Hardy (R-Salina) made the case: 'The people in this state have had it. Either we pay the bill now or we pay a bigger bill later.' "
"Nevada's legislature just passed a radical plan to let anybody sign up for Medicaid:: Nevada, with little fanfare or notice, is inching toward a massive health insurance expansion — one that would give the state's 2.8 million residents access to a public health insurance option. The Nevada legislature passed a bill Friday that would allow anyone to buy into Medicaid, the public program that covers low-income Americans. It would be the first state to open the government-run program to all residents, regardless of their income or health status."
"EPA begins offering buyouts to cut staff: report: The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has kicked off its buyout program to reduce staffs numbers, according to an internal memo reported by Reuters on Thursday.The EPA memo was sent to all agency employees as President Trump, joined at the White House by EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, announced that the U.S. would withdraw from the Paris climate change accord."
"California Senate passes single-payer health care plan: SACRAMENTO — As a legislative deadline loomed, California senators Thursday — in some cases, reluctantly — voted to pass a $400 billion plan to create a government-run health care system without a way to pay for it. Senate Bill 562, by Sens. Ricardo Lara, D-Bell Gardens, and Toni Atkins, D-San Diego, passed 23-14 and will now advance to the Assembly, where it will likely be amended to include taxes. And that would mean the measure would require two-thirds votes in both chambers." This still has a long way to go, and there's certainly no guaranty it'll happen, but....
"EFF Sues FBI For Refusing To Turn Over Documents About Its Geek Squad Informants: A child porn indictment in California has led to a full-fledged examination of the FBI's use of "private searches." Private searches, performed by citizens, can be used to instigate investigations and obtain warrants. In this case, the private searches were performed by Best Buy Geek Squad members, who came across alleged child porn images while fixing the defendant's computer. Private searches during computer repairs are normal. But they're not roughly analogous to searches performed with a warrant. Companies that repair electronic devices are legally required to report discovered child porn to law enforcement. What they're not supposed to do, however, is dig through devices they're repairing in hopes of finding something illegal. Most techs don't go looking for child porn. But the FBI's close relationship with Best Buy turned private searches into searches performed by paid informants. Once government money is introduced into the equation, the search can no longer be considered "private." The introduction of cash rewards also skews the incentives, possibly encouraging Geek Squad members to spend more time looking for illicit images than focusing on the repair job at hand."
"A new GOP bill would make it virtually impossible to sue the police: Keeping with the Trump administration's law-and-order rhetoric, Republicans in the House and Senate recently introduced a bill they're calling the Back the Blue Act of 2017. The Senate bill was introduced by John Cornyn (R-Tex.), and is co-sponsored by 15 senators, all Republicans. The identical House bill was introduced by Ted Poe (R-Tex.), and includes five co-sponsors, also all Republicans. The bill would create new federal crimes, impose federal police over the will of local officials and voters and shield police officers from virtually any civil liability, even in cases of egregious misconduct."
"Saudis take 100% control of America's largest oil refinery: America's largest oil refinery is now fully owned by Saudi Arabia. Saudi Aramco, the kingdom's state-owned oil behemoth, took 100% control of the sprawling Port Arthur refinery in Texas on Monday, completing a deal that was first announced last year. Port Arthur is considered the crown jewel of the US refinery system. The Gulf Coast facility can process 600,000 barrels of oil per day, making it the largest refinery in North America."
It turns out there was a real Russian hack, though not the one everyone's been looking for. Naturally, it wasn't any of the usual suspects who scooped the story, it was The Intercept. "Top-Secret NSA Report Details Russian Hacking Effort Days Before 2016 Election: Russian military intelligence executed a cyberattack on at least one U.S. voting software supplier and sent spear-phishing emails to more than 100 local election officials just days before last November's presidential election, according to a highly classified intelligence report obtained by The Intercept." The story doesn't suggest any hacking of actual voting machines, but it does underline the necessity of keeping sensitive materials offline and sequestered. And as Marcy points out, there is real exposure in hiring contractors rather than keeping it in-house. The source was unfortunately exposed and of course was a contractor. "I get why we need to disseminate such information widely. But even if this information merely reports on stuff that had already been reported (to the WaPo, long ago), it nevertheless is testament to the degree to which adding contractors adds the likelihood of leaks. Or let's put it this way: we're sharing FISA information with contractors who don't have a need to know. But we're not sharing it with defendants whose freedom depends on contesting it. Maybe those priorities are screwy?"
"Hacked Emails Show Top UAE Diplomat Coordinating With Pro-Israel Think Tank Against Iran: The email account of one of Washington's most connected and influential foreign operatives has been hacked. [...] The emails provided so far to the The Intercept show a growing relationship between the United Arab Emirates and the pro-Israel, neoconservative think tank called the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD). On the surface, the alliance should be surprising, as the UAE does not even recognize Israel. But the two countries have worked together in the past against their common adversary, Iran."
"Former Vice President Biden to headline Romney summit: WASHINGTON — Just days after launching a new political action committee, former Democratic Vice President Joe Biden will join Republican officials and donors at a weekend retreat hosted by former GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney. Biden will be interviewed by Romney during a Friday evening event in Deer Valley at the invitation-only summit, according to a Biden spokesman and participants briefed on the schedule. The speaker lineup for what is traditionally a gathering of Romney allies is packed with high-profile Republicans, among them House Speaker Paul Ryan and Sens. Lindsey Graham and John McCain."
"Joe Biden's Sound Advice for Democrats: As the Trump Administration stumbles on, Democrats' thoughts turn to the elections of 2018 and 2020. Despite Trump's current troubles, many of them believe that the Party faces a painful dilemma: Should it champion progressive policies that will energize its liberal base, or should it focus on winning back some of the persuadable voters it lost to Trump this past November? Joe Biden, for one, doesn't believe that the Party has to choose. Addressing a political dinner in New Hampshire a few days ago, the former Vice-President insisted that Democrats can promote their progressive values and reach out to economically embattled voters, including Trump voters, at the same time. 'There is absolutely no inconsistency,' Biden said, 'between defending the right to [gay] marriage, defining the rights of women to control their own bodies, standing up for the air we breathe, the water we drink, and demanding safe working conditions, a living wage, sick leave.'" Is he setting up a presidential run? Funny how the same people who keep saying Sanders is too old keep saying Biden would make a great candidate, as if he isn't within a year of Bernie's age and, by the way, the Senator from the Credit Card companies.
Hillary Clinton gave an interview. Everybody gets to decide what they thought was the most annoying part of it.
* "Ex-DNC aide hits back hard at Clinton, says her campaign ignored data on Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin: Hillary Clinton has found plenty of non-Hillary Clinton things to blame for her 2016 loss, including Russia, James B. Comey, debate moderators and misogyny. But her decision Wednesday to add the Democratic National Committee to that list is predictably proving pretty sensitive inside her own party. A top former DNC aide tweeted overnight that Clinton's allegations were 'f---ing bulls---' and even suggested that the Clinton campaign ignored its warnings about how competitive Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin were. Those three states proved decisive for President Trump and, especially in the case of Michigan and Wisconsin, were neglected by the Clinton campaign."
"Jeremy Corbyn's Surprising Gains: Something strange appears to be happening on the way to British Prime Minister Theresa May's anticipated victory after her clever strategy of calling a snap election. The ploy could backfire on her — just the way her predecessor, David Cameron, got caught when he thought he could shut up the ultra-nationalists by calling a referendum on British membership in the European Union. The result was Brexit, and Cameron's own hasty exit."
* "This Facebook Comment About the UK Election Is Going Viral: "
* "The fight of his life: on the road with Jeremy Corbyn: The Labour leader is vying to be elected prime minister against the odds. Through weeks of campaigning, Ewen MacAskill and photographer Sean Smith met him on his battlebus away from the spotlight."
"According to UK Prime Minister May, the fight against terrorism requires porn censorship on the Internet: A few people have commented on UK Prime Minister Theresa May jumping on the opportunity to argue for 'regulating the Internet' after the most recent terror attacks. Fewer have highlighted just what she demands, and how absolutely ridiculous this is on the surface and on every level of analysis depth: In order to fight terrorism properly, she states, Britain must censor pornography on the Internet."
David Dayen, "Here's How Broken Washington Is — Even Without Trump [...] The general idea is to allow millions more Americans to access hearing aids. Plus, the prospect of new customers could spur competition and drive down prices. Today, after numerous mergers, just six companies (William Demant, GN Store Nord, Sonova and Amplifon are the biggest) control the market, offering little incentive to lower prices. Oligopolies are a fixture in health care, from prescription drugs to hospitals to dialysis centers, and rolling back one could build momentum to truly reform health care delivery systems. Not only did Warren and Grassley introduce the bill, they got it into a must-pass piece of legislation to reauthorize user fees for the FDA. That bill is likely to become law by the end of July. So a problem caused by a government-granted monopoly looks like it'll actually get solved. Or it did, until conservatives found the name 'Elizabeth Warren' atop the bill."
"Polls Predict Defeat For Paul Ryan In His Home District: The GOP has worked to denigrate Pelosi for over a decade. Nationally her approval rating is an abysmal 30%-- with 50% disapproving of her. That's godawful! It has made her a liability for many Democratic candidates. But you know who's even more disliked-- and with no set-up by the Democrats? Flimflam Speaker Paul Ryan. The same new Quinnipiac poll that looks so devastating for Pelosi is even worse on Ryan. Only 27% approval and a 54% disapproval. He's in much worse shape, politically, than McConnell of Schumer. People have finally recognized what a dick-head he is-- thanks to his TrumpCare bill. By the 2018 midterms he'll be so toxic that any politician photographed with him will be in jeopardy."
Dean Baker in Jacobin, "Intellectual Property Is Real Money: Want to reduce income inequality in the US? Dismantle its onerous system of copyrights and patents."
Mathiew von Rohr interviewed Bernie Sanders for Der Spiegel and found out Sanders had just read Shattered. "The Man Who Knows Trump's Voters: Bernie Sanders energized many Americans during the U.S. election campaign with his socialist ideas. In the Trump era, he has become one of the leaders of the "resistance." In an interview with DER SPIEGEL, he warns Democrats against focusing on impeachment. [...] Is it true that he didn't even know the word 'millennial,' the designation for the young generation he had inspired so much? 'That's true,' says Sanders. And how did he manage to inspire it so much? 'That is a good question, and you know what? I still don't know the answer. I honestly don't.' He says that he has just read a book about Hillary Clinton called 'Shattered,' a relentless inside view of her election campaign. Sanders says he was surprised to read 'that you needed three speechwriters to tell you why you're running for president. I don't need somebody to tell me why. If I didn't know why I was running in the first place ... You know, you've got to know what you stand for.'"
Someone is sending a meme around saying, in essence, the Democrats are going to nominate another candidate who you don't agree with 100% and who isn't ideologically pure and you have to vote for them. I kind of lost my temper at it and wrote comment about it on a Facebook thread, and Will Shetterly put it up on his blog as a post, "Who is this person who demanded a candidate they agreed with 100%?"
"Russia Blog #7: When Mother Jones Was Investigated For Spreading 'Kremlin Disinformation': Mother Jones recently announced it's 'redoubling our Russia reporting' — in the words of editor Clara Jeffery. Ain't that rich. What passes for 'Russia reporting' at Mother Jones is mostly just glorified InfoWars paranoia for progressive marks — a cataract of xenophobic conspiracy theories about inscrutable Russian barbarians hellbent on subverting our way of life, spreading chaos, destroying freedom & democracy & tolerance wherever they once flourished. . . . because they hate us, because we're free. Western reporting on Russia has always been garbage, But the so-called 'Russia reporting' of the last year has taken the usual malpractice to unimagined depths — whether it's from Mother Jones or MSNBC, or the Washington Post or Resistance hero Louise Mensch. But of all the liberal media, Mother Jones should be most ashamed for fueling the moral panic about Russian 'disinformation'. It wasn't too long ago that the Reagan Right attacked Mother Jones for spreading 'Kremlin disinformation' and subverting America."
"Absent a More Progressive Economics, the Democrats Will Lose. Economic Populism appeals both to core Democratic voters and the white workers with whom the party has failed to connect. The challenge Democrats face today uniting a broad coalition of working class Americans that spans racial, regional, gender, and generational lines — is far from new, but it has not always been this daunting. "
Stanley Greenberg, "The Democrats' 'Working-Class Problem': It's not only with whites. It reaches well into the party's base. [...] The Democrats don't have a 'white working-class problem.' They have a 'working-class problem,' which progressives have been reluctant to address honestly or boldly. The fact is that Democrats have lost support with all working-class voters across the electorate, including the Rising American Electorate of minorities, unmarried women, and millennials. This decline contributed mightily to the Democrats' losses in the states and Congress and to the election of Donald Trump. [...] Working-class Americans pulled back from Democrats in this last period of Democratic governance because of President Obama's insistence on heralding economic progress and the bailout of the irresponsible elites, while ordinary people's incomes crashed and they continued to struggle financially. They also pulled back because of the Democrats' seeming embrace of multinational trade agreements that have cost American jobs." There's an instructive chartchart on that page showing Obama's annual approval ratings throughout his time in office.
Steven W Thrasher in the Guardian, "Democrats take us black voters for granted. What if we abandoned them? Black voters aren't showing up to vote for the Democratic party in the numbers they once did. There are reasons for that — and they must be confronted [...] I continue to vote, usually for Democrats and never for Republicans, largely out of a sense of nostalgia. America is a kind of drug to which I am addicted, and I continue to chase after its high even though I know it's not healthy for me. In this way, I have come to think of voting as a form of harm reduction. Voting Democrat is the equivalent of using a clean needle to shoot up, so that trying to get that American high is less likely to screw me up as badly as it could."
Jon Schwarz, "We Need Memorial Day to Obscure the Unbearable Truth About War [...] This perspective on the purpose of war was directly expressed by George W. Bush and his circle before he ever became president. Texas journalist and Bush family friend Mickey Herskowitz was hired to write a Bush biography for the 2000 campaign, and spent hours interviewing him. Herskowitz later said that Bush was already thinking about attacking Iraq — because, Bush said, 'One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander in chief.' According to Herskowitz, people around Bush, including Dick Cheney, hoped to 'start a small war. Pick a country where there is justification you can jump on, go ahead and invade.' Why? Because, Bush told Herskowitz, that would give him 'political capital' that he could use to 'get everything passed that I want to get passed.' In other words, the actual country of Iraq had little to do with the Iraq War. Its main purpose wasn't beating Saddam Hussein, it was beating Americans who wanted to stop Bush from privatizing Social Security.
"
"Iran introduced a basic income scheme, and something strange happened [...] One of the biggest criticisms of basic income, a system of giving people modest salaries just for being alive, is that it discourages people from working. A new report on an ongoing cash-transfer program launched in 2011 in Iran may cast some doubt on the claim. Published by the economists Djavad Salehi-Isfahani and Mohammad H. Mostafavi-Dehzooei, the paper finds no evidence to support the idea that people receiving cash transfers take themselves out of the labor force. Some workers even expanded their hours, the report found."
"Mythbusting: "The results were clear. Of the nearly two dozen federal minimum-wage hikes since 1938, total year-over-year employment actually increased 68% of the time. In those industries most affected by the minimum wage, employment increases were even more common: 73% of the time in the retail sector, 82% in low-wage leisure and hospitality. "These basic economic indicators show no correlation between federal minimum-wage increases and lower employment levels," the authors write. In fact, if anything, the data suggest that increases in the federal minimum appeared to encourage job growth and hiring."
Paul Street writes a review: "Obama: a Hollow Man Filled With Ruling Class Ideas: What on Earth motivated the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and law professor David J. Garrow to write an incredibly detailed 1078-page (1460 pages with endnotes and index included) biography of Barack Obama from conception through election to the White House? Not any great personal affinity for Obama on Garrow's part, that's for sure. Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama is no hagiography. On the last page of this remarkable tome, Garrow describes Obama at the end of his distinctly non-transformative and 'failed presidency' as a man who had long ago had become a 'vessel [that] was hollow at its core.' [...] His 'dollar value' to Wall Street would become abundantly clear in early 2009, when he told a frightened group of Wall Street executives that 'I'm not here to go after you. I'm protecting you... I'm going to shield you from congressional and public anger.' For the banking elite, who had destroyed untold millions of jobs, there was, as Garrow's fellow Pulitzer Prize-winner Ron Sukind wrote, 'Nothing to worry about. Whereas [President Franklin Delano] Roosevelt had [during the Great Depression] pushed for tough, viciously opposed reforms of Wall Street and famously said 'I welcome their hate,' Obama was saying 'How can I help?'' As one leading banker told Suskind, 'The sense of everyone after the meeting was relief. The president had us at a moment of real vulnerability. At that point, he could have ordered us to do just about anything and we would have rolled over. But he didn't — he mostly wanted to help us out, to quell the mob.' (It's worth going back to Street's assessment of Obama's keynote address, too.)
Our rights have been taken away, and we find we are often less citizens than supplicants. We spend an awful lot of time having to deal with large, powerful organizations to beg for what we thought was already ours, even for things we have already paid for. This video is a description of the "systematic dismantling and unbundling of all instruments and mechanisms of social solidarity and reciprocity that stood against the market," and the need of most people — the Precariat — to find a new path. "A Precariat Charter: From Denizens to Citizens" — a Seminar with Guy Standing.
"What Makes Call-Out Culture So Toxic: Call-out culture refers to the tendency among progressives, radicals, activists, and community organizers to publicly name instances or patterns of oppressive behaviour and language use by others. People can be called out for statements and actions that are sexist, racist, ableist, and the list goes on. Because call-outs tend to be public, they can enable a particularly armchair and academic brand of activism: one in which the act of calling out is seen as an end in itself."
From the first notes I asked myself, "Why didn't it ever occur to me that Todd Rundgren and Donald Fagen belong together?" See what you think: "Tin Foil Hat"
"Supreme Court on 5-3 Vote Affirms NC Racial Gerrymandering Case, with Thomas in Majority and Roberts in Dissent: The Supreme Court has issued this 5-3 opinion in Cooper v. Harris. Justice Kagan wrote the opinion for the Court, with Justice Thomas making the fifth vote for affirmance. Chief Justice Robert and Justices Alito and Kennedy dissented. That is an interesting lineup, to be sure. There is a lot of detail but here is my bottom line: This decision by Justice Kagan is a major victory for voting rights plaintiffs, who have succeeded in turning the racial gerrymandering cause of action into an effective tool to go after partisan gerrymanders in Southern states. That Justice Kagan got Justice Thomas not only to vote this way but to sign onto the opinion (giving it precedential value) is a really big deal. Despite what is written in the text of the opinion, Justice Kagan, in a couple of footnotes (footnotes 1 and 7), attempts to solve the race or party problem by moving the Court much closer to the position of treating race and party as proxies for one another in the American South. Points 8 -10 below explains this in detail."
I can't even begin to keep track of what's going on with the whole Russia thing, but meanwhile, "Donald Trump Committed Another Impeachable Offense This Week: And it had nothing to do with the Russia investigation. [...] It did not involve firing the director of the FBI, nor conspiring with the attorney general to facilitate the firing that even some Republicans recognized as a potential obstruction of justice, nor bragging to the Russians about how 'pressure' was 'taken off' by that firing, nor any of the other acts of presidential maladministration that scream out for an accountability moment. [...] On Wednesday, US forces carried out more unauthorized air strikes on pro-government forces in Syria. Though the Constitution explicitly states that the legislative branch, not the executive, has the power to initiate new military actions, Trump has steered the United States deeper into the Syrian conflict."
On the bright side, FiveThirtyEight says, "Donald Trump's Base Is Shrinking: A widely held tenet of the current conventional wisdom is that while President Trump might not be popular overall, he has a high floor on his support. Trump's sizable and enthusiastic base — perhaps 35 to 40 percent of the country — won't abandon him any time soon, the theory goes, and they don't necessarily care about some of the controversies that the 'mainstream media' treats as game-changing developments. It's an entirely reasonable theory. [...] But the theory isn't supported by the evidence. To the contrary, Trump's base seems to be eroding. There's been a considerable decline in the number of Americans who strongly approve of Trump, from a peak of around 30 percent in February to just 21 or 22 percent of the electorate now. (The decline in Trump's strong approval ratings is larger than the overall decline in his approval ratings, in fact.) Far from having unconditional love from his base, Trump has already lost almost a third of his strong support. And voters who strongly disapprove of Trump outnumber those who strongly approve of him by about a 2-to-1 ratio, which could presage an 'enthusiasm gap' that works against Trump at the midterms. The data suggests, in particular, that the GOP's initial attempt (and failure) in March to pass its unpopular health care bill may have cost Trump with his core supporters."
David Dayen, "Steven Mnuchin Goes Through The Looking Glass-Steagall In Strange Exchange With Elizabeth Warren: SEN. ELIZABETH WARREN had a confounding exchange with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin at a Senate Banking Committee hearing today. Mnuchin indicated that the Trump administration supports a 21st century version of the Glass-Steagall Act, except for the part about separating commercial and investment banks, which is substantially what is meant by Glass-Steagall. Warren wasn't having it."
The Economic Policy Institute finds "No evidence that automation leads to joblessness or inequality: In The zombie robot argument lurches on, EPI President Lawrence Mishel and Research Director Josh Bivens challenge the popular media narrative that the pace of automation is increasing, and that it will lead to overall joblessness and greater inequality. [...] What explains the failure of overall joblessness to rise despite ongoing automation? Automation allows businesses to cut costs, which leads to lower-priced goods — giving consumers additional money to spend elsewhere and creating jobs. Automation also creates complementary jobs in new industries. While there is no question that automation eliminates jobs in particular occupations or industries, historically it has not led to increased overall joblessness. There is little reason to believe that this pattern will not continue in the future." And, "'What is remarkable about the media narrative around automation is how strong the desire to believe it is, despite so little evidence to support these claims,' said Mishel. 'There clearly are serious problems in the labor market that have suppressed job and wage growth for far too long, but these problems have their roots in intentional policy decisions regarding globalization, collective bargaining, labor standards, and unemployment levels — not technological change.'"
"The Progressive Movement Just Scored a Huge Win in Philly's DA Race: Larry Krasner's victory was a referendum on Trump as well as on a whole host of issues that predate the president: immigrant rights, the war on drugs and mass incarceration. Weeks after Attorney General Jeff Sessions re-declared the war on drugs and threatened to cut federal support to police departments that do not cooperate with the administration's deportation efforts, the city of Philadelphia responded with defiance. In the Democratic primary for district attorney — the de facto election in the solidly blue city — voters chose civil rights lawyer and reformist Larry Krasner by a nearly 18-point margin. Krasner built his campaign around promises to end mass incarceration, protect rights and liberties and resist Donald Trump.
* "This wasn't just a primary victory. This was a revolution: If elected in November -- and he is the heavy favorite in this overwhelmingly Democratic town -- Krasner has pledged to never seek capital punishment while working to end bail policies that lock up people for being poor, an asset-forfeiture program that has been a national disgrace, and stop-and-frisk searches that disproportionately target non-whites."
Dems flip two deep red seats in NY special elections: "On Tuesday night, Democrats flipped not one but two state legislative seats in special elections — and both came in deep red territory. In New Hampshire, Democrat Edie DesMarais defeated Republican Matthew Plache by a 52-48 margin in the state House's 6th Carroll District, a seat Donald Trump won 51-44 last fall. Meanwhile, in the New York Assembly's 9th District, Democrat Christine Pellegrino beat Republican Thomas Gargiulo 58-42, even though Trump romped to a 60-37 victory there in November. This means that DesMarais moved the needle 11 points in the Democratic direction while Pellegrino did the same by an astounding 39 points. And while these are the first two seats to actually change hands since Trump's election, Democrats have consistently outperformed the 2016 presidential results in special elections across the country." Pellegrino is a teacher, and was a Sanders delegate at the 2016 Democratic National Convention.
"Why Bernie Sanders Wasn't Invited to CAP's Ideas Conference: The party has a coalition-building problem. [...] CAP president Neera Tanden explained to The Washington Post that 'We were trying to emphasize a new generation,' and a CAP spokesperson told The Nation that nobody who ran for president before was invited. That's true as far as it goes, but with any scrutiny it feels more like a post facto justification for not including Sanders. There's a big difference between Hillary Clinton — now a private citizen with no future electoral plans — and Sanders, a sitting senator who polls as the most popular politician in the country and who has pointedly not ruled out a 2020 presidential campaign. The press materials for the conference proclaimed it would 'bring together national leaders of the progressive cause,' and there's no real way Sanders doesn't fit that description, or rationally should have been excluded simply because he ran for president last year. (The presence of Susan Rice and Tom Daschle onstage also puts considerable strain on the idea that only new voices were being elevated.) [...] Meanwhile, being shunned by party bosses is rocket fuel for the Sanders movement. 'If you want to understand why establishment Democrats lose, look at CAP. They hold their...grassroots conference at the Four Seasons and don't invite grassroots progressives,' one progressive strategist affiliated with Sanders but not authorized to speak for him told The Nation. 'They charge $1,000 per ticket to attend their 'Progressive Party'...and eat canapes while wondering why they are out of touch with the rest of the country.'"
* Cenk is right about the crummy, highschool behavior of the DNC and their ridiculous exclusion of Bernie from their school prom. And I so want to smack Markos.
In other news from the Suicide Dems, looks like Debbie Wasserman Schultz has a kindred spirit in the Florida party: "So how does the new, incoming brass running the Florida Democratic Party respond? By telling constituents that "issues" don't matter and that it's not the party's job to focus on policies that will actually help anyone, like single-payer health care. Last night, the party's new second-in-command, Sally Boynton Brown, spoke in front of the Democratic Progressive Caucus of Broward County. And throughout the exchange, she steadfastly refused to commit to changing the party's economic or health-care messaging in any concrete way. This is not going to be popular, but this is my belief of the time and place we're in now: I believe that we're in a place where it's very hard to get voters excited about 'issues,' the type of voters that are not voting," Brown said. [...] How important is it for candidates to concentrate on "issues" like health care or economic equality, one audience member asked. Her answer? Not very. She said candidates moving forward should focus on "identity messages" instead, which she didn't actually define. In a follow-up question, she also warned party members not to get too excited about turning districts from Republican to Democrat and said the best we ought to hope for is that Florida becomes more "purple." (She also said she was proud about not supporting either candidate in the 2016 Democratic primary, which is an odd sort of thing to boast about as a Democratic Party leader.)"
However, now that the election is over and lost, it appears a good policy is no longer unicorn-crazy. Sure would have been nice if they'd decided to do this last summer. "Democratic leaders to join Sanders on $15 minimum wage pitch. Congressional Democratic leaders will unveil a proposal to hike the minimum wage to $15 an hour on Thursday alongside Sen. Bernie Sanders, who made the issue a centerpiece of his 2016 presidential campaign. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), and other senior Democrats will join Sanders and Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), vice chair of the Democratic National Committee, in releasing the legislation." Wow, even Steny Hoyer is in this, unlike on the single-payer bill. Amazing.
Ryan Cooper says, "Democrats: Stop. Listening. To. Rahm. Emanuel." Because, of course, establishment Dems want to follow this loser's advice. "But more importantly, Emanuel's brand of cynical deal-making politics and his handpicked congressmen led the Democratic Party as a whole into disastrous strategic errors. He personally lobbied to cut the size of the Recovery Act to below a trillion dollars, believing more was politically unrealistic. As the 2010 race got going, with unemployment stuck around 10 percent for the entire year, his moderates from the class of 2006 were a major force behind the Democrats' pivot to austerity and deficit reduction. The result was that the party's congressional majority was wiped out. "
* Another story on the same subject, "Democrats Are Turning to the Absolute Worst Person for Help Winning the 2018 Election."
I'm sure we had all hoped we had heard the end of Joe Lieberman, the man without whom I am convinced we would never have had Trump, but he has reared his head again — though not in a particularly surprising way.
Just in case you wanted to know what kinds of people President Hillary was likely to surround herself by, here's the guy who was slated to head her transition team. "Ken Salazar Working For Anadarko After Promising To Honor Federal Ethics Law: Former U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has been working for a major oil and gas company as it has sought to limit political damage after a deadly explosion near one of its Colorado wells, a spokesperson for Colorado Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper and emails obtained by International Business Times and MapLight say. One of his state's most powerful Democrats, Salazar was in touch with Hickenlooper's office after the blast on behalf of Anadarko Petroleum — a company Salazar helped when he ran the Interior Department under former President Barack Obama. Salazar, a corporate lawyer, has previously said he would honor federal ethics laws by walling himself off from matters in which he was involved at the agency. Emails show he has been working for Anadarko in Colorado though he has not registered to lobby for the company there, state records show."
"The British establishment is putting our lives at risk: Our state's key ally is a major public threat [...] This wave of terrorism driven by Islamic State, which has claimed responsibility for the attack, derives from a complex infrastructure of forces, working over time. But it springs ultimately from the ideology promoted by the ruling family in Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism, who were at least until recently funding and backing IS: they have done so to support their goal of overthrowing Assad in Syria and championing Sunni Islam in the face of rivalry with Iran. These are Britain's allies. Whitehall has a deep, long-standing special relationship with the extremist Saudis: it is arming them, backing them, apologising for them, and supporting their regional policies. At the same time, the Saudis have been helping to create the monster that now threatens the British public. So, too, have the policies of the British government." Even Boris Johnson, of all people, understood this. It's not a secret. So why do both the US and the UK continue to put up with it?
"White supremacist terrorist murders two men who tried to protect women from him. "Police have arrested 35-year-old Jeremy Joseph Christian of North Portland in connection with the stabbings, which occurred after commuters on the train allegedly tried to calm the suspect who was yelling what authorities said 'would best be characterized as hate speech.'" He was haranguing two female Muslim passengers when the two intervened and he slashed their throats.
"The Long Ordeal of Julian Assange: For the past decade, WikiLeaks has published groundbreaking evidence of government and corporate abuse while getting targeted for abuse itself, including a seven-year vendetta against founder Julian Assange, says John Pilger."
"State Troopers Are Ticketing NYC Drivers More Than Ever Before [...] The paper reports that New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo stationed 150 state police officers to patrol the city's bridges, tunnels and highways with the goal of building revenue and pissing off New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio."
"US admits DEA lied about Honduras 'massacre' that killed four villagers: The US Drug Enforcement Administration lied about its role in a bungled anti-narcotics operation in Honduras that left four innocent villagers dead, then misled Congress, the justice department and the public as it tried to cover its tracks, a damning bipartisan investigation has found. Honduran officers under the command of DEA agents fired at unarmed passengers traveling by taxi boat in May 2012, killing four people — including two pregnant women and a schoolboy — and seriously injuring three others."
This guy sounds pretty good, although I think America was built on more than just those two things (and that some slaves were Irish, too). "NJ's Bill Brennan Might Be the Realest Politician You've Never Heard Of [...] Bill Brennan, a Democrat, wants to be the governor of New Jersey. To that end, the veteran activist and former firefighter has positioned himself as a permanent thorn in Gov. Chris Christie's side, calling him out repeatedly for his role in 2013's politically motivated 'bridge-gate,' even going so far as to file a complaint against Christie in municipal court for official misconduct."
"Vox's CIA-Backed 'Democracy' Standard Is OK With Slavery and Women Not Voting [...] Vox, which constantly tells its readers that life is actually swell, with the momentum of history indisputably on the road to justice, decreased poverty and less war, consistently uses Polity IV to prop up its argument that 'democracy' is on the rise"
This is a pretty good speech: Transcript of New Orleans Mayor Landrieu's address on Confederate monuments. "There is a difference between remembrance of history and reverence of it. For America and New Orleans, it has been a long, winding road, marked by great tragedy and great triumph. But we cannot be afraid of our truth."
"Tax Cuts Defund The Very Things That Boost The Economy: If you cut taxes, over time the business environment necessarily gets worse because those roads deteriorate, people are not as well educated, scientific research declines, courts clog up, regulation enforcement declines, along with about a million other things that businesses rely on. If you can't get educated employees, can't move goods on crowded and deteriorated roads and your competitors can get away with cheating, your business just isn't going to do as well as it could."
"After switching positions, Gephardt and his lobbying firm have taken $8 million from Turkish government: As a member of Congress, Dick Gephardt often spoke passionately about the need for the United States to recognize as genocide the mass deaths of as many as 1.5 million Armenians under the Turkish government that began one century ago. But as a lobbyist for Turkey since leaving Congress in 2005, Gephardt, a Democrat, has taken the opposite side. His behind-the-scenes work has been cited as a factor in the annual failure of Congress to recognize the Armenian genocide."
Ted Rall on "Non-Competes: One out of six American workers, including manual and low-level laborers, are forced to sign non-compete agreements. It's abusive, it's strange, and studies say wages are 10% lower on average as a result."
"Don't Like Betsy DeVos? Blame the Democrats. The Democratic Party paved the way for the education secretary's efforts to privatize our public schools. Listening to their cries of outrage, one might imagine that Democrats were America's undisputed champions of public education. But the resistance to DeVos obscured an inconvenient truth: Democrats have been promoting a conservative 'school reform' agenda for the past three decades. Some did it because they fell for the myths of 'accountability' and 'choice' as magic bullets for better schools. Some did it because 'choice' has centrist appeal. Others sold out public schools for campaign contributions from the charter industry and its Wall Street patrons. Whatever the motivations, the upshot is clear: The Democratic Party has lost its way on public education. In a very real sense, Democrats paved the way for DeVos and her plans to privatize the school system.
"50 Terrible Ideas That Could Become Law If Trump Is Impeached and Pence Becomes President: As many Americans ponder the prospect of Donald Trump being removed from office, they should take a deep breath and look at what a President Mike Pence and Republican Congress are likely to do if the disrupter-in-chief is sent packing." These people are a nightmare. It might be a good thing if Trump keeps messing them up.
Michael Brooks and David Slavick, "No Time for a Negative Peace: This is what a failed 'resistance' looks like. What led to the end of the apartheid regime in South Africa? The African National Congress movement led by Nelson Mandela and other luminaries that pushed from the grassroots for liberation? Of course. A restive population committed to freedom and raising consciousness? Yes. A global business community who saw that the pariah nature of the apartheid system threatened the bottom line? Partially. An official opposition that promoted supposedly liberal alternatives to the Nationalist Party apartheid government in parliament? Not so much."
Rest in Peace: Roger Moore, much-beloved actor who was Beau Maverick, The Saint, and James Bond, at 89, of cancer. I was fonder of Cousin Beau and Simon Templar than of Moore's Bond, but that's nothing against him, just the fact that I met Beau first, and no one else was ever The Saint. People make jokes about Moore's acting, but no one was more deprecating of his talents than Moore himself. The net is awash in tributes and stories from admirers and colleagues alike, but this anecdote seems to have won the interwebs. However, I smiled when I read the one in this tribute.
* Gregg Allman, legendary pioneer of Southern Rock, of liver cancer. He was 69.
Regret in Perpetuity: "Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter's National Security Adviser, Dies at 89." There are a lot of tributes to him from the neocons and neolibs, the establishment is full of praise, but this is the guy who was responsible for arming the Taliban and the disastrous attempt at using the military to free the American hostages in Iran.
Rot in Perdition: Roger Ailes, "the controversial, visionary founder of Fox News who was forced out of the company amid a sexual harassment scandal, has died aged 77."
Andy Grove wrote this in 2010. Things have gotten worse since then. "How America Can Create Jobs [...] Startups are a wonderful thing, but they cannot by themselves increase tech employment. Equally important is what comes after that mythical moment of creation in the garage, as technology goes from prototype to mass production. This is the phase where companies scale up. They work out design details, figure out how to make things affordably, build factories, and hire people by the thousands. Scaling is hard work but necessary to make innovation matter. The scaling process is no longer happening in the U.S. And as long as that's the case, plowing capital into young companies that build their factories elsewhere will continue to yield a bad return in terms of American jobs."
Interview with Nina Turner, "Can Dems Learn From Their 2016 Mistakes If They Do Not Acknowledge Them? [...] In order to deal with that, the Democratic party is going to have to make some confessions that it has not had the courage to make which is despite what the Russians tried to do, no one in the intelligence community has said that the Russians voted. [...] Now, in terms of what the democrats need to do moving forward is what we should have did in 2016 and even before that, Kim. That we started losing state houses and governors mansions and secretary of state's offices since 2009 and so we can not blame that on Russians."
This isn't a bad recap of "The Rise of New Labour," but every time I saw him spell "crises" as "crisis's", I wanted to bang my head against the wall.
Something that really bothers me is that everywhere I look, people seem to be really interested in getting rid of Trump without much consideration to what would be left if that happened. True, even with Trump in charge they all seem pretty efficient at doing horrible things, but just think how much better they'd be at it if they didn't have him to worry about. And as near as I can tell, the only other person who is worried about this is Atrios.
The Republicans passed their scary "repeal and replace" of Obamacare in the House. Democrats, more fixed on winning elections than on how many people will die if this thing makes it through the Senate, sang a happy tune to celebrate a Republican electoral loss in the next election. Trouble is, there is no guarantee of that — nor that in such an event they will fix the damage. The probability is that the bill won't get through the Senate, but the happy dance is still pretty stupid.
Chris Floyd at Empire Burlesque, "Curtains for Comey: Rocketing Through the Looking-Glass With the Troller-in-Chief: Whatever else you can say about Trump (don't get me started), he's a first-class troll: citing Comey's handling of the Clinton email probe in the last days of the campaign as his reason for firing him! The very action Trump had long praised as a "gutsy" move by Comey, one which redeemed him in Trump's eyes. That's some high-grade mendacity there, transparently false, yet told with a straight face, and pretending it was on advice of the Attorney General."
"Reporter arrested at W.Va. Capitol during visit from Conway and Price: CHARLESTON, W.Va. (WSAZ) — A reporter was arrested Tuesday at the West Virginia Capitol for allegedly causing a disturbance and yelling questions at federal leaders in town, court records show. It happened during a visit from U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price and Special Counsel to the President of the United States Kellyanne Conway. Dan Heyman, 54, of Charleston, is charged with willful disruption of governmental processes, which is a misdemeanor."
Gothomist, "State Senate Passes Bill That Would Make Assaulting A Cop A Hate Crime: The State Senate on Tuesday passed a bill that would make assaulting a police officer, EMT, or other first responder akin to a hate crime. The bill, sponsored by Republican Senator Fred Ashkar of Binghamton, passed 56-6 with bipartisan support." So, Democrats supported this piece of crap. Great.
Sessions is stepping up the War on (Some People Who Use Some) Drugs. "Rand Paul: Sessions' sentencing plan would ruin lives: The attorney general on Friday made an unfortunate announcement that will impact the lives of millions of Americans: he issued new instructions for prosecutors to charge suspects with the most serious provable offenses, "those that carry the most substantial guidelines sentence, including mandatory minimum sentences." [...] The attorney general's new guidelines, a reversal of a policy that was working, will accentuate the injustice in our criminal justice system. We should be treating our nation's drug epidemic for what it is -- a public health crisis, not an excuse to send people to prison and turn a mistake into a tragedy."
"Three Murders in Philadelphia: In the early 1990s, the police arrested three men for crimes they didn't commit. It's taken more than 25 years for justice to be served." Coerced confessions, planted evidence, and exonerating evidence withheld — but none of those cops are going to jail.
"$elling off our freedom: How insurance corporations have taken over our bail system: Every year, millions of people are condemned to cages and separated from their families simply because they cannot afford to pay bail after an arrest. This country's justice system claims to treat people as if they are innocent until proven guilty but the reality is that before even being convicted of a crime, the accused and their families are forced to pay non-refundable deposits to bail companies in exchange for their release from jail. Bail insurers prey on those entering into the criminal justice system and trap them in debt through high fees and installment plans. These profiteers coerce people into signing over their privacy rights and when it's not profitable, they leave people in jail."
Mark Steel is the best political analyst in Britain, and he has a response to the latest claims about the evils of Corbyn. "Labour's leaked manifesto proves it's stuck in the 1970s, unlike those ultra-modern Tories who love fox hunting: Several Conservatives have taken issue with Labour's pledge to be 'extremely cautious' before using the nuclear deterrent. What sort of 1970s nonsense is that? If you're going to be extremely cautious about dissolving millions of civilians in an apocalyptic firestorm, you might as well bring back outside toilets."
Dean Baker:
* "The Fed's New Excuse for Raising Interest Rates: Helping the Poor: Bloomberg reports that Esther George, perhaps the Fed's biggest inflation hawk, has a new argument for raising interest rates: she claims that inflation is a big tax on the poor. This is peculiar for two reasons. First, the people who are denied work as a result of higher interest rates will be disproportionately those at the bottom of the ladder: African Americans, Hispanics, and workers with less education. Furthermore, higher unemployment rates mean that the workers who have jobs will have less bargaining power and be less able to push up their wages. It's hard to see how people who lose jobs and get lower pay increases will benefit from a slightly lower inflation rate. The other reason why the argument doesn't quite work is that even the modest inflation we have seen in recent years is driven almost entirely by rising rents."
* "The Need for Job Killing Robots in Pension Fund Management: Gretchen Morgenson had a good piece this weekend on fees paid by public pension funds. These fees are large and have grown rapidly in recent decades. The fees go to some of the richest people in the country, such as private equity and hedge fund managers (think of Peter Peterson or Mitt Romney). The fees often do not correspond to any benefits to the pension funds in the form of higher returns. In other words, these fees are the equivalent of a massive welfare program under which the taxpayers are putting money in the pockets of some of the richest people in the country, for doing nothing."
David Dayen:
* In The American Prospect, "Our Bankrupt Policy for Puerto Rico: The restructuring of the island's debt allows no role for the Puerto Rico's government." You guessed it — austerity imposed from without. Like Greece, only smaller. (More here.)
* At The Fiscal Times, "Who's Watching Wall Street? The Feds Turn a Blind Eye to Goldman's Game [...] There's only one problem with these investments: They're supposed to be illegal under the Dodd-Frank Act. But 'the law' is only as good as the men and women willing to enforce it, as Goldman Sachs has discovered to its delight. Big banks have turned one key section of Dodd-Frank into mush, such that Goldman can flaunt its defiance openly without an ounce of fear. It makes me wonder why House Republicans are working so hard to repeal Wall Street reform when regulators have shown so much willingness to repeal by neglect."
* At The Nation, "Trump Is Helping Big Media Companies Get Bigger: And it's looking like a mutually beneficial relationship." Pretty scary. Tribune was already big and right-wing, but Sinclair is genuinely part of the far-right media infrastructure. Laws against this kind of media conglomeration existed for very good reason. Unfortunately, as with so many things, Bill Clinton and his friends just didn't understand it when they did away with those restraints.
* At The Intercept, "Pressure On Democrats Pays Off As Chuck Schumer Picks Consumer Advocate For FTC Nominee: AFTER PRESSURE FROM consumer advocates, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has recommended Rohit Chopra, a former official at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), for an open Democratic seat on the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). As reported by The Intercept in March, Schumer had previously been considering his ex-Chief of Staff David Hantman — a former lobbyist for Yahoo and Airbnb who opposed regulation on Silicon Valley firms — for the position. After details of Hantman's past work became public, Schumer last month told the International Business Times that he would not be submitting Hantman's name. Chopra, by contrast, has a strong record of action on consumer issues."
"Paul Ryan Needs An Electoral Opponent-- And We're Very Close To Announcing One: Once again-- as it's done every two years like clockwork since Pelosi gained control over the committee-- the DCCC has moved to protect Paul Ryan's reelection. A swingy southeast Wisconsin district that Obama won in 2008, 51-48%, WI-01 offers an obvious Democratic target-- one the DCCC habitually refuses to consider, even going so far as to sabotage local candidates and asking institutional Democratic donors to cut off their funding. WI-01 is not on the DCCC target lists this year, despite the fact that Paul Ryan is the single most disliked and mistrusted politician in America."
Read an excerpt from Noam Chomsky's new book, Requiem for the American Dream: The Ten Principles of Concentration of Wealth and Power, "Principle #6: Running the Regulators [...] Remember, there were no financial crashes in the '50s and the '60s, because the regulatory apparatus of the New Deal was still in place. As it began to be dismantled under business pressure and political pressure, you get more and more crashes, and it goes on right through the years — the '70s is where deregulation starts, and the '80s is where crashes really take off."
"Democrats say they now know exactly why Clinton lost: WASHINGTON — A group of top Democratic Party strategists have used new data about last year's presidential election to reach a startling conclusion about why Hillary Clinton lost. Now they just need to persuade the rest of the party they're right."
Greg Sargent, "Why did Trump win? New research by Democrats offers a worrisome answer. [...] One finding from the polling stands out: A shockingly large percentage of these Obama-Trump voters said Democrats' economic policies will favor the wealthy — twice the percentage that said the same about Trump."
Marcy Wheeler, "The Obamacare Not Comey Effect: Unless Wang's chart is totally mislabeled (Update: In an 'explanation' added to his post, Wang effectively says his graph is off by three — though not four — days due to the way he presents multi-day polls; he has, at least, now told his readers when the actual letter came out) but what it shows seems to be consistent with what I showed in this post, which shows a Hillary dip and a Trump spike moving in concert on before October 28), then his chart show doesn't support a Comey effect at all — it shows the opposite. The differential started narrowing after October 24. By October 28, when the letter was released, the differential had plateaued before it turned up again. As it turns out, the ObamaCare spike was announced on October 24 (and reported heavily starting October 25)."
"Low Black Turnout May Have Cost Clinton the Election [...] According to Demos' Sean McElwee, UMass — Amherst's Jesse Rhodes and Brian Schaffner, and Indiana University's Bernard Fraga, black turnout declined by 4.7 points from 2012 nationally while white turnout increased by 2.4 points. Crucially, the drop in black turnout was even sharper in states where the margin of victory was less than 10 points than it was nationally — in those battleground states, black turnout dropped 5.3 points. In two critical states that swung to Trump — Michigan and Wisconsin — black turnout dropped by just more than 12 points. Declines were less dramatic but significant in other swing states Trump carried: Ohio (down 7.5 points), Florida (4.2), and Pennsylvania (2.1)."
"The New York Times defended hiring former Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens — a writer who has promoted climate denial and bigotry against Arabs — by insisting that it is seeking diversity of thought. Public Editor Liz Spayd responded to readers' complaints about Stephens by writing that the Times is looking 'to include a wider range of views, not just on the Opinion pages but in its news columns.' But hiring another prominent writer whose ideology hems close to that of the nation's elites — in this case, fossil fuel corporations who are polluting the world and advocates of Western military might — is hardly adding intellectual diversity to the pages of the Times." The Times, strangely, has no columnists representing the view of supporters of the most popular politician in America (Bernie Sanders), or the current president, who happens to be popular with Republicans. There are no young people and no Arab or Muslim Americans, although they are frequent topics in the paper. Despite the embarrassment of still employing Thomas "Suck on this" Friedman, the NYT has no counter-balancing opponent of insane militarism, and of course the hire of Stephens would only represesnt "diversity" of views if they also employed a columnist who was an environmental advocate.
"Stephen Fry's blasphemy probe dropped after Irish police fail to find 'enough outraged people': Asked in 2015 by the programme's host, Gay Byrne, what he would say to God if he arrived in heaven, Mr Fry replied: 'I'd say, bone cancer in children? What's that about?' 'How dare you? How dare you create a world to which there is such misery that is not our fault? It's not right, it's utterly, utterly evil.'Why should I respect a capricious, mean-minded, stupid god who creates a world that is so full of injustice and pain? 'We have to spend our life on our knees thanking him? What kind of god would do that? 'The god who created this universe, if it was created by god, is quite clearly a maniac, an utter maniac, totally selfish.'"
"Bernie Sanders Is Building An Army To Stop Trumpcare Dead In Its Tracks In The Senate: Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) wasted no time in immediately mobilizing the opposition that will be needed to kill Trumpcare in the US Senate. In a statement provided to PoliticusUSA, Sen. Sanders said, 'The bill that Republicans passed today is an absolute disaster. It really has nothing to do with health care. It has everything to do with an enormous shift of wealth from working people to the richest Americans. This bill would throw 24 million people off of health insurance — including thousands of Vermonters — cut Medicaid by $880 billion, defund Planned Parenthood and substantially increase premiums on older Americans. Meanwhile, it would provide a $300 billion tax break to the top 2 percent and hundreds of billions more to the big drug and insurance companies that are ripping off the American people. Our job now is to rally millions of Americans against this cruel bill to make sure that it does not pass the Senate. Instead of throwing tens of millions of people off of health insurance, we must guarantee health care as a right to all.'"
A review by Rob Levine, "Twenty five years later charter schools a costly, failed experiment: Ember Reichgott Junge's book provides a clear view into the history of charter schools in Minnesota, just not the one she intended" She says it was a "grassroots" movement, but it was led entirely by the big shots, and against everyone else.
Congratulations to our friend Whit Diffie for his election to The Royal Society.
"The Rock-Star Appeal of Modern Monetary Theory [...] For a small but committed group of economists, academics, and activists who adhere to a doctrine called Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), though, #mintthecoin was the tip of the economic iceberg. The possibility of a $1 trillion coin represented more than mere monetary sophistry: It drove home their foundational point that fiat currency is a social construct, and that there are therefore no fiscal limits on how much a sovereign currency-issuing nation can spend.
The article is about the British election, and the headline seems misleading, but aside from the fact that Corbyn is doing better than expected in the polls, contains a piece of advice the Clinton team badly missed: "Unnoticed and unreported, Jeremy Corbyn is surging in the polls: Labour's vote share is increasing as the election approaches. [...] As I've said before and will say again, the only bits of an election that matter are the bits that people who don't care about politics see: the newsbreaks between songs on music radio, the pictures that play without sound on Sky News in every Wetherspoons through the country, the few minutes at the start of the six and ten o'clock news before people switch channels — or the few minutes at the end before they switch back."
I hate to link to Kristof, but he's talking about people who are smarter and more moral than he is, and right in America, too, in "Meet Dr. Willie Parker, a Southern Christian Abortion Provider [...] 'I believe that as an abortion provider, I am doing God's work,' Parker writes in his new memoir, 'Life's Work.' 'I am protecting women's rights, their human right to decide their futures for themselves, and to live their lives as they see fit.' Since childhood, Parker had been taught that abortion was wrong, and for the first half of his career as an OB-GYN, he refused to perform abortions. But then he had what he calls his 'come to Jesus moment,' an epiphany that his calling was to help women who wanted to end their pregnancies."
"How 'Russiagate' Got So Much Momentum: A new book about Hillary Clinton's last campaign for president — Shattered, by journalists Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes — has gotten a lot of publicity since it appeared two weeks ago. But major media have ignored a revealing passage near the end of the book. Soon after Clinton's defeat, top strategists decided where to place the blame. 'Within 24 hours of her concession speech,' the authors report, campaign manager Robby Mook and campaign chair John Podesta 'assembled her communications team at the Brooklyn headquarters to engineer the case that the election wasn't entirely on the up-and-up. For a couple of hours, with Shake Shack containers littering the room, they went over the script they would pitch to the press and the public. Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument.' Six months later, that centerpiece of the argument is rampant — with claims often lurching from unsubstantiated overreach to outright demagoguery. A lavishly-funded example is the 'Moscow Project,' a mega-spin effort that surfaced in midwinter as a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund. It's led by Neera Tanden, a self-described 'loyal solider' for Clinton who also runs the Center for American Progress (where she succeeded Podesta as president). The Center's board includes several billionaires."
And speaking of Books about Clinton, Susan Bordo wrote one, too, The Destruction of Hillary Clinton, but Sarah Jones at The New Republic sees it as "The Deification of Hillary Clinton [...] In The Destruction of Hillary Clinton, the feminist scholar seeks to absolve Clinton for her loss to Donald Trump. To do so, she presents a raft of justifications: James Comey, Wikileaks, conservatives, Bernie Sanders, and dumb young people. There is scarcely a mention of policy positions Clinton took during her campaign that were less than inspiring, or of moments when the candidate seemed to misread the public mood — such as her repeated claim that 'America is already great.' Any rational analysis of Clinton's career and campaigns must include an examination of her mistakes, but Destruction is not rational. Bordo starts from the conviction that Hillary Clinton, as 'the most qualified candidate in history,' should have won. Clinton's actions interest her less than what she deems as Clinton's greatness. It's not an investigation but a deification. [...] Bordo's objection seems to be that anyone opposed Clinton at all, even from the left. What she does not grasp — and is seemingly not interested in grasping — is that Clinton's critics from the left were not opposing a caricature of her as some kind of right-wing political operator. We opposed Clinton-the-hawk and Clinton-the-means-tester. Our objection was about politics, not personality. Similarly, we do not reject the feminism of Bordo and Clinton because of its ideological rigidity, as Bordo suggests. We reject it because it is insufficient. America was not 'already great.' Our lives are proof."
"If Bernie says working class and you hear white working class, it is on you not Bernie [...] Bernie's economic agenda would benefit the entire working class, most especially in the lives of women and minorities. I am so sickened to see the donor class attempt to trick people into thinking that Bernie is attacking them when it is just the reverse. I am even more sickened to see people who should know better fall for it."
Thomas Frank, "The Democrats' Davos ideology won't win back the midwest: The party has harmed millions of their own former constituents. If they change course, they can reverse their losses [...] The wreckage that you see every day as you tour this part of the country is the utterly predictable fruit of the Democratic party's neoliberal turn. Every time our liberal leaders signed off on some lousy trade deal, figuring that working-class people had 'nowhere else to go,' they were making what happened last November a little more likely. "
"For Health and Freedom: Civil rights activists knew their struggle was incomplete without winning a just health care system. They're an inspiration for single-payer activists today."
Carole Cadwalladr in the Guardian, "Robert Mercer: the big data billionaire waging war on mainstream media: With links to Donald Trump, Steve Bannon and Nigel Farage, the rightwing US computer scientist is at the heart of a multimillion-dollar propaganda network. [...] We're not quite in the alternative reality where the actual news has become 'FAKE news!!!' But we're almost there. Out on Twitter, the new transnational battleground for the future, someone I follow tweets a quote by Marshall McLuhan, the great information theorist of the 60s. 'World War III will be a guerrilla information war,' it says. 'With no divisions between military and civilian participation.' By that definition we're already there."
* Carole Cadwalladr in the Observer, "The great British Brexit robbery: how our democracy was hijacked: A shadowy global operation involving big data, billionaire friends of Trump and the disparate forces of the Leave campaign influenced the result of the EU referendum. As Britain heads to the polls again, is our electoral process still fit for purpose?"
* Jane Mayer in The New Yorker, "The Reclusive Hedge-Fund Tycoon Behind The Trump Presidency: How Robert Mercer exploited America's populist insurgency"
I was disappointed in Todd Gittlin's article about how Americans have lost faith in the news media, because it seems to be all about Trump and Republicans. But a lot of highly-informed news junkies can tell you that the media is full of junk, and it's not just Fox news.
"The Democratic Party Is a Ghost: Democratic Party elites don't have ideals. They just need you to be scared of the Republicans. [...] The Democratic leadership looks hardly different than it has for my entire adult life, a grim and aging collection of Clinton apparatchiks totally secure in their sinecures — all the more so because the only time the party ever does use what power it has, it's to quash any discontent from its base or its leftward flank."
Jimmy Carter, "Losing my religion for equality: Women and girls have been discriminated against for too long in a twisted interpretation of the word of God. I HAVE been a practising Christian all my life and a deacon and Bible teacher for many years. My faith is a source of strength and comfort to me, as religious beliefs are to hundreds of millions of people around the world. So my decision to sever my ties with the Southern Baptist Convention, after six decades, was painful and difficult."
Richard J. Eskow, "Yes, Obama's $400,000 Speech is a Problem: A new poll shows fully two-thirds of the American public agrees with this statement: 'The Democratic Party is out of touch with the concerns of most people.' And scarcely more than one in four Democrats themselves think the party understands most people's everyday concerns. It was also just announced that Barack Obama, following in the well-heeled footsteps of Bill and Hillary Clinton, will be paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for giving a speech on behalf of a Wall Street firm. Anyone who thinks these two facts aren't connected isn't paying attention. Obama's payday reflects a longstanding pattern of behavior from Democratic leaders: Talk like liberals, govern from the center, and make a lot of money once you're out of office."
* Gaius Publius, "Obama Harvests His Presidency:
* And oddly, even The New York Times editorial board is critical of "The Cost of Barack Obama's Speech."
* "Barack Obama's $400,000 speaking fees reveal what few want to admit: His mission was never racial or economic justice. It's time we stop pretending it was."
* Elsewhere, Gaius reminded me of an article James K. Galbraith wrote back in 2011, "The Bad Deal: Over here reality has been evident for a while, thanks to the President's pattern of giving way to banks, lobbies, Republicans and right-wing extremists. Whether your prime interest is housing, health care, peace, justice, jobs or climate change, if you are an activist in America you have known for a long time that this President is not your friend. [...] The debt deal will make things clear. The President is not a progressive ' he is not what Americans still call a 'liberal.' He is a willful player in an epic drama of faux-politics, an operative for the money power, whose job is to neutralize the left with fear and distraction and then to pivot rightward and deliver a conservative result."
"Why the U.S. pays more for health care than the rest of the world [...] Other countries will say, here's the maximum price. Go ahead and compete below that. And in other countries, there's policy that you can charge a lot when you have a wonderful new technology, but as it gets older, that price has to keep coming down. And what we see in the United States, pretty much uniquely, is, as technologies get older, sometimes the price can go up, and can go up a lot. [...] In Japan, that same test would cost $100 to $150, because, in Japan, those prices have to go down over time. You can't say, wow, this was a great new technology 30 years ago, and so we're going to raise the price because it's even greater now. It's not. It's basically the same."
"Stay in a hospital, pay the CEO $56 a night: Norman Roth has a great job. He's the CEO of the relatively small Greenwich Hospital in southern Connecticut, and for each night patients stayed at his hospital in 2015, he got paid $56.40."
"The way forward for progressives" introduces an upcoming book: "As previously noted, this work traces the way the Left fell prey to what we call the globalisation myth and formed the view that the state has become powerless (or severely constrained) in the face of the transnational movements of goods and services and capital flows. Social democratic politicians frequently opine that national economic policy must be acceptable to the global financial markets and, as a result, champion right-wing policies that compromise the well-being of their citizens. The book traces both the history of this decline into neo-liberalism by the Left and also presents what might be called a 'Progressive Manifesto' to guide policy design and policy choices for progressive governments. We hope that the 'Manifesto' will empower community groups by demonstrating that the TINA mantra, where these alleged goals of the amorphous global financial markets are prioritised over real goals like full employment, renewable energy and revitalised manufacturing sectors is bereft and a range of policy options, now taboo in this neo-liberal world are available. In today's blog "
Last year, Gary Young went to "Middletown" to look at how America was experiencing the election up-close. His final dispatch was, "How Trump took middle America [...] But the issue was not simply about trade or globalisation: to many voters in Muncie, Clinton looked not only like an integral part of the establishment that had brought them to this place, but like a candidate advocating more of the same. 'If you take a step back and look at all America has achieved over the past eight years, it's remarkable to see how far we've come,' Clinton argued. For many of those who already had their backs against the wall, it was hard to see the progress. Trump, on the other hand, offered the near certainty that something would change. 'At least he'll shake things up,' was the phrase that kept coming up. One in five of those who voted for him thought he didn't have the temperament to be president. For some who had little to lose, he was evidently a risk worth taking. 'The Democrats keep making out like everything is OK,' says Todd Smekens, the publisher of the progressive online magazine Muncie Voice. 'And it's not. Nobody's buying it.'"
I sure hope I never again have to wake up from surgery during a shift change.
Having noticed that the Parliamentary Labour Party has effectively demolished it's own leader in the polls, the Tories saw their chance and Theresa May has announced an election. Labour has never been so weak, thanks to the efforts of the Blairites, and it seems pretty clear that they have no chance. Smart Tories have an ace up their sleeve: "Nicola Sturgeon and yes, Jeremy Corbyn, would demolish May in debate. If any party other than the Tories was declining to take part in debate, the media would quite rightly attack them for it. Do not however expect any more than token remonstration from the broadcasters; they are far too complicit in the cottonwool packaging of May, and have too deep an investment in the Unionist project, to rock the boat. Indeed, the media will now seek to frame any debate between opposition leaders which does go ahead as a gathering of losers, a carnival of grotesques. Any resemblance between this British general election and democracy is purely coincidental."
Meanwhile, the DNC goes to court and not only admits that the primaries were rigged, but claims a right to rig them. "DNC Shatters The Illusion Of American Democracy In Order To Keep People's 27 Bucks: Well that didn't take much. After all the time and effort that those of us in the alternative media have been pouring into our attempts to show people that democracy does not exist in America, the political establishment has stepped forward and admitted it candidly with its own face hole. A recently-released transcript of Florida court documents has revealed that the Democratic National Committee's first line of defense in their motion to dismiss a lawsuit against them by defrauded Bernie Sanders supporters is to state that they are under no contractual obligation to provide the American people with real party primaries."
So Trump bombed Syria. What's remarkable to me is the sudden emergence of members of Obama's circle who are suddenly erupting in vast applause for Trump bombing Syria — apparently, he was reining them in for all this time. The Washington press corps has suddenly decided Trump is "presidential" now that he's bombing someone for no good reason and with no plan. The neocons and the TV faces all have a tingle down their leg. But Robert Parry says it's "Trump's 'Wag the Dog' Moment: Just two days after news broke of an alleged poison-gas attack in northern Syria, President Trump brushed aside advice from some U.S. intelligence analysts doubting the Syrian regime's guilt and launched a lethal retaliatory missile strike against a Syrian airfield. The guided-missile destroyer USS Porter conducts strike operations while in the Mediterranean Sea, April 7, 2017. (Navy photo by Petty Officer 3rd Class Ford Williams)
Trump immediately won plaudits from Official Washington, especially from neoconservatives who have been trying to wrestle control of his foreign policy away from his nationalist and personal advisers since the days after his surprise victory on Nov. 8. [...] But a number of intelligence sources have made contradictory assessments, saying the preponderance of evidence suggests that Al Qaeda-affiliated rebels were at fault, either by orchestrating an intentional release of a chemical agent as a provocation or by possessing containers of poison gas that ruptured during a conventional bombing raid. One intelligence source told me that the most likely scenario was a staged event by the rebels intended to force Trump to reverse a policy, announced only days earlier, that the U.S. government would no longer seek 'regime change' in Syria and would focus on attacking the common enemy, Islamic terror groups that represent the core of the rebel forces." That story buries the lede, though, which is that there's no reliable evidence that Assad was guilty of the charge in this case. "New Evidence that Syrian Gas Story Was Fabricated by the White House" — Does this sound familiar?
* Really, no one is taking "The White House Report seriously, are they?
* Norman Solomon, "Russia-Baiting Pushed Trump to Attack Syria — and Increases the Risks of Nuclear Annihilation."
* Hm, I wonder where this stuff comes from.... "MSNBC's Rachel Maddow Sees a 'Russia Connection' Lurking Around Every Corner."
* "Five Top Papers Run 18 Opinion Pieces Praising Syria Strikes — Zero Are Critical."
Of course, this was an opportunity for a bit of proxy warring against Sanders by attacking Tulsi Gabbard for not instantly supporting Trump's attack on Syria, instead saying: "'This administration has acted recklessly without care or consideration of the dire consequences of the United States attack on Syria without waiting for the collection of evidence from the scene of the chemical poisoning.' Gabbard added she would support Assad's prosecution and execution as a war criminal if the attacks were proven, though she still wouldn't support military action. 'A successful prosecution of Assad (at the International Criminal Court) will require collection of evidence from the scene of the incident, and I support the United Nation's efforts in this regard. Without such evidence, a successful prosecution is impossible.'" Clintonites claim this statement was "pro-Assad".
Andrew Cuomo announces free college for New York, and it sure sounds to me like a bit of a fraud. For one thing, you can't be a part-time student or one who takes a semester off to try to earn some money to keep going. It doesn't cover books, which are pretty expensive these days.
"Irish Citizens Assembly votes to amend abortion laws: Pro-choice campaigners disappointed by vote to amend, rather than repeal, Eighth Amendment." Still, a very big deal. "A special committee set up to discuss Irish abortion laws has voted in favour of changing the constitutional clause which effectively criminalises abortion — but stopped short of repealing the law entirely. The Eighth Amendment to the Irish constitution protects the 'right to life of the unborn', and termination is illegal in Ireland in all but the most exceptional circumstances, where there is a 'real and substantial risk' to the mother's life." But I'm with Siobhan Fenton, who tweeted: "Not going to lie lads, I am crying my eyes out. Irish women have waited so long for this. Huge day for the country."
Payoff time: "Obama to net $400K for Wall Street speech: report: Former President Obama has agreed to speak at a Wall Street conference for $400,000, according to a new report. Obama will appear at Cantor Fitzgerald LP's healthcare conference in September, Fox Business Network first reported Monday. Fox Business said it confirmed Obama's appearance with senior members at Cantor, a financial services firm." The worst Clintonite troll in my twitter feed is manfully defending this receipt of a bribe, but Obama telegraphed it in The Audacity of Hope. He was happy to describe it, but he wasn't going to go against it. (More of that in this piece from a year ago.)
"The retail apocalypse is creating a 'slow-rolling crisis' that is rippling through the US economy: Retailers are closing thousands of stores and going bankrupt at a rate not seen since the recession, and tens of thousands of people are losing their jobs as a result. The effects of these job losses will hit local economies hard, according to Mark Cohen, the director of retail studies at Columbia Business School." Scary.
"The Long, Lucrative Right-wing Grift Is Blowing Up in the World's Face." As has been obvious for a while now, the fountain of "conservative" rationalization of insane policies the oligarchs have been feeding the rubes has worked beyond their wildest expectations, actually convincing so many that they have run for office and taken their seats sincerely believing the nonsense that was never supposed to be taken seriously by anyone in power. But a considerable portion of Congress, and now the White House, is finally occupied by those very rubes, and no one knows how to control them. Pity the Democrats didn't make the arguments when they had a chance to stop this train.
"Jeff Sessions Getting Rich Filling Private Prisons: It's more than a conflict of interest. The more people Attorney General Jeff Sessions sends to private prisons, the more money he shoves in his pockets. From announcing he wants federal law enforcement agencies to bust people for a little bit of weed, to ordering federal prosecutors to find ways to convict more immigrants, Sessions is looking for ways to provide more clients to private prisons that are contracted by the federal government. [...] As Attorney General Sessions fills these private prisons, he is making money. According to his latest financial disclosures required by congress, dated December 23, 2016, he divested of other investments that were found to be in conflict. In these disclosures, he also lists numerous Vanguard funds. Vanguard owns more private prison stock than any other investment management company. None of the Vanguard funds listed below were included in the divestiture."
"Alabama Senate votes to allow church to form police dept. MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — The Alabama Senate has voted to allow a church to form its own police force. Lawmakers on Tuesday voted 24-4 to allow Briarwood Presbyterian Church in Birmingham to establish a law enforcement department. The church says it needs its own police officers to keep its school as well as its more than 4,000 person congregation safe. Critics of the bill argue that a police department that reports to church officials could be used to cover up crimes."
"Police Arrested This Cop Watch Activist — But Then Recorded Themselves by Accident: Last August, Jose LaSalle, a prominent New York City Cop Watch activist, was arrested after filming a stop-and-frisk near a housing project in the South Bronx. Though filming the police is legal, LaSalle was charged with 'obstructing governmental administration.' LaSalle claims he was standing far away from the incident. To continue documenting his own arrest, the veteran activist left his two phones and a GoPro camera turned on and recording as he was being taken to a nearby police station."
"How the Government Is Turning Protesters Into Felons" — Basically, this amounts to treating a protest even as a crime in itself, and then saying everyone who attended was complicit in any property damage that occurred. And then throwing the book at them.
California fighting the trend and going for single-payer, but of course, Big Corporate Money Opposes Single-Payer Proposal. "As health care premiums rise and insurers threaten to leave Obamacare's state exchanges, polls show that a majority of Americans now support the creation of a universal, government-funded health care program. The so-called single-payer system has been a long-sought goal of progressive groups, who now hope that California lawmakers will pass a bill to create such a system. Proponents hope the system could then begin moving the United States to follow Canada, which saw its own national single-payer system first begin in the province of Saskatchewan. But before that happens, single-payer proponents are going to have to overcome powerful resistance. While California is known as a liberal stronghold, industry groups with a financial interest in blocking the measure are lining up in opposition — and they have poured cash into the campaigns of key state lawmakers who will decide the fate of the bill."
Rob Levine with some original research, "Free to choose a Walmart school: Poverty Academies, Segregation Academies and a foundation plan to destroy the Minneapolis public school district
"Fifty Shades of Green" — Thomas Ferguson, Jie Chen, and Paul Jorgensen at the Roosevelt Institute, on the effect of money in politics.
* "Does Money Buy Votes? Most Americans Say Yes; A New Study Says They're Right [...] The researchers found that for every $100,000 the financial industry spent on campaign contributions for a House Democrat who voted for Dodd-Frank, they were able to increase the likelihood that same Democrat would vote to dismantle parts of the bill by 13.9 percent, according to the study."
David Dayen on "How Congress Could Make Steve Bannon's Wildest Dream Come True: Beyond the competing sets of spin about the success or failure of Donald Trump's first hundred days, even the most committed liberal partisan can admit that he has allowed corporate America to run wild."
"'Superman Is Not Coming: Erin Brockovich on the Future of Water [...] 'It's not just one Flint. It's hundreds of Flints," Brockovich, who became a household name in 2000 when Julia Roberts portrayed her in an Oscar-winning film, tells me in an interview. 'We've already slipped and we're on the cusp of Third World conditions when it comes to our water supply.'"
The first event of Bernie Sanders' and Tom Perez's Come Together Fight Back Tour — Portland, ME.
* "The Democratic Party's messaging rift, in one short video: But serious differences between the Democratic Party's factions remain. On Wednesday, Sanders and Perez appeared with MSNBC's Chris Hayes for their first joint interview — and it didn't take long for Hayes to pry open the split in the politicians' worldviews."
Suddenly the Clintonistas are going all purity troll because Sanders and Perez are out there campaigning for Dems who aren't perfect. The New Republic, of all places, launches a defense, but frankly the whole tempest is pretty rich when you have Nancy Pelosi saying "'Of course' Dems can be against abortion" — and then of course, there was this candidate.
Yves Smith, "Democrat Disunity: Hypocritical Media Attacks on Sanders: On every conceivable front, the Democrats double downing down on the strategy that led them to hemorrhage losses in representation, meaning power, at every level of government. In keeping, more and more voters are leaving the party. The latest repeat of a failed strategy is to try to smear Sanders in a cack-handed effort to win over his base. This is as likely to succeed as calling Trump voters 'deplorables' did."
* Alas, there's not a prayer that these people who are attacking Bernie will realize the effect they are having on the polls and cut it out.
"The DNC and DCCC Confirm They Won't Support Progressive Candidates [...] Rather than this special election representing an anomaly or misstep from the Democratic leadership, there's a prevailing trend within the party's establishment to select and support weak, centrist candidates who provide the party with opportunities to fundraise from corporate donors. This trend is symptomatic of a revolving door within the Democratic Party leadership, where party officials often sell out to work for Republican lobbying firms. The Intercept's Lee Fang pointed out Mark Squier, John Donovan, and CR Wooters as just a few examples."
"The Democratic party is undermining Bernie Sanders-style candidates: Since losing the presidency to a Cheeto-hued reality TV host, the Democratic party's leadership has made it clear that it would rather keep losing than entertain even the slightest whiff of New Deal style social democracy."
Paul Street still thinks, "Bernie Sanders, the Company Man" is just corralling us for the Dems. I think he's looking at it the wrong way, but we shall see.
"Quick thoughts about airline economics [...] There are two things wrong with this line that air travel is awful because consumers' true revealed preference is that it should be awful and cheap. First, there is the fact that air travel managed by the main domestic carriers in the United States is uniquely awful, and there is no evidence that US travelers are any more price conscious than consumers in other countries. No frills, discount air travel is popular in Europe as well, and it is sometimes awful, but it is on the whole much cheaper than 'discount' air travel within the US. Mainstream carriers almost everywhere else in the developed world are notably less awful than the big American carriers, and often just as cheap."
"'Trump Is Just Tearing Off the Mask': An Interview with Eric Foner [...] ? It's very easy to say, 'Oh, Trump's gone off the reservation.' But actually, this is part of the American political culture, past and present. Our politics has not always been like the Lincoln-Douglas debates, some high-minded discussion of important issues. Even those debates weren't like that! We have seen the low road many a time. Go back to the Know-Nothings, George Wallace, Richard Nixon, the Southern strategy. This is an important strand of our political culture. That's a more frightening thought than calling Trump a lunatic and an aberration. He is the logical extension of the way the Republican Party has been operating since Barry Goldwater. This is how the Republican Party has gotten votes for 50 years — Trump is just tearing off the mask. Now he just says right out the racism that was only barely hidden for so long. An accurate history would show that it's always been there. We shouldn't just talk about how weird Trump is.
"A Bernie Sanders Campaign Adviser Was a Russian. Now He's Speaking Out: A high-level adviser and operative for the 2016 Sanders campaign was Vitali Shkliarov, a Soviet-born citizen of Belarus. Shkliarov, who had previously worked on the 2012 Obama re-election campaign and for several other successful Democratic Party campaigns, has also become increasingly in demand as a political adviser and campaign manager in Russia, working for liberal candidates in opposition to President Vladimir Putin. Possessing a unique background and vantage point, Shkliarov, now that the 2016 election is over, has many interesting observations to express on the state of American politics, the Democratic Party, U.S.-Russian relations, and the impact of rising anti-Russian sentiment in the U.S."
"How this garlic farm went from a labor shortage to over 150 people on its applicant waitlist: Christopher Ranch, which grows garlic on 5,000 acres in Gilroy, Calif., announced recently that it would hike pay for farmworkers from $11 an hour to $13 hour this year, or 18%, and then to $15 in 2018. That's four years earlier than what's required by California's schedule for minimum wage increases. Ken Christopher, vice president at Christopher Ranch, said the effect of the move was immediately obvious. At the end of last year, the farm was short 50 workers needed to help peel, package and roast garlic. Within two weeks of upping wages in January, applications flooded in. Now the company has a wait-list 150 people long. 'I knew it would help a little bit, but I had no idea that it would solve our labor problem,' Christopher said." He had no idea.
The Washington Post knows perfectly well that the US Post Office does fine and that its on-paper losses are a fabrication, but it persists in promulgating fake news trying to hide this Congressional accounting hoax. "The paper's latest pot shot was in an alarmist editorial declaring, 'The US Postal Service continues to hemorrhage red ink." Embracing their owner's anti-government ideology, the editors grumped that postal unions have made our mail service outmoded and insolvent, running up "a net loss of $5.6 billion last year.' That is pure bovine excrement -- and the editors know it. In fact, thanks to our amazing, innovative and efficient postal workers, the nation's public post offices racked up a $610 million operating profit last year, and a $1.2 billion profit the year before. The $5 billion in red ink that the paper's editorial propagandists touted is not real, but instead, is a deliberate bookkeeping hoax created by Congress to make the public think that our Post Office is a hopeless money loser that should be privatized."
Ted Rall, "Why is Trump So Hated? It's the Tribalism, Stupid [...] Remember all the antiwar rallies in 2012? Remember how Obama got primaried for destroying Libya and Syria? Neither do I. But don't be surprised if the streets fill with signs opposing Trump's Syria war — signs that might have made a difference to the hundreds of thousands of Syrians killed by American-made and -funded weapons under Obama. [...] The worst thing about America's political system is that it has no politics." I actually disagree with Rall's main statement here, but when it comes to forgiving our own, Democrats are just as bad as Republicans with the tribalism.
You can tell Clinton partisans are over the edge when they put Consortium News and Alternet in the same category as Infowars, like this. And, apparently the post would seem to come from a member of the biggest fake news site on the "left".
Katie Halper answers the attack on young women who supported Sanders, "A Millennial Feminist Explains the New Feminism to a Boomer Feminist Philosopher [...] I had assumed, perhaps falsely, that every feminist to the left of Sarah Palin sees a living wage as a feminist issue, given that two-thirds of minimum wage workers are women. But you didn't even address this significant difference. It's your prerogative to focus more on the gender dynamics and micro-aggressions that you perceive to be at play between Clinton and Sanders than a policy that will improve the lives of millions of people, the majority of whom are women. But that's a very entitled feminism."
If Bernie Sanders "doesn't connect with people of color" and is only supported by sexist white men, how is it that his popularity among blacks is +62% and at +31% among women? (For those so inclined, here's the boring data .pdf.)
* But why do people think Bernie "doesn't connect" with those among us who are not particularly white or male? Well, that's because it was Clinton campaign propaganda from the git-go. "A New Harvard Study Just Shattered the Biggest Myth About Bernie Supporters [...] "Before he was chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Obama Labor Secretary Tom Perez encouraged the Clinton campaign early on in the primary election cycle to demean her opponent by labeling him as a favorite of white men and unpopular with the African American, female, and the Latinx demographics. According to emails leaked by WikiLeaks, Perez encouraged Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta to use the Bernie Bro myth in order to win the Nevada caucus: 'Nevada is an opportunity to fight back on so many levels,' Perez wrote. 'First, the current storyline is that she does not connect well with young voters. Given that Nevada is far more demographically representative of America, I am confident that HRC can do well with all African Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans (don't forget the sizeable[sic] population of Asian Americans in Nevada, including Filipinos.).' '[Clinton campaign Nevada state director Emmy Ruiz] and the team have a good plan to attract all minority voters,' Perez continued. 'When we do well there, then the narrative changes from Bernie kicks ass among young voters to Bernie does well only among young white liberals — that is a different story and a perfect lead in to South Carolina, where once again, we can work to attract young voters of color.' In addition to Perez, staffers within the Democratic Party infrastructure used the term 'Bernie Bro' to loosely describe anyone who wasn't a ride-or-die Hillary Clinton supporter. In one email thread, when SiriusXM producer David Guggenheim reached out to DNC communications staff to request an interview with Debbie Wasserman Schultz, DNC communications director Luis Miranda and other staffers snidely commented that because Guggenheim was likely a 'Bernie Bro,' they should decline the interview."
* Meanwhile, Shaun King still says, "Now is the perfect time to discuss how and why Bernie Sanders could've beaten Donald Trump."
Meanwhile, a book has come out about how messed up the Clinton campaign was, and it's called Shattered. Naturally, the Twitter machine is going hot and heavy. I'm being called a white man again, some more!
* And here's the Sander's quote: "It's so phony."
* Matt Taibbi, "Yikes! New Behind-the-Scenes Book Brutalizes the Clinton Campaign: Shattered, a campaign tell-all fueled by anonymous sources, outlines a generational political disaster"
"The US Charging Julian Assange Could Put Press Freedom on Trial [...] But if the US Department of Justice prosecutes Assange, as it reportedly may soon, he could become something else: the first journalist in modern history to be criminally charged by American courts for publishing classified information. WikiLeaks may not look like a traditional journalism outlet, but it shares the same ends — publishing true information from its sources. And that means legal action against Assange could threaten the freedom of the press as a whole." I don't know why they said "could" there. It absolutely would.
Bravely, Nicole Sandler interviews Roger Stone: "I don't usually interview right wingers. I can't learn anything from them, and have no desire to give them an outlet to spew their bullshit. But every once in a while, an opportunity presents itself to interview someone so full of themselves, so wrong on just about everything, so completely devoid of humanity that I just can't resist."
"There Can be No Progressive Coalition Without Working Class Whites [...] Second, it simply is not possible to create a coalition that genuinely serves the poor but also excludes poor whites — especially while it enthusiastically ushers Wall Street under the tent. That certain liberals can simultaneously attack Sanders for emphasizing an economic message which, if manifested, will disproportionately uplift people of color and women, while celebrating women and people of color who have sold out the interests of their demographic groups again and again, speaks to the negative power of weaponized identitarianism, and is one of most serious threats faced by the progressive movement."
"The Duke Lacrosse Scandal and the Birth of the Alt-Right [...] Richard Spencer, the fourth speaker, is now America's most famous self-identified white nationalist. 'In this funny chain of events, the Duke lacrosse case changed the course of my career,' Spencer told me recently. 'My life would not have taken the direction it did absent the Duke lacrosse case.' The speech at the Thai restaurant — 'Ironic, isn't it?' he said — pushed him from an academic track toward a more activist one. McConnell commissioned Spencer to write a piece for The American Conservative about the case, and, by the end of the semester, Spencer had dropped out of school to work at the magazine full-time. A year later, he coined the term 'alt-right.'"
A talk with the pastor who delivered his friend Harper Lee's eulogy, from Gary Silverman in The Financial Times, about "How the Bible Belt lost God and found Trump [...] Flynt says evangelical Christians are mainly mobilising against the sins they either do not want to commit (homosexual acts) or cannot commit (undergoing an abortion, in the case of men). They turn a blind eye toward temptations such as adultery and divorce that interest them. In 2010, the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution calling the rising incidence of divorce among its members a 'scandal'. A Pew Research Center study in 2015 found that evangelical Protestants in the US were more likely to be divorced or separated than Catholics, Jews, Muslims or atheists."
Did I mention that eventually, The West Wing made my blood run cold whenever they actually talked about policy? Because they always spelled out the right-wing argument and then never answered it. I thought the business about Social Security was particularly chilling. Anyway, Luke Savage on "How Liberals Fell In Love With The West Wing: Aaron Sorkin's political drama shows everything wrong with the Democratic worldview."
We enjoyed the original, British, House of Cards. Kinda glad I never saw the America version.
From Ansible, "Malgorithms. A recent news page at Wn.com headlined 'Second Doctor Arrested in US Female Genital Mutilation Case' was helpfully illustrated with a stock photo of Patrick Troughton (1920-1987). [RR]"
RIP: Anti-Establishment Icon David Peel Dies at 73. He was so much a part of my neighborhood back in the day. His bandmate Billy lived in the apartment above us on East 5th Street. Used to run into David all the time, and still recall amusing moments like that time I was eating my breakfast pizza in the square and heard him shouting something, waving his album around, saying the last time the cops searched him, they found dirty underwear. Can't remember how many times I heard him sing this song.
* "Don Rickles, Legendary Insult Comic, Dies at 90." He was kind of ubiquitous back in the day. Lance Manion did a nice little appreciation of Mr. Warmth.
* "Guitarist J. Geils Dead at 71: J. Geils Band musician who appeared on rock radio hits 'Centerfold,' 'Freeze-Frame,' 'Love-Stinks' found dead at home." I never met him, but I went to a small school with Seth Justman, who used to sit in the student commons and play the piano now and then.
* Motown song writer Sylvia Moy, co-writer of Stevie Wonder's "Uptight (Everything's Alright)" and "I Was Made to Love Her", at 78.
* Carolyn Kelly, R.I.P., daughter of Pogo creator Walt Kelly and restorer and preserver of his work, as well as a talent in her own right. Condolences to Mark Evanier.
The things that pass for knowledge I can't understand
Bra of the Week: So, I was looking at this page to see if I could get some better advice for taking care of the skin during and after radiotherapy, and down at the bottom someone produced this whimsical innovation. (Comes with matching sun hat.) Oh, and by the way, I seem to have more cancer. The plan seems to be pretty much to do the same as last time, only it's on the other side.
"The Sanders Show: Welcome to 'Bernie TV' [...] Guests on "The Bernie Sanders Show" have so far included Rev. William Barber, the leader of the "Moral Monday" movement, anti-fracking filmmaker Josh Fox and former "Science Guy" Bill Nye, whose conversation with Sanders about climate change racked up 4.6 million views and 25,000 shares." You can watch it here.
"Repealing Broadband Privacy Rules, Congress Sides with the Cable and Telephone Industry: Putting the interests of Internet providers over Internet users, Congress today voted to erase landmark broadband privacy protections. If the bill is signed into law, companies like Cox, Comcast, Time Warner, AT&T, and Verizon will have free rein to hijack your searches, sell your data, and hammer you with unwanted advertisements. Worst yet, consumers will now have to pay a privacy tax by relying on VPNs to safeguard their information. That is a poor substitute for legal protections. Make no mistake, by a vote of 215 to 205 a slim majority of the House of Representatives have decided to give our personal information to an already highly profitable cable and telephone industry so that they can increase their profits with our data. The vote broke along party lines, with Republicans voting yes, although 15 Republicans broke ranks to vote against the repeal with the Democrats."
"Baltimore's Democratic mayor breaks promise, vetoes $15 minimum wage bill: Mayor Catherine Pugh dealt a shattering blow to the Fight for $15 campaign, vetoing a new minimum wage law. [...] The veto is the latest in a string of serious blows to the Fight for $15 campaign in Maryland. As reported by In These Times, an effort to enact a local minimum wage in populous Montgomery County went down in flames in January when county executive Ike Leggett vetoed the bill. As in the case in Baltimore, all the important elected leaders in Montgomery County are Democrats, and the higher minimum wage proposal fell because pro-business Democrats split with more progressive Democrats."
"Man banned from every shop, pub, cafe, restaurant and takeaway in Northern Ireland" — I don't know how he is supposed to eat, but I suppose he could always acquire more counterfeit notes and get someone else to do his shopping for him.... (OK, he's allowed to order food to be delivered to him at home, but if the judge is so convinced he has easy access to more faux fifties and would spend them, surely he could get someone else to spend them.)
Jeffrey Kaye is a clinical psychologist who wrote a book about the extremely assisted suicides at Guantanamo. Naturally, Your Talking Dog has interviewed him in his continuing series on Guantanamo. "The media reaction to the deaths has for the most part been awful. Harpers did open up their pages to Hickman and Scott Horton. But when in 2010 the story got an National Magazine Award there was significant growling from the rest of the media. Most amazing, to me, was the tirade of abuse coming from the pages of Adweek, an advertising industry stalwart. That must have thrown editors into a frenzy, with what I believe was practically explicit warning to stay away from these kinds of story, derogated as irresponsible conspiracy-mongering. From that time forward, you did not see stories about the deaths at Guantanamo."
"How local news sounded the alarm over the GOP's defeated health plan: Editorials and news coverage in numerous American communities responded with a clear message that such measures simply didn't pass muster for their communities. Many in their audiences agreed: A Quinnipiac Poll released yesterday found that only 17 percent of American voters approved of the Republican's bill, while 56 percent didn't. Many editorials found ways to ask the same question — 'Is this bill good policy?' — and then answer, conclusively, 'No.'"
"The CFPB Protects Us From Bad Banks; Republicans Want To Kill It [...] But lawmakers in Washington aren't trying to tighten enforcement against serial lawbreakers like Wells Fargo. Instead, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) has introduced a measure to shut it down, while other GOP efforts would strip it of funding. Other Republican initiatives would weaken the CFPB by stripping it of political independence and replacing its executive leadership with a commission. Other proposed legislation would weaken its rule-making and enforcement authority, reduce its ability to track consumer complaints, and strip it of its ability to (in the words of Bloomberg Law's Chris Bruce) 'attack unfair, deceptive or abusive acts or practices.' The Trump Administration, which has drawn heavily on Goldman Sachs for its senior staffers, has been openly fighting the CFPB. The administration wants to remove agency head Richard Cordray and make other staffing changes, and recently joined a lawsuit challenging the agency's independence."
"Erik Prince in the Hot Seat: Blackwater's Founder Is Under Investigation for Money Laundering, Ties to Chinese Intel, and Brokering Mercenary Services."
I can't believe that after the Republicans spent 20 years vilifying her, the Democrats spent eight years in control of the White House and apparently were only interested in fracking and TPP, and the candidate said things like this, there is still a constant flow of idiots in my feeds insisting that the only reason people didn't want to vote for Hillary was the Russians.
"Why Bernie's Progressive Narrative Appeals Across Partisan Lines [...] According to the National Academy of Social Insurance, 81% of Americans — including 87% of Democrats and 72% of Republicans — support Social Security and consider it a vital program. 77% of those polled want to protect Social Security benefits, even if doing so would require tax increases on all workers. As Social Security is one of the great progressive policy victories of the last century, this polling indicates that even Republicans are progressive on this issue. Sadly, this is one issue where the establishment political parties do not appear to care about the views of the voters. Virtually every Republican leader other than Trump (e.g. Ryan and McConnell) supports cutting Social Security, either through reducing benefits or increasing the eligibility age, while Democratic leaders have flirted with more subtle cuts (i.e. using chained CPI to reduce cost of living growth)." And it's much the same with other issues Sanders pushed — the public supports them, and party leadership does not. This has to raise questions about what the Democratic leaderships is up to. They can read polls as well as we can. They know their policies are unpopular, so they have to use careful — "nuanced" — language to make them sound like they're not as monstrous as they are. And one other thing. "Replicating the success of Bernie Sanders may be as simple as running candidates who credibly argue in favor of these massively popular progressive ideals, while refusing to take money from big donors. Anybody going up against this type of candidate must resort to lies, distortions, identity politics (e.g. race, religion, gender, culture, etc.) and character attacks, as real policy discussions are likely to just reinforce the idea that their opponent holds views that are widely popular."
Interview By Rachel Tabachnick, "Right Moves: Historian Jason Stahl Opens a New Era of Scholarship on Conservative Think Tanks: [...] The corrosive part of DLC and PPI was a denigration of movement-based politics, a suspicion of grassroots, movement-based politics. They accepted the pernicious framing of liberal/Left social movements that the Right had been forwarding for years, that these rabble-rousing movements were out of touch and un-American. PPI used this moniker — liberal fundamentalism — suggesting that liberalism is more akin to a kind of unthinking religious orientation and that this is the real problem of the Democratic Party. When you go down that road of denigrating movement politics, you are going down a disastrous electoral path, in my mind, regardless of your politics."
"The DLC Lives: "Third Way" Democrats Are Trying to Push the Party Rightward [...] At the height of its power the DLC was the dominant force in the party, boasting President Bill Clinton and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair as its acolytes. But like Bell's weak narcotics, the DLC, which supported the Iraq War and received money from the likes of the Koch Brothers, soon became a tainted brand. Long before 2011, when the organization dissolved, the DLC label hung around politicians like a scarlet letter. Even President Obama publicly distanced himself from the organization in 2004 as he ascended as a national figure. [...] Now, as Democrats face an existential crisis in the aftermath of the election of Donald Trump, these fundamentally conservative organizations, armed with millions in corporate donations, are working with a renewed aggressiveness in the public sphere. They are attempting to convince the party to shun its base and further embrace the so-called 'vital center,' and the corporatism that has long defined these groups."
Masha Gessen, "Autocracy: Rules for Survival * Rule #1: Believe the autocrat
* Rule #2: Do not be taken in by small signs of normality.
* Rule #3: Institutions will not save you
* Rule #4: Be outraged.
* Rule #5: Don't make compromises.
* Rule #6: Remember the future.
"The Bait And Switch Of Public-Private Partnerships: This being the age of public relations, the genteel term 'public-private partnership' is used instead of corporate plunder. A 'partnership' such deals may be, but it isn't the public who gets the benefits."
David Dayen in The Fiscal Times, "How Goldman Sachs Wins, and You Lose, From Its Mortgage Crisis 'Punishment': The Justice Department billed this as a '$5.1 billion settlement.' But that figure was incredibly misleading; at best the bank was giving DoJ a small cut of a decade of profits. There was a bigger problem, too: $1.8 billion of this settlement was earmarked for 'consumer relief,' in which Goldman would write down the mortgages of struggling homeowners. But it didn't own any home loans."
David Dayen in Vice, "How a Cruel Foreclosure Drove a Couple to the Brink of Death: A married couple resorted to self-harm after being physically and psychologically terrorized by Bank of America over their house — until a judge fined the bank $46 million." Of course, BoA plans to appeal, and it will be interesting to see the final disposition of this case, but this is what should have happened to them all. Even here, the judge did not impose criminal charges on BoA executives, but at long last the principle was stated clearly that this was not just the misbehavior of rogue, low-level functionaries, but decisions made at the top. "But if one bank is ordered to pay $46 million for just one foreclosure, it begs the question of whether the federal government settled on the cheap in its more systemic investigations of America's largest financial companies after the 2008 crash. 'The governmental regulatory system has failed to protect the Sundquists,'s Judge Klein wrote, and that goes double for the millions of homeowners who suffered similar fates, yet didn't contest their cases or find a judge willing to act on their behalf."
I'm baffled as to why people keep saying stuff like this: "What Happens When We Don't Believe the President's Oath? [...] If you're a liberal, one who voted against George W. Bush twice, do the following thought experiment: Did you ever doubt, even as you decried the Iraq War and demanded accountability for counterterrorism policies and actions you regarded as lawless, that Bush was acting sincerely in the best interests of the country as he understood them? Yes, people used the slogan 'Bush Lied, People Died,' but how many of them actually in their hearts doubted that Bush was earnestly trying to do his duty by the electorate, even if they differed in their understandings of what that duty entailed? Some, to be sure, we suspect many more accepted that Bush was honestly doing his best." OMG, do they not remember how the guy got into the White House? You do not do that in the "best interests" of the country!
"The Sleazy Origins of Russia-gate: An irony of the escalating hysteria about the Trump camp's contacts with Russians is that one presidential campaign in 2016 did exploit political dirt that supposedly came from the Kremlin and other Russian sources. Friends of that political campaign paid for this anonymous hearsay material, shared it with American journalists and urged them to publish it to gain an electoral advantage. But this campaign was not Donald Trump's; it was Hillary Clinton's. [...] The reports not only captivated the Clinton political operatives but influenced the assessments of Obama's appointees in the U.S. intelligence community. In the last weeks of the Obama administration, I was told that the outgoing intelligence chiefs had found no evidence to verify Steele's claims but nevertheless believed them to be true.
You know who didn't get much help from TARP? If there's one thing white supremacists didn't have to fear form Obama, it was that he would help people of his own race. He sure didn't. "The Decline of Black Business: And what it means for American democracy."
Every now and then I like to remind people that if you actually read the Bible, it is less a tale of faith than a tale of how states fail, over and over. Once they fall into Mammonism, once they let the rentiers control the economy, they destroy themselves. Or God smites them, depending on your point of view (Ezekiel 16:49). Rutger Bregman doesn't mention the Bible in "No, wealth isn't created at the top. It is merely devoured there," but it's that same story, and it's happening now.
Blast from the past: Early last year, Seth Ackerman did a useful take-down of two "liberal" pundits who did a prompt about-face on all of their previous opinions on health care, in a shameful display of partisanship. "Meet the New Harry and Louise: Vox's attack on Bernie Sanders is sold as a policy critique. It's actually a dishonest exercise in managing the Democratic Party base."
"Why You Seldom See Noxzema Anymore." This is kind of a shame, because it really is great for protecting your skin from breaking out, especially anyplace you use soap, and it wipes out eczema pretty damned quick. I get it from a local place down the market that appears to cater to a mostly black clientele, it's not seen on the shelves anywhere else that I recall. I thought that was a British thing until I saw this story — and it's from 2008.
RIP:
* One of the truly great journalists, "Legendary Newspaper Columnist Jimmy Breslin Dies At 88. [..] Breslin was old school. He began his career as a copy boy working his way up to a hard -bitten reporter." You can read his articles about Trump here, starting with his 7 June 1990.article, "Corum's Law", in which he learns that the news business sold itself very cheaply indeed to "The Donald". Also, see Michael Winship's A Couple of Things About Jimmy Breslin."
* Bernie Wrightson, (October 27, 1948-March 19, 2017), co-creator of Swamp Thing, after a long battle with brain cancer. A highly talented artist who had worked for pretty much every comic company at some time, beloved by many.
* Martin McGuinness, the IRA commander whose negotiations on behalf of Sinn Fein led to the Good Friday peace agreement, at 66, as a result of amyloidosis. "The cuddly, chess-playing and fly-fishing grandfather figure that he presented in later life was real — but so too was the guerrilla hard man of the 1970s, who neither smoked nor drank, partly because he was a member of the Catholic Pioneer temperance group, but also to minimise the pressures that might break him under interrogation"
* "Chuck Berry Dies at 90; Helped Define Rock 'n' Roll" Or, as Bill Wyman (no, not that one) put it, "Chuck Berry Invented the Idea of Rock and Roll." Brian May and Brian Wilson also gave tribute. But I loved this piece of information: "Chuck Berry reviewing old punk records remains one of my favourite things."
* "Chicago Blues Giant Lonnie Brooks Dead at 83"
* Bob Lee (1942-2017), after a battle with cancer. Black Panther and organizer Bob Lee forged the kind of revolutionary interracial solidarity desperately needed today. [...] In late 1968, Fred Hampton and Bob Lee indirectly created the original Rainbow Coalition. Led by the ILBPP, the Rainbow Coalition included the Young Lords, a socially conscious Puerto Rican gang; and the Young Patriots Organization (YPO), a group of Confederate-flag-wearing Southern white migrants.""
* Colin Dexter, creator of Inspector Morse, and three of my favorite TV series.
"Now Would Be A Good Time For A Democratic Healthcare Plan Proposal." A perfect time, really. And there even is one, so why aren't the Democrats pushing it like crazy? Apparently, they prefer to just talk about how mean the Republicans are instead of promoting proposals of their own that would give people a reason to vote for them.
* But no, when it's time to throw your drowning enemy an anchor, they throw them a life-preserver. "Dems Say They'll Help Trump Fix Obamacare If He Stops Trying To Kill It: The offer assumes Republicans won't try to sabotage a law they seem unable to repeal."
"More Americans say government should ensure health care coverage: As the debate continues over repeal of the Affordable Care Act and what might replace it, a growing share of Americans believe that the federal government has a responsibility to make sure all Americans have health care coverage, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. Currently, 60% of Americans say the government should be responsible for ensuring health care coverage for all Americans, compared with 38% who say this should not be the government's responsibility. The share saying it is the government's responsibility has increased from 51% last year and now stands at its highest point in nearly a decade." In nearly a decade of Democrats trying to pretend it's impossible, but it's actually a low number. It's not that long ago you could get nearly 70% of the country to agree that they would happily pay higher taxes if they could get a National Health Servicefor it.
Bernie Sanders did a Town Hall in "Trump Country" again, with Chris Hayes. You can see it here and here. This was, of course, an excuse for the Clintonistas to get on Twitter and get a big hate on against Bernie, who failed to spend enough time hating on Trump, apparently, and more importantly failed to be Hillary Clinton. They even hate him for talking to people in "Trump country", or speaking in public at all. They don't seem to be aware that he was appointed as the Senate Dems outreach person.
I'm leaving the whole Vault 7 thing with Marcy. In any case, no reason the CIA should have credibility with anyone. I reckon Kennedy was right.
* Oh, and Robert Parry. "Fresh Doubts about Russian 'Hacking: WikiLeaks' disclosure of documents revealing CIA cyber-spying capabilities underscores why much more skepticism should have been applied to the U.S. intelligence community's allegations about Russia 'hacking' last year's American presidential election. It turns out that the CIA maintains a library of foreign malware that could be used to pin the blame for a 'hack' on another intelligence service."
Meanwhile, even Buzzfeed admits that you can't believe every bad thing you read about Trump. "1.6 Billion Dollar Hoax: An elaborate hoax based on forged documents escalates the phenomenon of 'fake news' and reveals an audience on the left that seems willing to believe virtually any claim that could damage Trump. "
"Recruiting Republicans To Run For Congress As Democrats Has Usually Ended Badly For All Concerned: I'm going to start talking about a rule of Beltway politics by immediately pointing to an exception: Elizabeth Warren, who today-- along with men and women like Bernie Sanders, Ted Lieu, Pramila Jayapal, Raul Grijalva, and Jeff Merkley-- defines what it means to be a real Democrat, was once an Oklahoma Republican! That's a long time ago, the Democratic Party didn't recruit her as a Republican, and, like I said, that's the glaring exception to the rule. [...] It used to surprise me when crooked conservative Dems like Emanuel, Hoyer and Chris Van Hollen recruited Republicans to run as Democrats. Now it's practically standard operating procedure for the DCCC. Last cycle DCCC-recruited Republicans masquerading as Democratic candidates (like Monica Vernon in Iowa, Mike Derrick in New York, Randy Perkins in that old Palm Beach seat... just a few examples) went down in flames." (And as Atrios reminded us the other day, this has been going on for way too long.) How long can this go on?
And for more on how well the Democratic leadership treats progressives — not to mention blacks and women and, most notably, black women, "Donna Edwards Was Democrats' Rising Star. Now She's Podcasting From An RV. The good old boy network has no problem with elevating an obedient African-American woman. Edwards was not obedient. [...] 'I thought the Republican Party was full of dog whistles but the Democratic Party has a foghorn,' Edwards told reporters after that remark. 'As a sitting member of the House as the ranking Democrat on one of our committees in the House, as the co-chair of our steering and policy committee sitting at the leadership table with Leader Pelosi, as former chair of the bipartisan women's caucus, a lawyer: How dare they describe me as unqualified?'"
When Chaffets suggests that Americans should choose between an iPhone and health insurance, Atrios says, "Good Deal! This is the kind of thing which embodies everything about modern conservatives — a failure to understand the price/cost of anything, a failure to understand what people need to exist in contemporary society, and the belief the newfangled gadgets are like the mythical welfare queen Cadillacs of yesteryear." Go read the rest, it's not that long.
"Why is the Wyoming GOP scared? Anyone who has been around Wyoming politics understands just how small the state is. All politics there is retail. People expect to be able to meet their senators, governors, and representatives, and they almost inevitably do. Any politician deemed too formal or high-and-mighty is unlikely to go far in a state that prides itself on its non-hierarchical frontiersman mythos. Our elected officials spend a lot of time in jeans and cowboy boots. Governors have a tradition of keeping their office doors open." But GOP politicians are running away from their angry constituents.
Matt Taibbi, "Why the Russia Story Is a Minefield for Democrats and the Media: [...] If there's any truth to the notion that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian state to disrupt the electoral process, then yes, what we're seeing now are the early outlines of a Watergate-style scandal that could topple a presidency. But it could also be true that both the Democratic Party and many leading media outlets are making a dangerous gamble, betting their professional and political capital on the promise of future disclosures that may not come.
"How the DudeBros ruined everything: A totally clear-headed guide to political reality: Irritating left-wing guys have ruined democracy, apparently. Which might suggest it wasn't doing so great before. [...] Without ever letting the Hacky Sack touch the ground, the DudeBro army traveled back in time in their Tardis and terrified the Democratic Party into neutering itself ideologically, spending years running as the Slightly Less Mean Republicans and losing more than 1,000 state legislative seats during the eight years of Barack Obama's presidency. Perhaps their unsettling appearance in the past, wearing T-shirts for Radiohead albums that didn't yet exist, caused Obama to demoralize the progressive base by staffing up his Cabinet with financial industry insiders and conducting drone assassinations in numerous foreign countries with which the United States was not at war. Back in the present of 2016, the 'Bernie or Bust' tribe somehow spooked the Clinton campaign into abandoning the Rust Belt states and making what many pundits perceived as a bold play for 'moderate Republican women' in the suburbs of Charlotte and Phoenix and Philadelphia and Atlanta. All we are is dust in the wind. [...] When 'liberals' become a political grouping morbidly obsessed with their left-wing critics, constantly accusing them of being too idealistic and too intransigent and of being covert agents for the enemy, they have stopped being liberals and become conservatives. Which indeed happened some time ago, when the old 'conservatives' became radical fanatics. When 'the left' endlessly debates which core issues or constituencies must be sacrificed for political gain, as if economic justice for the poor and the working class could be separated from social justice for women and people of color and the LGBT community and immigrants and people with disabilities, it is no longer functioning as the left." Damn, it's sad to see Wolcott sucked into the maw of elite Democrats' denial. And the word seems to have gone out from Dem Central, because there have been a spate of these articles and more "learned"-sounding pieces trying to explain why the left is wrong, even though you have to go pretty ahistorical to make your case. I wonder if these people realize they are really trying to make the case that democracy itself leads to fascism.
And speaking of ahistorical approaches, even the mea culpas of neoliberals who realize something went wrong tend to miss the point. Atrios notes that Charlie Peters doesn't really seem to know what the New Deal he set about to destroy really had going for it. But having him rear his head again is a good reminder to some Democrats that, no, "neoliberal" is not a term that was just invented a couple of years ago by Sandernistas. Here's "A Neo-Liberal's Manifesto" in 1982.
Dissent has a little argument going on with itself that might be illuminating. First there's "The End of Progressive Neoliberalism," and then there's "There Was No Such Thing as 'Progressive Neoliberalism'." The second article purports to disagree with the first, but I don't think so — they're saying the same thing, really, only the latter supplies more detail. And of course, you can't openly acknowledge that the phony "progressives" who've been leading the Democratic Party were just giving lip-service to equality while doing us all more harm than good.
Shaun King, "The Democratic Party seems to have no earthly idea why it is so damn unpopular [...] "Recently, I've asked the crowds where I am speaking two key questions about the Democratic Party. The response that I get is always the same -- mass laughter or audible frustration. The first question is, 'If I asked you, in just a few sentences, to sum up what specific policies the Democratic Party stands for, what would you say?'"
"Paleocons for Porn: The new online right draws on transgressive aesthetics to rebrand conservative politics. It's a contradiction that won't hold. [...] While liberals enjoyed cultural hegemony and became complacent and intellectually lazy, the young transgressives of the alt-right produced an undeniable level of creative energy. The war for the soul of America Pat Buchanan waged in the 1990s has long since been won by the cultural left, and the tyrannical overreach of liberal intellectual conformity undoubtedly helped create the youthful rebellion against it. But this temporary alliance of very different factions — the most stark being between the traditionalist right and the libertinism of chan culture — has produced a schizophrenic incoherence."
RIP: "James Cotton, Blues Harmonica Legend, Dies at 81," of pneumonia.
* Joni Sledge — "Sister Sledge singer Joni dies at 60: Sledge, who formed Sister Sledge with her three siblings in 1971, was found unresponsive by a friend at her home in Phoenix, Arizona, her publicist said. She had not been ill and the cause of death is unknown. Sledge, who is survived by her adult son, last performed with the band in October."
Matt Bruenig, "Small populations make it harder to do what Nordic countries do: When you lay out the impressive economic indicators of the Nordic countries, naysayers come out of the woodwork to harp on their small size. These arguments never explain what small population sizes have to do with anything. Apparently it is supposed to be self-evident that smaller countries can do this kind of stuff more easily. But the exact opposite is true. Small populations should make it way harder to do what Nordic countries do."
Matt Stoller on "The Hamilton Hustle: Why liberals have embraced our most dangerously reactionary founder [...] Set in contrast to the actual life and career of its subject, the play Hamilton is a feat of political alchemy — as is the stunningly successful marketing campaign surrounding it. But our generation's version of Hamilton adulation isn't all that different from the version that took hold in the 1920s: it's designed to subvert democracy by helping the professional class to associate the rise of finance with the greatness of America, instead of seeing in that financial infrastructure the seeds of a dangerous authoritarian tradition."
Matt Bruenig, "Liberals and Diversity: Liberal commentators believe that you can have diversity or economic justice, but you can't have both. They're wrong."
"Politicking Without Politics: Democratic elites are delusional — you can't subdue the reactionary right without a robust alternative political vision."
Something good: "New Jersey Alters Its Bail System and Upends Legal Landscape [...] But under an overhaul of New Jersey's bail system, which went into effect Jan. 1, judges are now considering defendants' flight risk and threat to public safety in deciding whether to detain them while they await trial. Otherwise, they are to be released, usually with certain conditions." So people with jobs don't have to lose them when they can't afford bail. And even Chris Christie didn't oppose this.
Sirota, "Cigna-Anthem Merger 2017: With Billions Of Dollars At Stake, Proposed Health Insurance Deal Is Blocked By Federal Judge: A federal judge Wednesday blocked Anthem's proposed merger with Cigna -- a move that appears to shut the door on what could have created the largest health insurance conglomerate in American history. The judge in the case said the merger -- which could have affected up to 53 million consumers -- would unduly reduce competition in the healthcare economy, according to Bloomberg." We can thank The International Business Times for giving this deal a higher profile. But:
* "Anthem-Cigna Merger: With Ties To Donald Trump, Mike Pence And Jeff Sessions, Insurance Giant Hopes To Revive Blocked Deal: After delivering big money to President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence, health insurance giant Anthem is now pressing the new administration to settle a federal lawsuit blocking its controversial merger with Cigna, according to new court documents. Meanwhile, Trump has appointed an Anthem lobbyist to a top legal post in the White House -- a job that could position him to take over the Justice Department's antitrust unit that may ultimately decide the fate of the merger. [...] Justice Department officials typically argue that the antitrust division is insulated from political influence: As former Assistant Attorney General Bill Baer said in a 2015 speech, 'antitrust enforcement has been successfully nonpartisan' and 'political affiliation means little in this job.' Anthem's argument, though, appears to hinge on a hope that political intervention from the White House may shape the Justice Department's antitrust enforcement decisions."
Former Alabama Governor Don Seiglelman was released from prison after having been jailed under the Bush/Cheney administration's campaign of election-fixing and partisan prosecutions. The entire thing was an outrage and, given that the man was jailed essentially for being a Democrat who won an election, it's an even further outrage that Obama let him continue to cool his heels in prison rather than do anything to ameliorate the situation — you know, like a presidential pardon? In any case, Siegelman, now 70, is now out. But let's get a bit of a refresher: "Representative Bob Riley defeated Siegelman in his November 2002 reelection bid by the narrowest margin in Alabama history: approximately 3,000 votes. On the night of the election, Siegelman was initially declared the winner by the Associated Press. Later, a voting machine malfunction in a single county, Baldwin County, was claimed to have produced the votes needed to give Riley the election. Democratic Party officials objected, stating that the recount had been performed by local Republican election officials after Democratic observers had left the site of the vote counting, thus rendering verification of the recount results impossible. The state's Attorney General, Republican Bill Pryor, affirmed the recounted vote totals, securing Riley's election. Pryor denied requests for a manual recount of the disputed vote warning that opening the sealed votes to recount them would be held a criminal offense.[13] Some observers have opined that perhaps the most objective observation about this vote shift is that there was no corresponding vote shift in other issues and candidates on these same ballots, a shift that would be expected if they were actually anti-Siegelman voters, probably a mathematical impossibility. Largely as a result of this obvious inconsistency, the Alabama Legislature amended the election code to provide for automatic, supervised recounts in close races." At the time, pretty much everyone was sure that Siegelman had really won. But then, apparently at the behest of Karl Rove, Siegelman suddenly found himself on trial, though a long list of both Democratic and Republican justice officials were protesting loudly on his behalf. Why?: "In June 2007, a Republican lawyer, Dana Jill Simpson of Rainsville, Alabama, signed a sworn statement that, five years earlier, she had heard that Karl Rove was preparing to neutralize Siegelman politically with an investigation headed by the U.S. Department of Justice."
"Panama Papers investigation wins George Polk Award: The Panama Papers investigation has been honored with a George Polk Award for financial journalism, the Polk awards' sponsor, Long Island University, has announced. The Polk Awards judges lauded the reporting collaboration for sparking official investigations and reforms aimed at combating global tax dodging and money laundering. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, Süddeutsche Zeitung, McClatchy, the Miami Herald, Fusion and more than 100 other media partners worked together to investigate a trove of leaked documents from inside Mossack Fonseca, a Panama-headquartered law firm that sells offshore companies and other hard-to-unravel corporate structures."
Max Sawicky (of MaxSpeak) and Bob Dreyfuss have a blog, The Populist.
If your educators and representatives won't be responsible, it's up to the pornographers:
* "Utah lawmakers nix comprehensive sex ed, so porn site steps in. The Utah Legislature recently rejected the idea of adopting a comprehensive sexual education program — instead of the state's existing abstinence-only curriculum — so porn site xHamster has decided to take matters into its own hands. This week, the website began redirecting web traffic originating from Utah to a non-explicit sub-site featuring sex-ed videos."
* "Pornhub launches online sex education centre because no-one else is doing it. . The world's largest porn site has launched a centre dedicated to educating people about sexuality and sexual health — because of poor standards of sex and relationship education (SRE). In the US sex and relationship education is often heavily regulated by state lawmakers, meaning that school kids are commonly taught under 'abstinence-only' programmes that do not provide quality advice on protection, avoiding STIs or sexual health in general. In addition, a handful of states continue to maintain laws that ban teachers from mentioning homosexuality." Update: Got a phone call advising me that this is a bit of dishonest self-promotion from Pornhub, who haven't actually provided any sex education and you would be better off looking at Scarleteen for sex ed. The source of that info seems to have been a podcast by Dan Savage, but my attempts to locate it were unsuccessful. I also gather that Pornhub is owned by a company that is trying to get the UK government to use a verification service they provide with which they can block all other porn providers. Not nice people, so phooey on them.
"Teacher's town hall question goes viral: A Tennessee woman confronts Rep. Diane Black (R-TN) about health care reform at a town hall meeting in Murfreesboro, Tennessee."
Marcy Wheeler, "Four Details about Surveillance and the Flynn Ouster: It turns out Trump is on pace to fire a person every week, just like in his reality show. As you surely know, Mike Flynn has been ousted as National Security Advisor, along with his Deputy, KC McFarland."
Indiana without Pence: He left Republicans behind to guard the chicken coop when he went on to become Vice President, but they're already undoing some of his doings. And there's good news and bad news on that front.
Here's a show-stopper: "Arizona Senate votes to seize assets of those who plan, participate in protests that turn violent: Claiming people are being paid to riot, Republican state senators voted Wednesday to give police new power to arrest anyone who is involved in a peaceful demonstration that may turn bad — even before anything actually happened. SB1142 expands the state's racketeering laws, now aimed at organized crime, to also include rioting. And it redefines what constitutes rioting to include actions that result in damage to the property of others. But the real heart of the legislation is what Democrats say is the guilt by association — and giving the government the right to criminally prosecute and seize the assets of everyone who planned a protest and everyone who participated. And what's worse, said Sen. Steve Farley, D-Tucson, is that the person who may have broken a window, triggering the claim there was a riot, might actually not be a member of the group but someone from the other side." Or the police, who sent agents provocateur even back in the days when they couldn't make a profit off of it. However:
* "Arizona leader kills protest bill after widespread criticism" — in other words, protests stopped the anti-protest bill.
Pierce, "Pay Attention to This Particular Part of Jeff Sessions' Private Prison Memo [...] Sessions' confidence that the 'future needs of the federal correctional system' will require private prisons is a little unnerving. Remember when 'criminal-justice reform' was going to be the issue that brought bipartisan comity back to our politics? Yeah, that was cool."
* "Two Democratic Senators Voted for Climate Denial Today: Well, with the invaluable aid of Democratic Senators Heidi Heitkamp and Joe Manchin, Scott Pruitt was confirmed by a 'bipartisan vote' of 52-46 a little after one o'clock this afternoon."
Back in 2002, the first issue of The Black Commentator featured an article called, "Fruit of the Poisoned Tree: The Hard Right's Plan to Capture Newark NJ," which paid particular attention to a little known mayoral candidate, "a new type of African American politician --- Corey Booker in his first run for mayor of Newark NJ. Thanks in part to this expose Booker was defeated in 2002, but won the election four years later in 2006."
"Law enforcement took more stuff from people than burglars did last year [...] Officers can take cash and property from people without convicting or even charging them with a crime — yes, really! — through the highly controversial practice known as civil asset forfeiture. Last year, according to the Institute for Justice, the Treasury and Justice departments deposited more than $5 billion into their respective asset forfeiture funds. That same year, the FBI reports that burglary losses topped out at $3.5 billion."
"Electronic Media Searches At Border Crossings Raise Worry: PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — Watchdog groups that keep tabs on digital privacy rights are concerned that U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents are searching the phones and other digital devices of international travelers at border checkpoints in U.S. airports."
Radley Balko, "Man wrongly convicted with bite mark evidence confronts bite mark analysts: Keith Harward was wrongly convicted of a grisly rape and murder and spent more than 33 years in prison. The main evidence against him were alleged bite marks found on the victim. Over the course of two trials, six bite mark analysts said the marks were a match to Harward's teeth. He was finally cleared by DNA testing last year. This week, Harward showed up in New Orleans at the annual American Academy of Forensic Sciences conference, where he crashed a panel on bite mark analysis."
"Trump's First Terror Arrest: A Broke Stoner the FBI Threatened at Knifepoint: The Department of Justice proudly announced the first FBI terror arrest of the Trump administration on Tuesday: An elaborate sting operation that snared a 25-year old Missouri man who had no terrorism contacts besides the two undercover FBI agents who paid him to buy hardware supplies they said was for a bomb — and who at one point pulled a knife on him and threatened his family."
Sadly, Tom Perez beat Keith Ellison for DNC chair. "The DNC Chair Race Is Over. Now Comes the Real Battle: Tom Perez's win wasn't the end of the fights that defined the 2016 primary. It was a pause. [...] After the results were announced, a dozen Ellison supporters — including the congressman's brother, Eric — chanted "party for the people, not big money" from the back of the Atlanta ballroom, with a few cries of "bullshit!" thrown in. While the formal final vote, sealed on the second ballot, was 235 to 200, in a show of unity, Perez was subsequently elected by acclamation. In his first move as chair, he announced that Ellison had agreed to serve as his deputy chair."
* "Our Revolution Statement on DNC Chairmanship Election Results [...] Last night Keith talked about 'bus boy Democrats' — who always want to 'take things off the table' because they don't want to fight. We can no longer accept that. Now is the time to bring it all to the table and to pull up some extra chairs. With Trump and his allies controlling Washington, we have to take it upon ourselves to elect progressives -- even if elements of the Democratic Party are locked in complacency.""
* Common Dreams, "'Incredibly Disappointing': Democrats Choose Tom Perez to Head Party: DNC 'chose to continue the failed Clinton strategy of prioritizing wealthy donors over the activist base'"
* Ian Welsh, "Perez Chosen As DNC Chair [...] Ellison, of course, was the left wing choice, endorsed by Sanders, etc. I'm going to have a lot more to say about the Democratic party, neoliberals, Obama and Clinton later, for now I simply note that the most important thing, for those who control the liberal party, is retaining control over the liberal party. I note also that they genuinely believe in neoliberalism. They genuinely don't want a $15/minimum wage and will only grudgingly give on something as basic (and really, minor to them) as that. They want Americans poor. They want the poor to stay poor. They want the middle class to decline."
* The Hill, "Will Tom Perez bring the real change the Democratic Party needs? [...] Already, many activists have turned their backs on the DNC, choosing to pour energy into resistance and organizing in local communities. The new Perez administration has very little time to show the party will truly change, particularly when it comes to directing money, hiring people, leading a serious effort to reform voting laws and, most importantly, being a real voice against corporate power. If it does not, it will simply wither away."
* Earlier stories:
* "Tom Perez Apologizes for Telling the Truth, Showing Why Democrats' Flaws Urgently Need Attention." He admitted that the primary process was rigged. But soon he was hastily walking it back. But that's not what Greenwald's article is really about. "What drove Bernie Sanders' remarkably potent challenge to Hillary Clinton was the extreme animosity of huge numbers of Democrats — led by its youngest voters — to the values, practices, and corporatist loyalties of the party's establishment. Unlike the 2008 Democratic primary war — which was far more vicious and nasty but devoid of any real ideological conflict — the 2016 primary was grounded in important and substantive disputes about what the Democratic Party should be, what principles should guide it, and, most important of all, whose interests it should serve."
* Matt Stoller, "DNC Chair Candidate Tom Perez's Bank-Friendly Record Could Kneecap the Democratic Party: [...] Clinton Democrats were, of course, not in charge during the aftermath of the financial crisis; the Obama administration was. And what happened to Clinton was not isolated to her, or even to 2016. The reluctance to take on Wall Street has been a hallmark of the modern Democratic Party — and has served as an electoral headwind up and down the ticket. Democrats are currently debating how to structure themselves as an opposition party. And Tom Perez, a leading candidate for the Democratic National Committee chairmanship, has an established record of not taking on the banks; both at the Department of Justice and the Department of Labor."
Richard J. Eskow, "Principles for Progressives to Follow on Trump's Ties to Russia" — Don't get ahead of the facts, and remember that the Deep State is not your friend.
* Stephen F. Cohen in The Nation, "Why We Must Oppose the Kremlin-Baiting Against Trump: The Russia-connected allegations have created an atmosphere of hysteria amounting to McCarthyism."
* Glenzilla, "The Increasingly Unhinged Russia Rhetoric Comes From a Long-Standing U.S. Playbook: For aspiring journalists, historians, or politically engaged citizens, there are few more productive uses of one's time than randomly reading through the newsletters of I.F. Stone, the intrepid and independent journalist of the Cold War era who became, in my view, the nation's first 'blogger' even though he died before the advent of the internet. Frustrated by big media's oppressive corporatized environment and its pro-government propaganda model, and then ultimately blacklisted from mainstream media outlets for his objections to anti-Russia narratives, Stone created his own bi-monthly newsletter, sustained exclusively by subscriptions, and spent 18 years relentlessly debunking propaganda spewing from the U.S. government and its media partners. What makes Stone's body of work so valuable is not its illumination of history but rather its illumination of the present. What's most striking about his newsletters is how little changes when it comes to U.S. government propaganda and militarism, and the role the U.S. media plays in sustaining it all. Indeed, reading through his reporting, one gets the impression that U.S. politics just endlessly replays the same debates, conflicts, and tactics."
Do you want advice from "Former Clinton Campaign Staffer"? Neither do I! She says, "Moving Policy Further Left Shouldn't Be Assumed Response to Protests: Jennifer Palmieri argued on Wednesday that moving the Democratic platform further left is not the answer to recent protests. The former director of communications for Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign made the comments during an appearance on MSNBC with Chuck Todd. 'It is incumbent upon me as an American to stand up and say Donald Trump does not represent what I view America to be," Palmieri told Todd. "And I think that a lot of this energy is not the base, the base is there, but you are wrong to look at the crowds and think that everyone wants $15 an hour.'" Yes, they'd rather have $21 an hour.
In The New Republic, "Obama's Lost Army: He built a grassroots machine of two million supporters eager to fight for change. Then he let it die. This is the untold story of Obama's biggest mistake — and how it paved the way for Trump. [...] As we now know, that grand vision for a postcampaign movement never came to fruition. Instead of mobilizing his unprecedented grassroots machine to pressure obstructionist lawmakers, support state and local candidates who shared his vision, and counter the Tea Party, Obama mothballed his campaign operation, bottling it up inside the Democratic National Committee. It was the seminal mistake of his presidency — one that set the tone for the next eight years of dashed hopes, and helped pave the way for Donald Trump to harness the pent-up demand for change Obama had unleashed.'We lost this election eight years ago,' concludes Michael Slaby, the campaign's chief technology officer. 'Our party became a national movement focused on general elections, and we lost touch with nonurban, noncoastal communities. There is a straight line between our failure to address the culture and systemic failures of Washington and this election result.'"
Naomi Klein, "It was the Democrats' embrace of neoliberalism that won it for Trump [...] Here is what we need to understand: a hell of a lot of people are in pain. Under neoliberal policies of deregulation, privatisation, austerity and corporate trade, their living standards have declined precipitously. They have lost jobs. They have lost pensions. They have lost much of the safety net that used to make these losses less frightening. They see a future for their kids even worse than their precarious present. At the same time, they have witnessed the rise of the Davos class, a hyper-connected network of banking and tech billionaires, elected leaders who are awfully cosy with those interests, and Hollywood celebrities who make the whole thing seem unbearably glamorous. Success is a party to which they were not invited, and they know in their hearts that this rising wealth and power is somehow directly connected to their growing debts and powerlessness."
"Unless They Get Serious About it, Stop Calling It 'Pro-Life': We can stop pretending the abortion fight is about 'life' as a general moral good. A freshman lawmaker in the state of Oklahoma has spoken with such candor about his effort to obstruct abortion rights that he has given away the game."
Jon Schwarz in 2007: "Democrats And The Iron Law Of Institutions: Read this if you're driven insane by the Democrats." Especially if you need to be reminded how desperately the Democratic Party would rather lose to the likes of Nixon and Trump than win with a candidate who really doesn't want to see a corrupt party. This quotation, for example, spells out how well they know how to lose: "As soon as McGovern was nominated, party leaders began systematically slurring and belittling him, while the trade union chieftains refused to endorse him on the pretense that this mild Mr. Pliant was a being wild and dangerous. A congressional investigation of Watergate was put off for several months to deprive McGovern's candidacy of its benefits. As an indiscreet Chicago ward heeler predicted in the fall of 1972, McGovern is "gonna lose because we're gonna make sure he's gonna lose"...So deftly did party leaders "cut the top of the ticket" that while Richard Nixon won in a "landslide," the Democrats gained two Senate seats."
"Why 'Bernie Would Have Won' Matters: Following the 2016 election, many supporters of Bernie Sanders spawned a meme: 'Bernie would have won.' Notwithstanding the merits of the argument itself — of which much has already been said — the meme alone is significant: An indictment of the Democratic party establishment. And, just as in the general election, the centrist Democratic Party establishment has failed to grasp the essence of the meme."
"Breakaway Democrats in New York Feel Trump Backlash" — There's the small question of why Democratic officials from the most liberal districts are making deals with Republicans. (There shouldn't be so many Republicans in office in the first place, I'll be interested to see what happens when they realize this.)
Have I mentioned that Andrew Cuomo is a terrible Democrat?
* I mean, seriously. "Marijuana Legalization: New York Governor Andrew Cuomo Opposes Pot Legalization On Safety Grounds, Promotes Alcohol. [...] New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo waded into the national debate over drug policy, declaring his opposition to legalizing cannabis and asserting (despite research to the contrary) that using pot leads to the use of other, stronger narcotics. Cuomo has long promoted the alcohol industry, whose donors have bankrolled his election campaigns and whose businesses could be adversely affected by marijuana legalization."
"Trump's disapproval rating keeps creeping up," now at 38%, but, "Congress doesn't fare any better. Republicans, who hold majorities in both chambers of Congress, have a 31 percent approval rating and 62 percent disapproval rating. And Democrats' approval rating is 32 percent, while their disapproval rating is 59 percent." Way to go, Congressional Democrats.
Macleans interview with Chris Hayes on his book A Colony in a Nation, "America's inherent vice: the prison system: The MSNBC anchor discusses his provocative book on America's criminal justice system, the politics of fear and order, and Trump as a conspiracy theorist."
"With Coverage in Peril and Obama Gone, Health Law's Critics Go Quiet: WASHINGTON — For seven years, few issues have animated conservative voters as much as the repeal of the Affordable Care Act. But with President Barack Obama out of office, the debate over 'Obamacare' is becoming less about 'Obama' and more about 'care' — greatly complicating the issue for Republican lawmakers."
Chris Floyd at Empire Burlesque, "The ICEmen Cometh: Madness, Blindness and the Anti-Immigrant Cargo Cult [...] Many Americans seem to believe that if you just got rid of Mexican restaurant owners and all the 'illegals' who clean hotels and offices and do other grunt work for peanuts, then somehow, magically, a cornucopia of secure, high-paying jobs will suddenly appear. How this will happen is never made clear; undocumented immigrants aren't holding such jobs, they never 'took away' those jobs in the first place — and their absence won't bring them back."
Eschaton * "Thanks, Obama! [...] We all want to look back with fondness on the Obama years. There are thing to be fond about, and in comparison to President Pig Fucker, the Obama era will be our happy place, but the economic record was, overall, horrible, and not something to be cheered. Our system really demands that people have uninterrupted prosperity from adulthood to retirement, or they're pretty fucked. And a lot of people were pretty fucked by this recession.
* "Rules: This point has been made a thousand times, but when one side decides it's cool to play with 15 players on the field and keeps firing refs until they find one who agrees, the other side doesn't get any points for sticking with 11. Qualified praise about sportsmanship from the Washington Post editorial page doesn't count as a victory."
* "Ending Welfare As We Know It: One of the more maddening things was the victory laps about 'welfare reform' as if getting people off welfare should have been the goal, instead of getting people to not need welfare, which should have been."
"Federal Reserve Bankers Mocked Unemployed Americans Behind Closed Doors [...] It was hardly the first time these bankers blamed unemployment on the unemployed, rather than, say, bankers. In an April meeting that year, Richmond Federal Reserve President Jeff Lacker told participants that 'Several firms told us of difficulty finding adequate workers, because they preferred to collect unemployment benefits or can't pass drug tests.' He reiterated that point in November, saying that in West Virginia he was told by an employment agency that 'unquestionably the biggest problem in hiring skilled and unskilled workers was the inability to pass a drug test.'"
"Peter's Choice" — One of Rick Perlstein's students explains why he voted for Trump. "The answer was thoughtful, smart, and terrifying." (But I saw comments on a thread about this article where readers disagreed with Rick about that.)
"The strange tale of a dating site's attacks on WikiLeaks founder Assange: For an online dating site, toddandclare.com seems really good at cloak-and-dagger stuff. Disconnected phones. Mystery websites. Actions that ricochet around the globe. But the attention grabber is the Houston-based company's target: Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, whose steady dumps of leaked emails from Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign have given supporters of Donald Trump the only cheering news of the last few weeks."
Our story so far: Labour elected Jeremy Corbyn and suddenly the Labour party was looking competitive with the Conservatives for the first time in years. Then the party leaders got the knives out. "Jeremy Corbyn Allies Hit Back After Peter Mandelson Reveals He Is 'Working Every Day' To Topple Him." You wouldn't think you'd have much standing in a party where you were "working every day" to destroy the party, would you? It's working, though, these guys have managed to drag the party's poll numbers way back down. "But a Labour source told HuffPost UK: 'The idea of Jeremy Corbyn being Prime Minister and implementing policies that actually benefit the people terrifies the establishment. So it's no surprise Peter Mandelson has found time in his busy schedule of spending time on oligarch's yachts to attempt to undermine him.'"
Trumpgrets. The guy who was glad to be rid of Obamacare but wasn't worried about himself because he has ACA, not Obamacare, is perfect.
Adam Johnson at FAIR, "NYT: Unlike Russian Wars, US Wars 'Promote Freedom and Democracy': The New York Times, in its recent rebuff of comments President Donald Trump made about Russia, seems not to have evolved its understanding of US geopolitics past an 8th grade level. [...] Clearly, Trump's motives in questioning American innocence were anything but liberal or noble. He was evoking America's own sins not to challenge them, but to apologize for those of the Russian president and, preemptively, his own. But the outrage over Trump's comments from pundits and editorial boards did not seek to spotlight his cynicism and its dark implications, but rather to insist that the United States is, in fact, on a higher moral plane than Russia. This is a childish assertion that serves to flatter the ego of American readers while legitimizing their government's crimes." Yes, the problem with what Trump said was not that he said we were killers, but that he didn't seem to mind.
"30 Years Later, RoboCop Is More Relevant Than Ever: Has there ever been a movie more misunderstood than RoboCop? Paul Verhoeven's hyperviolent dystopian cybersatire was released 30 years ago and almost immediately joined the likes of The Prince, Watchmen, and Wall Street in the great pantheon of works whose points have been completely missed by legions of fans and imitators. RoboCop was intended to be a viciously hilarious attack on police brutality, union busting, mass-media brainwashing, and the exploitation of the working class by amoral corporate raiders. Alas, all too many people only noticed the viciousness, not the targets thereof"
"When Capitalists Go on Strike: It's not just 'money in politics' — capitalists get what they want through structural power over the economy. manufacturer refuses to invest in the United States until the government cuts taxes and loosens 'environmental regulations and hiring rules.' The CEO of a top technology firm flatly states that the $181 billion stored in an overseas tax haven won't come 'back until there's a fair rate.' Despite several trillion dollars in reserves, banks and corporations collectively refuse to make loans or hire new employees."
This is a pretty ad called "Winter Lights in Tohoku, Japan 4K. At least, I assume it's an ad, because it played before something I was trying to watch. For about three-and-a-half minutes. Which is way too long to have to wait for something on YouTube. Still, it's really a lovely ad, for whatever it's for, which I can't really be sure of, either.
Not sure you can get Terry Pratchett — Back in Black without a proxy server, but if you can see it, I recommend it to Pratchett friends and fans. It gave me a good, cathartic cry.
This asymmetry is what's so impressive about the modern Republican Party. It's not just that they've won, but that winning has put them in a position to enact an extraordinarily ambitious and radical agenda, one which will in the course of a few months destroy pillars of American government that have stood for fifty years or more. If Democrats are ever to be in a position to pass their own agenda (or merely to undo the damage that's about to be done), they need to play close attention not only to how the Republicans won in 2016 — a question over which much ink has been spilled — but to how the Republicans transformed themselves over a much longer timeline into a party that could transform the country when it won.
The lesson is this: in modern American politics, having an ideologically coherent and disciplined party is an advantage, not a liability. This flies in the face of conventional wisdom: during the 2016 primary, many Democrats, especially those who supported Clinton, worried about the 'purism' of the party's younger and more progressive wing: would it force the party to confront a choice between nominating ideologically progressive candidates who would be unelectable and facing mass defections to its left? After all, it was widely understood that candidates needed to 'pivot to the center' to win general elections. Clinton's claim to be a 'progressive who gets things done' was founded on this assumption: the notion was that Sanders' policies, even if you found them desirable, were unlikely to get done because it was too extreme, while Clinton's was closer to the center and therefore more achievable. Yet in 2017 the most extreme political party in decades seems poised to get more things done than any party since the Johnson administration. What's wrong with the conventional view?
The notion that it's easier to pass moderate policies than extreme ones takes its plausibility from the notion of the average or centrist voter. You can read about this voter in polling on policy issues. If your policy is fairly close to the views of the centrist voter, he's likely to vote for you and you're likely to win elections; the farther you get from this average view, the more difficulty you'll have. An extreme candidate will turn off centrist voters for the simple reason that they disagree with him. (It is through this logic that Mother Jones' Kevin Drum mistakenly concluded that Bernie Sanders would have lost against Donald Trump.)
The trouble with this theory is that in modern US politics it is by definition impossible for a major party to embrace policies which are 'extreme' in the sense of 'far from the consensus views of the average voter.' The average voter's policy views, to the extent that these exist at all outside this context other than as artifacts of polling, are largely determined not by any particular factual information about the issues or ideological commitments concerning the role of government but by the policy positions of the major parties. If one of these parties embraces a particular position on any given issue, the 40% of American voters who consistently support that party will come to adopt that position wholesale, while most of the rest will come to believe (and be encouraged by the media's carefully even-handed reporting to believe) that this position is at least reasonable and defensible if not correct. There are very few views so extreme and so indefensible that they can't garner mass support if repeated frequently enough by a major US party — just think of 'global warming is a hoax.'
Or think of the Democratic Party's position on what it calls "free trade", even though it isn't, and even though half the country is in a depression and in despair as a result of these odious policies.
Bernie Sanders' policies were not "extreme" by the standards of most American voters, but the discourse allows them to be called "extreme" because the Democratic Party leadership keeps saying they are extreme, despite the fact that many of these "extreme" policies have the agreement of 70%, 80%, and even 90% of Americans.
* * * * *
David Dayen in The American Prospect, "Dismantling Dodd-Frank -- And More: Candidate Trump promised to take on Wall Street. As deregulator-in-chief, he will be Wall Street's best friend. History teaches us that financial regulations die from a thousand cuts rather than a signifying event. As Cornell University law professor Saule Omarova puts it, 'Financial reform is like a big onion. The more layers you peel off, the harder you cry.' For example, by the time the Gramm-Leach-Bliley law removed the Glass-Steagall firewall between commercial and investment banks in 1999, that separation was already effectively wiped out — by administrative waivers granted by regulators. The 1994 Riegle-Neal Act that formally allowed banks to open branches across state lines came after a decade of states altering rules to undermine local control of finance. Deregulation of mortgage rules that led to the housing bubble rolled out over a 20-year period, spanning Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton. And even then, it took the George W. Bush administration's laissez-faire supervision to really supercharge predatory lending. So while Donald Trump, populist rhetoric notwithstanding, promised on the campaign trail and on his transition website to 'dismantle' Dodd-Frank financial reform, he probably won't do it in one shot. He won't even have to do it through Congress. Here's the likely blueprint."
President Bannon nominates Neil Gorsuch, who in high school founded a club called Fascism Forever, to the Supreme Court.
* "About That Kissinger Quote Neil Gorsuch Likes..." What does it mean when someone "whose primary credential is his supposed textual fidelity to the Constitution" loves a quote that says, "The illegal we do immediately, the unconstitutional takes a little longer"?
"As Iran Dumps Dollar, Congress Quietly Slips in Bill for 'Use of Force Against Iran': On March 21, The Islamic Republic of Iran will cease using the U.S. dollar in all of its financial reporting. The decision to stop using the dollar as a reference has been in the works for some time but was expedited after the Trump administration decided to include Iran as one of the seven countries banned from entering the United States. [...] In fact, the United States is already preparing for potential conflict with Iran, the US has introduced H.J.Res.10 — Authorization of Use of Force Against Iran Resolution. This resolution was quietly introduced last month with absolutely no media attention in spite of the fact that it 'authorizes the President to use the U.S. Armed forces as necessary in order to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.'"
"San Francisco police cut ties with controversial FBI terrorism task force: The San Francisco Police Department is suspending cooperation with the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Forces, or JTTFs, that have been accused by civil liberties activists of specifically targeting Arabs and Muslims, and violating their First Amendment rights."
"Obamacare's Unlikely Defenders: The prospect of losing coverage and jobs has jolted a marginalized workforce into political organizing."
Yves Smith, "The Obama Administration Bails Out Private Equity Landlords at the Expense of the Middle Class: Government Guarantees for Rental Securitization [...] So in its waning hours, the Obama Administration gave a completely unjustified bailout to private equity landlords, that Fannie Mae is guaranteeing the income of all but the bottom tranches of Blackstone's latest rental securitization.
Let us stress that there is absolutely no policy justification for this. The mission of the government sponsored agencies is to promote home ownership, not to give real estate speculators a 'get out of losses or underwhelming returns for free' card. Even worse, rather than forcing the private equity industry to take some well-deserved lumps for miscalculation, it will encourage them to continue to compete with lower-income prospective homeowners for purchasing properties. That means it will be even more difficult for young people to buy homes. Lambert has pointed out repeatedly in his stats wrap in Water Cooler that real estate markets are suffering from a shortage of homes. Having private equity continue to be on the prowl for lower priced properties that they know they can unload from an economic perspective means that the pauperization of the middle class is now official policy. Even though this guarantee clearly had to have been worked out during the Obama Administration, Blackstone did not make it public until it updated its filing with the SEC this week. It looks an awful lot like the timing was designed to make sure that the disclosure came after the new Trump team was in charge, meaning Obama would be unlikely to face the criticism he deserves, and the Trump Administration would be certain to let the deal stand."
"Army Corps of Engineers Directed To Clear Way For Dakota Access Pipeline: Jan 31 (Reuters) — Acting Secretary of the Army Robert Speer has directed the Army Corps of Engineers to proceed with the easement needed to complete the Dakota Access Pipeline, U.S. Senator John Hoeven of North Dakota said in a statement on Tuesday."
"The Left Needs to Be a Movement, Not a Bunch of Lobbyists: Democrats have been on a losing streak almost from the moment President Obama was inaugurated and began his program of appeasement and compromise. They lost control of Congress in 2010, and lost the White House last November, because they were not offering American voters a real progressive alternative. For decades now, the party and its elected officials in Washington have been DINOs (Democrats in Name Only). Corporatists as much as their Republican opponents, they have been posing as something different by playing to their base with things like support for gay marriage, support for the unenforceable and purely aspirational Paris Climate Agreement, and support for...um, well, it's actually a pretty short list when you think about what Democrats have been for lately that really rates as progressive. Recall that when President Obama came into office, with a solid Democratic majority in both houses of congress, he had won with a campaign in which he had vowed to restore open constitutional government, to make it easier for unions to organize, to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and to kickstart the recession-mired economy with a burst of major deficit spending. He did none of that, and the Democratic Congress did none of it for him either. Obama and the Democrats paid for their lack of decisive progressive action by losing Congress two years later and it's been downhill ever since. Now they've lost the White House too. Unless that party wakes up and realizes that it needs a wholesale makeover, in the form of a return to its progressively assertive New Deal roots, it will lose the Congressional elections in 2018, and it will lose the presidential race in 2020, along with even more state governorships and statehouses (currently 32 of the 50 states are wholly in Republican hands)."
"Hamlet in the Age of Trump: Should Officials Resign When the Government Goes Crazy? This unusual question is presenting itself with urgent regularity as President Trump tries to overturn a wide array of sensible policies in his drive to implement a far-right agenda, including a chaotic travel ban aimed at Muslim immigrants. Yet it's a familiar question to a particular species of government official: those who have resigned to protest deplorable initiatives they disagreed with. The last time it happened on a significant scale was in the early 1990s, and George Kenney was at the epicenter. [...] What should a frustrated civil servant do? In recent weeks, The Intercept interviewed Kenney and the other officials who quit over Bosnia, and to a surprising degree, they generally agreed that dissenting officials should stay in their jobs as long as possible in the Trump administration, working inside the always-powerful machinery of bureaucracy to keep destructive policies from being implemented."
"Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev warns, 'It all looks as if the world is preparing for war' [...] 'No problem is more urgent today than the militarization of politics and the new arms race,' he continued. 'Stopping and reversing this ruinous race must be our top priority.'
Earlier this month, hundreds of U.S. tanks, trucks and troops rolled into eastern Europe as part of a NATO buildup — a move that Russia has rebuked as aggressive Western buildup. Meanwhile, President Trump has reportedly said he wouldn't mind having an arms race and has openly called for America to strengthen its nuclear weapons capacities. Russian President Vladimir Putin has also said modernizing Russia's strategic nuclear forces is a priority."
"Seymour Hersh Blasts Media for Uncritically Promoting Russian Hacking Story: Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh said in an interview that he does not believe the U.S. intelligence community proved its case that President Vladimir Putin directed a hacking campaign aimed at securing the election of Donald Trump. He blasted news organizations for lazily broadcasting the assertions of U.S. intelligence officials as established facts. Hersh denounced news organizations as 'crazy town' for their uncritical promotion of the pronouncements of the director of national intelligence and the CIA, given their track records of lying and misleading the public." It's been pretty disgusting watching Democratic partisans use half-baked talking points and fabrications to try to discredit some of our most reliable reporters of the last 17 years, like Scahill and Greenwald and, yes, sometimes even Hersh. "'It's high camp stuff,' Hersh told The Intercept. 'What does an assessment mean? It's not a national intelligence estimate. If you had a real estimate, you would have five or six dissents. One time they said 17 agencies all agreed. Oh really? The Coast Guard and the Air Force — they all agreed on it? And it was outrageous and nobody did that story. An assessment is simply an opinion. If they had a fact, they'd give it to you. An assessment is just that. It's a belief. And they've done it many times.'"
Apparently, the Bannon White House is right about one thing. Turns out the popular president wasn't that popular. Of the last 12 presidents, it's no surprise to see that Kennedy had the highest popularity at the time he "left office" (70.1%), seeing as how he was assassinated and all. But even Johnson (55.1), Clinton (55.1), G.H.W. Bush (60.9%), W (49.4%) and Reagan (52.8%) were more popular than Obama when they left office. Only Ford, Carter, and Truman scored lower. Eisenhower's approval rating was 65% when he left office.
"How Democrats are getting played" — Or so it would seem. So far they are following the same playbook they used to let Scott Walker defeat them. Mass demonstrations are all very nice, but if they don't lead to people going out into the communities and finding a way to talk to strangers about the things they have in common and getting them onside, they end up being worthless.
Michael Hitzik, "Politicians aiming to cut Social Security and Medicare use weasel words to hide their plans. Let's call them on it. [...] We've been particularly wary of plans described as 'fixes' to Social Security and Medicare. As we've observed, these are invariably 'fixes' in the same sense that one 'fixes' a cat. But several other such weasel words surfaced in coverage of the confirmation hearing for Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-S.C.), President Trump's budget director-designate. NPR reported that Mulvaney 'wants to overhaul' Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. CNN said that he 'wants to overhaul' the programs and believes they 'need revamping to survive' — a journalistic twofer! [...] Let's not allow these euphemisms to obscure Mulvaney's true opinions about these programs. He proposes to raise Social Security's normal retirement age to 70 (it now tops out at 67 for those born in 1960 or later), and to means-test Medicare. These are benefit cuts any way you define them. Mulvaney also has described Social Security as a 'Ponzi scheme,' a term he tried to evade during his Jan. 24 confirmation hearing. He said he was just trying to explain Social Security's cash flow, which 'takes money from people now in order to give money to people now.' That's not a Ponzi scheme. Moreover, that's not a full and accurate description of Social Security's cash flow, which collects money from people now and banks some of it to provide benefits for people in the future. (Do we really want a budget director whose understanding of one of America's most important fiscal programs is so vacuous?)"
Did I mention that MaxSpeak is back? (And while I would never say that demonstrations are useless — they're not — I do want to see people do more than just demonstrate. I'm happy to say that whatever made people numb-out over the last 17 years seems to be evaporating, but you still need to talk to people who don't already agree with you if you want to get something done.)
"Should Progressives Let Corporate Democrats Lead and Be the Face Of the Resistance? [...] One of the side effects (or the main effect if you're cynically minded) of the constant and appropriate indictment of Donald Trump's policies is the rapid "disappearing" of those Democratic party actions that set the table for all Trump plans to do. This has two serious consequences. First, it puts neo-liberal, pro-corporate, pro-austerity Democrats first in line if Trump falls from grace and loses the consent of the governed. Which means competing progressive candidates would be mainly out of luck, and if Democrats won, we would likely get back a "fiscally responsible" Democrat who may want, for example, to "trim" Social Security, as Obama tried several times to do, instead of slash it, as Paul Ryan wants to do. [...] Putting austerity-loving Democrats first in line, though, wouldn't make them any more popular than they were the last time, when they lost a presidential squeaker that should have been blowout. And it puts them no closer to control of the House or Senate than they are right now, given their propensity to put up lackluster corporate candidates and kick real progressives to the electoral curb. In other words, putting corporate Democrats first in line to replace Trump is no solution at all from a "real progressive" standpoint — unless, of course, one is fully on board with a promise of incrementalism in a time that still demands rapid change."
"Democracy is Not a Team Sport [...] When we are aligned with a particular team, we tend to excuse and rationalize that team's bad behavior, because that team becomes attached to our own ego. We project our beliefs and feelings onto that team and its representative leader. Thus, any attack on the team becomes a personal affront, regardless of the fact that the team seldom cares about us. Consequently, Democrats rarely balked at Bill Clinton's roll-back of welfare, repeal of Glass-Steagall, enactment of an excessively harsh crime bill, passing of NAFTA, and deregulation of the Telecommunications industry. In addition, many Democrats justified or ignored Obama's increase in foreign wars, bail out of Wall Street, expansion of offshore oil drilling, extension of Bush's tax cuts to the wealthy, and promotion of free trade agreements that empower and enrich corporations. There is no direct Republican corollary to the actions of the Democrats because Republicans do not implement policies that would be otherwise considered Democratic. However, what occurs with Republicans is that when confronted with such policies from Clinton and Obama — policies that are inherently Republican in nature — the Republicans reject rather than support them because they originate from the wrong team."
Smart tweet storm by Matt Stoller on how to shape activism.
* Matt Stoller in The Washington Post, "Democrats can't win until they recognize how bad Obama's financial policies were: Two key elements characterized the kind of domestic political economy the administration pursued: The first was the foreclosure crisis and the subsequent bank bailouts. The resulting policy framework of Tim Geithner's Treasury Department was, in effect, a wholesale attack on the American home (the main store of middle-class wealth) in favor of concentrated financial power. The second was the administration's pro-monopoly policies, which crushed the rural areas that in 2016 lost voter turnout and swung to Donald Trump."
Larry E, "Excuses for failures of Democrats continue to come [...] So here's the kicker, the bottom line of what the Clinton campaign and the whole damn self-serving liberal political establishment got wrong: All that talk about the fears and frustrations, all that talk about economic stress, about the loss of things you had counted on, about the loss of hope that your children will have a better life, all that talk doesn't just apply to white people!"
"Game Over for Democrats? [...] Obama created Trump, the man didn't simply appear from the ether. Had Obama acted in good faith and kept his promises to shake up the status quo, end the foreign wars, restore civil liberties, hold Wall Street accountable or relieve the economic insecurity that working families across the country now feel, Hillary Clinton would have been a shoe-in on November 8th. As it happens, Obama made no effort to achieve any of these goals, which is why Hillary was defeated in the biggest political upset of the last century."
Freddie says, "the thing is that we're losing terribly: The thing about the left, whatever that is, is that we tells jokes. That's what we do. And this is what the people who tell jokes can't do: anything else. They can tweet, and they can joke, and they can mock, and they can fav each other's stuff, and they can make their memes and get in their sick burns. But what they can't do is win. All that pride, all that showy pride, that LOLing, that meme-making, that joking, that peacocking, that self-aggrandizing, swaggering style that's ubiquitous in left online circles... it's tied to nothing. No power. No movement. No plan. That's not fatalism. It's barely pessimism. It's a description of the world that, they know themselves, is simply and indisputably true."
Well, maybe using humor to promote a message can have value, as with "The Smothers Brothers: Laughing at Hard Truths." But that was a different president, and a different time. (And they still got kicked off the air for it.)
"Signs Democrats Are Rejecting The Gutter Politics Of David Brock & Peter Daou" — I'm not sure I would class Peter with Brock, but I have to admit he has been pretty awful since the beginning of the primaries, and he's still doing it. (Ironically, I noted that in his tweets, he actually took a rare break from trashing voters and pushing the Russian Traitor meme to ask why Senate Democrats weren't standing up to Trump. It was an act of will not to respond.)
Obama does good, but:
* "Chelsea Manning: majority of prison sentence commuted by Barack Obama: Chelsea Manning, the US army soldier who became one of the most prominent whistleblowers of modern times when she exposed the nature of warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan, and who then went on to pay the price with a 35-year military prison sentence, is to be freed in May as a gift of outgoing president Barack Obama. In the most audacious — and contentious — commutation decision to come from Obama yet, the sitting president used his constitutional power just three days before he leaves the White House to give Manning her freedom. Manning, a transgender woman, will walk from a male military prison in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, on 17 May, almost seven years to the day since she was arrested at a base outside Baghdad for offenses relating to the leaking of a vast trove of US state secrets to the website WikiLeaks." But some people, despite being very relieved to see Manning freed, are not applauding Obama.
And "Behold the worst reactions to Chelsea Manning's commutation ."
* "President Obama Pardons Oscar Lopez Rivera: After spending more than three decades in a Chicago prison, Puerto Rican political prisoner Oscar López Rivera was among the 64 prisoners pardoned by President Obama on Tuesday (Jan. 17). The Vietnam War veteran, who became the longest-held political prisoner in the history of Puerto Rico after being sentenced to 70 years in prison for "seditious conspiracy" back in 1981, will be released in May."
* However, though even "The US Attorney who prosecuted Leonard Peltier is now asking President Obama to free him," "President Obama won't commute Native American activist who killed FBI agents despite plea from Pope Francis." That should say "who allegedly killed FBI agents," but nevermind. "Ultimately, even the FBI in later appeals admitted it could not be sure Peltier pulled the trigger on the shots that felled the two agents — but insisted the charges against him should stand as an 'aider and abettor.'"
Marcy Wheeler wonders if Assange hasn't come to think that maybe those leaks were from Russian hacks and he could be in the line of fire. She thinks he's being paranoid (or not) about Putin's goons, but Putin is not the only one who has goons. He is in Britain, after all, where people have been known to die with amazing convenience to certain western leaders.
However, someone at HuffPo wants to point to "The Domestic Conspiracy That Gave Trump The Election Is In Plain Sight: Information presently public and available confirms that Erik Prince, Rudy Giuliani, and Donald Trump conspired to intimidate FBI Director James Comey into interfering in, and thus directly affecting, the 2016 presidential election. This conspiracy was made possible with the assistance of officers in the New York Police Department and agents within the New York field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. All of the major actors in the conspiracy have already confessed to its particulars either in word or in deed; moreover, all of the major actors have publicly exhibited consciousness of guilt after the fact. This assessment has already been the subject of articles in news outlets on both sides of the political spectrum, but has not yet received substantial investigation by major media." I still am not sure whether anything related to emails affected the election, but if anything did, it was Comey's late October surprise, and not anything to do with the WikiLeaks.
Ray McGovern at Consortium News, "Obama Admits Gap in Russian 'Hack' Case: Oops. Did President Barack Obama acknowledge that the extraordinary propaganda campaign to blame Russia for helping Donald Trump become president has a very big hole in it, i.e., that the U.S. intelligence community has no idea how the Democratic emails reached WikiLeaks? For weeks, eloquent obfuscation — expressed with 'high confidence' — has been the name of the game, but inadvertent admissions now are dispelling some of the clouds."
Taibbi: "The Russia Story Reaches a Crisis Point: Have we ever been less sure about the truth of an urgent news story? Three days into the 'Russian dossier' scandal, which history will remember by a far more colorful name, we still have no clue what we're dealing with. We're either learning the outlines of the most extraordinary compromise to date of an incoming American president by a foreign power, or we're watching an unparalleled libel and media overreach."
"Booker And The Other Big-Pharma Democrats Have No Excuse. Here's The Vote That Proves It. It's devastating, and potentially lethal, when Americans can't afford life-saving drugs because their elected representatives are in thrall to Big Pharma. It's disappointing when Democrats offer implausible excuses for their votes, as Sen. Cory Booker and twelve other senators did this week. And it's downright outrageous when those same Democrats claim their votes were driven by drug safety concerns, since all twelve voted to lower drug safety standards when they supported the 21st Century Cures Act. If Booker and the others hadn't broken with their party and ignored the needs of the American people, a budget amendment from Sens. Bernie Sanders and Amy Klobuchar would have paved the way for the importation of prescription drugs from Canada, where they cost far less than they do in the United States. This was a rare opportunity for bipartisan progress. Twelve Republicans broke with their party to support the amendment. If these Democrats hadn't moved the other way, it would have passed. Their betrayal crushed one of the few remaining rays of hope for the millions of Americans whose health and financial security are endangered by the new Republican Congress."
* Zaid Jilani and David Dayen, "Cory Booker Joins Senate Republicans to Kill Measure to Import Cheaper Medicine From Canada."
* Michael Hitzik, "The 21st Century Cures Act: A huge handout to the drug industry disguised as a pro-research bounty [...] If universal praise for a measure makes your B.S. detectors twitch, you're on the right track. The 21st Century Cures Act is a huge deregulatory giveaway to the pharmaceutical and medical device industry, papered over by new funding for those research initiatives. The punchline is that the regulatory rollback is real, but the funding may not be — it's subject over the next decade to annual appropriations by Congress that might never come."
* "Meet Cory Booker's Top Donor: A Right-Wing, Islamophobic, Pro-Israel Outfit That Backs Trump's Extremist Agenda: At a recent town hall, Booker's responses to questions about his bigoted donors were baffling."
* For the record: Hillary partisans in my Facebook feed are railing against "BernieBros" for being upset with Brooker et al. over this Pharma vote.
"DNC Chair Candidate Tom Perez Refuses to Support Ban on Corporate Money and Lobbyists: Labor Secretary Tom Perez, one of the leading candidates for chair of the Democratic National Committee, has stumbled in recent days when asked about his position on money in politics. Asked at a DNC forum in Phoenix last Saturday whether he will 'revive President Obama's ban on corporate donations to the DNC' and a ban on appointing lobbyists as party leaders, Perez demurred. 'It's actually not that simple a question,' Perez responded, adding that such a move might have 'unintended consequences.' Perez argued that such a ban might impact 'union members who are lobbyists,' though the question explicitly only addressed corporate lobbyists. Speaking to the Huffington Post, Perez has refused to clarify his position on resurrecting President Obama's ban on lobbyist donations to the DNC, which was overturned by former DNC Chair Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., during Hillary Clinton's bid for the presidency."
"Obama Expands Surveillance Powers on His Way Out: With mere days left before President-elect Donald Trump takes the White House, President Barack Obama's administration just finalized rules to make it easier for the nation's intelligence agencies to share unfiltered information about innocent people."
"Republican Lawmakers in Five States Propose Bills to Criminalize Peaceful Protest [...] The proposals, which strengthen or supplement existing laws addressing the blocking or obstructing of traffic, come in response to a string of high-profile highway closures and other actions led by Black Lives Matter Activists and opponents of the Dakota Access Pipeline. Republicans reasonably expect an invigorated protest movement during the Trump years."
"Congress moves to give away national lands, discounting billions in revenue: Though recreation on public lands creates $646bn in economic stimulus and 6.1m jobs, Republicans are setting in motion a giveaway of Americans' birthright. In the midst of highly publicized steps to dismantle insurance coverage for 32 million people and defund women's healthcare facilities, Republican lawmakers have quietly laid the foundation to give away Americans' birthright: 640m acres of national land. In a single line of changes to the rules for the House of Representatives, Republicans have overwritten the value of federal lands, easing the path to disposing of federal property even if doing so loses money for the government and provides no demonstrable compensation to American citizens. At stake are areas managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), National Forests and Federal Wildlife Refuges, which contribute to an estimated $646bn each year in economic stimulus from recreation on public lands and 6.1m jobs. Transferring these lands to the states, critics fear, could decimate those numbers by eliminating mixed-use requirements, limiting public access and turning over large portions for energy or property development.
"Erik Prince in the Hot Seat: ERIK PRINCE, founder of the now-defunct mercenary firm Blackwater and current chairman of Frontier Services Group, is under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice and other federal agencies for attempting to broker military services to foreign governments and possible money laundering, according to multiple sources with knowledge of the case."
* "Scahill: Blackwater Founder Erik Prince, the Brother of Betsy DeVos, Is Secretly Advising Donald Trump: Right, well, Robert Mercer, the billionaire hedge funder, his daughter Rebekah ran one of the most important super PACs to Trump, Make America Number 1 super PAC. And Trump — and Erik Prince and his mother, Elsa, were two of the largest contributors to one of the most significant super PACs that supported Donald Trump. Erik Prince is very close to Robert Mercer. Prince was also at the "Heroes and Villains" party that Mercer threw in Long Island after the election. And, in fact, there's a picture that Peter Thiel, the right-wing billionaire who destroyed Gawker — a picture of Peter Thiel, Donald Trump and Erik Prince, that Peter Thiel says is not safe for the internet. But it's clear that Erik Prince, through Betsy DeVos, through Robert Mercer and through his very right-wing paramilitary crowd, has the ear of President-elect Donald Trump. And our understanding, from a very well-placed source, is that Prince has even been advising Trump on his selections for the staffing of the Defense Department and the State Department." And Prince wants to resurrect a version of Operation Phoenix. His sister, of course, is President Pence's pick to destroy public education and funnel public funds to religious "schools".
Dean Baker, "NYT Says Davos Elite Are Concerned Because Public Doesn't Buy Their Lies Anymore. [...] The concern in Davos is that the public in western democracies no longer buys the lie that they are committed to the public good rather than lining their pockets. It is nice that the NYT is apparently trying to assist the elite by asserting that they have an interest in "free trade," but it is not likely to help their case much."
It's not like Lewis has lacked new chances to serve the people this last half century. He's represented a metro Atlanta district in Congress the past 28 years. Ruled by black mayors and the black political class since 1973, Atlanta has billed itself as 'Black Mecca' though for more than half of black Atlanta there's been little to celebrate. Black mayors have relentlessly gentrified the city, starting with the Carter Presidential Library in the 80s, the Olympics in the 90s, and after that demolition of public housing, privatization of the land under it, and the BeltLine project which steals $150 million annually from Atlanta's public schools to build yuppie housing and shopping destinations. Marquee 'development' projects have driven a six figure number of poorer black residents from the city. John Lewis never says a mumbling word about any of this. John Lewis never publicly contradicts the black Atlanta mayors who crack down on the homeless, who line up for the privatization of public property, public transit and public schools. Perhaps being a Legendary Civil Rights Hero puts him above all that.
Supporting Hillary Clinton last year, Lewis spoke out against free health care and free college tuition which many countries grant their young people, explaining that 'free stuff' was just not the American Way. Lewis was also an early member of the Democratic Leadership Council, which irretrievably locked that party into subservience to its one percenter donors.
Sometimes members of Congress can undo historic wrongs. Lewis blew one such chance when he doubled down upon the expulsion of the descendants of black freedmen from the Cherokee nation in which they had once enjoyed voting rights.
John Lewis calls himself a pacifist and never misses a chance to lecture on the supreme utility of nonviolence. But the US Navy is building a ship with his name on it, a 'fleet replenishment oiler' to resupply warships on deployment. Isn't this an 'honor' a pacifist should reject? And shouldn't our Apostle of Non-Violence vote against every arms giveaway, sale and Pentagon budget? John Lewis doesn't. Like most other members of the Black Caucus Lewis votes to fund mass surveillance and re-arm the apartheid state of Israel with depressing regularity.
"The Audacity of Obama's Farewell Address" — he can brag all he wants to (the gods know there are plenty of partisans and personality cultists to do it for him), but his real record doesn't look so good. "The true legacies that will be remembered long term will be the accelerating rate of income inequality, the real basis for the growing divisions in America, and the near collapse of the Democratic Party itself."
"The Sanders Conundrum" — Everyone agrees he's got the right message, but is Bernie giving too much cover to the wrong people by sharing a stage with the likes of Chuck Schumer?
Old Cue Ball, of all people, gets it right when establishment Dems get together: "There were real disagreements about the right course of action. But speaker after speaker said the party's reliance on demographic trends had made it complacent on matters of economic justice. This had cost Democrats not just the presidency, but governorships and hundreds of state legislature seats across the country. 'The Democratic coalition lives in the economy, all right?' former Bill Clinton campaign manager James Carville told reporters. 'The idea that somehow it's only white working-class people that live in an economy — blacks, Hispanics, unmarried women, gay people ... they're like everybody else.'"
"Trump Team Targets Iran: Saudi Arabia dominates above all other nations as a supplier of suicide bombers, and its royal family dominates as the world's top financial backer of Al Qaeda and other jihadist groups, but incoming President Donald Trump has chosen to lead his national-security team, only people who blame Iran and not Saudi Arabia, as being the main source of international terrorism.
All four of the persons selected by U.S. President-Elect Donald Trump for the top U.S. national-security posts are committed to replacing the outgoing U.S. President Barack Obama's #1 military target, Russia, by a different #1 military target, Iran. Iran has long been the #1 military target in the view of Michael Flynn, the chosen Trump National Security Advisor; and of James Mattis, the chosen Trump Secretary of Defense; and of Dan Coats, the chosen Trump Director of National Intelligence; and of Mike Pompeo, the chosen CIA Director."
"The Clinton Foundation Shuts Down Clinton Global Initiative: The Clinton Foundation's long list of wealthy donors and foreign government contributors during the 2016 elections provoked critics to allege conflicts of interests. Clinton partisans defended the organization's charitable work, and dismissed claims that it served as a means for the Clintons to sell off access, market themselves on the paid speech circuit, and elevate their brand as Hillary Clinton campaigned for the presidency. But as soon as Clinton lost the election, many of the criticisms directed toward the Clinton Foundation were reaffirmed. Foreign governments began pulling out of annual donations, signaling the organization's clout was predicated on donor access to the Clintons, rather than its philanthropic work."
"How the American Postal Workers Union Scored One of its Biggest Wins Ever: Members of one of the largest labor unions for post office workers are celebrating the success of a three-year campaign to roll back a commercial alliance between the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) and office supplies retailer Staples that threatened a major advance in the privatization of the national mail system. Coming just before the accession of Donald Trump to the White House, the victory marks one of the most successful corporate campaigns by any labor union during the Obama era." They organized all of the related unions to act together, but more importantly, an alliance outside of the various postal workers' unions: "But the act of solidarity that carried the most powerful punch was the decision by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA) to support the boycott. According to Dimondstein, 'There are 3 or 4 million teachers in this country, and in a lot of cities and towns the teachers are given the power to go out and buy school supplies. For Staples, these are customers who come back year after year. This is market power that has real meaning to corporations like Staples.'"
James Kwak, "A Change Is in the Air: There was one moment, when I was finishing up the manuscript of Economism, that I thought someone had already said what I was trying to say in the book." That someone was, of course, John Maynard Keynes in the 1920s.
"Ringling Bros. Circus to Close After 146 Years." Wow. I once spent two weeks traveling with the Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Blue Show on the west coast. It was a little society of its own and even had some of its own laws. I wouldn't say it was magical or anything like that, but it had its own little dramas and history and culture and I feel sad for the people who had that dream and now will have no place to take it. These people aren't just losing their dreams or a job, by the way — they live in the circus, so they're losing their homes, too.
While there was a swing among white, blue-collar and union household voters to Trump, it was significantly smaller than the overall drop in Democratic voters.
While recent voter suppression laws demanding state-issued photo IDs in some 17 states along with the racial cleansing of voter rolls in many states have undoubtedly limited voting for Blacks, Latinos and low-income whites, most non-voters don't vote because they don't see anything compelling to vote for.
At the same time, working-class voter participation has remained low in part because the political parties have reduced the direct door-to-door human contact with lower-income voters in favor of purchased forms of campaigning, from TV ads to the new digitalized methods of targeting likely voters.(12)
[...]
It's not that no doors are knocked on or phone calls made, but the algorithm that decides the limited number of actual voters to be visited or called to turn out the vote in practice has meant identifying the better-off part of the population. The Get-Out-The-Vote campaign has become the Get-Out-The-Well-To-Do-Votes canvass. More importantly, the shaping of the political process, already an auction, is being even further outsourced to the profit-making 'expert' firms that provide this service.
In short, despite all the vast amounts of money raised and deployed, all the digital and 'expert' sophistication available to this 'party of the people' and Clinton's allegedly massive 'ground game' force in the 'battleground' states, the Democratic Party as a whole no longer can or tries to mobilize enough of those among its traditional core constituencies — Blacks and Latinos, as well as white workers and union members — to win national and even state offices in these key states.
To be sure, Clinton won the popular vote nationally, perhaps as John Nichols gloated in The Nation by an 'unprecedented' margin that might run as high as two million or more. The problem is that 1.5 million of that can be accounted for from Clinton's margin over Trump in New York City alone.(16) The majorities in the coastal states of California and New York by themselves accounts for more than her net majority; the rest of the country continues to see its Democratic vote stagnate or decline.
I remember back in the earlier years of this century there were a few jokes going around about getting rid of the south. I even linked to a couple of them, I understand the impulse that well. Or I did. But right now I'm seeing people discuss things like partitioning the country without even the least bit of humor. I think it's time for this article again, with specific attention to that last map.
One of the loopier themes I've seen on my Twitter feed accepts that Clinton was the wrong candidate but posits that this is because she wasn't a "sensible" candidate like, of all people, Barack Obama. This is a bit like the people who seemed to think that Michael Bloomberg was the perfect candidate. Or maybe they are even the same people, I don't know. After seeing the behavior of Democrats over the last few months, I have no idea how many of them might find excuses to support him, but the simple fact is that he's never been able to rouse much enthusiasm and there's every reason to believe he'd just be another loser. But, as Branko Marcetic says in "Nobody for Bloomberg," the fetish of the elite for "sensible centrism" isn't sensible and certainly isn't popular among voters. Obama didn't win because he was "sensible", he won because he was charismatic and symbolic and anyway everyone was sick of Bush. But on policy, "Despite the certainty of political elites that the path to political success sits directly down the middle — a belief typically based on nothing but gut instinct — there is plenty of evidence that policies typically considered far to the left enjoy broad support." Obama was certainly not being sensible when he referred to people who opposed Social Security cuts — about 90% of Americans — as "the crazy far-left." That's exactly the kind of thing that makes people lose their minds and vote for the likes of Trump. "This is the trend for a whole host of other supposedly far-left policies. Large majorities of Americans believe money has too much influence on politics and want campaign finance reform. 58 percent favor replacing Obamacare with a federally funded health insurance program, with only 22 percent in favor of repealing it with no replacement. 61 percent say the wealthy pay too little in taxes. Just over half think the Obama administration failed to do enough to prosecute bankers. And 54 percent agree with the statement that a 'political revolution might be necessary to redistribute money from the wealthiest Americans to the middle class.' The ideas championed by 'firebrands' like Sanders are not fringe policies to be abandoned in the rush to the center. They are the center."
It's nice to know there is someone showing enough leadership to be talking about what matters. "Bernie Sanders: We need serious talk on serious issues: In my view, the media spends too much time treating politics like a baseball game, a personality contest or a soap opera. We need to focus less on polls, fundraisers, gaffes and who's running for president in four years, and more on the very serious problems facing the American people -- problems which get relatively little discussion. I hope that's what our town meeting on CNN tonight will accomplish."
* CNN Bernie Sanders Town Hall 1/9/17, with Chris Cuomo.
Norman Solomon, "The Democratic Party Line That Could Torch Civil Liberties — and Maybe Help Blow Up the World [...] Many top Democrats are stoking a political firestorm. We keep hearing that Russia attacked democracy by hacking into Democratic officials' emails and undermining Hillary Clinton's campaign. Instead of candidly assessing key factors such as longtime fealty to Wall Street that made it impossible for her to ride a populist wave, the party line has increasingly circled around blaming Vladimir Putin for her defeat. Of course partisan spinners aren't big on self-examination, especially if they're aligned with the Democratic Party's dominant corporate wing. And the option of continually fingering the Kremlin as the main villain of a 2016 morality play is clearly too juicy for functionary Democrats to pass up — even if that means scorching civil liberties and escalating a new cold war that could turn radioactively hot.
Glenn is absolutely right about anti-Russia hysteria, and his scathing evaluation of Howard Dean's McCarthyism is spot on. Watching this craziness is disgusting. And Glenn is also absolutely right that Democrats need to stop obsessing on Russia conspiracy theories and address the real and present danger of Republicans' plans to destroy our institutions. Now.
Jimmy Dore is right, too, that when even Tucker Carlson can tear you full of holes, you really need to get your act together — and nothing in this whole Russia scare is doing any good for the American people, or even for the Democratic Party.
The Baltimore Sun has William Binney and Ray McGovern saying the Emails were leaked, not hacked, and they certainly have more credibility than all these other "experts".
Leonid Bershidsky has no love for Putin, but even he doesn't bye the Russian hacking story. The trouble with these "security" people who think they know what happened is that they start with inference and keep building. Their stack of assumptions makes the whole story shaky, weak as the foundation is.
Meanwhile, people are working overtime to make Julian Assange look like the villain who gave Trump the election — even at the Guardian, which ginned up some juicy quotes it made up and spread all around the net.
And Matt Taibbi says, "Something About This Russia Story Stinks." Well, it does.
* And Marcy Wheeler On the Joint Analysis Review, AKA the False Tor Node Positives Report says, "As I noted here, everyone agrees that the Joint Analysis Report released with Obama's sanctions package is a shitshow (here's the best explanation of why). But aside from complaining about how the shitshow JAR undermines the Administration's claims to have confirmed Russia's role in the DNC hack, no one has tried to explain why the Administration would release such a shitshow report."
Micah Lee checked some data. "The U.S. Government Thinks Thousands of Russian Hackers May Be Reading My Blog. They Aren't. After the U.S. government published a report on Russia's cyber attacks against the U.S. election system, and included a list of computers that were allegedly used by Russian hackers, I became curious if any of these hackers had visited my personal blog. The U.S. report, which boasted of including 'technical details regarding the tools and infrastructure used by Russian civilian and military intelligence services,' came with a list of 876 suspicious IP addresses used by the hackers, and these addresses were the clues I needed to, in the end, understand a gaping weakness in the report. An IP address is a set of numbers that identifies a computer, or a network of computers, on the internet. Each time someone loads my website, it logs their IP address. So I searched my web server logs for the suspicious IP addresses, and I was shocked to discover over 80,000 web requests from IPs used by the Russian hackers in the last 14 months! Digging further, I found that some of these Russian hackers had even posted comments (mostly innocuous technical questions)! Even today, several days after publication of the report (which used a codename for the Russian attack, Grizzly Steppe), I'm still finding these suspicious IP addresses in my logs — although I would expect the Russians to stop using them after the U.S. government exposed them. [...] I found out, after some digging, that of the 876 suspicious IP addresses that the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of National Intelligence put on the Russian cyber attacker list, at least 367 of them (roughly 42%) are either Tor exit nodes right now, or were Tor exit nodes in the last few years."
Barry Lynne in The Washington Monthly, "Democrats Must Become the Party of Freedom: Re-embracing anti-monopoly will reinvigorate American liberty and beat back Trumpism."
In 1932, about 70% of blacks voted for Republican Herbert Hoover but by 1936 a historic realignment began. Most Blacks were poor before the Great Depression and they continued suffering, even more than whites, during it; black poverty and unemployment rates were about twice as high than for whites. Though Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal policies did not target black poverty — and Southern Democrats managed to carve out huge, racist exceptions that severely disadvantaged blacks — millions of blacks benefited. FDR's wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, also pushed him toward black equality, earning her the enmity of sexists and racists alike.
As a result of tangible gains, African Americans started voting Democratic. In 1936 71% voted for FDR, perhaps the single most dramatic shift of any group of American voters in a four-year period.
Did I mention that Trump's expected nominees seem to be mostly people who should have been prosecuted by the Obama administration? Well, they are. And Steve Mnuchin is one of those people who should have been aggressively prosecuted for numerous documented crimes leading up to and evolving from the financial crisis, but funnily enough, he was never prosecuted. Who was the state AG who made that decision? "The Elephant in the Room Is a Donkey (Reflections on Kamala Harris) [...] In other words, how many Democratic leaders wish they had run the general election with Sanders in the lead? Not one. Just listen; you won't hear a single regret. There's no point in controlling the country, as they see it, if they don't control the party as well. Without control of the party, which of their donors would back them? With Sanders jailing Wall Street bankers, where who would pay Chuck Schumer to stay in office? With Sanders in the White House, the current class of Democratic leadership would have to find new donors — actual humans perhaps, as Sanders did — or retire from public life on their previous gains and lobby for a living."
* David Dayen wrote the story on Mnuchin on 3 January, with a follow-up on the 5th, "Kamala Harris Fails to Explain Why She Didn't Prosecute Steven Mnuchin's Bank. Former California Attorney General Kamala Harris on Wednesday vaguely acknowledged The Intercept's report about her declining to prosecute Steven Mnuchin's OneWest Bank for foreclosure violations in 2013, but offered no explanation. 'It's a decision my office made,' she said, in response to questions from The Hill shortly after being sworn in as California's newest U.S. senator.
'We went and we followed the facts and the evidence, and it's a decision my office made,' Harris said. 'We pursued it just like any other case. We go and we take a case wherever the facts lead us.'" But as near as I can tell, her office advised her to prosecute, and the decision not to was made entirely by Kamala Harris.
Naturally, Al From is in the Guardian trying to sell more of his snake oil. "Conventional wisdom among many pundits and Democratic strategists is that to win over more of them, we need to offer a populist agenda — associated with senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren — that rails against the wealthy. This thinking would also relegate the growth-oriented New Democrat-Third Way agenda associated with President Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, which I played an active part in promoting, to the scrapheap of history. I disagree. In fact, I believe the opposite is true." What he does believe is warmed-over GOP rhetoric that was a lie when we first heard it, and still is.
"TPP: How Obama Traded Away His Legacy: Donald Trump is preparing to wipe President Barack Obama's legacy from existence. The Affordable Care Act, Dodd-Frank and protections for the environment and immigrants all are set to disappear in no part small part thanks to President Obama himself and his relentless advocacy for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) right through Election Day."
Cornell West, "Pity the sad legacy of Barack Obama: Our hope and change candidate fell short time and time again. Obama cheerleaders who refused to make him accountable bear some responsibility." West actually gives Obama more slack than I would.
Gaius Publius, "How Obama Traded Away His Legacy: I'm about to say the obvious, but with so many dots getting connected in this post-election, pre-Trump interregnum, I want to connect just these two and let the obvious sink in. Obama's push for TPP not only cost Clinton the election (among other factors, of course), it very likely cost Obama his legacy — all of it."
Jon Schwarz, "Chuck Schumer: The Worst Possible Democratic Leader at the Worst Possible Time: When Barack Obama leaves the White House, New York Sen. Chuck Schumer will almost certainly be elected Senate minority leader — and therefore become the highest ranking Democratic official in America. That's a terrible roll of the dice for Democrats, because Schumer might as well have been grown in a lab to be exactly the wrong face for opposition to Donald Trump." He's got a list.
Hating the poors is universal, even in the UK. Apparently, feeding the poor makes a mess.
"Amicus: Corruption in the White House: [N]o person holding any office of profit or trust under them, shall, without the consent of the Congress, accept of any present, emolument, office, or title, of any kind whatever, from any king, prince, or foreign state." Zephyr Teachout talks to Dahlia Lithwick about "why the Emoluments Clause is so important, and why Trump's planned violation is a pretty serious affront to our Constitutional history."
* Pierce on the same subject, "If We Tolerate This, What Won't We Tolerate?"
"The Crimes of SEAL Team 6: Officially known as the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, SEAL Team 6 is today the most celebrated of the U.S. military's special mission units. But hidden behind the heroic narratives is a darker, more troubling story of 'revenge ops,' unjustified killings, mutilations, and other atrocities — a pattern of criminal violence that emerged soon after the Afghan war began and was tolerated and covered up by the command's leadership."
"Backpage Shutters 'Adult' Ads Section Following Years of Government Bullying [...] Backpage CEO Carl Ferrer and his associates have been subject to lawsuits, criminal charges, economic bullying, and Congressional hearings — the latest of which will take place today, January 10, before the U.S. Senate's permanent subcommittee on investigations — in an attempt to thwart this supposed sex trade. But after proclaiming innocence and pushing back and for several years, Backpage will now — 'as the direct result of unconstitutional government censorship,' its lawyers said in a statement — comply with demands to end its adult-ad section. [...] Last fall, former California Attorney General Kamala Harris tried to convict Ferrer and former Backpage.com heads Michael Lacey and James Larkin (founders of Village Voice media) of pimping and conspiracy to commit pimping. A judge threw out the charges, saying they were unconstitutional and violated federal law, which specifies — under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act — that third-party publishers can't be held criminally liable for the content of user-generated posts. Section 230 doesn't just stop sites like Craigslist and Backpage from getting in trouble if someone posts a prostitution ad there but allows Reddit to exist without its CEO getting charged for every credible user threat, keeps Facebook from being shut down after some 20-year-old picks up a 17-year-old girl there, prevents Craigslist from being found guilty every time someone rips someone off over a used washer, and stops the feds from coming after Reason.com when the comments section contains unsavory content." The claim is that shutting down he adult ads protects children. In fact, it does the reverse.
Rick Perlstein, "He's Making a List: Donald Trump and Richard Nixon have at least one thing in common: They are the two most paranoid and vindictive men ever to win the presidency. Both came to power armed with enemies lists, vowing to seek revenge against those who stood in their way. Both roamed the mansions of power late at night, raving against every perceived slight. Both were caught on tape describing the ways they enjoyed bending others to their will."
Atrios goes long on Nice Things, and there are eight whole paragraphs here so I'm not going to quote the whole thing, but it's one of the longest things he's written, and he's right: "We're the richest damn country in the history of the world (close enough, anyway). Life shouldn't be so hard. Not against The Data, but the data doesn't really capture what's going on for "the middle class." It isn't that wages are stagnant or shrinking — though that's an issue too! — It's that doing the right thing and having a tiny bit of luck is no longer enough to achieve economic security anymore. Life's a crap shoot from 18-67 (soon to be longer, if Republicans get their way). We're all one medium sized economic hit (including medical) away from the downward spiral. And thanks to that glorious bankruptcy bill, once you get into a hole you're probably trapped there. Bipartisany goodness to make David Broder swoon. 74-25 in the Senate, 302-126 in the House. But the Dems are the good guys! Yah, well, not enough of them and not consistently enough. Vote for Dems and the share of them voting for horrible things will shrink slightly! And it isn't complicated. Thinking that it is complicated is the problem. There are better and worse ways to achieve things, and the wonks can fight it out, but the point is to achieve them. And, really, given how small the nice things budget is who cares?"
* Also a little bit longer than I want to quote all of, Atrios says, "Can't Appeal To The Judges," so, "Fight the agenda. The man isn't going anywhere." Yes, dammit, fight the agenda.
* Damn, he did it again, on "Fissures: One can draw too many inferences from a life spent online, but I see a lot of antagonism towards The Left, and by The Left I just mean people who, before the whole Clinton/Sanders spat erupted, were pretty solidly in the mainstream of the online Left, a group which was the on the left wing of the democratic party, but not exactly planning on leading the communist revolution. Policy positions that I thought were pretty standard fare are now dismissed because they're associated with Sanders, and therefore associated with Berniebros, and therefore the people who didn't vote for Hillary Clinton and therefore the people who are to blame for all of this. There are a lot of assumptions in there (and of course I'm making gross generalizations I recognize), as on the internet no one knows you're a dog. But basically there's a chain of them which goes from support of policy ideas which were pretty standard stuff before the primary means you didn't vote for Clinton which means it's all your fault." Go read the rest.
RIP: Peter Weston (1944-2017), of complications of cancer. I first met Pete when he came to DC for his TAFF trip at the 1974 Worldcon, Discon II, and of course have had many encounters with him since, not only at conventions, but in my home in London when he came around to put his head together with the resident fanhistorian. We saw more of him after he was diagnosed and coming around with boxes of memorabilia to give a new home to, as well as background and photos for the final version of Then. He was always easy to get along with and good at infecting you with his enthusiasm, and he is the man who made the Hugos. His last box of fan memorabilia arrived only a a month or two ago. We'll miss him.
* "Nat Hentoff, Journalist and Social Commentator, Dies at 91: Nat Hentoff, an author, journalist, jazz critic and civil libertarian who called himself a troublemaker and proved it with a shelf of books and a mountain of essays on free speech, wayward politics, elegant riffs and the sweet harmonies of the Constitution, died on Saturday at his home in Manhattan. He was 91. His son Nicholas said he was surrounded by family members and listening to Billie Holiday when he died."
* "Carrie Fisher, Star Wars actress, dies aged 60" — You already know what the obits say. Me, I always enjoyed her interactions with Craig Ferguson. But this is where I first saw her. A little different from Princess Leia. And here she was at the AFI.
* Debbie Reynolds DEAD AT 84, while planning arrangements for her daughter Carrie's funeral. Reynolds and Eddie Fisher had been America's sweethearts until he left her for Elizabeth Taylor.
* "Watership Down author Richard Adams dies aged 96"
* I see there were a few I didn't hear about in TCM Remembers 2016, and more in In Memoriam: Remembering Those We Lost in 2016, THE LOST LEGENDS OF 2016: IN MEMORIAM, and In Memoriam 2016. Of course, they'd all jumped the gun, so they missed Carrie and Debbie.
* And they also missed "William Christopher, Father Mulcahy on 'M*A*S*H,' Dies at 84," of lung cancer, on New Year's Eve, exactly one year after the death of co-star Wayne Rogers.
Ryan Cooper in The Week on "2009: The year the Democratic Party died" is probably the best explanation for what happened this November, and I recommend you read it all:
There are unquestionably many factors behind this result. But I want to focus on the biggest one that was completely under Democrats' control. It is the same thing that killed the Republicans of Hoover's generation: gross mishandling of an economic crisis. Democrats had the full run of the federal government from 2009-10, during the worst economic disaster in 80 years, and they did not fully fix mass unemployment, nor the associated foreclosure crisis. That is just about the most guaranteed route to electoral death there is.
[...]
So when the crisis happened, the main thing the political system managed to do was fling money at bankers until the financial sector was stabilized. Afterwards, the idea that bankers might have committed crimes — might in fact have had whole floors of people committing crimes all day long — was simply too big to swallow. So Democrats — many of whom no doubt had plush consulting gigs in the back of their mind — basically looked the other way. No bankers went to jail, and over nine million people lost their homes.
This is not to absolve Republicans of their obstruction in Congress or President-elect Donald Trump or anything else. But the fact of the matter is that Democrats had two golden years to fix the depression, restore the housing market, hold Wall Street to account, and cement a new generation of loyal Democrats, and they bobbled it.
President Obama's spectacular charisma — and his savvy campaign against a filthy rich vulture capitalist in 2012 — papered over these problems to some extent. But for most of his presidency America has basically ceased to function for a huge fraction of the population. Fair or not, the party perceived to be responsible for that situation is going to be punished at the polls.
I have a few quibbles with Cooper — it's not that the party "did not fully fix mass unemployment, nor the associated foreclosure crisis," it's that they just didn't fix it and didn't try to. Their priority was clearly saving the bankers, despite the fact that these people had damn-near wrecked the world with their criminal enterprise. Everyone down-plays the fact that the reason they "had to" go into court with forged documents in the first place was because they'd set up an illegal mechanism to by-pass the ordinary filings and transaction fees that are required for any sale of real property to take place. The banksters found it too cumbersome to obey the law and record transfers of title, and decided it cost them too much to pay the legally required fees, so they invented MERS to paper-over the fact that they weren't doing it. And the courts were letting them get away with foreclosing on properties where they not only didn't hold the titles but couldn't even begin to guess where they were. Did the Obama administration make any effort to rein this in? No, they did not, and the same criminality is still going on.
And, meanwhile, Democrats are bragging about the fact that Obama cut deficits. He did this by reducing government expenditure, which in part was done by reducing government jobs. Those were jobs that needed doing, and those paychecks were money that needed to keep going out into the real economy. This had nothing to do with Congress — it was all in the executive's hands. Cooper is right about this: Barack Obama's decisions in the early part of his first term were devastating to the country and to the party.
"Majority of jobs added under Obama administration are temp, part time — study" — But you knew that, right? "Jobs that come with access to healthcare, vacation time, the occasional sick day and Social Security and Medicare taxes paid through employers have declined under Obama's presidency. One-million fewer people are working steady jobs than they were at the beginning of the recession, according to a study authored by Lawrence Katz at Harvard University and Alan Krueger at Princeton University." I'm old enough to remember when the only people who took part-time and temp jobs were people who actually wanted to work part-time or temp because it fit better into their lifestyle. People who wanted a full-time job looked for, and got, full-time jobs. Some people just weren't suited to that kind of permanent slot, but they've been pushed out of the part-time or temp market by people who are. And today's version of a "part-time" job is very often really full-time or worse, when your time is never your own and employers practice wage-theft as a matter of course. (And yes, the link is to RT, and I've already seen Clinton partisans treat the story as Russian propaganda, even though they must know it's true. Or are they really that dumb?)
"Democrats are wasting no time in repeating the mistakes they made in the 2016 primary. The race for DNC chair is getting heated. Shortly after the election, it looked like it was going to be a cakewalk for Minnesota congressman Keith Ellison. He quickly racked up all the right endorsements — Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders and Chuck Schumer and the AFL-CIO and Bill de Blasio. (OK maybe not that last one.) He did the rounds on the Sunday shows, saying all the right things about broadening the party's base — bringing white working class voters back into the fold without losing its progressive, multicultural base. But then things started to shift. The Obama White House was not thrilled with the idea of Ellison leading the DNC — and many of the leaks have suggested that they were uncomfortable with Ellison's identity (he's black and Muslim), more than anything else. Labor secretary Tom Perez jumped into the fold with the White House at his back. And now, Ellison is dealing with opposition research dumps — something of an oddity in a race for party chair."
It was always obvious that the Clinton team was convinced they did not need any Sanders people or any advice from "the left" that supported him. People from the Sanders team tried to help Clinton but no one would listen. They wanted to get out there and talk to people in Wisconsin and Michigan and they wanted to talk about issues and what they got back from the Clinton team was talking points for how to answer the Comey email crap. They were clueless. Naturally, Cenk has steam coming out of his ears about this, and he's right.
"Wisconsin Election Officials Reject Hand Counts After Electronic Scanners Make Big Mistake." Even the judge admitted it was the best way to look at what the real vote had been and what the error rate was, but ruled against hand-counts anyway.
* "Why Clinton Didn't Push for Michigan Recount [...] When Joe Biden said, "Our electoral system is the envy of the world," I'm thinking, he's only been to Kazakhstan then. Because when I'm in London for the BBC, when I'm in Berlin for ARD, their giant station there, when I'm in Buenos Aires, for the big southern South American stations, they are both laughing and terrified of what our system's going to come up with next. No one thinks our system works. When I did the story, The Steal of Florida, with wiping out black men, calling them felons and it was fake, the rest of the world got that story on page one in The Guardian, top of the nightly news BBC -- all over the world, everywhere but the United States. In fact, if it weren't for The Real News Network, I'm not sure much of it would've finally made it through that electronic Berlin Wall."
* For the sake of completeness, Bruce Schneier, in "Auditing Elections for Signs of Hacking", points out that being able to audit machine reports against paper ballots is a national security issue.
"There is more than one truth to tell in the awful story of Aleppo: Our political masters are in league with the Syrian rebels, and for the same reason as the rebels kidnap their victims — money. Western politicians, 'experts' and journalists are going to have to reboot their stories over the next few days now that Bashar al-Assad's army has retaken control of eastern Aleppo. We're going to find out if the 250,000 civilians 'trapped' in the city were indeed that numerous. We're going to hear far more about why they were not able to leave when the Syrian government and Russian air force staged their ferocious bombardment of the eastern part of the city. And we're going to learn a lot more about the 'rebels' whom we in the West — the US, Britain and our head-chopping mates in the Gulf — have been supporting."
* Atrios probably has a better understanding of Syria than most of them do: "As far as I can tell (news reports are sometimes contradictory), we had a program of arming moderate rebels which put a bunch of weapons there and then we discovered that our rebel fighting force wasn't too "moderate" (whatever that means) and wasn't that interesting in fighting for "us." Then we had the Saudis arm rebels and that didn't work too well. Then we tried to cut some sort of deal with Russia and Assad and that didn't turn out too well. We're notionally supporting some "rebels" (yay Star Wars!) against Assad and Assad against some rebels. And now there are a bunch of good liberals making holocaust comparisons (I don't want to downplay what's going on there, but there is a lot of propaganda which makes it harder to really know what's going on there). You know, the usual "never again" stuff. Go read the rest.
Just in case anyone gets the idea that Republicans are serious when they talk about the sanctity of elections and the right of the winner to get their wish list, there is North Carolina, where Republicans are so steamed that a Democrat won the governorship that they're hurriedly passing laws to block gubernatorial powers. "First, for weeks after the close election, Gov. Pat McCrory refused to concede to Attorney General Roy Cooper, demanding recounts and alleging, without evidence, widespread voting fraud. It didn't get him anywhere. So on Wednesday, during a hastily convened special session, Republican lawmakers introduced bills to, among other things, require State Senate confirmation of cabinet appointments; slash the number of employees who report to the governor to 300 from 1,500; and give Republicans greater clout on the Board of Elections, the body that sets the rules for North Carolina's notoriously burdensome balloting." They also want to weaken the state supreme court, which has a 4-3 Dem majority.
* Mark Joseph Stern in Slate, "North Carolina Republicans' Legislative Coup Is an Attack on Democracy: The trouble in North Carolina began when Republican Gov. Pat McCrory lost his re-election bid, likely because of his support for the anti-LGBTQ law known as HB2. At the same time that voters replaced McCrory with Democrat Roy Cooper, they ousted a conservative state Supreme Court justice in favor of a progressive. That tilted the balance of power on the court to a 4-3 liberal majority, ending an era in which the court's conservatives could rubber stamp the legislature's voter suppression and gerrymandering."
* Someone asked how it is that they have all these destructive plans ready and waiting all the time. Where do they come from? A right-wing think-tank called Civitas. But when I google Civitas, all I see is their own propaganda. Even Wikipedia is just their bumph repeated. But here's Jane Mayer in 2011, "State for Sale: A conservative multimillionaire has taken control in North Carolina, one of 2012's top battlegrounds."
Hm, I wonder whose idea it was to appoint the CEO for Secretary of State.... Oh, well, at least the prince of darkness is on board: "At the center of the pitch for Tillerson: Richard Cheney and Marco Rubio [...] What's not clear is whether these Republicans are working with Trump's blessing or cooperation — or whether, instead, they are freelancing their own agenda to promote an official they favor for Trump's administration. Rice and Gates run a consulting firm that counts ExxonMobil as a client."
Paul Ryan is trying to privatize everything, cut taxes for the rich, ban abortion — you name it, he's ready to pass the whole right-wing wish list — so, of course, Democrats are all over the place ranting about the extreme importance of doing something about Russians "influencing" our elections. There are a lot of things wrong with treating this as a priority, given that no one seems to care that we can't even count our own ballots, but there's also the fact that the emails that may have turned the election weren't the WikiLeaks mails, but the ones that were on Hillary Clinton's home server. And, in fact, it's not really the emails themselves, but just the fact that she had them on her own server and Comey kept dribbling out announcements about how he might or might not be doing something-or-other about the server maybe not being appropriate. The WikiLeaks mails, of course, told us nothing we didn't already know, but rather confirmed what many were saying anyway. But Comey's continual hints that there might be a subpoena or something in the future, well, that seemed to unnerve a lot of people. Although even that is in question since the polls tightened a little bit before Comey's infamous last announcement before the election — oh, around the time Hillary called Trump voters "deploraables". But seriously, and I'm not making this up, my feeds are full of partisan Dems talking for all the world like the Russians committed an act of war by (allegedly) telling us that Democrats were actually just what they seemed. Did Putin want Trump to win? Quite possibly. When his opposition seems to constantly be trying to encourage a war between his country and our own, I can see his point. Come to think of it, I don't want to see my country go to war with another nuclear power, either. (Or maybe they just want revenge for this.) But the idea that Russia can be blamed for our ills is a bit far-fetched, or as Juan Cole says, "No, America, it wasn't Russia: You did it to Yourself." Indeed, and since Bernie Sanders pretty much handed Clinton a blueprint for what she needed to do to win, the sheer arrogance of her campaign in tossing it into the fire is all the explanation we need.
So, it seems pretty clear that there's still not much to write home about when it comes to Russian hacks, but it seems most people still haven't learned to read the news for tell-tales. And, as Glenn Greenwald says, "Anonymous Leaks to the WashPost About the CIA's Russia Beliefs Are No Substitute for Evidence." Yet Democratic partisans have suddenly developed a touching faith in the integrity of the CIA.
But hey, this story keeps changing by the day. It would be funny if everyone wasn't taking it so seriously. Marcy: "The DNC's Evolving Story about When They Knew They Were Targeted by Russia: This week's front page story about the Democrats getting hacked by Russia starts with a Keystone Kops anecdote explaining why the DNC didn't respond more aggressively when FBI first warned them about being targeted in September. The explanation, per the contractor presumably covering his rear-end months later, was that the FBI Special Agent didn't adequately identify himself."
"The DNC Breach and the Hijacking of Common Sense: In the physical world of crime investigation, common sense dictates that the perpetrator of a crime may use any weapon and not just one made in the country of his birth, and that the developer or manufacturer of the weapon most likely isn't the criminal. And yet, those seemingly crazy assumptions are made every day by cybersecurity companies involved in incident response and threat intelligence."
* * * * *
In other stupid Democrat news, there was a move on to convince Republican electors to switch their votes in the Electoral College vote to officially choose the president. The extreme unlikeliness of this time-wasting enterprise just made me wonder how insane people are. There they all were, ignoring the blatant plans the Republicans in Congress and from state to state were making plain for a wholesale destruction of our country, and all they could think about was doing something that held no promise of any useful outcome. (Unless you think fomenting war with Russia is a useful outcome.) As it turned out, two Republicans did switch their votes — one to Kasich, and one to Ron Paul, but four Democrats did — three to Sanders, and one to Faith Spotted Eagle of the Yankton Sioux Nation, organizer and activist against Keystone XL and the Dakota Access Pipeline. "Democratic electors in other states attempted to change their vote for Clinton, but they were shot down by state laws. Only one other faithless vote was counted, and it went to Bernie Sanders in Hawaii. That vote was cast by David Mulinix, who said that he would have voted for Clinton if President-elect Donald Trump had not already won the Electoral College by the time that he placed his vote." Except last I heard, that wasn't true, either. Then there was something about Sanders votes being switched to Colin Powell? I don't know, the internet is full of conflicting stories but the bottom line is that the Dem's case for being a "faithless elector" mostly only worked on other Dems.
"The Democratic Deficit: As the dust settles following last month's Brexit vote, elites seem to be coming to the same conclusion about what's ailing the United Kingdom and the rest of the advanced capitalist world: an excess of democracy."
The Hill, "Biden: Clinton never figured out why she was running: Vice President Biden believes Hillary Clinton lost the presidential election in part because she never figured why she was running for the nation's highest office. 'I don't think she ever really figured it out,- Biden told the Los Angeles Times in an interview published Thursday. 'And by the way, I think it was really hard for her to decide to run.' As evidence, the vice president pointed to similar concerns raised privately by Clinton allies in hacked emails that were published by Wikileaks in the midst of the campaign."
Dean Baker, "The Trade Deal Crusaders: Can They Never Learn? Viewing the unpopularity of failed trade deals as being a problem of messaging is a denial of reality that deserves the name Trumpian. In the last 15 years, millions of workers have lost jobs due to imports and tens of millions have seen weaker wage growth — this is not a problem that will go away with better messaging. "
Diane Ravitch, "Chicago: Charter Schools Do Not Outperform Public Schools, Despite Rahm's Claims: Rahm Emanuel wrote an article in the Washington Post a few days ago, defending school choice (and putting him in the same camp as Betsy DeVos and Donald Trump). He gave the example of charter schools in Chicago to support his claim. But a recent analysis of charter school performance in Chicago says that they do not measure up to the public schools, even though they get to choose their students and benefit from the extra money of philanthropists and hedge fund managers."
Shaun King, "Obama and the Clintons still have no earthly idea why the Democratic Party lost the presidential election: Over the past few days, the Obamas and the Clintons have made a series of statements on why the Democratic Party lost the presidential election to Donald Trump. The statements, if anything, reveal what happens when politicians are isolated from the American public for so long. While some nuggets of truth could be found there — by and large they all severely miss the mark on how and why Hillary Clinton lost. Instead of looking internally at mistakes they made, they continue to look outward — casting blame on anybody and everybody but themselves."
I get so tired of being told how Obama saved us from the financial crisis. No, he didn't. I explain this to people over and over, I just wish they'd read David Dayen. "Obama Failed to Mitigate America's Foreclosure Crisis: The country's first black president contributed to a significant disintegration of wealth for people of color. [...] Former Representative Brad Miller calls the crisis 'an extinction event' for the black and Latino middle class." David talked about this, and a lot of other things, on The Majority Report.
Hm, this sounds kinda fascist. "'Alt-Right' Trolls Are Targeting DC's DIY Music Houses: The Washington area has a long and mostly proud tradition of houses that lend themselves as venues for up-and-coming bands. But in the last few days, some residents of those houses have become guarded after discovering their homes' names and addresses targeted in online message boards populated by members of the white nationalist movement known as the 'alt-right.'"
"Why Russia Shut Down NED Fronts: The neocon-flagship Washington Post fired a propaganda broadside at President Putin for shutting down the Russian activities of the National Endowment for Democracy, but left out key facts like NED's U.S. government funding, its quasi-CIA role, and its plans for regime change in Moscow, writes Robert Parry."
"Federal Bureau of Prisons Renews Contract With the Company Formerly Known as CCA: So much for the Justice Department's plan to phase out private prisons. The private prison company formerly known as the Corrections Corporation of America — recently rebranded CoreCivic — announced Tuesday that the Federal Bureau of Prisons will extend its two-year contract with the company, despite recent findings of inadequate supervision and gaps in oversight of private prisons. In August, the Department of Justice announced that it would phase out its use of private prisons. The announcement came on the heels of a blockbuster Mother Jones investigation of a Louisiana CCA prison by reporter Shane Bauer, and just one week after the DOJ's inspector general released a report that found shortcomings in safety, security, and oversight at private prisons used by the government. The Bureau of Prisons is a subsidiary of the DOJ." Remember, Obama is still the president.
Even many people who voted for Trump are being surprised by cabinet choices that promise the very reverse of "draining the swamp" and cleaning up corruption and crony capitalism. His choice of Goldman Sachs honchos for his cabinet has dismayed some of them, but of course there are others who are gleeful. And nothing makes them more gleeful than something that they know will aggravate liberals, like this here: "Potential Secretary of State Nominee Rex Tillerson Has an SEC Problem: ExxonMobil has been under SEC investigation since "
* Naturally, we seem to be looking at more far-right wet dreams for education: Betsy DeVos and the Plan to Break Public Schools: Among the points that can be made in favor of Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump's billionaire nominee for the position of Secretary of Education, are the following: She has no known ties to President Vladimir Putin, unlike Trump's nominee to head the State Department, Rex Tillerson, who was decorated with Russia's Order of Friendship medal a few years ago. She hasn't demonstrated any outward propensity for propagating dark, radical-right-leaning conspiracy theories, unlike Michael T. Flynn, Trump's designated national-security adviser. She has not actively called for the dismantling of the department she is slated to head, as have Rick Perry, Trump's nominee for Energy Secretary, and Scott Pruitt, the nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency. That the absence of such characteristics should bear noting only underlines the dystopian scope of Trump's quest to complete his cabinet of cronies. On the other hand, DeVos has never taught in a public school, nor administered one, nor sent her children to one. She is a graduate of Holland Christian High School, a private school in her home town of Holland, Michigan, which characterizes its mission thus: 'to equip minds and nurture hearts to transform the world for Jesus Christ.' How might DeVos seek to transform the educational landscape of the United States in her position at the head of a department that has a role in overseeing the schooling of more than fifty million American children? As it happens, she does have a long track record in the field. Since the early nineteen-nineties, she and her husband, Dick DeVos, have been very active in supporting the charter-school movement"
It isn't just Americans who are having a rude awakening, of course. Wherever the neoliberals have prevented the left from rooting them out, the worst elements of the right gain power, and then surprise their own supporters with betrayal. Take Britain, for example. Oh, no one should be surprised that Theresa May is a disaster, but her promises weren't worth anything, either — a habit conservatives and neoliberals alike just can't break. "She steeled herself to call off the expensive disaster of Hinkley C — then meekly waved it through. She vowed to install workers on company boards — then the idea didn't even make it on to a green paper. She promised to stick up for 'just about managing' families, then allowed her chancellor instead to carry on slashing taxes for multinationals. And then there's foreign ownership of Britain's infrastructure. Remember how May promised to scrutinise any proposed takeovers of such strategic assets as water, energy and transport? Well, last week, while the rightwing commentators were diligently huffing and puffing over Gina Miller at the supreme court, another kind of sovereignty was being covered on the City pages. The National Grid announced it would sell a majority of its gas pipelines to a consortium of largely overseas investors, including China and Qatar, and led by an Australian investment bank, Macquarie." Well, Macquarie is a shady little empire that already owns a considerable part of Britain, so why not?
"Detroit's voting irregularities spur state audit: Lansing — Voting irregularities in Detroit have spurred plans for an audit by Michigan Secretary of State Ruth Johnson's office, Elections Director Chris Thomas said Monday. State officials are planning to examine about 20 Detroit precincts where ballot boxes opened during the recount had fewer ballots than poll workers had recorded on Election Day."
Policy changes that began to affect workers in the early '70s have meant consistent wage stagnation, but it happened at the same time that Affirmative Action started to be enforced, and that's what a lot of people blamed, because, as MahaBarb put it in "Why People Turn to Dictators," scapegoating is "easier than explaining the real reasons."
* Barb also linked to an Ian Welsh piece I missed, "Living in the Truth or Dying in Lies," in which he says, "It is nice that you don't think that racism and racists get stronger when times are bad, and that people who don't see a pay raise in 40 years are likely to turn to nasty politics, and it is even important that you think so, since your sheer stupidity and blindness makes it harder to stop, but you are wrong. You are, in fact, part of the problem, because problems happen and we need to be able to fix them, and you and your type are making it harder to do anything by muddying the water. The inability to separate partisanship from a clear understanding of the world is at the heart of why we are where we are today. Clear consequences of action and non-action are dismissed wholesale until it is too late to do anything about it."
"Democrats, Trump, and the Ongoing, Dangerous Refusal to Learn the Lesson of Brexit [...] The indisputable fact is that prevailing institutions of authority in the West, for decades, have relentlessly and with complete indifference stomped on the economic welfare and social security of hundreds of millions of people. While elite circles gorged themselves on globalism, free trade, Wall Street casino gambling, and endless wars (wars that enriched the perpetrators and sent the poorest and most marginalized to bear all their burdens), they completely ignored the victims of their gluttony, except when those victims piped up a bit too much — when they caused a ruckus — and were then scornfully condemned as troglodytes who were the deserved losers in the glorious, global game of meritocracy. That message was heard loud and clear. The institutions and elite factions that have spent years mocking, maligning, and pillaging large portions of the population — all while compiling their own long record of failure and corruption and destruction — are now shocked that their dictates and decrees go unheeded. But human beings are not going to follow and obey the exact people they most blame for their suffering. They're going to do exactly the opposite: purposely defy them and try to impose punishment in retaliation. Their instruments for retaliation are Brexit and Trump. Those are their agents, dispatched on a mission of destruction: aimed at a system and culture they regard — not without reason — as rife with corruption and, above all else, contempt for them and their welfare."
I know I've said this before, but I've been hearing that whole thing about how demographics will give Democrats a lock on electoral and ideological victory since I was 15, and as old people have died off and babies have reached voting age, things have only moved to the right, state-by-state, and now each branch of the federal government is in the hands of people who really do sound crazier than legislators of the Jim Crow era. And the Democratic response to the issues that affect a considerable proportion of the population is not to address those issues, but to simply cast them as intractable and inevitable facts of nature. Which means only the right-wing gets to provide answers, and therefore solutions. That the answers and solutions are all based on racism, nativism, and sexism may trouble the modern liberal Democrat, but not enough to require them to tell the truth: that these problems are not intractable or inevitable but can be ameliorated by policies geared to relieve the pressures on Americans that make them so desperate to grasp for any solution, even a monstrous one. When only the right-wing acknowledges the suffering of millions and avers that there is a way to fix it, the right-wing is going to be able to take ground that was once held by those with more democratic and progressive impulses. "Demographics Are Not Destiny: Why Democrats were wrong to think that shifting demographics alone would hand them victory."
* As a footnote, some of us were horrified at the way the Clinton campaign took for granted that she owned the black vote. I don't mean simply that they assumed black voters would support the Democrat, but that the black community was a monolith that all thought the same way, and, more, owed their allegiance to Clinton. This despite the fact that there were a number of indicators showing that, as with white Democrats, there were divisions within families, particularly between generations, on whether to support Clinton or Sanders in the primaries. Carl Beijer looked at the numbers back in February.
Someone was remarking that Trump's cabinet choices were so deeply contraindicated that it would not be surprising if Bernie Madoff got an appointment. I said that'd be great, because his time in prison seemed to have given him a new appreciation for just how rancid the financial industry really is. Someone else mentioned that Bernie Kerik also seemed to have gained new insights into our judicial system after spending time inside.
Ian Welsh believes that "Reagan and George W Bush Changed the World More than Bill Clinton Or Obama [...] George W. Bush had his two terms, and he changed the nature of American government in ways that neither Clinton nor Obama did. Bill Clinton ran Reagan's economy better. Reagan was not smart. Reagan changed the nature of American government more than any President since FDR. Bill Clinton was Reagan's butt-boy. Understand that. Internalize it. He ran the neo-liberal economy that Reagan had created, and yes, he ran it better than Reagan, but he was living in Reagan's world. Obama ran Bush's government. He kept deporting people, deported even more than Bush. He ramped up drones. He kept troops in Afghanistan, he attacked Libya, he kept extending the Patriot Act and AUMF. He was operating in a constitutional order set up by Bush, and he never challenged it, not once. Obama was Bush's butt-boy. Understand that, internalize it." All of this is true, but I believe that there was one significant change of "things", and that's that we now had Democrats essentially championing right-wing policy rather than working to undo it and defend liberalism, and I think that's what made it possible for us to be where we are today. And if Democrats don't take this all to heart, they have no hope of fighting Trump.
A friend and I were walking down St. Mark's Place one night when we were stopped by gentlemen standing outside of the big building that had recently been painted blue and opened as a club — what was it called? The Electric Factory? Memory is dim, but anyway, they invited us to come in for free and hear some live music, so we did. The place wasn't terribly crowded and the stage itself was the perfect height to lean on, so I did, trying to read the twisty writing of the band's name on the drum-head. Eventually, between tunes, I caught the bass-player's eye and motioned him over and said I couldn't read it, what was the band's name? And he told me it was "Sly and the Family Stone." They sounded good. Anyway, Sly Stone, The Velvet Underground, Nina Simone and others are getting Lifetime Achievement Grammy's.
"Barrett Brown has been released from prison; WikiLeaks publishes to celebrate: Today, investigative journalist Barrett Brown has been released from FCI Three Rivers to a halfway house outside Dallas, earlier than initially scheduled. His parents picked him up from the federal prison to drive him six hours to his new residence. Brown's release comes with several post-imprisonment restrictions, including a 'computer and internet monitoring program', a ban on firearms, and forced drug tests and participation in a drug treatment programme. It is as yet unknown how long Barrett will spend at the halfway house."
"Top Trump campaign aide in Michigan guilty on 10 felony counts: Brandon Hall, the controversial west Michigan blogger who served as a key figure in the Donald Trump campaign's organizing efforts across the state, was found guilty today on 10 felony counts of election fraud."
Bernie Sanders says Trump got rolled by Carrier: "In exchange for allowing United Technologies to continue to offshore more than 1,000 jobs, Trump will reportedly give the company tax and regulatory favors that the corporation has sought. Just a short few months ago, Trump was pledging to force United Technologies to 'pay a damn tax.' He was insisting on very steep tariffs for companies like Carrier that left the United States and wanted to sell their foreign-made products back in the United States. Instead of a damn tax, the company will be rewarded with a damn tax cut. Wow! How's that for standing up to corporate greed? How's that for punishing corporations that shut down in the United States and move abroad? [...] Trump has endangered the jobs of workers who were previously safe in the United States. Why? Because he has signaled to every corporation in America that they can threaten to offshore jobs in exchange for business-friendly tax benefits and incentives. Even corporations that weren't thinking of offshoring jobs will most probably be reevaluating their stance this morning. And who would pay for the high cost for tax cuts that go to the richest businessmen in America? The working class of America."
"Senate Democrats Have One Shot At Saving SCOTUS — Will They? It is now time for Senate Democrats to take their shot at saving this country from fascists assuming the reins of power in January. It can be done, but it will require them to be courageous and aggressive."
Of course, the death of Fidel Castro has caused the same people who said we should say something nice about Sfalia when he died to tell us that Fidel Castro was without redeeming value. Some would argue there was more to be said for Castro than for Scalia, but never mind that — whatever else you may know about Cuba, you should certainly remember that there is a prison on that island where people have been held and tortured for 14 years without charges. And Cuba does not run that prison. But even leaving all that aside, "American criticism of Cuba on human rights is total hypocrisy, given our history of terrorizing the island."
"Pipeline politics explained: That contentious oil pipeline being built across the Standing Rock reservation's water supply has a revealing history. It wasn't originally supposed to go there!"
Also from Dday, "Donald Trump Is Coming for Your Medicare: The selection of Tom Price to head HHS brings the president-elect into alignment with Speaker Paul Ryan."
"The Dangers of Anti-Trumpism: Silvio Berlusconi's tenure as Italian prime minister shows how not to resist an authoritarian demagogue."
* "Normalizing Trump [...] Berlusconi was toppled the first time by popular action, something that unsettles mainstream liberals, who are terrified of the mob. Of course, a government can fall in a parliamentary system and not ours. But popular action is all we've got. It won't be long before Chuck Schumer and Steve Mnuchin sit down and make some deals. Faced with profound defeat at every level of government, all the Dems seem able to do is re-elect Nancy Pelosi and dream of Cory Booker as their 2020 savior. Booker, who made his political debut at a lunch thrown by the right-wing Manhattan Institute, served on the same school reform board as Education Secretary-designate Betsy Devos, who wouldn't mind destroying the public school system. These are dire times, and it's hard to imagine resistance that doesn't feature millions in the streets."
"Trump May Not Be Anti-Gay, But Much of His Senior Staff Is: President-elect Donald Trump has called himself a 'supporter' of LGBT rights, but his senior staff picks include some of the most virulently anti-gay politicians in the country, leaving LGBT groups uncertain and worried about what path he will eventually take."
Could Trump follow Jimmy Carter's example? So far he is only threatening to prevent Muslims from entering the country, but Carter actually did worse to Iranians. The trouble is that Carter went after a nationality, whereas Trump is going after a religion. Still, was it right the first time?
"How Stable Are Democracies? 'Warning Signs Are Flashing Red' [...] He fears that the minutiae of politics can easily distract from these more fundamental dangers. 'It's not just about what Trump will do to the E.P.A.,' he said, referring to the Environmental Protection Agency. 'It really is that Trump may try to undermine liberal democracy in the United States.' 'Look, this stuff is already going on in other places,' Mr. Mounk added. 'If there's one task that we have as journalists, as academics, as thinkers, it's to drive the stakes of this home for people.'"
Nate Silver, "Why I Support An Election Audit, Even Though It's Unlikely To Change The Outcome: In many ways, undertaking an audit of the election results is tantamount to performing a test for a rare but potentially fatal disease. You want to weigh the probability of successfully detecting an anomaly against the invasiveness of the procedure and the chance of a false positive result. Oftentimes, the risk outweighs the reward. For instance, many experts warn against mammograms for women in their 40s because the underlying risk of breast cancer is low for women of that age and the rate of false positive tests is high, causing undue stress for the patients and subjecting them to further tests and operations that might be harmful."
I'm tempted to quote way too much of this scathing indictment of Krugman, so follow the link and enjoy: "Who Lost The White House? [...] But unlike Clinton campaign goons, paid party operatives, and your liberal Facebook friends who play them for free on the internet, Krugman is not a party crackpot — a liberal, yes, obviously, and a Democrat, but also, supposedly, a scholar and intellectual being paid to tell us the truth as he understands it, not to spin some bogus line about how the Russians magically — with Facebook memes! — caused Clinton to flush a billion dollars to raise another billion dollars, to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, and then not even to have the guts to come out and address her supporters on the night she lost, choosing instead to do what the campaign did all along: send an overpaid functionary to play surrogate on her behalf." Oh, hell, I can't resist one more: "The argument is that something like Obamacare is complex and corporate because that was the only way to smuggle in the benefits without tripping over the obstructionist GOP. This argument would hold more merit if the Democratic Party ever bothered to engage in full-throated advocacy for a real, non-means-tested, universal program which then got whittled down in negotiation. Instead, the party endlessly triangulates against itself, and the few things that squeak through often are worse than the alternative nothing. The real Clinton campaign slogan wasn't 'I'm With Her'; it was 'How About $12.50?' — Hillary Clinton's answer when asked about a $15 per hour minimum wage."
* And at Ring of Fire, "Paul Krugman Pompously Suggests Democrats Turn Their Backs On Working Class."
Matt Taibbi, "The Washington Post 'Blacklist' Story Is Shameful and Disgusting: Last week, a technology reporter for the Washington Post named Craig Timberg ran an incredible story. It has no analog that I can think of in modern times. Headlined "Russian propaganda effort helped spread 'fake news' during election, experts say," the piece promotes the work of a shadowy group that smears some 200 alternative news outlets as either knowing or unwitting agents of a foreign power, including popular sites like Truthdig and Naked Capitalism. [... Helping Beltway politicos mass-label a huge portion of dissenting media as "useful idiots" for foreign enemies in this sense is an extraordinarily self-destructive act. Maybe the Post doesn't care and thinks it's doing the right thing. In that case, at least do the damn work."
"In the early going, nothing is closer to pure gold than favorable free media exposure." Of course, the Clinton campaign knew this, and knew that while Clinton's own name-recognition and access to big money were already high, debates were free airtime that they didn't want to give Bernie Sanders, and that's the real reason they scheduled only six of them and started them as late as they possibly could.
My feeds are full of my friends screaming about how anyone who voted for Trump should not be understood as anything but horrible people. I understand the temptation, but I don't think it's a terribly productive approach and it sounds to me like they are planning to keep repeating the same mistakes. Meanwhile, here is someone who tried to explain — but anonymously. "Liberals Should Stop Ranting And Seek Out Silent Trump Voters Like Me: I am an urban, millennial woman, and I voted for Trump. Now, I'm afraid to explain my reasoning to an angry, vitriolic left that will not listen to me. [...] I understand many of you opposed Trump and feel afraid and frustrated, or just saddened and confused. I know it is easy to lash out right now. But I don't want to be subjected to vitriolic tirades by people who claim to practice tolerance, then project fury whenever their worldview is challenged."
Leslie Lopez, "'I believe Trump like I believed Obama!': Christian Parenti's Listening to Trump resonated with me on a personal level. Both of my 'Latino' working-class parents voted for Trump, and I don't think we were the only family politically divided this Thanksgiving. Election night, I was exactly like those stunned white people suffering from cognitive dissonance on Saturday Night Live, except I'm not white. I'd enthusiastically supported Sanders, and then reluctantly voted for Hillary — but her campaign did not represent a 'glass ceiling' moment for me. In the mid-90's, while teaching at a Native American Preparatory School in New Mexico, I'd shown my students videos of working conditions in maquiladoras, read Subcommandante Marcos and Rigoberta Menchu, and taught about NAFTA from an indigenous and economic perspective. I later learned that liberalism excluding class and labor had a word — neoliberalism.
"
"How to Get Ahead as a Woman in Tech: Interrupt Men." I'm still not sure what the cause-and-effect is, there, but it's always been fairly clear to me that people who are more confident of what they are talking about are also more likely to interrupt and contribute to conversations. Status alone can give someone some of that confidence and also make others less likely to react disapprovingly when they interrupt.
Tom Sullivan on Disaster Progressivism: "The hair-on-fire panic many progressive activists exist in vis-a-vis national politics and the future of the country (and now the planet) reflects the same short-term thinking that leads establishment Democrats to defend their reelection first and the voters second. ("This is the most important election of our lifetimes," etc.) No long-term thinking. Longer-term, the Democratic party is a pushover if progressives will just do the work and stick around long enough to see results from the pushing. Yet a lot of talented activists are unwilling to get their nice, white vinyl souls soiled by contact with the icky party to do that. They consign themselves to irrelevancy. [...] Democrats and progressives seem forever to do more Monday-morning quarterbacking about missed opportunities than thinking three to five moves ahead, never pre-positioning themselves to capitalize on opportunities when they arise. That's what Naomi Klein described in "The Shock Doctrine." Like my roommate, those disaster capitalists pay attention to faint signals and pre-position themselves so they are poised to move quickly and take advantage of opportunities when they present themselves. So are progressives going to do that now or just protest after the fact? Because there's a disaster coming, and we'd best be positioned to capitalize on opportunities that will appear suddenly out of nowhere. Better that than complain how the old boys clubs failed to do it for us."
Ezekiel Kweku on "The Skin Game: How to beat white nationalism at the polls [...] The lesson we should draw from Clinton's loss is not that white supremacy is unbeatable at the polls, but that it's not going to beat itself. White people are not going to instinctively recoil from racist appeals, and neither are people of color going to flock to the polls to defeat them. If the Democratic Party would like to keep more Donald Trumps from winning in the future, they are going to have to take the extraordinary step of doing politics."
Wolfgang Münchau in the Financial Times, "Some revolutions could have been avoided if the old guard had only refrained from provocation. There is no proof of a 'let them eat cake' incident. But this is the kind of thing Marie Antoinette could have said. It rings true. The Bourbons were hard to beat as the quintessential out-of-touch establishment. They have competition now. Our global liberal democratic establishment is behaving in much the same way. At a time when Britain has voted to leave the EU, when Donald Trump has been elected US president, and Marine Le Pen is marching towards the Elysée Palace, we — the gatekeepers of the global liberal order — keep on doubling down."
"The Blind Spots of Liberalism: What an impoverished small town tells us about the dangers of not taking class seriously. [...] This November, the town (and 362 other Placer County, California precincts not unlike it) voted for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton, 51.1 percent to 39.5 percent. But it's hard to blame sexism or racism for Clinton's loss. On Election Day, the people of Placer County also voted for Kamala Harris, a black woman, to be their US senator. Her vote share? 63 percent. And her vote tally? 16,178 more than Clinton's."
Mike Konczal, "Learning From Trump in Retrospect: Trump is unapologetically against trade that harms American workers. I would have assumed he was fighting a straw man here, but one thing I've learned is how a certain class of liberals don't approach job loss from trade with a regrettable sense of the trade-offs, but instead a more cutting sense that Americans don't have any claim on the jobs that go away anyway. It's all for the best, in the long-run. The brilliant economist David Card gave me a useful point here during an interview: the divide among economists on trade is driven by the fact that labor economists study the real effects of unemployment on real people, where trade and macroeconomists treat people as just another commodity."
Rick Perlstein, "Meet the Press: The hustlers, hucksters, hacks, and cowards who helped elect Donald Trump" I was curious, so I did a bit of research on theories about why great civilizations fall. Some scholars point to the danger of overextended militaries, others on overwhelmed bureaucracies. Sometimes the key factor is declines in public health, often caused by agricultural crises. Political corruption is another contender, as are inflated currencies, technological inferiority, court intrigue, rivals taking control of key transportation routes, or an overreliance on slave labor. Others point to changes in climate, geographic advantages won and lost, or the ever-popular invasion by barbarian hordes. None I could find, however, mentioned what may become future historians' most convincing explanation for America's fall, should Donald Trump end up her author and finisher: bad journalism.
Howie Klein, "The Democratic Party's Scourge: Identity Politics: I'm gay. I'm proud that the highest lifetime crucial vote score of any member of Congress is Mark Pocan, a gay men. His score is 98.95. Does he rock! Unfortunately, the single worst voter of all members being returned in 2107 is also gay-- Arizona Blue Dog Kyrsten Sinema, whose lifetime score is a an abysmal 36,63. And Sinema isn't the only LGBTQ person at the bottom on the garbage pile. Sean Patrick Maloney, currently making a bid for chairman of the DCCC, is not just a married gay man but also a New Dem Wall Street whore and the proud owner of 5th worst voting record score (45.19) among Democrats."
"A Note on the Taboo Subject of Stolen Elections" — A reminder that we hardly know how a fair election would play out anymore in America, but no one in big media wants to talk about it, so small media will have to do the job.
OK, it's that time of year again, so let's start with a little Advent music. We'll get to the other Christmassy stuff I like to deploy in my war against Bill O'Reilly's War on Christmas soon. Remember, it's the darkest and coldest time of the year up here in the northern hemisphere, and we need to light and warm the way. So, just a simple little version of "The Carol of the Bells" to get the feeling.
Everyone is chiming in with what went wrong. what needs to go right, who to blame and who is faultless, people scared to death, or else steeling themselves to face what's coming. As always, there are a lot of people I'd like to smack, but let's start two years ago in the NYT:
Democrats did lose the South, but they didn't lose it because of the Civil Rights Act. Instead of waiting for all those mean old Southern white men to die, Democrats might be better off asking themselves why so many of them were still voting Democratic just 22 years ago.
Nor have Democratic losses in the South been much worse than they were all over the country. To give just one egregious example, Democrats lost the Massachusetts statehouse this year — for the fifth time in their last seven tries.
This is a historic shift. From 1931 to 1995, Democrats held majorities in the House of Representatives for all but four years and in the Senate for all but 12. On the state level, they held their own with (or outnumbered) Republicans in governorships and state legislatures for the vast majority of those 64 years.
It's been a completely different story since 1994, however, and by next January, Democrats will not only be in the minority in both houses of Congress. They will likely hold 18 statehouses and both chambers in only 11 state legislatures.
Suffering a series of historic defeats is not a sign that you're winning. The Democrats no longer please anyone much, neither their depressed base nor the less committed. Meanwhile, Republicans still manage to portray them as wild-eyed socialists. The party does take the White House more often now, but at the state level, and in the midterms, when a third of the senators and all representatives are up for election, the party has been hollowed out.
THE trouble was that the Clinton-Obama strategy got things upside down from the start. Why try to cast yourselves as economic moderates and cultural progressives when the disparate elements of your coalition have little in common culturally, but are all struggling with the same wretched economy?
Bernie Sanders is taking the line of resisting the intolerant, warmongering Trump & Co. while simultaneously challenging him to put real money into infrastructure and to write better trade deals, Trump's signature overtures to the working class. Most if not all Senate Democrats are taking the same line.
An alternative strategy would be to emulate what Mitch McConnell did with Obama, to just oppose everything, regardless of whether or not it is congenial to his ideological interests. This worked well for the Republicans, but that doesn't mean it would work for the Dems, since their constituencies and policy priorities are different. It makes for a debate in which reasonable people can disagree. But that's not what's happening.
Justifiable hysteria over Trump's appointments, such as the unspeakable Senator Sessions for Attorney-General, is making rational discussion more difficult. Some are accusing Sanders of collaborationism, 'reaching out' to racist Trump voters, folding in the face of fascism. In other words, they are resuming the Clinton primary campaign of libelous gossip and the failed general election campaign against deplorables.
In this setting, every single Trump voter is irredeemably racist from top to bottom, with no mitigating concerns. As a matter of fact, I don't doubt that many of them are, but to win a national election, Democrats don't need all of these people; they only need a handful. After all, the total margin of defeat in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin — the electoral vote difference that put Trump over the top — was less than 110,000. Tiny.
I don't normally defer to authority, but in this case it ought to be noted that Sanders' line is the same as other Senate Democrats, who know more about electoral politics than I do. So some consideration is merited, and the onus of the position should not be put on Sanders alone.
The Clinton line about her defeat is that nothing was their fault. It was all the FBI, Wikileaks, and the media. To be sure, all of those factors exerted a malign influence and any one of them could have flipped the result. So might any number of decisions by the Clinton Campaign. The upshot of the Clinton line is that no course corrections for the Democratic Party are warranted, except in the realm of technical operations. The strategy going forward is to hope for better luck and demographic rescue in the years (decades!) ahead.
The Clintons and their elite cronies are not going away. They want to retain power. Their attacks on Sanders should be rejected by the left; these attacks are an effort to demobilize his movement, which as things stand is The Movement. There is no Clinton movement; there are Clinton elites and apologists. There is no Clinton-led grassroots mobilization against the impending racist, sexist, xenophobic wave led by Trump. The Clinton plan is to hunker down and broker the next neo-liberal champion. Corey Booker, a nation turns its lonely eyes to you.
There may be good arguments for a stance of wall-to-wall opposition to all things Trump. Let them be made. At the same time, the only impact from stigmatizing Sanders and his followers is to perpetuate the current Democratic sclerosis that has led us into this abyss.
As a former member of Congress and former chair of the Committee on Domestic Policy, I hereby request you open an immediate investigation of police authorities in Standing Rock, North Dakota for conspiring against the civil and constitutional rights of protestors, in violation of 42 U.S.C., Section 1983, which reads, in part, 'Every person who, under color of any statute — causes to be subjected, any citizen of the United States or other person within the jurisdiction thereof to the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution and laws, shall be liable to the party injured in an action at law. . . ."
It has been reported that police, as part of a strategy of crowd control, deliberately used water cannons, in subfreezing temperatures, against protestors, subjecting protestors to risk of serious injury and depriving them of their First Amendment right of free speech, the right to protest.
I am requesting that you use the power of your office to investigate this incident, to determine the participants and to take such action to enjoin the offending parties from further violation of the US Constitution and applicable federal law.
Al Franken has also sent a letter to the AG. Obama, who promised to have their back, has been amazingly quiet about all this. Clinton, when pushed, was non-committal during the campaign and has nothing to say on the subject now. Schumer? Don't kid yourself. "Phillips 66, who have financed 25% of the Dakota Access Pipeline project, is primarily owned by billionaire Warren Buffett's holding company. Buffett actively campaigned for Hillary Clinton this past presidential election, and has made large donations to Clinton, Obama, and other Democrats over the past several years."
"Father of Activist Injured at Standing Rock Calls on Obama to Stop Dakota Access Pipeline Drilling [...] President Obama, has to step in there and stop this. They're drilling now even though they don't have a permit. The Army Corps of Engineers has asked them to stop. The Army Corps of Engineers has said that they were not going to issue a permit until after they did further environmental studies and spoke with the tribe, and yet they go ahead and set all the drills in place, and they continue. They're probably drilling under the river right now, as we speak. And it's a very, very dangerous situation there. And that's just thing number one. Number two is they have to demilitarize the police there. There's no reason that the police should be intentionally trying to kill people, maim people. And this has to stop."
But the citizenry's pressure on local authorities to withdraw from the attack on the protesters, especially in the face of increasing costs to public funds, does seem to be having an effect. "It was not an easy choice to make, Gootkin said. 'I wanted to go and help my fellow law enforcement.' Then, he raised a question that has begun to rattle many communities across America lately. 'I just don't understand where we separated from the public. It really breaks my heart. We are not the enemy.'"
* * * * *
"Slovenia Declares Water A Human Right By Amending Constitution [...] Meanwhile, private corporations like Nestle are expanding their extraction of fresh water, bottling it and selling it for profit. In one particularly horrific example, Nestle is set to triple its water extraction from an aquifer in Michigan only 120 miles from the embattled town of Flint, where residents have not had access to clean drinking water for over a year."
You would think Democrats would be asking why no recounts with such close losses and contradictory exit polls, but no. In fact, when Jill Stein raises over $4.5m to request US election recounts in battleground states, the Clintonites are all over the net sneering and accusing her of nefarious purposes and "a scam" and advising people not to give money to the cause. Apparently, they got the memo to blame Trump's election on Stein and her supporters and they just can't stop themselves.
We might learn something about this election if we look at the foreclosure map. "The first map is from RealtyTrac, and indicates the states with the largest foreclosure inventory in 2012. The second is a map of the key battleground states. In 2008 and 2012, Obama won these states. In 2016 Clinton lost them. There's a lot of similarities between those two maps. Even in the best economic environment, residential mortgage foreclosure is a long, messy process. The massive wave of foreclosures that hit these regions after the financial crisis had enormous consequences economically. They also had a tremendous, painful impact on the families and neighborhoods of the people affected, directly and indirectly by the foreclosures. [...] I was involved, to a small degree, with homeowners, activists and lawmakers that tried to deal with the issues and problems in the foreclosure crisis, some of which is documented in David Dayen's excellent new book, Chain of Title. As Dayen documents, the government response to the issues was ultimately terribly unsatisfying and at best, had the effect of sweeping the issue under the carpet. The consequences of the government's response played out in this presidential election. [...] How much of an impact would a compassionate outreach have had on these neighborhoods? It's also worth remembering that the people hit by the foreclosure crisis were generally middle class — prior to the crisis they owned homes, held jobs, were members of the community. Where were they by the time the 2016 election came around?"
"Why Some Protests Succeed While Others Fail [...]
Since those D.C. protests are coming up, and are likely to be massive, they are a natural focal point for the complicated questions surrounding protest and organization. So I asked several scholars of activism, protest, and movement-building what advice they would give to the organizers, and how their own work fits into their predictions about what could go well or poorly in January. One of the most consistent answers I got was that protesters should realize that protests aren't enough. There's a real risk of catharsis being the start and end of the resistance to Trump: Protesting feels good and righteous, but if nothing comes after then it may not accomplish that much. It's key, therefore, to understand the limits of protests and to put them in a broader activism context. 'There are some people that think that protests solve everything; you just have a protest, it's going to make everything change,' said Fabio Rojas, a professor at Indiana University and the author of From Black Power to Black Studies: How a Radical Social Movement Became an Academic Discipline. 'That's not true — it is a tool that does a very specific thing, and you have to understand that when you start out.'"
Bernie Sanders is all up in Trump's face: "Sanders Statement on Carrier and Outsourcing: During the campaign, Donald Trump made a 100 percent commitment to prevent United Technologies from shipping 2,100 jobs from Indiana to Mexico. All of us need to hold Mr. Trump accountable to make sure that he keeps this promise. Let's be clear: it is not good enough to save some of these jobs. We cannot rest until United Technologies signs a firm contract to keep all of these good-paying jobs in Indiana without slashing the salaries or benefits workers have earned."
Robert Reich, "The Democratic party lost its soul. It's time to win it back [...] You might think this overwhelming drubbing would cause the Democratic party to reorganize itself into a very different party from the one it's become — which is essentially a giant fundraising machine, too often reflecting the goals and values of the moneyed interests that make up the bulk of its funding. Don't bet on it."
"We Can Blame the Voters or Blame the Elite. Only One Choice Offers a Way Forward [...] Which of these characterizations you choose, the first or second above, will determine whether you see the world in "the left vs. the right" terms or "the rich vs. the rest" terms, and also whether you wish to continue the failed American struggle against the elites, or improve your chance of winning it."
"There's a simple reason for Clinton's shocking loss to Trump [...] But the very inconvenient truth that must be absorbed, by the technocratic Democrats of the Obama years and by the apparent plurality of voters who supported Secretary Clinton, is that the Obama administration did not deliver on its promises of hope and change, and broke the trust of many of those (enough, at least, to elect Donald Trump) who were counting on a sharp departure from business as usual following the Great Recession."
It was a mistake to keep saying the economy was so much better when Millions of Americans Are Still Out of Work: "In 2007, before the Great Recession, the unemployment rate was 4.6 percent. The employment rate — the percentage of all Americans age 16 and older who had a job — was 63.0 percent. By 2010, the unemployment rate had risen to 9.6 percent, and the employment rate had dropped to 58.5 percent. Since then, a weird thing has happened. Although unemployment has fallen back to 4.9 percent — just 0.3 percentage points above the 2007 average — the employment rate has remained stubbornly low."
"Many in Milwaukee Neighborhood Didn't Vote — and Don't Regret It. [...] As for the claims of racism that have dogged Mr. Trump, Mr. Babar wasn't so worried. 'It's better than smiling to my face but going behind closed doors and voting against our kids,' he said."
"Trump's Infrastructure Bill? It's a Trap [...] Trump's so-called "infrastructure" bill is really just a tax cut bill for investors in infrastructure and would do nothing to guarantee that the most needed (as opposed to the most profitable) projects are undertaken."
One thing I never want to see again is another candidate in which loyalists will with a straight face explain that their candidate can't do what's needed because this particular candidate is handicapped by some trait that is mainly their own and that another candidate would not have. We had a lot of that with Obama ("If he does that, they'll call him an angry black man" — I disagreed, but if they really believed that, why did they think he was the right man for the job?), and now we see that even Clinton's own team knew that Clinton couldn't campaign against Trump as needed, but Sanders could. Nevertheless, they kept insisting that in "the most important election in history", only she could win.
Bill Black, "Hillary's Threat to Wage Continuous War on the Working Class via Austerity Proved Fatal: I've come back recently from Kilkenny, Ireland where I participated in the seventh annual Kilkenomics — a festival of economics and comedy. The festival is noted for people from a broad range of economic perspectives presenting their economic views in plain, blunt English. Kilkenomics VII began two days after the U.S. election, so we added some sessions on President-elect Trump's fiscal policy views. Trump had no obvious supporters among this diverse group of economists, so the audience was surprised to hear many economists from multiple nations take the view that his stated fiscal policies could be desirable for the U.S. — and the global economy, particularly the EU. We all expressed the caution that no one could know whether Trump would seek to implement the fiscal policies on which he campaigned. Most of us, however, said that if he wished to implement those policies House Speaker Paul Ryan would not be able to block him. I opined that congressional Republicans would rediscover their love of pork and logrolling if Trump implemented his promised fiscal policies. The audience was also surprised to hear two groups of economists explain that Hillary Clinton's fiscal policies remained pure New Democrat (austerity forever) even as the economic illiteracy of those policies became even clearer — and even as the political idiocy of her fiscal policies became glaringly obvious. Austerity is one of the fundamental ways in which the system is rigged against the working class. Austerity was the weapon of mass destruction unleashed in the New Democrats' and Republicans' long war on the working class. The fact that she intensified and highlighted her intent to inflict continuous austerity on the working class as the election neared represented an unforced error of major proportions. As the polling data showed her losing the white working class by staggering amounts, in the last month of the election, the big new idea that Hillary pushed repeatedly was a promise that if she were elected she would inflict continuous austerity on the economy. 'I am not going to add a penny to the national debt.' The biggest losers of such continued austerity would as ever be the working class. She also famously insulted the working class as 'deplorables.' It was a bizarre approach by a politician to the plight of tens of millions of Americans who were victims of the New Democrats' and the Republicans' trade and austerity policies. As we presented these facts to a European audience we realized that in attempting to answer the question of what Trump's promised fiscal policies would mean if implemented we were also explaining one of the most important reasons that Hillary Clinton lost the white working class by such an enormous margin."
Brian Beutler in The New Republic, "How to beat Donald Trump" — There are a number of words in this article that I disagree with, but he still thinks running like Bernie will do a better job of beating Trump.
Beat the Press on "Surviving the Age of Trump [...] Most importantly, the people in Congress want to get re-elected. Pushing unpopular policies like privatizing Social Security or Medicare, or taking away insurance by ending Obamacare, will be horrible albatrosses hanging over their heads the next time they face voters. This reality has to constantly be put in their faces. It is easy for politicians to push nonsense stories about eliminating trillions of dollars of waste, fraud, and abuse. It is much harder to get away with taking away your parents' Social Security check or the health care insurance that pays for your kid's insulin.
So, The WaPo got suckered by a fake news org. "Washington Post Disgracefully Promotes a McCarthyite Blacklist From a New, Hidden, and Very Shady Group: The Washington Post on Thursday night promoted the claims of a new, shadowy organization that smears dozens of U.S. news sites that are critical of U.S. foreign policy as being 'routine peddlers of Russian propaganda.' The article by reporter Craig Timberg — headlined 'Russian propaganda effort helped spread 'fake news' during election, experts say' — cites a report by a new, anonymous website calling itself 'PropOrNot,' which claims that millions of Americans have been deceived this year in a massive Russian 'misinformation campaign.' The group's list of Russian disinformation outlets includes WikiLeaks and the Drudge Report, as well as Clinton-critical left-wing websites such as Truthout, Black Agenda Report, Truthdig and Naked Capitalism, as well as libertarian venues such as Antiwar.com and the Ron Paul Institute. This Post report was one of the most widely circulated political news articles on social media over the last 48 hours, with dozens, perhaps hundreds, of U.S. journalists and pundits with large platforms hailing it as an earth-shattering exposé. It was the most-read piece on the entire Post website after it was published on Friday. [...] In casting the group behind this website as 'experts,' the Post described PropOrNot simply as 'a nonpartisan collection of researchers with foreign policy, military and technology backgrounds.' Not one individual at the organization is named. The executive director is quoted, but only on the condition of anonymity, which the Post said it was providing the group 'to avoid being targeted by Russia's legions of skilled hackers.'" We can't even know the name of the executive director? Are we sure this isn't a couple of eight-year-olds in a treehouse? "More troubling still, PropOrNot listed numerous organizations on its website as 'allied' with it, yet many of these claimed 'allies' told The Intercept, and complained on social media, they have nothing to do with the group and had never even heard of it before the Post published its story."
"Democrat Harold Ford Jr. emerging as potential Trump pick." Some of us would argue that Harold Ford was never a Democrat, but the Dem leadership did keep trying to foist him off on us. Then when he would lose, they'd pretend it was racism. But no one wanted to vote for Harold Ford, no matter what color they were.
"Jesse Jackson: Obama should pardon Hillary Clinton: Speaking at President Gerald Ford's alma mater, The Rev. Jesse Jackson called for President Obama to issue a blanket pardon to Hillary Clinton before he leaves office, just like Ford did for Richard Nixon."
Cornel West, "Goodbye, American Neoliberalism. A New Neo-Fascist Era Is Here." I think it's being optimistic to think we will see the back of neoliberalism that easily.
* Hazem Salem has a similar pipedream: "Clinton & co are finally gone. That is the silver lining in this disaster : Hillary Clinton has given us back our freedom. Only such a crushing defeat could break the chains that bound us to the New Democrat elites. The defeat was the result of decades of moving the Democratic party — the party of FDR — away from what it once was and should have remained: a party that represents workers. All workers [...] This is not to deny the reality of structural racism or xenophobia or the intolerance shown to Muslims or the antisemitic undertones of Trump's campaign. I am myself a person of color with a Muslim-sounding name, I know the reality and I am as frightened as everyone else. But it is crucial that our cultural elite, most of it aligned with the New Democrats, not be allowed to shirk their responsibility for Trump's success."
* And over at The Baffler, another fantasy that it will all go away: "#RIPMyShillaries [...] Third, the Shillaries. The host of journalists, commentators, pundits, and celebrities who took it upon themselves day in and day out to explain, scrub, polish, promote, praise, defend, and sell Hillary as the best thing that could ever happen to our blessed country, because she had an endemic inability to do what politicians are supposed to do: sell themselves to the public. Presidential candidates, especially those with Clinton's record-breaking funding base, can pay consultants to promote their ideas and promise. We don't need journalists to volunteer to do it for them, and we sure as hell don't need journalists who are taking on double-duty as PR flacks to further their own careers in the liberal punditocracy's cursus honorum from lowly scribe to editor-writer at a highbrow magazine or earnest millennial channel to White House press secretary — or the C-suite at a Silicon Valley unicorn. RIP, my Shillaries. (A new genre seems to have emerged, here, for getting on Ezra's case after his recent performance during the primaries and election season. Another entry is "The persistence of Vox".)
'Extreme surveillance' becomes UK law with barely a whimper: Investigatory Powers Act legalises range of tools for snooping and hacking by the security services. [...] The security agencies and police began the year braced for at least some opposition, rehearsing arguments for the debate. In the end, faced with public apathy and an opposition in disarray, the government did not have to make a single substantial concession to the privacy lobby."
Alex Emmons and Naomi Chance in The Intercept, "Obama Refuses to Pardon Edward Snowden. Trump's New CIA Pick Wants Him Dead. President Obama indicated on Friday that he won't pardon NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, even as President-elect Donald Trump announced his pick to run the CIA: Kansas congressman Mike Pompeo, who has called for 'the traitor Edward Snowden' to be executed."
David Atkins, "Stop Blaming the Voters: Only the brilliant minds of the establishment could have taken a race featuring a 68-year-old white lifetime civil servant, running against a comically corrupt billionaire real estate tycoon who rides in a gilded elevator to a gaudy sex palace highrise home befitting a Sasha Baron Cohen character, and turn it into a referendum on temperament and multiculturalism instead of inequality."
"The Right Way to Resist Trump: Mr. Berlusconi was able to govern Italy for as long as he did mostly thanks to the incompetence of his opposition. It was so rabidly obsessed with his personality that any substantive political debate disappeared; it focused only on personal attacks, the effect of which was to increase Mr. Berlusconi's popularity. His secret was an ability to set off a Pavlovian reaction among his leftist opponents, which engendered instantaneous sympathy in most moderate voters. Mr. Trump is no different. [...] The Italian experience provides a blueprint for how to defeat Mr. Trump. Only two men in Italy have won an electoral competition against Mr. Berlusconi: Romano Prodi and the current prime minister, Matteo Renzi (albeit only in a 2014 European election). Both of them treated Mr. Berlusconi as an ordinary opponent. They focused on the issues, not on his character. In different ways, both of them are seen as outsiders, not as members of what in Italy is defined as the political caste."
This is a completely different take on the subject than anything else I've read: "You're still crying wolf [...] Stop writing articles breathlessly following everything the KKK says. Stop writing several times more articles about the KKK than there are actual Klansmen. Remember that thing where Trump started out as a random joke, and then the media covered him way more than any other candidate because he was so outrageous, and gave him what was essentially free advertising, and then he became President-elect of the United States? Is the lesson you learned from this experience that you need 24-7 coverage of the Ku Klux Klan?"
Chris Hedges, "We Are All Deplorables [...] I finished my book with a deep dislike for megachurch pastors who, like Trump, manipulate despair to achieve power and wealth. I see the Christian right as a serious threat to an open society. But I do not hate those who desperately cling to this emotional life raft, even as they spew racist venom. Their conclusion that minorities, undocumented workers or Muslims are responsible for their impoverishment is part of the retreat into fantasy. The only way we will blunt this racism and hatred and allow them to free themselves from the grip of magical thinking is by providing jobs that offer adequate incomes and economic stability and by restoring their communities and the primacy of the common good. Any other approach will fail. We will not argue or scold them out of their beliefs. These people are emotionally incapable of coping with the world as it is. If we demonize them we demonize ourselves.
RIP: Ron Glass, 71, who played Detective Ron Harris in Barney Miller and Shepherd Book in Firefly, of respiratory failure. And a bright light goes out in the 'Verse. No, I wasn't expecting this, it was mere happenstance that I linked to "The Harris Incident" last time, but perhaps good timing. His former colleagues from Firefly were all over Twitter with tributes.
* Fidel Castro, at 90. Most people forget that even if you see him as a tyrant, he kicked out an even worse tyrant (and the Mafia) and gave his people health care, despite the embargo. Say what you will, but Batista was a bastard, yet somehow the United States managed to make nice with him.
* Scott Eric Kaufman (SEK), blogger at Lawyers, Guns & Money and a bunch of other things. He was funny and much-loved, and I don't want to talk about this now. There was still hope, for a while, that he could recover from the infection that caused multiple organ failure, but on the 18th he posted on Facebook: "I'm dead -- well, not yet. Still sorting it out. But I'm entering an end-of-life facility at the end of the week, to die in Houston. It's been fun, but such fun can only last so long -- time to get to the difficult business of dying."
* Don Waller, who chronicled rock music and was even a punk musician back in the day — but who we remember as a once-active Atriot screen-named Agent Orange. There's a nice remembrance over at Buzzbands with a video of the Imperial Dogs playing, but I can't find an obit with details of age and cause of death. LA Weekly doesn't know either, but they did say, "R.I.P. Don Waller, Influential Music Journalist and Imperial Dog [...] OK, there's his resume. If you didn't know about Don Waller before, the gist of it is that the man made a major, major contribution to what you know and think about pop and rock and American roots music; if you're a fan of any of the above-mentioned stuff, Don's DNA is inside you, whether you knew the man or not."
There were things I knew and forgot because for a moment there was a chance to get around them. It's incredibly rare for the incumbent party to win the White House after a full two terms — it's only happened once in my lifetime, and that was Bush1, who turned out to be a one-term president. And much as the public seems to love Obama (who, it must be said, has comic timing that must make hundreds of professional comics envious), they had voted for real change in 2008, and did not get it, and still wanted it. Bernie Sanders had offered that option — a different kind of leadership you really could believe in, because there wasn't a neoliberal record that had to be constantly explained away. He was a wild card. So I guess I got carried away with the idea that we could win, even after my heart sank when I realized there was no chance for Sanders to take the nomination. And even though I still knew, and kept cataloging, the reasons why Clinton was a terrible standard-bearer and a terrible candidate, I was completely unprepared for the fact that Trump actually won.
But wait — this is The Sideshow, and I never take for granted that that's really what happened. On Tuesday night, my Twitter feed was full of people saying, "These exit polls are really messed up," but there were no links, there was no data, and I couldn't find anything about them. We know that we can't expect transparency from the voting machines — we simply can't trust them. We know that Voter ID laws stopped some people from voting and had a deterrent effect on others. But we also know that voting was depressed — voter ID laws stopped both white and black poorer people from voting in some states, and so did pulling legitimate voters off the rolls. But millions of people who showed up for Obama did not show up Tuesday, even in states that didn't have new voting restrictions. Nevertheless, I know that yes, our elections can be stolen. I assumed all along that the Republicans (who own the machines) wouldn't bother to use that strategy against Clinton because a lot of the GOPs bigwig funders seemed to know Clinton was the real Republican in the race, but it seems they all got on board in the end, so I don't know. And it would appear that the red shift keeps on happening. We won't know what's really going on unless we have paper ballots, hand-counted in full public view on the night.
Still, I think the best explanation for how Trump won was that his opposition was a candidate who as much as promised that people would not get the change from her that they wanted, and that they were childish to want that change — and whose principle campaign argument for her election was that she wasn't Trump. This is never a winning strategy for Democrats. The candidate who admitted that things were bad and needed to be fixed was Trump. Trump had the message of hope and change, and Hillary was the candidate of fear.
So let's hear it for the one lefty who told us months ago why Trump would win: Michael Moore. Nobody listened, but he was right.
* And here was Moore after the election, saying it again on Morning Joe.
Al Gore said the people usually get it right. For all I know, maybe they did. God knows those smug, self-satisfied "centrist" elites who've been running the Democratic Party needed a wake-up call. And much as it terrifies me to think that we really will have President Pence, appointing GOP crackpots to head our agencies, I can't help but notice that in the last few days, Trump has been backing off of some of his most odious campaign policies, and the week before the election, there was this at Reuters: "Trump calls for '21st century' Glass-Steagall banking law." Right? The Republican called for a new Glass-Steagall. Believe me, it would not hurt to see that happen.
What was the disheartening message on my feeds on Wednesday morning? That Clinton Democrats were unfriending any Sanders supporter who expressed their own bitterness about the results, who said, "I told you so," who said, "Bernie would have won." Well, maybe he would have and maybe he wouldn't have — it appears that the polls were right all along — but the fact is that after nearly two years of being told that Clinton was the inevitable next president, the sure thing, and anyone who wanted a different candidate was just being childish, selfish, and "privileged", they're entitled to. (Oddly, The Washington Post let Freddie deBoer say, "Hillary Clinton lost. Bernie Sanders could have won." Tuesday night, Krugman was in my Twitter feed blaming it all on Jill Stein, whose poll numbers were so low she might as well not have been there. That Nader fever just keeps infecting some people.)
There are still plenty of Clintonites making embarrassing arguments about why Trump won. Lambert Strether debunks some of the most popular ones over at Naked Capitalism. (Just for the record, I really get upset when people write off election results they don't like as "the public is stupid". The public is often a lot smarter than our highly-educated technocrats, and they seem to know what's going on a lot better than the "smart" people do. And, as I said privately to Matt Stoller, it's almost funny listening to people who love Obama talk about how Trump voters were taken in by a con man.)
Anyway, the net is full of recriminations and even self-recriminations, like this one from David Plouffe: "What I Got Wrong About the Election," He has a list of things he got wrong, but I really think this is the one that mattered most: "IT REALLY WAS A CHANGE ELECTION The voters were serious about that. And there was only one change candidate."
And speaking of recriminations, go Zach, whoever you are. "DNC Staffer Screams At Donna Brazile For Helping Elect Donald Trump [...] 'Why should we trust you as chair to lead us through this?' he asked, according to two people in the room. 'You backed a flawed candidate, and your friend [former DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz] plotted through this to support your own gain and yourself. You are part of the problem,' he continued, blaming Brazile for clearing the path for Trump's victory by siding with Clinton early on. 'You and your friends will die of old age and I'm going to die from climate change. You and your friends let this happen, which is going to cut 40 years off my life expectancy.'"
And from the old socialist Jew himself, "Trump Won Because Democratic Party Failed Working People, Says Sanders: Adding his voice to the chorus of condemnation heaped on the Democratic Party in the wake of Donald Trump's election victory, Sen. Bernie Sanders on Thursday attributed the Republican win to the failure of the liberal elite to represent working people. 'It is an embarrassment, I think, to the entire of [the] Democratic Party that millions of white working-class people decided to vote for Mr. Trump, which suggests that the Democratic message of standing up for working people no longer holds much sway among workers in this country,' the progressive senator and one-time presidential candidate told the Associated Press. 'You cannot be a party which on one hand says we're in favor of working people, we're in favor of the needs of young people but we don't quite have the courage to take on Wall Street and the billionaire class,' he continued. 'People do not believe that. You've got to decide which side you're on.'"
Matt Taibbi, "President Trump: How America Got It So Wrong: Journalists and politicians blew off the warning signs of a Trump presidency — now, we all must pay the price [...] The almost universal failure among political pros to predict Trump's victory — the few exceptions, conspicuously, were people who hailed from rust-belt states, like Michael Moore — spoke to an astonishing cultural blindness. Those of us whose job it is to cover campaigns long ago grew accustomed to treating The People as a kind of dumb animal, whose behavior could sometimes be unpredictable but, in the end, almost always did what it was told. [...] These elites lived in both parties, Trump warned. The Republicans were tools of job-exporting fat cats who only pretended to be tough on immigration and trade in order to win votes, when all they really cared about were profits. The Democrats were tools of the same interests, who subsisted politically on the captured votes of hoodwinked minorities, preaching multiculturalism while practicing globalism. Both groups, Trump insisted, were out of touch with the real American voter. Neither party saw the awesome potential of this story to upend our political system."
It's pretty disgusting watching people killing themselves to insist that the sole takeaway from the election result is that well-to-do whites voted for Trump only because they are racist and sexist, and that no other factor was involved. The demographic that broke most strongly for trump made $50K-$70K — not poor, but certainly not rich. They may make more than the median, but these are the people who can't afford to send their kids to college and know the only way to do it is see them saddled with crushing debt. They aren't people who have helicopter pads, and they probably don't even have a pool. They aren't simply looking at an imaginary loss of status because being white doesn't make them better than blacks anymore, they are looking at a world of real, material loss. They remember when they were young and they were able to find jobs that had real hours and a straight salary and they could plan an evening out in advance, and their kids can't because their employer won't give them a reliable schedule and might just call them up at a moment's notice to come in to work. They remember a time when it was possible to say, "Take this job and shove it," because it was a reasonable expectation that you could walk away and find something better. They remember that yes, even black teenagers could get a job and rent an apartment and know that the job would cover the rent every month — hell, cover the rent in the first week of the month — and now their kids can't possibly find a place where they can expect that they will get enough hours this month to pay the rent when it comes due. They started with the same dream their parents had, to make life better for their kids, to give them those things they never had — and now they know they can't even give them what they did have. Employers and banks are doing things that used to be illegal — for good reason! — and they can't promise their kids anything at all, least of all that, "Everything will be all right," because it's become pretty obvious that it won't. Here's David Atkins responding to myriad articles purporting to show that only racism and sexism account for the election results: "The Twisted Pretzel Logic of the 'It's Not Economic Anxiety' Crowd.
"Here's to all the lonely progressives living outside the liberal echo chamber: How did this happen? I'm a progressive. I see government as a tool of the people, and I think things like food and healthcare should be basic human rights. What am I doing out here, shunned and exiled by all my liberal friends and keeping it a secret how relieved I am that Hillary Clinton lost the election?"
Atrios wrote what for him is a long piece, for a change — long enough that I'm not just going to quote the whole thing, here. But the shortened version is: "Shit is fucked up and bullshit and neither our benevolent nor our malevolent overlords know or care." Go read it:
"Don't Overlearn."
* Also: And Piss Off About That: I've seen some prominent liberals fretting "oh noez Trump now owns the NSA!!!" Well, uh, yeah, principled opposition to the NSA's ever expanding powers never depended on whether one thinks the guy in charge is a good guy or a bad guy. Abuse of those powers never required that the person on top was the one abusing them. The powers are themselves intrinsically abusive, and giving them to a secret, largely unaccountable, and powerful for rather obvious reasons agency is nuts even if you trust the person who is supposedly their boss."
"Polls Showed Sanders Had a Better Shot of Beating Trump — but Pundits Told You to Ignore Them: There was a debate last spring, when the Sanders/Clinton race was at its most heated, as to whether Bernie Sanders' consistently out-polling Hillary Clinton was to be taken as a serious consideration in favor of his nomination. Before, during and after the race was competitive, this was the Vermont senator's strongest argument: He was out-polling Trump in the general election by an average of 10 or so points, whereas Clinton was only slightly ahead. His favorables were also much higher, often with a spread as much as 25 points. Never mind, the pundits said — Clinton had been 'vetted' and Sanders had not [...] The idea that Sanders had not been 'properly examined' was pure dogma, asserted by pundits with hardly any critical thought. It was true because Important People in Important Media Outlets simply said it was. Most in the media failed to meaningfully push back against this dogma, and it was a major contributing factor to the Democrats nominating someone who, by all available measures, was a stronger candidate than Clinton."
"Congress will flush TPP down the toilet, White House concedes: Obama administration admits defeat after congressional leaders from both parties say they will not bring trade deal forward during lame-duck session. White House officials conceded on Friday that the president's hard-fought-for Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal would not pass Congress, as lawmakers there prepared for the anti-global trade policies of President-elect Donald Trump.
"Elizabeth Warren And Bernie Sanders Tell Donald Trump They'll 'Work With Him' On Key Economic Issues: During his unorthodox Republican presidential campaign, Donald Trump at times touted his support for longtime progressive causes, promising to reform trade deals, invest in infrastructure, reinstate a key Depression-era financial regulation and combat political corruption. Now, some of Trump's harshest progressive critics are offering their support for the president-elect on the issues on which they seem to agree. [...] 'Trump tapped into the anger of a declining middle class that is sick and tired of establishment economics, establishment politics and the establishment media,' he said in a press release. 'To the degree that Mr. Trump is serious about pursuing policies that improve the lives of working families in this country, I and other progressives are prepared to work with him.' [...] 'Trump tapped into the anger of a declining middle class that is sick and tired of establishment economics, establishment politics and the establishment media,' he said in a press release. 'To the degree that Mr. Trump is serious about pursuing policies that improve the lives of working families in this country, I and other progressives are prepared to work with him.'"
NYT op-ed from Bernie Sanders, "Where the Democrats Go From Here: I will keep an open mind to see what ideas Mr. Trump offers and when and how we can work together. Having lost the nationwide popular vote, however, he would do well to heed the views of progressives. If the president-elect is serious about pursuing policies that improve the lives of working families, I'm going to present some very real opportunities for him to earn my support."
Look, no one is saying that racism had nothing to do with why some people voted for Trump — there has always been a cadre of old-line segregationists and their heirs in the far right of the GOP. But it doesn't explain why so many people who you would expect to vote Democratic voted for Trump instead. What might is the fact that the bottom 90% has been losing ground during the nearly eight years of a Democratic administration. And that fact is almost certainly behind rising incidence of racism, too. "But ugly attitudes don't simply fall out of the sky, eternal and inflexible. A new paper from economists Rob Johnson and Arjun Jayadev looks at economic downturns from 1979 to 2014, and finds a tight correlation between unemployment and racism — the higher the unemployment rate, the more ubiquitous the discrimination. A 2014 study from New York University psychologists found that racial animosity hardens under economic scarcity. Last year, three German economists found that 'far-right' political parties almost always make significant gains after a financial crisis."
"Bernie's empire strikes back: In state after state, supporters of the Vermont senator's presidential bid are challenging the Democratic establishment for party control."
Sam Seder did a great interview with Jane McAlevey, author of No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age — about how liberals have forgotten how to do the real work of organizing that is necessary to wielding citizen power.
* Also on The Majority Report, "Wes Clark, Jr: Mobilizing for the Climate Crisis: The history of the oil industry's intermingling with US intelligence and the subsequent history of colonialism, evident in the mentality of Energy Transfer Parters and the pipeline builders. How #NoDAPL represents 'colonialism at home.' The need for climate radicalism as opposed to spectatorship. How climate change will enter the system through the insurance industry. The geopolitical risks of China's plan to use Africa for future food growth." And a reminder that the land those #NoDAPL protesters are on belongs to the people who are being arrested for "trespassing" on it, not to the people who are tasing and tear-gassing and setting dogs on them.
"Restoring trust in our trade policy: I'm in favor of trade. I don't know anyone opposed to trade. A better question is, 'How should we manage globalization?' We've lost trust in our approach to globalization. The Brexit vote in Europe was a vote of no confidence. Millions of voters in our presidential campaigns send a similar message. Globalization is not working for us. We should rethink our approach to globalization if we hope to restore trust."
"Why the White Working Class Rebelled: Neoliberalism is Killing Them (Literally) [...] [...] Neoliberalism — putting the market in charge of social policy and actually encouraging industries to move abroad for higher profit margins (but for fewer industrial jobs at home) — had much the same effect on the white working class as the fall of the Soviet system had on the Russian working class"
"Muslims who saved Jews from Holocaust commemorated in I Am Your Protector campaign [...] Organised by I Am Your Protector (IAYP) — who describe themselves as 'a community of people who speak up and stand up for each other across religion, race, gender and beliefs' — the group is attempting to highlight the, often forgotten, stories of Muslims who helped Jews during one of history's deadliest genocides."
David Dayen in The New Republic on "The Utter Chaos of Brexit: If you thought U.S. politics was fractured, take a look across the pond. Britain's High Court has thrown the future of Europe into uncertainty, ruling this week that Prime Minister Theresa May must get Parliament's approval before she can begin the process of taking Britain out of the European Union. The potential consequences of the ruling are all over the map: It could lead to an accelerated Brexit timetable or a new British governing coalition that nullifies it. It could lead to greater harmony inside Europe or a continental banking crisis."
The Legacy of Billy Tauzin: The White House-PhRMA Deal [...] In the 2008 campaign, Obama declared his intention to include all stakeholders as he sought to reform the nation's health care system, but also supported key Democratic health reform policies. Among these were several that targeted the pharmaceutical industry: Allowing re-importation of drugs from first world countries with lower drug prices and providing Medicare with negotiating authority over prescription drug prices in the recently enacted Part D program. These weren't just promises, Obama had already voted for both of them as a senator in 2007. (Roll Call Vote 132 and Roll Call Vote 150.) [...] The cost cutting measures passed in the Energy & Commerce bill spooked the board of PhRMA, which included all of the CEOs involved in the deal-cutting meetings with the White House and Baucus. The board pressured Tauzin to go public with the deal to ensure that the White House would recognize it and not renege. On August 4, the Los Angeles Times, in an exclusive report, featured quotes from Tauzin claiming that a deal between the White House and PhRMA existed and that, as Tauzin put it, 'The White House blessed it.' Tom Hamburger wrote in the article, 'For his part, Tauzin said he had not only received the White House pledge to forswear Medicare drug price bargaining, but also a separate promise not to pursue another proposal Obama supported during the campaign: importing cheaper drugs from Canada or Europe.' The White House's Jim Messina later confirmed Tauzin's claim, stating, 'The president encouraged this approach ... He wanted to bring all the parties to the table to discuss health insurance reform.'
"Controversy Erupts Around $10 Million Bust of Legal Marijuana Grow: Over the weekend, 35 people were arrested and $10 million worth of marijuana was seized during a raid at an old airport in Calavaras County, California. According to the sheriff's department, the grow operation had been under investigation for the past month due to a reported increase in traffic going and out of the airport. However, the operation wasn't illegal; investigators found that the owners had a permit to grow cannabis."
"How Donald Trump Used Fine Print To Make It Harder To Sue Wall Street For Fraud: Throughout the presidential campaign, Donald Trump has cast himself as both an anti-Wall Street populist and a straight shooter fed up with the waffling and equivocating that dominates business and politics. He disdains 'crooked' Hillary Clinton, as he calls her, but the blunt-talking Trump is no stranger to the art of the lawyered caveat. In one of his most significant court battles, Trump protected his business empire with carefully parsed fine print — a 'perfect prospectus' that secured a landmark ruling helping to insulate Wall Street from charges of fraud."
"Doubts About the Promised Bounty of Genetically Modified Crops [...] But an extensive examination by The New York Times indicates that the debate has missed a more basic problem — genetic modification in the United States and Canada has not accelerated increases in crop yields or led to an overall reduction in the use of chemical pesticides."
Dept. of Keystone Kops: "N.S.A. Appears to Have Missed 'Big Red Flags' in Suspect's Behavior: WASHINGTON — Year after year, both in his messy personal life and his brazen theft of classified documents from the National Security Agency, Harold T. Martin III put to the test the government's costly system for protecting secrets. And year after year, the system failed."
"Racism Alone Doesn't Explain Trump's Support, Which Also Reflects Economic Anxiety: [...] This analysis, however, falls apart under scrutiny. First, while Trump's biggest fans are indeed wealthier than average, they remain overwhelmingly blue collar — and the Gallup study also shows that their children's community health and economic mobility are lower. They don't depend much on social services themselves, but they see their way of life and their families' futures disappearing before their eyes."
"Enormous, Humongous $36.4 September Trade Deficit Helps Trump: [...] In normal times a trade deficit of $36.4 billion in a single month would be met with outrage, headlines, speeches, torches and pitchforks. It represents a transfer of fulfillment of our economy's 'demand' out of the country at a time when we need jobs here. A trade deficit means factories close here, workers are laid off, they open 'there,' the same goods come back to our country. But it is called 'trade' because now the goods cross a border. And it is a trade deficit because more goods are coming in than are going out. Our economy has to borrow to make up the difference. In these abnormal times we're only getting the torches and pitchforks — also known as Trump voters, pissed off that their middle-class jobs have been replaced by low-paying jobs. The US has had a trade deficit since the late 1970s, when we were sold on 'free trade' and 'free markets' that benefit the 1% at the expense of the rest of us"
Jon Schwartz, "Donald Trump Will Be President. This Is What We Do Next. It's not hyperbole to say the United States, and in fact the world, will need some luck to get out of this one alive. So let's concentrate on making our own luck."
"Why More American Men Feel Discriminated Against [...] Perhaps more important, though, researchers have found that men are prone to seeing discrimination as a zero-sum game. That is, they believe that discrimination against one group necessarily benefits another group and vice versa, so any policy that benefits African-Americans, for instance, harms whites, and any policy that benefits women amounts to discrimination against men. Fifteen years ago, younger men — and women of all ages — overwhelmingly rejected this view, but recent data shows that younger white men are now about as likely as older men to see discrimination as zero-sum. With race-based policies, it's possible that some might amount to aiding a minority at the expense of the majority — affirmative action policies for college admissions, for instance. But it's often less clear how policies that help women might hurt men. In the ANES data, men who perceive discrimination against men are more likely to oppose mandatory employer coverage of contraception and parental leave laws, for instance. Even if there's no evidence that such policies would hurt men (heterosexual men clearly also benefit from contraception), the logic of the zero-sum approach is unforgiving: Anything that helps women must also be hurting men."
RIP: "Leonard Cohen Dead at 82: Hugely influential singer and songwriter's work spanned five decades" I suspected this would be coming soon, he was no spring chicken and he'd had a good run, but he was still performing and you always hope for more. It's not happy news, but we will always have that music.
* "Musician Leon Russell has died at 74." He'd been performing right up to the end.
* "Mose Allison, Iconic Blues and Jazz Pianist, Dead at 89: The Who, Yardbirds, Van Morrison, the Clash and Elvis Costello all covered musician's prolific catalog."
"Janet Reno, former US attorney general, has died," at 78, of complications from Parkinson's disease. Reno gets blamed for a lot of things that were set in motion before she took the job, but to me she will always be remembered as the idiot who was so afraid of being accused of partisanship that she let Ken Starr turn the Whitewater case into a sex show by expanding an investigation of a lousy real estate deal into a prurient circus around a private sexual affair.
"Creator of chatbot that beat 160,000 parking fines now tackling homelessness : Teenager who designed DoNotPay to overturn tickets in London and New York expands service to assist those dealing with housing problems in the UK. London-born Stanford student Joshua Browder created DoNotPay initially to help people appeal against fines for unpaid parking tickets. Dubbed 'the world's first robot lawyer', Browder later programmed it to deal with a wider range of legal issues, such as claiming for delayed flights and trains and payment protection insurance (PPI). Now, Browder, 19, wants his chatbot to provide free legal aid to people facing homelessness. He said: 'I never could have imagined a parking ticket bot would appeal so much to people. Then I realised: this issue is bigger than a few parking tickets.'"
Somehow I missed these at the time, but former US Congressman from North Carolina Brad Miller, now a Roosevelt Institute senior fellow, has been writing a bit about what he has seen in Washington, at HuffPo. Here are a couple:
* "The Rabble Understands Trade Pretty Well: There is no issue that has done more to fuel the unexpected success of anti-establishment candidates on the left and the right this year ' Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump ' than international trade. There is no issue about which establishment economic policy elites feel more certainty than trade. There is no issue about which elites feel more entitled to act on supposedly neutral, antiseptic technocratic analysis without the intrusion of tawdry politics than trade. And there is no issue that has done more to undermine the credibility and legitimacy of elites, political insiders, in the eyes of ordinary Americans, people trying to make an honest living, than trade."
* "Pragmatism in Pursuit of What? On Financial Reform, Differences in Goals [...] The elites who have filled economic policy roles in recent administrations, Democratic and Republican alike, did not share the public's enthusiasm for tough reform. And they regarded economic policy as the province of experts into which the opinion of the rabble should not intrude. 'Our job was to fix it,' former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said, 'not to make people like us.'"
The news told me the clouds had cleared so I could se the supermoon, only they hadn't, so no. However, David Sirota got a couple of nice shots.
"The Harris Incident" — I'd forgotten about this 1978, episode of Barney Miller. There's a lot in it. Watch it closely and see if you can see what I mean. And also remember that this is the show real cops used to say was the most realistic cop show on the air. Detective Ron Harris, by the way, is played by the same Ron Glass who we later knew as Book in Firefly.
Nellie McKay, "Ridiculous"
♫ "you shoulda listened to your kids
not corporate nationalists
nor fortunate fantasists who ill disguise their proto-fascist fist
you can't remember who to blame
those you hate or those you agree with
but the latter is hard to resist" ♬
"How Comcast Muscled Its Way out of Negative Political Ads: There are few things people agree on in this world more readily than their abhorrence of Comcast. Thanks to its price gouging and infamous customer service, the odious telecom monopoly was named Consumerist's "Worst Company in America" in both 2010 and 2014. The company has even been criticized for violating free-speech provisions via throttling — the intentional slowing of internet service to certain websites. Now, Comcast is under fire for messing with political advertisements in Oregon."
"We Never Voted for Corporate Rule: The $66 billion sale of Monsanto is yet another reminder of how corporations have colonized the world and subverted democracy. To regain our future, we must claim our right to popular sovereignty."
Matt Stoller in The Atlantic, "How Democrats Killed Their Populist Soul: In the 1970s, a new wave of post-Watergate liberals stopped fighting monopoly power. The result is an increasingly dangerous political system."
* Also on the subject of monopoly power (and how Robert Bork — yes, that Bork — started the ball rolling), Sam Seder interviewed Barry Lynn on how it directly threatens democracy and what we can do about it.
* "What Voters Need to Know About Wall Street and Economic Policy: Mike Konczal, a financial-engineer-turned-popular-progressive-blogger, offers his views on the 2008 financial meltdown and the ways in which it changed both political parties."
Dday is worried that the Clinton campaign has already chosen it's key staffers and we need to push hard to make sure they are to our liking. I don't actually consider it that surprising that they've already got their players lined up, but push-back is certainly something people should be ready to do.
"Major New Court Ruling Says 'Even The President' Can't Declare Torture Lawful: "In a robust ruling in favor of Abu Ghraib detainees, an appellate court ruled Friday that torture is such a clear violation of the law that it is 'beyond the power of even the president to declare such conduct lawful.' The ruling from a unanimous panel of judges on the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals reinstates a lawsuit against a military contractor for its role in the torture of four men at the notorious prison in Iraq. Last June, a district court ruled that a 'cloud of ambiguity' surrounds the definition of torture, and that despite anti-torture laws, the decision to torture was a 'political question' that could not be judged by courts. That ruling echoed the widely discredited legal theories of the Bush administration, which argued that the war on terror gave the president the inherent authority to indefinitely detain and torture terror suspects, and conduct mass surveillance on Americans' international communications. But the Fourth Circuit soundly rejected that theory, saying that the United States has clear laws against torturing detainees that apply to the executive branch." About damned time.
"ACLU Wants 23 Secret Surveillance Laws Made Public: The ACLU has identified 23 legal opinions that contain new or significant interpretations of surveillance law — affecting the government's use of malware, its attempts to compel technology companies to circumvent encryption, and the CIA's bulk collection of financial records under the Patriot Act — all of which remain secret to this day, despite an ostensible push for greater transparency following Edward Snowden's disclosures."
David Dayen, "When You Find Out Your Neighbors Own Your House and They Try to Evict You" — What it means when the banks broke the cadastre — the chain of title.
* "Robert Scheer and David Dayen Uncover Untold Stories of the Mortgage Crisis [...] That's right. What they did on the back end, after they fell into foreclosure, and reading those foreclosure documents, and seeing the discrepancy, and seeing that they're being sued by people they've never heard of before, entities that they've never heard of before, and seeing that the alleged transfer to that entity was executed after they were put into foreclosure. In other words, by the evidence they were presented, U.S. Bank, in the case of Lisa Epstein, didn't own the loan at the time that they foreclosed on her, and that's just the beginning."
Dean Baker, "Volcker and Peterson: Ignoring the Lack of Demand Problem: Former Federal Reserve Board Chair Paul Volcker and private equity billionaire Peter Peterson had a NYT column this morning complaining that not enough attention is being paid to the national debt. The piece uses wrong-headed economics and xenophobia to try to scare readers into backing their austerity agenda. On the economic side, it implies that the prospect of a rising debt to GDP ratio implies an imminent crisis. [...] There are several points to be made here. First the ratio of debt service to GDP is currently just 0.8 percent. (This is net of interest payments rebated by the Federal Reserve Board.) This is near a post-war low. By comparison the ratio was over 3.0 percent in the early and mid-1990s. In other words, the reality is the exact opposite of what Volcker and Peterson claim, the burden of the debt on the economy is unusually low.
* David Dayen, "Debate Moderators Under the Spell of Deficit-Obsessed Billionaire Pete Peterson: THE COMMITTEE FOR a Responsible Federal Budget, an organization that is virtually unknown outside of Washington, was nonetheless cited in four different questions during this year's presidential and vice-presidential debates. Moderators Elaine Quijano and Chris Wallace, seemingly unable to string together an intelligent thought about domestic policy on their own, outsourced their questions to a cabal of self-styled serious grown-ups who believe that advocating for cutting Social Security and Medicare makes them look like paragons of virtue. But members of Washington's media elite are virtually the only people left in America still buying the well-funded nonsense CRFB and its Wall Street backers have been selling for decades. Every time their ideas get exposed to the public, they are rejected wholesale. While the D.C. cocktail-party circuit sees deficit scare tactics as steely-eyed wisdom, the national constituency for such monomania could fit in a mid-sized sedan." I didn't think writing about Pete Peterson's antics could be so funny.
By the way, Dean Baker has a book out, Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer. "There has been an enormous upward redistribution of income in the United States in the last four decades. In his most recent book, Baker shows that this upward redistribution was not the result of globalization and the natural workings of the market. Rather it was the result of conscious policies that were designed to put downward pressure on the wages of ordinary workers while protecting and enhancing the incomes of those at the top. Baker explains how rules on trade, patents, copyrights, corporate governance, and macroeconomic policy were rigged to make income flow upward."
"We're Missing The Point About Trump's Charges Of Illegitimate Elections." I think most readers of The Sideshow are aware that if the Republicans are accusing the Democrats of doing something shady, that means the Republicans are doing it. But the Republicans also have a long history of declaring any Democratic presidential winner illegitimate. Strangely, the one president of our lifetimes who can genuinely be called "illegitimate", George W. Bush, is not given this label by the Democratic establishment. Funny how that happens.
"An Unpredictable, High-Stakes Election [...] On election night, Wasserman Schultz was announced the winner by a commanding lead of 13.5%. However, we have examined statistical analysis of the race from four separate analysts and after detailed demographic research have concluded that there are red flags that deserve further investigation." This is Florida, where people have constantly complained that the machines flip their votes.
David Sirota, "Hillary Clinton And Wall Street: Financial Industry May Control Retirement Savings In A Clinton Administration: While Hillary Clinton has spent the presidential campaign saying as little as possible about her ties to Wall Street, the executive who some observers say could be her Treasury Secretary has been openly promoting a plan to give financial firms control of hundreds of billions of dollars in retirement savings. The executive is Tony James, president of the Blackstone Group."
* Yves Smith, "Blackstone's Tony James Touting What Looks Like Hillary's Scheme to Gut Social Security: In other words, this is the worst of all possible worlds. You have an individual account, but you are not permitted to invest in stocks and bonds; you may not be permitted even to choose your asset allocation. Worse, James' language suggests that the vehicles will be 'run by professional asset managers,' as in many or perhaps all will be actively managed, as opposed to indexes. As any student of John Bogle will tell you, paying for active managers is a waste of money, but Hillary wants to go that route on an industrial scale so as to further enrich grifters like Tony James (let us not forget that the Blackstone has paid fines in an SEC settlement for charging fees it was not authorized to take, which in most walks of life would be called embezzlement). And of course, private equity is on the list of preferred investment. And even better: James holds up private equity as a solution, just as it supposedly is for public pension funds, even as Blackstone was one of the first private equity firms to warn that returns in the future would be paltry. Indeed, the valuations of the private equity firms that are public say that they expect none of them will be earning any carry fees over the next few years. It's perverse to see James praise public pension funds for their high allocations to alternative investments even when he and his private equity colleagues snigger privately about their lack of sophistications."
* Sirota again, "Wall Street 2016: Firms Managing Pension Money Spend Millions To Support Governors, Despite Pay-To-Play Rule."
David Dayen, "Debate Moderators Under the Spell of Deficit-Obsessed Billionaire Pete Peterson: THE COMMITTEE FOR a Responsible Federal Budget, an organization that is virtually unknown outside of Washington, was nonetheless cited in four different questions during this year's presidential and vice-presidential debates. Moderators Elaine Quijano and Chris Wallace, seemingly unable to string together an intelligent thought about domestic policy on their own, outsourced their questions to a cabal of self-styled serious grown-ups who believe that advocating for cutting Social Security and Medicare makes them look like paragons of virtue. But members of Washington's media elite are virtually the only people left in America still buying the well-funded nonsense CRFB and its Wall Street backers have been selling for decades. Every time their ideas get exposed to the public, they are rejected wholesale. While the D.C. cocktail-party circuit sees deficit scare tactics as steely-eyed wisdom, the national constituency for such monomania could fit in a mid-sized sedan." I didn't think writing about Pete Peterson's antics could be so funny.
"Trump TV? CNN's Jeff Zucker explains how he became Donald's useful idiot: Until very recently, it seemed self-evident that Donald Trump was the biggest raging moron in American public life. But that was before CNN president Jeff Zucker's star turn before the guardians of establishment wisdom at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government."
Hélène Barthélemy in The Nation, "The Agency Designed to Protect Civilians From the Police Actually Protects Police From Civilians: The CCRB, it seems, was an agency doomed to uselessness from the start. On September 16, 1992, 10,000 protesters descended on City Hall. They blocked traffic for the better part of an hour, climbing over cars, buses, and police barricades. Some were violent and inebriated, and a few physically assaulted members of the press, as others hurled racist epithets at New York's first African-American mayor, David Dinkins. They eventually burst through barricades into the City Hall parking lot, much to the indifference of the 300 uniformed police officers there to oversee the demonstration. The protesters were off-duty cops. sent in by police unions and egged on by would-be mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, they were indignant over that day's heated hearing on a bill supported by Mayor Dinkins. The bill was designed to establish an independent civilian agency providing oversight of police, at a time not too different from today, when unrelenting police brutality was the subject of both weekly headlines and unyielding protests. The agency was pushed for by a 'rainbow coalition' of community groups, civil-liberties agencies, and City Council representatives."
James O'Keefe hits paydirt. They got a video of a Democrat talking about sending people to Trump rallies to start fights. But it means some people are starting to talk about O'Keefe like he's...legitimate.
* And just in time, because some people are also saying that "Trump Could Be Quietly Building a Media Empire," and O'Keefe is expected to have a place in it.
Not much has changed since 2007, when this came out: "Special Report: Democratic House Officials Recruited Wealthy Conservatives: This letter sent from then DCCC Head Rahm Emanuel to Democratic House hopeful Jan Schneider underscores a DCCC policy of remaining "neutral" in primary races. Schneider soon came to doubt the letter's sincerity."
RIP: "Phil Chess, the Polish immigrant who brought blues to the world: The Chess Records co-founder was first inspired by music he heard through the walls of a Baptist church, and went on to make an indelible mark on music history."
* Tom Hayden, Civil Rights and Antiwar Activist Turned Lawmaker, Dies at 76, of complications after a stroke. A long time ago, I met Tom and his wife of the time, Jane Fonda, in a local church. It was Jane I ended up arguing with, so I can't say much about Tom, although I had seen him at events where SDS made presentations. In recent years, he has been most notable for making silly endorsements of Democratic primary candidates Senator Barack Obama and Secretary Hillary Clinton, but in his younger years, he made his mark with The Port Huron Statement, a document that was remarkable in its time, and perhaps today as well.
* Bobby Vee: 1960s pop singer dies aged 73. He did two of my favorites, "The Night Has A Thousand Eyes" and "Take Good Care of My Baby".
* Sherri S. Tepper, 87. John Scalzi, said: "This is genuinely upsetting news for me: Locus is reporting the death of Sheri S. Tepper, who wrote the Hugo-nominated novel Grass among many others, and who was given a lifetime achievement award by the World Fantasy Convention just last year. Tepper was in her late 80s, and had an accomplished life outside of her considerable writing career, including being an executive director of the Rocky Mountain Planned Parenthood in Colorado, so one can't precisely say this is an unexpected development. But she was one of my favorite science fiction and fantasy writers, and an influence on my thinking about SF/F writing, so to have her gone on is still a deeply depressing thing." Me, I loved her books. Here's the obit at Tor.com.
* "Steve Dillon: Judge Dredd, Preacher and Punisher comic artist dies" — he was 54.
* "RIP Jack Chick, father of the Satanic Panic." Cory Doctorow said, "The paranoid, hateful minicomics pioneer is now dead. No one will say how he came to be dead." Mrs. Betty Bowers, America's Best Christian, posted a cartoon in his honor that you can print out and leave around for people to find, just like the real thing (only different).
"Code of Silence: Two Chicago police officers uncovered a massive criminal enterprise within the department. Then they were hung out to dry." — Yes, that's right, a criminal gang operating inside the Chicago police. "The common understanding of the code of silence is that it is a peer-to-peer phenomenon — I've got your back, you've got mine — within the rank and file. Senior officials are implicated to the extent they do not take affirmative steps to discourage operation of the code. The thesis of the Spalding case, by contrast, is that high-ranking officials ordered retaliation against the officers for violating the code."
* "Hundreds of police departments in Texas, California broke laws on reporting police shootings, study finds. HOUSTON -| Hundreds of police departments in Texas and California failed to report officer-involved shooting deaths as required by law in the past decade, a recent study found. Research by Texas State University in San Marcos found registries created by the two states to report all in-custody deaths did not list about 220 use-of-force fatalities in Texas and 440 in California from 2005-2015, the Houston Chronicle reported Monday.
" I don't even blink when I see stories like this anymore. Of course they did.
"Elizabeth Warren Wants President Obama to Fire His SEC Chair: In an extraordinary letter, Warren highlighted several critical shortcomings at the Wall Street oversight agency. For many months, Senator Elizabeth Warren has been castigating Securities and Exchange Commission chair Mary Jo White during hearings, media appearances, and in letters to the agency. Friday morning, Warren finally asked President Obama to replace her. In a strongly worded letter to the White House, Warren outlined her principal objections to White's tenure and what she described as 'brazen conduct': namely, White's refusal to develop an SEC rule that would force publicly traded companies to disclose political donations, along with White's failure to fully implement Dodd-Frank financial reforms. [...] Moreover, Warren is firing yet another warning shot to the next president about the role Warren expects to play. While Obama is unlikely to demote his own selection for chair, Hillary Clinton could plausibly do so without appearing to do an about-face."
"Legalizing Cannabis: Prison Food Provider Donates To Keep Marijuana Illegal In Arizona: A deep-pocketed coalition is spending big to keep marijuana illegal in Arizona. Drug companies, the Chamber of Commerce, and the alcohol industry, have together poured millions of dollars into the campaign to defeat Proposition 205, a ballot measure that would legalize marijuana for those over 21. And as opinion polls show a tight race, another industry entered the fray: prison food providers."
"RT: NatWest 'freezes Russian channel's UK bank accounts': NatWest bank has frozen the accounts of Russia's state-run broadcaster RT, its editor-in-chief says. Margarita Simonyan tweeted: "They've closed our accounts in Britain. All our accounts. 'The decision is not subject to review.' Praise be to freedom of speech!" RT says the bank gave no explanation for its decision."
Jon Schwarz, "D.C. Hivemind Mulls How Clinton Can Pass Huge Corporate Tax Cut: Treating the whole voting thing as a formality, serious political players are now pondering how exactly President Hillary Clinton can pass what Sen. Elizabeth Warren has called 'a giant wet kiss for tax dodgers.'
This discussion isn't happening on television, where normal people would hear about it. Or on Reddit, where people would freak out about it. To the degree it's taking place in public at all, it surfaces in elite publications, where only elites are paying attention. For instance, Peter Orszag, a top Obama economic official before he left to cash in with Citigroup, just wrote an op-ed in the Financial Times on how to make the wet kiss happen."
The Nation, "Amy Goodman Is Facing Prison for Reporting on the Dakota Access Pipeline. That Should Scare Us All. e charges against Goodman are a clear attack on journalism and freedom of the press. [...] Goodman's report created a rare crack in the consensus of silence. And, as Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi writes, the outrage it generated may well have influenced the Obama administration's decision to halt work on the pipeline several days later. This was journalism that mattered. Yet, on September 8, Goodman received the news that Morton County, North Dakota, had issued a warrant for her arrest. The charge: riot, a misdemeanor punishable by jail time and a fine. (It should be noted that the original charge leveled against Goodman was not riot but criminal trespass, also a misdemeanor. However, just days before Goodman was set to appear in court, the prosecutor, Ladd Erickson, switched up the charges because, he admitted in an email to Goodman's lawyer, Tom Dickson, there were 'legal issues with proving the notice of trespassing requirements in the statute.') When asked to explain the grounds for arresting a working journalist, Erickson told the Grand Forks Herald that he did not, in fact, consider Goodman a journalist."
* Matt Taibbi, "Journalist Amy Goodman Shouldn't Be Arrested for Covering Dakota Pipeline Story: [...] But a prosecutor who arrests a reporter because he doesn't think she's "balanced" enough is basically telling future reporters what needs to be in their stories to avoid arrest. This is totally improper and un-American. We have enough meddling editors in this country without also recruiting government officials to the job. "
* "Documentary Filmmaker Faces Up to 45 Years in Prison for Covering Pipeline Protest." Edward Snowden tweeted this story, saying, "This reporter is being prosecuted for covering the North Dakota oil protests. For reference, I face a mere 30 years."
* Luckily... "Judge Rejects "Riot" Charges Against Amy Goodman in North Dakota."
It's not just black Kenyan Muslim presidents: "McCain: GOPers Will Unite To Block 'Any' Clinton SCOTUS Nominee." She's hardly nearing the end of her term, either. They can do this without ever going on the record, simply by continuing not to bring votes on nominees to the floor. Then you can never say, "He voted against Garland." Which is protection for office-holders on both sides who don't want to let anyone know where they really stand. As in, "He voted against Roberts," when he first made sure there was no filibuster of a nomination he knew would pass if it got to the floor, versus, "He never voted for Garland."
"Excerpts of Hillary Clinton's Paid Speeches to Goldman Sachs Finally Leaked — And if you expected her to sound more in tune with Wall Street than with all those kids who live in their parents' basements (do they? Maybe in some households, but my parents didn't make me vacate my room on graduation), well, you won't be surprised. One gets the impression that, while she thinks she can understand why those kids are so upset, she doesn't actually concur with their entirely sane recognition that it doesn't have to be this way — I mean, gosh, it's too bad for them, but it's just the way it is.
* David Sirota, "Hillary Clinton, In Paid Speeches To Wall Street, Promoted Commission That Pushed Social Security Cuts [...] In the email published by Wikileaks, Clinton tells a real estate industry trade association that she believes that as a public official, 'You need both a public and a private position' on major issues.
Clinton promised on the campaign trail that she would oppose the 12-nation Trans Pacific Partnership, and that she 'will stop any trade deal that kills jobs or holds down wages.' But in the email released by Wikileaks, she is shown telling a Brazilian bank that, 'My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders.' She also is quoted saying: 'We have to resist protectionism, other kinds of barriers to market access and to trade and I would like to see this get much more attention and be not just a policy for a year under president X or president Y but a consistent one.' Clinton on the campaign trail declared, 'I won't cut Social Security.' Yet in the email's excerpts of her Morgan Stanley speech, she lauded a presidential commission that proposed changes that would slash Social Security benefits, according to experts. The email shows Clinton specifically telling Morgan Stanley that the Simpson-Bowles commission 'put forth the right framework' for dealing with fiscal challenges. She also said 'the Simpson-Bowles framework and the big elements of it were right.' As the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reported in 2011, that commission proposed a plan to 'cut benefits for the vast majority of Social Security recipients, weaken the link between a recipient's benefits and past earnings (which could undermine public support for the program), and, despite the claims of the co-chairs, fail to protect most low-income workers from benefit cuts.'"
* David Dayen, "Behind Closed Doors, Hillary Clinton Sympathized With Goldman Sachs Over Financial Reform [...] Far from chiding Goldman Sachs for obstructing Democratic proposals for financial reform, Clinton appeared to sympathize with the giant investment bank. At a Goldman Sachs Alternative Investments Symposium in October 2013, Clinton almost apologized for the Dodd-Frank reform bill, explaining that it had to pass 'for political reasons,' because 'if you were an elected member of Congress and people in your constituency were losing jobs and shutting businesses and everybody in the press is saying it's all the fault of Wall Street, you can't sit idly by and do nothing.'"
* "New Email Leak Reveals Clinton Campaign's Cozy Press Relationship" — Glenn says this is just a glimpse into how political campaigns operate rather than some surprising exposé of nefarious doings, but considering the way the narrative became filled with spurious smears of Sanders and his supporters that came straight from the Clinton campaign, it's that much more of a bitter reminder that they pretty much kept the establishment press thoroughly in the bag for The One True Candidate all along.
People who get all their information from Clinton campaign emails keep insisting that the restricted number of debates DWS set up were not evidence that the DNC was working to aid Clinton's campaign and rig the primaries against Sanders, but the email that says it all right up front makes it clear: "Through internal discussions, we concluded that it was in our interest to: 1) limit the number of debates (and the number in each state); 2) start the debates as late as possible; 3) keep debates out of the busy window between February 1 and February 27, 2016 (Iowa to South Carolina); 4) create a schedule that would allow the later debates to be cancelled if the race is for practical purposes over; 5) encourage an emphasis on local issues and local media participants in the debate formats; and 6) ensure a format that provides equal time for all candidates and does not give the moderator any discretion to focus on one candidate."
Nice precis in "Roaming Charges: a Wikileak is a Terrible Thing to Waste [...] The three prevailing obsessions of the Podesta emails: raising money, containing the contamination of the Clinton Foundation and screwing Bernie Sanders. There's barely any hint of anxiety over Trump. In fact, they relish his every false move, almost as if each faltering step had been pre-visualized, if not orchestrated. If possible, the press corps comes off worse than Team Clinton. Almost every reporter is revealed as pliable, servile and so lazy that they basically beg the Clinton PR shop to write their stories for them. The press has reiterated this obsequiousness over the course of the last seven days with what can only be described as an orgy of coverage of the Trump sex tapes and assorted scandals. By all accounts, the Trump campaign is dead and has been for weeks. The 24/7 obsession now amounts to a kind of political corpse abuse. Forsaken in this feeding frenzy has been any serious attention at all to the Wikileaks email dump, except to echo Clinton camp assertions that they were the victims of a Russian plot to tilt the election to Trump. If so, the Russians have proved even more incompetent than we thought them to be." (And comments on other news, as well.)
Despite the fact that Clinton herself confirmed the authenticity of the leaked emails when she explained their contents in response to questions at the second debate between Clinton and Trump, David Brock's Daily News Bin has been pushing back with fanciful stories about how the emails are fake and come from the Russians. Then the government spook agencies got into the act, which of course led to Marcy Wheeler unpacking the language to work out what it means, and what it means is that they still have no way whatsoever to tie these particular leaks to actual Russian hackers. Yes, the Russians have been hacking all over the place, but no, there's no evidence that the material posted at DCLeaks and WikiLeaks came from the Russians, let alone the fanciful idea that all hacking and leaking could only have occurred at the command of Putin.
A connected meme is that it's terrible for the Russians to be trying to influence or otherwise interfere with American elections. Even if we forget that politicians taking campaign donations from foreign entities is exactly that and goes on constantly — and illegally — it might be a good idea to recall The long history of the U.S. interfering with elections elsewhere.
Another talking point meant to undermine WikiLeaks is the question of why Assange isn't releasing hacks of the RNC and Donald Trump. We know that Assange is pissed off with Clinton, who has been a cheerleader for the notion that Assange should be shut up permanently, preferably in a deep, dark hole, but WikiLeaks doesn't commission leaks, it just receives them. They're not responsible for the fact that no one has sent them data about Trump or the GOP. But isn't it a funny question? This blog has about 15 years worth of scandals by Republicans that involve quite serious criminal as well as immoral activity, and the Democratic Party, the DoJ, the White House, and law enforcement in general, not to mention the TV talking heads, all seem to be completely uninterested. So what are these hacks supposed to reveal? Are they going to find out Trump is a crass, racist, sexist, tax-evading right-wing loon? Yeah, that'll surprise people!
Understand, there is no evidence that the Russians are behind the emails, but Clinton campers really urgently want you to think so. For some reason they believe it invalidates the contents, but it is also part of the rhetoric that the neocon warriors have been floating against Russia in their current revival of red-baiting. Yeah, the Russians are coming.
Of course, the whole Russian thing, aside from being a modern commies-under-the-bed propaganda campaign, is really just about distracting from the contents of the emails. By which I do not mean mere confirmation of the illicit relationship between the Clinton campaign in the primaries and the DNC itself, but things like "Clinton Email Shows US Sought Syria Regime Change for Israel's Sake ."
Democratic partisans think they're seeing the GOP falling apart. It may be fun to think so, but let Ian Welsh spell it out for you. "The Republican Party Is Not 'Broken': There are a great number of stories about how Trump is 'destroying' the Republican party.
Bullshit.
That Trump is most likely to lose the Presidency badly does not make the Republican party broken. There is some down-ballot effect, but:
* Republicans will certainly hold the House;
* Republicans will still control majority of State Governorships; and,
* They might lose the Senate but if they do it will be barely.
Does that sound like a broken party? No, it sounds like a largely ordinary election result: in fact, in 2008, the Republicans did far worse.
There will be blow-on effects from the Trump candidacy, but they will no more 'destroy' the Republican Party than the Tea Party did."
I can't help wondering if Joe is feigning surprise in this segment where he appears to be learning for the first time that the government can't negotiate drug prices. I wonder this, because it was big news at the time and we were all bitching about it and startled that the Republicans finally gave in and voted for it. I say "gave in" because even though, yes, some of them were happy to do Big Pharma's bidding, a lot of them balked and they had to hold voting up late into the night and blackmail their own members into voting for it. I realize he was always a Republican operative, in or out of Congress, but he didn't notice? (Thanks to CMike for supplying better links than the one I was going to use, complete with transcriptions.)
From bmaz, "Trump Is Who He's Always Been, And Trump Is the Epitome of the GOP; They Have To Own Him." And they're having a hard time with it. A variety of Bushes and the McCains have already declared they won't vote for him, while Paul Ryan and others are steadfastly biting their lips together. Many establishment Republicans are saying they'll vote for Clinton, others are saying they simply won't vote for president (or at all!). Officially, the Republican Party is still "100% behind Trump", but the religious right is split between being outraged at how this man should never be president and believing that Trump's vulgar impropriety, misogyny and licentiousness were all part of God's plan to propel him to the White House.
From Facebook, Matt Stoller defines neoliberalism: "Our current governing apparatus is neoliberal. What does that actually mean? What is neoliberalism? Neoliberalism is a kind of statecraft. It means organizing state policies by making them appear as if they are the consequences of depoliticized financial markets. It involves moving power from public institutions to private institutions, and allowing governance to happen through concentrated financial power. Actual open markets for goods and services tend to disappear in neoliberal societies. Financial markets flourish, real markets morph into mass distribution middlemen like Walmart or Amazon. This definition is my paraphrase of Greta Krippner's "Capitalizing on Crisis", a pretty good book about what happened from the 1960s to the 1980s in terms of financial politics. Her thesis is that the liberal democratic system was dismantled because it was too explicit about who was making choices. People would get mad at politicians when they didn't have, say, mortgage credit, or when the price of milk went up too high. The answer came to be neoliberalism, or creating a veil of financial markets to make all those decisions seem apolitical. Milk too expensive? Ah, those darn markets. Sure you can get mortgage credit, but market is going to charge you 19%. Can't afford that? Oh those darn financial markets. Neoliberalism is not faith in free markets. Neoliberalism is not free market capitalism. Neoliberalism is a specific form of statecraft that uses financial markets as a veil to disguise governing policies."
John Pilger isn't so sure the CW is correct. He says Hillary Clinton is more dangerous than Donald Trump. "A mini nuclear bomb is planned. It is known as the B61 Model 12. There has never been anything like it. General James Cartwright, a former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said, 'Going smaller [makes using this nuclear] weapon more thinkable.' In the last eighteen months, the greatest build-up of military forces since World War Two — led by the United States — is taking place along Russia's western frontier. Not since Hitler invaded the Soviet Union have foreign troops presented such a demonstrable threat to Russia. Ukraine — once part of the Soviet Union — has become a CIA theme park. Having orchestrated a coup in Kiev, Washington effectively controls a regime that is next door and hostile to Russia: a regime rotten with Nazis, literally. Prominent parliamentary figures in Ukraine are the political descendants of the notorious OUN and UPA fascists. They openly praise Hitler and call for the persecution and expulsion of the Russian speaking minority. This is seldom news in the West, or it is inverted to suppress the truth. In Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia — next door to Russia — the US military is deploying combat troops, tanks, heavy weapons. This extreme provocation of the world's second nuclear power is met with silence in the West." And then there's China, and no sign from Clinton that she is the least bit worried by these developments. Indeed, quite the reverse.
Chris Hedges, "Donald Trump: The Dress Rehearsal for Fascism [...] The political elites in Yugoslavia at first thought the nationalist cranks and lunatics, who amassed enough support to be given secondary positions of power, could be contained. This mistake was as misguided as Franz von Papen's assurances that when the uncouth Austrian Adolf Hitler was appointed the German chancellor in January 1933 the Nazi leader would be easily manipulated. Any system of prolonged political paralysis and failed liberalism vomits up monsters. And the longer we remain in a state of political paralysis — especially as we stumble toward another financial collapse — the more certain it becomes that these monsters will take power."
"House of Lords attacks the government over library closures: John Bird painted a grim picture of the UK with a reduced library service, warning the House of Lords on Thursday that cuts would result in 'disorder, crime, problems for schools and the fact that children will not be able to get a job because they will not have the skills and abilities'."
Fred on Everything, "An Obsolescent Military: Bombing Everything, Gaining Nothing: What, precisely, is the US military for, and what, precisely, can it do? In practical terms, how powerful is it? On paper, it is formidable, huge, with carrier battle groups, advanced technology, remarkable submarines, satellites, and so on. What does this translate to?"
"2016 Nobel Prize In Literature Awarded To Bob Dylan: STOCKHOLM, Oct 13 (Reuters) — Bob Dylan, regarded as the voice of a generation for his influential songs from the 1960s onwards, has won the Nobel Prize for Literature in a surprise decision that made him the only singer-songwriter to win the award. The 75-year-old Dylan — who won the prize for 'having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition' — now finds himself in the company of Winston Churchill, Thomas Mann and Rudyard Kipling as Nobel laureates. The announcement was met with gasps in Stockholm's stately Royal Academy hall, followed — unusually — by some laughter."
In The New Yorker, a long profile, "Leonard Cohen Makes It Darker: At eighty-two, the troubadour has another album coming. Like him, it is obsessed with mortality, God-infused, and funny." I was more affected then I expected to be over the news therein that Marianne had died last summer — which I had missed at the time — with a friend holding her hand and humming "Bird on the Wire". So long, Marianne. Nice discussion with Dylan of Cohen's work, too.
I loved the Amazon blurb for Is There Life Outside The Box?: An Actor Despairs by Peter Davidson, the Fifth Doctor. Not sure if he wrote it or it's just Tennant's foreword or something else, but it was fun to read.
Mr. Sideshow enjoyed this Halloween costume he saw on the front page of the Evening Standard.
"Larry Kane: The reluctant Beatles fan. [...] Kane tried to persuade his bosses to send instead one of the DJs already into the band. 'There were all the Cuban refugees in Miami. There was war in Vietnam escalating and racial revolution in America — why would we bother about an English band who would doubtless disappear in a few months?' But in December 1964 Kane found himself at the first venue on the tour — the Cow Palace in Daly City, California."
There was a vice presidential debate that I could not bring myself to watch, but as I understand it, two white bread guys flapped at each other. I didn't expect Kaine to tell much truth and I didn't expect Pence to do anything but lie, and from all reports, that's mostly what happened. Ryan Grim and Sam Seder did what might be a useful debate recap that was probably smarter than most of the articles I read about, though. Short version: Kaine's job was to get a few lines out there uninterrupted that could be used in video ads later, and to keep Pence from doing the same. I guess he did that.
"'So what?': In 1984, Bush official celebrated impotence of post-debate factchecking: Just before the 1984 election, Peter Teeley, the press secretary for then-Vice President George H.W. Bush, told the New York Times, 'You can say anything you want during a debate and 80 million people hear it.' If the media documents afterwards that what the candidate said was false, said Teely, 'So what?... Maybe 200 people read it or 2,000 or 20,000.'"
It sounds like some members of the anti-Corbyn wing of Labour are starting to realize they are doing real damage to their party and it has to stop. Even the Guardian is starting to post articles to this effect, after abusing Corbyn all year. With even Gordon Brown making the call, that leaves Tony Blair as the major outlier. Of course, much of this is along the lines of "rejoin his government and get back on the bench before those seats get filled by more Corbyn-minded types," and "Corbyn needs to compromise like hell and not get rid of people who have consistently been trying to undermine him," but it's a start, I suppose. Anyway, they tried it on again and failed even worse than they did last time, and it's not like they have much choice.
* "The Guardian view on the Labour leadership: wanted — tolerance and compromise"
* "Labour faces terminal damage if fighting goes on, warns Andy Burnham"
* "Corbyn Wins Challenge From The U.K.'s Version Of The Blue Dogs And New Dems-- The Conservative Wing Of The Labour Party.: Today, Jeremy Corbyn's 62% win was bigger than his original victory as leader of Britain's Labour Party-- 313,209 to 193,229 votes-- much to the chagrin of the establishment conservatives (and their media allies) who hold the progressive Corbyn in contempt and view him with disdain and hatred."
* But somehow Mr. Corbyn doesn't think keeping a cabinet full of enemies at his back is a prudent idea.
* I'm pleased to see Mark Steel weigh in on the subject: "The Labour plotters are right: it's definitely Jeremy Corbyn who needs to 'learn lessons' from the last few months: The plotters made an important point: that Corbyn must 'reach out'. Instead of being divisive, as he was last time by offering them jobs in the shadow cabinet from which they resigned, he should let them pick their own jobs, and if they don't fancy doing them one day, let them bring in games."
Not quite sure how long we've been waiting for something like this to happen — "Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore suspended for rest of term: Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore has been suspended from the bench for telling probate judges to defy federal orders regarding gay marriage. It's the second time Moore has been removed from the chief justice job for defiance of federal courts — the first time in 2003 for refusing to remove a Ten Commandments monument from the state judicial building."
No surprises here: "US police abused database access to stalk innocent people — report: Police across the US have been abusing confidential law enforcement databases to stalk romantic partners, landlords, journalists or neighbors who had no connection to actual police investigations, a report has revealed. An Associated Press probe into abuses of the federal and state crime databases has revealed numerous cases of law enforcement checking information on people for personal reasons — whether romantic quarrels, personal conflicts, or voyeuristic curiosity. In a handful of cases, officers were caught using the information to stalk or harass people, while one former New York cop even sold information to private investigators."
"Opiates Are a National Epidemic. Enter the Opioid Lobby: The epidemic is nationwide. The crisis is nationwide. The corporate pushback to develop a policy that looks good and doesn't do something about the problem that cuts into corporate profits also is nationwide."
"Haymarket time capsule uncovered, still unopened: History is being uncovered near the Haymarket Martyrs Monument in Forest Home Cemetery. A large team of volunteers worked to recover a time capsule that was buried near the monument over a hundred years ago. Despite adverse weather conditions over the weekend, they made remarkable progress, finding a cube, believed to contain the ashes of Haymarket martyr, Oscar Neebe. Beneath this, they discovered a cylinder that appears to be the time capsule. It was removed late Monday afternoon. This discovery caps over two years of effort on the part of local residents and archeological experts. Researchers Mark Rogovin, a labor historian, and Bleue Benton, an Oak Park Public Library research librarian, first found mention of the capsule in a Chicago Tribune article from Nov. 7, 1892. It describes a capsule being ceremonially buried under the cornerstone of the monument. A speaker at the ceremony stated, 'When generations to come dig up these records and read them, they will wonder that such barbarity could have been tolerated in the 19th century.'"
"Why This Activist Hacker Is Launching A Hunger Strike In Jail: Martin Gottesfeld, an activist jailed on charges stemming from a politically motivated cyberattack on Boston Children's Hospital, said he'll begin a hunger strike on Oct. 3 to bring attention to what he says is widespread mistreatment of children. In a message published exclusively on HuffPost last week, Gottesfeld said he took out the hospital's internet in the spring of 2014 to protest the controversial treatment of teenager Justina Pelletier and to protest the 'troubled teen industry' more broadly."
"U.S. Admits Israel Is Building Permanent Apartheid Regime — Weeks After Giving It $38 Billion: In 2010, Israel's then-defense minister, Ehud Barak, explicitly warned that Israel would become a permanent 'apartheid' state if it failed to reach a peace agreement with Palestinians that creates their own sovereign nation and vests them with full political rights. 'As long as in this territory west of the Jordan River there is only one political entity called Israel, it is going to be either non-Jewish, or non-democratic,' Barak said. 'If this bloc of millions of Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state.' Honest observers on both sides of the conflict have long acknowledged that the prospects for a two-state solution are virtually non-existent: another way of saying that Israel's status as a permanent apartheid regime is inevitable. Indeed, U.S. intelligence agencies as early as 45 years ago explicitly warned that Israeli occupation would become permanent if it did not end quickly. All relevant evidence makes clear this is what has happened. [...] This week, with its fresh new $38 billion commitment in hand, the Israeli government announced the approval of an all new settlement in the West Bank, one that is particularly hostile to ostensible U.S. policy, the international consensus, and any prospects for an end to occupation. The new settlement, 'one of a string of housing complexes that threaten to bisect the West Bank,' as the New York Times put it this morning, 'is designed to house settlers from a nearby illegal outpost, Amona, which an Israeli court has ordered demolished.' This new settlement extends far into the West Bank: closer to Jordan, in fact, than to Israel. In response to this announcement, the U.S. State Department yesterday issued an unusually harsh denunciation of Israel's actions. 'We strongly condemn the Israeli government's recent decision to advance a plan that would create a significant new settlement deep in the West Bank,' it began. It suggested Netanyahu has been publicly lying, noting that the 'approval contradicts previous public statements by the government of Israel that it had no intention of creating new settlements.'"
"Yes, Monsanto Actually DID Buy the BLACKWATER Mercenary Group!: Reports that the huge multinational corporation Monsanto bought the largest mercenary army in the world might have seemed ridiculous on the surface. But it turns out that's exactly what happened. A report authored by Jeremy Scahill for The Nation revealed that Blackwater, later called Xe Services and more recently 'Academi', had been sold to Monsanto."
"Cerberus Uses Private Equity Looting Strategy With Scandal-Ridden Steward Health Care Hospitals [...] After Steward consolidated, operational misadventures began. In 2013, it closed the pediatric unit at Morton Hospital (look here). In 2014, it closed Quincy Hospital, despite promises that it would expand health care services, and specifically not close that hospital so quickly (look here). Starting in 2014, Steward stonewalled state requests to disclose financial data as required by state regulations after the private equity takeover (look here). In 2016, Steward continued to withhold financial data (look here), and closed the short-lived family medicine residency program at Carney Hospital, amidst complaints by the residents about poor organization, and inadequate numbers of faculty (look here).
Now, this is an interesting development. "Congress votes to override Obama for first time: Congress voted Wednesday to override President Obama for the first time in his eight-year tenure, as the House followed the Senate in rejecting a veto of legislation allowing families of terrorist victims to sue governments suspected of sponsoring terrorism. The House easily cleared the two-thirds threshold to push back against the veto. The final tally was 348-77, with 18 Republicans and 59 Democrats voting not to override the veto. The Senate voted 97-1 in favor of the override earlier in the day, with only Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) voting to sustain the president's veto. Given that Obama's argument is that people we bomb might sue the United States, it's rather astonishing that this Congress actually shot him down. The White House said, "I would venture to say that this is the single most embarrassing thing that the United States Senate has done, possibly, since 1983." Many people think it's the most sensible thing they've done for quite a while. But think about that headline — for the first time ever. The obstructionist Republicans have never before overridden a Obama veto. I wonder if any of his apologists saw that headline and thought, "Oh. How come?"
* Elsewhere, opinions differ: "White House Is Profoundly Wrong About the Most Embarrassing Thing Senate Has Done."
* But anyway, the very next day, the Republicans complained that the president had not properly apprised them of the "downside" that Obama had been claiming was the downside in all the media, so it's all his fault they overrode his veto. Yes, "Day After Rejecting Veto, Congressional Leaders Concerned About 9/11 Law: House Speaker Paul Ryan said Congress might have to 'fix' the legislation to protect U.S. service members in particular." Of course, the legislation itself is such weak tea that it takes very little for the government to stop any lawsuits it doesn't happen to like.
"Pro-Fracking Law Ruled Unconstitutional by Pennsylvania Supreme Court: The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has ruled that the state's controversial Act 13 is unconstitutional, calling it a special law that benefits the shale gas industry. The massive Marcellus Shale formation, which underlies a large area of Western Pennsylvania, provides more than 36 percent of the shale gas produced in the U.S. ...] The Pennsylvania State Legislature passed Act 13 in 2012 and it was almost immediately challenged by seven of the state's municipalities along with the Delaware Riverkeeper Network and a private physician. The onerous law enabled natural gas companies to seize privately owned subsurface property through eminent domain, placed a gag order on health professionals to prevent them from getting information on drilling chemicals that could harm their patients, and limited notification of spills and leaks to public water suppliers, excluding owners of private wells that supply drinking water for 25 percent of Pennsylvania residents. Act 13 also pre-empted municipal zoning of oil and gas development."
Deplorable: "Obama enlists Republican Kasich to push for TPP trade deal [...] The unlikely partnership comes as the White House makes a final full-court push to persuade Republican congressional leaders to approve the deal in a "lame duck" session after the Nov. 8 election. Both Republican and Democratic candidates have pilloried the TPP."
Elizabeth Warren Just Gave Hillary Clinton a Big Warning: Senator Elizabeth Warren fired an unmistakable warning shot to Hillary Clinton and her advisers on Wednesday, cautioning against appointing cabinet or administration members who are linked to Wall Street while name-checking a firm closely tied to Clinton and the Democratic Party."
* Warren, invoking Clinton, demands FBI explain failure to charge bankers: Sen. Elizabeth Warren is trying to leverage the FBI's unusual embrace of transparency around Hillary Clinton's email investigation as a means to get answers about why more banking executives were not punished after the 2008 financial crisis."
This is a fairly good news discussion show, with some illuminating analysis of what the Democrats are really up to — "What Clinton Really Thinks About Progressives: On this episode of "By Any Means Necessary" host Eugene Puryear is joined by Marcus Farrell, political strategist, organizer and former African American Outreach Director for Bernie Sanders and Ben Norton, columnist with Salon.com to talk about the recently leaked audio of Clinton discussing Sanders' supporters that gave them all the more reason not to support her candidacy. The group also discusses the implications of a Clinton presidency on the American progressive movement and why Trump supporters couldn't care less if he has ever paid taxes."
"Hyde Is What Happens When Left Fakes Right: Today, we mark 40 years of the Hyde Amendment. This law banning federal money from funding abortion has been renewed through administrations Democratic and Republican. Beyond hindering access to abortion, Hyde encapsulates what happens when Left fakes Right and unwittingly undermines its own aims." I'm not sure there's much illumination in the essay, but Democrats let this happen as surely as the right-wing pushed for it. It's time to end it.
"If Clinton Beats Trump 60-40%, The DCCC Would Still Fail To Take Back The House-- And Anyone Who Tells You Differently, While Asking You For A Donation... * "A Quick Senate Scorecard" — from Gaius Publius, a rundown on how Chuck Schumer is screwing Democrats' chances of taking back the Senate. "Schumer has succeeded in sabotaging every race he has tried to sabotage" — so Gaius figures he will succeed in doing that in Alaska, but if he fails, we could take that seat, which is apparently just what Schumer is afraid of. (By "we", in this case, I mean someone who doesn't have a history of being corrupt.) He already succeeded in sabotaging the Florida Senate seat, paving the way for Patrick Murphy to take the nomination and thus lose the contest.
"Donald Trump is going to win, says professor who has correctly predicted the last 8 elections — He uses 13 non-ideological True/False questions to assess the likelihood of the party in power winning re-election. They look like pretty good questions. But I still don't know who is actually going to win. This is a strange election, and the FSM knows the Dems are doing a great job of finding ways to lose it, but then, so is Trump.
William Greider in The Nation, "Whom Should We Blame for Our Deranged Democracy?: Laying it all on Trump is too easy -both political parties are out of touch and distant from the people. [...] The leaders of both parties may be betting that the Trump upheaval will be defeated in November, then lose energy and fade away afterward, so politics can get back to 'normal.' For lots of reasons, I think this is delusional. Regardless of who wins this year and what happens to Trump, the political instability will continue because it reflects seismic shifts under way in the American condition." I normally love what Greider writes, but when I got to the end of this article I realized he never really answered the question in the title.
"If You're a Democrat Bashing Bernie Voters, You're Supporting Trump [...] The argument I have just made is, of course, absurd. But it follows from the logic being advanced by many Democrats, which is that by criticizing Hillary Clinton, one supports Donald Trump, since criticism of Clinton makes people less likely to vote for her. Clinton-supporting pundit Bob Cesca has gone so far as to say that 'any attack on Hillary must be taken as tacit support for Trump.' Others, like Paul Krugman, imply that any journalism that puts Clinton in a negative light deliberately provides aid and comfort to the Trump campaign."
The American Prospect, "Why Millennials Don't Like Clinton — And What She Can Do About It: Hillary Clinton's support from millennial voters has dropped sharply since August, a problem that she needs to address even more aggressively to hold onto this key bloc of voters."
Strangely, there's a good piece by Emmett Rensin in Newsweek, of all places, "This Is Hillary Clinton's Millennial 'Problem': It is possible, just possible, that political choices meaningfully reflect political preferences. [...] Here is my own wild take on why millennials don't support Clinton 'enough': Many younger American voters, perhaps a sufficient number of them to seriously imperil Clinton's chances, have significant ideological differences with the candidate. That's my theory. Many liberal pundits seem unimpressed by this idea perhaps because it suggests that votes must be earned in a democracy, but it does have the benefit of the evidence. The liberal punditry might be forgiven for underestimating the depth and seriousness of these differences had these young people not voted overwhelmingly and across all other demographic lines for a different candidate. The Clinton campaign might be forgiven for imagining these voters would 'come home' had it not spent the weeks since the Democratic Convention fundraising and playing Bush administration endorsement bingo. The trouble is not that young people are insufficiently familiar with the neoconservative horror show of their own childhoods. The trouble is that the candidate they are meant to support does not appear to find that show particularly horrifying."
Sam Seder has been arguing a lot lately with Jimmy Dore about voting for Hillary. Sam says if you're in a swing state, you need to vote to stop Trump. Jimmy disagrees. The arguments are lively and entertaining, although I don't know if they change anyone's mind. But just for the record, you might want to bookmark The Jimmy Dore Show page, 'cause no matter where you fall on this particular argument, Jimmy does say some pretty smart things.
* And here's a more concise Progressive Case for a Non-Progressive Candidate. (And down in the ensuing thread, I found this video on How to Fix America's Corrupt Political System, which was a relief to see since it's been obvious for a long time that Citizens United isn't really the issue.)
I admit to being bored with complaints about the Democratic convention, but I was surprised by some of the things in this video that I hadn't realized they'd done.
Hillbots keep accusing Glenn Greenwald of being pro-Trump because he dares to criticize Hillary, so he made up a little compendium of evidence to the contrary.
Links from commenter CMike, "Out of Prison, Out of Work" About 7 million American men of prime working age (25 through 54) are not in the labor force, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That means they don't have a paid job and haven't been actively looking for one. This figure does not include those in jail or prison. It does include students and men staying home to take care of children or other family members -- but, as Nicholas Eberstadt estimates in his important new book, "Men Without Work," these two categories seem to account for less than 15 percent of what he calls the NILFs (for not in labor force). And the NILF share of the U.S. prime-age male population has been growing and growing.
* Chris Hedges, "The Prison State of America: Prisons employ and exploit the ideal worker. Prisoners do not receive benefits or pensions. They are not paid overtime. They are forbidden to organize and strike. They must show up on time. They are not paid for sick days or granted vacations. They cannot formally complain about working conditions or safety hazards. If they are disobedient, or attempt to protest their pitiful wages, they lose their jobs and can be sent to isolation cells. The roughly 1 million prisoners who work for corporations and government industries in the American prison system are models for what the corporate state expects us all to become. And corporations have no intention of permitting prison reforms that would reduce the size of their bonded workforce. In fact, they are seeking to replicate these conditions throughout the society. States, in the name of austerity, have stopped providing prisoners with essential items including shoes, extra blankets and even toilet paper, while starting to charge them for electricity and room and board. Most prisoners and the families that struggle to support them are chronically short of money. Prisons are company towns. Scrip, rather than money, was once paid to coal miners, and it could be used only at the company store. Prisoners are in a similar condition. When they go broke — and being broke is a frequent occurrence in prison — prisoners must take out prison loans to pay for medications, legal and medical fees and basic commissary items such as soap and deodorant. Debt peonage inside prison is as prevalent as it is outside prison."
Dean Baker, though, says that, while the post-incarceration unemployment situation is a real problem, "it just cannot explain the larger falloff in employment rates over the last 15 years."
* Also, "NYT Devotes Room for Debate Segment to Dealing with Defense from Martians: At a time when we are seeing the slowest productivity growth on record the NYT decided to devote a Room for Debate section to the question of how we will deal with surging productivity (called "automation" in the description). Blaming the problems of high unemployment and low wages on automation has certain attractive features. It makes our major social problems the result of the development of technology rather than bad economic policy. This is a longer topic (yes, it will be addressed in my forthcoming book), but let's just say that it is not only Donald Trump's supporters who have a tenuous grip on reality."
* And, "NYT Pulls Out the Stops in Pushing NAFTA: The NYT is bending over backwards to promote the protectionist pattern of trade policies of recent presidents. Yes folks, it is protectionist even if they call them "free trade" deals. Patent and copyright protection are protectionism, even if your friends benefit from them. And when we spend an extra $100 billion a year on doctors, compared with pay in Canada and Western Europe, because doctors who don't complete a U.S. residency program are not allowed to practice in the United States, that is protectionism."
* Plus, "Why Don't Directors Want to Clawback Pay from Corrupt CEOs? Gretchen Morgenson had an interesting piece pointing out that it is rare that corporate boards ever clawback substantial sums from CEOs involved in illegal or inappropriate activity. (The immediate context is the clawback of some future performance pay from Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf.) The issue, as Morgenson presents it, is that boards don't generally do clawbacks except where it is legally required."
"Do Not Resist: new film shows how US police have become an occupying army: Craig Atkinson's documentary about police militarization in America asks an important question: how did we get here? Craig Atkinson's documentary about police militarization, Do Not Resist, is filled with unsettling scenes like the one where a Swat team destroys a family's home during a drug raid that nets small amounts of loose marijuana. But the most disturbing scene transpires during the relative placidity of a seminar when a hugely successful lecturer tells a room full of police officers: 'We are at war and you are the frontline. What do you fight violence with? Superior violence. Righteous violence. Violence is your tool ... You are men and women of violence.'"
Will Shetterly has a good post up at it's all one thing clarifying the relationship between police violence and class, "Why #BlackLivesMatter should be #PoorLivesMatter now with graphics: A casual glance shows police killings are racially disproportionate to our population — though black people are 13.3% of the US, 25% of people killed by the police are black. But that hides another fact: Police killings are racially proportionate to America's poor. Which makes sense — though there are exceptions from all races, most people killed by the police are poor. [...] The racial list of who is most likely to be killed lines up with racial household income: Native Americans are poorest, followed by blacks, then Hispanics, then non-Hispanic whites, then Asian Americans, who have higher incomes than white Americans. The basic rule for police killings: the richer the group, the less likely its members will be killed by police."
RIP: Terence Bayler, at 86. More sad Pythhon-related news. He had two memorable lines in Life of Brian (both ad libs), and also appeared in The Rutles, Time Bandits and Brazil, as well as numerous other credits, including Doctor Who and much non-genre work in various media.
RIP Doug Fratz (1952-2016), alumna of the University of Maryland (College Park) science fiction club and long-time active fan. (I hold him personally responsible for convincing me to come to the convention they put together and therefore setting me up to get roped into a bridge game by Fred Pohl and Tom Monteleone. On the other hand, they also roped in X, who turned out to be Jack Heneghan and who, with his partner Elaine, taught me how to actually play the game.) I really liked that guy, he was fun and I miss him, I'm really sorry that he's already gone. (CSPA Obit)
'Draw and you'll go to jail': the fight to save comics from the censor: From worried parents to policemen with built-in 'Satan detectors', underground comics have never lacked enemies. And for 30 years Neil Gaiman and his friends have fought back in the name of free speech." I remember the Mike Diana case at the time, being shocked that someone could be sent to jail not for acts, not even for photographs of acts, but for drawings. And all these years later, it still shocks me.
Bra-clasp of the week. I only know about this because I found an eight-year-old message Karen B. left me in one of a million websites I've been known to wander into.
Well, I had no idea that "Rocket Man" was a big thing in bluegrass.
Some people complain that I'm always ragging on Democrats instead of on Republicans. Leaving aside my opinion that some Democrats are Republicans, I just don't see the point, since the Republicans are already hopeless, and there's nothing I can do about them except hope we somehow get a party that will actually oppose them. Until the Democrats start really doing that, yes, I'm ragging on them.
This is FiveThirtyEight's election projection page, and about halfway down there's a map with the states sized by number of electoral votes, which is nice because all those big red states like Wyoming, Montana, and the Dakotas are cut down to size and are no bigger than Vermont. It gives you a much better picture of how close the election is than looking at a normal map with all that red territory.
"In historic move, Gov. Jerry Brown expands overtime pay for California farmworkers: Leaders of the United Farm Workers of America, which sponsored the overtime bill, called Brown's decision a victory in a nearly 80-year quest to establish broad rights and protections for farm laborers. But the move shocked the agricultural community, which lobbied heavily against its provisions, saying the new law would hurt a valuable state industry already on the decline. [...] It will lower the current 10-hour-day threshold for overtime by half an hour each year until it reaches the standard eight-hour day by 2022. It also will phase in a 40-hour standard workweek for the first time. The governor will be able to suspend any part of the process for a year depending on economic conditions."
Forget jail, "Wells Fargo Exec Who Headed Phony Accounts Unit Collected $125 Million" — and 5,000 nonentities working for him got fired.
* "Bernie Sanders Asks The Only Relevant Question About The Wells Fargo Scandal."
* David Dayen in TNR, "The Obama Administration Must Prosecute Wells Fargo: CEO John Stumpf's testimony before the Senate Banking Committee offered more than enough evidence of major securities fraud. [...] If the SEC and the Justice Department don't get involved here, they might as well not even exist. CFPB's Cordray and OCC's Thomas Curry wouldn't say whether they issued criminal referrals to law enforcement in this case, though Cordray hinted at it. Attorney General Loretta Lynch, if she wants to emerge from wherever she's been hiding on this issue, has enough information to bring cases. Will President Barack Obama's administration end its tenure as it began, by refusing to prosecute systemic fraud in the financial markets? That's the unavoidable conclusion so far."
* There's nothing quite like watching her give a fraudster a good grilling, and it was gratifying to see Elizabeth Warren eviscerate Wells Fargo's CEO.
"'Big Short' guru tells whiny bankers to shut up [...] 'You lived in a bad neighborhood. You didn't police yourselves. You're going to have to live with this. You frickin' blew up Planet Earth. Shut up and move on.'"
Marcy Wheeler on "A Busy Day for the Bears" after the leaked Powell emails, a speech by Guccifer, and other things.
* Much as I hate to link to the Daily Mail, I have to admit to being amused by their headline of the leaked Colin Powell emails.
"A bad day for Missouri: The people of Missouri just had a very bad day. It started off with the top lobbyist for the top donor in Missouri being allowed by Republicans to speak from the dais on the Senate floor. Lobbyists getting what they wanted would be the theme of the day. During the veto session on Wednesday, the Republicans who control our legislature went on a rampage against the people of Missouri. They made it harder to vote and easier for anyone to carry a gun anywhere, unchecked and untrained. They put industry representatives in charge of policing their own water pollution. They gave a $50 million retroactive handout to special interests without budgeting for it. They voted to fine the poorest people in the state if they use an emergency room or miss a doctor's appointment. They spent the day celebrating their unchecked authority taunting Democrats, voters and the Governor on social media, while refusing to help any Missourians."
Barton Gellman, one of the four journalists (with Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald, and Ewen MacAskill) to see the original Snowden materials, and whose stories in The Washington Post on the subject earned the paper a Pulitzer, on "The House Intelligence Committee's Terrible, Horrible, Very Bad Snowden Report: Late on Thursday afternoon the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence released a three-page executive summary (four, if we count the splendid cover photo) of its two-year inquiry into Edward Snowden's National Security Agency (NSA) disclosures. On first reading, I described it as an 'aggressively dishonest' piece of work. With a day or so to reflect on it, I believe it's worse than that. The report is not only one-sided, not only incurious, not only contemptuous of fact. It is trifling."
* Marcy Wheeler: "Remember, every single member of the committee, Democrat or Republican, signed this report. Every single one. For some reason, even fairly smart people like Adam Schiff and Jackie Speier signed off on something with inexcusable errors."
* "Former CIA Officer: President Obama Should Pardon Edward Snowden: He let Americans evaluate omniscient domestic surveillance for themselves."
* "WashPost Makes History: First Paper to Call for Prosecution of Its Own Source (After Accepting Pulitzer): Three of the four media outlets that received and published large numbers of secret NSA documents provided by Edward Snowden — The Guardian, the New York Times, and The Intercept — have called for the U.S. government to allow the NSA whistleblower to return to the U.S. with no charges. That's the normal course for a news organization, which owes its sources duties of protection, and which — by virtue of accepting the source's materials and then publishing them — implicitly declares the source's information to be in the public interest. But not the Washington Post." But Margaret Sullivan took issue with them — in their own Style section, with "As a source — and a patriot — Edward Snowden deserves a presidential pardon."
* "'Pardon Snowden' Campaign Takes Off as Sanders, Ellsberg, and Others Join: His bravery was a catalyst for the modern movement to defend democracy."
"Warrant Issued for Amy Goodman's Arrest for DAPL Reporting: Watch Your Back! I guess that you might expect a film showing security guards unleashing dogs and pepper spray on those protesting the Dakota Access oil Pipeline (DAPL) would be bound to get someone's attention. Surely it might lead to an arrest or at minimum, disciplinary measures against those who employed such tactics against non-violent protestors. After all, the optics of such measures surely rebound against those who order them to be unleashed (anyone remember Selma, for example?) Well, if you thought that, you would be wrong. We don't live in sane times. Instead, a warrant has been issued in Morton County, North Dakota for the arrest of award-winning journalist Amy Goodman, host and executive producer of Democracy Now!, on a charge of criminal trespassing, a Class B misdemeanor offense, as reported by the local Dickinson Press. Goodman and her team have been in the forefront of covering the DAPL protests. On September 3, they filmed security personnel working for the pipeline company using dogs and pepper spray to attack protesters. That graphic report, which may be viewed here, went viral and was rebroadcast widely by CBS, NBC, NPR, CNN, MSNBC and the Huffington Post, among other outlets."
Pierce, "The Charter School Movement Is a Vehicle for Fraud and Corruption: As I may have mentioned, we have a red-hot ballot initiative up here in the Commonwealth (God Save It!) in which we are asked whether or not we want to lift the cap on the number of charter schools in the state. The usual suspects and the usual out-of-state money are weighing in heavily on the YES side of things; their ads continually portray charters as merely an extension of the existing public school system even though experience everywhere tells us that the people who are making big bank of education "reform" generally, and on charters in specific, insist that they be allowed to run their businesses...er...schools independently of the school boards that manage the rest of the public system. In other words, all they want from the public school system is money and suckers."
I'm always wary of "cures" for addiction, but I'm also aware that there are circumstances where they can help, and this one looks — so far — like it might just work, So, yes, "Banning a promising cure for opioid addiction is a bad idea [...] But not to worry: The Drug Enforcement Administration is on the case. 'To avoid an imminent hazard to public safety,' the agency said in a press release, it will be adding kratom, a medicinal herb that has been used safely in Southeast Asia for centuries, to its list of Schedule 1 substances, placing the popular botanical in a class with killers like heroin and cocaine at the end of September. Why ban the mild-mannered tree leaf? Well, because the DEA claims it's an opioid with 'no currently accepted medical use.' Wrong on both counts.
" But given the nature of the drug's potential, why would the DEA even get interested in banning it. Oh. "However, drug companies have shown little interest in a plant remedy that cannot be patented. While some of kratom's active ingredients have indeed been patented by researchers who hope one day to market them to pharmaceutical firms, Boyer said that these compounds have failed to exhibit as powerful pain-killing effects as the whole plant."
For a change, the stats say things were better for Americans last year. Well, some of them, anyway. David Dayen in The New Republic, "Obama Thanks Himself — for a Slow, Partial Recovery: A good 2015 doesn't make up for years of stagnation. [...] But digging into the data reveals a more complicated picture, especially when put in the context of what we've been through in the Obama era. First of all, we should be chastened by the fact that this is the first gain in median household income since 2007. That means that, after eight years in the wilderness, the post-recession recovery for the middle class only started in 2015." And not all of the credit should be going to Obama, either; much of it may be owed to Fight for $15.
"Obama Expected To Veto 9/11 Bill Because It Sets A Dangerous Precedent: The House voted Friday to allow the families of 9/11 victims to sue the state of Saudi Arabia for their alleged ties to terrorism. The vote comes four months after the Senate voted the bill through, but proponents worry that President Obama will veto the bill. 'We are in the same place we were the last time,' a White House official told NBC on Friday. Obama said in April he would veto the bill. The White House says that the bill's enactment could put American officials overseas in danger. By opening up the prospect of victims suing governments (or states), the United States could be opening itself up to law suits from individuals who feel that the country has committed crimes in their nation — like victims of drones in Pakistan, or civilians killed by the U.S.-backed Saudi coalition in Yemen." Oh, noes! We wouldn't be able to bomb children safely!
"Secret government electronic surveillance documents must be released, judge says: In a major victory for journalists and privacy and transparency advocates, a federal court has started the process of unsealing secret records related to the government's use of electronic surveillance. US District Court Judge Beryl Howell said at a hearing Friday morning that absent an objection by government attorneys, the court would post to its website next week a list of all case numbers from 2012 in which federal prosecutors in Washington, DC applied for an order to install a pen register or a trap and trace device. A pen register is an electronic apparatus that tracks phone numbers called from a specific telephone line (though the 2001 USA PATRIOT Act expanded the definition of pen register to allow for collection of email headers as well). A trap and trace device is similar, but tracks the phone numbers of incoming calls. [..;] Orders authorizing the use of a pen register are initially sealed to prevent tipping off the subject of the investigation that their communications are being monitored. However, courts rarely reexamine the need for continued secrecy after the investigation is closed. As a result, virtually all pen register applications and orders have remained hidden from public view years or even decades after the investigation has ended."
The ACLU has a case: "Police Accidentally Record Themselves Conspiring to Fabricate Criminal Charges Against Protester." A long time ago, before there were videocams, I watched some cops sit around casually trying to figure out what charge they could trump up against me right in front of me, without the slightest worry that they were doing so in front of a witness. This wasn't going to be easy, because they'd stopped a car for going five miles over the speed limit and I had been asleep in the back seat, so it would have been hard for me to be an accessory to the crime. Didn't stop me from spending three days in jail, though.
"Stephen A. Smith: Military Pays NFL To Make Players Stand For National Anthem: On ESPN's First Take, Stephen A. Smith blew the whistle on Jones' fake outrage by reporting that players were not mandated to stand until 2009. Until then, nobody stood for the anthem because players stayed in the locker room until it was time to come out on the field and play. He goes on to say that players were moved onto the field during the anthem as a marketing strategy to make them look more patriotic. Smith says that the U.S. Department of Defense and the U.S. National Guard paid the NFL more than $10 million combined to pull off the move."
Rick Perlstein, America's historian in The Washington Spectator, "Hillary's Reckless Off-Ramp Strategy [... The speech, I was dismayed to discover, proved quite popular among liberals, some of whom singled me out for not understanding the sublime cleverness of the 'off-ramp' Clinton had provided for indignant Republicans. After all, the person who wins the most votes wins the presidential election. (I know, I know, Mr. Gore, I mean usually wins the presidential election.) Additionally, a president with more friends in Washington has a better chance of advancing her agenda than one with fewer friends — and that, simply, was all Clinton's speech was about. But it's not so simple. For decades, the Democrats' Achilles' heel has been an obsession with strategizing to win this election, often at the expense of building strategic capacity to keep winning elections and control the agenda for the next several elections — and decades — to come. [...] But what's the harm? Don't right-wing grifters' votes count the same as horny-handed tillers of the soil? Won't the news that famous Republicans are breaking for Hillary help ordinary Republicans stomach the switch, too? It's not like Glassman is going to be her treasury secretary. Democrats have an election to win, and it's less than two months away — doesn't Team Clinton want to pile up as many supporters as it possibly can? The flaw in this argument is that it overlooks something: the potential problems come in the longer term. Large numbers of supporters of only glancing or provisional commitment to your governing agenda, shoehorned into your tent in time for Election Day, can become quite the liability for effectuating that agenda when it comes time to govern. Just ask Jimmy Carter. Carter was elected president in 1976 by riding a wave of disgust with untrustworthy government, a victory foreshadowed in 1974 by the election of a passel of what became known as Congress's 'Watergate Babies.' Many of these fresh-faced political youngsters retired as legendary liberal lions: Representatives George Miller and Henry Waxman, Senators Tom Harkin and Chris Dodd. A lot of them, however, were explicitly like Gary Hart." And Hart was the exemplar of the New Democrats. He even had a name for his stump speech: "The End of the New Deal." If you ever wondered how it was that the Republicans were suddenly able to sell their appalling, destructive — and widely hated — policies, Democrats like Hart are the ones you can blame.
The Guardian has a little report, "Because Scott Walker Asked: Leaked court documents from 'John Doe investigation' in Wisconsin lay bare pervasive influence of corporate cash on modern US elections [...] The prosecutors alleged in court filings published here for the first time that Walker's campaign found a way around these restrictions by banking the corporate cash through the third-party group, Wisconsin Club for Growth. WCfG describes itself as a 'pro-liberty, pro-fiscal restraint' organisation, sharing the same small government and anti-union ideology as Walker. It is a tax-exempt group, or 501 (c) (4), that is supposed to be primarily concerned with 'social welfare' rather than partisan politics and as such is not obliged to reveal its donors."
David Dayen introduces this Intercept series in a Facebook post:
I've spent nearly a year working on a series of articles for The Intercept that we're calling The Penny Stock Chronicles. It follows Chris DiIorio, an institutional stock trader and analyst who loses over a million dollars in a penny stock. Wanting to understanding why, he researches this world and finds a web of short selling fraud, tax evasion, shell corporations, and money laundering. This was a very difficult story to write. The twists and turns are quite incredible. There's an entire market out there that everyone knows is suffused with corruption, but they have no idea about the extent of it. And though DiIorio's claims can be hyperbolic and should be judged on their own terms, the numbers he provided all check out. When he wrote Flash Boys, Michael Lewis said 'the market is rigged.' He didn't even know the half of it. Please give The Penny Stock Chronicles a read."
Those Biblical cities that God kept smiting? They all did what Bill Moyers is describing in "We, the People Versus We, the Wealthy: How did the United States become the land of the unequal — and how do we find our way back? [...] The Greek historian Plutarch is said to have warned that 'an imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of a Republic.' Yet as the Washington Post pointed out recently, income inequality may be higher at this moment than at any time in the American past. When I was a young man in Washington in the 1960s, most of the country's growth accrued to the bottom 90% of households. From the end of World War II until the early 1970s, in fact, income grew at a slightly faster rate at the bottom and middle of American society than at the top. In 2009, economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez explored decades of tax data and found that from 1950 through 1980 the average income of the bottom 90% of Americans had grown, from $17,719 to $30,941. That represented a 75% increase in 2008 dollars."
Commenter CMike informs us that Matt Stoller says that "This is better policy analysis than 99% of news media." It's "The Conspiracy Behind Your Glasses by comedian Adam Conover.
* And while we're at it, Adam ruins Security Theater, too, with a surprise appearance from our pal Bruce.
Chris Hedges on "The Courtiers and the Tyrants [...] The corporate elites failed to grasp that a functioning liberal class is the mechanism that permits a capitalist democracy to adjust itself to stave off unrest and revolt. They decided, not unlike other doomed elites of history, to eradicate the liberal establishment after they had eradicated the radical movements that created the political pressure for advancements such as the eight-hour workday and Social Security. [...] 'There hasn't been a single major piece of legislation advancing the health, safety and economic rights of the American people since 1974, arguably since 1976.'"
"How the Sugar Industry Shifted Blame to Fat" — It still irritates me that I continue to run into people who think using butter and cream is more fattening and generally harmful to health than cereals packed with sugars — by which I don't just mean your Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs, but Quaker Oats.
Jeffrey Sterling in The Intercept, "I Was a CIA Whistleblower. Now I'm a Black Inmate. Here's How I See American Racism.: Call me naive, call me a dreamer, and I'll wear those monikers proudly because I still believe, even from prison, in this country and what it is supposed to stand for. Has that been my personal experience and what I've been seeing from prison? No. As merely one example, during my time in the CIA it became clear, in the organization's words and actions toward me, that they saw me not as an American who wanted to serve his country but as 'a big black guy.' But my dreams of America are far more enduring than a prison TV room mentality. There is a black America, there is a white America, there are many Americas. The greatness and promise of this country lies in equality reinforced by our differences rather than defined by them. My America is not a prison. For now, I'm confined to the black TV room at the Federal Correctional Institution in Englewood, Colorado. When I am free, I don't want to feel that I'm merely going from one prison to another."
"Bernie backer wins special Democratic primary: After losing the Democratic primary in Missouri's 78th District, Bruce Franks has won in a landslide after challenging the validity of the first primary. Franks won with more than 75 percent of the vote on Friday, a much greater margin than the 55 absentee votes he lost by in August. State Representative Penny Hubbard won that contest, however Franks filed suit, with the courts ruling that the city's board of elections mishandled at least 142 in-person absentee ballots. Franks will almost certainly be on his was to Missouri's state house, as the district leans heavily Democratic."
* I read this story, "Challengers beat two state representatives, primary winners in line for open seats", but I still can't tell whether the results were good or bad. They say the winners won "from the left", but there's nothing in there about what that means, and I'm not inspired to do the research to find out.
"Why the Deeply Held Ideas of the Nation's Most Elite Economists Were Direct Causes of Extreme Inequality [...] This is dismaying but it is important to understand that a fundamental mainstream idea was behind it. Generally, the reaction of the economic mainstream to the inflationary turmoil of the 1970s was to retreat to an ideological interpretation of their fundamental ideas — a doctrinaire reinforcement of laissez-faire economics. As Americans turned away from government, so did the economics profession. In regard to the financial markets, it boiled down to this. Free markets without government interference work too well to become dangerously unstable; therefore, no need to account for how a credit crisis might affect the real economy. It would correct itself too quickly to do damage."
Comedy from DNC lawyers when they file to dismiss the lawsuit against them from Sanders backers. "The DNC attorneys also get a bit creative in their effort to get this lawsuit thrown out. They claim that all of the named plaintiffs already knew that the DNC was biased when they donated — so therefore how could they have been duped if they knew? We are not joking, that was one of their actual claims in the motion to dismiss."
"What would Mother Jones do? Probably not bash idealistic young leftists: The left-of-center Mother Jones mag inexplicably is targeting the young people behind Bernie Sanders's movement." But perhaps MoJo is just doing what it's spent the last year-and-a-bit doing, which is promoting Clintonite memes, and Clinton's camp is doing what it always does, which is try to alienate real liberal progressives.
RIP: Dave Kyle (1919-2016), former Worldcon chair, founder of Gnome Press, probably the first SMOF, and revered long-time fan. He was Fan Guest of Honor at the 1983 Worldcon, where I ran fan programming, which was a bit of a problems since I simply did not know him well enough to figure out what would be the most appropriate sort of panels to build around him. I asked everyone I knew, including the committee members who'd chosen him as FGoH, and no one had any suggestions. So finally I told him if he had any ideas of what he would do with them, I could offer him six hours of programming time. He had ideas and, if I recall correctly, used all six hours. It seemed to go over really well.
NYT Corrections: "A picture caption on Sept. 4 with an article about Boulder, Colo., described a house in the city incorrectly. The house was the setting of the Mork and Mindy TV show, not the residence of the poet Allen Ginsberg."
A little late to the party, Avedon discovers Nolan Strong and the Diablos, a Detroit group with a really great tenor — and Doo-Wops. Here they are doing "Mind Over Matter".
Spencer Ackerman has a fascinating report in the Guardian, "Inside the fight to reveal the CIA's torture secrets" The first part of the inside story of the Senate investigation into torture, the crisis with the CIA it spurred and the man whose life would never be the same." He was part of the Senate investigation and he'd found a smoking gun. "There was one document in particular that proved it. Jones and his team had found it years before, placed mysteriously onto a shared computer network drive the Senate intelligence committee investigators were using in northern Virginia, not far from CIA headquarters. But they hadn't appreciated its full significance until the agency, in an attempt at refuting a report that was still far from publication, told Barack Obama's staff that the committee was pushing a hysterical interpretation of the agency's fateful post-9/11 embrace of torture. The document, prepared for Leon Panetta when he was CIA director, had reached the same conclusions about the torture program that Jones had. As long as Jones had it, he would be able to show that the agency knew full well how brutal the torture was; how ineffective its torturers considered it to be; and how thoroughly the CIA had covered all of that up. As long as Jones had the document, that is. Lurking in the back of his mind was the event that had led him to devote five years of ceaseless work, through nights and weekends: the CIA had already destroyed evidence of torture. It did that before the Senate had launched an investigation, and long before that investigation had turned acrimonious."
* Charlie Pierce says you should read it all. "This CIA Torture Story Is the Best Example of Our Post-9/11 Failings: Not that they'd listen to me or anything but, if I were the gang at the Pulitzer committee, I'd get a head start on putting Spencer Ackerman's name on the National Reporting plaque right now, just to save themselves the work next spring. Getting someone to talk on the record is the eternal jackpot of investigative reporting, and, in today's Guardian, Ackerman hits the Comstock Lode with Daniel Jones, who was the chief investigator for the Senate intelligence committee when that committee was looking into the practice of rendition and torture and the other extraconstitutional horrors perpetrated in our name by the late Avignon Presidency, and who also looked on in anger as the CIA worked overtime to ratfck the investigation and to bury its result. This is the first of a three-part series. I'd say that the extended weekend forecast calls for fury and outrage. [...] Nobody comes out of this report very well. Leon Panetta's reputation gets its bell rung pretty hard. John Brennan is exposed as somebody you wouldn't trust to park your car. And why, Mark Udall, why didn't you read the report into the Senate record after you lost re-election the way so many people begged you to do?
WaPo, "Inside the Republican creation of the North Carolina voting bill dubbed the 'monster' law" — I have no patience with the idea that it's okay to deprive American citizens of their right to vote as long as its purpose is merely to prevent people from voting for the other party, rather than to prevent black people from voting. It's still election-fixing and it should be a jailable offense.
"Distrust Of 2016'S Hackable Election Is A Media Landslide With Just One Solution: Hand-Counted Paper Ballots. ...] But the real threat to our election system comes from private for-profit corporations that register voters, control voter databases, then count and report the vote with secret proprietary software and zero transparency, accountability or recourse. After ignoring or attacking the reportage since Florida 2000 of Bev Harris, Greg Palast, freepress.org and numerous others, the corporate media seems finally to be getting the message: under the current system, any American election---even the one for president---can be stripped and flipped by a tiny handful of electronic hackers working anywhere from the Kremlin to a party HQ to a state governor's office to a teenager's garage."
"This small Indiana county sends more people to prison than San Francisco and Durham, N.C., combined. Why? [...] If Mr. Gaddis had been caught 20 miles to the east, in Cincinnati, he would have received a maximum of six months in prison, court records show. In San Francisco or Brooklyn, he would probably have received drug treatment or probation, lawyers say. But Mr. Gaddis lived in Dearborn County, Ind., which sends more people to prison per capita than nearly any other county in the United States. After agreeing to a plea deal, he was sentenced to serve 12 years in prison."
"U.S. Denies Entry to Former British Ambassador Craig Murray: The U.S. government, for no stated reason, and after having approved his entry in the past, has denied Craig Murray the usual approval to enter the United States without a visa that is given to UK citizens. Craig Murray was British Ambassador to Uzbekistan from 2002 to 2004."
Wonkette, "God Spares Phyllis Schlafly Sight Of First Woman President."
* Corey Robin on Phyllis Schlafly, 1924-2016, quoting Catharine MacKinnon's words in debate with Schlafly: "Mrs. Schlafly tells us that being a woman has not gotten in her way. That she knows what she is saying because it happened to her. She could be one of the exceptional 7.8 percent, although who's to know? I do submit to you, though, that any man who had a law degree and had done graduate work in political science; had given testimony on a wide range of important subjects for decades; had done effective and brilliant political, policy, and organizational work within the party; had published widely, including nine books; was instrumental in stopping a major social initiative to amend the Constitution just short of victory dead in its tracks, and had a beautiful, accomplished family — any man like that would have a place in the current administration. Having raised six children, a qualification not many men can boast of (and if so probably with less good reason) did not make the difference. I would accept correction if I am wrong, and she may yet be appointed. She was widely reported to have wanted such a post, but I don't believe everything I read, especially about women. She certainly deserved a place in the Defense Department. Phyllis Schlafly is a qualified woman. I charge that the Reagan Administration has discriminated against Phyllis Schlafly on the basis of her sex."
* Los Angeles Times obituary for Schlafly, world's most famous anti-feminist.
In our continuing coverage of the parade of Bad Dems the leadership has been foisting off on us, we see Blue Dogs and New Dems helping the GOP when "Friday House Conservatives Granted Private Equity Firms A License To Defraud Their Customers: OK, so now, what is this Investment Advisors Modernization Act of 2016? Modernization sounds good-- even progressive-- no? No, not in the Orwellian sense it's being used. Alan Grayson, who of course, voted against it, told us yesterday that "basically, the bill dictates to the SEC how to protect, or not to protect, investors. It repeals by statute investor-safety regulations that, in some cases, date back half a century."
* "Keep Track Of Who's Celebrating Victories By Wasserman Schultz And Patrick Murphy." Given how badly Murphy is polling against his Republican opposition, you'd think the Democratic Party would not be so happy.
"There's no such thing as a victimless billionaire" — A great line if ever I saw one, and the explanation for why the Kochs and their little friends are on the warpath to prevent people from voting, most notably by making claims of voter fraud. "Is there really a gigantic conspiracy of one million Democrats to vote twice, or is it a massive scheme to take away the votes of a million innocent people?" Innocent people whose names are on a list of people with similar names — names like Washington, Kim, and Garcia.
"U.S. Considers HSBC Charge That Could Upend 2012 Settlement: Prosecutors' fresh investigation of HSBC brings them closer to a step that has often been threatened but rarely taken -- tearing up a deferred-prosecution agreement if a company fails to walk the road of reform laid out by the Justice Department." This really should happen.
The Washington Post says, "A record number of Americans now dislike Hillary Clinton." Theories about how this has happened are mainly that: 1. The Republicans have been attacking her for 30 years; and 2. That mean old Bernie Sanders attacked her so viciously during the primaries. It's true that the Republicans have been attacking her for 30 years (they never forgave her for keeping her maiden name when she got married), but Sanders didn't attack Clinton, and if you want to see a vicious primary campaign, look no further than the Obama camp's antics in 2008, which were downright sickening. No, all Sanders did was disagree with Clinton's policies. And maybe some people just don't like them. But her popularity seems to be going down since the primaries ended, and, gosh, I wonder who is helping that? Could it be the "objective" media? After the NYT embarrassed themselves reporting a Trump speech in advance as being much like the sane pivot Trump's advance publicity said it would be (yes, stenography in the NYT, what a surprise) and it just plain wasn't, we now have an endless stream of false equivalence to beat the band. They can't bring themselves to call Trump what he is, but every innuendo about Clinton gets a big headline. The media just can't stop themselves — but it's all Bernie's fault that they've carried GOP water for 30 years.
"The Clinton Foundation's Problems Are Deeper Than You Think: But critics of the Clinton Foundation may want to think twice before casually paying tribute to the organization's tremendous good work. Most of the claims about the Foundation's efficacy have little basis in any actual reported facts. Instead, it is simply assumed that the organization has tremendous humanitarian accomplishments, without any serious inquiry into what these are. An examination of the actual available evidence, as opposed to the PR claims of the Foundation and its boosters, suggests the need for far greater skepticism about the organization's charitable acts in addition to its fundraising."
"The Unrelenting Pundit-Led Effort to Delegitimize All Negative Reporting About Hillary Clinton [...] That Donald Trump is an uber-nationalist, bigotry-exploiting demagogue and unstable extremist does not remotely entitle Hillary Clinton to waltz into the Oval Office free of aggressive journalistic scrutiny. Nor does Trump's extremism constitute a defense to anything that she's done. It is absolutely true that Trump has at least as many troublesome financial transactions and entangling relationships as the Clintons do: These donations to the Florida attorney general are among the most corrupt-appearing transactions yet documented. Even worse, Trump has shielded himself from much needed scrutiny by inexcusably refusing to release his tax returns, while much of the reporting about the Clintons is possible only because they have released theirs. All of that is important and should be highlighted. But none of it suggests that anything other than a bright journalistic light is appropriate for examining the Clintons' conduct. Yet there are prominent pundits and journalists who literally denounce every critical report about Clinton as unfair and deceitful, and band together to malign the reporters who scrutinize the Clintons' financial transactions. Those prominent voices combine with the million-dollar online army that supreme sleaze merchant David Brock has assembled to attack Clinton critics; as the Los Angeles Times reported in May: 'Clinton's well-heeled backers have opened a new frontier in digital campaigning, one that seems to have been inspired by some of the internet's worst instincts. Correct the Record, a Super PAC coordinating with Clinton's campaign, is spending some $1 million to find and confront social media users who post unflattering messages about the Democratic front-runner.'"
People who claim to be "fiscally responsible" always seem to come up with ideas that cost more money than they pretend to be saving. "DWP fit-to-work assessments cost more money than they save, report reveals: Government will pay £1.6bn in next three years to private contractors who carry out controversial assessments The Government is spending more money assessing whether people are fit to work than it is saving in reductions to the benefits bill, a damning official report has revealed."
"This is Wrong and Bullshit and You Shouldn't Support It" — Brock Turner's slap on the hand for rape outrages a lot of people for a lot of reasons). John Cole: "But cheering armed mobs outside his house threatening castration and rape is illiberal, offensive, and obscene, not to mention unfair to his other neighbors."
"The human toll of America's public defender crisis: Years of drastic budget cuts have created bottomless caseloads for public defenders — the 'pack mules of the system' — and tipped the scales of justice against the poor. [...] In recent years the US has begun to reckon with its role as the world's biggest jailer, home to a manifestly unequal justice system that disproportionately punishes poor people of color. In diagnosing the causes of this problem much of the focus has centered on sentencing reform, but in a country where 95% of criminal cases are settled by plea deal, little attention has been given to the critical state of indigent defense. Around the US, defenders routinely report an increase in overburdening and underfunding, caused by a variety of structural, political and economic drivers."
* "For Louisiana's defenseless poor, it's one for all: Meet Rhonda Covington, the last line of defense for thousands in need of an attorney in a forgotten corner of rural Louisiana"
Having obsessed on the subject for 15 years, your Talking Dog did not let this anniversary go by without writing his "homily" for 9/11. He used the word homily, I wouldn't.
* Ray McGovern on what happened and what didn't happen and what it all must mean. There's a lot of information in this, and I recommend you listen to it all.
* Seeing all the various stories around commemorating 9/11, I couldn't help remembering how uninterested the Bush administration had been in security against terrorism. And Al Franken's chapter on Operation Ignore.
"Teaching 'grit' is bad for children, and bad for democracy [...] There is a time and place for grit. However, praising grit as such makes no sense because it can often lead to stupid or mean behavior. Duckworth's book is filled with gritty people doing things that they, perhaps, shouldn't."
Charlie Stross, "Sometimes I don't know why I bother! The trouble with writing fiction is that, as a famous novelist once said, reality is under no compulsion to make sense or be plausible. Those of us who make stuff up are constantly under threat of having our best fictional creations one-upped by the implausibility of real events. I'm pretty much resigned to this happening, especially with the Laundry Files stories: at least space opera and fantasy aren't as prone to being derailed as fiction set in the near-present. But there's a subtle corollary to the impossibility of story-telling keeping up with reality, and that's the point that it is also pretty much impossible to invent protagonists who can keep up with reality."
Ray McGovern, "A Lawless Plan to Target Syria's Allies: On Aug. 17, TV interviewer Charlie Rose gave former acting CIA Director Michael Morell a 'mulligan' for an earlier wayward drive on Aug. 8 that sliced deep into the rough and even stirred up some nonviolent animals by advocating the murder of Russians and Iranians. But, alas, Morell duffed the second drive, too. Morell did so despite Rose's efforts to tee up the questions as favorably as possible, trying to help Morell explain what he meant about 'killing' Russians and Iranians in Syria and bombing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad into submission. [...] Not to put too fine a point on this, but everything that Morell is advocating here violates international law, the rules that — in other circumstances, i.e. when another government is involved — the U.S. government condemns as 'aggression' or as an 'invasion' or as 'terrorism.'" And it looks like there may be a place for him in Clinton's government, too.
"A Congressman Campaigns to 'Stop the Madness' of U.S. Support for Saudi Bombing in Yemen: For months, a California congressman has been trying to get Obama administration officials to reconsider U.S. backing for the Saudi-led war in Yemen. And for months, he has been given the runaround. Ted Lieu, a Democrat representing Los Angeles County, served in the Air Force and is a colonel in the Air Force Reserves. The brutal bombing of civilian areas with U.S.-supplied planes and weapons has led him to act when most of his colleagues have stayed silent. 'I taught the law of war when I was on active duty,' he told The Intercept. 'You can't kill children, newlyweds, doctors and patients — those are exempt targets under the law of war, and the coalition has been repeatedly striking civilians,' he said. 'So it is very disturbing to me. It is even worse that the U.S. is aiding this coalition.'"
"Obama's TPP campaign could drag down Democrats: How much is President Obama willing to harm the Democratic Party in order to win approval for the deeply unpopular Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) 'trade' agreement? We may soon find out."
The Nation, "How Obama Helped Lay the Groundwork for Trump's Thuggery: His refusal to prosecute torturers and his Wild West assassination of bin Laden show how moral complacency can all too easily degenerate into full-blown corruption."
Rolling Stone, "The GOP's Stealth War Against Voters: Will an anti-voter-fraud program designed by one of Trump's advisers deny tens of thousands their right to vote in November?"
"Report shows that Army took away gun from Dallas cop shooter Micah Johnson: A sergeant who supervised Micah Johnson, the man who killed five Dallas police officers in July, told the Army that his gun should be taken from him in 2014 because he posed a potential threat, according to a newly released Army investigation."
"U.S. Defense Contractors Tell Investors Russian Threat Is Great for Business: The escalating anti-Russian rhetoric in the U.S. presidential campaign comes in the midst of a major push by military contractors to position Moscow as a potent enemy that must be countered with a drastic increase in military spending by NATO countries. Weapon makers have told investors that they are relying on tensions with Russia to fuel new business in the wake of Russian's annexation of Crimea and modest increases in its military budget."
"One year on, Russia's war in Syria is hardly a 'quagmire': US interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan got bogged down by ambitious goals. In Syria, Russia has kept it simple and is gaining in influence in the region because of it."
"WikiLeaks Reveals How the US Aggressively Pursued Regime Change in Syria, Igniting a Bloodbath: On August 31, 2013, US president Barack Obama announced that he intended to launch a military attack on Syria in response to a chemical weapons attack in that country that the US blamed on the Syrian government. Obama assured the US public that this would be a limited action solely intended to punish the Assad government for using chemical weapons; the goal of US military action would not be to overthrow the Assad government, nor to change the balance of forces in Syria's sectarian civil war. [...] The cables gave the public a recent window into the strategies and motivations of US officials as they expressed them to each other, not as they usually expressed them to the public. In the case of Syria, the cables show that regime change had been a long-standing goal of US policy; that the US promoted sectarianism in support of its regime-change policy, thus helping lay the foundation for the sectarian civil war and massive bloodshed that we see in Syria today; that key components of the Bush administration's regime-change policy remained in place even as the Obama administration moved publicly toward a policy of engagement; and that the US government was much more interested in the Syrian government's foreign policy, particularly its relationship with Iran, than in human rights inside Syria."
"US Soldiers Are Relying on Millions of Dollars in Food Stamps to Survive [...] For years, the military has been embarrassed by reports showing that some active-duty service members struggle to feed their families and use government benefits to get by. A recent report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that the Department of Defense (DoD) does not fully understand the scope of the problem." Frankly, this article doesn't go far enough — members of the military are being charged for things they should be getting for free, to begin with.
Dean Baker, "Fixing Obamacare: The Democrats Have to Talk About It [...] If we are going to see the problems with the ACA addressed, Democrats will have to start talking about the program and explaining what it has done in ensuring that people have health care. If people understand what the ACA is, they are likely to want to protect it, just as millions now rush to the defense of Medicare whenever it is threatened."
The New Republic, "The Anti-Democratic Urge: With populism on the rise in both parties, it has become fashionable for elites to bash the masses. But we need more democracy, not less. [...] In reality, our political system is far less democratic than it was a generation ago. Over the past 40 years, we've seen unions crushed, welfare gutted, higher education defunded, prisons packed to overflowing, voting rights curbed, and the rich made steadily richer while wages stagnated. It's not the frustration of the people that should terrify us, but rather the legitimate sources of their frustration, which have so long gone unaddressed. Regular citizens struggling to make ends meet have almost nowhere to turn, nothing to join. We shouldn't wonder that so many voters have seized on this election to make a statement, even a nihilistic one. To insist that the only solution is for the people to get back in line is to refuse to acknowledge that the 'establishment' bears any responsibility for the conditions that created the public's outrage in the first place.
"Liberal Hate for the Green Party: Liberals have joined Hillary Clinton's 'big nasty tent' in a very big way. They have moved far beyond the usual rationales for sticking with the Democrats and are now carrying on a full-fledged hate fest. Their targets are Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein and her running mate Ajamu Baraka, who is also a Black Agenda Report editor and columnist."
It's really worth listening to Sam Seder's interview with Carol Anderson: White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide, much as it will make you feel the outrage all over again — and there are probably a couple of things you didn't know about, too. But most of all, she ties it all together neatly.
"The Real Reason Middle America Should Be Angry: Like many 'flyover' cities, St. Louis's decline is not mainly a story of deindustrialization, but of decisions in Washington that opened the door to predatory monopoly."
"Virgin Trains controversy 'has helped Jeremy Corbyn's leadership bid'" — All Corbyn had to do was mention being on a crowded train and the press seems to have gotten excited, but I was more interested in this: Corbyn also said he would support a private members' bill tabled by Labour backbencher Margaret Greenwood aimed at unpicking the internal market in the NHS. That approach received support from David Owen, former Labour health secretary and one of the founders of the Social Democratic party. 'For the first time in 14 years we have the leader of the Labour party today unequivocally committing the party to reversing the legislation which has created in England a broken down market-based healthcare system,' Lord Owen said. 'Surely now the whole Labour movement can combine together, left, right and centre to make this official party policy at this year's autumn conference.'" Yes, you'd think they could at least agree on that. I mean, that's David Owen, who isn't exactly famous as part of Labour's left.
"NPR Host Demands That Assange Do Something Its Own Reporters Are Told Never to Do" In a ten-minute interview aired Wednesday morning, NPR's David Greene asked Wikileaks founder Julian Assange five times to reveal the sources of the leaked information he has published on the internet. A major tenet of American journalism is that reporters protect their sources. Wikileaks is certainly not a traditional news organization, but Greene's persistent attempts to get Assange to violate confidentiality was alarming, especially considering that there has been no challenge to the authenticity of the material in question.
On how Gawker has been sued out of existence, Tom Scocca says, "Gawker Was Murdered by Gaslight. [...] "Gawker always said it was in the business of publishing true stories. Here is one last true story: You live in a country where a billionaire can put a publication out of business. A billionaire can pick off an individual writer and leave that person penniless and without legal protection. If you want to write stories that might anger a billionaire, you need to work for another billionaire yourself, or for a billion-dollar corporation. The law will not protect you. There is no freedom in this world but power and money."
"Why Trump voters are not 'complete idiots' [...] Trump voters may not vote the way I want them to, but after having spent the last five years working in (and having grown up in) parts of the US few visit, they are not dumb. They are doing whatever any other voter does: Trying to use their vote to better their particular situation (however they define that). Labeling them dumb is simply a way of not trying to understand their situation, or what they value."
"Why Poor People Stay Poor: Saving money costs money. Period." The article is a couple years old, but it bears repeating.
"How Veterans Are Losing the War at Home: A friend of mine, a Vietnam vet, told me about a veteran of the Iraq War who, when some civilian said, 'Thank you for your service,' replied: 'I didn't serve, I was used.' That got me thinking about the many ways today's veterans are used, conned, and exploited by big gamers right here at home." And the Koch brothers themselves are making a tidy profit sucking up VA money to keep right on using them.
"Inmates Made Thousands Of Unsafe Helmets For U.S. Troops: After multiple investigations, the Department of Justice found that a company that employed prisoners to build U.S. military helmets produced thousands of defective products, putting combat soldiers at risk. The Office of Inspector General worked with the Defense Criminal Investigative Service and the U.S. Army to expose poor manufacturing practices by a company that paid inmates to make military helmets for the Department of Defense."
"In States Like Tennessee, Private Prisons Will Survive Obama Administration: On August 18, the same day the Department of Justice announced it would seek to end its private prison contracts, an inmate died at a Corrections Corporation of America facility in Tennessee, where she was denied proper medical treatment after she was attacked by other inmates." The facility holds a number of federal prisoners, but the contract is with the state, not the fed, so it may continue.
Dahlia Lithwick on "Leavenworth's Spygate: A private prison facility in Kansas was spying on constitutionally protected attorney-client conversations. [...] Amid this news, it was easy to miss the story out of the Leavenworth Detention Center in Kansas, in which a private prison system appears to have been committing a broad and systematic violation of the constitutional rights of its inmates. That federal private prison, operated by Corrections Corporation of America, was secretly videotaping conversations between prisoners and their lawyers and also allegedly recording audio of some phone calls between prisoners and their attorneys, then handing over some of the information from those recordings to state prosecutors. Corrections Corporation of America, which manages 85 facilities all over the country, appears to have basically been engaging in a widespread fishing expedition for evidence gleaned from secret videotapes — evidence they then handed off to prosecutors without the knowledge of prisoners nor their lawyers."
"Obamacare's Faltering for One Simple Reason: Profit: There have been dozens if not hundreds of news articles about Aetna leaving the Affordable Health Care Act's online marketplaces in eleven states, and whether this signals serious problems for Obamacare down the road. But none of them have truly explained that what's happening with Aetna is the consequence of a flaw built into Obamacare from the start: It permits insurance companies to make a profit on the basic healthcare package Americans are now legally required to purchase. This makes Obamacare fundamentally different from essentially all systems of universal healthcare on earth. (There is one tiny exception, the Netherlands, but of the four insurance companies that cover 90 percent of Dutch citizens, just one is for profit.)"
"Donald Trump is a Fascist: Whether Donald Trump is a full-fledged fascist or 'merely' a proto-fascist depends on which historian's definition of fascism you prefer." An eight-part series (scroll down to get to the first part).
Corey Robin on "How Clinton Enables the Republican Party: I've been saying that one of the problems with the 'Trump is like no Republican we've ever seen before' line is that it prevents us from consigning the Republican Party to the oblivion it deserves. In making Trump sui generis, by insisting that he is an utter novelty, you allow the rest of the party to distance themselves from him, to make him extreme and themselves respectable, and to regroup after November."
"Ross Perot, Last American Leftist [...] Agents of Influence ultimately inspired Perot's whole political career — and gave Choate a second act as a senior campaign adviser commonly called 'Perot's brain.' And to their combined credit, Perot's brain on matters of substance remained remarkably lucid, consistent and focused during the surreal and volatile four years that followed. Sure, he had some odd personal notions about a GOP plot to crash his daughter's wedding, but his political convictions were unflappable. He spent all of seven words — 'I think this is a woman's decision' — on abortion, blaming failing infrastructure and the weak economy for the 'breakdown of the family' that preoccupied the culture warriors of the day. And while he often invoked the menace of debt and deficits on the campaign trail, it was always as a byproduct of the trade deficit he sought to attack with a robust Japan-style industrial policy."
"Why the Deeply Held Ideas of the Nation's Most Elite Economists Were Direct Causes of Extreme Inequality: As Americans turned away from government, so did the economics profession." Could these people really have had no idea of the damage they were doing? Surely it's obvious why so many people had hated those policies in the past and done their best to prevent them. It's hard to believe that the destruction of our economy is a bug rather than a feature.
Brad DeLong can still adhere to economic models that make no sense, but nevermind. As Norman Mailer explained long ago, the Elitemigration happened when smart Republicans took over the Democratic Party. No, really. "It's not like that faith is gone with the wind. Someone still vehemently believes in all those classic Chamber of Commerce GOP things, plus trade deals and outsourcing (with social liberalism, too, in a minor difference); someone still hates the economic left with religious and eliminationist intensity; someone still praises business, growth, deregulation with sunshiney Reaganite enthusiasm and in total denial of the persistent corruption, failure, and moral bankruptcy of same; and that someone is the current neoliberal Democratic Party elite, of which Brad DeLong is a prominent member." I hate to admit it, but Mailer was way ahead of me: "The Republicans said to themselves, 'we're in terrible trouble, they're on to us, we've...got to send a few of our best people into the Democratic Party and get them to run it' sort of as undercover people all these years. And I think they've succeeded. Look at the results."
"The Scourge of Neoliberalism: Why the Democratic Party Is Failing the Poor: When Democrats began their rightward lurch in the late 1960's, they were not content to merely broaden their coalition in order to quell the rise of the ultra-reactionary right; they have been concerned, also, with preventing left-wing insurgencies that could spook their patrons and push the party left."
"During Obama's Presidency Wealth Inequality has Increased and Poverty Levels are Higher [...] Despite the last few years of 'recovery,' the share of wealth held by the bottom 50% of the U.S. population declined from 1.15% in 2010 to 1.05% in 2013. This is less than half of where it stood in 2007, before the great recession, when the share of the country's wealth held by the poorest 50% of the population was at 2.5%."
Rick Perlstein on "Hillary's GOP Sympathies: Don't save the Speaker — let him go down with the Trump ship. When your opponent is drowning, the old saying goes, throw him an anvil. Is Hillary Clinton throwing hers a life raft instead?"
"There Will Be No Second American Revolution: The Futility of an Armed Revolt [...] There is no place in our nation for the kind of armed revolution our forefathers mounted against a tyrannical Great Britain. Such an act would be futile and tragic. We are no longer dealing with a distant, imperial king but with a tyrant of our own making: a militarized, technologized, heavily-financed bureaucratic machine that operates beyond the reach of the law.
"Sci-fi author Haldeman on whether a 'Forever War' movie will happen." There isn't really any surprising content in the article, but I do remember that day when Joe walked up to me in the bar looking stunned, having just met Heinlein and having him enthuse about how he'd enjoyed The Forever War. Joe had felt the book was a retort to Starship Troopers, so that was a bit unexpected.
What I found most interesting about "Few quick thoughts on Brexit" was that Arnade focuses somewhat on Emile Durkheim, but never really spells out what may have been Durkheim's most important revelation: that the rate of suicide in a society is a response to the society. Presumably, there will always be people who would kill themselves regardless of how much they are offered by society, but when rates of suice go up, it's not an individual illness or problem, it's something the society is doing to its people. Suicide is up in America, and our government's decisions are what is killing them.
In "Soul of A New (Political) Machine," Anne Laurie says, "I am personally pro-machine, both out of filial piety (my Irish grandparents owed their livelihoods to Tammany Hall) and because the known alternatives are so much worse. Perhaps the concept is due for revival, as the retro vintage artisanal alternative to the kleptocrats of our Second Gilded Age? Are we sophisticated enough, technologically or socially, to harness the machines' benefits without the corruption for which they were infamous?"
p>"Nobody talks about the fact that Taylor Swift is Jewish. Here's why it matters."
"Obama puts Congress on notice: TPP is coming: The White House put Congress on notice Friday morning that it will be sending lawmakers a bill to implement President Barack Obama's landmark Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement — a move intended to infuse new energy into efforts to ratify the flat-lining trade pact. The move establishes a 30-day minimum before the administration can present the legislation, but the White House is unlikely to do so amid the heated rhetoric of a presidential campaign in which both major party nominees have depicted free trade deals as massive job killers. Friday's notification is the clearest signal yet that the White House is serious about getting Obama's legacy trade deal — the biggest in U.S. history — passed by the end of the year, as he has vowed to do despite the misgivings of Republican leaders and the outright opposition of a majority of Democrats in Congress." I was pretty sure as soon as Hillary started using stronger anti-TPP language that she knew Obama was going to push for it to be a done deal in the lame duck and ostensibly take it out of her hands.
* "Sanders to Democrats: Rule out lame-duck vote on trade deal: It is now time for the leadership of the Democratic Party in the Senate and the House to join Secretary Clinton and go on the record in opposition to holding a vote on this job-killing trade deal during the lame-duck session of Congress and beyond."
* "Liberals rally to sink Obama trade deal: Liberals are amping up their opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) on and off of Capitol Hill, amid escalating concerns that the package will get an 11th hour vote after the November elections. Republican leaders in both chambers have said it's unlikely the mammoth Pacific Rim trade deal will reach the floor this year. But the accord remains a top priority for President Obama in the twilight of his final term, and the critics — leery of pro-TPP members in both parties — aren't taking anything for granted."
Bless you, Zephyr Teachout! David Dayen in The New Republic, "Debate the Billionaires! What do you do as a politician when billionaire plutocrats drop millions of dollars into a super PAC dedicated to ending your career? Democrats will need to answer this question, and fast. As desperation sets in with the Donald Trump campaign, the Republican National Committee is considering cutting its losses and re-directing funds to save the Republican majorities in the House and Senate. And right-wing super PAC helmsmen, from the Koch Brothers to Karl Rove, have been training their eye on Congress for months. This means dozens of Democrats will likely see attack ads and mailers blanketing their districts this October. One candidate has come up with a plan to deal with this, and it could become a model for how to, at least, raise awareness of the effort by Big Money to effectively buy congressional races. Zephyr Teachout, a progressive populist hoping to take over an open seat in upstate New York currently held by the GOP, has challenged her opponent to a debate. Not the Republican candidate, but his wealthy super PAC donors. [...] 'We can't let billionaire donors buy off politicians and get away with being faceless names on a filing,' Teachout told me. 'People deserve to know who's trying to take away their right to choose their representatives.'"
"Fox, Meet Henhouse: FDA Says Food Makers Can Decide Which Food Additives Are Safe: If you want proof that our food system is corporate-friendly rather than consumer-friendly, putting consumer health at unnecessary risk, take a look at the FDA's Final Rule on Substances Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS), which was released last Friday. It's a doozy. The agency announced it will continue to allow food manufacturers to decide whether new food additives that preserve, flavor, blend or add texture to food can be safely added to processed food or drink. Yes, you read that correctly. The food company, which may have a financial interest in using the food additive, gets to decide its safety while the FDA does not have to do a review."
"US justice department announces it will end use of private prisons: [...] Yates said in her memo that research had found private prisons 'simply do not provide the same level of correctional services, programs, and resources' and 'do not save substantially on costs' either. Essential government education and training programs for prisoners 'have proved difficult to replicate and outsource' in the private sector, she said. The decision was announced days after the Department of Justice's inspector general released a damning investigation report. It found instances of inmate-on-inmate assaults were 28% higher in contract prisons than in government-run facilities, and that the confiscation of contraband mobile phones occurred eight times more frequently. Federal inmates in private prisons were found to be nine times more likely to be placed on lockdown than those at other federal prisons, and were frequently subjected to arbitrary solitary confinement." Well, yes, all the things we warned against, not to mention the creation of a powerful lobbying industry that has, among other things, sucked up precious state funds as well, made more things crimes, and increased the likelihood that kids who normally might have had nothing worse than detention to deal with suddenly ended up being dragged out in cuffs and incarcerated. The very idea that "the Land of the Free" actually allowed a private prison system is unbearably shameful. Unfortunately, it's not only the federal government that's been playing this game, and the states are still riddled with this corrupt system.
"The Justice Department's stunning report on the Baltimore Police Department [...] As you might expect, all of these problems are exacerbated in black neighborhoods, where stops, use of force and unlawful arrests are far more common, even after controlling for racial demographics. There's also just routine harassment. One officer told DOJ investigators that she likes to disperse (usually black) youths in public spaces because it 'looks bad.' She recalled another time when she told a man and his four-year-old son to leave a playground because they 'couldn't just stand around' and 'needed to move.' [...] In fact, the report found that officers routinely described clearly unconstitutional stops and arrests in their police reports. I suppose it's at least good that they're forthcoming about it. But it suggests either a department that doesn't bother educating its officers about the constitutional rights of the people they serve, or that enforcement of those rights is so lax that officers have no qualms about documented their own unconstitutional behavior. I'm not sure which is worse. [...] Just so we're clear, the sergeant not only instructed a subordinate to violate the men's constitutional rights by concocting a lie, he did so while knowingly in the presence of DOJ monitors. That's some serious cultural and institutional rot. In another incident, the report describes how several officers detained a man whose only offense was to be in a 'high-crime area' with his hands in his pockets. (The DOJ report notes that it happened to be a cold January morning.) After repeated questioning, the officers found a (perfectly legal) kitchen knife in his possession. They then illegally arrested him. When he resisted, they beat and Tased him to the point that he needed medical care. He was never charged with a crime. In his report, the supervising sergeant praised the officers for their 'great restraint and professionalism.'"
* "Everything Wrong With How Our Justice System Treats Poor People, In One Awful Case" — Well, not everything, but it's a pretty big thing.
"Turkey and Iran Reach Agreement on Conditions for Syria Peace: In a stunning diplomatic surprise, Turkey and Iran have announced a preliminary agreement on fundamental principles for a settlement of the Syrian conflict. The dramatic turn in the diplomacy of the Syria War was revealed in Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim's regular weekly speech to the ruling AKP Party in the parliament and confirmed by a senior Iranian foreign ministry official Tuesday. Both Yildirim's speech and the Iranian corroboration were reported Tuesday by Al-Araby Al-Jadeed and Al-Hayat, Arabic-language newspapers published in London, but the potentially pivotal development has been unreported thus far in Western news media."
"Feds can't spend money to prosecute people who comply with state medical pot laws, court rules: A U.S. appeals court decided unanimously Tuesday that the federal government may not prosecute people who grow and distribute medical marijuana if they are complying with state laws. Congress in the last two years has banned the federal government from spending money in ways that would thwart state medical marijuana laws. The U.S. Department of Justice contended the ban did not undermine its right to prosecute growers and distributors under federal law, even in states where medical cannabis was legal. But in the first federal appellate decision on the subject, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals said the ban prevents the government from spending money on prosecutions of people whose marijuana activities were legal in their states."
Big health insurers are pulling out of Obamacare in spite of its giveaway to them. Apparently, they just can't cope with the meager requirement that they actually do at least a little insuring. But Aetna is actually doing it as blackmail. The Wall Street Journal says, "To Sanders, Aetna's Pull-Back from Affordable Care Act Markets Shows Need for Overhaul: Sen. Bernie Sanders, who mounted a strong challenge for the Democratic presidential nomination, said Tuesday that news that a major health insurer was pulling back its participation in the Affordable Care Act exchanges affirms the need for his single-payer, government-run program. He promised to introduce legislation creating 'Medicare for all' again next year. This week, Aetna Inc. said it will withdraw from 11 of the 15 states where it currently offers plans, the latest major national insurer to sharply pull back its participation."
"Hillary Clinton Appoints Ken Salazar To Lead White House Transition. Salazar is a prime example of a revolving-door traveler of the very kind that Clinton purports to oppose. And, "In November, Salazar authored a joint oped with former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt saying 'The TPP is a strong trade deal that will level the playing field for workers to help middle-class families get ahead. It is also the greenest trade deal ever.' Politico reports that Salazar is now opposing a ballot measure designed to restrict fracking in his home state of Colorado. He has previously asserted that 'there's not a single case where hydraulic fracking has created an environmental problem for anyone.'
* "Hillary Clinton Picks TPP and Fracking Advocate To Set Up Her White House.TWO BIG ISSUES dogged Hillary Clinton during the Democratic primary: the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement (TPP) and fracking. She had a long history of supporting both. Under fire from Bernie Sanders, she came out against the TPP and took a more critical position on fracking. But critics wondered if this was a sincere conversion or simply campaign rhetoric. Now, in two of the most significant personnel moves she will ever make, she has signaled a lack of sincerity. She chose as her vice presidential running mate Tim Kaine, who voted to authorize fast-track powers for the TPP and praised the agreement just two days before he was chosen. And now she has named former Colorado Democratic Senator and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to be the chair of her presidential transition team — the group tasked with helping set up the new administration should she win in November. That includes identifying, selecting, and vetting candidates for over 4,000 presidential appointments."
* "Progressive Clinton supporters: You broke it, you bought it: With Donald Trump tanking in the polls, there's room for progressives to simultaneously crush his bid for the presidency while holding Hillary Clinton's feet to the fire on the TPP. She's now appointed two pro-TPP politicians to key positions on her campaign — Tim Kaine as her Vice President and Ken Salazar to lead her presidential transition team. It's time for progressives who helped Clinton beat Bernie Sanders in the primary to take the lead on holding her accountable. Progressives who supported Clinton in the primary should use their leverage to ensure Clinton makes good on her vow to stop TPP and keep other promises she made on the campaign trail to win progressive votes. Bernie supporters will have your back, but it's up to you to lead on this one."
Pierce: "Why Is Hillary Clinton Bragging About This Endorsement? A recurring series. In her continuing tour of the dingier side of the 20th Century American diplomatic elite, Hillary Rodham Clinton picked up the endorsement on Wednesday of one John Negroponte." Sam Seder thinks the news was released by some younger person in the campaign who didn't know who Negroponte was. Let's hope that's true, but it seems like Clinton has been courting these endorsements.
In the face of continuing charges of corruption about what appears to have been a little too much horse-trading between foreign donors and Hillary Clinton's state department, we get the announcement that the "Clinton Foundation won't accept foreign money if Hillary wins". But even Jonathan Chait can see that "Hillary Clinton's Ethics Problems Are Worse Than She Understands," although he is still making excuses. Yes, it's particularly short-sighted for someone who knows she has been under a microscope for decades to do something that looks so corrupt, but no one should be acting with such an overt conflict, regardless of who them are.
"Federal judge refers Sheriff Joe Arpaio for criminal contempt: A federal judge on Friday referred Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio and three of his aides to the U.S. Attorney's Office, requesting that they be prosecuted for criminal contempt of court. The landmark decision comes after U.S. District Court Judge G. Murray Snow found that Arpaio intentionally violated various orders rooted in an 8-year-old racial-profiling case. The judge's order also refers Chief Deputy Jerry Sheridan, Arpaio's former defense attorney Michele Iafrate, and Capt. Steve Bailey for prosecutors to consider criminal contempt charges against them as well. The sheriff and Sheridan already have been held in civil contempt of court. Potential penalties are steeper in a criminal case, and only criminal contempt could result in incarceration." This should have happened a long time ago and should end up with Arpaio in jail. We'll be watching.
Whistleblower Retaliation Alive and Well at Hanford: It's getting real out at Hanford in eastern Washington, the site of the most expensive (and likely dangerous) environmental clean-up in the world. On July 21, Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson, along with watchdog group Hanford Challenge and UA Local Union 598 Plumbers and Steamfitters, filed an emergency legal motion asking US Judge Thomas Rice to intervene and force the US Department of Energy and federal contractor Washington River Protection Solutions to protect their workers from toxic vapor exposure at the site. [...] Allegedly, that 'culture of indifference' is what got Sandra Black, an employee concerns program manager (ECP), fired in January 2015. Black, who worked for DOE contractor Savannah River Nuclear Solutions (SRNS), was in charge of hearing out grievances raised by workers who have safety concerns, such as those working at Hanford. Black claims that she was terminated after speaking to investigators from the Government Accountability Office (GAO)."
"The Raid: In Bungled Spying Operation, NSA Targeted Pro-Democracy Campaigner." He had committed no crime, but "Ony Fullman is a middle-aged former tax man and a pro-democracy activist. But four years ago, a botched operation launched by New Zealand spies meant he suddenly found himself deemed a potential terrorist — his passport was revoked, his home was raided, and he was placed on a top-secret National Security Agency surveillance list."
"4 Years Later, Sweden Accepts Ecuador's Offer to Hear Assange: More than four years after Ecuador offered Swedish authorities the opportunity to interview Julian Assange in the nation's London Embassy, a deal appears to have been struck Wednesday after Ecuador's attorney general responded positively to a request from the Swedish government to interview the WikiLeaks founder in the building. [...] The WikiLeaks founder entered his fifth year inside the Ecuadorean Embassy on June 20 in conditions the United Nations has deemed arbitrary detention. Swedish and British authorities dismissed the U.N. ruling, which was made a day before the former requested to interview Assange in London. Ecuador's decision to continue to grant asylum to Assange has sparked friction with not just Sweden and the U.S., but also the U.K. But on Wednesday Ecuador's Foreign Ministry was unequivocal in reaffirming the country's support for both the U.N. ruling and the whistleblower's continued asylum."
Elizabeth Warren demands open access to data from patient trials of drugs: "'I appreciate that there are many policy, privacy, and practical issues that need to be addressed in order to make data sharing practical and useful for the research community,' Warren wrote in an editorial in the venerable New England Journal of Medicine, 'but the stakes are too high to step back in the face of that challenge.'"
Matt Taibbi, "The Summer of the Shill: Campaign 2016 won't just have lasting implications for American politics. It's obliterated what was left of our news media [...] It's not that stations were wrong to denounce Trump's comments. He deserves it all. But he's not the only stupid, lying, corrupt politician in the world, which is the impression one could easily get watching certain stations these days. These all-Trump, all-the-time story lineups are like Fox in reverse. The commercial media has devolved, finally, into two remarkably humorless messaging platforms."
"Clinton courts the right: Attacking Trump as aberration rather than apotheosis gives Republicans a pass: Donald Trump has made this election, like everything else, about Donald Trump. Hillary Clinton, happily skewering him as he blows up his campaign with ruinous attacks on fellow Republicans and myriad others, has zero problems with this. But critics on the left do, because by playing it safe Clinton is sending troubling if unsurprising signals about the agenda she will set as president, and also missing a historic opportunity to crush the Republican Party in a moment of acute vulnerability. Instead of aggressively making the case that Trump represents the worst of Republican greed and bigotry, she is inviting their leaders and donors to join her campaign en masse."
Erik Levitz in New York Magazine, "Disagreeing With the Elite Consensus on Trade, Immigration, or Foreign Policy Does Not Make One a Trump 'Enabler': On Monday, Kirchick wrote a piece titled 'Beware the Hillary Clinton-Loathing, Donald Trump-Loving Useful Idiots of the Left.' In the column, Kirchick observes that Donald Trump once said that he was uncomfortable with the idea of American exceptionalism — and (gasp) many left-wing thinkers agree! Thus, Kirchick reasons, all left-wing critics of American foreign policy must be 'Trump fans' who are recklessly 'validating' a 'reactionary.' That may sound like a caricature of his argument, but the cartoonishness is Kirchick's own." There's a lot of this going around.
"Hillary Shows Her True Colors (Again) In Florida [...] Many Democrats were nauseated this week to see Clinton-- up to her old tricks-- rush to Miami to try to save Wasserman Schultz's collapsing campaign."
Leftists Against Clintonism: It's Not Just About the Lies, It's About the Record [...] But in advocating lesser evilism as a voting strategy, Chomsky often makes another crucial point: That electoral politics should make up only a tiny part of efforts to change society for the better. "The electoral season in the United States, the quadrennial extravaganza, typically tends to draw energy away from activism because people are caught up in the hoopla and the excitement and so on," Chomsky has said, expressing a view similar to that of Adolph Reed, who has frequently noted the problems with "electoralitis." Democrats, for their part, have long been infected by electoralitis; they have come to view the election of more Democrats as an end in itself, not as a means to push for a more equitable society. But, long-term, we must be focused on more than merely defeating Trump; we must also defeat the appeal of Trumpism. For that to happen, we need a strong left with a working class core.
The Great Grift revealed, in "How We Killed the Tea Party: Greedy super PACs drained the movement with endless pleas for money to support 'conservative' candidates — while instead using the money to enrich themselves. I should know. I worked for one of them. "
"The Great White Hype: No One Is Energizing the White Working Class, Not Even Donald Trump [...] Only in the most secure segment of Americans did Pew find that a simple majority planned to support Republican candidates. As financial security decreased, the category that benefited most was not the Democrats, but rather 'OTHER/NOT SURE' — indicating that the person being surveyed was not heavily engaged in the political process, and unlikely to vote."
I was surprised to see in my Twitter feed a flurry of people sneering about Maureen Dowd. This seemed odd, since I thought everyone had quit reading her long ago, just like I had. But then it all became clear: She said something mean about Hillary Clinton. Now, it is not exactly a surprise to have MoDo saying mean things about Hillary Clinton, but this particular mean thing — well, see if you can guess why it so upset them....
Paul Craig Roberts on "The Stench of Raw Propaganda: I just heard the rawest kind of propaganda from former presstitute David Satter, who hangs out at the right-wing Hudson Institute and pretends to be an expert on Russia and Putin. On August 10 Satter told NPR's audience that Washington's hope to bring peace to Syria would fail unless Washington understood that the Russian government had no humanitarian feelings and did not care about the loss of human life. What Washington needs to do, said Satter, was to make sure that Putin and his henchmen understood that they would be held accountable as war criminals. I should be hardened by now, but it never fails to astonish me that agents for the elite are willing to tell the most blatant and transparent lies. Perhaps this is because they know that the media and their fellow bought-and-paid-for 'experts' will not challenge them on their statements. In fact, this is the way explanations are controlled and history rewritten." But there's something perhaps more significant in this piece that bears reading.
"Social Security and the 1 Percent: In February of last year, the Center for American Progress (CAP) released a report titled The Effect of Rising Inequality on Social Security. The report shows how the increase in economic inequality in the U.S. has led to deteriorating Social Security revenues, often to the tune of tens of billions of dollars a year. Earlier research by Dean Baker showed that the upward redistribution of wage income was responsible for 43.5 percent of the projected 75-year shortfall in Social Security funding as of 2013."
"We're in a Low-Growth World. How Did We Get Here? One central fact about the global economy lurks just beneath the year's remarkable headlines: Economic growth in advanced nations has been weaker for longer than it has been in the lifetime of most people on earth." And it's been like that for the whole 21st century. Strangely, this article does not say it's "because people are underpaid and no one has any money."
Steven Thrasher in the Guardian, "Hate Trump? You should still hold Clinton's feet to the fire: It will make Hillary Clinton a stronger candidate if she's held accountable for her past and for her actions. Oh, and it's not a vote for Donald Trump."
"Policing Class [...] There's a reason why the vast majority of police stops occur in the Western and the Central Districts: the Western is home to Baltimore's poorest black neighborhoods, the Central is home to Baltimore's business district. In effect, the city is producing and reproducing a population that has no functional purpose other than to be policed.
Atrios: "I don't go to DC much anymore. Actually I haven't been for years. For awhile I went fairly regularly for various reasons, including occasionally meeting with people who have a wee bit more power than I'll ever have. I spent some time scheming with one congressional office in particular (whether they valued my input or were just humoring me, they were serious about the issue) about how to keep people who were getting screwed in their homes. It was depressing. This office gave a shit, but nobody (exaggeration, of course) else did, and they couldn't get anything past administration attempts to block anything, or at least let things wither on the vine. One can always argue that legislative fixes just couldn't get the votes, but legislative fixes were necessary only because the administration was sitting on a giant pile of cash (went largely unspent) they had discretion over and plenty of regulatory power they could apply and they weren't doing anything. If stealing homes is basically legal and profitable, people (and companies) will steal homes. That no one could see the importance of this, even without shedding tears for the l000zers who had their homes stolen, was hard to comprehend."
* "Everybody Loves Henry: I'm not always thrilled about various efforts at broadening the coalition — voters or elite — by reaching out to Republicans, though I get the utility, but what advantages are there to publicly embracing Henry Kissinger and Negroponte? Is there a single voter out there who ponders to her/himself, "Well, I was on the fence a bit, but now that those brutal amoral assholes Kissinger and Negroponte are on board, I trust that Clinton will support enough political violence to make me happy?" Well, I'm sure there are a few, but they all write for the Washington Post op-ed pages. DC's a complicated place and I get that strange alliances are formed, but those don't require wearing your giant sized "Henry Approved!" button. This is the moment when someone says, "It doesn't matter. All that matters right now is beating Trump." Okay, fine, and this helps elect Clinton... how? I guess if I fail to mention it then it didn't happen. Blue Nation Review is a lovely happy place."
* "It's About Hating Liberals" — This one is long enough that you should click the link. I mean, long for Atrios, which isn't long.
Adolph Reed, "Vote for the Lying Neoliberal Warmonger: It's Important: An explanation for why defeating Donald Trump — despite what we know about Hillary Clinton — should be the left's primary national electoral objective this November" — I have to admit I lean toward this view for swing-state voters, at least, but I would feel a lot better if everyone was using the bumper-sticker like they did in the Duke-Edwards race.
RIP: Alan Legum, "Annapolis civil rights lawyer remembered as fearless, graceful," at 69. Local civil rights people knew who he was, of course. And the liberal blogosphere knows his son Judd.
* R2-D2: "The British actor who played R2-D2 in the Star Wars films has died at the age of 81 after a long illness. Kenny Baker, who was 3ft 8in tall, shot to fame in 1977 when he first played the robot character." He was also in Time Bandits, one of my all time favorites.
@samknight1 tweeted this graph with the words, "If you're trying to explain the 2016 election and deliberately ignore this graph please get out of my face forever." Or here's another way to look at it.
Jeremy Corbyn makes the case against privatized government services in the Telegraph, "You don't need to settle for the future the Tories are creating [...] Over the last six years you've been deceived on a scale not seen since Bernie Madoff's infamous Ponzi scheme. Time and again you've been told that to build a strong economy we had to tighten our belts and cut public funding. Today we have the utterly self-defeating reality of rapidly declining public services while our debt is going up."
So Joe Lieberman isn't sure who to support in the presidential election. This inspired Marcy Wheeler, who remembers Joe well, to remember this Tom Tomorrow cartoon.
"Grassroots Democrats Are Making the TPP a Big Issue in Congressional Races [...] Critics of the TPP such as Zephyr Teachout in New York and Pramila Jayapal in Washington have won open congressional primaries in recent weeks. And the dwindling circle of Democratic incumbents with records of support for free-trade agreements, such as Kind, are getting an earful from constituents."
Charles Pierce says, "If Hillary Clinton Seeks (or Accepts) an Endorsement from Henry Kissinger, She's Lost My Vote."
* "Hillary Clinton's Embrace of Kissinger Is Inexcusable: Bernie Sanders should call on her to repudiate him as the war criminal he is. [...] Kissinger is a unique monster. He stands not as a bulwark against Donald Trump's feared recklessness and immorality but as his progenitor. As Richard Nixon's aide-de-camp, Kissinger helped plan and execute a murderous, illegal foreign policy — in Southeast and South Asia, Southern Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America — as reckless and immoral as anything Trump now portends. Millions died as a result of his actions. Kissinger and Nixon threatened to use nuclear weapons, and, indeed, Kissinger helped inscribe the threat of 'limited nuclear war' into doctrine. Kissinger, in the 1970s, not only dug the hole that the greater Middle East finds itself in, but, as an influential cheerleader for both the first Gulf War in 1991 and its 2003 sequel, helped drive the United States into that ditch."
"Frustrated state public defender appoints Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon to represent indigent defendant: Fed up with what he says is the governor's failure to properly fund his overwhelmed office, the state's lead public defender ordered Gov. Jay Nixon this week to represent a poor person in Cole County this month. Michael Barrett said he was using a provision of state law that allows him in extraordinary circumstances to delegate legal representation 'to any member of the state bar of Missouri.' He's starting with the state's highest-profile lawyer: Nixon."
The shocking news that AARP has been funding ALEC generated immediate pressure that appears to have convinced AARP that being pals with Alec
wasn't a good idea. But they gave a strange excuse for this affiliation: "The letter also revealed that AARP said its 'interest in supporting ALEC was to gain better access to legislators.'" I wonder where that came from — it's hardly as if AARP can't already get access to legislators and has to go through a partisan group that acts directly against its interests.
"Court Throws Out Terrorism Conviction in Canada, Citing Police Entrapment: Sting operations — in which an undercover agent or informant provides the means and opportunity to lure otherwise incapable people into committing a crime — have represented the default tactic for counterterrorism prosecutions since the 9/11 attacks. Critics believe these stings amount to entrapment. Human Rights Watch, for instance, argues that law enforcement authorities in the U.S. have overstepped their role by 'effectively participating in developing terrorism plots.' Nonetheless, U.S. courts have rejected entrapment defenses, no matter how hapless the defendants. In Canada, however, the legal standing of counterterrorism stings has suddenly shifted. Last week, a high-ranking judge in British Columbia stayed the convictions of two alleged terrorists, ruling that they had been 'skillfully manipulated' and entrapped by an elaborate sting operation organized by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police." This needs to start happening in the US. Again.
Another new interview at The Talking Dog, with A. Naomi Paik, "Assistant Professor of Asian American studies at the University of Illinois at Champaign/Urbana. Professor Paik holds a B.A. from Columbia, and an M.A., M.Phil. and Ph.D. from Yale University, She is the author of Rightlessness: Testimony and Redress in US Prison Camps since World War II. On July 15, 2016, I had the privilege of interviewing Professor Paik by telephone. What follows are my interview notes, as corrected by Naomi Paik."
"Mississippi Police Want to Arrest the Satanists Who Turn Dead People Gay: Just over a week ago the Satanic Temple, unwavering disciples of the Prince of Darkness and aspiring adopt-a-highway participants, performed a Pink Mass over the grave of Catherine Idalette Johnston, the mother of Westboro Baptist Church founder Fred Phelps Jr. Westboro has yet to officially comment on the eternal gaying of its leader's dead mom, but the owner of the cemetery where the ceremony was performed has filed charges with the local police department."
"Venezuela's Latest Terrible Economic Idea Is Forced Labor: Venezuela is mired in a years-long economic free fall that has killed a lot of people, and which is in the process of killing a lot more. Last week, the humanitarian catastrophe there got one of its darkest twists yet: The government of president Nicolás Maduro has, in a new decree, paved the way for the conscription of the nation's citizens into forced labor."
Ryan Cooper in The Week: "To end police violence, we have to end poverty: The movement against American racism recently got a big boost from a new project called "Campaign Zero." The racial justice activists behind Campaign Zero hope that by reforming the police and courts, and improving community oversight, they can eliminate unjust police violence. This is a promising and important agenda. However, it's worth examining what a narrow focus on police violence risks leaving out. Economic factors, particularly poverty, are deeply entwined with racist outcomes and police violence. To truly fight racism, we have to fight poverty, too."
"If Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine are 'Progressive,' Then the Word Has Lost All Meaning [...] So why are so many liberal writers so anxious to persuade us that, deep in his heart of hearts, Tim Kaine is, too, a progressive? Probably there's a desire to exaggerate Kaine's progressivism because Hillary's own progressive bona fides are questionable. But mostly it seems that today, the progressive label has become little more than a marketing tool, a signifier deployed to distract us from that the actual content of the signified. How did we arrive at this sad state of affairs?"
Jon Schwarz, "Cracks in the Dam: Three Paths Citizens United Created for Foreign Money to Pour Into U.S. Elections"
"US Doctors Call for Universal Healthcare: "Abolish the Insurance Companies": A group of more than 2,000 physicians is calling for the establishment of a universal government-run health system in the US, in a paper in the American Journal of Public Health. According to the proposal released Thursday, the Affordable Care Act did not go far enough in removing barriers to healthcare access. The physicians' bold plan calls for implementing a single-payer system similar to Canada's, called the National Health Program, that would guarantee all residents healthcare."
What I remember most about the announcement that pregnancy test kits would be sold in stores was an outcry from lab techs to the effect that performing these tests required training and skill and women would not be able to do them. Since I had been doing these tests at a clinic with about 30 seconds' training (the time it takes to do the test), that gave me a good laugh. Pagan Kennedy in the NYT provides a little history: "Could Women Be Trusted With Their Own Pregnancy Tests?"
"The Price of Access: More than 100 Americans Are Rich Enough to Buy the Presidential Election Outright"
"On causes of Brexit: There's something about the post-Brexit autopsies that I'm not entirely happy with. It's the failure to distinguish between the margin and the infra-margin."
"Make Algorithms Accountable: Companies use them to sort through stacks of résumés from job seekers. Credit agencies use them to determine our credit scores. And the criminal justice system is increasingly using algorithms to predict a defendant's future criminality. Those computer-generated criminal 'risk scores' were at the center of a recent Wisconsin Supreme Court decision that set the first significant limits on the use of risk algorithms in sentencing. The court ruled that while judges could use these risk scores, the scores could not be a 'determinative' factor in whether a defendant was jailed or placed on probation. And, most important, the court stipulated that a presentence report submitted to the judge must include a warning about the limits of the algorithm's accuracy."
Environmentalist Bill McKibben is being stalked: "And yet, for all that logic, I still find myself on edge. To be watched so much is a kind of never-ending nightmare. And sometimes it's just infuriating. I skipped the funeral this summer of Patrick Sorrento, an important mentor to me at my college newspaper, because I didn't want my minder to follow me and cause a distracting spectacle. When my daughter reports someone taking pictures of her at the airport, it drives me nuts. I have no idea if it's actually this outfit; common decency would suggest otherwise, but that seems an increasingly rare commodity."
"Three Words That I Wish I'd Never Hear Democrats Say Again: Speaking of poor whites — or any impoverished population — as a 'separate breed' conveniently allows us to skirt solutions to help lift them out of poverty. What I experienced when I went to see my family was not racial resentment, but an overall despair and paralysis. They know how bad their lot is, but they simply can't afford to move to start a new life. It wasn't racism that angered the 'hillbillies,' but a recognition that there was simply no future for them in the American scheme, and the fact that a wealth-obsessed American society, increasingly stratified in rich enclaves, has utterly abandoned them to their fate."
Simon Jenkins in the Guardian: "Want to avoid recession? Then shower UK households with cash: The economy is in dire need of a jump start — cutting interest rates has failed miserably. So instead give money to people who would actually spend it."
Richard J. Eskow, "American Greed: Trump's Economic Team Is a Who's Who of What's Wrong. [...] Trump's team isn't just monochromatic and male. At least four, and perhaps as many six, of the men are billionaires. They range in age from 50 to 74 — or, from 'younger old white guy' to 'older old white guy.' Five team members are named Steve — which means that eight of them are not. For diversity, that will have to do. There are only two economists on the team — and one of them believes in the flat tax. But hedge funds are represented. So is fracking. And tobacco. And guns. And banking. And steel. And there's the guy who mismanaged Chrysler before it was rescued by a government intervention."
Whatever else I may think of Penn Jillette's politics, I share his lack of patience with people who try to guilt-trip people about their third-party vote.
I haven't read it since I don't like the format and was never that crazy about the show, but someone wrote a script for The 911 episode of Seinfeld.
I'm told that a lot of Beatles music has been pulled from YouTube all of a sudden, but I can still see this so I hope you can, too — a version of Paul doing "For No One" with an American accent.
Important bit of journalism that started with Sirota and the IBT seems to have led to a truly enormous piece of news: "U.S. antitrust officials set to challenge Anthem, Aetna deals: source:
U.S. antitrust officials will file lawsuits to stop the two large health insurance deals they have been scrutinizing for a year, Anthem Inc's (ANTM.N) acquisition of Cigna Corp (CI.N) and Aetna Inc's (AET.N) takeover of Humana Inc (HUM.N), a person familiar with the matter told Reuters. Antitrust regulators have been concerned that consolidation of the nation's largest insurers would raise prices for Americans. Anthem and Aetna have said the deals will help consumers by giving the companies the scale to create more cost savings for customers." And here I was waiting for their merged company to be called "AnathemA". But at least it's being looked into. It would be nice to think we can go back to doing some serious trust-busting again.
Department of Nice Surprise: I don't expect much from Terry McAuliffe, but this is pretty good: "Governor McAuliffe Statement on the Virginia Supreme Court Decision on the Restoration of Civil Rights: Once again, the Virginia Supreme Court has placed Virginia as an outlier in the struggle for civil and human rights. It is a disgrace that the Republican leadership of Virginia would file a lawsuit to deny more than 200,000 of their own citizens the right to vote. And I cannot accept that this overtly political action could succeed in suppressing the voices of many thousands of men and women who had rejoiced with their families earlier this year when their rights were restored. Forty states give citizens who have made mistakes and paid their debt to society a straightforward process for restoring voting rights. I remain committed to moving past our Commonwealth's history of injustice to embrace an honest process for restoring the rights of our citizens, and I believe history and the vast majority of Virginians are on our side. Despite the Court's ruling, we have the support of the state's four leading constitutional experts, including A.E. Dick Howard, who drafted the current Virginia Constitution. They are convinced that our action is within the constitutional authority granted to the Office of the Governor. The men and women whose voting rights were restored by my executive action should not be alarmed. I will expeditiously sign nearly 13,000 individual orders to restore the fundamental rights of the citizens who have had their rights restored and registered to vote. And I will continue to sign orders until I have completed restoration for all 200,000 Virginians. My faith remains strong in all of our citizens to choose their leaders, and I am prepared to back up that faith with my executive pen. The struggle for civil rights has always been a long and difficult one, but the fight goes on."
* Don't worry, he reverted to type to pump for the TPP immediately.
"Texas Voter ID Law Violates Voting Rights Act, Court Rules: Texas' voter identification law violates the U.S. law prohibiting racial discrimination in elections, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday. The U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed previous rulings that the 2011 voter ID law — which stipulates the types of photo identification election officials can and cannot accept at the polls — does not comply with the Voting Rights Act."
"Obama Signs Industry-Backed GMO Label Bill Into Law: Looks like we're finally getting GMO labels on food products — just not the kind you can actually read. " The bill "allows businesses to use a smartphone scannable QR code instead of clear, concise wording that informs consumers if a product contains genetically modified ingredients." It also nullifies state laws on labeling.
"Why Is President Obama Lying About Patrick Murphy's Record?: The TV spot targeting African-American voters in Tallahassee and Jacksonville that Obama cut for Patrick Murphy's drowning Senate primary campaign puts the president's credibility dangerously on the line. Murphy's record in the House is unquestionably one of the most reactionary and blatantly anti-progressive of any Democrat serving in the House. He has been an unabashed advocate for cutting Social Security and Medicare, an unflinching ally of Wall Street and payday loan predators and a consistent backer of Republican initiatives against the environment and, in fact, against the Obama administration itself. "
"Obama To Police: 'We Have Your Backs'; Yes, the President of the United States, in the aftermath of the police murders in Dallas and Baton Rouge, has gotten off the fence. Up to now, he spoke in irreconcilable tones in an effort to offend no one, no side, by arguing that police were needlessly killing black men while praising the police for the great job they were doing, when he just said the job they were doing was needlessly killing black men."
Dean Baker: "NYT Does Impassioned Pitch for TPP in Its News Section: "It is incredible that the NYT tried to present the current debate as a narrow one over traditional issues of trade and protection. This is obviously not the case and there are no shortage of experts who could have explained this fact to its reporter. A good place to start would be the Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman, who also happens to be a NYT columnist. Joe Stiglitz, another Nobel Prize winning economist, could have also explained the nature of these trade agreements to its reporter."
A journalist for the WSJ encounters Homeland Security at LAX: "But then she asked me for my two cellphones. I asked her what she wanted from them. 'We want to collect information' she said, refusing to specify what kind. And that is where I drew the line -- I told her I had first amendment rights as a journalist she couldn't violate and I was protected under. I explained I had to protect my government and military sources -- over the last month, I have broken two stories that deeply irked the US government, in addition to other stories before I went on maternity leave, including one in Kabul that sparked a Congressional investigation into US military corruption, all stories leaked by American officials speaking to me in confidence. 'Did you just admit you collect information for foreign governments?' she asked, her tone turning hostile. 'No, that's exactly not what I just said,' I replied, explaining again why I would not hand over my phones. She handed me a DHS document, a photo of which I've attached. It basically says the US government has the right to seize my phones and my rights as a US citizen (or citizen of the world) go out the window. This law applies at any point of entry into the US, whether naval, air or land and extends for 100 miles into the US from the border or formal points of entry. So, all of NY city for instance. If they forgot to ask you at JFK airport for your phones, but you're having a drink in Manhattan the next day, you technically fall under this authority. And because they are acting under the pretense to protect the US from terrorism, you have to give it up. So I called their bluff."
"Would Turkey Be Justified in Kidnapping or Drone-Killing the Turkish Cleric in Pennsylvania?: Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan places the blame for this weekend's failed coup attempt on an Islamic preacher and one-time ally, Fethullah Gulen (above), who now resides in Pennsylvania with a green card. Erdogan is demanding the U.S. extradite Gulen, citing prior extraditions by the Turkish government of terror suspects demanded by the U.S.: 'Now we're saying deliver this guy who's on our terrorist list to us.' Erdogan has been requesting Gulen's extradition from the U.S. for at least two years, on the ground that he has been subverting the Turkish government while harbored by the U.S. Thus far, the U.S. is refusing, with Secretary of State John Kerry demanding of Turkey: 'Give us the evidence, show us the evidence. We need a solid legal foundation that meets the standard of extradition.'"
An After School Satan Club could be coming to your kid's elementary school [...] They're here plotting to bring their wisdom to the nation's public elementary school children. They point out that Christian evangelical groups already have infiltrated the lives of America's children through after-school religious programming in public schools, and they appear determined to give young students a choice: Jesus or Satan."
The Talking Dog interview with Pardiss Kebriaei, "a Senior Staff Attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, where she works on challenging U.S. government abuses in the national security context, including representation of current and former Guantanamo detainees, and others implicated in or affected by the "war on terror." She also advocates on behalf of other cases as part of the No Separate Justice Campaign, a grassroots initiative formed to shed light on unjust domestic terrorism prosecutions."
Michael Moore thinks Trump will win. His reasons are not that crazy, but I still don't think he will. Yes, I realize it was a total screw-up for the DNC to court another election that's closer than it ought to be, but a lot of people really don't like Trump. Nevertheless, a word of warning: Clinton and her cronies have earned themselves a lot of ill-feeling from people who they could have made allies if they had wanted to, and decisions like that do not generate respect for her integrity or her decision-making.
The RNC had their convention and everyone ended up talking about how "Melania's Plagiarism Actually Just Shows How Vapid Political Speeches Are" so no one would notice how neatly Michelle Obama's words fit into a GOP convention: "Barack and I were raised with so many of the same values: that you work hard for what you want in life, that your word is your bond... Because we want our children and all children in this nation — to know that the only limit to the height of your achievements is the reach of your dreams and your willingness to work for them." As opposed to all those lazy poor people who don't get to the White House.
* I saw an announcement that "GOP Platform to Call for Reinstatement of Glass-Steagall" but when I tried to find it in the Platform it made me fall asleep.
* I had Trump's speech on in the background and it was all over the place. The weirdest part was at the end where he started saying a bunch of liberal-sounding stuff. This kind of thing is inspiring Thomas Frank to write a warning: "Hillary Clinton Needs to Wake Up. Trump Is Stealing the Voters She Takes for Granted: For the first time in living memory, the Republicans are outflanking the Democrats on the left. If they don't rise to the challenge, they'll be trounced [...] The question we need to ask is this: what are the consequences of the violent disruption Trump has visited on our delicately balanced political system? Look what he has done. He has dynamited the free-trade consensus that dominated Washington for so many years, he has done it with force, and in the process he has made himself the choice of many millions of Americans who have watched their economic situation deteriorate and heard their concerns brushed off by the Thomas Friedmans and the Bill Clintons of the world. Think about it this way. For years, Republican orthodoxy on trade made possible endless Democratic sell-outs of working people, with the two-party consensus protecting the D's from any consequences. They could ram Nafta through Congress, they could do trade deals with China, they could negotiate the Trans Pacific Partnership, they could attend their conferences at Davos and congratulate themselves for being so global and so enlightened, secure in the belief that the people whose livelihoods they had just ruined had 'nowhere else to go'.
[...] In other words, it was only possible for our liberal leaders to be what they are — a tribe of sunny believers in globalization and its favored classes — as long as the Republicans held down their left flank for them. Democrats could only celebrate globalization's winners and scold its uneducated losers so long as there was no possibility that they might face a serious challenge on the matter from the other party in the system."
* "Jon Stewart's Closing Monologue on The Late Show is a Must-Watch."
And then the Democrats had their convention. The press focused on acrimony and Clintonites in social media obediently ranted at their friends about how stupid they were for still daring to criticize The Nominee. Then suddenly the DNC emails story breaks in the mainstream and the Clinton/DNC team (which we know were one and the same) are working heavy damage control, trying to blame the Russians while continuing to accuse Sanders supporters of originating strong language and conspiracy theories. But eventually the DNC had to admit the emails were genuine and apologized to Sanders, and even Harry Reid admitted that, "I knew — everybody knew — that this was not a fair deal." Well, we knew that. We all knew that, the minute we found out about the Democratic debate schedule. An awful lot of people seem to have forgotten how important the primary season is for creating new party activists who may ultimately evolve into your bench of future candidates. Anyone who pretends to care about downticket races yet nevertheless defends DWS' debate schedule is talking crap, because the debates are a big deal in generating excitement for the current race that turns into activism and leadership. In 2007, the debates started in April and there were 13 events before October, and 13 more after that. It generated A LOT of interest and excitement for the party.
In 2015, Debbie Wasserman Schultz decreed that there would be only six debates (eventually adding a few more only because Clinton agreed, though she backed out of the promised California debate), and the first of these was not held until October 13th. So the DNC wasted an entire summer season and rather than generating enthusiasm, alienated numerous new activists who might otherwise have become reliable party activists, voters, and possibly future leaders. Now, you can say this was because the fix was in for Hillary, or you can say, "Of course they did, they hate liberal progressives and don't want them in the party in the first place," but you can't say the primaries weren't rigged. Of course they were.
* "Bernie Sanders to Return to Senate as an Independent: Democratic runner-up says more DNC staff should leave over emails."
* The Republicans got the traditional bump from their convention, bringing Trump up to parity or better with Clinton in many polls, but the Dem convention seems to have more than erased that effect and now she is looking good for November.
Oh, you know how in recent years every protest demonstration at a political convention seems to result in large numbers of outrageously out-of-order arrests? Didn't' have that in Philly. "Here's What Philly Cops Thought of the DNC Protests: We don't know if we can handle all of these good vibes."
Unsurprisingly, Trump actually got a bump from the GOP convention and a lot of people got into a frenzy because he was running so close to Clinton, but then Clinton got an even bigger bump.
* RCP Trump-Clinton electoral vote map * Electoral-Vote.com map * If nothing "interesting" happens, Hillary will probably win pretty big. On the other hand, that could all go topsy-turvey in the event of the economy tanking again.
The scam of the Clinton Victory Fund was also exposed for all to see, showing that all that money people thought they were giving to downticket races and local parties (because the campaign said it was) was actually going straight to Clinton. Matt Taibbi: "What does it all mean? If you're a Clinton fan, probably nothing. To anyone else, it shows that the primary season was very far from a fair fight. The Sanders camp was forced to fund all of its own operations, while the Clinton campaign could essentially use the entire Democratic Party structure as adjunct staff. The DNC not only wasn't neutral, but helped with oppo research against Sanders and media crisis management. DNC chief Debbie Wasserman Schultz was forced to resign as a result of this mess, which exposed to Sanders voters the extent to which they were viewed organizationally as annoyances to be managed. The immediate question going forward for the party is whether the two camps can put aside their differences in time to defeat the more-than-a-little-scary Donald Trump. But down the road, someone will have to address the problem of a Democratic Party structure that effectively had no internal advocates for a full 43 percent of its voters. As we've seen with the Trump episode on the other side, people don't much like having to fight against the party claiming to represent them."
Anyway, Sandernistas were pretty upset and in no mood to forgive, a few of them even booed Bernie for being a turncoat for going along with the party and speaking for Clinton and all. It was less of a big deal than the press made it out to be, but there was still a lot of grumbling. But inside the hall it was mostly business as usual except for a few moments when the warhawks decided to shout down the peacenicks with "USA! USA!" Which sounds so much less jingoistic when Democrats do it, right? No.
* Here's Elizabeth Warren's speech, where she points out that DC has no problem with partisan gridlock when it comes to giving the bad guys what they want. And here's Bernie's.
* Obama made his speech and I swear it sounded like he was biting back a laugh when he talked about how hard Clinton has fought for working people. Listening to him and Biden talk about how wonderful Clinton is and her sincere commitment to teachers and families was pretty bitter brew for me, but a lot of my friends professed to be in tears and wishing for four more years.
On Democracy Now!, Amy Goodman moderated a discussion between two left-progressives on how to deal with it all, a conversation you are unlikely to hear elsewhere, at least with such civility: "Kshama Sawant vs. Rebecca Traister on Clinton, Democratic Party & Possibility of a Female President." A pullquote: "So, if you look at the significance of her being the first female nominee, I understand the appeal of that, I'm sympathetic to that. But here's what I would say. I actually — you know, all throughout this campaign season, I was reminded of a show — an episode that you played, Amy, in 2008, when you had Melissa Harris-Perry and Gloria Steinem debating, and Gloria was saying, "Well, if you're a woman, you need to vote for Hillary Clinton," and Melissa was saying, "Well, if you're a person of color, you need to vote for Obama." And I was sitting there watching as a woman of color, saying neither of these candidates represent my interests as a woman of color. And the reason I say that is it has less to do with their identity and far more to do with the interests they represent."
A number of progressives are just throwing up their hands: "I have come to terms with the fact that the Republicans will eventually get the White House. They always do at some point. It's inevitable. The Supreme Court is always an issue, as is abortion, as is every single important social issue you can name. There will never come an election where those are not issues. And I've come to realize why it is that when we give you Democrats the ball on all of this, you drop it every time in the name of 'bipartisanship'. It's because you like things the way they are, no less than the Republicans, and pretending to give a damn about social issues will keep us voting for you like robots every time. But you can't afford to actually fix the problems because then you wouldn't be able to scare us into voting for you. You don't even really want to fix those problems. You have just as much contempt and hatred for the peasantry, for civil rights, for democracy, as do the Republicans, and you only pretend to care because it's a convenient tool to get people to vote for you without thinking."
"Bad Business: Billions of Taxpayer Dollars Wasted on Hiring Contractors: POGO's study analyzed the total compensation paid to federal and private sector employees, and annual billing rates for contractor employees across 35 occupational classifications covering over 550 service activities. Our findings were shocking — POGO estimates the government pays billions more annually in taxpayer dollars to hire contractors than it would to hire federal employees to perform comparable services."
"IMF admits disastrous love affair with the euro and apologises for the immolation of Greece: The International Monetary Fund's top staff misled their own board, made a series of calamitous misjudgments in Greece, became euphoric cheerleaders for the euro project, ignored warning signs of impending crisis, and collectively failed to grasp an elemental concept of currency theory. This is the lacerating verdict of the IMF's top watchdog on the fund's tangled political role in the eurozone debt crisis, the most damaging episode in the history of the Bretton Woods institutions. It describes a 'culture of complacency', prone to 'superficial and mechanistic' analysis, and traces a shocking breakdown in the governance of the IMF, leaving it unclear who is ultimately in charge of this extremely powerful organisation."
You probably have to log in to Facebook to read these, but if you can stand to:
* I know we're not supposed to acknowledge it, but Republican operatives do own and control most of the electronic voting machines in the country. Is it just possible that they could be fixing the results? In this Excerpt from 'An Electoral System In Crisis', Election Justice USA says it looks like they are.
* Blue America says, "'Party Unity' is a Two Way Street" — and Steve Israel et al. are once again doing their best to sabotage the Democratic candidate because she resoundingly beat "some guy" they dug up to try to defeat the grassroots candidate in the primary, and she won anyway. "His Wall Street-backed candidate, Bill Golderer, who was overwhelmingly rejected by all the Democratic and allied organizations in the district, brought in $375,402 for the primary. Israel's negative onslaught made it impossible for Mary Ellen to spend even $50,000. But local Democrats decided to stand up and tell the DCCC what to do with their candidate and their attempt to take over PA-07. On primary night Mary Ellen beat Golderer and the DCCC by a stunning 51,525 (73.8%) to 18,276 (26.2%). The DCCC immediately removed all mentions of PA-07 from their boards and website. They removed Golderer from Red to Blue of course but didn't replace him with Mary Ellen. They just decided to pretend that the once "must-win" district no longer exists-- like Pelosi's sometime mantra. 'When women win, America wins.' [...] And it isn't just Mary Ellen's campaign being singled out and targeted by the DCCC. Nope, while Pelosi's political arm prepares to spend tens of millions of dollars to rescue the failing careers of incumbents hated by Democratic voters-- like Collin Peterson and Brad Ashord, each of whom votes far more with the GOP on core issues than with the Democrats-- the DCCC has adamantly refused to get behind progressives like Mary Ellen who have already won their primaries and will face Republicans in November." If you have extra dosh to help grassroots candidates, follow the links.
Also on FB, a provocative piece from C'helle Egalite Griffin: "We know what Donald Trump has promised to do. He has promised to build a wall between the US and Mexico. Clinton, though, has actually supported deportations of workers and the harassment of Mexican people under a banner of "immigration reform." We know Donald Trump likes to talk about warring against Muslims; Clinton, though, has actually destroyed Muslim countries and incited--yes, incited, and not coincidentally--sectarian violence in those countries. We know Donald Trump likes to talk about taking food stamps out of poor parents' hands and making them "get off their asses." Clinton, though, has actually taken food stamps and other assistance away from the poor."
Glenn Greenwald: "One of the things that is bothering me and bothered me about the Brexit debate, and is bothering me a huge amount about the Trump debate, is that there is zero elite reckoning with their own responsibility in creating the situation that led to both Brexit and Trump and then the broader collapse of elite authority. The reason why Brexit resonated and Trump resonated isn't that people are too stupid to understand the arguments. The reason they resonated is that people have been so fucked by the prevailing order in such deep and fundamental and enduring ways that they can't imagine that anything is worse than preservation of the status quo."
Eric Levitz in New York Magazine, "Liberals Need to Stop Writing Off Non-College Educated Workers — Before the White Working Class Writes Off Liberals: To retain the party's current share of the demographic, Democrats will need to make their economic pitch more salient than the right-wing's nationalist appeals. There are many ways to go about this task. But a good first step would be to stop insinuating that non-college educated workers are destined to live miserable lives because their skills are obsolete."
"How an obscure adviser to Pat Buchanan predicted the wild Trump campaign in 1996: [S]ooner or later, as the globalist elites seek to drag the country into conflicts and global commitments, preside over the economic pastoralization of the United States, manage the delegitimization of our own culture, and the dispossession of our people, and disregard or diminish our national interests and national sovereignty, a nationalist reaction is almost inevitable and will probably assume populist form when it arrives. The sooner it comes, the better... [Samuel Francis in Chronicles]"
Lee Camp reckons Bernie really won the primaries. Well, I don't know about that, but what I do know is that, yes, there's no reason to trust the results of hackable electronic voting machines. And it's worrying that so many Democratic voters mysteriously discovered when they went to vote that their registrations had been changed in recent months — and that one woman who went to court to challenge that change was able to prove that her signature had been forged. How does that happen?
"Do You Eat Like a Republican or a Democrat?" — take the test. I did, and it was annoying, because I wouldn't order either of those pizzas (not enough cheese, for one thing), and in a lot of other cases the answer is, "Which one did I have last time?" Also, do I have to have my BLT on brown bread with Romaine lettuce instead of white toast with iceberg? I've never had a summer roll but I'd be happy to try one — but that doesn't mean I don't eat egg rolls.
RIP: "Marni Nixon, 86: The 'ghost' who sang for Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady, for Deborah Kerr in The King and I and for Natalie Wood in West Side Story."
* Here she is back on the day on To Tell the Truth, and here she is looking back.
The Labour Party's neoliberals tried to come up with a procedural way to get rid of Jeremy Corbyn. It didn't work. "For at least 20 years, the leaders of the Labor Party, the ones before Jeremy Corbyn, were involved in eliminating--purging, you might say--all of the progressive MPs to have a parliamentary Labor Party which was overwhelmingly centrist and right wing neoliberal. Tony Blair was very effective in doing that, and his successors did not change that. [...] So he came to control a party whose members supported him strongly and supported his social democracy. But his members of Parliament were neoliberals. All right. The members of Parliament have, the overwhelming majority of them, have been plotting to get rid of him since the day he was elected, which was the middle of September last year. All right. They have seized this moment to do it. The problem can be stated simply. If they run against a Social Democrat, Jeremy Corbyn or someone else from the left of the party, they will lose. Their only hope of regaining their control, their neoliberal control of the party, was to keep Corbyn off the ballot. And I can only assume that the woman who announced that she was going to challenge Corbyn thought that today the executive committee of the Labour Party would vote to keep Corbyn off the ballot. The vote, in fact, was very close, 18 to 14."
* The new leader of the Conservative Party, and therefore Prime Minister, is the extremely right-wing Theresa May, who unfortunately is not Teresa May. As Home Secretary she instituted policies with complete disregard to the actual law, even over the objections of the House of Lords. Her immigration policies were a scandal and her attitude toward internet privacy is a horror show. And she appointed Boris Johnson to be Foreign Secretary, which shows she's mad as a hatter.
* Jonathan Pie on assignment, who has some questions for Theresa May.
Former Labour MP Bryan Gould, who once might have been a potential challenger to Tony Blair but suddenly ran off to Australia, asks: "How Did It Come to This?" And it all sounds so familiar.
"Sanders booed by House Democrats: Lawmakers press Sanders during a tense question-and-answer session on whether he would ultimately endorse Clinton and help foster party unity." This has been annoying from the beginning — Sanders has always said he would endorse the Democratic nominee, but the Clinton side kept ginning up fantasies about his plans not to do so, or to act as a splitter, or some other nefarious plot to blow up the whole party. The craziness has been evident on Facebook and Twitter ever since the California primary, but of course everyone insists that's "not the campaign", just random social media users. However, now we see the rot at the top, too. The only question I have is whether they are really this stupid and actually think such behavior fosters party unity, or if it's all part of the usual DLC program of trying to push liberal progressives out of the Democratic Party.
"Top Banking Committee Democrat Reprimands Loretta Lynch For Going Easy On Wall Street: Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) sent a sharply worded letter to Attorney General Loretta Lynch on Friday, calling on the government's top lawyer to rescind a drug money laundering settlement with HSBC and bring criminal charges against the British financial titan's employees. Under the standards of Beltway etiquette, it's a provocative move for a Democratic congresswoman in a leadership position. Waters is the ranking member of the powerful House Financial Services Committee — to publicly challenge a sitting Democratic cabinet member. But Waters' letter is particularly biting for another reason: Lynch was personally in charge of the HSBC investigation that infuriated financial reform advocates in December 2012, while she was U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York." The whole HSBC settlement is a scandal of enormous proportions, especially the fact that no one went to jail.
"The ghosts in Minneapolis' 'progressive' machine [...] There is a warning tucked neatly in a 2006 report from the Federal Bureau of investigations about 'ghost skins,' a network of whites with extremist positions who don alternate personas so that they can infiltrate law enforcement, state government, and the military to further the cause of white power. In Minneapolis it would be hard to believe such a problem could exist. It's liberal here. Very liberal. It would be harder to push a camel through the eye of a needle than to elect a Republican in Minneapolis. Yet, the police department is mostly made up of suburban and exurban officers who come from parts of Minnesota that aren't liberal."
Yves, "Elizabeth Warren Opens Broad Attack Against Rent-Seeking Oligopolists Like Amazon, Apple, Google, Walmart, Comcast: While the media has been obsessed with Elizabeth Warren acting as the new heavy in the Clinton campaign against Donald Trump, it has curiously neglected a front she and other progressives are opening against powerful companies that are strong backers of the Clinton presidential bid. She has called out some of the most powerful companies in America as having too much economic power and has called for them to reined in." If Elizabeth Warren is going to be the trustbuster barnstormer, I'm good with that. And so is:
* Pierce, "Another Plea for Elizabeth Warren to Keep Her Day Job: She's too valuable for a gig like VP right now."
Robert Parry, "How Hillary Clinton Ignores Peace: Despite neocon-instigated chaos and bloodshed across the Mideast (and now into Europe), Hillary Clinton continues to advocate more 'regime change' wars with almost no fear from a marginalized anti-war movement."
Bill Black, "The Terrible Cost to Democrats and Our Nation of Ignoring Tom Frank's Warnings" — Black takes down the NYT's emerging neoliberal apologist Nick Cohn, who would rather hint that the working class is motivated entirely by racism and nationalism than acknowledge that the working class hates them because of the war they have waged — and mostly won — against the non-rich.
* "Defying the Investors: Thomas Ferguson on how voter alienation from corporate candidates produced this year's dizzying election results. [...] But I have looked through some of the Sanders campaign filings. My tentative judgment is that unlike 2008 and 2012, when the Obama campaign clearly encouraged donors to break up their contributions into smaller amounts to create the appearance of a mass movement, the Sanders campaign pretty much is what it appears to be: a movement swept along by a vast array of small donors. No wonder Democratic elites were so nervously petulant at Sanders for staying in the race and continuing to propagate his views."
"The Psychology of Why Hillary Clinton Supporters are Still So Angry at Bernie Sanders" — It has been puzzling to see the bizarre hatred of Sanders that has sprung up from people who support Clinton. This has ranged from people I used to like making bizarre assertions about why he hasn't dropped out and endorsed Clinton yet to some fairly vicious and no longer-veiled claims that Sanders is only interested in "a white, male electorate". Many Clintonites have behaved this way from the moment he entered the race, screaming vitriol about how he is a liar who is misleading his supporters, making up stories about how he has "never had a real job in his life" (which is a funny thing to say about one of the few people in Congress to have ever had a job working with his hands — and may have been helped along by this "meme"), and so on. They also seem to subscribe to the fantasy that all legislative work is done by being a sponsor or author of a bill that passed — as if none of his many other accomplishments exist because it wasn't his name on the bill. But many others seem to have developed a kind of Tourettes where they simply can't stop posting on social media about how much they hate him for not dropping out of the race and endorsing Clinton — apparently, they don't realize he really is about his issues. They also don't seem to know that endorsing her now would be counterproductive, but nevermind. The main thing is that they can't seem to stop themselves. Shane Ryan thinks it's about identity politics — and no doubt some of it is — but I think a lot of this goes back to 2008. I'm not saying Team Clinton didn't play a bit dirty back then, but no one who wasn't the most severe Obama fanatic could have missed just how much nastier the Obama campaign played it, and I think, having defended her then, they have bonded to Clinton in a way they might otherwise not have, and to them, a Clinton win is the only justice, giving her the victory she deserved against Obama.
Matt Taibbi, "In Response to Trump, Another Dangerous Movement Appears: Fears of demagoguery are provoking a frightening swing in the other direction [...] Donald Trump is dangerous because as president, he'd likely have little respect for law. But a gang of people whose metaphor for society is 'We are the white cells, voters are the disease' is comparably scary in its own banal, less click-generating way. These self-congratulating cognoscenti could have looked at the events of the last year and wondered why people were so angry with them, and what they could do to make government work better for the population. Instead, their first instinct is to dismiss voter concerns as baseless, neurotic bigotry and to assume that the solution is to give Washington bureaucrats even more leeway to blow off the public. In the absurdist comedy that is American political life, this is the ultimate anti-solution to the unrest of the last year, the mathematically perfect wrong ending"
Andy Stern, former head of the Service Employees International Union, is also talking about the need for a Universal Basic Income, but again the figure is much too low, a mere $1,000 a month. Why do these people think anyone can live on that?
Commenter CMike has caused me to do something I never thought I'd do — recommend, without irony or derision, a column by Ross Douthat, on "The Myth of Cosmopolitanism".
"Universal basic income to be trialled in Oakland, Y Combinator announces: Around 100 families will be given between $1,000 and $2,000 each month to test how a basic income will affect their lives." This isn't going to tell us much — I mean, 100 families? Really? That won't have any impact on the economy or the society, which means it will tell us very little.
Startlingly, our members of Congress pretended to be hippies protesting right on the floor on behalf of a worrying version of anti-gun legislation. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor calls it "The Cynical Sit-In," saying, "The congressional sit-in was not just cynical political theater — it was for a deeply reactionary cause."
The idea that we can say it is a "right" to make, sell, buy, and own a particular sort of gun, but then say that we can deprive some people of that "right" if they happen to have landed on the terror watch-list or no-fly list (largely due to being brownish or Muslim, although you may recall that pacifist nuns have also found themselves on the latter list), which is something you don't even know in advance and have no means to challenge, sounds pretty creepy to anyone who thinks about civil liberties. You may also recall that US Senator Ted Kennedy spent months getting his name off the no-fly list, and the actor David Nelson (son of Ozzie and Harriet) found he was forbidden to fly. And so, for that matter, did one man who should know better: Congressman John Lewis.* Yet there are Lewis and all the other "liberal" Democrats claiming to "occupy" the House, presumably to dramatize Republican intransigence on gun control, which forces many of us to wonder why such a potentially useful tactic waited until now — for this issue, and after the votes have been taken and it's too late.
The failure of Republicans to act on gun control legislation is a curious breaking point for the Democratic Party. House Democrats have endured the political recalcitrance of the Republican Party without protest on any number of issues that affect millions of Americans.
Where have the sit-ins been to protest the continued cuts to social welfare? Where have the congressional protests been to demand affordable housing or a public option for healthcare? Where have the sit-ins been to demand an end to police brutality and mass incarceration?
Indeed, there are other things going on right now that a stunt like this draws attention away from, such as Paul Ryan's latest proposal to "replace" Obamacare with measures that raise the age of Medicare eligibility to 67. But then, Democrats didn't seem to be that interested in fighting back when the age of retirement went up, and they still aren't saying anything about it.
None of which should surprise anyone at this late date, since it has long been obvious that the Democratic leadership hates liberalism:
Democrats did not merely stand by and watch as Republicans destroyed welfare, deregulated Wall Street, and passed disastrous trade deals: They have been at the front fighting, with impressive gusto, for the interests of corporate America and against the interests of those they claim to support.
President Obama has carried the baton with his endorsement of and aggressive lobbying for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, an agreement that, if passed, would grant corporations unprecedented power and influence.
Though her rhetoric has shifted drastically in the face of pressure from her left, Hillary Clinton represents more of the same — another self-styled progressive whose campaign is heavily bankrolled by some of America's largest financial institutions and whose agenda focuses almost entirely on tempering the expectations and ambitions of Democratic voters rather than pushing them upward.
Ah, but with the Clinton nomination in the bag, the Democrat Party wants to make sure its message is not lost on you. For example, here's the DNC Platform Committee voting down a living wage. Given that the platform isn't exactly binding, it's rather amazing that they wouldn't even give lip service to it. Oh, and they also voted down opposition to the TPP. The excuse for this is that they can't be seen to be opposing the policy of the Democratic president — but why is the Democratic president so busy opposing Democratic voters (and most everyone else) in an election year? That's inexcusable.
Over to Ian Welsh on Brexit. Cameron resigned after losing this one, which means more than a lot of people realize. Meanwhile, many European leaders reacted with statements to the effect that the EU needs to stop with the austerity and start taking care of their people again — there are some interesting quotes in this article (starting about halfway down the page). All over, people just plain hate the status quo.
* "People are really, really hoping this theory about David Cameron and Brexit is true [...] Perhaps many Brexiters do not realise it yet, but they have actually lost, and it is all down to one man: David Cameron. With one fell swoop yesterday at 9:15 am, Cameron effectively annulled the referendum result, and simultaneously destroyed the political careers of Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and leading Brexiters who cost him so much anguish, not to mention his premiership."
* Glenn Greenwald, "Brexit Is Only the Latest Proof of the Insularity and Failure of Western Establishment Institutions."
* Marcy Wheeler on NATO and Brexit * Patrick Healy in The New York Times: "'Brexit' Revolt Casts a Shadow Over Hillary Clinton's Cautious Path [...] 'Brexit is clearly a cautionary tale for the Clinton campaign not to get too complacent with a potential victory,' said David B. Cohen, a professor of political science at the University of Akron. 'Trump, Sanders and those in Great Britain who ran the Leave campaign are tapping into an anger and anxiety that is clearly festering. Working-class folks in the United States are similar to working-class folks in Europe. And a lot of those working-class people feel as if the international economic system is not working for them and strangling the middle class.'" Clinton's people dismiss these concerns, with one saying, "Hillary Clinton understands we always need to change — but change that doesn't cause unintended consequences for the average American." Leaving aside the question of whether putting half the country into a depression was an intended consequence, Cory Robin has a few thoughts on Unintended Consequences, and his commenters discuss what "average American" must mean when she says it.
* Yves Smith, "Brexit: Fear, Loathing, and Anger on Both Sides of the Channel"
* Dean Baker, "On Brexit, Experts Leave Much to Be Desired."
* Bill Black on BREXIT: Populism and Democracy: Part 1, BREXIT Part 2: Roger Cohen * Matt Taibbi, "The Reaction to Brexit Is the Reason Brexit Happened: If you believe there's such a thing as 'too much democracy,' you probably don't believe in democracy at all."
* Cory Doctorow, "Bernie Sanders on Brexit: urgent lessons for the Democrats"
Trust neoliberals to react to the opposition party's failures by snatching defeat from the jaws of victory and trying to destroy their own party instead of capitalizing on the moment (which the Torygraph can tell you about its own self). Not content to watch the Tories blow up, the New Labour right decided to try to follow suit, and seems to have failed:
* The New Tory wing of the Labour Party tried to blame it all on Corbyn, but the unions are backing Jeremy, who sacked Hillary Benn in the wake of his blatant coup attempt.
* Richard Seymour at Vice says Corbyn has called the rebels' bluff: "Labour's No Confidence Vote is a Perfect Example of How Not to Do A Coup [...] Nevertheless, in so many of the resignation letters, there was also a carefully pitched plea for Corbyn to 'do the decent thing' and go. His refusal to comply, to the amusing exasperation of journalists and politicos alike, seems to have called their bluff. They seem to have no plan for the next steps. While those resigning claimed that Corbyn had 'lost the confidence of the party,' they seem determined not to test that in a leadership contest.
* "Is it true that a PR firm full of Blairites is orchestrating the Labour coup?" The author states up front that it's not true, but, curiously, provides no evidence that it couldn't be.
"House of Commons cafeteria runs out of knives: The House of Commons cafeteria has asked MPs if they'd mind returning the knives they currently have sticking out of their backs, as they've run out."
"Clinton's pledge to forgive student debt of entrepreneurs, not average workers, will benefit the elite: Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton has pledged to help forgive the student loans of entrepreneurs and small business owners, yet has not made similar promises to help forgive the student debt of average workers. Clinton released her Initiative on Technology & Innovation on Tuesday. It reflects her neoliberal, technocratic vision of the economy."
The death of Antonin Scalia has had fairly dramatic effects on the Supreme Court, as Ian Millhiser discussed with Sam Seder.
* Adam Liptak in the NYT, "Supreme Court Strikes Down Texas Abortion Restrictions [...] The 5-to-3 decision was the court's most sweeping statement on abortion since Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992, which reaffirmed the constitutional right to abortion established in 1973 in Roe v. Wade. It found that Texas' restrictions — requiring doctors to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals and clinics to meet the standards of ambulatory surgical centers — violated Casey's prohibition on placing an 'undue burden' on the ability to obtain an abortion. If Casey limited the right established in Roe, allowing states to regulate abortion in ways Roe had barred, Monday's decision effectively expanded that right. It means that similar requirements in other states are most likely also unconstitutional, and it imperils many other kinds of restrictions on abortion."
* "Supreme Court Rules Domestic Abusers Can Lose Their Gun-Ownership Rights: The U.S. Supreme Court ruled today in a 6-2 vote that domestic abusers convicted of misdemeanors can be barred from owning firearms. The majority opinion, written by Justice Elena Kagan, concludes that misdemeanor assault convictions for domestic violence are sufficient to invoke a federal ban on firearms possession. [...] Five justices concurred in Kagan's opinion, while Justice Clarence Thomas dissented and Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented in part."
* On the other hand, "Sonia Sotomayor Blasts SCOTUS for Excusing 'Lawless Police Conduct' in 4th Amendment Case: In a 5-3 decision issued today, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that an illegal police stop and resulting drug arrest did not ultimately violate the Fourth Amendment because the officer later discovered an outstanding traffic warrant for the individual that he had illegally stopped." The "liberal" Stephen Breyer joined with Alito, Roberts, Thomas, and Kennedy to agree that it is fine for police to illegally stop you and rummage around looking for an excuse to arrest you.
With ongoing ballot counts and recounts in California, Sanders' is closing in on Clinton in every county, and although a winning leap seems unlikely, the gap has narrowed in the state . And there are still the LA ballots remaining to count. (But don't hold your breath — what activists are doing out in the states is more important than this part of the process, now.) The latest story I've seen on the count is from Wednesday's Los Angeles Times.
* Testimonials from Poll Workers and Voters in LA County about the CA Primary on June 7, 2016. This isn't about intraparty politics, it's about a lack of funding for elections and a dearth of competent poll-workers. Still, it should be incomprehensible that an organ that calls itself "the Democratic Party" hasn't tried to do anything to alleviate any of the problems with election incompetence or fraud. (And, depressingly, some Clintonites have now been dismissing complaints about these things as "conspiracy theories". We are now being told that the only thing that went wrong in Florida in 2000 was Ralph Nader.)
* And on that subject, Matt Taibbi on "The Return of Lesser Evilism" With Trump on the other side, Democrats can be lazier than ever this election. [..] The problem with this line of thinking is that there's no end to it. If you think I owe you my vote because I recycle and enjoyed To Kill a Mockingbird, you're not going to work very hard to keep it. That's particularly true if the only standard you think you need to worry about is not being worse than Donald Trump, which is almost the same as no standard at all. This is why the thinking within the Democratic Party has gotten so flabby over the years. It increasingly seems to rejoice in its voters' lack of real choices, and relies on a political formula that requires little input from anyone outside the Beltway."
"TransCanada formally seeks NAFTA damages in Keystone XL rejection: TransCanada Corp is formally requesting arbitration over U.S. President Barack Obama's rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline, seeking $15 billion in damages, the company said in legal papers dated Friday."
Sneaky: You do a survey of voters and ask them to choose their preferred Democratic candidate, and even though many of them are Republicans whose vote in November will still to go the Republican or Libertarian, you treat all of those who chose Sanders as "Sanders supporters". When "Sanders supporters" seem to lean a bit to the right of Clinton supporters, you say Sanders supporters are less liberal — and the Clintonites catapult the propaganda. But when you take out the Republicans, you see something else entirely: "Interestingly, when we remove these GOP respondents from the pool, the sharpest differences between Sanders and Clinton supporters occur not on economic policy but on questions involving gender and race. And for all the online chatter about sexist 'Bernie Bros,' the ANES data offer little evidence that Sanders voters embrace him out of a desire to buttress their male identity. Sanders backers, for instance, were more likely to strongly endorse requiring employers to pay men and women equally for the same work. They were also much more assertive in their support for mandatory paid parental leave [...] Nor do the ANES data furnish much evidence that Sanders voters have been motivated by white racial resentment. Among Democrats and non-Republican-leaning independents, in fact, white Clinton supporters were more inclined than white Sanders supporters to say that blacks are 'lazy' or 'violent,' and that black people should work their way up 'without special favors.'"
When asked back in April why no Wall Street executive went to jail for the massive mortgage fraud behind the financial crisis and robbed millions of Americans of their wealth, Hillary Clinton used a lot of words that amounted to there just not being any good cases or any firm laws or — well, what does she mean, exactly? "Are the laws insufficient? Therefore how do we try to make them tougher as a deterrent and make it clear to people in the financial services industry that there's a new sheriff in town so that there will be additional legal requirements and we will resource better." (New York Daily News interview.) No, no, no. The laws are on the books and clear, people have gone to jail in the past for violating such laws — fraud, forgery, and perjury are crimes. David Dayen has explained many times that the banks knew what they were doing was illegal, did it anyway, and got off the hook because the Obama administration ran interference for them. One person did go to jail, and is still there, for having done the banks' bidding: "The one person held accountable for foreclosure fraud was Lorraine Brown. She was the CEO of DocX. DocX was a third party company that actually created these fraudulent documents. She was arrested, charged and convicted for committing a conspiracy that was 'unbeknownst to DocX clients.' In other words, her clients — banks and mortgage companies — were asking for documents after the fact to support their foreclosure operations. However, somehow they didn't know that they were going to be fake documents — even though they couldn't be anything but fake because they were done after the fact. I describe Lorraine Brown as the private first class Lindy England of the foreclosure."
"US Government and Wall Street Played a Trick on Libya: Libya is suing Wall Street megabank Goldman Sachs for $1.2 billion dollars, claiming that it used different forms of corruption to secure high-risk contracts with Libyan Investment Authority (LIA) in 2008. According to the Libyan government, Goldman Sachs bankers used bribes, lavish gifts, and prostitutes to lock in contracts that turned out disastrous for the African nation. The trial, which begins this week in London, has made headlines, as many of the bank's top officials rotated into and out of influential government jobs, including managing partner Timothy Geithner, who was appointed Secretary of the Treasury under US President Barack Obama."
"Is This The Return Of U.S. 'Gunboat Diplomacy' Serving Corporations?: Colombia is allowing local production of a generic form of a cancer drug that is ultraexpensive because of a government-granted monopoly handed to a giant, multinational pharmaceutical corporation. The U.S. government is stepping in on the corporation's side with a modern form of 'gunboat diplomacy' — even though the giant corporation isn't even 'American.'"
"Only One Presidential Candidate Accepts Invite To Address National Congress Of American Indians: The National Congress of American Indians invited four presidential candidates to its mid-year conference in Spokane this week.Although Hillary Clinton is likely to be the Democratic party's nominee for President, Bernie Sanders is still on the campaign trail. In a three-and-a-half minute video message to the National Congress of American Indians, Sanders said he'd continue to fight for a progressive agenda."
"I Am An AR-15 Owner And I've Had Enough [...] Give me three 100 round drum magazines and I could hold my whole block hostage for a day. Give me thirty 10 round magazines and someone will be able to stop me."
Charles Murray, of all people, is making a case for "A Guaranteed Income for Every American," but at only $10,000 a year, it's not going to be enough to replace all other subsidies and grants for people who can't work.
This article at TPM is called "The History of Privateization," and it made me angry all over again. "'Thus a top priority,' Smith wrote, 'should be to identify Democratic senators and representatives who might be persuaded to support privatization and convince them to take the lead on the issue.' The liberal think tanks were also targeted. In 1988 the conservative Olin Foundation provided funding to the Brookings Institution for a book on education vouchers, and, throughout the 1990s, to the program on education policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. In the words of Olin's executive director, James Piereson, 'we were interested in getting these ideas ensconced at liberal places.'" Yes, converting the discourse from the Democratic side was a key priority for the right-wing, but this article does not mention the Democratic Leadership Council. I realize this is only Part One of a series, but once you start talking about Reagan, Al From is already on the scene. "In fact, Clinton succeeded where Reagan and Bush failed. Writing in 1997, the Heritage Foundation's Ron Utt (who had been Reagan's 'privatization czar') praised Clinton for pursuing 'the boldest privatization agenda put forth by any American president to date,' and noted that his proposals were 'virtually all drawn from recommendations made in 1988 by President Reagan's Commission on Privatization.' In 2006 Reason Foundation's Robert Poole declared that 'the Clinton administration's privatization successes exceeded those of Reagan.'" That's your DLC for you. (And no one ever seems to mention the Post Office, it's as if what they now call "socialism" didn't exist in America before. It's not a New Deal program; Benjamin Franklin created the US Post Office.)
Your Talking Dog has interviewed Rebecca Gordon, author of American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes. Gordon's earlier works include Mainstreaming Torture, Letters from Nicaragua, and Cruel and Usual: How Welfare 'Reform' Punishes Poor People. Sam Seder also interviewed her on The Majority Report.
The last couple of weeks kinda got away from me, so I'm just going to post this to get it out of the way.
Gun control just became a gay issue: There's nothing I can really say about the Orlando killings, but given that gay-hating in certain American "Christian" circles is ubiquitous, it's pretty stupid to blame Muslims for something these "Christians" seem to advocate on a daily basis. And maybe the story is more complicated than the punditocracy can understand. You only have to look at the Republicans in Congress to know that homosexuals who also suffer from their own homophobia are pretty scary people. Or maybe the guy just got turned down too may times, or just got dumped, but he doesn't even seem to have known the difference between Hezbolla and ISIL, so he wasn't much of a Muslim activist. I don't know. But from the beginning, the media was strangely reluctant to admit that there was any significance to the fact that it was an attack on a gay venue, though the world knew it,
* And then there's this: "British security company G4S confirms that Florida shooter is one of their own [...] G4S claims expertise in vetting and screening employees: 'A robust employee screening programme helps organisations minimise the risk of making inappropriate recruitment decisions,' G4S tells potential customers. 'We have a wealth of experience in developing and implementing background checks and security clearance for companies in the private and public sector.' But time and again racist, misogynist and otherwise dangerous people have slipped through the company's own screening process and been given power over vulnerable people. Repeatedly the company's readiness to act in response to warnings has been found wanting."
* Bernie Sanders, of course, reiterated his long-standing opposition to the sale of automatic weapons and his support of expanded background checks and closing sales loopholes.
Stunning millions, the Associated Press announced early last week that the primaries were over and Hillary Clinton had won, based on her superdelegate count — on the eve of the California, New Jersey, North Dakota, South Dakota, New Mexico, and Montana races. At first I assumed it was just AP jumping the gun to scoop everyone else, but maybe not. Perhaps we were tipped that this was already in the works when a superdelegate endorsed Bernie because "the DNC has informed me that I cannot stay neutral until the convention." Hm, where do they get off doing that? In the event, there is much speculation that this announcement depressed voter turn-out and hurt down-ticket races as well as specifically depressing Sanders turn-out (since older voters are far less likely to be voting-day voters and had probably already mailed in their ballots).
So, the results were disappointing, with radical drop in what appeared to be a close race on the west coast, and Sanders only taking two states — one where hardly anyone seemed to show up — only 354 Democrats caucused in North Dakota (which Bernie took 64.2%-25.6). He also took Montana, 51.1%-44.6%. But California went to Clinton (55.8%-43.2%), as did New Jersey (63.2%-36.8%) and the rest, and that's really all she wrote. There are still a couple million provisional and mail-in ballots left to be counted in California, but no one expects them to change anything, particularly since Clinton voters were more likely to have voted early. (But yeah, there were voting problems.)
* No surprises in the Chocolate City, either.
Sanders Campaign Statement on Puerto Rico Polling Places: "Some Puerto Rico Democratic officials are claiming that the Sanders campaign requested fewer polling places in today's primary contest. That's completely false. The opposite is true. In emails with the party, Sanders' staff asked the party to maintain the 1,500 plus presidential primary locations promised by the Puerto Rico Democratic party in testimony before the DNC in April, when the party was asking to have its caucus changed to a primary. They cannot blame their shoddy running of the primary on our campaign. This is just one example of irregularities going on in Puerto Rico voting today. We are the campaign that has been fighting to increase voter participation." Activists had warned that closing so many polling places would cause chaos, and it did, as well as significantly depressing turnout: While local officials expected more than 700,000, only 60,671 made it to the ballot box. Though voter turnout in Puerto Rico is usually much higher than in the 50 U.S. states, Sunday's Democratic race had a dismal showing of just 3.45 percent of eligible voters. After spending weeks telling the press that the decision to reduce the number of polling sites was based on lack of funding and a lack of poll workers, the local Democratic Party changed its story Sunday and claimed that the Sanders campaign requested the cuts." Of course, this is a ludicrous excuse and one wonders if it's possible for the DNC to stop blaming Sanders for their own behavior.
Matt Taibbi: "Democrats Will Learn All the Wrong Lessons From Brush With Bernie: [...] This was no ordinary primary race, not a contest between warring factions within the party establishment, á la Obama-Clinton in '08 or even Gore-Bradley in '00. This was a barely quelled revolt that ought to have sent shock waves up and down the party, especially since the Vote of No Confidence overwhelmingly came from the next generation of voters. Yet editorialists mostly drew the opposite conclusion. [...] Politicians are so used to viewing the electorate as a giant thing to be manipulated that no matter what happens at the ballot, they usually can only focus on the Washington-based characters they perceive to be pulling the strings. Through this lens, the uprising among Democratic voters this year wasn't an organic expression of mass disgust, but wholly the fault of Bernie Sanders, who within the Beltway is viewed as an oddball amateur and radical who jumped the line. Nobody saw his campaign as an honest effort to restore power to voters, because nobody in the capital even knows what that is. In the rules of palace intrigue, Sanders only made sense as a kind of self-centered huckster who made a failed play for power. And the narrative will be that with him out of the picture, the crisis is over. No person, no problem."
* He's right. The press is already full of articles explaining that Clinton doesn't need those Sanders' voters anyway.
* Meanwhile, Joshua Holland is quick to use it as an excuse to stop fighting and learn to love the neoliberals. Pretty sad.
"Proving Revolution Has Roots, Vast Majority of Dems Back Major Sanders Role: 'Election days come and go but political revolutions are not dependent on election days,' says Bernie Sanders." Clinton claimed she was winning because of her policies, but that clearly isn't true if most Democrats want Sanders' policies to stay up front. Of course, a majority of them also said Sanders should endorse Clinton. I wonder if it will be anything like the endorsement he gave Bill Clinton....
"The Democratic Party derailed Bernie: How the establishment has worked to discredit Sanders' movement: Party leaders demonized Sanders supporters to stymie debate of the progressive change he's championed. [...] One constant narrative throughout the primaries has been that Sanders just can't gain the support of women or people of color, and that his supporters are overwhelmingly white males who back him for the simple reason that he is a man (e.g. Walsh's 'angry white male cult'). But again, this is complete hogwash. Sanders has actually done better with young women than young men — a USA Today poll taken in the midst of the primaries found that Millennial women backed 'Sanders by a jaw-dropping 61%-30% while the divide among Millennial men is much closer, 48%-44%.' Similarly, while Clinton has dominated with African American voters overall, young black and Hispanic voters have a more favorable opinion of Sanders than Clinton, according to a Gallup survey from May. Indeed, Sanders is viewed even more favorably among black millenials than white millenials. The survey also found that Sanders is viewed more favorably among millennial women than millennial men, and that millenials were the most left-leaning generation. [...] This seems to validate the notion that the youngest generation is the most progressive generation and that they like Bernie Sanders because he's the most progressive candidate (I know, it's crazy that voters would support a politician because of his or her politics and ideas rather than his or her gender or ethnicity)."
"Media Coverage of the Primaries Was Awful, Harvard Study Confirms [...] Thomas Patterson, Harvard's Bradley Professor of Government and the Press, in conjunction with the Shorenstein Center on Media, Public Policy, and Politics, conducted an analysis of eight different cable networks and newspapers and found that media companies devoted an unprecedented amount of coverage to Donald Trump from the start of his campaign, effectively shutting out over a dozen of his competitors. The Shorenstein analysis also learned that the Republican candidates got roughly twice as much media coverage as the Democratic candidates."
Thomas Frank, "Anthem for Bummed Youth [...] As for the issues, there is really only one this year: What we call, alternately, 'the economy,' or 'inequality,' or the slow deterioration of the middle class. It overshadows everything else. For young people, who know firsthand the emptiness of the politicians' promises of economic security for the properly credentialed, the matter is particularly acute. This is the one great issue facing the nation, and yet as of today it is essentially off the table. Yes, economic desperation has given us Donald Trump, but the suggestion that this swaggering mountebank might actually do what is required to reverse our national illness seems like a cruel joke at the moment. Hillary Clinton, for her part, has never really had more than a feigned, superficial interest in the fate of working people; her lifelong concern is exactly what she has said it is so many times in this campaign: 'breaking down barriers' that keep individuals from rising in their chosen fields. That this is the correct goal of all social policy is obvious and even instinctive to her, as are so many other assumptions of the professional class. Meritocracy defines her life as well as her politics. For the affluent professionals who are the Democratic Party's truest believers, what is unfolding today is a scenario of fulfillment and triumph. They have always suspected that politics is really just a battle between the stupid and the smart, the ignorant and the enlightened, and every morning for the next five months their newspapers will tell them how very right they are.
"
Paul Street, "Feel the Hate [...] Mr. Clinton earned the gratitude of Wall Street and corporate America by passing the arch-global-corporatist North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), by repealing the Glass-Steagall Act (which had mandated a necessary separation between commercial deposit and investment banking), and by de-regulating the burgeoning super-risky and high-stakes financial derivatives sector. He knew the score from day one of his presidency. As the famed Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward noted in his 1994 book The Agenda, Clinton said the following just weeks after winning the 1992 election: 'we're Eisenhower Republicans here.... We stand for lower deficits, free trade, and the bond market. Isn't that great?' Clinton added that his post-election policy direction would 'help the bond market' and 'hurt the people who voted us in.' The Clintons certainly do know how to get things done." There's a whole lot more there, but I hadn't seen that before.
"President Obama Proposes Expanding Social Security Benefits" — This is a bit of a surprise, although it's fuzzy enough not be clear what it actually means, but it's a gift to Clinton if she's smart enough to take it. Not sure she understands that the best way to unify the party is to take Sanders' policies on board. Not sure she even wants to unify the party.
Jonathan Turley, "Nixonian palace guard now protects Hillary: Greatest danger from electing Clinton president may be her cadre of fawning aides [...] What is so concerning is that Clinton seems to invite such expressions of absolute loyalty and reverence. The question is whether there is a John Dean willing to walk into her office and tell her of a cancer growing within the White House. After years of scandals and investigations, Clinton has distilled a team down to the truest believers who have little difficulty repeating truth-defying spins or refusing to cooperate with investigators."
"Hillary Clinton's Flat and Misleading Foreign Policy Speech [...] It's been getting decent reviews in the mainstream media for the zingers she tossed at Donald Trump. But when you listen to the speech (you can watch it here) and think about it, you realize how insipid and unoriginal it really was. [...] 1. The speech featured the usual American exceptionalism, the usual fear that if America withdraws from the world stage, chaos will result. There was no sense that America's wars of choice in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, etc. have greatly contributed to that chaos. Oh, there was also the usual boast that America has the greatest military. That's what Imperial and Nazi Germany used to boast — until the Germans lost two world wars and smartened up. 2. Hillary mentioned we're electing 'our' next commander-in-chief. No, we're not. The president is a public servant, not 'our' commander-in-chief. The president serves as the civilian commander-in-chief of the military, and the military alone. [...] For many people who are leery of a Trump presidency, Hillary's hawkish and colorless conformity to the Washington system is more than enough to qualify her. If she wins the presidency, she will be much like Brezhnev and Andropov, senior apparatchiks of an empire in denial of its own precipitous decline."
* "Sanders to Clinton: Yes, Trump's Foreign Policy Ideas Are Scary. But So Are Yours: We need a foreign policy based on building coalitions and making certain that the brave American men and women in our military do not get bogged down in perpetual warfare in the Middle East. That's what I will fight for as president."
* Marcy Wheeler, "Hillary Promises Not to Order the Military (!?!) to Torture: Though I agree with the general sentiment that Donald Trump should not be trusted with America's nuclear codes, there's a lot I loathed in Hillary's foreign policy speech yesterday. Her neat espousal of American exceptionalism, with the specter that another country could make decisions about our lives and jobs and safety, is especially rich coming from a woman who has negotiated several trade deals that give corporations the power to make decisions about our lives and jobs and safety."
x * "The Bigger Nuclear Risk: Trump or Clinton? If the U.S. election comes down to Hillary Clinton v. Donald Trump, the American people will have to decide between two candidates who could risk the future of the planet, albeit for very different reasons, writes Robert Parry."
* "Clinton Positions Herself to the Right of Trump in National Security Speech: Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies says although Clinton rightfully used her national security speech to condemn the bigotry and outlandishness of Trump's positions, she laid out a much more militaristic foreign policy."
* "We Can't Have More of the Same: The Very Real Dangers of Hillary Clinton's Foreign Policy: Trump may well be dangerous. But know what you're getting with Hillary: American hegemony that's hated worldwide."
David Dayen in The New Republic,: "Bernie Sanders Has Already Won California: The results won't change the Democratic contest — but the campaign has changed everything. Does the outcome of next Tuesday's California primary matter? Conventional wisdom says no; news outlets are already pinpointing the precise time of the evening when Hillary Clinton will clinch the nomination with victories elsewhere — three hours before the polls close in the Golden State. Naturally, this perturbs Bernie Sanders fans, who see it as one more way the Democratic nomination contest has been rigged from the start. But they should know that the election in California is of critical importance — not to deciding the 2016 Democratic nomination (already a done deal), but to determining the future of the Democratic Party."
Hillary Clinton's Plan for Conservation and Collaborative Stewardship of America's Great Outdoors is full of wonkish phrases but if you read carefully, it seems to be saying we will be destroying the natural landscape in order to turn it into energy farms. "MAKE PUBLIC LANDS AN ENGINE OF THE CLEAN ENERGY ECONOMY: As President, Clinton will set a goal to generate enough renewable energy to power every home in the country. To help meet this goal, Clinton will expand energy production on public lands and waters ten-fold within ten years of taking office, while reforming federal fossil fuel leasing."
Yves Smith, "Why Some of the Smartest Progressives I Know Will Vote for Trump over Hillary [...] The result is that the U.S. economy is becoming lethal to the less fortunate, according to the New York Times, which reported this week that U.S. death rates have risen for the first time in a decade. The increase in death rates among less educated whites since 2001 is roughly the size of the AIDS epidemic. One cause, the opioid epidemic, resulted from Purdue Pharma overselling the effectiveness of reformulated OxyContin, then recommending higher dosages when it failed to work properly, which experts deemed a prescription for creating addicts, according to a number of lawsuits. This was permitted by the U.S. government, leading to thousands of unnecessary deaths. Despite President Barack Obama's Panglossian claim that the economy is doing well, the spike in suicides to levels over those during the financial crisis belies that. Yet the Clinton campaign is in such denial about this that it has become vitriolic in its verbal and tactical attacks on Sanders and his supporters — rather than recognizing that the stunning success of his campaign is proof of their abject policy failures. The message is clear: The Clintons believe, as Bill himself put it, that the true progressives have nowhere to go. But in fact, they've been leaving. The Clinton and Obama administrations presided over the worst losses in congressional and state races in modern history in 1994, 2010 and 2012. And voter preferences were clear. Under Obama, it was the Blue Dog, Third Way Democrats who were turfed out, while candidates with strong stances on economic justice kept their seats. Similarly, as political scientist Tom Ferguson pointed out in a Roosevelt Institute paper, Obama's loss of a Senate majority when Republican Scott Brown won in Massachusetts was the result of his focus on bailing out banks rather than aiding distressed homeowners (or forcing mortgage services to give modifications to borrowers who still had adequate income, as banks had done historically). The level of votes for Brown was strongly correlated with the amount of foreclosures in those particular districts."
* And a scary poll graph from The Wall Street Journal and NBC News shows Americans think Trump will be better than Clinton on the economy, but Clinton will be a better "Commander in Chief"..
"New Hillary Scandal Checks All the Boxes on the Clinton Controversy Bingo Card. [...] Thanks to a newly released batch of State Department emails, ABC News was able to revisit the story of Rajiv Fernando, a wealthy securities trader who gave heavily to both Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign and the Clinton Foundation — and who just so happened to land himself a plum spot on a sensitive government intelligence advisory panel after Hillary became secretary of state. Politicos rewarding donors is sadly not uncommon but what makes this particular example stand out is Fernando's lack of qualifications for a job that involved advising the secretary of state — and, by extension, the president of the United States — on the topic of nuclear weapons."
"Fraction Magic — Part 1: Votes Are Being Counted As Fractions Instead Of As Whole Numbers: This report summarizes the results of our review of the GEMS election management system, which counts approximately 25 percent of all votes in the United States. The results of this study demonstrate that a fractional vote feature is embedded in each GEMS application which can be used to invisibly, yet radically, alter election outcomes by pre-setting desired vote percentages to redistribute votes. This tampering is not visible to election observers, even if they are standing in the room and watching the computer. Use of the decimalized vote feature is unlikely to be detected by auditing or canvass procedures, and can be applied across large jurisdictions in less than 60 seconds."
"The Research Is Clear: Long Hours Backfire for People and for Companies" — The reason we had eight-hour days in the first place wasn't just the union movement, it was the realization by employers that by having workers on the job for shorter hours, they saved money. If they could figure that out in the steel mills of Pittsburgh, it's amazing that our modern technocrats haven't managed to keep up to date.
"Burying the White Working Class: Liberal condescension towards white workers is code for a broader anti-working class agenda [...] Despite off-the-charts wealth inequality, Democratic Party liberals have been concerned not with an egalitarian reckoning to unite the have-nots against the haves but with inclusion: bringing different 'interest groups' into the professional class while managing everyone else's expectations downward. This kind of 'inclusion' politics — the chance at climbing one of a tiny handful of rickety ladders to the top — is the only economic program the Democratic Party mainstream is selling to those not already in the upper tiers. Sure, this politics is better than nothing. But as Ralph Miliband put it, 'access to positions of power by members of the subordinate classes does not change the fact of domination: it only changes its personnel.' Standing outside of this shift, unmoved and — as the Democratic Party sees it — ungrateful, is the white working class. Not just those silver-haired remnants from the unionized, manufacturing heyday whose jobs have been offshored or, more likely, de-unionized, but the vast swath who've been forced to adjust to the new norm of low-wage, flexible, service-sector hell. Even with the college degree and boatload of debt needed to obtain it."
Astonishingly, "Larry Summers Gets This Right: We Really Need An Infrastructure Decade" — When ordinary people don't have enough money to spend, there's no demand, and therefore nothing for rich investors to invest in. You can start fixing this by having a government that puts money into the hands of ordinary people — by, for example, hiring them to do all the work that needs to be done, of which there is quite a lot.
"U.N. Chief Admits He Removed Saudi Arabia From Child-Killer List Due to Extortion: U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon publicly acknowledged Thursday that he removed the Saudi-led coalition currently bombing Yemen from a blacklist of child killers — 72 hours after it was published — due to a financial threat to defund United Nations programs."
RIP: Muhammad Ali, 'The Greatest of All Time', Dead at 74. He would "float like a butterfly, sting like a bee." He was a champion of civil rights and one of the most compelling figures on the world stage in my lifetime.
* Pierce: "Muhammad Ali Transcended Sports, Culture, and Time: There's no real ending for an existence like that."
* Thomas Hauser in the Guardian, "Muhammad Ali: the man behind the icon: The late boxer's biographer recalls getting to know a deeply spiritual and intelligent man with endless tales, no regrets and a passion for life that never diminished, even as his condition did."
* "Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on Brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No I'm not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. This is the day when such evils must come to an end. I have been warned that to take such a stand would cost me millions of dollars. But I have said it once and I will say it again. The real enemy of my people is here. I will not disgrace my religion, my people or myself by becoming a tool to enslave those who are fighting for their own justice, freedom and equality. If I thought the war was going to bring freedom and equality to 22 million of my people they wouldn't have to draft me, I'd join tomorrow. I have nothing to lose by standing up for my beliefs. So I'll go to jail, so what? We've been in jail for 400 years." — Muhammad Ali
Richard Eskow, "Social Security's Enemies Are Down — But They're Not Out [...] If the Republicans win all three branches of government, Social Security will be in immediate mortal danger. And while the rhetorical shift among Democrats is welcome, they'll need to be held to it. Hillary Clinton's website says she would 'expand Social Security for those who need it most and who are treated unfairly by the current system.' That's not enough, given the current retirement crisis. The Sanders proposal, which is detailed and covers everyone, must be written into the Democratic platform. And activists must send the message that there will be dire political consequences if it isn't honored. Otherwise, a new 'grand bargain' is still a very real possibility."
"The Great Barrier Reef: a catastrophe laid bare: Australia's natural wonder is in mortal danger. Bleaching caused by climate change has killed almost a quarter of its coral this year and many scientists believe it could be too late for the rest. Using exclusive photographs and new data, a Guardian special report investigates how the reef has been devastated — and what can be done to save it"
The moment Bernie Sanders announced his candidacy, the entire press corps started singing in unison a talking point that they were obviously repeating directly from the Clinton campaign: "Bernie Sanders doesn't connect with people of color."
That's how I knew from the start that the Clinton campaign was going to use racism to undermine a man whose support for black civil rights goes seamlessly back from the 1960s (a time when Clinton was supporting Goldwater), right up to the present. (The real disparity is that, though young black people have a slight preference for Sanders, they are less likely to vote than their white counterparts.)
The "doesn't connect with people of color" story is veiled but implies a racism that isn't there: Sanders doesn't hang out with a lot of black people, Sanders moved to a white state, Sanders wins white states, and on and on and on — from which we are meant to infer that maybe what's behind Sanders is that perhaps he doesn't really like black people very much, and that the Democrats who like Sanders might not like black people much, either. It was also a way to make his black supporters invisible, the same way the BernieBros meme was meant to make his female supporters invisible (as a similar Clinton campaign meme did in '08). So you never see much in the press about how support for Sanders among male millenials is nothing compared to Sanders' support from young women, and you don't hear about it when numerous black and Latino-dominated groups endorse Sanders, nor when America's oldest black magazine endorses him. The suggestion, of course, is that only sexist men and whites like Sanders, because they just don't care about racism or sexism.
Neoliberals, like their plantation-owning ancestors, love to use racism and sexism to divide people, and this is a great example of how they do it. When Clinton says "If we break up the big banks, will that end racism? Will that end sexism?" she isn't just pointing out that "not everything is an economic theory," she is actually pitting economic justice against social justice, as if the two weren't very much a part of the same thing. She doesn't want you to think about how white racism is constantly encouraged and used to break up joint efforts by whites and blacks together to get economic justice. And she also doesn't want you to ask whether Too Big To Fail banks should be allowed to continue to suck away the wealth of the black community and impoverish women (and whites in general) whose lives are already precarious — and whether doing so can possibly do anything to ameliorate racism and sexism, either.
Understand, the big banks stole the homes of millions of people, committed massive fraud of every kind and created the greatest financial crisis in history and were allowed to get away with it and keep doing it because they were deemed "too big to fail", and yet Hillary Clinton can say, "If we broke up the big banks tomorrow — and I will if they deserve it, if they pose a systemic risk, I will — would that end racism?" as if their being too big and posing a threat was even in question, despite the fact that they are even bigger today than they were in 2008.
"If"? If they pose a systemic risk? If they deserve it? Is this a joke? Thanks to Bill Clinton's policies and Obama's indulgence of the banksters, the black community has been losing economic ground to an even greater degree than they did under Reagan, but we're supposed to ignore that.
We are also supposed to ignore the fact that it is precisely because of the growing poverty of whites that resentment of black people has skyrocketed, and every time Democrats speak as if they are going to give special help to blacks or women, that resentment grows. It doesn't grow because everyone is a racist, it grows because when they hear Democrats talking about how bad things are for black people, they know that what they really mean is, "We're not going to help you."
This is why the right-wing can sell the implication that black people are getting some kind of secret welfare that whites aren't getting, that they are giving black people a leg up while letting whites sink into poverty and die.
But the kicker is, they're not helping black people, either, and they're still not going to.
Starting to see new polling in California that show the gap narrowing again. Still not throwing any parties yet, and even if Sanders wins, it probably won't be big enough to make a real difference, but perhaps he won't do as badly as earlier polls were suggesting.
Seizing Chance, Sanders Makes Bold Progressive Picks to Shape DNC Platform * DNC to offer Sanders more seats on platform committee: report * This story is slanted, but essentially correct in its conclusions: "Bernie Sanders's 'Scorched Earth' Strategy Seems to Be Working [...] In late April, when national polls consistently showed Clinton prevailing over Trump by comfortable margins, Clinton allies were whispering to the Hill that she planned to take a 'hard line' with Sanders, insisting the party's left flank had already received its fair share of concessions. Since then, Clinton's unfavorability rating with Sanders's supporters has steadily increased — and her polling advantage over Trump has collapsed. Now, anonymous Clinton surrogates are singing a different tune. 'She needs to do something in the coming weeks to show that she's also trying to unify the party,' a Clinton ally told the Hill on Thursday, arguing that Clinton should look left for her vice-presidential pick." Of course, this was always true — alienating Sanders supporters was a good way to alienate them, as anyone could have told her. Leadership requires that she, not Sanders, find some way to unify the party. It's always important for a candidate to ask voters for their votes, but Hillary's message for the last few weeks had been, "I don't need you, go away." Stupid. Relenting on freezing Sanders out of choosing members of the platform committee is a nice start, though it means little in the long run. Still, Bernie picked some pretty in-your-face choices and it could make a difference on issues that don't get much of a hearing otherwise. But we all know Clinton needn't bother running on that platform and no one ever seems to remember what was in the platform once the general election is over. But even The Washington Post is seeing this as a win for Sanders.
There's tons of evidence all over the net of no violence having occurred at the Nevada convention, but the Clinton talking points went out and spread Jon Ralston's fairy story far and wide, and nothing seems to catch up with it. Of course, the whole "BernieBros"-style narrative is a time-honored tradition in HRC campaigns, so we shouldn't be surprised.
* Snopes: "The Chair Thrown 'Round the World: A Las Vegas reporter's second-hand claim Bernie Sanders supporters threw chairs at a Nevada convention was widely reproduced by other news outlets."
* Barbara Boxer joins the smear campaign with a shameful claim that Sanders supporters frightened her.
* Let's take a look at that internecine primary violence again — Oh, Wendell, how disappointing. Where's Clinton's apology, again?
* Greg Palast, "Media Fabricates Sanders Riot, Buries the Real Story: In Nevada, 64 Bernie Sanders delegates — some committee chairmen and lifelong county Democratic Party members — were disqualified on the grounds that they were Republicans. They are lifelong Democrats, and that's why they were at the convention, as chosen delegates. Bernie Sanders had more delegates than Hillary Clinton. It was a very close race in Nevada. When they knocked out the 64 Bernie delegates as Republicans, suddenly Hillary won the caucus by 35 delegate votes. Some of the Sanders people didn't like that. So what was the report? Not how Sanders delegates were somehow excluded from exercising their rightful vote for the party's nominee. Instead, The New York Times headline was: 'From Bernie Sanders Supporters, Death Threats Over Delegates.'"
* But the hits just keep on coming, with members of the party leadership comparing Sanders supporters with the John Birch Society and the Tea Party and demanding that Sanders should point them to the exits. Jimmy Dore reports.
In any case, Hillary Clinton, having declared herself to have won the primaries, has refused a California debate.
Bill Moyers and Michael Winship, "Democrats Can't Unite Unless Wasserman Schultz Goes!: The Democratic National Committee chair has thrown fuel on the flames of infighting just as the party faces a critical November election." This woman has protected Republican seats and lost hundreds of Democratic seats all over the country. There isn't a single reason to leave her in position.
* But, "In Race Against Clinton, Bernie Sanders Has Unveiled An Ugly Truth About Democratic Party: If nothing else, Bernie Sanders has pulled the curtain back on something we all suspected but couldn't yet prove: The Democratic Party doesn't really care about the people."
"First, Do Some Harm: How to Smear a Disfavored Candidate on NYT's Front Page [...] This is Bad Journalism 101: You come up with a thesis, like 'Bernie Sanders wants to hurt Hillary Clinton's chances of beating Donald Trump.' You take your thesis to your source, and ask them to agree with it; like any sensible spokesperson, they decline to comment on it. You take their no-comment as an endorsement of your thesis — and that becomes the lead headline in the nation's most influential newspaper"
If you can stand Facebook, Matt Karp did a review of Sanders' 1996 memoir, recently re-issued with an updated title. Here's my favorite bit: "Some dismiss Bernie's past electoral success as the skewed product of the leftmost corner of America's leftmost state. But it's not at all clear that Burlington, Vermont was a hotbed of radical energy until Bernie's Progressive Party made it that way. When he won an upset victory as mayor in 1981, the 11 Republicans and Democrats on the 13-member Burlington city council joined forces to block his new administration's every move, refusing even to accept his appointments as city attorney, clerk, treasurer, etc. Only through extensive political struggle — which involved nearly doubling the Burlington voter turnout between 1978 and 1983 — did Bernie build a coalition that was able to govern effectively. In other words, when Bernie talks about one election not being enough to matter — that real change will require a 'political revolution' — he speaks from personal and hard-fought experience." And if you can't stand Facebook, here's Verso's page for Outsider in the White House (originally titled Outsider in the House).
Finally! "Obama cuts all funding for Christian-based 'Abstinence Only' sex-ed programs." There should never have been a single day when this was funded, and it's outrageous negligence that Democrats continued to vote to fund this thing even after they took the White House and the largest majorities in a generation in Congress. I can't believe it's taken this long. "President Obama's 2017 budget proposal has removed a $10 million annual grant that goes towards funding 'abstinence-only' sexual education classes in public schools. By eliminating the grant, Obama would end the financial incentive for states to continue teaching the debunked sex-ed program."
"Banks Must Defend Libor Lawsuits After Judges Warn of Impact: Sixteen of the world's largest banks including JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Citigroup Inc. must face antitrust lawsuits accusing them of hurting investors who bought securities tied to Libor by rigging an interest-rate benchmark, a ruling that an appeals court warned could devastate them."
"GOP budget bill would kill net neutrality and FCC's set-top box plan: House Republicans yesterday released a plan to slash the Federal Communications Commission's budget by $69 million and prevent the FCC from enforcing net neutrality rules, "rate regulation," and its plan to boost competition in the set-top box market. The proposal is the latest of many attempts to gut the FCC's authority, though it's unusual in that it takes aim at two of FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler's signature projects while also cutting the agency's budget. The plan is part of the government's annual appropriations bill."
Ryan Cooper recommends David Dayen's Chain of Title in The Week, "This is Obama's biggest failure: In the early 2000s, when the great housing bubble was gaining steam, one hurdle for Wall Street firms who wanted to issue mortgage-backed financial products was the simple reality of the American mortgage market: It was mature. It had been around for decades, its procedures were very well-established, and just about everyone who could reasonably qualify for a loan already had one. One path mortgage originators took, as most people know by now, is handing out mortgages to anyone who could fog a mirror. But another one was systematic fraud. That is the subject of Chain of Title, a new book by David Dayen about the foreclosure crisis. It's an excellent and absolutely infuriating look at how the American political system, from Barack Obama on down, refused to use enormous legal leverage to help millions of its citizens who were victimized by Wall Street crime. Every American should read this book."
* David Dayen in Salon, "This man made millions suffer: Tim Geithner's sorry legacy on housing: Forget the book tour designed to polish his legacy. Tim Geithner's record on housing will forever live in infamy [...] In reality, Geithner made the same arguments as DeMarco against principal reduction, most explicitly in a hearing of the Congressional Oversight Panel in December 2009, arguing it would be 'dramatically more expensive for the American taxpayer, harder to justify, [and] create much greater risk of unfairness.' Geithner later cited the potential moral hazard of 'strategic default,' where homeowners would intentionally not pay their mortgage to get a principal reduction (something that never has and never would happen), to argue against making such modifications mandatory when they made sense for the investor and the borrower."
* From 2012, in The Fordham Urban Law Journal, Matt Stoller with "The Housing Crash and the End of American Citizenship
Tom Gallagher in the Los Angeles Times, "Can superdelegates be convinced to support Bernie Sanders? Unlikely, but not impossible [...] It's all but impossible for either Clinton or Sanders to amass enough pledged delegates to ensure the nomination before the convention. To achieve the 2,383 votes needed just through pledged delegates, Clinton would need to take 77% of those still up for grabs in the remaining primaries and caucuses, even though her portion of those elected so far is just 54%. Sanders could not reach the mark even if he were to win all of the remaining pledged delegates. This puts the Democratic nomination squarely in the hands of the party's 714 superdelegates."
The Hill says, "Sanders is the king of credibility in 2016 [...] Even more striking, the number of Democrats who consider Sanders honest and trustworthy was an astonishing 84 percent in that poll, almost 30 points higher than the same number for Clinton among Democrats and for Trump among Republicans."
"Koch Brothers Prepare To Go To War Against Democrats, While Schumer, Reid And Wasserman Schultz Go To War Against Progressives: So what are the Democrats doing while the Koch brothers ready a $30 million Senate war-chest for August and September targeting races in Florida, Nevada, Ohio and Pennsylvania? If you're on the DSCC mailing list you know they are asking for contributions on a daily basis. But if you get your Senate campaign news from that list what you don't know is that they've been deploying whatever money they can get their hands on to smear and destroy progressive Democrats. If you contributed to the DSCC, regardless of what the e-mail you were responding to said, your money went to knock Joe Sestak out of the Pennsylvania Senate race because he refused to kiss Chuck Schumer's ass. (The Democrats don't put it that graphically and just claim he is too independent-minded for what they have in mind.)"
I confess, I have been unable to understand why people who I swear gave every appearance of being real liberal progressives who understood the problems with the Democratic establishment a year ago seem to have become its great defenders once this race got started. Is it really down to this? "When olds like Joan Walsh and Michael Tomasky lecture young people for worrying about their future, they are doing this from a position of absolute privilege. For them, a Hillary Clinton presidency is acceptable, because they get all of the advantages and none of the disadvantages. They get low energy prices that come from Clinton's middling climate-change incrementalism, and none of the droughts, rising oceans, and global instability that we'll see by the end of the century. They can tell young black people that their votes don't matter, because olds won't be around to see the devastation wrought to black communities by Clintonian economic governance; olds will, however, get the nice short-term bump in their 401(k) that comes when Hillary inflates the next bubble. They can tell young women that their fights for childcare and family leave are overhyped, because the boomers have already sent their last children to college."
Remember, it's still a lie that the 1973 decision in Roe v Wade caused a natural backlash. There was no backlash, so they had to invent one. Samantha Bee's Full Frontal.on the history of the religious right and how the anti-choice movement got started as a cynical move to create a political movement. Part 2. And the full interview with Frank Schaefer about his involvement, which he says he bitterly regrets.
The Supreme Court Just Sent a Strong Message About Racism in the Justice System: In a 7-1 opinion, the court grants a new trial for a black death row inmate convicted by an all-white jury>." [...] The lone dissenter was the court's only African American justice, Clarence Thomas, who sided firmly with state of Georgia."
"Banks Must Defend Libor Lawsuits After Judges Warn of Impact: Sixteen of the world's largest banks including JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Citigroup Inc. must face antitrust lawsuits accusing them of hurting investors who bought securities tied to Libor by rigging an interest-rate benchmark, a ruling that an appeals court warned could devastate them. The appellate judges reversed a lower-court ruling on one issue -- whether the investors had adequately claimed in their complaints to have been harmed -- while sending the cases back for the judge to consider another issue: whether the plaintiffs are the proper parties to sue, in part because their claims, if successful, provide for triple damages that could overwhelm the banks."
"San Francisco Police Chief Resigns Following Recent Police Shooting: San Francisco Police Chief Greg Suhr has resigned following a shooting by San Francisco police officers. SF Mayor Ed Lee asked for Suhr's resignation and then announced it at a press conference at City Hall Thursday evening. The announcement comes just days after Suhr indicated he had no intention of leaving the department. But this morning, A 27-year-old black woman was shot by SFPD officers in the Bayview neighborhood around 10am"
"15 Year-Old BackPage Prostitute Sentenced To 9-years In Prison: A 15-year-old girl and mother of two toddlers was sentenced to prison for helping to rob prospective johns who responded to an Internet sex ad. 15-year-old prostitute sentenced to 9-years prison for robbing a trick with a toy gun Latesha Clay was sentenced Monday, Jan. 11, to nine years in prison for robbing two men who responded to an ad on Backpage.com. The ad offered sex with a teen."
"Outgoing Defense Minister Ya'alon: Extremists Have Taken Over Israel: Sadly, senior politicians in the country have chosen the way of incitement and segregation of parts of Israeli society instead of unifying it and bringing it together. It is unbearable to me that we will be divided among us out of cynicism and lust for control, and I expressed my opinion on the matter more than once out of honest concern for the future of society in Israel and the future of the next generations"
* "Israel Has Been Infected by the Seeds of Fascism, Says ex-Prime Minister Ehud Barak [...] Responding to the resignation of Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon earlier in the day, Barak said that it 'should be a red light for all of us regarding what's going on in the government. Life-sustaining Zionism and the seeds of fascism cannot live together,'"
RIP:
* Hedy Epstein, Rights Activist and Holocaust Survivor, Dies at 91, of cancer. This is her in a Humans of St. Louis post on Facebook last year: "The first time I really remember being shocked about my own lack of information was when I came to this country in May 1948, and I started working a few days later. The person who told me what I was supposed to do in my job was an African American woman. Shortly before lunchtime she said, 'We go to lunch at noon. Did you bring your lunch?' And I said, 'No.' She told me all the different restaurants in the neighborhood. This was in New York City. So, I said, 'Well, can we go together?' And she said, 'No.' And I didn't really think anything about it. Maybe she's made some arrangement with somebody else. 'OK, well, maybe tomorrow?' 'No.' I waited a few days, and I asked again, 'Well, can we go to lunch together?' 'No.' By that time, I was beginning to wonder, 'Is there something about me that's bothering you? Please tell me.' She said, 'Well, you know why.' 'No, I don't know why.' I said, 'Please tell my why. I honestly don't know why.' 'Well, you're White, and where you can go to lunch, I cannot. I'm Negro. And where I go, White people don't go there.' I said, 'What? I read the Good Book, and Lincoln freed the slaves, and this is 1948, and you can't go to eat where I go? Isn't somebody doing something about this?' She said, 'Yeah, well maybe the Urban League and the NAACP.' I said, 'Well, how about I get in touch with them?' I'd only been in this country less than two weeks. Finally, I went to where she went to eat. I asked her, 'Can I please go with you?' And I ate chitlins for the first time. I never heard of chitlins before. That was the beginning of me getting involved in civil rights issues."
* Marco Pannella, Italian civil liberties champion, 86. He served in the parliament for nearly two decades, and though officially he was never very powerful, he was disproportionately influential, and many credit him with being personally responsible for changing the debate on divorce and abortion — and other issues — that led to far-reaching liberal changes. "A one-man party of irrepressible energy, who never gathered more than a handful of votes (3.4% in 1979 was the best result), he was never far from the limelight, galvanising his followers and attracting the odium of much of respectable Catholic society. Yet the tributes following his death temporarily united the entire Italian political spectrum, the anti-clericals as well as the pope, the right as well as the left, the pacifists as well as the 'liberal' interventionists — all joining in praising the exceptional life of a man who had done his best to annoy all of them, though never at the same time. Pannella's longevity was remarkable considering that he had endured several debilitating hunger strikes (the most recent, in 2011, in protest against prison conditions, lasted three months), had a quadruple heart bypass in 1998, and smoked almost continuously throughout his life."
* Mr. Ed's best friend Wilber, Alan Young dies at 96. His other genre credits include The Time Machine and numerous cartoon voices.
* Mr. Ed, first episode.
* Mister Ed's Christmas Story
These cops are tired of white people getting freaked out by their black neighbors: "So I'm working last week and get dispatched to a call of 'Suspicious Activity.' Ya'll wanna know what the suspicious activity was? Someone walking around in the dark with a flashlight and crow bar? Nope. Someone walking into a bank with a full face mask on? Nope. It was two black males who were jump starting a car at 930 in the morning. That was it. Nothing else. Someone called it in."
It's been disorienting over the last 15 years to realize that Barney Frank can no longer be deemed a progressive — sure, he's gay, but without him how could Dodd-Frank have been such weak tea? Oh, well, I'm sure the financial industry could have gotten some other "progressive" Democrat to co-sponsor it.
McJoan reviews Dday's Chain of Title: "Dayen knows you're going to be filled with impotent fury at the very unsatisfying ending, so he gives you a silver lining. 'Without the foreclosure fraud movement,' he writes, 'there is no Occupy Wall Street; there is no Elizabeth Warren wing of the Democratic Party; there is no student debt movement, or low-wage worker movement, or movement to transfer money to credit unions and community banks.' That's all true, but because this is the story of these three individuals who gave up so much of their lives in this fight, the real happy ending is that they overcame the shame and the isolation and the feeling of personal failure their foreclosures brought them. They overcame it not just personally, but for all the people who were cheated by their banks and lost everything. They created a community and gave regular people the power to fight back."
Geoff Beckman made a comment on Facebook I thought would have made a good blogpost, so since he doesn't have a blog, I made it into a blog post at the other weblog and called it, "Fight to lose, or fight to win."
Revealed: How copyright law is being misused to remove material from the internet: Writing a bad review online has always run a small risk of opening yourself up to a defamation claim. But few would expect to be told that they had to delete their review or face a lawsuit over another part of the law: copyright infringement. Yet that's what happened to Annabelle Narey after she posted a negative review of a building firm on Mumsnet."
Good Housekeeping says, "Study Proves Spanking Hurts Your Kids' Mental Health [...] Researchers from the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Michigan used data on more than 150,000 children over a 50-year period to come up with a fairly damning conclusion: Spanking is linked to aggression, antisocial behavior, mental health problems, cognitive difficulties, low self-esteem, and a whole host of other negative outcomes. As for the upsides, there were absolutely zero — the practice revealed no redeeming effects but consistently strong links to 13 bad ones."
But what really happened at the Nevada Democratic convention? There are claims of violence, threatened violence, and people complaining merely because they didn't get their way, but I've seen no evidence of the former and it sure looks like the woman chairing simply picked her favorite results for voice votes. Wild claims have been made about Sanders' supporters reacting with violence and throwing chairs, although there is no evidence of it. Sanders disavowed violence and then was accused of not disavowing violence. Even Van Jones is disgusted with the DNC's reaction: "I don't think that that was wise for her to do that. First of all, Bernie did say in his statement that he was against the violence. Also, if you want to talk about violence, only one person's been arrested; it was a Hillary Clinton supporter, Wendell Pierce, arrested for assaulting a Sanders supporter."
* Bernie Sanders' statement * More details at Naked Capitalism.
So now it's time for that old dance about whether Hillary will deign to debate in California. From the San Francisco Chronicle, "Sanders steps up in California — will Clinton?"
* "Sanders pushes Clinton for debate in California: In a Wednesday afternoon statement, Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver said the Vermont senator has accepted an invitation from Fox News to debate 'with the understanding that we can reach mutual agreement on the debate moderators, the format and other details.'"
The big arguments now are about just how narrow the path is for Sanders to win the nomination, whether he should, whether the superdelegates should vote for Sanders because current polling says he is most like to win the general or whether they should go with the candidate who has the most votes, whether Sanders can win once the Republicans find themselves faced with such a prospect. It still doesn't look like either candidate will reach the convention with the minimum number of required delegates, so it does seem like things will be contentious one way or the other. There's a lot of optimism in the Sanders camp about the rest of the west coast going the way of Washington, but I just don't see it: Hilary has been consistently ahead in California, where it looked for a while that the gap was narrowing but that trend reversed around the first of May. Clinton is way out ahead in New Jersey, too.
* National polling for the general election, though, seems to be all in favor of Sanders, and some would say that only Sanders would be a sure thing. But that presupposes that the GOP (and Democratic establishment) won't pull some rabbits out of their hats. Judging by some of the things I've seen from pro-Clinton Sanders-haters, that could be pretty creepy, because for Democrats, these people sound pretty right-wing — but they're Clintonites. It would be one thing if they were saying that he'd been too complimentary toward Castro in the past, but they aren't just saying these things might hurt him with Republicans, they are foaming at the mouth that he objected to US support for the Contras, which is a mighty strange thing for "progressives" to be angry at him for.
* "Dead heat: Trump, Clinton tied in 3 swing-state polls" — Sanders has been consistently beating Trump in all three states. This kind of thing keeps giving Seth Abramson dreams, but they rely on wins for Sanders in California and New Jersey, and I don't see that happening. He has some good points, though: "Clinton and the DNC Are Not Just Colluding — They're Changing the Rules for Superdelegates" — because it's still their job to get a Democrat elected, not just nominated.
* Meanwhile, the GOP is in the acceptance phase, and they're ready to rally around the candidate. Well, most of them.
Marcy Wheeler is probably the smartest analyst of foreign policy working today, and in her two most recent appearances on Virtually Speaking, she made some very important comments on the fantastical, expensive, and extremely dangerous foreign policy approach of Hillary Clinton. The first of these was a a couple of weeks ago with Jay Ackroyd, and the second was Virtually Speaking Sundays where they were joined by Avedon Carol (who accidentally said "Goldwater" when she meant "Rockerfeller" at the '68 GOP convention). Marcy noted that Clinton just gave the best reason to let Chelsea Manning out of jail — without knowing it.
* Jay also spoke to Lawrence R. Jacobs about Fed Power: How Finance Wins. The Fed is pretty murky to most people and most don't realize that we've essentially got an unelected body that has commandeered what were supposed to be the prerogatives of Congress — and they have no accountability and are under no control.
"Pollster Stan Greenberg Urges Democrats Not To Run For Obama's 'Third Term': Bill Clinton's former pollster thinks it's a mistake for Democratic presidential candidates to essentially run for President Barack Obama's 'third term.' 'That's not what the country wants. It's not what the base of the Democratic Party wants,' said longtime Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg, whose past clients include Clinton and Vice President Al Gore. 'The Democratic Party is waiting for a president who will articulate the scale of the problems we face and challenge them to address it.' Greenberg thinks it's time to go bigger."
"Court Backs Snowden, Strikes Secret Laws: In a major vindication for Edward Snowden -- and a blow for the national security policy pursued by Republicans and Democrats alike -- the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled Thursday that the National Security Agency's metadata collection program is unlawful. This is the most serious blow to date for the legacy of the USA Patriot Act and the surveillance overreach that followed 9/11. The central question depended on the meaning of the word "relevant": Was the government's collection relevant to an investigation when it collects all the metadata for any phone call made to or from anywhere in the U.S.?"
Am I the only one who thinks Comey is having too much fun with this cat-and-mouse game? "FBI head challenges Clinton's description of email probe: The head of the FBI on Wednesday appeared to challenge Hillary Clinton's characterization of the federal investigation into her private email server. Clinton and her allies have repeatedly called the probe a routine 'security inquiry.' But Director James Comey told reporters that wasn't an accurate description.
"It's in our name. I'm not familiar with the term 'security inquiry,' " Comey said at a roundtable with reporters, according to Politico. 'We're conducting an investigation ... That's what we do,' he said, according to Fox News. Comey reportedly declined to say whether or not the investigation is 'criminal' in nature."
Alex Pareen, "Don't Blow This [...] Democrats could, for example, take their famously thin-skinned opponent, who is easily provoked into absurd and unpresidential tantrums when his insecurities are mocked, and they could bestow upon him a nickname that instead serves to reinforce his own (imagined) toughness. They could call him, I don't know, 'Dangerous Donald.'" Personally, I thought they should have gone with "Dainty Donald" — both a reference to his hands and to that maiden-aunt performance when he apparently couldn't cope with the idea that Hillary Clinton went to the loo.
Read about Nicole Sandler's experience of running to be a Sanders delegate from Florida. It was not reassuring. But I think she comes to the wrong conclusion — they are perfectly happy to alienate anyone who doesn't support the status quo, and that's exactly why people need to stay in and fight them.
"Yes, Voters Really Are Angry and Anxious About the Unfairness of the Economy: There is a growing amount of contrarian analysis these days suggesting that Americans really aren't so angry about the economy after all, that what appears to be economic populism is really just a cover for racism, sexism or other cultural issues, and that ultimately the only thing the majority of voters really want is a stable technocrat who will keep the good times rolling while fixing some social issues. [...] To believe these things, of course, you would have to assume that voters aren't actually being inspired by the rhetoric and policy positions of Sanders and Trump but by other factors they're subtly tapping into. You would have to ignore most of the actual reasons given in interviews and focus groups by Sanders and Trump voters for why they support their candidates. You would have to ignore what they actually say in media comments sections and at various political forums. You would, in essence, have to ignore all the qualitative data in front of you showing what people say in their own words, in favor of polling data about their generic feelings about the economy or their own current personal economic situation."
David Dayen: "Donald Trump Is Right: Deficits Don't Matter [...] I'm almost certain that Donald Trump had no intention of stumbling into this philosophical debate, traditionally fought between the left and the far left. But his freewheeling style of political rhetoric often drops him into uncharted territory. In this case, Trump exposed an unsaid but prevalent conservative hypocrisy about deficits. As Cheney's quote about Reagan shows, Republicans habitually ignore deficits when they obtain power. It's a matter of convenience, a tempting way out of the fiscal responsibility trap that makes it difficult for politicians to keep their campaign promises. But every time a Bill Clinton or a Barack Obama gets the keys to the Oval Office, Republicans flip the script, generating a sudden fear of mountains of debt. Congressman Paul Ryan has been claiming the U.S. is about to turn into Greece for eight years. A deficit hawk industry in Washington comes alive to tell the nation that we're broke. This creates practical constraints on liberal spending programs to help the poor and the elderly. Trump's comment that America can't default on its debt, and can money-print its way out of trouble, shreds that Republican playbook. Deficit fear-mongering loses its punch if the GOP's new leader dismisses an animating principle of how conservatives defend against social spending." I've been disappointed that Sanders has never brought this up, but he seems to prefer to stay within conventional frames, even though he has had Stephanie Kelton working with him. But I also found it interesting that this article appeared in The New Republic.
"New Democrats Still Partying Like It's 1999: The Mark Warner Edition [...] Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., called on an audience of business and political elites earlier this week to respond to populist anger by lobbying harder for a deficit-reduction package that would reduce corporate tax rates and cut public retirement programs such as Social Security." Your DLC, still at work despite officially disbanding in 2011.
"Rather Than Campaign As Liberal Alternative To Trump, Clinton To Run As Smarter Republican [...] The strategy will not only allow Clinton to be her authentic political self again, but it will also end the charade of moving to the left to appease supporters of her opponent, Bernie Sanders. It would also diminish any confusion over whether Clinton is anything more than a corporate Democrat, who progressives should approach with great skepticism and opposition."
Democratic Convention Hosted by Republican Donors, Anti-Obamacare Lobbyists [..] The composition of the 15-member Host Committee may appear out of sync with the rhetoric of Democratic presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, but the reality is that the party, in the form of the Democratic National Committee, has moved decisively to embrace the lobbying industry. In October 2015, DNC chair Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., reportedly huddled with dozens of lobbyists to plan the convention in Philadelphia, and provided the influence peddlers involved with a menu of offerings in exchange for donations. In February, news reports revealed that the DNC had quietly lifted the Obama-era ban on federal lobbyist donations to the party and convention committee."
Meanwhile in Florida, it's pretty rich Harry Reid getting on a high horse about Alan Grayson's alleged ethics (that aren't being investigated because the ethics committee could find no There there) when his own Golden Boy in Florida, "ex"-Republican Patrick Murphy, stinks to high Heaven. For that matter, so does Reid.
"Ending Tax Break for Ultrawealthy May Not Take Act of Congress [..] In one deft move, Mr. Obama could instruct officials at his Treasury Department to close the so-called carried interest tax loophole that allows managers of private equity and hedge funds to pay a substantially lower federal tax rate on much of their income."
"This isn't how a democracy should work: How the media boosted Donald Trump and screwed Bernie Sanders: Voters want change. Elites in D.C. and the media -- both liberal and conservative -- are actively obstructing it. [...] In his book Democracy, Inc., the late, distinguished political scientist Sheldon Wolin has argued that we have a 'managed democracy,' that elite 'management' of elections is the key to perpetuating the 'primal myth' that the people determine the rulers. As Wolin put it, this 'antidemocracy' doesn't attack the idea of government by the people, it encourages 'civic demobilization' — conditioning the electorate to be aroused for a brief spell, controlling its attention span, and then encouraging distraction or apathy."
"For 40 Years, Liberals Have Accepted Defeat and Called It 'Incremental Progress.' [...] For most of the Left, Clinton-style 'incrementalism' is just a code word to disguise what is effectively a right-wing retrenchment. Nevertheless many self-identified progressives have backed Clinton's 'theory of politics' as the most realistic path to achieve Sanders's objectives. [..] 'There are those timid souls who say this battle cannot be won; that we are condemned to a soulless wealth,' declared Lyndon Johnson in 1964. 'I do not agree. We have the power to shape the civilization that we want.' Compare that to our current Democratic front-runner, whose most impassioned moment on the 2016 campaign trail came when she denounced single-payer health care as an idea 'that will never, ever come to pass.'"
"Pfizer Blocks the Use of Its Drugs in Executions." This is interesting for a number of reasons. Not only is it surprising that Pfizer did something good, but it suggests a sea-change in how Pfizer is looking at the United States as a market — not so much for the number of dollars involved (which isn't that great), but for the willingness to play ball.
"Goodbye Middle Class: 51 Percent Of All American Workers Make Less Than 30,000 Dollars A Year: We just got more evidence that the middle class in America is dying. According to brand new numbers that were just released by the Social Security Administration, 51 percent of all workers in the United States make less than $30,000 a year. Let that number sink in for a moment. You can't support a middle class family in America today on just $2,500 a month — especially after taxes are taken out. And yet more than half of all workers in this country make less than that each month. In order to have a thriving middle class, you have got to have an economy that produces lots of middle class jobs, and that simply is not happening in America today."
* RJ Eskow, "What's Killing the American Middle Class?: A new study by the Pew Research Center spurred a rash of headlines last week about 'the dying middle class.' But the word 'dying' might be more appropriate if we were watching the regrettable but inevitable effects of natural forces at work. We're not. We're seeing the fruits of deliberate action — and sometimes of deliberate inaction — at the highest levels of power."
"9/11 commissioner leaks damning new info: Saudi government officials supported the hijackers: The 9/11 hijackers had support from Saudi government employees, said a former Republican official who investigated the attacks — and he wants the Obama administration to release evidence to prove it. John Lehman, an investment banker and Navy secretary in the Reagan administration, said his fellow 9/11 commission members had helped to obscure Saudi links to the 2001 terrorist attacks, reported The Guardian."
Department of misleading headlines: "CSU student sues college for sanctioning him for what he calls consensual sex: A Colorado State University-Pueblo student filed a federal lawsuit against the university and the U.S. Department of Education claiming sexual discrimination after he was sanctioned for a sexual act that he and his girlfriend insist was consensual sex." That phrase "and his girlfriend" makes all the difference there, doesn't it?
Dday's Chain of Title reviewed in The New York Times: "Exposing those lies becomes a moral crusade. The homeowners' stories are emotional roller coasters, which Dayen meticulously reports. He and his characters find the banks' behavior not just indefensible but criminal. Prepare to be surprised, and angry."
"Washington Post Squeezes Four Anti-Sanders Stories Out of One Tax Study Over Seven Hours" — and it's another "study" that pretends single-payer costs more than what we have now, rising like a zombie to campaign for Clinton in it's rotting corpse. "Why would so much ink be spilled on a candidate who, by the Post's estimation, can't possibly win? The objective is, of course, to further stigmatize Sanders' ideas and platform goals — all of which are deeply antithetical to the editorial and financial bottom line of the paper and its sole owner, Jeff Bezos, whose net worth is over $45 billion."
RIP:
* "Michael Ratner, Lawyer Who Won Rights for Guantánamo Prisoners, Dies at 72 [...] As head of the Center for Constitutional Rights, Michael Ratner oversaw litigation that, in effect, voided New York City's wholesale stop-and-frisk policing tactic. The center also accused the federal government of complicity in the kidnapping and torture of terrorism suspects and argued against the constitutionality of warrantless surveillance by the National Security Agency, the waging of war in Iraq without the consent of Congress, the encouragement of right-wing rebels in Nicaragua and the torture at the Abu Ghraib prison during the Iraq war."
* William Schallert, 93, Dies; Prolific Actor Was Father on The Patty Duke Show and actors' union leader who appeared in nearly everything else, too. His list of sf genre credits alone is longer than most actors' entire careers, but he was in everything our whole lives. (Except, for some reason, M*A*S*H. I was honestly shocked not to see it on his IMDB page.)
"Burying the White Working Class: Liberal condescension towards white workers is code for a broader anti-working class agenda."
"Meet the Woman Who Invented Cosplay: Myrtle R. Douglas, otherwise known as Morojo, rarely gets the credit she deserves for the worldwide phenomenon. [...] For more than 10 years Morojo and Ackerman were an inseparable, intellectually compatible dream duo, and 1939 was an especially big year for the pair: they started their first major zine together, jointly financed the publication of teenage Ray Bradbury's first sci-fi zine, and attended the first-ever World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon) wearing "futuristicostumes" straight out of the 1936 H.G. Wells movie Things to Come — the FIRST FAN COSTUMES EVER WORN IN RECORDED HISTORY."
David Dayen's book, Chain of Title: How Three Ordinary Americans Uncovered Wall Street's Great Foreclosure Fraud, is being released this month and you should buy it. Readers of this blog know that Dday is not simply the best reporter on the banking scandal to come out of the blogosphere, but one of the very best anywhere, and this book is the story of how the bankers broke the cadaster — the record of property ownership — and how a nurse, a car dealership worker, and a forensic expert got together to investigate and expose it.
Nate Silver gave Hillary Clinton a 90% chance of winning Indiana, but Bernie took the state, 52.5%- 47.5%. This sent the Clinton partisans into a frenzy of insistence that Sanders couldn't win and he should drop out now
"After Bitter Tuesday, Progressives Ask Democratic Party What It Stands For [...] At a union hall in Prince George's County Tuesday night, Edwards gave a passionate concession speech that criticized the Democratic Party's faux-progressive mantle. 'To my Democratic Party, you cannot show up in churches before election day, you cannot sing the first and last verse of 'Lift Every Voice and Sing,' you cannot join hands and walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and call that post-racial and inclusion,' she said to cheers and applause. 'To my Democratic Party, let me say that today Maryland is on the verge of having an all-male delegation in a so-called progressive state. So what I want to know from my Democratic Party, is when will the voices of people of color, when will the voices of women, when will the voices of labor, when will the voices of black women, when will our voices be effective, legitimate, equal leaders in a big-tent party?' she said."
"Schmidt: There Will Be An Organized Effort By Clinton To Grab The Republican Foreign Policy Establishment: Men and women who served in senior positions, in national security positions, in Republican administrations. The Clinton campaign's going to go after them. They're going to go after them forcefully. And I think you look ahead now in the weeks to come. As Hillary Clinton moves beyond the Bernie Sanders challenge for the moment for Hillary Clinton to address Republicans in this country."
David Dayen in The New Republic, "Why Hillary Clinton Won't Offer a Bold Economic Agenda [...] A coalition of professionals, minorities, and people freaked out about the prospect of a Trump presidency will likely amount to a majority of Americans for this election. But it isn't a majority that's going to push a Clinton presidency to prioritize the struggles of the working class. And I don't know if there's a way to change that, to turn an election featuring Donald Trump into an election about ideas. During the primary, Clinton memorably asked, 'If we broke up the big banks tomorrow... would that end racism?' Set aside the fact that racism was at the heart of the subprime mortgage crisis, when toxic loans were handed out disproportionately to African-Americans. Clinton's question reveals a clever way to opt out of this dilemma of how to properly credit Obama's economic gains in an age of inequality, when all those gains go to the top. She can find other points of emphasis, enough to win a general election. But failing to address the real economic pains felt by large swaths of the country will not only exact a political price down the line, it will ensure that those pains continue far beyond when they could have been eased."
But before any eulogies are written, here's some optimism from John Laurits, who says, "This is What Will Happen at the Democratic Convention [...] It has even become something of a weekly occurrence for Hillary Clinton and her Wallstreet-backed campaign to imply, insinuate, or flat-out demand that Sanders withdraw his bid for the nomination — they are growing increasingly indignant about the fact that Sanders is trying to win. Which brings us to the heart of the issue — can Bernie Sanders — can we — win the delegates needed for the nomination? The answer to this question is as simple as it is misleading — No. No, my friends, we cannot. And yet! And yet, neither can Hillary Clinton — and I am going to show you what the media is willfully hiding from you. I am going to show you why, using the one thing that even the media can't hide: Math."
Department of Dreamers: "Hey, Hillary: Let's make a (new) deal! How moderates and progressives can unite." This doesn't seem likely when you see stories like this: "Clinton to take hard line with Sanders, say allies [...] Clinton supporters argue the former secretary of State has already been forced to the left by Sanders, and can't risk moving further ahead of a general election. 'I don't know what's left to extract,' Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.), a Clinton supporter, said in an interview with The Hill. He said the Democratic primary moved the discussion 'farther to the left than most moderate Democrats would like to see.'" Which puts "moderate" Democrats farther to the right than most of the country. Okay...
* Gaius Publius expected this. Certainly nothing I'm seeing says he's wrong.
* I can't escape the feeling that Benjamin Studebaker is looking at him through rose-colored glasses, but there's a lot to consider in, "Clinton Supporters are Scaremongering about Donald Trump to Silence the Concerns of the Young and the Poor: I started seeing it a few weeks ago, when Daily Kos told its contributors that after March 15th, they were no longer allowed to robustly criticize Hillary Clinton from the left. As Donald Trump continues to win, win, and win some more, it has only intensified. First they asked Bernie Sanders supporters to unite behind Clinton. Now they're accusing Sanders supporters of being privileged if they resist. And from there, it's just a small step to calling Sanders' people enablers of racism, sexism, or even fascism. If you haven't seen these arguments yet, you will soon. The arguments being peddled are very poorly constructed. They rely on a mix of fear and bias toward the near. [...] But left egalitarianism is not the only alternative to neoliberalism on the menu. Donald Trump offers right nationalism as an alternative, and his alternative has proven very compelling. Right nationalism acknowledges the economic problems people face, but its solutions are much more bellicose and divisive. Right nationalists believe that we are being taken advantage of by somebody, usually somebody foreign. Many people think that Trump is popular because of his personality, but the Trump persona is gift-wrapping a product, and that product is the idea that foreigners are the reason you've been getting a raw economic deal. So Trump says that immigrants are taking your jobs and driving down your wages. Like Sanders, he also goes after bad trade deals. Many countries now have political parties that market right nationalism as an alternative to neoliberalism. There's National Front in France, UKIP in Britain, the Alternative for Germany, Golden Dawn in Greece, and the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, among others. Many of the leaders of these European right nationalist parties have endorsed Trump. What he is selling is not new or even uniquely American. All of these parties market themselves by telling working people that their grievances are real and offering them solutions. The solutions are terrible, but because the left has become so impotent in most of the western world today, right nationalist parties tend to do much better with these groups than leftist parties. Clinton supporters want you to believe that if Donald Trump gets elected, it would be some kind of massive disaster, that he might start a nuclear war or enact policies that are immensely damaging to marginalized groups. This is all based on the idea that Trump is some kind of insane person. But while many right nationalist politicians are true believers who have consistently expressed abhorrent views, we have strong reasons to think that Donald Trump is exploiting the right nationalist playbook for personal gain. This becomes clear when we look at the history of things he said and did before he became a presidential candidate." Yes, it's true that Trump didn't used to sound this right-wing, and, frankly, it was unclear whether he felt any significant ties to either party. And yes, it does seem he is playing the Republicans because he knows how to game them. There's an undercurrent on the net of people (from both parties) who wonder whether Trump didn't get into the race to make it easy for Clinton to win. I do hear people worrying that Trump will do things that he just can't do, and I also hear them worrying that he will do things that Clinton is actually more likely to do. But I am not all relaxed about a Trump presidency, either. Still, there's something to be said for this: "But while Donald Trump is not a right nationalist, he is marketing himself as if he is one and most people believe he is one. He's choosing to do this for strategic reasons — he recognizes that the public increasingly holds the neoliberal consensus exemplified by the establishments of both parties in contempt. The anger they feel toward neoliberal establishment figures is so intense that they welcome it when Trump openly bullies members of the establishment on national television. The American people loved watching Jeb Bush go down in flames and the internet mocked him harshly" And this: "Hillary Clinton's net favorability rating has been continuously falling for a couple years now, and Trump hasn't even started in on her in earnest yet. She's currently at -13.0. This is only going to get worse. Clinton is unpopular not because she's a woman (she was a woman in January 2013, when she was much more popular) but because she's part of the neoliberal establishment. As economic conditions have continued to stagnate or deteriorate for many Americans, their anger toward this establishment continues to increase, and the ability of left egalitarian and right nationalist candidates to effectively channel this anger continues to grow." Sure, but I'm not sure Trump can do anything to counteract his own negatives by November, so he still looks the weaker candidate to me. However, here's a point I agree with so much that I'm even gonna boldface it: "But let's say you don't buy this. Let's say that you think that no matter what, Clinton is always going to be a more competitive candidate than Sanders in 2016. Let's say that you don't buy my argument that we don't really know what Trump will do, that you remain convinced he is absolutely deadly. None of this changes the fact that Clinton is a neoliberal and that neoliberalism is failing too many people too conspicuously. Even if Clinton wins in 2016, continued neoliberal policies are going to continue to build anger, and if the left doesn't develop a left egalitarian alternative to neoliberalism to channel that anger constructively, the right nationalists will become the only vehicle through which anyone can express serious effective dissent. Over time, this will strengthen the right nationalists until they do win, and when they win they might not be led by Trump but instead by a true believer, someone who is absolutely committed to every right nationalist principle — someone like Ted Cruz."
* Not sure who this writer at Political Reads is, but it's quite a fancy. "Super Delegates Will Write History by Nominating Sanders in Philadelphia [...] However, the purpose of the minority power is not to elect a candidate. Rather, they were designed to prevent a loss in a general election, a proverbial safety valve to circumvent an obviously weak candidate. This is the superdelegate's role in the Democratic nomination process: they are independent judges that only emerge in marginal contests. Their function is to secure a nomination based upon available data and a completed primary map. Their sole task is to identify and eliminate the candidate that controls a frenzied base, yet fails to connect outside of their stronghold. They're designed to stop a candidate like Hillary Clinton. The control Clinton has over the Democratic base is frightening. Obvious vulnerabilities that would end any other candidate's presidential bid are overlooked and dismissed by her loyalist support. Face it. Whenever drastic unfavorability, distrust, and a possible FBI indictment fail to internally dismiss a party's candidate, you're not dealing with a potential nominee. You're describing the leader of a cult, the very thing superdelegates were designed to prevent." Rumor has it that the superdelegates are actually leaning toward Biden, so I don't think so.
"What Florida New Dem Patrick Murphy Did To Undermine Hillary Clinton: On May 8, 2014, the Republicans rammed through a resolution to establish the Select Committee on the Events Surrounding the 2012 Terrorist Attack in Benghazi, a committee specifically designed as a witch hunt to drag Hillary Clinton through the mud and sully her name before the 2016 presidential election. Every single Republican voted YES (225 of them) and 186 Democrats voted NO. Seven of the worst Democrats in the House-- the ones who consistently vote for Boehner's agenda day in and day out-- crossed the aisle and voted with the Republicans." And one of them was Murphy, the guy Chuck Schumer is running against Grayson.
* And in the House, John Delaney (MD-06) and Dan Lipinski (IL-03) voted with Republicans to siphon funds out of DC public schools and into a voucher system.
Mike Bloomberg gives a speech, and Bill Black takes it apart: "Bloomberg Tells Michigan Grads They Must Defeat Bernie's Plan to Jail Wall Street Felons: Michael Bloomberg has just published, in Bloomberg, what he describes as 'an adaptation of an address to the University of Michigan's class of 2016.' Having graduated twice from Michigan, as did our eldest, I was intrigued. Bloomberg's title was 'Here's Your Degree. Now Go Defeat Demagogues.' What Bloomberg means is that he is frightened that so many young people supported the 'Occupy Wall Street' movement and support Bernie Sanders. I've written before about Bloomberg, a Wall Street billionaire, and the myths he tries to spread about Bernie. Wall Street elites fear Bernie. They know he won't take their money, he will end the systemically dangerous banks, and he will imprison their leading felons. Bloomberg's hate for, and fear of, Bernie is perfectly rational. Why he thinks that Michigan students will take his advice and learn to love Wall Street's felons is a lot less clear." Bloomberg decried students who worry about racism and sexism, but it looks like the real threat that worries him is that someone might impose responsibility on the financial industry. Black notes that Bloomberg's own paper contains many article showing just why such regulation should be imposed. The Bloomberg context of Bloomberg's speech to the Michigan grads demonstrates that Bloomberg is indeed open to different ideas. Each of the seven articles I cited that accompanied his printed version of his speech is supported by citations of facts from experts — and proves that Bernie is right about the critical need to restore the rule of law and morality in order to end Wall Street's corrupt culture. Demagogues are the folks who ignore the facts and data and make biased assertions that just happen to be in their personal and commercial self-interest. That makes Bloomberg the demagogue."
* Gail Collins repeats the usual mantra of Hillary Clinton's supposed history as a progressive fighter, but it's thinner than you think. Her first professional job was one year at the sChildren's Defense Fund, and then she went on to Rose Law Firm. "Hillary's fight for 'better schools in Arkansas' included a war on the state's teachers' union, making her a pioneer of neoliberal education reform, which holds teachers' unions in deep contempt. The school reform initiative, which Hillary led, imposed competency tests on teachers. That act that was widely seen as racist because the teaching corps was disproportionately black, earning the enmity of civil rights organizations in the state. According to Carl Bernstein, this criticism 'deeply pained' Bill and Hillary, but not enough to make them rethink the struggle. As for making the union the enemy, Bernstein noted that 'the ASTA [Arkansas State Teachers Association] was not exactly the antichrist, and in fact had done some pretty good things in a state where the legislature had typically accorded more attention to protecting the rights of poultry farmers to saturate half of Arkansas's topsoil with chicken feces than providing its children with a decent education.'" Her alleged advocacy for reproductive rights has never impressed me, either (her sole objection to proposed Republican legislation banning late-term abortion is that it omitted exceptions for life and health of the mother), and I'm still waiting to see her actually do anything for women. And, seriously, you have to be stupid not to realize that cutting off welfare hurts women and families — how can anyone ever have defended welfare reform?
* In which Katha Pollit doesn't get it: "Why Bernie Didn't Get My Vote: It's not his focus on the economy — it's that he doesn't seem to understand that the economy is structured by gender and race." Apparently, Bernie gave insufficient lip-service to "gender" issues, so she — well, wait, she's been voicing her support for Clinton all along, it obviously had nothing to do with anything Sanders did or didn't do during the campaign. Throwing in a little red-baiting for the "electability" argument, she still can't defend her belief that Clinton's poor lip-service to issues of racism and sexism is somehow superior to Sanders' obvious understanding that having an equal shot at no money, no jobs, and no hope is not exactly keeping your eyes on the prize.
* Andrew Sullivan has returned to blogging, and The Rude One is unimpressed. While it is indisputable that Sullivan has things entirely wrong, I won't say His Rudeness has things entirely right — except for that last paragraph.
* Anis Shivani was also inspired by the re-emergence of Andrew Sullivan, to write a righteous rant, "Our awful elites gutted America. Now they dare ring alarms about Trump, Sanders — and cast themselves as saviors : Both parties ignored workers, spewed hate, enriched themselves, hollowed out democracy. Now the problem's populism? [...] To manipulate them, the Democratic and Republican elites have both played a double game for forty years and have gotten away with it. They have incrementally yet quite comprehensively seized all economic and political power for themselves. They have perverted free media and even such basics of the democratic process as voting and accountability in elections. Elites on both sides have collaborated to engineer a revolution of economic decline for the working person, until the situation has reached unbearable proportions. The stock market may be doing well, and unemployment may theoretically be low, but people can't afford housing and food, they can't pay back student loans and other debts, their lives, wherever they live in this transformed country, are full of such misery that there is not a single word that an establishment candidate like Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush says that makes sense to them."
Thomas Frank, "Why must the Trump alternative be self-satisfied, complacent Democrats? [...] Seven years have passed now since the last recession officially ended, and yet the country's fury has scarcely cooled. To this day we remain angry at Wall Street; we rage against career politicians; and we are incandescent that the economic system seems to have been permanently 'rigged' against working people. Median household income has still not recovered the levels of 2007. Wages are going nowhere. Elite bankers are probably never going to be held accountable for what they did. America is burning. Listening to the leading figures of the Democratic party establishment, however, you'd never know it. Cool contentment is the governing emotion in these circles. What they have in mind for 2016 is what we might call a campaign of militant complacency. They are dissociated from the mood of the nation, and they do not care.
Eugene Robinson says, "Trump understood the voters the GOP forgot," and he isn't just talking about racism: "This ideological disintegration has been years in the making. I believe one fundamental cause is that after winning the allegiance of millions of 'Reagan Democrats' — mostly white, blue-collar, and Southern or rural — the party stubbornly declined to take their economic interests into account."
"The Story of the Great Brooklyn Voter Purge Keeps Getting Weirder: The first head has rolled after more than 100,000 voters were mistakenly purged from the Brooklyn voter rolls ahead of this week's New York primary, which handed Hillary Clinton a much-needed win over Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. Diane Haslett-Rudiano, the chief clerk of the New York Board of Elections, was suspended "without pay, effective immediately, pending an internal investigation into the administration of the voter rolls in the Borough of Brooklyn," the agency said in a statement, according to the New York Daily News. Anonymous city elections officials said Haslett-Rudiano, who was in charge of the city's Republican voter rolls, had been "scapegoated," according to the New York Post. "It sounds like they cut a deal to make the Republican the scapegoat and protect Betty Ann," an anonymous Democratic elected official from Brooklyn told the Post, referring to Betty Ann Canizio, who was in charge of the Democratic voter rolls."
"Prominent Democratic Consultants Sign Up to Defeat Single Payer in Colorado: INFLUENTIAL DEMOCRATIC CONSULTANTS, some of whom work for the Super PACs backing Hillary Clinton, have signed up to fight a bold initiative to create a state-based single-payer system in Colorado, according to a state filing posted Monday. [...] The anti-single-payer effort is funded almost entirely by health care industry interests, including $500,000 from Anthem Inc., the state's largest health insurance provider; $40,000 from Cigna, another large health insurer that is current in talks to merge with Anthem; $75,000 from Davita, the dialysis company; $25,000 from Delta Dental, the largest dental insurer in the state; and $100,000 from SCL Health, the faith-based hospital chain."
"The Supreme Court Is Fixing To Let Political Corruption Run Rampant: Former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell was convicted by a federal jury in September 2014, after he was caught participating in one of the most cut-and-dry examples of cash-for-favors found in the political corruption textbook. Now, however, McDonnell's appeals have taken his case to the Supreme Court, where — believe it or not — a majority of justices seem predisposed to overturning his conviction, and decimating anti-corruption laws. [...] As The Huffington Post's Cristian Farias reported, McDonnell may well be on his way to a great escape, thanks to a majority of Supreme Court justices who seem, alternatively, amenable to McDonnell's point of view, and troubled that too many prosecutors might start taking up corruption cases" This is a straightforward case of bribery, but the Court seems to be unable to distinguish actual bribery from campaign contributions, even though no campaign contributions are involved. (You don't give someone a Rolex as a campaign contribution!) And I'm not just talking about Chief Justice Roberts, here — only Ginsberg and Sotomayor seem to see what's going on here.
"Tax Cheats Stick Honest Taxpayers with a $406 Billion Annual Tax Bill: A new report from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) estimates that the 'tax gap,' meaning the amount in taxes that are owed but go unpaid each year, was $406 billion on average between 2008-2010. This is a $406 billion cost that honest taxpayers are forced to make up for due to the illegal actions of individuals and corporations. While the $406 billion figure is rather staggering, many experts believe that this could be an understatement of the cost of tax evasion. In testimony before the Senate Budget Committee, Bob McIntyre, director of Citizens for Tax Justice, explained that the IRS estimates likely underestimate the amount of income that individuals and corporations are able to evade by hiding their money in tax havens. It is also important to note that the vast majority of middle income taxpayers are not the ones evading taxes. That's mainly because they can't cheat even if they were so inclined. Employers must report wages to the IRS and remit withholding taxes. The majority of the tax gap ($247 billion) is due to underreporting of business income. [...] Providing the IRS with the resources it needs to do a better job cracking down on tax cheats would seem to be a no brainer, except to the brain dead members of Congress. According to one estimate, increasing funding for IRS enforcement, modernization and management systems can save the government $200 for every dollar invested. Rather than increasing the funding of the IRS to close the tax gap however, Congress has actually cut the IRS budget by 17 percent since 2010, after accounting for inflation. While cutting the IRS budget may appeal to members of Congress who are in favor of tax cheating, it's counterproductive in terms of deficit reduction and protecting honest taxpayers." But you knew that
"This Town Ran An Illegal Debtor's Prison For Years. Now It Has To Pay Back The People It Jailed. Colorado Springs will pay back destitute people it illegally jailed because they couldn't pay court fines, the city announced Thursday. The city will also discontinue its debtor's prison policy, which violated both the U.S. Constitution and a 2014 state law in Colorado. The system usually targeted non-jailable offenses like jaywalking, violating park curfews, or drinking in public.
"Financial frauds had a friend in Holder: Eric Holder was U.S. attorney general at a time when the world desperately needed the nation's chief law enforcement officer to hold accountable the elite bankers who oversaw the epidemic of fraud that drove the 2008 global financial crisis and triggered the Great Recession. After nearly six years in office, Holder announced on Sept. 25 that he plans to step down, without having brought to justice even one of the executives responsible for the crisis. His tenure represents the worst strategic failure against elite white-collar crime in the history of the Department of Justice (DOJ). "
* Matt Taibbi: "Eric Holder, Wall Street Double Agent, Comes in From the Cold: Eric Holder has gone back to work for his old firm, the white-collar defense heavyweight Covington & Burling. The former attorney general decided against going for a judgeship, saying he's not ready for the ivory tower yet. "I want to be a player," he told the National Law Journal, one would have to say ominously."
Even Brad DeLong can't make sense of TTP: "I am what Paul Krugman calls "Davos Man" to a substantial degree--a card-carrying neoliberal, a believer in globalization and free trade, someone who has seen more than enough of the stupidities of places like Berkeley and so doesn't mind hippy-punching now and then. As a believer in free-trade, in the importance of harmonizing global economic regulation, and in getting intellectual and general property rights right, I ought to be a very strong technocratic advocate for the TPP. Yet I found myself having major questions about it [...] Plus there is the big negotiating question: This is, primarily, a Republican priority. Why would a Democratic president put himself in the position of begging for Democratic legislative votes for a Republican priority, rather than demanding Republican policy concessions on issues of importance to Democrats in return for his signature?"
* TTIP, TISA Explained | Wikileaks | Jeremy Corbyn | Bernie Sanders | Julian Assange * "Another Secret 'Trade' Deal Leaks, Shows Corporations Still In Control"
RIP: "Daniel J. Berrigan, Defiant Priest Who Preached Pacifism, Dies at 94: The Rev. Daniel J. Berrigan, a Jesuit priest and poet whose defiant protests helped shape the tactics of opposition to the Vietnam War and landed him in prison, died on Saturday in New York City. He was 94. His death was confirmed by the Rev. James Martin, a Jesuit priest and editor at large at America magazine, a national Catholic magazine published by Jesuits. Father Berrigan died at Murray-Weigel Hall, the Jesuit infirmary at Fordham University in the Bronx." The Berrigans are who I always think of when I hear Paul Simon sing the words "the radical priests", but they were on the cover of Time, not Newsweek.
* Amy Goodman, "RIP Father Daniel Berrigan: Remembering the Life and Legacy of the Antiwar Priest and Poet"
"A World to Make: Eleven Theses for the Bernie Sanders Generation: 1. The Economy is About Power; 2. Expertise Is Not Legitimacy; 3. You're Allowed to Want Economic Security; 4. You Are More than Human Capital; 5. Solidarity Is Different from Hope; 6. Democracy Is More than Voting; 7. Not Everything Has to Be Earned; 8. Equal Treatment Is Not Enough; 9. We Need a Fight to Make Peace with the Planet; 10. We Have in Common What We Decide to Have in Common; 11. We Have a World to Make." Now read the rest.
It's been clear that nobody knows what you mean when you talk about neoliberalism, so Ed Waller rounded up some Recent Discussions of Neoliberalism by Corey Robin, Billmon, and others.
"Apple Stole My Music. No, Seriously [...] What Amber explained was exactly what I'd feared: through the Apple Music subscription, which I had, Apple now deletes files from its users' computers. When I signed up for Apple Music, iTunes evaluated my massive collection of Mp3s and WAV files, scanned Apple's database for what it considered matches, then removed the original files from my internal hard drive. REMOVED them. Deleted. If Apple Music saw a file it didn't recognize — which came up often, since I'm a freelance composer and have many music files that I created myself — it would then download it to Apple's database, delete it from my hard drive, and serve it back to me when I wanted to listen, just like it would with my other music files it had deleted. [....] If Apple serves me my music, that means that when I don't have wifi access, I can't listen to it. When I say 'my music,' I don't just mean the music that, over twenty years (since before iTunes existed), I painstakingly imported from thousands of CDs and saved to my computer's internal hard drive. I also mean original music that I recorded and saved to my computer. Apple and wifi access now decide if I can hear it, and where, and when. [....] the only way to prevent this from happening over and over, according to Amber, was to cancel my subscription to Apple Music (which she herself doesn't use due to the above-listed reasons) and to make sure my iCloud settings did not include storing any music backups."
Lest we forget: Many people who pretend to be older and wiser assure me that it is a paranoid delusion on my part that Obama tried to cut Social Security. I'm too tired to search out a list of links regarding his attempt to get Congress to hold a "Deficit Commission" and, when that failed, his setting up his own "Deficit Commission" packed with people whose hobby-horse was privatizing, cutting, or killing Social Security. Or how he refused to simply allow the Bush tax cuts to expire on schedule and then used this as yet another set-up for his Grand Bargain. Or any of his other machinations to try to get his GB through. But someone reminded me of this one from 2013: "Reality Check: Obama Cuts Social Security and Medicare by Much More Than the GOP: Obama plans to cut between $200 billion and $380 billion more from Social Security and Medicare than Republicans in the next ten years."
"Warner Bros Wins Battle For Channing Tatum's The Forever War [...] ...the feature adaptation of the popular sci-fi actioner The Forever War with Channing Tatum attached to star and Jon Spaihts (Prometheus, Doctor Strange, Passengers) scripting.."
Patrick Leahy hasn't been much of a Senator since that assassination attempt put the fear into him, but at least he's a Batman fan.
Bernie didn't get his miracle in New York, where Hillary beat him 58%-42%. Sanders took most of the counties, but they aren't terribly populous, and Clinton took the city, where most people live. Unlike in so many places, Sanders underperformed the polls, although some people credit some interesting chicanery in Brooklyn, where over a hundred thousand people were oddly kicked off the rolls. Still, he did better than Obama did in 2008.
* Chris Lehman in The Baffler watched the spectacle of "Hillary's Courtiers: You could almost hear the great sigh of relief heaving across cable TV's green rooms and the news-curating portals of our media nation: sure, the Republican side of Campaign '16 continues to resemble a dumpster fire on the set of Mad Max: Fury Road, but the Democrats, bless their managerial hearts, had begun to show signs of what passes in these circles for political maturity. After a distressing series of primary contests falling to Bernie Sanders, the wild-eyed socialist insurgent, New York state — the very seat of media power — has heroically elevated the most experienced, the best-connected, the savviest, most lavishly moneyed Democratic aspirant to the presidency, one Hillary Rodham Clinton. Perhaps you've heard of her?"
* "Sanders Campaign's Commitment To Victory Irritates Media, Offends Clinton Campaign." Yes, every few weeks the Clinton campaign and the press crow that the primaries are over, even with half the delegates still to be voted on, but never mind that detail, let the coronation begin! Sure, it's harder for Bernie to make it to the nomination, but it's still technically possible, even though the likelihood does seem to dwindle. And there is something ironic about hearing the same refrains we heard in 2008, when it was Obama who needed to quit because he couldn't possibly win.
And then Maryland (63.0%-33.3%), Connecticut (51.7%-46.5%), Pennsylvania (55.6%-43.6%), Delaware (59.8%-39.2%) all went to Clinton on the same night, with only Rhode Island (55%-43.3%) going to Sanders. Although Sanders significantly outperformed polling expectations in RI, his showings in states that went to Clinton were for the most part unimpressive (PA, CT) and Clinton did even better in MD, and though there wasn't much polling in DE, she was way up on it. (I was a a little surprised by this, given all the little digs Biden has been making about Clinton and praise for Sanders, but then again, it is the credit card state.) Once again, there are claims of shenanigans.
* Then again, Bernie might somehow get Colorado since the Colorado Democratic Party admitted it screwed up.
* Apparently, an overzealous Clinton supporter also arranged to troll some pro-Sanders groups on Facebook and get them taken down — then gleefully crowed about it in a Clinton FB group..Of course, her fans kept it classy.
The Clinton folks have pretty much declared victory, so Kos decided they can play nice, now: "Clinton hasn't won, Sanders hasn't lost. This is bigger than any single primary. [...] If you are a Clinton supporter, have some damn compassion, will you? You haven't won yet. The primary? Who gives a shit! Donald Trump will win his too, and has he won shit yet? The real winner will get crowned in November. That's the victory that matters. Beating another Democrat shouldn't bring you any joy unless that Democrat is Joe Lieberman. So why would you piss on people we need for November, not just for the White House but all those downballot races as well. How well do you think Clinton will do with a Republican Congress? We need everyone we can get. So maybe it's time for some olive branches? Also, be impressed. It's not every day we get to see the creation of a whole new class of people excited about politics. Hillary certainly didn't manage that. So it behooves you to harness as much of that energy as possible. Of course, Sanders people won't be as excited about Clinton as you are, but who cares? There are more Democrats on the ballot than Clinton, and some of them are pretty awesome. Help them get excited about fixing our party."
Certainly, Sanders has acknowledged that his path has narrowed considerably. Though it is still possible for him to catch up with Hillary in delegates, it gets less and less likely with each primary. He's cutting staff outside of states where there are still primaries to be held, which many are treating as a concession right there.
David Dayen, "A Rough Night for Democratic Revolutionaries: Donna Edwards and Joe Sestak went up against Chuck Schumer on Tuesday. It was no contest." This is a shame, Edwards was doing well against van Hollen, but in the end the party machinery went into high gear for him and froze her out — and so much for all that backing for women and minorities, eh?
Again, Team Clinton kept castigating Sanders for not helping downticket Dems — although he does — but this is a ridiculous charge to make during the primaries. This isn't something you normally expect from someone who is fighting for the nomination (and for good reason). For example, In 2008 Barack Obama Didn't Start Helping Down-Ticket Dems Until After Hillary Left the Race.
"Hillary Not Truthful About Wall Street Speaking Fees [...]
Hillary is veering from the truth when she suggests her $225,000 per speech fee, paid three times by Goldman Sachs, was 'what they offered.' It was not what they offered — it was what Team Hillary demanded."
* "Money influences everybody. That includes Hillary Clinton: Democrats were quick to criticize Republicans who flirted with banks and big oil. Why won't they admit that Hillary's links are a problem too?" This is one of the things that annoys me about her campaign — these have always been standard criticisms of Republicans, but now suddenly we're not allowed to criticize this appearance of corruption or assimilation by the corporate Borg. But it was good enough for Clinton, once: "While Clinton called the suggestion that she might be influenced by the wealthy bankers who raise money for her campaign an 'artful smear' in 2016, she also had no problem hurling even stronger accusations about Obama in 2008: 'Senator Obama has some questions to answer about his dealings with one of his largest contributors — Exelon, a big nuclear power company,' she said. 'Apparently he cut some deals behind closed doors to protect them from full disclosure of the nuclear industry.'" But that was before she got money from the banksters to put in her own pockets for closed-door speeches. But now she wants us to believe she's incorruptible.
* "To Protect Hillary Clinton, Democrats Wage War on Their Own Core Citizens United Argument: Supreme Court's 5-4 decision in Citizens United was depicted by Democrats as the root of all political evil. But now, the core argument embraced by the Court's conservatives to justify their ruling has taken center stage in the Democratic primary between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders — because Clinton supporters, to defend the huge amount of corporate cash on which their candidate is relying, frequently invoke that very same reasoning."
* David Dayen, "Why We Don't Need to See the Hillary Clinton Transcripts: We already know that she gives priority of place to Wall Street [...] That's what the fuss over the Goldman Sachs speeches is all about: who you believe and who you trust as a politician. [..] Nobody is perfectly objective and unmoved by the people around them. It's why politicians need a diversity of opinion and experience in their inner circles, to fight through the inevitable bubble mentality. And it's why spending hours giving talks to financial elites matters."
"It's 'Possible' Hillary Clinton Could Be Better President than GOP Pick, Charles Koch Says." And why not? As one of the original funders of the Democratic Leadership Council, Charles, with his brother, could pretty much claim to have helped create the Clintons. And given the current crop of GOP candidates, there is no reason why he — or any other part of the GOP establishment — should feel particularly uncomfortable about another Clinton presidency, seeing how much the first one did for them all.
Lawrence Noble, general counsel at the Campaign Legal Center, in The Washington Post: "Clinton's campaign-finance hypocrisy [...] Of course, most candidates and super PACs say they are following the law and not coordinating, no matter how ludicrous the claim appears in light of the facts. But according to Correct the Record, the super PAC and Clinton's campaign have taken a new and different approach — actually claiming the right to coordinate." The internet is full of Clinton partisans insisting this is no big deal, too, proving that in the name of Clinton, Democrats are willing to sacrifice every standard Democrats once tried to hold Republicans to.
* "Re-explaining Why the Hillary Victory Fund Is an Issue [...] The new allegation is that this money being allocated by the joint committee is mostly being spent in ways that help the Clinton campaign, either primarily or exclusively. This is where the legal issue gets sticky. Instead of keeping a wall between Clinton money and DNC money, which I believe is what the law calls for, it appears the money is being treated as something fungible that is still mostly being spent according to the wishes of the Clinton campaign."
* "Hillary PAC Spends $1 Million to 'Correct' Commenters on Reddit and Facebook [...] The PAC was created in May of last year when it was spun off from the American Bridge SuperPAC, which is run by longtime Hillary and Bill Clinton supporter David Brock. [...] 'This explains why my inbox turned to cancer on Tuesday,' wrote user OKarizee. 'Been a member of reddit for almost 4 years and never experienced anything like it. In fact, in all my years on the internet I've never experienced anything like it.'" Last May? Seriously? Did we even *have* Bernie Bros back then?
"Bernie Sanders To Stay A Democrat For Life And Support Clinton If She Is The Nominee: Bernie Sanders is going to keep campaigning for a Democratic nomination that he is still trying to win, but the long-term ramifications of the announcement by Jeff Weaver are huge. By keeping his Democratic affiliation, Sen. Sanders may see an even bigger promotion in the Senate if he fails to win the Democratic nomination. Sanders had been caucusing with the Democrats, but there are benefits to being a member of the party."
"Why Bernie vs Hillary Matters More Than People Think [...] We have a tendency in American politics to focus too much on individuals and personal narratives, especially in presidential campaigns. Who's in touch with ordinary people? Who is experienced? Who is a nice person? Who connects better with different identity groups? Who would you like to have a beer with? This is in large part because many democrats like to think of Hillary and Bernie as different flavors of the same Democratic Party popcorn. Consequently, they mostly just pay attention to which candidate they feel they can more readily identify with. But Sanders and Clinton represent two very different ideologies. Each of these ideologies wants control of the Democratic Party so that this party's resources can be used to advance a different conception of what a good society looks like. This is not a matter of taste and these are not flavors of popcorn. [...] On economic policy, contemporary establishment democrats have more in common with contemporary republicans than they do with the FDR/LBJ democrats. Carter and Clinton took the party away from economic progressives. The Democratic Party, which was once the party that saw economic inequality and poverty as the core causes of economic instability, now sees inequality and poverty as largely irrelevant. Instead of eliminating inequality and poverty to fuel the capitalist system and produce strong economic growth, establishment democrats now largely agree with establishment republicans that the problem is a lack of support for business investment. So Bernie Sanders is not merely running to attempt to implement a set of idealistic policies that a Republican-controlled Congress is likely to block. He is running to take the Democratic Party back from an establishment that ignores the fundamental systemic economic problems that lead to wage stagnation and economic crisis. [...] Hillary Clinton is a neoliberal building on the legacy of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. She doesn't understand the pivotal role inequality plays in creating economic crisis and reducing economic growth. She has been taken in by a fundamentally right wing paradigm, and if she is elected she will continue to lead the Democratic Party down that path."
Here's the Thing So Many Americans Can't Grasp About Bernie Sanders [...] Here's the big thing about Bernie that makes so much sense to the rest of the world, but not to a lot of you. Our earliest ancestors formed tribes so we could hunt more efficiently and protect one another. We moved on to villages, then cities and finally nations for mutual benefit. We can do more together than alone, and when we band together we can put safety nets in place so if people are unlucky and get struck down, we can all help them back up. That way no one has to live in fear of losing out in the lottery of life. That's what social democracy is, and those of us who live in them recognize that what we have is pretty damn great."
"Forget Bernie Bros — the Worst Trolls Work in Corporate Media: One of the more popular pastimes of establishment media pundits is complaining of their various 'trolls' — anonymous, faceless basement dwellers who lurk online and harass with aggressive, non-stop vigor. But a recent online dust-up started by Washington Post columnist Philip Bump made something clear: When you factor in actual impact, big media pundits troll just as much as — if not more than — any random egg avatar on Twitter."
"House Democrats Push Back On Obama Plan To Cut Drug Prices: Pharmaceutical companies hate the new plan, and Democrats have noticed." But this is Nancy Pelosi, and she apparently means to do what the drug companies want: "The Department of Health and Human Services is working toward finalizing a new rule that would experiment with ending the financial incentive doctors have for prescribing some extremely expensive medications. The rule has been well-received among some patient advocates, but congressional Democrats have been largely silent, while the pharmaceutical industry and medical community have waged an aggressive campaign to stop it. The campaign is bearing fruit. The letter being circulated among House Democrats uses the oldest move in the opposition playbook — warning of the dreaded unintended consequences. [...] Pelosi encouraged her caucus to get behind the Neal letter to fend off the GOP attack. In fact, Pelosi's office even helped with the letter: Democrats forgot to scrub their data from the document before circulating it, and an inspection of its properties reveals that it was last handled by a health policy fellow in Pelosi's office."
Matt Taibbi, "Why Is the Obama Administration Trying to Keep 11,000 Documents Sealed? The "most transparent administration in history" has spent years trying to hide embarrassing financial secrets from the public." No one believes that "most transparent" stuff anymore, do they? "The Obama administration invoked executive privilege, attorney-client and deliberative process over these documents and insisted that their release would negatively impact global financial markets. But in finally unsealing some of these materials last week, a federal judge named Margaret Sweeney said the government's sole motivation was avoiding embarrassment." Yeah, that's the usual reason.
"Virginia's Awesomely Sneaky Governor Screws Republicans, Restores Voting Rights To 200,000 Americans: Virginia's Democratic governor, Terry McAuliffe secretly plotted (moohoohahahaha!) and then executed a plan to restore the voting rights to 200,000 convicted felons. This move bypasses the GOP controlled legislature and will send Republicans into a screaming fit of outrage and lawsuits" I don't have much good to say about McAuliffe, but restoring voting rights to felons who've served their sentence is a good thing. This isn't legislative, so it seems only to apply to people who have already "paid their debt to society," but it's a start.
"Sometimes, When "All the Facts are In," It's Worse: The UC-Davis Pepper-Spray Report: You know how every time somebody in law enforcement does something that looks bad, we're told that we should "wait until the facts are in" before passing judgment? Well, after Lieutenant Pike of the UC Davis Police Department became an internet meme by using high-pressure pepper-spray on peaceful resisters, the campus hired an independent consulting firm to interview everybody they could find, review all the videos and other evidence, review the relevant policies and laws, and issue a final fact-finding report to the university. The university just released that report, along with their summary (PDF link), and the final report is even worse than the news accounts made it seem.
David Dayen, "Bill That Obama Extolled Is Leading to Pension Cuts for Retirees: ONE OF THE MANY obscure provisions jammed into a last-minute budget bill in 2014 endorsed and signed by President Obama is leading to what would be the first cuts in earned pension benefits to current retirees in over 40 years. The Washington Post reports that the Treasury Department is on the verge of approving an application from the Central States Pension Fund — a plan that covers Teamster truckers in several states — to cut worker pensions by an average of 23 percent, and even more for younger retirees. Over 250,000 truckers and their families would be affected.
"Woman In Leading Flint Water Crisis Lawsuit Shot To Death In Home [...] Her lawsuit was among 64 filed on behalf of 144 children, the Journal reported, which named six companies involved in monitoring and constructing Flint's water system. The case is slated to continue, with a representative to be appointed to represent Bell's child."
In England, it's finally acknowledge that the deaths 27 years ago of 96 people at Hillsborough were not the fault of the fans, but of the police and other professionals whose job it was to keep the crowd safe. The families of the dead appear to have expressed closure, but there is still plenty of anger from the public about the way the Thatcher government treated the Hillsborough disaster and the claims that were made placing full responsibility on the fans and the victims.
Thanks again to CMike, who in comments called our attention to this quote in Emmett Rensin's "The smug style in American liberalism," a long essay in Vox: "If the smug style can be reduced to a single sentence, it's, Why are they voting against their own self-interest? But no party these past decades has effectively represented the interests of these dispossessed. Only one has made a point of openly disdaining them too. Abandoned and without any party willing to champion their interests, people cling to candidates who, at the very least, are willing to represent their moral convictions. The smug style resents them for it, and they resent the smug in turn. The rubes noticed that liberal Democrats, distressed by the notion that Indiana would allow bakeries to practice open discrimination against LGBTQ couples, threatened boycotts against the state, mobilizing the considerable economic power that comes with an alliance of New York and Hollywood and Silicon Valley to punish retrograde Gov. Mike Pence, but had no such passion when the same governor of the same state joined 21 others in refusing the Medicaid expansion. No doubt good liberals objected to that move too. But I've yet to see a boycott threat about it." Some further thoughts on that from Fredrik deBoer at far less length here, and some more from Will Shetterly.
David Dayen, "This election is blinding us to a Wall Street outrage: Inside the media's negligent response to a foreclosure disaster: While banks are finding new ways to rip off homeowners, the press only cares how it affects Julian Castro's VP odds One of the biggest problems with the permanent campaign mentality we've succumbed to is that every issue gets folded into the presidential election. Last week we saw a perfect example. An activist group that has for years been criticizing pernicious practices at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) escalated their campaign, known as Don't Sell our Homes to Wall Street. And the only thing the media cared about was how it would affect HUD Secretary Julián Castro's chances for the vice presidency. Politico won the day with the headline 'Progressive groups target Julián Castro.' Progressive caucus co-chair Raul Grijalva had to explain to Buzzfeed that he wasn't trying to torpedo Castro's VP bid, entangling the entire matter with intra-Latino politics. Castro himself turned around the campaign, telling NBC News that he thought 'it was really about politics and the presidential race and not really about the policy.' This is dumb. Housing advocacy groups have been working on this issue since well before Castro became HUD Secretary in July 2014. They represent communities of color that have been devastated by foreclosures and are now seeing the same financial players who precipitated that crisis come back into their neighborhoods to wreak havoc. And at a time when they've begged for mortgage relief for troubled borrowers, they're seeing that relief go to the Wall Street firms instead. [...] Whatever the solution, the issue has nothing to do with Julián Castro's political career, or his ethnicity, to suggest that the agency he runs is hurting communities and abandoning HUD's mission in favor of a quick buck. 'We've been dedicated for years to saving our neighborhoods,' said Amy Schur. 'Having a federal agency dedicated to affordable housing sell off housing stock to private equity firms and hedge funds is problematic.' "
EFF, "Secret Court Takes Another Bite Out of the Fourth Amendment: Defenders of the NSA's mass spying have lost an important talking point: that the erosion of our privacy and associational rights is justified given the focus of surveillance efforts on combating terrorism and protecting the national security. That argument has always been dubious for a number of reasons. But after a November 2015 ruling [.pdf] by the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) was unsealed this week, it's lost another chunk of its credibility. The ruling confirms that NSA's warrantless spying has been formally approved for use in general criminal investigations. The national security justification has been entirely blown. That's because the secret court, over the objection of its hand-selected amicus, determined that once information is collected by the NSA for "foreign intelligence" purposes under section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, that information can be searched by the FBI for regular criminal investigations without any need for a warrant or prior court oversight. Although the FISC has signed off on the FBI's procedures claiming this authority for years, this ruling from late 2015 may be the first time the FISC has actually considered their legality."
Seymour Hersh says the Saudis bribed Pakistan to hide bin Laden: "The Saudis bribed the Pakistanis not to tell us [that the Pakistani government had Bin Laden] because they didn't want us interrogating Bin Laden (that's my best guess), because he would've talked to us, probably. My guess is, we don't know anything really about 9/11. We just don't know. We don't know what role was played by whom."
"Confessions of a former US Air Force drone technician [...] It hit me when I was in Kandahar airbase, on one side you have a McDonald's and down the road there's kids begging for water. Those people lived an austere life, and we're sitting there from the comfort of the joystick, resolved in the idea that we're killing bad guys. Maybe they're not bad guys. Maybe we just need fewer bombs and more communication between cultures."
Carl Beijer, "This is what I see in liberal journalists who call themselves feminists, but who only care about the problems of rich women: a toxic blend of apathy for their comrades and ambition for themselves. If America, as Steinbeck supposedly put it, is a land of "temporarily embarrassed millionaires", liberal journalism is an industry of temporarily embarrassed executive editors, would-be Jill Abramsons who are fine with laying off hundreds of women as long as they're the ones who get to do it."
"Who Was Ty Cobb? The History We Know That's Wrong" He was one of the greatest ballplayers of all time, but a false story of who he was obliterated his history — until someone did a little research and realized there was nothing to back it up.
For the record, I have always been uncomfortable with the way people use the words "whore" and "prostitute" to mean you're selling out your integrity. Whores rent their services out for money, but they don't sell their souls. Be that as it may, I don't think feminism is well served by cries of sexism every time someone uses language like this. Liberals have been calling members of media and Congress "whores" for a long time now to emphasize the fact that they have become people whose paychecks depend on selling out the public, and no one would think twice about such language if both of our candidates were men. I think it would be nice if people realized that calling someone a "bankster" or "neoliberal" or "former leader of the Democratic Leadership Council" is actually a bigger insult than to call them a "whore", but since we don't live in that world yet, I'll just be that little voice over here to the side saying, "That's an insult to whores!" and the rest of ya'll can just shut up about how we have to use more polite language now that one candidate is a woman and everything is all about her — and her sex. (I was disgusted when the Obama campaign did this crap to the Clintons in 2008, but it's clear she's adopted his playbook.)
I'm still listening to the Democratic debate at the Brooklyn Navy Yard — for the fourth time. (This video seems to loop when I open it — I had to push it back to the beginning.) Clinton talked over Sanders constantly — now that she has her whole chorus screaming "Sexism!" every time he tries to get a word in edgewise, she clearly feels free to step all over him when he tries to speak. Knowledgeable people may recognize how much of what she had to say was fog and double-talk, but the cheers of her supporters in so many wrong places tell us that they don't. Meanwhile, I thought it was interesting that no matter how many times she was asked if she supported raising the cap on Social Security, she always evaded the question. The Young Turks sum up.
* Ludicrously, the Clinton reaction to another suggestion that she release the transcripts of her paid speeches has been to say she would do it when everyone else does. Not sure who she means, since Sanders, like any other member of Congress, is forbidden to give speeches for money. Not sure it's the same for governors, but Trump has no secrets and nobody cares — or even remembers if he ever gave a speech for money — did he? Threads around the web complain of a "double standard" that only Hillary is being asked this, but again, only Hillary is in the position of having been paid more than a US Senator's annual salary for a single speech. Then we got the demand that Sanders release his tax returns! We don't usually hear that one until the general election, when the Democrat tries to get the Republican to spill. But this time, it's a desperation move from the Clinton camp. Right, because Sanders is of course hiding all of his ill-gotten gains in the Caymans. Oh, wait, he isn't.
US Senator Jeff Merkley, "Why I'm Supporting Bernie Sanders [...] But as we look toward the next administration, there is far more work to do. We need urgency. We need big ideas. We need to rethink the status quo. [...] But Bernie Sanders is boldly and fiercely addressing the biggest challenges facing our country. He has opposed trade deals with nations that pay their workers as little as a dollar an hour. Such deals have caused good jobs to move overseas and undermined the leverage of American workers to bargain for a fair share of the wealth they create in our remaining factories. He has passionately advocated for pivoting from fossil fuels to renewable energy to save our planet from global warming — the greatest threat facing humanity. He recognizes that to accomplish this we must keep the vast bulk of the world's fossil fuels in the ground. Continue reading the main story
Bernie is a determined leader in taking on the concentration of campaign cash from the mega-wealthy that is corrupting the vision of opportunity embedded in our Constitution. [...] It is time to recommit ourselves to that vision of a country that measures our nation's success not at the boardroom table, but at kitchen tables across America. Bernie Sanders stands for that America, and so I stand with Bernie Sanders for president."
* 'Determined Leader' Sanders Nabs First Senate Endorsement * Sanders hangs out with striking communications workers and picks up an endorsement from a New York transit union.
The Clinton camp had to really reach to twist that New York Daily News interview to make Sanders look bad, but no editorializing makes Clinton's own assertions when she spoke to the NYDN look good: "Hillary Clinton Says Honduras Coup Not Illegal In Daily News Editorial Board Interview." Anyone who was following the Honduras story at all knows that the whole world condemned this illegal coup, including our own ambassador and, originally, even Obama. But as Secretary of State, Clinton undercut efforts to restore democracy in Honduras and the result has been disaster for that country. She just loves decapitating governments to no useful purpose and letting the blood flow. (I won't even start on her plan to "incentivize" entities to put more money where it would be more useful. If there is one thing the last 45 years should have taught her, it's that "incentives" just create new options for raking off profits by gaming the system rather than using funds for the purposes they are intended.) Oh, yes, and there's the means-testing and promise of ten hours work for college tuition, evidence that she still doesn't get where the expenses are and what is being asked of students. And when asked about whether some of the banksters should have gone to jail, she says, "Well, it rankles me that I don't believe we had sufficient laws, sufficient prosecutorial resources to really go after what could have been not just dangerous, unethical behavior but perhaps illegal behavior. I've talked with some of the people responsible for trying to determine whether there could be cases brought. And they were totally outresourced." Well, no, actually, we had the laws, we had prosecutions going forward, and Obama stopped them. Everybody knows this — he insisted on offering them an opportunity to settle their cases for paltry sums of money when they should have been prosecuted to the full extent of the law. They had committed well-documented fraud of every type and they belonged in jail and they deserved to pay crippling fines. They should have hurt. Instead, they all came out better off than they'd been before. Let's not pretend it was all legal and no one could prosecute them. And does she think there are banks that should be broken up? "At this point, I am not privy to the analysis that is being conducted under Dodd-Frank to make that determination." Seriously? They were "too big to fail" before, but not now, when they are even bigger? Of course, forewarned and forearmed by having seen the interview with Sanders, Clinton was careful to make sure she had the explicit statutes to hand, so she could carefully recite them when they came up in the interview. None of it matters, because The Washington Post isn't writing stories about how badly Clinton answered these questions, and the NYDN itself, owned by a man who is already closely allied with Clinton, endorsed her, as they were always going to. But anyone who already has questions about Clinton's goals was not disabused of the feeling that Clinton's foreign policies are terrible and her aspirations for improvement in the current system are so minimal that they won't do much for the rest of us at all.
* "'She's Baldly Lying': Human Rights Expert on Hillary Clinton's Defense of Her Role in Honduras Coup"
David Dayen: "The Fed needs a revolution: Why America's central bank is failing — and how we can make it work for us: A bold new plan with links to the Sanders campaign has proposed taking the Federal Reserve, at long last, public ."
* Robert Reich on "Bernie and the Big Banks: The recent kerfluffle about Bernie Sanders purportedly not knowing how to bust up the big banks says far more about the threat Sanders poses to the Democratic establishment and its Wall Street wing than it does about the candidate himself. Of course Sanders knows how to bust up the big banks. He's already introduced legislation to do just that. And even without new legislation a president has the power under the Dodd-Frank reform act to initiate such a breakup. But Sanders threatens the Democratic establishment and Wall Street, not least because he's intent on doing exactly what he says he'll do: breaking up the biggest banks."
* Also from Dday, "Why the Goldman Sachs Settlement Is a $5 Billion Sham: The penalty might sound pretty stiff. But get a load of the real math." Actually, the penalty doesn't sound that stiff, either, when you consider what they did. David talked to Sam Seder about it on The Majority Report.
The Sacramento Bee, "No consequences, no justice in Goldman Sachs settlement.[...] It's now clear from a review of the settlement that Goldman Sachs likely will pay much less in penalties than the Justice Department claims, due to special credits included in the deal and, unbelievably, tax deductions Goldman Sachs will receive for payments it makes under the settlement. Disturbing as this may be, what's most troubling is that this settlement agreement — like previous deals between the Justice Department and big financial institutions — contains no consequences for the executives who drove or condoned wrongdoing. As a result, it will not deter future financial lawbreaking and will further undermine the public's faith in the fairness of our legal system."
* "FDIC, Fed Rulings Could See Five 'Too-Big-to-Fail' Wall Street Firms Broken Up by 2018: Federal regulators announced Wednesday morning that Dodd-Frank-mandated resolution plans of five "too big to fail" banks were 'not credible,' setting in motion a process that could see them broken up in thirty months."
* "I'm the real-life Gordon Gekko and I support Bernie Sanders: Banking is the least understood, and possibly most lethal, of all the myriad issues at stake in this election. No candidate other than Bernie Sanders is capable of taking the steps necessary to protect the American people from a repeat of the recent debacle that plunged the nation into a recession from which we have not recovered. The potential for a depression looms heavily on the horizon. As a trained economist who has spent more than 20 years on Wall Street — and one of the models for Gordon Gekko's character — I know the financial system is in urgent need of regulation and responsibility. Yet Hillary Clinton is beholden to the banks for their largesse in funding her campaign and lining her pockets. The likelihood of any Republican candidate taking on this key issue is not even worthy of discussion. The recession of 2007-2016, and the persistent transfer of wealth from the 80% to the 1% is, mostly the result of banking irresponsibility precipitated by the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999. The law separated commercial banking (responsible for gathering and conservatively lending out funds) from investment banking (more speculative activities)."
"Sorry Paul, but the Bailout WAS about the Banks. Paul Krugman claims that "Many analysts concluded years ago" that the big banks were not at the heart of the financial crisis and that breaking them up would not protect us from future crises. Incredibly, his claim is linked to an article by ... Paul Krugman. Maybe a Nobel Prize comes with a license to cite oneself as Gospel authority, but I don't believe that Krugman's Nobel Prize was for his expertise on bank regulation. So what's wrong with Krugman's claim? Let's go piece by piece."
Even Joe Conason, who has a long history of defending the Clintons and supports Hillary in this race, admits it: "On Israel, Bernie Sanders Is Right (And Hillary Clinton Knows It) [...] That should be blindingly obvious, especially to Clinton, who has worked alongside President Clinton and President Obama toward a decent two-state solution for almost a quarter century. Her disappointing reply to Sanders reflected her political priorities in the New York primary, rather than her commitment to human rights or her assessment of American diplomatic interests."
"Clinton, Sanders Will Sue Arizona Over Botched Election [...] According to the Post, the suit will focus on Maricopa County, home to roughly 2 million registered voters. Many voters experienced hourslong wait times after county elections officials cut the number of polling places from 200 in 2012 to 60 in 2016."
"Warren, Sanders Sponsor Bill Going After TurboTax, Complexity of Tax Filing [...] The following is another instance of the difference between neo-liberal governance and FDR-liberal governance. At present, tax filing — filling out and sending in a prepared multi-page tax return — is complicated and in most cases requires third-party software to complete. The government could do this for you, by filling in your forms with the information they have already, making those forms available online at a secure government web site and letting you add the rest of the data yourself. But under our current neo-liberal government, the IRS doesn't do that. Instead, the IRS has agreements with vendors in the software industry, including the TurboTax giant Intuit, not to cut into their profit by "competing" with them in "providing free, on-line tax return preparation and filing services to taxpayers." Even though, as you'll see below, the IRS is compelled by law to do just that. Consider that point for a moment, as you (perhaps) scramble to complete your own return for this year. What if you could go to a U.S. government website (instead of a third-party corporate website) and complete your tax filing online without filling out a complicated paper or PDF "return"? Would you prefer that? Would you mind not buying tax-filing software each year, year after year? At present, you don't have that choice. Even though, since 2002, the government has been legally required to develop and offer such a service, it won't. Capture of government by industry, including in this case the tax-preparation industry, has delayed that implementation."
Last week, Nicole Sandler's Monday show discussed the "Democracy Spring" demonstrations in DC and talked to Joel Silberman (about superdelegates and the mish-mash of the primaries) and Seth Abramson about his perceptions of the primaries.
Black Agenda Report: "Bill Clinton Insults Blacks in Order to Build Hillary's 'Big Tent' Party: Bill Clinton's behavior was calculated, predictable, and inevitable. The only question was the timing. It's the song he loves to sing, and Hillary sings it, too, as she did two decades ago when she spoke of the 'kinds of kids that are called 'super predators' — the ones with 'no conscience, no empathy, we can talk about why they ended up that way, but first we have to bring them to heel.' This is a lot louder than a dog-whistle; it's white racist theater in service of the Mass Black Incarceration State. Bill Clinton reprised the performance, in Philadelphia, a generation later, with full-throated venom."
One of the big claims going around on the Clinton side is that Sanders isn't supporting down-ticket Democrats the way Clinton is. But "Is Clinton Really Supporting Down Ballot Candidates? Or Just Laundering Campaign Donations? [...] This is just a way to raise huge amounts of money (up to $355,000) for the Clinton campaign. It does nothing, absolutely nothing to help state parties. Worse, it is overt support for one candidate during a primary by the party — and remember, this was happening while O'Malley, a long-time Democrat 'in good standing' was also in the race."
* "How Hillary Clinton Bought the Loyalty of 33 State Democratic Parties [...] If a presidential campaign from either party can convince various state parties to partner with it in such a way as to route around any existing rules on personal donor limits and at the same time promise money to that state's potential candidates, then the deal can be sold as a way of making large monetary promises to candidates and Super Delegates respectable." She bought endorsements and superdelegate vote commitments. But another meme has been, "Why won't Sanders' Senate colleagues endorse him?" — an attempt to buttress a (false) claim that none of his colleagues like him. But Clinton has deftly found ways to make it advantageous to Senators to withhold endorsements from Sanders and to make sure that if they endorse anyone, it will be her. "In Montana, a state where one third of voters identify as independents, and where it is imperative that Democratic candidates for public office win some votes from both Republicans and Independents in order to get elected, it seems peculiar that the Montana State Democratic Party would make a deal with the Hillary Clinton campaign months before the national primaries were underway, given that there is a very real and proud tradition of political independence in Montana. Being told who to vote for in a primary by your party's big wigs is not part of that tradition."
"Republicans have faced more and more ideological primary challenges. Democrats haven't." Yes, the DNC, DSCC, and DCCC have suppressed those challenges, to the detriment of the party. They tried to stop this primary from being anything more than a coronation of Hillary Clinton, again to the party's detriment. As it was, the dearth of debates earlier in the season allowed the Republicans to command the airwaves and suppress the excitement that a real primary contest can generate.
Robert Borosage, "Sanders on Clinton: Not Unqualified, Compromised. [...] Sanders' critique of Clinton isn't that she is unqualified or inexperienced. It is far tougher and more substantive. His campaign is premised on the belief that she is too compromised and conservative to be the president we need. It isn't about character or experience; it is about direction, program and independence. Sanders argues that our economy is rigged to favor the few, and our politics is corrupted by the big money, special interests and revolving door appointments that keep fixing the game. He argues we need fundamental change, not simply piecemeal or incremental reform if we are to make this economy work for working people once more. Sanders is running because he believes that Clinton is too compromised in her agenda. He has defined major substantive areas of disagreement: on corporate trade policies, on the need for major public investment and a sweeping initiative to take on global warming, on national health care, on breaking up the big banks and curbing Wall Street, on progressive taxation that will pay for tuition free public college, on $15.00 an hour minimum wage and empowering workers to organize, on dialing down our interventionist foreign policy and more. Clinton has moved to adopt a bolder reform position this year than in 2008 or before. She's basically at one with President Obama's policies. Yes, she's come out against the president's Transpacific Partnership deal, but everyone believes that is just campaign positioning. She claims to be tough on Wall Street, but even her Wall Street donors don't believe her. She's assiduously avoided embracing the Warren-Sanders reform agenda. She's put forth a good agenda on global warming, but opposes putting a price on carbon, opposes banning fracking, and hasn't made climate change a centerpiece of her campaign. She's scorned Sanders call for national health care or for tuition free college. She's been a supporter of the regime change follies from Iraq, to Honduras to Libya to Syria to the Ukraine."
"Big Bank 'Living Wills' Are a Failure — and Point to a Bigger Problem: Regulators this week rejected, in whole or in part, the 'living wills' of seven of the eight largest U.S. banks. Does that suggest that those banks are all still 'too big to fail?' I would step back from that. The very process of having banks design living wills, which are roadmaps for their own bankruptcy, suggests they are too big."
"Dozens of Prominent Academics Urge McGraw-Hill Education to Reverse Decision to Censor Palestinian Loss of Land Maps: Last month, publishing giant McGraw-Hill Education withdrew and destroyed copies of a US college level textbook because of complaints from supporters of Israel over a series of maps showing loss of Palestinian land from 1946, shortly before Israel was established, to 2000. In response to this shocking and outrageous act of censorship of the Palestinian narrative from US schoolbooks, dozens of respected Palestinian, Israeli, and American academics have signed onto the enclosed open letter calling on McGraw-Hill Education to reverse its decision."
"Warren Buffett's right-hand man gave a dark warning about American finance [...] 'There's way, way too much of that in America. And too much of the new wealth has gone to people who either own a casino or are playing in a casino. And I don't think the exaltation of that group has been good for life generally, and I am to some extent a member of that group. I'm always afraid I'll be a terrible example for the youth who want to make a lot of money with and not do much for anybody else and who just want to be shrewd about buying little pieces of paper. Even if you do that very honestly, I don't consider it much of a life. Just being shrewd about buying little pieces of paper, shrewder than other people, is not an adequate life. It's not a good example for other people.' [...] Munger, a Republican and a billionaire, also said he agreed with the views of Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders on this issue. 'The truth of the matter is that ... Elizabeth Warren doesn't agree with me on many subjects, and I wouldn't agree with her on many subjects, but she is basically right when she says that American finance is out of control and that it isn't good for the rest of us,' he said. 'Both Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are not two of my favorite people on earth, but they are absolutely right.' Munger went on to say that there was cyclicality in the securities market and that 'the big busts hurt us more than the big booms help us.' He added that what gave rise to Hitler was the Great Depression." (That's from the story — but the full transcript of the interview is attached below it.)
It always worries me when people start getting triumphal about how any minute now demographics or political weather is presaging a sea change in political control of the country. I've been hearing it my whole life while the people who are running things keep moving further and further to the right. I think the assumption that the clock is ticking against the aristocracy makes people complacent. The Baby Boomers had this same belief and allowed themselves to be distracted and deceived by clever "nuanced" language and politicians who wore the trappings of liberalism while forwarding the language and the policies of the aristocracy. Demographics may offer a chance at shifting course, but only if people are prepared to be very vigilant, to organize, and to work hard and never think the work is done.
* Jacobin, "The Coming Left-Wing Majority: More and more young people are rejecting the politics of fear and moving left."
* Cory Robin, "What's going to happen to liberals when the Right begins to give way?
"Neoliberalism — the ideology at the root of all our problems: Imagine if the people of the Soviet Union had never heard of communism. The ideology that dominates our lives has, for most of us, no name. Mention it in conversation and you'll be rewarded with a shrug. Even if your listeners have heard the term before, they will struggle to define it. Neoliberalism: do you know what it is? Its anonymity is both a symptom and cause of its power. It has played a major role in a remarkable variety of crises: the financial meltdown of 2007-8, the offshoring of wealth and power, of which the Panama Papers offer us merely a glimpse, the slow collapse of public health and education, resurgent child poverty, the epidemic of loneliness, the collapse of ecosystems, the rise of Donald Trump. But we respond to these crises as if they emerge in isolation, apparently unaware that they have all been either catalysed or exacerbated by the same coherent philosophy; a philosophy that has — or had — a name. What greater power can there be than to operate namelessly?"
"We Asked 4 Prominent Bernie Supporters if They'd Vote for Hillary in November. Here's What They Told Us [...] Rania Khalek: Sure, Trump has demonized Mexicans, Muslims, and women. But Clinton called black children 'superpredators' and referred to welfare recipients as 'deadbeats.' She routinely accuses Palestinians of teaching their children to hate while closely aligning herself with Israel's right-wing, Holocaust-revising Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a man whose demagoguery rivals Trump's. She also likened Russian president Vladimir Putin to Hitler and expressed pride in making an enemy of 'the Iranians' whose country she once threatened to 'obliterate.' The problem with Clinton goes beyond semantics. On issues relating to trade and foreign policy, Clinton is clearly to the right of Trump. [...] Josh Holland: The counter-arguments are, frankly, incoherent. If droves of Sanders supporters were to stay home and deliver the White House to the GOP, the political establishment would view that as further proof that parties rarely win three terms in a row. The story would be that Clinton had too much baggage, or that Trump had brilliantly appealed to 'Reagan Democrats.' Whatever message the 'Bernie or Bust' crowd might think they'd be sending to the establishment would undoubtedly fall on deaf ears. [...] Doug Henwood: I've spent too much time reading about her hawkishness and her loyalty to corporate power to bring myself to pencil in the oval next to her name. It's likely she'd rip up the nuclear deal with Iran — more elegantly than Donald Trump, perhaps, but no less thoroughly — and try to change a disobedient regime or two. And her apologists who want to know what specific quid pro quos she's granted in exchange for campaign contributions from banks and other powerful corporations are missing the point: They shouldn't be read as transactional but as votes of confidence from people who don't part with money lightly. [...] Kathleen Geier: Vote for the sinner, hate the sin."
Sorry Paul, but the Bailout WAS about the Banks: Breaking up the big banks alone will not prevent all future crises. And no one is claiming that. But by breaking up the big banks there will be the political room to regulate the financial system more effectively. Too-big-to-fail is too-big-to-regulate. And that alone makes breaking up the big banks an important goal."
* The headline is just a bit misleading, but it's not really that much of a stretch to think that Warren had Krugman and others of his ilk in mind when she said: "There's been a lot of revisionist history floating around lately that the Too Big to Fail banks weren't really responsible for the financial crisis, That talk isn't new. Wall Street lobbyists have tried to deflect blame for years. But the claim is absolutely untrue. There would have been no crisis without these giant banks. They encouraged reckless mortgage lending both by gobbling up an endless stream of mortgages to securitize and by funding the slimy subprime lenders who peddled their miserable products to millions of American families. The giant banks spread that risk throughout the financial system by misleading investors about the quality of the mortgages in the securities they were offering"
Matt Bruenig is grateful to learn from this campaign about "The various pathologies of young women: One thing I've enjoyed about the Democratic primary is learning which voter demographics you can pathologize and which you can't. It turns out that even vaguely gesturing at the idea that Black voters may be choosing incorrectly is definitely oppressive and wrong. After all, that's the kind of stuff we usually only reserve for the disgusting poor and working class white voters. On the other hand, explicitly saying young women voters are ignorant, complacent, naive, or boy-crazy cool girls is actually fine. Used to, that was the stuff of Reddit, but believe it or not, 'bitches be crazy' is an actual genre of election coverage about why young women go for Bernie."
"Panama Papers: Spy agencies widely used Mossack Fonseca to hide activities: Intelligence agencies from several countries, including CIA intermediaries, have abundantly used the services of Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca to "conceal" their activities, German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) says, citing leaked documents."
Russ Wellen, "Let's Review: Saudi Arabia Is Not Our Friend [...] It is time we get it through our heads once and for all that the Saudis are not our friends. Not only have they funded terrorism for years, either directly or indirectly, but they constitute an ongoing fly in the ointment in our relations with Iran. Also, the United States has let itself get sucked into supporting the Saudis in its war on Yemen — the savageness of which is only exceeded by its senselessness. The United States doesn't even need their oil anymore."
Apparently, a couple of weeks ago Peter Lilley himself posted on the Tory blog that he opposes TTIP. This guy was Secretary of State for Trade & Industry under Thatcher, and he's breaking with his party by sounding a warning against the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) — which, being the kind of Tory he is, he had initially been wholly in favor of, before he actually looked into it. But even as anti-protectionist as he is, he ended up not liking it. "TTIP is not primarily about removing tariffs and quotas. The average tariff levied by the US on goods from Europe is just 2.5 per cent. Getting rid of them would be worthwhile — but no big deal. It is mainly about harmonising product specifications and creating a special regime for investment. There is no objection to those things in principle. Insofar as product harmonisation means removing rules introduced as hidden protection of a domestic producer, that is fine. But we should not sign away Parliament's right to protect our citizens from harmful additives, and so forth." Eric Zuesse says, "The very core of both Obama's 'trade' deal with Europe, TTIP, and his 'trade' deal with Asia, TPP, is precisely that: to sign away legislators' power to protect the electorate from harmful additives, toxic water and foods and air, unsafe cars, and a sustainable environment for themselves and future generations — and more (Lilley is especially concerned because it would abolish Britain's vaunted public health service. Imagine: a British Conservative is determined to protect that enormously successful socialist program in his country! Flabbergasting, but true.) The very core of it is to transfer national sovereignty to a worldwide dictatorship of international corporations (three-person corporate-accountable panels of 'arbitrators', whose rulings are non-appealable and aren't required to adhere to any nation's laws — it's shocking, but true)."
Dean Baker, "Point: We Had Trade Before We Had NAFTA and Other Trade Deals [...] The United States already had plenty of trade before NAFTA, CAFTA and the other trade deals negotiated over this period, just as it already has a huge amount of trade with the TPP countries. It will continue to have large amounts of trade with Canada, Japan and other TPP countries regardless of whether Congress approves the deal, so we are not arguing about whether or not the United States should trade. Rather, NAFTA and subsequent trade deals are about putting in place a set of rules that structure the pattern of trade to favor some groups and disadvantage others. At the top of the list of beneficiaries of these deals are the multinational corporations that want more protections for their investment in other countries."
Ian Welsh, "The Market Fairy will not solve the problems of Uber and Lyft: Here is the thing about Uber and Lyft (and much of the 'sharing economy'). They don't pay the cost of their capital. The wages they pay to their drivers are less than the depreciation of the cars and the expense of keeping the driver fed, housed and healthy. They pay less than minimum wage in most markets, and in most markets that is not enough to pay the costs of a car plus a human."
Jeremy Scahill and Matthew Cole, "Echo Papa Exposed: Inside Erik Prince's Treacherous Drive to Build a Private Air Force [...] One of the mechanics soon recognized Echo Papa from news photos — he was Erik Prince, founder of the private security firm Blackwater. Several of the Airborne staff whispered among themselves, astonished that they had been working for America's best-known mercenary. The secrecy and strange modification requests of the past four months began to make sense."
"Barack Obama says Libya was 'worst mistake' of his presidency: 'Failing to plan' for the aftermath of Muammar Gaddafi's downfall is the US president's biggest regret from his time in office." You'd think they would have thought of that, eh? Prepared, much? Thanks, Hillary.
"The South's new re-segregation plan: The Koch brothers, ALEC and the sneaky scheme to undo Brown v Board of Education: Eighty years after Brown, Southern segregation is on the rise -- and "school choice" is its vehicle. [...] The rise of vouchers is not a response to popular demand. Vouchers have been put to voters in several states, and every time they have been soundly defeated, even in red state Utah. The revival of the voucher movement is nothing more than ideology and politics taking charge of schooling. School choice is not the 'civil rights issue of our time,' as its proponents claim; it is the predictable way to roll back civil rights in our time."
Cenk makes a good point about his recent problem with American Airlines. You're a captive in an airport and individuals who work for an airline have tremendous power to exact significant vengeance for the pettiest of reasons, and you shouldn't have to be Cenk Uygur to get any redress, but the fact is you shouldn't have to put up with this crap at all. No one should be able to yank your ticket (no refunds!) at the last minute of boarding a plane over some irrelevant nonsense that everyone knows poses no impediment or threat whatsoever. The crazy security theater needs to be gone, and with it the sense of entitled power that even the pettiest officials are able to abuse.
"I am on the Kill List. This is what it feels like to be hunted by drones: I am in the strange position of knowing that I am on the 'Kill List'. I know this because I have been told, and I know because I have been targeted for death over and over again. Four times missiles have been fired at me. I am extraordinarily fortunate to be alive. I don't want to end up a 'Bugsplat' — the ugly word that is used for what remains of a human being after being blown up by a Hellfire missile fired from a Predator drone. More importantly, I don't want my family to become victims, or even to live with the droning engines overhead, knowing that at any moment they could be vaporized. I am in England this week because I decided that if Westerners wanted to kill me without bothering to come to speak with me first, perhaps I should come to speak to them instead. I'll tell my story so that you can judge for yourselves whether I am the kind of person you want to be murdered."
"How 'Maintainers' not 'Innovators' Make the World Turn [...] But those who've questioned whether technology really is society's salve aren't alone. Lee Vinsel, an assistant professor of science and technology at the Stevens Institute of Technology, wrote a dissertation on innovation and regulation in the early days of the automobile. But lately, he finds that the word 'innovation' is overused to the point of meaninglessness — and worse, that it can obfuscate the bleak realities of the status quo. 'In a culture where we forget about things like crumbling infrastructure and wage inequality, those narratives about technological change can be really dangerous,' Vinsel says."
You thought the leaden winter would bring you down forever
Bernie wins Wisconsin, 56.6%-43.1%, exceeding the polls. FiveThirtyEight showed a remarkable switch from giving Clinton an 83% probability of winning less than a week earlier, with a rapid turnaround as we got into April. (He was in Wyoming to announce it at a rally.)
* I don't suppose anyone really expects the same last-minute turnaround to happen in New York on 19 April, but Clinton's lead is narrowing....
* Bernie also won Wyoming, a big state with big precincts with not many people in them, 55.7%-44.3%. Curiously, however, Hillary gets the same number of delegates that Sanders does.
And, speaking of New York, the Bernie campaign made a reprise of their "America" video — only this time, for New York.
Not sure who the next president will be or for how long, but if we are still having elections after that, the next one has to be Elizabeth Warren. That video is so much fun!
Team Clinton must have decided that their email was running against refusing to debate Sanders in New York, since she'd already promised to do so. They 180'd and said they would debate — but they are using the DWS scheduling tool, apparently. Sanders released a statement: We are very pleased that Secretary Clinton finally has accepted our request for a debate about the needs of New York and America. Unfortunately, the dates and venues she has proposed don't make a whole lot of sense. The idea that they want a debate in New York on a night of the NCAA finals — with Syracuse in the tournament no less — is ludicrous. We have proposed other dates which they have rejected. We hope we can reach agreement in the near future. The people of New York and America deserve to see and hear a debate on the important issues facing the state and country" Wil Wheaton had a nice little tweet summing up the debate about debates.
* They did finally agree to a date, on April 14th, but it won't be open to the public. "Sources said each candidate will receive a private allocation of tickets to Thursday night's showdown that will be televised live on CNN and NY1. It remains unclear how each campaign plans to distribute those tickets. Representatives for the Clinton and Sanders campaigns did not respond to requests for comment."
The Sanders campaign apparently got stupid again and talked to the NYT about campaign strategy. This is always a mistake and they should stop doing it. "But allies and advisers of Mr. Sanders say they missed opportunities to run an aggressive political operation in 2015 that would have presented more of a challenge to Mrs. Clinton. She has now firmly built a big lead in delegates needed to clinch the nomination — a margin that would be smaller if Mr. Sanders had run differently last year, according to interviews with more than 15 people who are on his team or close to him." That's 15 blabbermouths who need to be told. And anyway, I think they're wrong. Greg Sargent agrees with me — so there.
And this is the video and transcript of The Daily News interview with Bernie Sanders. Regardless of what you may have read in the press, it was not at all a bad interview, although Sanders did not realize that tokens are no longer used on the New York Subway. Bear in mind that a lot of these, though they seem reasonable, are gotcha questions, and the editors who interviewed him either didn't understand his answers or were trying to make him look like he had never thought about these things. (And one question, well, Bernie is hamstrung as long as he can't just say, "Because Barack Obama protected the criminals.") But most people seeing this interview won't be thinking of those things, and to a lot of people — and, unfortunately, journalists — it looks bad that he didn't appear to answer those questions. Except, he did answer the questions, as Mike Konczal points out — it's just that the journalists didn't know what he was talking about — or, indeed, what they. were talking about, such as that it's pretty hard to know what a judicial decision (MetLife) is going to mean when it's been sealed and no one can read it. Or maybe they did know and were trying to trip him up. But all this raises the question of who wrote the interview questions, and whether it was someone who knew that the right answers would appear wrong to people who didn't understand this stuff. Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian of The Young Turks think the whole thing was a set-up. Apparently, Hillary Clinton doesn't know much about these issues, either, because she seemed to imply that it all made him #unqualified. (And then there was this, which some nitwit confused with "blood libel.")
* Incidentally, Ryan Grim even remembered that Hillary must know better, because she has said the same thing — but only to attack reinstatement of Glass-Steagall.
* And yes, asserting that a few journalists who support Clinton might be less knowledgeable about how to break up the banks than people who are experts in the field really does get you the "Oh, you're right and everyone else is wrong" treatment. Which has been the general tone of Clinton supporters all along. How'd that happen?
* Matt Taibbi on "Why the Banks Should Be Broken Up [...] The typical arc of this scam went as follows: Giant bank lends money to sleazy mortgage originator, mortgage originator makes lots of dicey home loans, the dicey home loans get sold back to the bank, the bank pools and securitizes the loans, and finally the bank sells the bad merchandise off to an unsuspecting investor. The criminal scenario that was most common was a gigantic bank buying up huge masses of toxic loans from a Countrywide or some other fly-by-night operation and knowingly selling this crap as a good investment to some investor."
* Krugman has gone so partisan for Hillary that Bill Black reckons Krugman's first post of this month was an April Fool's gag. It's hard to disagree, given that the same man who today argues that the big banks aren't a problem wrote in 2009 that "The collapse of Lehman Brothers almost destroyed the world financial system, and we can't risk letting much bigger institutions like Citigroup or Bank of America implode."
"The Disappearance of Hillary Clinton's Healthcare Platform: In an extraordinary magic trick, performed on a national scale, Hillary Clinton's healthcare platform has been disappeared. While policy analysts, news anchors, and columnists have been engaged in an intense debate over Bernie Sanders's 'Medicare for All' proposal, Clinton's incremental alternative has escaped almost all scrutiny — even among those who say they prefer it. Combining the election-season writings of our most prolific, liberal-leaning columnists at the New York Times, Huffington Post, Vox, Mother Jones, Politico, The American Prospect, etc. you'll find dozens of articles critiquing Sanders's single-payer plan. None have mentioned a single Clinton healthcare proposal as a point of comparison — merely that she supports a philosophy of incremental reform. [...] What would happen if the media lifted the curtain on Clinton's healthcare platform and introduced any level of scrutiny to her proposed improvements on the Affordable Care Act? They would find two categories of Clinton proposals: some that are so vague they're difficult to evaluate, and other more concrete plans that follow in the footsteps of one of Congress's most practiced healthcare incrementalists: Senator Bernie Sanders. [...] Previous national trends in incremental healthcare reform — from managed care through pharmacy benefit management, chronic disease management, narrow networks, and beyond — have often created lucrative new industries, but had dubious impacts on underlying healthcare costs or access to care. Most of Clinton's healthcare platform falls exactly into these danger zones, and should be received with a critical eye."
Max Sawicky says, "Hillary's getting a huge free ride on her purported mastery of the mechanics of policy, in contrast to Bernie. I decided to look into just one of her campaign initiatives. She likes to throw around the phrase 'universal child care' or 'universal pre-K.' But she isn't proposing universal either. She's proposing new money for pre-K, which is fine, but a) false advertising, and b) it's not clear how it would 'work.' [...] The rub is that they are no more specific or rigorously motivated than the Sanders proposals that people have been blathering about. [...] Note that bumping up Head Start does not get you to universal either. It's fine, but Head Start is a tiny program, relative to the relevant population. How to 'pay for it'? Forget it. They don't say, not that I care. All the critics of 'unpaid-for' single-payer BernieCare evidently don't care either. Criticisms of Sanders' vagueness on policy can be applied to HRC as well, if one delves just a little bit. I look forward to all the deep-dive analyses of HRC's projected path to universal health care coverage. Are there any? Why not? Because Hillary advocates are too busy blathering about Bernie. Those with policy expertise don't apply it to Hillary's treacle."
Another meme that's going around is that Bernie never works for downticket candidates and he didn't even work for the more progressive judge running against an extremist right-wing partisan in Wisconsin — but it just isn't true.
Hillary tries to charm young Bernie voters some more by stupidly insulting them: "Hillary: 'I Feel Sorry' for the Young People Who Believe Sanders Camp's Lies: I feel sorry sometimes for the young people who, you know, believe this. They don't do their own research. And I'm glad that we can now point to reliable independent analysis to say no, it's just not true." Yes, those poor little kiddies have never heard of Google.
This piece is wonderfully sarcastic, but it's exactly what people don't want to admit they are saying when they suggest that Clinton's foreign policy experience is "better" than Bernie's: "Sorry Bernie Bros, Your Candidate Just Doesn't Have The Foreign Policy Experience Necessary To Prop Up A Pro-Western Dictatorship. [...] Argue all you want, but the bottom line is that Sanders has repeatedly failed to demonstrate the deep grasp of international affairs that a president needs to install politically expedient totalitarian regimes abroad. Sure, he can speak abstractly about international relations, but enabling the rise of the next Pinochet requires a lot more than abstractions. For that, you need actual diplomatic chops and hands-on experience supporting tyrannical despots, and that's where Sanders would be way out of his depth. I'm just being pragmatic here. Even the most fanatical Bernie Bro has to admit their hero knows nothing about the real-life challenges a president faces when undermining established foreign governments. The tough truth is that no amount of high-minded rambling about free college tuition can put machine guns into the hands of juntas sympathetic to U.S. strategic goals." Well, you have to admit, if by "experience with foreign policy" you mean undermining democracies and supporting coups and dictators, Hillary is indeed the one with foreign policy chops.
Clinton surrogate and financial industry shill Barney Frank has been running around insulting Sanders again, so RJ Eskow wrote, "Barney vs. Bernie: Sanders is the Real 'Progressive Who Gets Things Done' [...] Here's the truth: Hillary Clinton got very little done during her eight years in the United States Senate, while Bernie Sanders amassed an impressive record of accomplishments in both the House and Senate. [...] Before Barney Frank repeats his unfounded attacks on Bernie Sanders' record, he may want to take a second look at his own."
* Clinton isn't being quite accurate about Bernie and guns, either.
Riding to the rescue, Bill Clinton unites the party in wanting him to shut up and stop ruining everything. Hillary has had to work hard to put distance between herself and the right-wing dialogue that inspired the horrible criminal justice approach from the Clinton administration, and he just got up there and undid all her work.
"How Hillary Clinton is Like a Shitty Mechanic [...] Every pundit trying to paint Clinton as a pragmatist is selling me on my own shitty car. They're the bankrupt mechanic who needs you to buy one last round of repairs. Don't give up on the thing, they say. They don't really care what's best for you. The car's already in the shop, they say. One more go, for old time's sake? Think of all the progress this car has gotten you. Don't get all crazy thinking about a new car when you can sink a few thousand bucks into this shitbucket. As Lee Fang reported in The Intercept, most of the pundits being called on to talk about Clinton are quite literally in her employ. They run consulting firms that the Clinton campaign pays to advise them. They would be bad at their jobs if they told you to buy a new car. No, they're going to tell you how great your shitty car is. Or that you're not ready for a new car. Or that the world is not ready for everyone to drive good cars. Or elderly Blacks in the South drive shitty cars so your new car is somehow racist. Whatever it takes to get you to sign on to pay for the same old shit."
Let's be frank about this. Yes, the right wing wants to create division among Democrats and weaken the presumptive nominee in the general election. But that's not the real problem. The problem is that it's actually harder to attack Clinton from the right than from the left, because there isn't enough distance between her and the right to shoot from on economic issues. If she didn't leave so much room on the left to attack her from, Karl Rove and his friends would not be able to do it. It always requires a lot less creativity to be able to critique her on something that's true rather than have to make up lies (as they spent the '90s doing). Clinton's relationship with all of the wrong people is too cozy and all of the on-the-ground indicators are that she will go back to supporting odious ideas like TPP once she is in the White House. Look at that equivocal answer she gave on fracking — asking if you support fracking is much the same as being asked, "Do you support poisoning the groundwater and causing earthquakes in your town?" But she couldn't bring herself to oppose it. Her own policies and actions make her an easy target. Admonishing the left not to believe right-wing memes because they emanate from the right-wing is disingenuous when the critiques actually originate on the left and the charges are true. The issue isn't that Sanders supporters are dumb, it's that you have a bad candidate.
Scandal weekend: Two big scandals that lay bare the structure of global corruption.
* "Unaoil's Huge New Corporate Bribery Scandal, Explained [...] Unaoil and its subcontractors bribed foreign officials to help major multinational corporations win contracts, tens of thousands of the company's internal documents show. The investigation illustrates just how complicit big Western companies are in corruption overseas. It also shows that by enabling corruption, these companies fuel the kind of political instability that allows insurgencies like the self-described Islamic State to grow."
* "The Panama Papers — What Happens When Corruption Is Systemic: Over the weekend, an historic release of information came out in the Panama Papers showing exactly who, how, and when a vast network of people stole and hoarded money. Our minds easily grok the realities of Vladimir Putin embezzling a billion dollars through offshore accounts or the Prime Minister of Iceland stealing cash from public coffers. Where we fail more easily is visualizing the system of shell companies, accounting tools, trade regimes, tax havens, and legislative changes that make up the system of wealth extraction all of these individuals are using in collaboration with their partners in crime. As the media is quite likely to frame the Panama Papers as a few bad apples using legal financial instruments, I would like to offer an alternative that keeps our mental eye on the ball. What really matters is the architecture of wealth extraction that has been systematically built up in every country around the world."
* "What are the Panama Papers? A guide to the biggest data leak in history" Hiding money, laundering money, you name it — and even David Cameron's father are involved.
* Craig Murray, "Corporate Media Gatekeepers Protect Western 1% From Panama Leak"
* Marc Wheeler, "Why Do They Call It Panama Papers, Anyway?"
* "How the U.S. became one of the world's biggest tax havens"
* "Bernie Sanders Predicted Panama Papers Scandal back in 2011!" — he objected to the Panama "free trade" agreement.
Don't forget to check out the Water Cooler at Naked Capitalism, where there are always loads of links like these about the latest on TPP, corruption, money-laundering, mortality rates, suicide rates, you name it.
David Dayen, "Why Are Voters Angry? It's the 1099 Economy, Stupid. [...] But The New York Times's Neil Irwin might have found an answer last week, when he pointed to eye-opening new research from Princeton's Alan Krueger and Harvard's Lawrence Katz on Americans in alternative work arrangements, which they defined as 'temporary help agency workers, on-call workers, contract workers, and independent contractors or freelancers.' This cohort of the workforce grew from 10.1 percent in 2005 to 15.8 percent at the end of 2015, representing an increase of 9.4 million workers. That's all of the growth in the labor market over the past decade."
"Solving the Mystery of the Schools: In recent years, American public education has been swamped by bad ideas and policies. Our national leaders, most of whom were educated at elite universities and should know better, have turned our most important domestic duty into a quest for higher scores on standardized tests. While it is true that students must do well on standardized tests to enter universities, few of the better universities judge students' knowledge and ability solely by such flimsy measures. Thus it is puzzling why public officials have made test scores the purpose of education."
"The Origins of Totalitarianism: Conclusion [...] Polanyi says that when a social structure imposes too much stress on too many people it has to change. We don't know how many disaffected people there are In the US, but it is clear that there is an enormous number, in both parties and among the unaffiliated, and that change will come. The US has always prided itself on its openness to change. We believe that everything will work out for the best, because we are the exceptional people, the City on the Hill. We assume that change will be for the best. Arendt points out the sickening reality: some changes are deadly."
"The Fall of King Coal: After 29 men died in his company's mine, Don Blankenship is fighting to stay out of prison. But he already won the battle to convert coal country to his brand of conservative politics."
"Mo. Supreme Court: Voter ID law is unconstitutional: In a 6-1 decision, the Supreme Court of Missouri struck down the state's voter identification law Monday. Supreme Court Judge Stephen Limbaugh Jr. cast the dissenting vote. Senate Bill 1014, signed into law June 14 by Gov. Matt Blunt, required Missourians to show a valid federal or state-issued photo ID to vote this November. Monday's decision upholds a September ruling by Cole County Circuit Judge Richard Callahan that the ID requirement was an unconstitutional infringement on the right to vote."
For April 1st, The Talking Dog departed from his usual habit of (really) interviewing people who were directly involved with Guantanamo, and applied his format to Donald Trump.
"In Blow to Big Pharma, Treasury Cracks Down on Corporate Tax Dodgers: New rule would 'wipe out the expected tax breaks Pfizer was counting on' from its $150 billion mega-merger: Issuing what some called a death blow to the proposed $150 billion merger between pharmaceutical giants Pfizer and Allergan, the U.S. Treasury Department late Monday proposed new tax regulations aimed at cracking down on so-called corporate inversions. Corporate inversions allow U.S. businesses to avoid paying U.S. taxes by claiming foreign citizenship. The merger between Viagra-maker Pfizer Inc. and Allergan PLC, which manufactures Botox, would have been "the largest inversion ever," according to the Wall Street Journal, allowing Pfizer to profit from a lower corporate tax rate in Allergan's home country of Ireland."
"Two Losses for Bosses: SCOTUS Rules Against Walmart, Wells Fargo in Class-Action Suits: The Supreme Court made more decisions unfavorable to corporate executives in the wake of Antonin Scalia's death. Justices declined on Monday to hear appeals by Walmart and Wells Fargo in moves that upheld two nine-figure class action judgments that went against the multinational giants." This would almost certainly have been heard and overturned with Scalia still on the court, and Obama's nominee has a history of being unsympathetic to unions as well, so this was probably the best possible timing.
We nominate our Lois Lane Award choice: "9-year-old journalist, chided for breaking murder story, puts critics in their places: Hilde Kate Lysiak received a tip, hustled to the scene, and beat all local journalists with the news of a murder by posting a short story and video online. Unfortunately for her competitors and critics, Lysiak is a nine-year-old third grader. Lysiak was recently profiled in The Washington Post and the journalism prodigy already has thicker skin than most adult reporters. Locals bashed Lysiak on Facebook Sunday night after she broke her big story. One person said they are 'disgusted that this cute little girl thinks she is a real journalist,' before asking, 'what happened to tea parties?' Another said Lysiak should be 'playing with dolls.'
Lysiak was not only unfazed, but fired back. 'If you want me to stop covering the news, then you get off your computers and do something about the news. There, is that cute enough for you?'"
Chile students' debts go up in smoke: Artist named Fried Potatoes removed tuition contracts he says were worth up to $500m from private university and burned them."
RIP:
* Winston Moseley, Who Killed Kitty Genovese, Dies in Prison at 81, at Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, N.Y. after nearly 52 years imprisonment. Everyone who has ever studied sociology or psychology must know this story, but very possibly you have it all wrong.
* Merle Haggard, Country Music's Outlaw Hero, Dies at 79: "Merle Haggard, one of the most successful singers in the history of country music, a contrarian populist whose songs about his scuffling early life and his time in prison made him the closest thing that the genre had to a real-life outlaw hero, died at his ranch in Northern California on Wednesday, his 79th birthday."
"Why it's OK to give to homeless drug addicts: If a person living on the streets decides to spend your money on drugs or alcohol, it's none of your business." I can't tell you how strongly I agree with this. And yes, I have had someone walk up to me and thank me for having given them a quid a time or two last year, and tell me they've gotten themselves together since, and that they are grateful for people like me who helped them in the interim.
The Real Difference Between Brown Eggs vs White Eggs — Actually a bunch of different things about eggs, including the egg-scare. I admit to getting bored before I read to the end, but I didn't see a place where they noted that the yolk is where the protein is and the white has more carbs.
"Clinton Strategist: We Won't Do Any More Debates Unless Bernie Sanders Changes His Tone" — So, it seems Clinton doesn't like it that Bernie is actually running against her, and now no debates unless he stops doing so. Nobody asked whether we like her tone. But the tone of this is that Clinton is a poor, wilting flower of womanhood who can't handle criticisms of her record and now she's all upset because having someone campaign against her is so ungentlemanly and mean. Or, as Reno Berkeley put it, "Hillary's Refusal To Debate Until Sanders Is 'Nicer' Is A Sign Of Weakness." She's right: "Hillary Clinton has a history of using her gender to her advantage. On the one hand, she claims to be a strong, independent feminist, able to take on men in power. On the other hand, she is quite willing to play the damsel in distress if someone calls her out on her questionable behavior or actions. Because of this, she actually sets the feminist movement back. She claims the criticism lobbed at her is due to sexism. She advances the idea that women who criticize other women's ideas or behavior is traitorous. It's a show of contempt toward other women who dare question her past actions and words, and that in itself is dangerous."
"Hmm, That's Strange... Why Would Clinton Use Trump Abortion Remarks to Attack Sanders? Even though Bernie Sanders immediately took to Twitter and called Donald Trump "shameful" for his comments on Wednesday regarding "punishment" for women who would have abortions, Hillary Clinton is now using the incident as an opportunity to attack her Democratic rival on the campaign trail by suggesting to voters that Sanders does not take the issue of women's choice seriously enough."
Why Is Clinton Polling Worse Than Her Delegate Count? Early Voting: Yes, the answer, unique to this contest, is early voting. Let me explain. Anyone who's breathlessly watched as voting returns come in knows at least two things: early voting totals (from votes by mail, for example) are reported first; and on the Democratic side early voting heavily favors Clinton. Most of the analysis of this phenomenon ignores the way this "primes the pump," as it were, by creating the initial impression that Clinton will win a given contest, and instead focuses on other factors.." And when Hillary Clinton was declared the winner in Arizona before a single election-day count had been reported, that set the scene for all those people who were waiting in line. As the most familiar candidate, Hillary has an advantage with early voters in that many of them will be voting before they've even been exposed to Sanders and his campaign. But election day voters will have had time to become more informed, which makes the difference. "Which leads to a rather stunning discovery — if you subtract out the early voting totals in the Democratic contests and look at election day totals only, Sanders ties or beats Clinton, even in some of the "Clinton states" like North Carolina." Those Clinton states, by and large, are also states where Republicans have set voter-suppression methods in place. They advantage Republicans in the general election, but in the primaries, they give the advantage to the most established candidate and hurt the candidate who is most popular among younger voters.
It's almost as though the Democratic Party is trying to irritate people, isn't it? "Sanders bumped off D.C. ballot: Both the Sanders' campaign and Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton's campaign paid the $2,500 fee to appear on the June 14 Democratic primary ballot on time but the district's Democratic Party failed to inform the Washington D.C. Board of Elections until March 17, one day after the deadline."
When the candidates come to town, it's expensive, but the public usually foots the bill. But this time, "Police Chief: Bernie Is the First Candidate to Ever Offer and Pay Police Overtime [...] Not only did Sanders pay, 'He actually asked up front how much, and he paid those costs, which makes him the first candidate to do so in my 23 years [of law enforcement in Iowa].'"
From Dean Baker:
* "Magical Thinking: Sanders, Clinton, and the Federal Reserve Board"
* "Michael Gerson's Fact Free Attack on Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump: Gerson doesn't just get the basic story of productivity growth 180 degrees backward, he also gets the story of globalization wrong. Our manufacturing workers saw their pay lowered by globalization because that was the purpose of the trade agreements we negotiated. The point was to make it as easy as possible to relocate factories in Mexico, China, and other developing countries, putting our workers in direct competition with low-paid workers who were often willing to work for less than one-tenth the wages of our workers. At the same time we left in place or even increased the barriers that protect doctors, dentists, and lawyers from having to compete with their lower paid counterparts in the developing world or even other rich countries. (Apparently our trade negotiators think that doctors and lawyers lack the skills necessary to compete in the world economy.) For example, doctors still have to complete a U.S. residency program to practice in the United States and dentists have go a U.S. dental school. (We recently starting allowing graduates of Canadian dental schools to practice here as well.)"
* The Generational Warfare Industry * "Washington Post Tea Parties Out on Representative Donna Edwards
"The feds have resumed a controversial program that lets cops take stuff and keep it: The Justice Department has announced that it is resuming a controversial practice that allows local police departments to funnel a large portion of assets seized from citizens into their own coffers under federal law. The "Equitable Sharing Program" gives police the option of prosecuting some asset forfeiture cases under federal instead of state law, particularly in instances where local law enforcement officers have a relationship with federal authorities as part of a joint task force. Federal forfeiture policies are more permissive than many state policies, allowing police to keep up to 80 percent of assets they seize." This is a licence to steal, of course, and should be outlawed. So why have they resumed it? Oh.
* Well, at least there's this: "Supreme Court: Feds Can't Seize Untainted Assets Needed For Legal Fees."
The Housing Bust's Long Shadow [...] A new report from the Urban Institute's Housing Finance Policy Center offers a valuable glimpse at what has happened to the U.S. population's housing and credit status since the turn of the century. Of particular interest: A group of about 19 million renters who, at some point in the past 16 years, used to be homeowners."
"U.S. Citizen Detained By Immigration Agents After Protesting Donald Trump" — We know what this is all about, but she said an interesting thing at the end of the article. "She said of the Obama administration: 'They built up the prisons, they built up the deportation programs, they made sure Border Patrol and ICE are the largest they've ever been. They would just be handing over the keys to Trump with a full tank of gas.'"
David Dayen: "High Court Asks Administration to Weigh in on Predatory Lending Case: A SUPREME COURT order this week forces the Obama administration to make a decision: either save consumers tens of billions of dollars at the expense of debt collectors, car loan specialists, and student lenders, or defend those financial entities. In a one-line order, the justices on Monday asked Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, the legal representative for the federal government in Supreme Court matters, to file a brief in the case of Madden v. Midland Funding, 'expressing the views of the United States.' In Madden, a class-action case, borrowers argued that loans sold by a bank to a debt collector should be subject to the usury law in New York state, which limits the interest rate that can be charged. The 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals agreed, and Midland Funding appealed to the Supreme Court. Legal experts are following the case closely, since it could, after nearly 40 years, herald a return to prominence for state-based usury laws, a key safeguard against predatory lending. [...] If the administration advises the court to hear Madden, it would presumably signal that it wants the Court to overturn the 2nd Circuit ruling, which would be a victory for the financial industry." This is actually a more important case than you might imagine, keep your eye on it.
"Koch Brothers Attempt to Kill Single-Payer Health Care in Colorado: Colorado's efforts to become the first state to pass a public, universal health care system are facing stiff opposition from right-wing organizations, many of which are funded by or affiliated with brothers Charles and David Koch. As expected, these moneyed interests are doing everything they can to stop the state from amending its constitution with a ballot referendum, Amendment 69, which would implement a statewide version of "single-payer" health care. If approved, ColoradoCare would cover every resident, regardless of employment or ability to pay. In October, organizers submitted enough signatures to put the amendment on the ballot. The vote will take place on Election Day this year."
Interesting heads-up from Lambert on the "TPP: '[T]he nation's mayors — most of them Democrats, especially in the larger cities — remain overwhelmingly committed to free trade in general and the Trans-Pacific Partnership in particular' [Rob Brownstein, The Atlantic]. These Mayors are Clinton's local surrogates. You can bet that if Clinton had changed her position on TPP in reality, that they'd be changing their tune." (There are, of course, a lot of other interesting links and observations in that post, too, including "Was There Election Fraud in Arizona? 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know.")
California Raises Minimum Wage to $15: "According to the LA Times, Governor Jerry Brown has reached a deal with the state's labor unions to increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour through legislation passed by both the California Assembly and Senate, avoiding a ballot initiative that may have instituted a $15 an hour minimum wage sooner."
"French journalist Florence Hartmann jailed by war crimes tribunal: The journalist Florence Hartmann, a former correspondent for Le Monde, has been jailed at the war crimes tribunal in The Hague, the body established to try the criminals she devoted her life to exposing. She was arrested ahead of the verdict handed down to former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžic. Hartmann's lawyer said she was being held in isolation, a situation that will last until at least Tuesday because of the Easter holiday. [...] Hartmann was convicted of contempt of court in 2009 for revealing in a book that the tribunal had withheld crucial information on the Srebrenica massacre of 1995 from the nearby international court of justice. The conviction was later upheld on appeal."
That Ehrlichman quote about why they invented the War On (Some People Who Use Some) Drugs is going around again, which no doubt makes it another good cue for a mention of Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, a reminder that the real war started over a hundred years ago, and that Billie Holliday's "Strange Fruit" was a focus of Anslinger's hatred and his drug war vendetta.
Startlingly, John McCain wrote this Salute
to a Communist in The New York Times: "Delmer Berg wasn't a celebrity. He wasn't someone with great wealth or influence. He had never held public office. He was a Californian. He worked as a farmhand and stonemason. He did some union organizing. He was vice president of his local N.A.A.C.P. chapter. He protested against the Vietnam War and nuclear weapons. He joined the United States Communist Party in 1943, and, according to The Times, he remained an 'unreconstructed Communist' for the rest of his life. He was 100. He was also the last known living veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade."
RIP: Patty Duke, 69, of sepsis related to a ruptured intestine. Her performance as Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker won her an Oscar as Best Supporting Actress at 16 and she soon had her own TV show, playing two identical teenagers who weren't actually twins — and one was British..
Interactive Google Doodle for the 105th birthday of Clara Rockmore, theramin virtuoso * Video Google Doodle for the 101st birthday of fabulous movie star and inventor Hedy Lamarr
The Sessions — A live restaging of the Beatles at Abbey Road studios.
Yes, who appoints the next Supreme Court Justice is important, but so is who appoints cabinet members and hires other officials with whom to surround themselves. Hillary Clinton's financial advisor is Gary Gensler, the same man who, with Bill Clinton, shoe-horned the new deregulatory language into the Commodity Futures Modernization Act at the last minute in the dead of night and then tacked the whole ugly package onto a bill to fund the entire government — without most people who voted for it even knowing the CFMA had been changed so radically. Clinton says her husband — who created the "new economy" and rammed through deregulation Republicans could never pass because Democrats used to stop them — will also be an advisor. The man who crafted America's foreign policy of endless wars, Henry Kissinger, is apparently a mentor of Clinton's and he still has her ear.
I have no faith whatsoever that her Supreme Court appointments will be any better than a Republican's as regards these issues, and the only question is which social justice hostage she will choose to stamp "progressive" credentials onto while selling out the others. "Centrists" give a lot of lip-service to being defenders of reproductive rights while normally never lifting a finger to prevent the right-wing's attacks on them from being successful. They've treated the fight for abortion rights as icky, they come up with slogans like, "Safe, legal, and rare," trying to distract us from what they are saying. Rare? We're talking about a medical procedure here — do you say you want appendectomies to be "safe, legal, and rare"? If they really even believed that, wouldn't they have stopped voting to fund abstinence-only sex miseducation by now and returned to the older model that was, y'know, trying for truthful effectiveness? Oh, but Bill Clinton reversed his predecessor's infamous order not to fund abortions for our overseas military personnel, so he was a champion of reproductive rights — while abortion became increasingly inaccessible in most of the United States.
Yes, Trump and Sanders are both a response to the same problem, but that problem, more than anything, is that Democrats in leadership went over to the other side and started fighting their own party in favor of the same Republican policies we hate. And we hate those policies because they are terrible, damaging, dangerous policies. The kind of austerity policies that, imposed from without, created the fertile soil for fascism in Weimar Germany.
And since the Democratic leadership kept enabling Republicans and marching to the right, the Republicans had to march further to the right and went completely over-the-top. The authors of today's Republican Clown Car Politics were the Democratic Leadership Council.
If Clinton wins the presidency, I have no faith that she or her supporters will do a damned thing to right the course of the nation and restore the policies that used to protect our country and its people — and get rid of the policies that have been the fuel of rising fascism on the right. Trump may never be president, but what's behind him isn't just going to go away under the leadership of someone who promises more of the same.
The Huffington Post says, "Win Or Lose, Bernie Sanders Has Changed America," but I'm worried about what happens if all those Bernie kids get slapped in the face with a Clinton nomination and either Trump wins (which I still think is unlikely) or Clinton becomes president and continues the policies that have given us Trump and his movement of fascists in the first place. She can't keep the lid on it if she delivers on her promise to maintain the status quo.
Results Tuesday in Arizona, Idaho and Utah: The sparse polling for Arizona put Clinton ahead by at least 26 points, and she won the state but Bernie did do better than predicted and was only 18.1 points down.
* There weren't many polls available for Utah, either, and Clinton was ahead in January by 10 points, down to seven points in February and by this month Bernie was eight points up, but on Tuesday he came out massively higher at 79%-20.3. RCP only shows one poll for Idaho, in February, and it shows Sanders at +2, But he won 78%-21.2%. A decent night for Bernie.
* "AZ Lawmakers to hold special hearing on elections fiasco" — There were many complaints of voting problems in Arizona, with people having to wait in line for hours after never having to wait before. A huge turn-out meant the decision to cut polling places in Maricopa County from 200 to 60 meant people were waiting for four or five hours to cast a ballot. Moreover, registration lists appear not to have been up-dated and many people who had recently registered as Democrats found they were either not listed (first-time voters) or re-registration from Independent had not been changed.
"With Tax Plan, Sanders Beats Both Clinton and Trump by Double Digits: After accounting for 'No Idea,' the tax plan put forth by the only democratic socialist in the race is the winner... by far. Undermining the flawed trope that "everyone hates the tax man," for those who have opinions on the competing tax plans put forth by this year's presidential candidates, Bernie Sanders' proposal is the hands-down favorite. Beating out all other contenders from both major parties by double-digit margins, according to a new survey WalletHub/Survey Monkey published Monday, Sanders' plan was supported by 23 percent of respondents. In comparison, only 13 percent liked the plan of Hillary Clinton best, giving her a slight edge over the 12 percent who chose Donald Trump's plan. Taking the fourth and fifth spots respectively, Sen. Ted Cruz nabbed 8 percent support while Gov. John Kasich (R-Ohio) got 5 percent.
Not sure this gives her a problem in the general like the headline says, but it's nice to know so many "BernieBros" are women. "Sanders Wins Millennial Women Two-to-One; Clinton Would Have Millennial Problem in General Election. "Sanders now leads Clinton among younger voters by 54%-37%, an even bigger advantage than the 11-point edge he held in January's survey. Millennial women now back Sanders by a jaw-dropping 61%-30% while the divide among Millennial men is much closer, 48%-44%.
Pierce: "The Scariest Thing About Trump? He's Winning Fair and Square He has forced the Republican party to reckon with many decades of poor choices." Yes, but poor choices by the Democrats, too, for enabling the crazy and creating the economic conditions that are fertile ground for the growth of fascism. You can't hollow out the wealth of the working classes without creating this kind of reaction. Your choices are left-wing populism or right-wing populism. And the Democrats kept their mouths shut and nodded along, and Obama kept saying things like, "Republicans have some good ideas," while saving his insults for "the crazy far-left", and this is where you go. And now the Democrats are offering more of the same. It may delay the nightmare of a fascist leadership by a couple-few years to get Clinton into the White House, but unless she changes her mind and uses the power of the presidency to do everything possible to restore the economy, it's just not going to last.
* Charlie also isn't impressed with Brooks' worries about Trump.
Remember that time George W. Bush told us the thing to do after 9/11 was to go shopping? And remember that time a divorced mother of three told George Bush she couldn't make ends meet working three jobs and he said, "You work three jobs? Uniquely American, isn't it? I mean, that is fantastic that you're doing that"? I wonder if Hillary is going to run through any more of George W. Bush's greatest hits. And by the way, Madame Secretary, no one should have to shop for health insurance.
You don't see a lot of stories about Jane Sanders on the campaign trail, but she seems to have picked an unusual stop, having a confrontation with the notorious Sheriff Joe Arpaio when she toured his equally infamous Tent City Jail.
"Congressman calls on bankers to 'neuter' Elizabeth Warren — the 'Darth Vader' of Wall Street: Senior House Financial Services Committee member, Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer (R-MO) told a conference of bankers Wednesday morning that they needed to 'find a way to neuter' Sen. Elizabeth Warren, according to Politico. Luetkemeyer was at an American Bankers Association conference in Washington when he made the remark, also calling Warren 'the Darth Vader of the financial services world.'"
You gotta wonder what was President Bill thinking — presumably, he was talking about the Republicans, though how we can put that behind us is unclear, but it's pretty easy to take it that he means the Obama administration when he says, "'But if you believe we can all rise together, if you believe we've finally come to the point where we can put the awful legacy of the last eight years behind us and the seven years before that where we were practicing trickle-down economics with no regulation in Washington, which is what caused the crash, then you should vote for her,' he added." Oh, I see, he wants you to forget who put that no-regulation stuff into action, and that was the guy before George W. Bush. What was his name again?
Ian Welsh, "Why Poor White Males Are the Core of Trump's Support [...] So, for damn near 48 years, poor whites have done terribly. For forty-eight years, ordinary politicians have promised to do something about it, and nothing has improved. Do not tell me, or them, that they are 'privileged.' Yes, it is better to be poor and white than poor and black, and better to be a poor white man than a poor white woman, but people who are in pain do not react well to some smug, upper-middle-class jerk telling them they are privileged when their lives are clearly terrible."
"Report Of High Level DNC Infiltration In N. Carolina Sanders Campaign: Niko House is the President of North Carolina College Students for Bernie Sanders. In a recent video posted to youtube, he describes the orchestrated infiltration of the Bernie Sanders campaign in that state by well-connected DNC operatives. House goes into great detail to describe intimidation tactics used against his group that seemed counterproductive — suppression of advertising for events, reaching out to the community, etc.
He goes into some detail explaining that the outsiders who stepped in and took over the campaign from the initial grassroots organizers made what seemed like a concerted effort to avoid reaching out to black leaders in North Carolina and basically ran the campaign into the ground. The videos are worth a watch and pretty illuminating. I'd also say they're disturbing, but we've all come to expect these types of tricks from the Clinton campaign."
Robert Reich wants you to act now, because, "My old department -- the U.S. Department of Labor -- is close to issuing a new rule giving lower-wage salaried workers the overtime pay they deserve. (I explain the justification for the rule in the accompanying video.) But the moneyed interests don't want it. Just days ago, congressional Republican shills of big U.S. corporations introduced legislation to block the new rule. Anyone in America who still believes Republicans in Washington are working for average workers rather than for the privileged and the powerful few has no idea what's going on. Vote them all out of office this November. (From his Facebook page.)
Steve M. is talking about the Supreme Court nomination, and while he's talking about Republican tactics and how "moderate" Merrick Garland is or isn't, I noticed something interesting in the first comment, noting that, "I'm going further: in my view, President Obama has nominated the best candidate for the SCOTUS period. I don't just mean 'in these peculiar circumstances'. Garland is the lawyer's lawyer, the judge's judge. If there were a votes on these matters by every attorney in the nation and by every judge in the nation, I have no doubt that Garland would among the top 5 in the first and would be at the top of the second. But even that doesn't capture the brilliance of this nomination: this SCOTUS has two big needs plus one desperate one. It needs another criminal law expert; it needs another administrative law expert; and it desperately needs who would become its ONLY antitrust expert. That last one is actually alarming: if one goes back to the federal courts appointments of each of both Roosevelts, Wilson, Truman, Eisenhower, JFK, LBJ, Carter, yes even GWB Bush, and dammit even to some extent first term Reagan, the one single golden thread that runs through the thousands of judges nominated by those 16 White Houses is an understanding of the dangers of business trusts and the necessity of a federal court system that gets the dangers of economic monopolies and monopsonies, and the need to bust trusts or at least regulate the oligarchical tendencies in the American economic system. Garland is an order of magnitude more adept and solid on antitrust law than even Breyer and Notorious." You know, that could be really cool.
* But Charlie Savage says, "Merrick Garland Often Deferred to Government in Guantánamo Cases." That's not the kind of thing that instills confidence.
Mike Signorile notes that the Human Rights Campaign has done it again, endorsing a Republican with only a 75% HRC rating over Democrat Tammy Duckworth, who has a 100% rating. Duckworth has been a hard worker on behalf of gay rights and she deserved that endorsement.(Source: The Hill.)
"Huge Victory: Senate Rejects the DARK Act:
Today, the Senate did the right thing and did not advance a bill from Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) that can best be described as the Denying Americans the Right to Know (DARK) Act. The bill would have prevented states from requiring labeling of genetically engineered (GMO) foods and stopped pending state laws that require labeling to go into effect."
Dean Baker with Trade Lessons for Thomas Friedman "Thomas Friedman once again stumbled into trade policy, telling us that the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is exactly the sort of trade deal that tough negotiator Donald Trump would have gotten. Unfortunately, he gets some of the big things badly wrong."
"In Louisiana, the Poor Lack Legal Defense: I'm the public defender in Vermilion Parish, right now the only public defender. Due to a lack of funding for our district and our office, today we will be taking applications for our service but you will be put on a wait list."
"Flint's Police Chief Calls Break-In At Office Storing Water Documents an 'Inside Job': Suspicions are growing regarding a mysterious break-in at the city of Flint, Michigan's city hall, where an office containing documents relevant to the city's ongoing crisis with contaminated water were stored. Flint's new police chief, Tim Johnson, more or less made the implication the two events are linked on Friday, telling the Flint Journal the robbery was an 'inside job.' 'It was definitely an inside job,' he told the site, noting only a television has been confirmed to be among the missing items. 'The power cord (to the TV) wasn't even taken. The average drug user knows that you'd need the power cord to be able to pawn it.' 'It was somebody that had knowledge of those documents that really wanted to keep them out of the right hands, out of the hands of someone who was going to tell the real story of what's going on with Flint water,' Johnson continued. His opinion was echoed by Mayor Karen Weaver, who confirmed she also thought the timing and target of the robbery curious. 'Well sure (it's suspicious) when they go into a room where all the water files were and they take a TV, but not the cord to make it work, yes,' the mayor told the paper. '... We don't know if papers or files were taken because papers were all over the floor.'"
"Blacks at All Wealth Levels Are More Likely Than Whites to Be Incarcerated." Yes, being wealthier does, obviously, reduce the chances that you will be incarcerated, but, "Wealth does not provide the same degree of insulation from imprisonment for black and Hispanic males as it does for white males."
UK: "Scratch. One. Tory." Ian Duncan Smith resigned from the government, ostensibly because cuts to disability benefits offended his conscience (not bloody likely), and it would seem to portend a real revolt in the party and growing recognition that austerity is definitely not working and maybe George Osborne isn't so smart after all! It was nice to see the government back down on the cuts despite Osborne's efforts to keep digging that hole. In any case, Paul Mason reckons the IDS resignation is Jeremy Corbyn's victory: "In one speech he's blown apart the Tory front bench, made likely two substantial revolts, destroyed the cabinet and made the Tories look like incompetent fools." Even better, "It's a disaster for Blairites. They'd prepared their cabbage patches of opposition to Labour's own new fiscal rule, and spent weeks revving up to diss Corbyn over his expected mishandling of the Budget. Instead Labour is ahead in one poll, tied in another, and its radical left leadership looks not just vindicated politically, but — and this matters in the Commons — tactically: Corbyn and McDonnell executed a near perfect hit on the government by announcing their own fiscal rule; denouncing the benefit cuts; and now splitting the cabinet."
* "Snooper's Charter: Tech companies will have to give police 'back-door' access to customers' data. Companies will not be allowed to tell customers if their messages are being shared with police."
Brazil: "Brazil Is Engulfed by Ruling Class Corruption — and a Dangerous Subversion of Democracy [...] But the picture currently emerging in Brazil surrounding impeachment and these street protests is far more complicated, and far more ethically ambiguous, than has frequently been depicted. The effort to remove Dilma and her party from power now resembles a nakedly anti-democratic power struggle more than a legally sound process or genuine anti-corruption movement. Worse, it's being incited, engineered, and fueled by the very factions who are themselves knee-deep in corruption scandals, and who represent the interests of the richest and most powerful societal segments long angry at their inability to defeat PT democratically. In other words, it all seems historically familiar, particular for Latin America, where democratically elected left-wing governments have been repeatedly removed by non-democratic, extra-legal means. In many ways, PT and Dilma are not sympathetic victims. Large segments of the population are genuinely angry at them for plainly legitimate reasons. But their sins do not justify the sins of their long-standing political enemies, and most certainly do not render subversion of Brazilian democracy something to cheer."
Juan Cole: "Int'l Criticism mounts over massive Israeli 'land grab' in Palestinian West Bank."
* In Haaretz "Protesting Bigots and Demagogues at AIPAC? Don't Stop at Trump. Call Out Netanyahu Too [...] Israel has already built the wall that Trump only talks about. It has blighted the lives of millions of Muslims, as Trump says he would like to do. Its behavior has been far more bellicose than anything Trump has exhibited so far and its racism is not only more extreme, but a lot more deadly. The supporters of Israeli Trumpism have assassinated a prime minister, gunned down worshippers in a mosque, burned a Palestinian baby to cinders in its bed and committed thousands of other racist atrocities. But when the Israeli Trump-in-chief arrives in Washington, he is feted by AIPAC as the true representative of Jewish values. The anti-Trump. What perversion allows American Jews — or the majority of them, it would seem — to regard Donald Trump as the antithesis of their Jewish values and Benjamin Netanyahu as their exemplar? What cognitive bypass enables them to recognize the potential fascism of Trump, but not the existing tyranny of Israel's rule over the Palestinians, under the decade-long leadership of Netanyahu?
"Erdogan claims fighting terrorism outweighs democracy in Turkey: Combating terrorism is Turkey's highest priority, even higher than the rule of law, Turkish President Erdogan has said. Following a recent bomb attack in Ankara, he has pledged to crack down on Kurdish dissidents." So, pretty much like the New America.
In the fight against plastic, we now have the edible spoon. (Scroll down for video.)
Some nice photographs of Whitechapel Bell Foundry, and a chat with Alan Hughes, its current owner. I've spoken to Alan a few times, mainly because if you phone the main number at the Foundry, he is sometimes the person who answers. Just think, the owner of Britain's oldest manufacturing plant answers the phone.
A bit late with this (though I'm still good up to the Epiphany), but let's start with the traditional Christmas links before we lose the holiday spirit:
Time to start the war against Bill O'Reilly's war on Christmas, so happy Advent and some 
This is just a neat old picture of Arthur Thomson drawing direct to stencil that Rob Hansen found in someone's old photo collection. Arthur once asked me why everyone called him "ATom" in print instead of just "Atom", which is what he thought he was writing. He didn't seem to realize his signature came across that way.
At the polls, it was a good night for Dems.
I'd never seen this photo before last week when Colin Hinz posted it. Chuch Harris, Rob Hansen, me, and Sue Harris, at Toad Hall in Minneapolis before the 1989 Corflu, all looking so very much like ourselves.
Everyone will tell you radiotherapy is fatiguing. Oh, gods, it bloody is!
I remember back in the earlier years of this century there were a few jokes going around about getting rid of the south. I even linked to a couple of them, I understand the impulse that well. Or I did. But right now I'm seeing people discuss things like partitioning the country without even the least bit of humor. I think it's time for 
The traditional Christmas links:
OK, it's that time of year again, so let's start with a little Advent music. We'll get to the other Christmassy stuff I like to deploy in my war against Bill O'Reilly's War on Christmas soon. Remember, it's the darkest and coldest time of the year up here in the northern hemisphere, and we need to light and warm the way. So, just a simple little version of "
Some people complain that I'm always ragging on Democrats instead of on Republicans. Leaving aside my opinion that some Democrats are Republicans, I just don't see the point, since the Republicans are already hopeless, and there's nothing I can do about them except hope we somehow get a party that will actually oppose them. Until the Democrats start really doing that, yes, I'm ragging on them.
@samknight1 
Comments on the conventions are below, but here's 
Yes, who appoints the next Supreme Court Justice is important, but so is who appoints cabinet members and hires other officials with whom to surround themselves. Hillary Clinton's financial advisor is Gary Gensler, the same man who, with Bill Clinton, shoe-horned the new deregulatory language into the Commodity Futures Modernization Act at the last minute in the dead of night and then tacked the whole ugly package onto a bill to fund the entire government — without most people who voted for it even knowing the CFMA had been changed so radically. Clinton says her husband — who created the "new economy" and rammed through deregulation Republicans could never pass because Democrats used to stop them — will also be an advisor. The man who crafted America's foreign policy of endless wars, Henry Kissinger, is apparently a mentor of Clinton's and he still has her ear.
