Year: 2014

And on the Subject of Evil Companies that are Not Named “Hobby Lobby”………

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We have the natural food manufacturer Eden Foods:

The slogan for Eden Foods, which describes itself as the “oldest natural and organic food company in North America,” is “creation and maintenance of purity in food.” Its CEO and founder, Michael Potter, has been prominent in debates over labeling of organic food and GMOs. But the company has been quietly seeking in court another form of purity — to Catholic doctrine about sex being solely for procreation. That goes not just for Potter, but for all 128 of his employees.

That is, Eden Foods — an organic food company with no shortage of liberal customers — has quietly pursued a decidedly right-wing agenda, suing the Obama administration for exemption from the mandate to cover contraception for its employees under the Affordable Care Act. In court filings, Eden Foods, represented by the conservative Thomas More Law Center, alleges that its rights have been violated under the First Amendment, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and the Administrative Procedure Act.

Eden Foods, which did not respond to a request for comment, says in its filing that the company believes of birth control that “these procedures almost always involve immoral and unnatural practices.” The complaint also says that “Plaintiffs believe that Plan B and ‘ella’ can cause the death of the embryo, which is a person.” (Studies show that neither Plan B nor Ella interfere with fertilization, which is the Catholic definition of the beginning of life, if not the medical one. In other words, not the death of an embryo. Also, at that stage, it’s a zygote, not an embryo — let alone a “person.”) The filing also said that “Plaintiff Eden Foods’ products, methods, and accomplishments are described by critics as: tasteful, nutritious, wholesome, principled, unrivaled, nurturing, pure.”

Until now, Eden Foods’ conservative advocacy litigation has remained mostly under the radar, even as their marketing seems designed to appeal to liberals, from the slogan ”Organic agriculture is society’s brightest hope for positive change” to the ’60s imagery and the use of the word “revolution” in some of its print marketing. The company’s mission statement includes its goal to “contribute to peaceful evolution on earth,” “to maintain a healthy, respectful, challenging, and rewarding environment for employees,” and to “cultivate sound relationships with other organizations and individuals who are like minded and involved in like pursuits.”

They are also a closely held company, so according to five of the so-called Justices on the Supreme Court, it’s their right, but do not buy their products.

F%$# them and the horse they rode in on.

Yes, Blackwater Threatened to Kill a State Department Investigator

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And what’s more, the response of the state department was to expel the investigator from Iraq:

Just weeks before Blackwater guards fatally shot 17 civilians at Baghdad’s Nisour Square in 2007, the State Department began investigating the security contractor’s operations in Iraq. But the inquiry was abandoned after Blackwater’s top manager there issued a threat: “that he could kill” the government’s chief investigator and “no one could or would do anything about it as we were in Iraq,” according to department reports.

 American Embassy officials in Baghdad sided with Blackwater rather than the State Department investigators as a dispute over the probe escalated in August 2007, the previously undisclosed documents show. The officials told the investigators that they had disrupted the embassy’s relationship with the security contractor and ordered them to leave the country, according to the reports.

 After returning to Washington, the chief investigator wrote a scathing report to State Department officials documenting misconduct by Blackwater employees and warning that lax oversight of the company, which had a contract worth more than $1 billion to protect American diplomats, had created “an environment full of liability and negligence.”

(emphasis mine)

This raises the obvious question, just who at the State Department makes a habit of engaging in unnatural acts with sheep, and how did Blackwater get video of them doing this.*

Well, it’s mentioned in passing in the above story that when State investigated this, the investigation was headed by Patrick Kennedy. (Not one of THE Kennedys)

At Foreign Policy, they go into detail on Mr. Kennedy’s repeated roll in this, and similar clusterf%$#s:

Eye-opening new revelations about the private security firm formerly known as Blackwater Worldwide and its cozy relationship with the State Department are raising new questions about a senior Foggy Bottom bureaucrat who has found himself in Capitol Hill’s crosshairs before — and seems certain to now do so again.

 On Sunday, the New York Times reported that Patrick Kennedy, the State Department’s current under secretary for management, led a review of the private security firm in 2007 after its guards fatally shot 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad’s Nisour Square. Kennedy’s review, however, failed to reference a scathing State Department memo on the contractor completed just weeks earlier that found the company had systematically overcharged the government. The memo also alleged a senior Blackwater executive in Baghdad threatened to kill the State Department auditor behind the memo. At the time, Kennedy dismissed questions about early warnings of Blackwater misconduct.

………

 Though the incident is now seven years old, anger remains on Capitol Hill about how the State Department, and in particular, Kennedy, manages relations with government contractors. On Monday, an aide for Senator Claire McCaskill (D-M.O.) noted his boss’s “longstanding frustrations with the failure to improve contract management at the State Department.” He cited an April letter between McCaskill and Kennedy in which she scolds Kennedy for failing to implement recommendations from the Inspector General about the maintenance of contract files dating back seven years.

………

 No one on the panel interviewed Richter, according to the panel’s final report, which includes a list of everyone consulted about the incident. It’s particularly unusual that the panel didn’t talk to Richter given that he specifically visited Iraq to review the State Department’s contract with Blackwater, the firm at the center of the controversy. During a press Q&A on October 23, 2007, then-Time magazine reporter Brian Bennett noted the existence of “complaints about contractor conduct,” and asked “why this review wasn’t done earlier?” In response, Kennedy told reporters that his review found no communications from the embassy in Baghdad complaining about contractor conduct prior to the Nisour Square killings.

It should be noted that a cursory record of Kennedy’s record (his Wiki, for what it’s worth) it appears that Kennedy has had at least one similar incidents previously.

*To be fair, it could also be bribery that is responsible for this behavior, but my money is on a dead hooker in a hotel room in Bayonne, NJ.†
†Actually, it is also possible that this was a product of the cronyism that was rife at the instigation of Rumsfeld and Cheney.‡
‡Or, he could, as a lifelong member of the State Department, he could simply be inculcated in a tradition of CYA and obfuscation, particularly as regards the actions of politically connected ambassadors, but the sheep thing just makes better copy.

Linkage

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Neat orgami robotic wheel concept:

And This Decision is a Camel’s Nose Under the Tent

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In Harris v. Quinn, the Supreme Court ruled that home healthcare workers who are not members of a union do not have to pay dues for the services received.

It is better than could be expected, since they could have applied this to all public sector unions, effectively going right to work nationwide.

What I do think is that it is clear that this, along with an earlier decision, Knox v. SEIU, are an attempt to reverse the National Labor Relations Act via the death of 1000 cuts.

Eventually, assuming that the current 5-4 reactionary judge/real judge split remains in place on the Supreme Court, they will be making it  impossible for labor unions to function in the United States for the next decade.

This is partisanship masquerading as an impartial judiciary.

Yes, Hobby Lobby is Almost Dredd Scott* Bad

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The basic decision is completely incoherent and contradictory.

The gist of the decision is that private corporations can ignore basic regulations if they are “sincerely held beliefs,” whatever the f%$# means, which ignores decades of jurisprudence which slapped down various flavors of bigots, sexists, and nut-jobs who have attempted to use religion to avoid following civil law.

They say that this is so because to quote Mitt Rmoney, “corporations are people too.”

They say that it only applies to “closely held” corporations, (fewer than 5 people holding over half of the equity in the firm) but provide no real explanation for why it should so be limited, and they do not explain why it does not, for example, apply to multibillion dollar corporations like Koch industries.†

Furthermore, they say that it applies only to contraception, and not, for example, to the JW’s objection to blood transfusion or vaccination, but again, they simply say this, and provide no real justification:

This decision concerns only the contraceptive mandate andshould not be understood to hold that all insurance-coverage mandates, e.g., for vaccinations or blood transfusions, must necessarily fall if they conflict with an employer’s religious beliefs. Nor does it provide a shield for employers who might cloak illegal discrimination as a religious practice.

Basically, it only applies to contraception, because we care about what Catholics and right wing Evangelicals think, but not (Mercy!) Jehovah’s Witnesses.

What’s more, they redifine the definition of corporations to justify their opinion:

In other words, the Court has changed, definitionally, what it means to be a corporation under the state laws in question.

The existential condition of separateness is true even with closely held companies. The largest such companies – Cargill, Koch Industries, Dell, Bechtel, and Aramark, to name just a handful – have tens of thousands of employees and billions of dollars of revenue. (In 2008, Forbes reported that the 441 largest closely held companies employed more than 6 million people and enjoyed $1.8 trillion in revenue.) They are created under the same understanding of a wall existing between shareholders and the company. They could indeed not exist otherwise – the potential liability to individual investors would simply be too great.

So in evaluating whether Congress intended the word “person” in RFRA to cover corporations, the most reasonable assumption is that the states creating such entities intended such separateness and that corporations should not carry the rights of their shareholders. To assume otherwise flies in the face of decades, indeed centuries, of corporate law assumptions.

The Court makes a second corporate law mistake. In arguing that for-profit companies can have religious purposes, the Court makes hay from the fact that state incorporation statutes typically allow businesses to be chartered for any “lawful purpose or activity.” The Court uses this corporate law truth to argue, as a descriptive matter, that some corporations in fact engage in behavior that is in conformity with the religious views of their shareholders.

………

Indeed, I will not be surprised if we see, in the coming weeks, a host of closely held corporations – and a few publicly traded ones – asserting the right to discriminate against LGBT job applicants, employees, and customers notwithstanding various state laws to the contrary.

This is an unbelievably bad decision, and, unless the Congress revokes the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (the justification for the ruling), we are in for decades of counter productive anti-American religious zealotry.

This is a horrible decision, and if it had been made at the federal court level, we would assume that it would have been overturned at the appellate level before the ink was dry.

*Dred Scott v. Sandford. If you need this link, read some f%$#ing history.
†I dunno. Maybe they do want it apply to Koch industries.

This is Going to Get Very Ugly

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The bodies of the three kidnapped teens have been found in Israel:

Israel’s intense 18-day search for three abducted teenagers ended Monday when three bodies were found buried under a pile of rocks in an open field about 15 miles from where the youths were last seen in the occupied West Bank. A nation that had been enmeshed in hopeful prayer was instantly engulfed by a mix of grief and anger and vowed retaliation against the militant Palestinian group Hamas, which Israel says was behind the kidnapping.

“They were kidnapped and murdered in cold blood by beasts,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said at the start of an emergency cabinet meeting Monday night. “Hamas is responsible, and Hamas will pay.”

Just after midnight, witnesses in the West Bank city of Hebron said the retaliation had begun as Israeli forces used explosives to demolish the homes of Marwan Qawasmeh and Amer Abu Aisha, the Hamas men who have been missing as long as the teenagers and are Israel’s prime suspects.

We are going to see dozens, if not hundreds, of casualties following this, and there is a real possibility that hostilities between Hamas and Fatah resuming as well.

I do not know how many people will die because of this, but my guess is that 90% of them will be Palestinian.  (Particularly since that ratf%$# Natanyahu clearly does not view Palestinians as full human beings)

What the hell were the perps thinking?  I could (kind of) understand if they had demanded a prisoner swap, or if the targeted people were troops, but this is just destructive for its own sake.

The only think that I can figure out is that, to quote Alfred Pennyworth, “Some men just want to watch the world burn.”

Another Example of the US Failure in Iraq

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In response to the advance of ISIS, the Iraqi military has taken an emergency deliveries of Su-25 ground attack fighters:

A video uploaded by the Iraqi Ministry of Defence and a subsequent announcement shed light on Iraq’s first success in acquiring a combat capable platform to stop the advance of the Islamic State. The latter has made great progress in capturing large areas of Iraq and is now slowly advancing to Iraq’s capital Baghdad.

”The Ministry of Defence announced the arrival of the first out of five Russian combat aircraft Su-25 into Iraqi territory under a contract with the Russian ministry, which will contribute to increasing the combat capability of the Air Force and the other branches of the armed forces to eliminate terrorism.”

The Iraqi Army and Air Force have proved anything but capable to halt the Islamic State’s advance and have been desperately looking for other ways to fill the caps currently posed in Iraqi’s Armed Forces. With the United States reluctant to provide close air support or speeding up the delivery of Iraq’s F-16s, Iraq has been increasingly looking to countries in Eastern Europe to strengthen the Iraqi Air Force (IQAF). It is now clear a batch of five ex-Russian Su-25s are the first to have arrived.

The first Su-25, still in Russian Air Force (RuAF) camouflage and with a hastily applied Iraqi flag, arrived onboard a Russian An-124-100 cargo plane together with ground support equipment on the 28th of June. The Su-25s are believed to have been stored at the Aircraft Repair Plant 121 (ARZ 121) in Kubinka before being flown to Iraq. The contract also included new engines for the aircraft, which were installed just before the delivery flight.

The Iraqis have been waiting for the delivery of F-16s, but they got these surplus Su-25s in a matter of a few weeks.

It also of note that the Iraq AF operated this under Saddam, and the Iranians operate them today, so there is operational experience that can be tapped.

Additionally, under the current tactical situation, it’s a better weapon system than the F-16, because what is needed is a dedicated close air support (CAS) and strike aircraft with low operational costs.

What’s more the aircraft’s agility at low speed and low altitude allows it to maximize the effect of unguided munitions, which comprise the bulk of Iraqi munitions.

Additionally, it constitutes a major change in Iraqi policy. It shows that they are moving away from Western weapon systems, and the US defense contractors. (Yet another goal of Bush/Cheney that has turned into a fail)

So, the failure of the Neocon’s Iraq adventure continues to damage the interests of the United States.

The Sound You Hear is Another Bubble Collapsing

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Remember those stories about all those investors paying cash to acquire rental properties?

Remember how they were going into single family rentals?

Well, it looks like the rush for the door has begun:

A year ago, buying foreclosed homes to rent out was the sure-thing trade for investment firms backed by money from private equity companies, hedge funds and pension systems. But with the supply of cheap foreclosed homes dwindling, some early investors are looking to cash out a bit by flipping homes to competitors.

The Waypoint Real Estate Group, one of the first companies to raise money from private investors to buy foreclosed homes, is quietly shopping as many as 2,000 houses in California that it acquired in the last few years in several private investment funds, said three people who had been briefed on the matter but were not authorized to discuss it. The homes, which are largely rented, are being shown to other companies backed by investor money that have also scooped up distressed houses in states including Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois and Nevada.

Waypoint is considering selling about half of its 4,000 homes. Some of the biggest institutional investors in the market for foreclosed homes — companies like the Blackstone Group, American Homes 4 Rent and American Residential Properties — have slowed their pace of acquisitions in response to an increase in home prices and a dearth of foreclosed homes that do not require significant renovation.

Waypoint is following other early investors like the Och-Ziff Capital Management Group and Oaktree Capital Management, which have sold homes bought near the start of the financial crisis. But unlike Och-Ziff and Oaktree, Waypoint is not leaving the single-family home market. It is still managing more than 7,000 homes for a publicly traded real estate investment trust, or REIT, it formed last year with the Starwood Capital Group called Starwood Waypoint Residential Trust.

Jason Chudoba, a spokesman for the trust and Waypoint’s management company, said the firm did not comment on market speculation.

The single-family home market, after a wave of acquisitions by companies backed by Wall Street money, is changing as institutional buyers now focus more on expanding their operations to manage tens of thousands of homes across the United States. Industry participants say that the rapid buying of foreclosed homes has ended and that they expect other early institutional buyers to sell homes to lock in profits. They say they also expect the business to consolidate into the hands of a few large companies.

So, the small operators are getting out, and the big operators, aka the too big to fail operators are doubling down, because they figure that they know better.

In a way, the TBTF players are right:  When this comes tumbling down, the taxpayers will find a way to bail them out, yet again.

We are f%$#ed.

Finally, Someone Says IT to a Neocon

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Thats Gonna Leave a Mark

Katrina Vanden, editor-in-chief of The Nation finally calls out the Neocons as cowards when she tells Bill Kristol join the Iraqi army:

“For example, the president should go to Congress if he’s going to take military action in Iraq,” she explained. “There’s no military solution to Iraq, and I have to say, sitting next to Bill Kristol, man — I mean, the architects of catastrophe that have cost this country trillions of dollars, thousands of lives — there should be accountability.”

 “If there are no regrets for the failed assumptions that have grievously wounded this nation — I don’t know what happened to our politics and media accountability, but we need it, Bill,” she continued. “Because this country should not go back to war. We don’t need armchair warriors, and if you feel so strongly, you should, with all due respect, enlist in the Iraqi Army.”

(emphasis mine)

This needs to be said, repeatedly.

The Neocons have spent decades accusing anyone who does not support their stupid military adventures of cowardice.

Calling out them as armchair warriors who send other people’s children to die is an essential part of our public discourse.

It’s Bank Failure Friday!!!! (One Week and One Day Late)

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And here they are, ordered, and numbered for the year so far.

  1. Valley Bank, Moline, IL  <== Occurred on June 20
  2. Valley Bank, Fort Lauderdale, FL <== Occurred on June 20
  3. The Freedom State Bank , Freedom, OK

Yeah, I forgot to check last week.

Full FDIC list

The stuff does seem to happen in fits and starts.

So, here is the graph pr0n with last few years numbers for comparison (FDIC only):

I Think that Obama Just Called al-Maliki’s Bluff

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Kerry just announced that there will be no airstrikes without a national unity government in Iraq:

US Secretary of State John Kerry has ruled out airstrikes against the rapidly advancing Islamist State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) unless Baghdad forms a more inclusive government, upping the political pressure on Nouri al-Maliki to work with the Sunnis and Kurds, or step aside as prime minister.

“It would be a complete and total act of irresponsibility for the president to just order a few strikes,” Kerry told CBS News on Tuesday. “But there’s no government, there’s no backup, there’s no military – there’s nothing there that provides the capacity for success.”

“The president reserves the right to use force as he does anywhere in the world, if it is necessary,” Kerry said. “But he wants to do so … with knowledge that there’s a government in place that can actually follow through and guarantee that what the United States is working toward can actually be achieved.”

But Prime Minister al-Maliki, a Shiite, rejected calls on Wednesday for a national unity government with Sunnis and Kurds, saying such a step would amount to a coup. Maliki’s State of Law alliance won the most seats in parliamentary elections last April, but fell short of the majority needed to form a government without help from rival parties.

I’m not sure if this is good news, or bad news.

It’s clear that Nouri al-Maliki is the source of most of the problems in Iraq, but our meddling in Iraqi affairs implies that we are getting back in.

It looks like when Obama is desperately trying to get back into the war that he called “stupid” in 2003.

Who says that Irony is dead?

Why You Should Not Give Money to the Red Cross

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Even if you ignore their blood products profiteering which killed a significant portion of the Hemophiliacs in the United States under Liddy Dole, you have their routine and brazen profiteering in the event of major disasters:

Just how badly does the American Red Cross want to keep secret how it raised and spent over $300 million after Hurricane Sandy?

The charity has hired a fancy law firm to fight a public request we filed with New York state, arguing that information about its Sandy activities is a “trade secret.”

The Red Cross’ “trade secret” argument has persuaded the state to redact some material, though it’s not clear yet how much since the documents haven’t yet been released.

As we’ve reported, the Red Cross releases few details about how it spends money after big disasters. That makes it difficult to figure out whether donor dollars are well spent.

The Red Cross did give some information about Sandy spending to New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who had been investigating the charity. But the Red Cross declined our request to disclose the details.

So we filed a public records request for the information the Red Cross provided to the attorney general’s office.

 That’s where the law firm Gibson Dunn comes in.

 An attorney from the firm’s New York office appealed to the attorney general to block disclosure of some of the Sandy information, citing the state Freedom of Information Law’s Trade Secret Exemption.

 The documents include “internal and proprietary methodology and procedures for fundraising, confidential information about its internal operations, and confidential financial information,” wrote Gabrielle Levin of Gibson Dunn in a letter to the attorney general’s office.

If those details were disclosed, “the American Red Cross would suffer competitive harm because its competitors would be able to mimic the American Red Cross’s business model for an increased competitive advantage,” Levin wrote.

(emphasis mine)

Trade Secret Exemption?  Proprietary Methodology?  Competitive Harm?  Business model?  Competitive Advantage?

Seriously?

You are asking us to give you money on the vague promise that you won’t blow it all on salaries and severance packages for senior executives (and, you know, give thousands of Hemophiliacs AIDS ……… Oops, too late on that one).

The American Red Cross, and the Susan G. Komen foundations are not charities should be our first choices for donations.

I Disagree With the Rude One

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In response to the Supreme Court decision giving free reign for antiabortion protesters to intimidate doctors, nurses, and patients, the Rude Pundit suggests that we engage in aggressive in your face threatening protests outside the churches that winds up the anti-abortion terrorists:

Look at that church. Isn’t it a pretty little church? It’s St. Mary’s Church in Grafton, Massachusetts. It’s freakin’ idyllic, no? It’s also deeply invested in anti-abortion actions. The congregation participated in 40 Days for Life, an action during Lent that 17,000 churches around the world took part in, with another 40 Days planned for September 24 to November 2.

The St. Mary’s churchgoers headed over to Worcester to protest at a Planned Parenthood and to “sidewalk counsel” women there. “[I]s it worth it to stand out in the wind and rain and cold to pray in front of Planned Parenthood?” the church’s website asks. And, for them, it was. They convinced one woman to not get an abortion. You can see the baby. It’s like a taste of something that will keep them addicted to protesting. A crack baby, if you will. No doubt the church will be supporting the baby and the mother until the baby is an adult. No doubt.

Come September, and maybe even before, the parishioners will be harassing every woman who goes to the Planned Parenthood, even those just going for pap smears and help getting pregnant. And they will no doubt be joined by the anti-abortion radicals, the fetus picture carriers, the screamers, the hysterics who shame women.

“Is it really necessary to be out on the sidewalk instead of praying at home?” St. Mary’s wants to know. Look up at that picture again. What do you see in front of St. Mary’s? That’s a nice, wide, very public sidewalk. The parking lot is across the street, so most of the people attending church services on, say, a nice summer Sunday will have to walk that sidewalk, a sidewalk just like the one outside Planned Parenthood in Worcester. A sidewalk like the one that Eleanor McCullen “gently” counsels women from outside a Planned Parenthood in Boston.

 ………

 So let’s get out there, every goddamn Sunday, and head to the churches that send their lunatic Jesus-fellaters out to try to shut down Planned Parenthoods, and stand on their sidewalks, just like the one up there outside St. Mary’s in Grafton, and let’s make churchgoing a living f%$#in’ hell for ’em. Let’s bodily block the access to the walkways that lead to the church. Let’s bring signs that have pictures of women who were killed by illegal abortions. Let’s go up to them and try to convince them to convert or go atheist, following them until we are on church property and have to stop. Let’s block the street by walking back and forth in the crosswalk. Let’s force the churchgoers to need escorts to even get inside.

 Shit, let’s plaster the telephone poles with photos of the priests and church leaders, their addresses, their phone numbers. Let’s tell them as they pass, “We know where you live.” Let’s film everyone going into the church and post those on a website. Hey, it’s a public f%$#in’ sidewalk, man. Let’s scream at them about how they’re terrible people, how they support raping children, how they have given money to help silence victims. Can’t you hear their silent screams? Can’t you? F%$#, yeah.

 Going to church is a choice, no? Let’s make sure they regret that f%$#in’ choice, however legal it may be for them to make it. Then let’s see how quickly they’re begging for buffer zones.

(%$# mine)

First, and most important, is that this behavior is wrong.

Second, the methods that the Rude Pundit is suggesting require that its target already have a credible fear that they will be the target of violent terrorism.  The folks outside the Church will not be slashing tires, setting fire to the church, or shooting priests,* so any such demonstration will be almost completely without impact.

I would suggest, however, that people of good conscience refuse do make other common causes with people who go to places like St. Mary’s Church in Grafton, because consorting with terrorists, even at a soup kitchen, is still consorting with terrorists.

*Though some former alter boys might be considering this for a completely different reason.

Gaaaahhhh!!!!!

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My daughter’s phone has stopped working.

The display and touch screen are dead, but the rest of the phone, an LG Mach LS 860, still works.

I’ve been trying to figure out a way to get the already MyPhoneExplorer synching software to run with no access to the screen.

Why do I do this sh%$?