Month: September 2016

Busy Maintaining My Blog

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I am dealing with a bane of my blogging existence, the truncated feed, tonight.

This is where the RSS syndication feed only hands up the first few lines of the article, meaning that I need to click through.

Well, there are some work arounds, but they most of them have stopped working, probably because of complaints from the websites.

Well I found an open source full text RSS reader, and I’ve installed it on my account, and pointed my feed reader at the new full feeds.

Unfortunately, it took most of the night, mostly by dint of my own incompetence.

From Up and Coming to Basket Case in Under 6 Months

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I am referring, of course, to Brazil, which has just removed its president Dilma Rousseff.

As near as I can figure out, it was driven by two things:

  • The right wing party that controls the legislature wanted to take power.
  • The entire political establishment was attempting to distract people from their own corruption.

Brazil’s first female president Dilma Rousseff has been thrown out of office by the country’s corruption-tainted senate after a gruelling impeachment trial that ends 13 years of Workers’ party rule.

Following a crushing 61 to 20 defeat in the upper house, she will be replaced for the remaining two years and four months of her term by Michel Temer, a centre-right patrician who was among the leaders of the campaign against his former running mate.

In a separate vote, the senate voted 42 to 36 not to bar Rousseff from public office for eight years.

………

Despite never losing an election, Rousseff – who first won power in 2010 – had seen her support among the public and in congress diminish as a result of a sharp economic decline, government paralysis and a massive bribery scandal that has implicated almost all the major parties.

For more than 10 months, the leftist leader fought efforts to impeach her for frontloading funds for government social programmes and issuing spending budget decrees without congressional approval ahead of her reelection in 2014. The opposition claimed that these constituted a “crime of responsibility”. Rousseff denies this and claims the charges – which were never levelled at previous administrations who did the same thing – have been trumped up by opponents who were unable to accept the Workers’ party’s victory.

………

In keeping with her pledge to fight until the end for the 54 million voters who put her in office, Rousseff – a former Marxist guerrilla – ended her presidency this week with a gritty 14-hour defence of her government’s achievements and a sharply worded attack on the “usurpers” and “coup-mongers” who ejected her from power without an election.

Her lawyer, José Eduardo Cardozo, said the charges were trumped up to punish the president’s support for a huge corruption investigation that has snared many of Brazil’s elite. This follows secret recordings of Romero Jucá, the majority leader of the senate and a key Temer ally, plotting to remove the president to halt the Lava Jato (car wash) investigation into kickbacks at state oil company Petrobras.

While Rousseff was in the upper chamber, her critics heard her in respectful silence. But in a final session in her absence on Tuesday, they lined up to condemn her. As in an earlier lower house impeachment debate, the senators – many of whom are accused of far greater crimes – clearly revelled in the spotlight of their ten-minute declarations. Reflecting the growing power of rightwing evangelism, many invoked the name of God. One cited Winston Churchill. Another sang. Another appeared to be in tears.

And the right wingers who seized power are already trying to do their best to f%$# the poor by rolling back social programs.

This is ugly, and I only see this as getting uglier.

I am Both Horrified and Impressed

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When Donald Trump said that he would make Mexico pay for a border wall between the two countries.

I figure that he was engaging in classical Trump bullsh%$, but he has now said how this. Specifically, he has said that will hold remittances to Mexico hostage to get concessions:

New Delhi, Beijing, Manila and Paris may want to sit up and take notice. Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump plans to make Mexico pay for the wall:he intends to build on the United States’ southern border by cutting off remittances – transfer of money by a foreign worker to his home country – till it coughs up the lolly.

This unprecedented threat – detailed in a two-page memo Donald Trump+ has drawn up – could decimate the Mexican economy, which receives around $24 billion annually in remittances, and is the fifth largest remittance-receiving country in the world. The top four (for whom this should serve as a warning about the methods Trump would consider to settle accounts): India ($ 72 billion in remittances in 2015), China ($ 64 billion), Philippines ($ 30 billion), and France ($25 billion).

The memo, with the subject line “Compelling Mexico to Pay for the Wall,” offers an insight into the kind of bare-knuckle tactics Trump will employ to offset what he sees as economic injustice against the United States, including withholding of visas and trade tariffs.

”Our approvals of hundreds of thousands of visas every year is one of our greatest leverage points,” Trump writes. ”We also have leverage through business and tourist visas for important people in the Mexican economy.”

These remittances would account for about 2½% of Mexican GDP, so it would have a significant impact on the economy, particularly in rural and poor.

Note that I find this course of action, particularly with regard to the secondary effects, money transfer to Mexico would almost certainly go underground, creating a new profit center for various gangs, to be ill advised, but Trump actually does have a plan to accomplish this.  (And that’s ignoring the rather dire human consequences of this policy.)

That being said, there is a certain perverse elegance in the plan.

Not The Onion

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I have mentioned that this election season has me wanting to live in a cave until it is all over.

It appears that Vladimir Putin has found the current election insanity unsettling as well:

Vladimir Putin blasted both Donald Trump’s and Hillary Clinton’s tactics on the campaign trail but refused to publicly take sides in a U.S. presidential race in which he’s been accused of secretly favoring the New York real estate billionaire.

“They’re both using shock tactics, just each in their own way,” the Russian president said in an interview. “I don’t think they are setting the best example,” he added.

We have the two must unelectable candidates engaging in truly awful campaigns.

No matter who wins, the American people lose.

What a Surprise

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A school district in Marin County has been stripping resources from largely black schools to funnel them to a largely white charter school. This is a feature, not a bug

Members of the community and school officials will meet Wednesday evening to discuss a scathing report that found a Marin County school district has been funneling resources to a Sausalito charter school away from a nearby Marin City school that’s attended by a majority of black students, potentially segregating the schools in violation of federal civil rights laws.

The focus of the report, authored and issued this month by the state’s Fiscal Crisis & Management Assistance Team, adds to the problems facing the Sausalito Marin City School District, which boasts one K-8 school — Bayside Martin Luther King Jr. in Marin City — and was recently embarrassed when its superintendent resigned after being indicted in February on a felony charge in San Diego County.

In looking at the relationship between the district’s board and Sausalito’s Willow Creek Academy, an independent charter school attended by a majority of white students, investigators found that leaders of the charter school “exercise significant control” over most of the district’s board members, making for a “clearly biased financial arrangement” that benefits Willow Creek Academy.

Students at the underperforming Bayside MLK, meanwhile, continue to fall behind as money is diverted from the school to pay for the charter school.

One of the hidden appeals of the charter school movement that is its implication that they will resegregate public schools.

Once Again, Scalia Makes the World a Better Place by His Absence

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The Supreme Court will not allow North Carolina’s voter suppression law to be in force for election day. It was a 4-4 tie:

A deadlocked Supreme Court on Wednesday refused to revive parts of a restrictive North Carolina voting law that a federal appeals court had struck down as an unconstitutional effort to “target African Americans with almost surgical precision.”

The court was divided 4 to 4, with the court’s more conservative members voting to revive parts of the law. The court’s brief order included no reasoning.

North Carolina’s law, which imposed an array of voting restrictions, including new voter identification requirements, was enacted by the state’s Republican-controlled legislature in 2013. It was part of a wave of voting restrictions enacted after a 5-to-4 Supreme Court decision that effectively struck down a central part of the federal Voting Rights Act, weakening federal oversight of voting rights.

Challenges to the laws have met with considerable success in recent months, and Wednesday’s development suggested that the current eight-member Supreme Court is not likely to undo those victories.

If Scalia were still on the court, it would be gleefully reinventing Jim Crow.