Year: 2014

This is F%$#ed Up and SH%$

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Private equity companies are worried about regulations on insane levels of leverage, so they are lobbying organizations that don’t even regulate them:

The private equity industry’s lobbying group met officials from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Reserve last week to address concerns over a crackdown on junk-rated loans, people familiar with the matter said on Monday.

 The private meeting – the first between the Private Equity Growth Capital Council (PEGCC) and the U.S. regulators over the issue – underscores many buyout firms’ reliance on leveraged loans for outsized returns in their debt-fueled acquisitions of companies.

 It also highlights the willingness of the OCC and the Fed to engage with parties they do not regulate. Private equity firms are typically regulated by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Seriously. What has got them worried? Has the SEC, the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, been too hard on them?

I get it. You are pillaging barbarians, and your weapon is other people’s money.

You need insane levels of leverage so that you can make your money by shutting down factories, moving production overseas, charging excessive fees to “manage” your acquisitions, etc.

Clearly, you need assurances that no one will ever prevent you from doing this, because anything that might get in the way of your f%$#ing the rest of us would be an affront to  the gods of the market.

Not enough bullets.

House GOPer: Obama Impeachment Talk Is A ‘Trap’

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Actually, he looks less like an alien than John Boehner’s “tan”

In the House, Representative Mick Mulvaney (R-SC) is warning his fellow party members that all the impeachment talk is a ploy from Obama and the Democrats:

Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-SC) last week said that Democrats are “desperate” for House Republicans to impeach President Obama, but warned the GOP against falling into such a “trap.”

“Believe me, let’s make one thing perfectly clear. The only people who want impeachment more than the right wing of the Republican Party is the entire Democrat Party,” Mulvaney said in an interview with WQSC 1340, according to audio obtained by Buzzfeed.

The congressman said that Democrats are using calls for impeachment to distract from other issues and raise money.

“They’re desperate for impeachment. They would love to be able to talk about impeachment and immigration between now and the November elections, instead of talking about jobs, and the economy, and health care,” he said. “They are desperate to change the dialogue, which is exactly why you heard the president starting to talk about his amnesty cause he’s begging to be impeached.”

This is completely unfair.

There are no Democrats who would attempt to extract political benefit from ……… Attempt to use impeachment ……… Sorry, I just cannot keep a straight face.

Of course this is what they are doing!  

The Republicans are being played for fools, and the Democratic politicians and consultants who are “condemning” the Teabaggers for calling for impeachment are the players doing this.

It’s all they can do not to drool in public over the prospect.  (Well, Mark Penn is drooling a bit, but he always does)

Thoughts on Ferguson: Part 2: the Protests and the Police Response

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These are not peace officers, These are an implacably hostile occupying force.

This guy is eager to start shooting “animals”

First, and perhaps most telling, was the police officer caught on tape screamig, “Bring it, all you f%$#ing animals! Bring it!”

This is not just a cop who is ill trained to either handl a protest and defuse potential violence, this is someone who actively wants to shoot some people. (One does wonder which Cracker Jack box this guy got his badge out of)

Then, we have the comments by the Ferguson police chief, blaming the violence on “outside agitators,” which has historical echos to the comments of people like Birmingham’s infamous police commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor.

I think that it is fairly clear that both the Ferguson, and the St. Louis County PD have not covered themselves with glory, but a bigger issue is the increasing militarization of the police, and their increasing view of the general public as the enemy:

Michael Brown was shot dead by an officer from a police force of 53, serving a population of just 21,000. But the police response to a series of protests over his death has been something more akin to the deployment of an army in a miniature warzone.

 Ferguson police have deployed stun grenades, rubber bullets and what appear to be 40mm wooden baton rounds to quell the protests in a show of force that is a stark illustration of the militarization of police forces in the US.

 “I’m a soldier, I’m a military officer and I know when there’s a need for such thing, but I don’t think in a small town of 22,000 people you need up-armor vehicles,” Cristian Balan, a communications officer in the US army, who was not speaking on behalf of the US military, told the Guardian. “Even if there’s an active shooter – are you really going to use an up-armor vehicle? Do you really need it?”

Of course the don’t but the Pentagon is giving away their slightly older stuff for free, and they are fun toys.

The problem is that it makes things worse, not better:

“As we’ve seen in Ferguson, the militarization of policing tends to escalate the risk of violence to the communities,”said Kara Dansky, senior counsel with the ACLU’s Center for Justice and the prime author of its June 2014 report on the militarization of US police. “We think that historically, the police and the military have had different roles and that American neighborhoods aren’t war zones and police officers should not be treating us like wartime enemies.”

 She said the trend of militarizing local police forces has continued over the past several decades and that communities of color bare the brunt of most military policing.

 Representative Hank Johnson, a house Democrat from Georgia, said on Thursday that he plans to introduce the “Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act”, which would end the department of defense’s military surplus program.

Your mouth to God’s ear, Representative Johnson.

I would also suggest that requiring on duty police to wear cameras at all time would help.  We know what happens when both the police, and the citizenry, become aware that there is monitoring of law enforcement interactions with the general populace:

.
In 2012, Rialto, a small city in California’s San Bernardino County, outfitted its police officers with small Body Cams to be worn at all times and record all working hours. The $900 cameras weighed 108 grams and were small enough to fit on each officer’s collar or sunglasses. They recorded full-color video for up to 12 hours, which was automatically uploaded at the end of each shift, where it could be held and analyzed in a central database.

 When researchers studied the effect of cameras on police behavior, the conclusions were striking. Within a year, the number of complaints filed against police officers in Rialto fell by 88 percent and “use of force” fell by 59 percent. “When you put a camera on a police officer, they tend to behave a little better, follow the rules a little better,” Chief William A. Farrar, the Rialto police chief, told the New York Times. “And if a citizen knows the officer is wearing a camera, chances are the citizen will behave a little better.”

The situation in Ferguson has gotten so bad that both liberal icon Elizabeth Warren, and Teabagger militant Justin Amash have condemned the overreaction of the police, and civil rights icon John Lewis has called for Barack Obama to federalize the National Guard and declaring martial law.

On the bright side, the local constabulary, both the Ferguson and the St. Louis county PD have been removed from command, and replaced by the state Highway Patrol, which has resulted in a lighter touch and less violence:

A wall of militarised police had blocked the centre of Ferguson, Missouri, this week, shooting teargas and rubber bullets at seething protesters who dared to show any defiance.

 On Thursday evening it melted away.

 A carnival-like demonstration filled the centre of the city after a new police chief given control of protests over the killing of an unarmed 18-year-old implemented a dramatic shift in tactics.

 Hundreds of people gathered at the same intersection in this northern suburb of St Louis that has been the epicentre of violent clashes with police in the previous days.

 But where the officers with assault rifles once stood, backed by armoured trucks topped with snipers’ nests, on Thursday there was almost no police presence.

 Car horns filled the air as people blew whistles and chanted “no justice, no peace” and “hands up, don’t shoot”, the slogan adopted in solidarity with Michael Brown, who according to witnesses was shot by a police officer as he fled a confrontation with his arms aloft on Saturday afternoon.

 The shift followed the installation of Captain Ron Johnson of the Missouri state highway patrol as the effective commander on the ground, under orders earlier in the day from the state governor, Jay Nixon. His force replaced the St Louis county police in leading the operation

Gee, a simple rule, “Don’t be a savage and blindly unreasoning racist asshole,” appears to have defused much of the situation.

I think that the police forces in that part of Missouri rate a full deep dive investigation of their policies and actions by the Feds.

Zero tolerance, baby.

Thoughts on Ferguson: Part 1: the Shooting

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This first bit is arguably the least important detail in the whole affair.

What we know at this point is that two black men of roughly college age, Michael Brown and Dorian Johnson, were walking down the street, that a police officer confronted them over this and it ended with Michael Brown dead from multiple gunshot wounds.

The video you see is Dorian Johnson describing the confrontation.

The police claim that Mr. Johnson went for the gun, and Mr. Johnson claims that the (as still unnamed) police officer went after Mr. Brown, and that Brown was trying to get away, and his death was the result of the police officer being shot while holding his hands up.

So, what really happened?

I don’t know, but what I do know is that what happened in the immediate aftermath is very strange.

What surprises me is that Dorian Johnson has not yet been questioned by police.  Heck, it surprises me that he wasn’t taken into custody, as he wasn’t just a witness, but he was a part of the incident, as he was walking down the street with the victim.

The only reason that I can imagine that the police are studiously avoiding questioning witnesses in this matter is because the police already knew what happened, that the officer was at fault, and they are trying to cover it up.

Note that I am not talking about the law enforcement reaction to the protests, that will be part 2, I am simply describing the profound irregularities in the investigation that I cannot explain except by deliberate wrongdoing.

If Not an Explanation, At Least It Gives Us Some Context

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It turns out that Robin Williams was suffering from early stage Parkinson’s Disease:

Patients with Parkinson’s disease often suffer from depression, medical experts said Thursday, after Robin Williams’ widow revealed that the comedian was in “early stages” of the neurological disease at the time of his apparent suicide.

The same biochemical changes in the brain that cause the hallmark physical symptoms of Parkinson’s — tremors, slowed movement, rigidity, balance loss — can also affect mood, said Dr. Jeff Bronstein, a neurologist in the Movement Disorder Program at UCLA.

“Obviously getting the diagnosis can make people depressed,” he said. “But we also know that there’s a much higher incidence of depression even before the disease is recognized. We think it’s one of the early symptoms.”

I don’t think that anyone can truly understand what was going on in his head, but the fact his limbic system was being short circuited from a lack of dopamine was certainly a major contributing factor.

Gee, You Think?!?!?!?

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In an exercise worthy of Captain Obvious, the CFPB is warning people that their Bitcoins are probably not safe from hackers:

“The CFPB advises consumers to be aware of potential issues with virtual currencies such as unclear costs, volatile exchange rates, the threat of hacking and scams, and that companies may not offer help or refunds for lost or stolen funds,” the government agency announced in an advisory on Monday . Consumers who’ve experienced problems with the virtual currency can also submit a complaint with the bureau, the CFPB said. “Virtual currencies are not backed by any government or central bank, and at this point consumers are stepping into the Wild West when they engage in the market,” it warned.

Well duh!

And Now the Banksters Want Our Drinking Water

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Seriously, these guys are a bigger threat to our way of life than Osama bin Laden ever was.

Yes, if they just turn Wall Street’s full potential on the supply of water, everything will be great, because ……… magic sparkle pony fairy dust:

The problem of water scarcity is growing at an alarming rate. By 2050, experts forecast a 55% increase in the amount of water required to meet demand from rising populations, food production and industry. Failure to meet that demand will have devastating consequences: water shortages will become chronic, leading to the proliferation of water riots and water wars. According to UN estimates, $1.8 trillion in new investments will be needed over the next 20 years to avoid such a calamity. The question is:

 Whence Will That Money Come?

 According to the wise masters of big capital and finance, there can only be one source: the ever-knowing, ever-perfect financial markets. Writing in the Daily Telegraph, Andrew Critchlow argued the case for financializing water:

Markets can play an important role in providing future water security (DQ: Note the use of the term “water security,” not “water independence” or “water sustainability”). The City can help to fund vital water infrastructure and the creation of a futures market to trade water would help to create a baseline pricing mechanism against which regional water tariffs could be fairly set

 “Water will become something that is traded, there will be a market for it and this could happen in the next decade,” said Usha Rao-Monari, chief executive officer of Global Water Development Partners – an affiliate of New York-based investment giant Blackstone, the world’s largest private equity firm with a reported $280bn under management

The reasoning is clear: in order to create more efficient distribution of the world’s most vital resource, we need to create myriad new layers of middlemen and financiers and have them trading billions (if not trillions) of dollars in derivatives of that scarce resource on global commodity exchanges. It will be the Enron-ization of water, as the exact same people who almost destroyed the global economy with mortgage-backed securities and credit default swaps and who have corrupted the basic pricing mechanism of just about every commodity market on the planet will be entrusted to determine the price of the water we consume.

 “It’s intuitively appealing to talk about water as a traded asset,” said Deane Dray, a Citigroup analyst who heads up global water-sector research. “If you look at projections over the next 25 years, you’ll see that global water supply and demand imbalances are on track to get worse.”

What will this mean for the rest of us?

Well it ain’t anything good:

As a result of this huge influx of Wall Street money, the food commodity markets are now 80% speculation, with the volume of financial transactions between 20 and 30 times as large as the real transactions. As Kaufman told Wired magazine, the direct consequence has been volatility two standard deviations above the 1990’s norm:

We’ve seen the price of food become more expensive than ever three times in five years [DQ: sparking food riots and revolutions throughout the developing world]. Normally we’d see three price spikes in a century. And part of the reason is this new kind of commodity speculation in food markets.

If you aren’t worried about what Wall Street will do if it gets control of safe supplies of drinking water, you are either catatonic, deluded, or a follower of Ayn Rand. (But I repeat myself.)

Remember, the most recent WTO talks broke down because the US, and Wall Street, wanted to shut down poorer nations’ ability to stockpile staple foods to avoid being held hostage by speculators.

Be very, very afraid.

Schadenfreude, We Haz It!!!!!

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Head bigot at the rabidly homophobic group Texas Values, Jonathan Saenz appears to have a personal reason for his animus against other people’s happiness, his wife left him for another woman:

Mere months before Jonathan Saenz became president of the anti-gay group Texas Values, his wife left him for another woman, according to Hays County district court records obtained by Lone Star Q.

The revelation could help explain Saenz’s seemingly abrupt transformation from socially conservative lobbyist to homophobic firebrand.

Saenz, a devout Catholic, has been a right-wing operative in Texas for many years — working on abortion and religious liberty cases as a staff attorney for the Plano-based Liberty Legal Institute as far back as 2005.

However, it wasn’t until recently that Saenz emerged as one of the state’s best-known — and most extreme — anti-LGBT voices.

Court records indicate that Saenz’s ex-wife, Corrine Morris Rodriguez Saenz, is a member of the LGBT community who was dating another woman when she filed for divorce from Saenz in August 2011.

In early 2012, with their divorce still pending, Saenz would take the helm of Texas Values after the organization spun off from the Liberty Legal Institute, where he’d risen to chief lobbyist.

With Saenz as president, Texas Values has led the charge against not only same-sex marriage, but also passage of LGBT-inclusive nondiscrimination ordinances in San Antonio and Houston. In fighting the ordinances, Saenz has often repeated the debunked right-wing myth that sexual predators would use the laws to prey on women and children in bathrooms.

All this while going through a “War of the Roses” style brutal divorce.

Seriously, are there any professional conservatives out there who aren’t complete nutjobs?

H/t Raw Story.

More Thoughts on Nixon Around the 40th Anniversary of His Resigning

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First is Hunter S. Thompson’s seminal obituary of Nixon, titled He was a Crook:

Richard Nixon is gone now, and I am poorer for it. He was the real thing — a political monster straight out of Grendel and a very dangerous enemy. He could shake your hand and stab you in the back at the same time. He lied to his friends and betrayed the trust of his family. Not even Gerald Ford, the unhappy ex-president who pardoned Nixon and kept him out of prison, was immune to the evil fallout. Ford, who believes strongly in Heaven and Hell, has told more than one of his celebrity golf partners that “I know I will go to hell, because I pardoned Richard Nixon.”

The rage of Hunter S. Thompson’s is something truly awesome to behold.

I will not disagree with Mr. Ford.  He should be in hell for that.

Then there is John Dean’s interview at Salon:

How should we see Nixon now? On one hand, there’s been some Nixon revisionism as Republicans turned so hard to the right that people look at OSHA, at the EPA, and say that Nixon was practically a liberal compared to conservatives today.

 Well, first I’m not sure if those are really Nixon. I heard some tapes — I didn’t put everything I heard in there, but there was clearly some stuff where Nixon is telling John Ehrlichman, who is something of a liberal/progressive — certainly a moderate at the time — who wants these ideas. And Nixon, in essence, tells him, go ahead and do whatever you want, just don’t get me arrested, or don’t get me in trouble. Not arrested, but you know, don’t get me politically in trouble for any of this stuff. So it’s really not Nixon driving any of this stuff.

 On one hand, the domestic agenda is fairly progressive.

 It is.

 On the other hand, Nixon going back to his first campaign against Helen Douglas and “the Pink Lady” was a pretty nasty character. And he probably would have been right at home with the Tea Party today.

 Exactly what I was going to say. He was an opportunist and I think he would feel very comfortable with the Tea Party.

 At the same time, some of Nixon’s abuses, as horrible as it is to hear them being coordinated from the Oval Office, seem almost quaint compared to Iran-Contra, or what we saw under Bush/Cheney, or the extent of the NSA surveillance state revealed by Edward Snowden.

No question. We don’t know what the parallels were from earlier, if the NSA was doing the same kind of stuff.  The Church Committee certainly uncovered a lot of unseemly stuff, and I think because technology changed, the NSA changed. ………

His portrait of Nixon as a political opportunist with little in the way of  core principles seems to ring true to me,  particularly since Nixon was a master of the politics of resentment.

I am rather surprised that Dean tags Erlichman as the architect of Nixon’s progressive domestic agenda.

It means that I probably gave Nixon too much credit on his domestic agenda yesterday, but it should be noted that he was still HMFIC when OSHA.EPA/etc. were created.

Edward Snowden Still has a Lot to Say

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He gave a rather expansive interviewed with Wired. Here are the most recent revelations:

  • He left “bread crumbs” which should have let shown the NSA what he took. He ascribes the fact that they continue to be surprised to incompetence, but I am not buying it.  I think that acknowledging what was taken would put our state security apparatus in the position of validating some programs that have not yet come out:

    • Snowden speculates that the government fears that the documents contain material that’s deeply damaging—secrets the custodians have yet to find. “I think they think there’s a smoking gun in there that would be the death of them all politically,” Snowden says. “The fact that the government’s investigation failed—that they don’t know what was taken and that they keep throwing out these ridiculous huge numbers—implies to me that somewhere in their damage assessment they must have seen something that was like, ‘Holy sh%$.’ And they think it’s still out there.”

  • Some of the leaks appear not to have come from Snowden, which points to a 2nd whistle blower.
  • The CIA’s IT infrastructure is archaic.
  • Syria did not shut down its internet at the beginning of their civil war, it was an NSA cock-up:

    • ………One day an intelligence officer told him that TAO—a division of NSA hackers—had attempted in 2012 to remotely install an exploit in one of the core routers at a major Internet service provider in Syria, which was in the midst of a prolonged civil war. This would have given the NSA access to email and other Internet traffic from much of the country. But something went wrong, and the router was bricked instead—rendered totally inoperable. The failure of this router caused Syria to suddenly lose all connection to the Internet—although the public didn’t know that the US government was responsible. (This is the first time the claim has been revealed.)

  • The NSA has setup  a program called Monstermind, which would have it launching cyber-attacks against other nations without human intervention.
  • The final straw for him was when James clapper flat out lied to congress about spying on Americans.  (I liked his use of the phrase, “Banality of Evil,” to describe this, though I didn’t like his use of the boiling frog metaphor, which is scientifically inaccurate)

There are more revelations to come.

It is really worth the read.

I Know that Some People are Offended, but I Approve

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In a a primary in Arizona, one candidate has invoked Trayvon Martin in describing another candidate’s support for stand your ground:

An Arizona candidate for Congress has sent out a mailer displaying the image of Trayvon Martin to attack her opponent’s record as a state lawmaker.

 Mary Rose Wilcox used the mailer to slam her opponent, Ruben Gallego, in the Democratic primary for Arizona’s 7th Congressional District in Phoenix, according to The Arizona Republic, which posted a copy of it.

 “America doesn’t need more Trayvon Martin tragedies,” the mailer reads, underneath a portrait of Martin in a hoodie. On the next page it lists Gallego’s support for “Stand Your Ground” legislation and what it describes as his B+ record from the National Rifle Association.

More of this, please.

If we ever want to push against against the NRA and other ammosexuals, we must extract a political price on people who find capitulating to 2nd amendment extremist, and the best place to do this is in the primaries.

It is is a good thing for supporting the NRA is turned into a liability at the primary level.

It’s the first step to standing up to the ammosexuals.

To quote former Reagan staffer James Baker,  “F%$# ’em, the won’t vote for us anyway.”

Thank You Richard Nixon (Not a Joke)

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One of the things that Richard Nixon did that he doesn’t get credit for is getting lead out of paint and gasoline.

Kevin Drum has written a lot about how falling crime rates 20 years after environmental lead was removed from paint and gasoline crime fell, and now we see lead exposure correlates to teen pregnancy as well:

Jessica Wolpaw Reyes has a new paper out that investigates the link between childhood lead exposure—mostly via tailpipe emissions of leaded gasoline—and violent crime. Unsurprisingly, since her previous research has shown a strong link, she finds a strong link again. But she also finds something else: a strong link between lead and teen pregnancy.

This is not a brand new finding. Rick Nevin’s very first paper about lead and crime was actually about both crime and teen pregnancy, and he found strong correlations for both at the national level. Reyes, however, goes a step further. It turns out that different states adopted unleaded gasoline at different rates, which allows Reyes to conduct a natural experiment. If lead exposure really does cause higher rates of teen pregnancy, then you’d expect states with the lowest levels of leaded gasoline to also have the lowest levels of teen pregnancy 15 years later. And guess what? They do. The chart on the right shows the correlation between gasoline lead exposure and later rates of teen pregnancy, and it’s very strong. Stronger even than the correlation with violent crime.

It’s not surprising.

One of the effects of lead on the developing brain is reduced impulse control, and it seems obvious to me that lack of impulse control would increase the likelihood of high risk sexual behaviors.

I am Actually Familiar With the Turkish Cleric and His Charter Schools

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One of his charter schools is Chesapeake Science Point Public Charter School, which holds a Rubik’s cube competition, and so I’ve been down there a couple of times, and it seemed a bit different, so I Googled it, and discovered that it was a part of the Gülen movement schools, which is led by Fethullah Gülen, a Turkish preacher living in self-imposed exile in the United States.

To be clear, Chesapeake Science Point is not a religious schools in any way shape or form, it’s more of an international school.

One of the interesting things that I discovered about this is that Fethullah Gülen is an ally turned opponent of Islamist PM (now President) of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, despite his residing in Pennsylvania.

So, I found it rather interesting when The Atlantic found the movement, and looked at the schools. The initial discussion is measured and anodyne:

It reads like something out of a John Le Carre novel: The charismatic Sunni imam Fethullah Gülen, leader of a politically powerful Turkish religious movement likened by The Guardian to an “Islamic Opus Dei,” occasionally webcasts sermons from self-imposed exile in the Poconos while his organization quickly grows to head the largest chain of charter schools in America. It might sound quite foreboding—and it should, but not for the reasons you might think.

You can be excused if you’ve never heard of Fethullah Gülen or his eponymous movement. He isn’t known for his openness, despite the size of his organization, which is rumored to have between 1 and 8 million adherents. It’s difficult to estimate the depth of its bench, however, without an official roster of membership. Known informally in Turkey as Hizmet, or “the service”, the Gülen movement prides itself on being a pacifist, internationalist, modern, and moderate alternative to more extreme derivations of Sunni Islam. The group does emphasize the importance of interfaith dialogue, education, and a kind of cosmopolitanism. One prominent sociologist described it as “the world’s most global movement.”

Much of the praise for the Gülen movement comes from its emphasis on providing education to children worldwide. In countries like Pakistan, its schools often serve as an alternative to more fundamentalist madrassas. Gülen schools enroll an estimated two million students around the globe, usually with English as the language of instruction, and the tuition is often paid in full by the institution. In Islamic countries, where the Gülen schools aren’t entirely secular: The New York Times reported that in many of the Pakistani schools, “…teachers encourage Islam in their dormitories, where teachers set the example in lifestyle and prayers.” But the focus is still largely on academics. Fethullah Gülen put it in one of his sermons, “Studying physics, mathematics, and chemistry is worshipping Allah.”

In Western countries such as the United States, Germany, and France, there isn’t any evidence whatsoever that the nearly 120 Gülen charter schools in America include Islamic indoctrination in their curriculum. The schools are so secular that singling out the Gülen schools as particularly nefarious, simply for being run predominantly by Muslims, smacks of xenophobia.

He appears to be running modernist schools, some secular, and some Islamic (not Islamist).

The next part is interesting to me because, once it gets into the nitty gritty of charter schools, as in pretty much every case where I have looked into charter schools, the finances become disturbing:

However, these schools might be suspect for reasons that are completely unrelated to Islamic doctrine. One of their most troubling characteristics is that they don’t have a great track record when it comes to financial and legal transparency. ……… Furthermore, as the Deseret News reported, the school’s administrators seemed to be reserving coveted jobs for their own countrymen and women: “In a time of teacher layoffs, Beehive has recruited a high percentage of teachers from overseas, mainly Turkey.”

………

There are similar stories from other states. In Texas, where 33 Gülen charter schools receive close to $100 million a year in taxpayer funds, the New York Times reported in 2011 that two schools had given $50 million to Gülen-connected contractors, including the month-old Atlas Texas Construction and Training, even though other contractors had offered lower bids. It was the same thing in Georgia, where Fulton County audited three Gülen schools after allegations that they’d skipped the bidding process altogether and paid nearly half a million dollars to organizations associated with the Gülen movement.

………

There are similar stories from other states. In Texas, where 33 Gülen charter schools receive close to $100 million a year in taxpayer funds, the New York Times reported in 2011 that two schools had given $50 million to Gülen-connected contractors, including the month-old Atlas Texas Construction and Training, even though other contractors had offered lower bids. It was the same thing in Georgia, where Fulton County audited three Gülen schools after allegations that they’d skipped the bidding process altogether and paid nearly half a million dollars to organizations associated with the Gülen movement.

Let’s be clear here: This is actually typical behavior within the Charter school movement, as Diane Ravich notes when contacted by The Atlantic:

………Diane Ravitch, education professor at New York University and Assistant Secretary of Education under George H.W. Bush, writes about this larger transparency issue in her latest book, Reign of Error, explaining, “In 2009, New York Charter School Association successfully sued to prevent the state comptroller from auditing the finances of charter schools, even though they receive public funding. The association contended that charter school’s are not government agencies but ‘non-profit educational corporations carrying out a public purpose.’” The New York State Court of Appeals agreed with the organization in a 7 to 0 vote. It took an act of legislation from the state—specifically designed to allow the comptroller to audit charter schools—for this to change.

Ravitch also writes of a similar instance in North Carolina in which the state, urged on by lobbying giant ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council), proposed the creation of a special commission, composed entirely of charter school advocates, as a way for charter schools to bypass the oversight of the State Board of Education or the local school boards. Ravitch writes, “The charters would not be required to hire certified teachers. Charter school staff would not be required to pass criminal background checks. The proposed law would not require any checks for conflicts of interest—not for commission members or for the charter schools.” In other words, it isn’t the Gülen movement that makes Gülen charter schools so secretive. It’s the charter school movement itself.

It turns out that the Gülen schools got raided by the FBI for steering money from the E-Rate program to favored contractors: (One wonders if the FBI, who has employed nut-job Islamophobic consultants, would have bother to investigated if the target wasn’t Islamic)

This comes across in the latest news story related to the Gülen schools: an FBI raid last month on the headquarters of over 19 Gülen-operated Horizon Science Academies in Midwest. According to search warrants obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times, federal authorities were interested in gathering general financial documents and records of communication. The warrant specifically mentions something called the E-rate program—a federal program that, according to the Sun-Times, “pays for schools to expand telecommunications and Internet access.” A handful of the Gülen-affiliated contractors assisting the schools were receiving money from this federal fund. It’s difficult speculate what this could all mean, as all documents pertaining to the investigation, save the warrants themselves, have been sealed from the public.

And then there is Ohio:

I contacted Matthew Blair, and he told me that the problems with the Gülen schools were merely symptomatic of a larger problem within the state’s education system. “The charter school system in Ohio is broken beyond repair,” he wrote in an email. “As it is, charter schools operate in a lawless frontier. Regulations are few and far between. Those that exist are consistently and consciously overlooked.”

The Gülen schools, he wrote, “are an excellent example” of this problem: “A Gülen organization controls the real estate companies that own their schools. They charge rent to their own schools and tax-payers foot the bill. They refuse to answer public records requests, falsify attendance records, and cheat on standardized tests. Yet, Ohio continues to grant them charters to operate.” He added, “It doesn’t hurt that the Gülen organization is politically active and treats state politicians to lavish trips abroad.” But overall, he said, “this Wild West atmosphere of few regulations creates incestuous relationships among politicians, vendors, and schools. Charter schools like Gülen’s give generously. In return, they are allowed to keep their saloons open and serve whatever they want. The only way to save the charter school system is to start over again by using the model of effective public schools.”

Let me reiterate: This is not a problem specific to the Gülen Schools. This is the standard way that charter schools do business.

I have already wrote about how Rocketship Schools loots taxpayer fund by paying exorbitant prices for software from a for-profit firm whose owners constitute a bulk of the board of directors of the nominally non profit schools, and the real-estate shenanigans are pretty much standard fare.

Charter schools as they are implemented in the United States are a remarkably criminogenic manner.

Google+ Won the Internet Today

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No, this is not The Onion.

I just came across an account f%#$ing with telemarketers that should win the Nobel Price for f%$#ing with telemarketers:*

Today is a good day. I just had a call from a telemarketer. Did I yell and scream at them, you ask? Certainly not. Like a good IT administrator I put my skills to use for their benefit. Here’s how the conversation went:

Computer: “Press 9 to not be contacted in the future. Press 4 to speak to someone about your mortgage issues”
TM: “Hello, are you having problems paying your mortgage?”
Me: “Hi, this is the IT department. We intercepted your call as we detected a problem with you phone and need to fix it.”

………

That’s right. I made a telemarketer unwittingly factory reset his phone which means he will be unable to make anymore calls until someone is able to reconfigure his phone and that will take at least an hour or longer if they can’t do it right away!

Needless to say, I am following the author of this, Chris Blasko, like forever.

Read the rest.  I had never thought to do this, but now, I am considering donating a dime to the NRSC, the RCCC, the RNC, Newsmax, and a couple of Teabagger groups to get on their call lists so that I can f%$# with them this way.

*I know that there is no Nobel Prize for f%$#ing with telemarketers, but there should be. If they have prizes for Peace, Literature, Physics, Chemistry, Medicine and Physiology, and Economics, they really should have one for f%$#ing with telemarketers.

Why I Don’t Give to NPR on Pledge Week, Part Infinity

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The first reason is their Jihad against community owned low power radio stations, and now they quote a consulting firm that is bought and paid for by the CIA to condemn Snowden’s NSA Leaks:

On August 1, NPR’s Morning Edition broadcast a story by NPR national security reporter Dina Temple-Raston touting explosive claims from what she called “a tech firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.” That firm, Recorded Future, worked together with “a cyber expert, Mario Vuksan, the CEO of ReversingLabs,” to produce a new report that purported to vindicate the repeated accusation from U.S. officials that “revelations from former NSA contract worker Edward Snowden harmed national security and allowed terrorists to develop their own countermeasures.”

The “big data firm,” reported NPR, says that it now “has tangible evidence” proving the government’s accusations. Temple-Raston’s four-minute, 12-second story devoted the first 3 minutes and 20 seconds to uncritically repeating the report’s key conclusion that ”just months after the Snowden documents were released, al-Qaeda dramatically changed the way its operatives interacted online” and, post-Snowden, “al-Qaeda didn’t just tinker at the edges of its seven-year-old encryption software; it overhauled it.” The only skepticism in the NPR report was relegated to 44 seconds at the end when she quoted security expert Bruce Schneier, who questioned the causal relationship between the Snowden disclosures and the new terrorist encryption programs, as well as the efficacy of the new encryption.

With this report, Temple-Raston seriously misled NPR’s millions of listeners. To begin with, Recorded Future, the outfit that produced the government-affirming report, is anything but independent. To the contrary, it is funded by the CIA and U.S. intelligence community with millions of dollars. Back in 2010, it also filed forms to become a vendor for the NSA. (In response to questions from The Intercept, the company’s vice president Jason Hines refused to say whether it works for the NSA, telling us that we should go FOIA that information if we want to know. But according to public reports, Recorded Future “earns most of its revenue from selling to Wall Street quants and intelligence agencies.”)

The connection between Recorded Future and the U.S. intelligence community is long known. Back in July, 2010, Wired‘s Noah Shachtman revealed that the company is backed by both “the investment arms of the CIA and Google.”

Indeed, In-Q-Tel—the deep-pocket investment arm of both the CIA and other intelligence agencies (including the NSA)—has seats on Recorded Future’s board of directors and, on its website, lists Recorded Future as one of the companies in its “portfolio.” In stark contrast to NPR, The New York Times noted these connections when reporting on the firm in 2011: “Recorded Future is financed with $8 million from the likes of Google’s venture arm and In-Q-Tel, which makes investments to benefit the United States intelligence community, and its clients have included government agencies and banks.”

Worse, Temple-Raston knows all of this. Back in 2012, NPR’s Morning Edition broadcast her profile of Recorded Future and its claimed ability to predict the future by gathering internet data. At the end of her report, she noted that the firm has “at least two very important financial backers: the CIA’s investment arm, called In-Q-Tel, and Google Ventures. They have reportedly poured millions into the company.”

Also, she ignores the fact that the changes to encryption, as reported by the New York Times, have been an ongoing process for at least 7 years, predating the Snowden whistle-blowing.

Why would I want to pledge money for the care and feeding mindless hack journalists acting as stenographers for the American state security apparatus?

Huh, Something Good on the Sunday Shows

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Woodward and Bernstein were interviewed about the constellation of scandals that became known as Watergate on Face the Nation:

The high points from the transcript:

WOODWARD: ……… And so what happened here is — and Carl and I have spent a lot of time looking at tape transcripts, and listening to these tapes and so forth, and you see the real Nixon come out which is kind of the dog that never barks on the tapes. Nixon never says, what’s good for the country, what do we need. It was always about Nixon and it was using the presidency as an instrument of personal revenge in a horrendous way.

 ………

 BERNSTEIN: When we were the writing the final days we started to encounter this, and it’s in the final days in person after person would tell us about how he railed against Jews and about blacks and finally Arthur Burns, the patrician economic adviser to the president said to me while we were reporting on the final days, Nixon had epithets for whole sections of mankind. There was an anger.

 ………

 WOODWARD: Yes, and then, also, if you look, he was — he was vice president for Eisenhower for eight years. And there’s some marvelous reporting that’s been done on this, which shows that Nixon was snubbed by Nix — by Eisenhower, that Eisenhower never brought him in. And — and Nixon felt that America was filled with a series of clubs that he could never get into.

 And it — and it just burned him. And, again, it’s on the tapes. He’ll — he’ll say things like, oh, you know, all those — he joined — after he left the vice presidency and lost the governor’s race in ’62, he went to practice law on Wall Street.

 And he says on the tapes with this kind of seething bitterness, you know, any of those lawyers ever ask me to their country clubs and ask me to go out and play golf with them?

 Not a one.

 ………

 WOODWARD: Yes.
But, um, what — it was seven years ago I went over to do what turned out to be the last interview with Bob McNamara, who was secretary of Defense for Kennedy and Johnson, Mr. Vietnam, and who apologized for Vietnam. And it was three hours. And he had an apartment in the Watergate and I kept pressing McNamara, you know, squeeze out what’s the final lesson of the mistake of Vietnam?

 And he said, there’s one lesson, and that is the advisers to the president need to sit around with the president and argue with him and say, wait a minute, let’s look at all the options. Uh, you have to create a conflict situation.

 And he said what happens in the presidency is no one wants to argue with the president, particularly in front of other advisers. So the president gets isolated and lives in a bubble.

 And I think you can argue that happens to every president, including this one.

I think that this last bit might be the most important lesson.

The founder of GM, William Durant, was famous for not allowing a major decision to made if everyone showed up at the meeting in agreement. He thought that it meant the idea had not been properly thought through.*

I think that he was right.

In addition, I think that any President who goes to a meeting of his staff/cabinet and thinks that he is the smartest guy in the room is likely to be have even more problems with the bubble phenomenon, because they will find it natural for people to agree with him.

*I cannot find this bit on the Google machine right now. I recall hearing it on the radio at some point in the past century.

Hillary Lets Her Inner Neocon Show

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Hillary Clinton was interviewed by noted “liberal hawk”, Iraq war booster, and blithering idiot, Jeffrey Goldberg, and she went full Dick Cheney:

President Obama has long ridiculed the idea that the U.S., early in the Syrian civil war, could have shaped the forces fighting the Assad regime, thereby stopping al Qaeda-inspired groups—like the one rampaging across Syria and Iraq today—from seizing control of the rebellion. In an interview in February, the president told me that “when you have a professional army … fighting against a farmer, a carpenter, an engineer who started out as protesters and suddenly now see themselves in the midst of a civil conflict—the notion that we could have, in a clean way that didn’t commit U.S. military forces, changed the equation on the ground there was never true.”

 Well, his former secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton, isn’t buying it. In an interview with me earlier this week, she used her sharpest language yet to describe the “failure” that resulted from the decision to keep the U.S. on the sidelines during the first phase of the Syrian uprising.

 “The failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protests against Assad—there were Islamists, there were secularists, there was everything in the middle—the failure to do that left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled,” Clinton said.

Let’s be clear. Before Syria turned into a full up civil war, largely at the instigation of the House of Saud, the behavior of the Assad regime was awful, but better than that of Bahrain, whose atrocious behavior was in large part instigated by the House of Saud.

If the Gulf states, particularly the Saudis, had not aggressively shipped weapons and Jihadis to Syria, Syria would pretty much look like Bahrain, a brutal ruthless dictatorship, except that it would not be religiously based.

She continues:

During a discussion about the dangers of jihadism (a topic that has her “hepped-up,” she told me moments after she greeted me at her office in New York) and of the sort of resurgent nationalism seen in Russia today, I noted that Americans are quite wary right now of international commitment-making. She responded by arguing that there is a happy medium between bellicose posturing (of the sort she associated with the George W. Bush administration) and its opposite, a focus on withdrawal.

Because doubling down on a failed strategy, is such a good idea.

Then she doubles down on the whole Clash of Civilizations crap:

“One of the reasons why I worry about what’s happening in the Middle East right now is because of the breakout capacity of jihadist groups that can affect Europe, can affect the United States,” she said. “Jihadist groups are governing territory. They will never stay there, though. They are driven to expand. Their raison d’etre is to be against the West, against the Crusaders, against the fill-in-the-blank—and we all fit into one of these categories. How do we try to contain that? I’m thinking a lot about containment, deterrence, and defeat.”

Of course, Osama bin Laden’s justifications for his actions largely was that we were making war on Arabs and Islam: (H/t Naked Capitalism for the Link)

As for the first question: Why are we fighting and opposing you? The answer is very simple:

 (1) Because you attacked us and continue to attack us.

And Hillary’s solution is to bomb more Muslims and more Arabs.

It should also be noted that she was a big supporter of another Saudi supported bit of failed adventurism, the cluster F%$# that was the nation state of Libya.

Over at Salon, Joan Walsh wonders if the faction of the Democratic party that doesn’t need settle their manhood issues with bombs might be an impediment to her coronation as the Democratic Nominee in 2016.  (She actually hopes that it won’t, because ……… I dunno. She makes no coherent case at all for voting Hillary.)

As an aside, I am so glad that I live in Maryland. My vote for president does not matter, so I feel no compulsion to cast a vote for the Democratic nominee, no matter how retrograde.