One of the arguments for providing services and goods to people instead of money is that the direct provision of money leads to spending on bad things, think tobacco and alcohol.
It is increasingly common for governments to give poor people money. Rather than grant services or particular goods to those in poverty, such as food or housing, governments have found that it is more effective and efficient to simply hand out cash. In some cases, these cash transfers are conditional on doing something the government deems good, like sending your children to school or getting vaccinated. In other cases, they’re entirely unconditional. For decades, policymakers have been concerned that poor people will waste free money by using it on cigarettes and alcohol. A report on the perception of stakeholders in Kenya about such programs found a “widespread belief that cash transfers would either be abused or misdirected in alcohol consumption and other non-essential forms of consumption.” The opposite is true. A recently published research paper (paywall) by David Evans of the World Bank and Anna Popova of Stanford University shows that giving money to the poor has a negative effect on the consumption of tobacco and alcohol. Evans and Popova’s research is based on an examination of nineteen studies that assess the impact of cash transfers on expenditures of tobacco and alcohol. Not one of the 19 studies found that cash grants increase tobacco and alcohol consumption and many of them found that it leads to a reduction. ……… Why on earth would this be? Evans and Popova highlight several possibilities. One, the cash transfers may change a poor household’s economic calculus. Before receiving the cash, any spending on education or health might have seemed futile, but afterwards, parents might decide that a serious investment in their children’s school was sensible. To make this happen, it might mean cutting back on booze and smoking. ……… Regardless of why, the idea that poor people will use any cash they get for cigarettes and alcohol has been laid to waste.
Every year, wealthy countries spend billions of dollars to help the world’s poor, paying for cows, goats, seeds, beans, textbooks, business training, microloans, and much more. Such aid is designed to give poor people things they can’t afford or the tools and skills to earn more. Much of this aid undoubtedly works. But even when assistance programs accomplish things, they often do so in a tremendously expensive and inefficient way. Part of this is due to overhead, but overhead costs get far more attention than they deserve. More worrisome is the actual price of procuring and giving away goats, textbooks, sacks of beans, and the like. Most development agencies either fail to track their costs precisely or keep their accounting books confidential, but a number of candid organizations have opened themselves up to scrutiny. Their experiences suggest that delivering stuff to the poor is a lot more expensive than one might expect. Take cows. Many Western organizations give poor families livestock, along with training in how to raise and profit from the animals. Cows themselves usually cost no more than a few hundred dollars each, but delivering them — targeting recipients, administering the donations, transporting the animals — gets expensive. In West Bengal, India, for example, the nonprofit Bandhan spends $331 to get $166 worth of local livestock and other assets to the poor, according to a report by the rating agency Micro-Credit Ratings International. Yet even this program sounds like a bargain compared to others. In Rwanda, a study led by the economist Rosemary Rawlins found that the cost of donating a pregnant cow, with attendant training classes and support services, through the charity Heifer International can reach $3,000. ……… “Just give the poor cash” is an old refrain. What is new, however, is a burgeoning body of experimental evidence, produced by groups ranging from the nonprofit Innovations for Poverty Action to the World Bank, on how the effect of cash grants compares to that of in-kind donations. Recent studies have come to surprising conclusions, finding that typically lauded approaches to reducing poverty, such as educational and loan programs, are not so effective after all. One of the best examples is microloans, small, short-term loans to poor entrepreneurs. By opening up credit to people who were too poor to borrow from banks, the logic went, microfinance would give the poor the jump-start they needed to escape their plight. Beginning in the 1990s, the microcredit movement took the development world by storm, leading to a Nobel Peace Prize for the Bangladesh-based Grameen Bank in 2006.
As you might guess, microloans don’t show the results that grants do.
Neither do training programs, etc.
This is yet another reason why the Clinton’s gleeful destruction of the US Welfare program is so deeply contemptible: Not only did it make the poor worse off, it cost the rest of us more money to make the poor worse off.
I know a lot of people who hate this idea, and the studies that support it: A lot of them have a job delivering cows to poor people.
In September 2012, the amount the National Health Service (NHS) was charged for 100mg packs of anti-epilepsy drug phenytoin sodium went from £2.83 to £67.50 ($3.56 to $84.98), according to the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA). As a result of the price increase, NHS expenditure on the drug increased from about £2 million ($2.52M) a year in 2012 to around £50 million ($62.95M) in 2013. The CMA has ordered the two companies involved, the US pharma giant Pfizer and UK-based distributor Flynn Pharma, to pay record fines of £84.2 million ($106.01M) and £5.2 million ($6.55M) respectively, and to reduce their prices for phenytoin sodium. Both have said that they will be taking legal action to overturn the decision. Before September 2012, Pfizer sold the drug in capsule form to UK wholesalers and pharmacies under the brand name Epanutin, and the prices of the drug were regulated. That month, Pfizer sold the UK distribution rights for Epanutin to Flynn Pharma, which “de-branded” the drug. A spokesperson for the CMA explained in an e-mail to Ars what this meant in practice:
Prior to de-branding, Pfizer’s prices were governed by the Pharmaceutical Price Regulation Scheme (PPRS) which prevented any large prices increases. The PPRS applies only to branded products. After Flynn purchased the UK distribution rights from Pfizer, it de-branded the products. As de-branded (or genericised) products, the PPRS price controls did not apply, which allowed Flynn to charge whatever prices it wanted. De-branding did not have the consequence of increasing prices; rather it removed the PPRS restriction on Flynn increasing the prices. Normally, we would expect competition to lead to the price of a generic product to fall. However, the characteristics of this drug—i.e. the constraints on switching patients to other drugs—mean that did not occur.
In response to the complaints of the pharm pig-felchers, CMA replied:
In response to this, the CMA spokesperson told Ars: “the fact that other companies may have been charging high prices does not entitle Pfizer and Flynn to charge excessive and unfair prices.”
This is an attitude that is unthinkable in the United States.
If Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren, and Keith Ellison, and their fellow travelers can make people think in terms of unfair and excessive prices, the battle is already half won.
The neoliberal “Washington consensus”, which seems to be composed of equal parts Ayn Rand and hypocrisy, needs to be overthrown.
For the first time in more than two decades, life expectancy for Americans declined last year — a troubling development linked to a panoply of worsening health problems in the United States. Rising fatalities from heart disease and stroke, diabetes, drug overdoses, accidents and other conditions caused the lower life expectancy revealed in a report released Thursday by the National Center for Health Statistics. In all, death rates rose for eight of the top 10 leading causes of death. “I think we should be very concerned,” said Princeton economist Anne Case, who called for thorough research on the increase in deaths from heart disease, the No. 1 killer in the United States. “This is singular. This doesn’t happen.” A year ago, research by Case and Angus Deaton, also an economist at Princeton, brought worldwide attention to the unexpected jump in mortality rates among white middle-aged Americans. That trend was blamed on what are sometimes called diseases of despair: overdoses, alcoholism and suicide. The new report raises the possibility that major illnesses may be eroding prospects for an even wider group of Americans.
………
The number of unintentional injuries — which include overdoses from drugs, alcohol and other chemicals, as well as motor vehicle crashes and other accidents — climbed to more than 146,000 in 2015 from slightly more than 136,000 in 2014. Public health authorities have been grappling with an epidemic of overdoses from prescription narcotics, heroin and fentanyl in recent years. Xu said overdose statistics were not yet ready to be released to the public.
I would note that at least one of those, “diseases of despair,” overdoses is being driven by our regulators allowing Pharma to both misrepresent the benefits and risks of opioids and aggressively promote their dangerous products.
Monopoly rents, and the ability of the powerful to loot our society may be nearing the point where we experience something akin to the destruction of the Soviet Union.
I would also note that Obamacare doesn’t seem to help, but that is not surprising: High deductible plans that are beloved of the experts, because it means that people have “skin in the game”, have been shown not to produce the desired effect: Consumers shopping for cheaper healthcare.
Instead they lead to people avoiding early, and less expensive, medical interventions.
The Rich Can’t Save Us (Jacobin) After running the worst Presidential campaign in US history, (she lost to Trump, QED) the Hillary camp is still trying to get money from rich donors. Also: David Brock needs a boot to the ass.
Diane Hessan worked the Hillary Clinton campaign, and she followed a few hundred undecided voters for the months before the election.
She went back through her notes, and discovered what the turning point was, and interestingly enough, it was when Hillary was at her most authentic and honest:
……… Last week, I reread all of my notes. There was one moment when I saw more undecided voters shift to Trump than any other, when it all changed, when voters began to speak differently about their choice. It wasn’t FBI Director James Comey, Part One or Part Two; it wasn’t Benghazi or the e-mails or Bill Clinton’s visit with Attorney General Loretta Lynch on the tarmac. No, the conversation shifted the most during the weekend of Sept. 9, after Clinton said, “You can put half of Trump supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables.” All hell broke loose. George told me that his neighborhood was outraged, that many of his hard-working, church-going, family-loving friends resented being called that name. He told me that he looked up the word in the dictionary, and that it meant something so bad that there is no hope, like the aftermath of a tsunami. You know, he said, Clinton ended up being the biggest bully of them all. Whereas Trump bullied her, she bullied Wilkes Barre.
She told something like half the country that she loathed them, and for once they believed her.
She is an avatar of the that right-wing subset of the Democratic Party that believes that if your life is tough, it’s because you were too lazy to get into Yale, and any issues that might have arisen from the increasing of multinational labor arbitrage, the assault on unions, deregulation, and the financialization of the economy is your own damn fault.
You can call it the DLC wing of the party, or the New Dem wing of the party, or the Blue Dog wing of the party, or the Bob Rubin part of the party, of Republican Lite.
The nation’s health insurers, resigned to the idea that Republicans will repeal the Affordable Care Act, on Tuesday publicly outlined for the first time what the industry wants to stay in the state marketplaces, which have provided millions of Americans with insurance under the law. The insurers, some which have already started leaving the marketplaces because they are losing money, say they need a clear commitment from the Trump administration and congressional leaders that the government will continue offsetting some costs for low-income people. They also want to keep in place rules that encourage young and healthy people to sign up, which the insurers say are crucial to a stable market for individual buyers. ……… On Tuesday, Marilyn Tavenner, the chief executive of America’s Health Insurance Plans, a leading industry trade group, warned that the state marketplaces were already on unstable financial footing. Failing to continue the funding aimed at low-income Americans, she said, would have far-reaching consequences because the business would become much tougher for insurers. ……… Hospital groups also held a news conference on Tuesday to warn of what they said would be the dire financial consequences of a repeal if the cuts to hospital funding that were part of the Affordable Care Act were not also restored. ……… Ms. Tavenner did not give many details about her group’s positions, but she said its top priority was to stop the immediate threat of eliminating the subsidies for plans sold to low-income people. House Republicans have already sued to block these payments, and the lawsuit is now delayed. If the new administration chose not to defend the lawsuit, the money would disappear, and insurers would probably rush to the exits because fewer potential customers would be available. Another of the industry’s concerns is ensuring that enough young and healthy people sign up to stabilize the market. Republicans have discussed eliminating one of the law’s main tools, the so-called individual mandate, a tax levied on those who do not enroll. In talking with Congress, Ms. Tavenner said, her members are emphasizing the need for some alternative, especially after criticism by insurers that the penalty is not large enough to persuade enough people to enroll. “There’s not one magic solution,” she said. She pointed to some of the provisions in Medicare that encourage people to sign up before they become sick. And she discussed some options to ease how insurers price their policies to be able to offer plans that are less expensive to younger people. She also argued that the insurers had no desire to return to the time before the law was passed, when people with pre-existing conditions were routinely denied coverage in the individual market.
So basically, they want the subsidies, marketplaces, and mandates, but apart from that they are fine with whatever is done.
Of course, subsidies, marketplaces, and mandates are Obamacare: The rest is commentary.*
Why do I have to qualify this to say that this is not a parody?
Ummm….Because the former wrestling executive, and some time performer has graced us with performances like this: (click through if the GIF doesn’t animate).
She’s shown kicking husband Vince McMahon in the cojones. (It’s fake, pro wrestling is fake, and if you observe carefully, you can see how they set up the whole stunt so that no one is actually hurt)
About the only thing that could make this worse, and more undignified, would if pro wrestling were real.
Earlier this week, Texas officials finalized a set of rules requiring funeral services for fetuses in what many see as a transparent and particularly callous ploy to restrict abortion access in the state. In response, Satanic Temple spokesperson Jex Blackmore has announced plans to engage in a crass counter-attack.
Having mailed a ejaculate-covered sock to Texas Governor Greg Abbott, along with a handwritten note that says, “These r babies. Plz bury,” Blackmore is publicly encouraging others to send Governor Abbott semen-encrusted materials of their own (or, for those wary of sending bodily fluids through the mail, items coated in non-seminal-but-semen-esque substances).
According to Blackmore, this campaign, which is evocatively titled “Cumrags for Congress,” is meant to expose the absurdity of forcing people to treat fetal tissue as human remains. (Lucien Greaves, another spokesperson for the organization, tells Broadly that the campaign isn’t officially endorsed or encouraged by the Satanic Temple.) “The concept of the state mandating a non-medical ritual as part of the abortion procedure is offensive and crude, essentially demanding that all citizens adopt the moral, philosophical opinion that fetal tissue is comparable to a living human,” she tells Broadly. “Fetal tissue has the ‘potential’ to become a human, but is not a human yet, does not have consciousness, and cannot exist without the mother host.” She points out that semen and ova have the potential to become human life, yet “we do not mourn every ejaculation.”
I am not a usually big fan of guerilla theater, but the Church of Satan has been doing some magnificent trolling lately.
Politicians have exempted themselves from Britain’s new wide-ranging spying laws.
The Investigatory Powers Act, which has just passed into law, brings some of the most extreme and invasive surveillance powers ever given to spies in a democratic state. But protections against those spying powers have been given to MPs.
For most people, that warrant can be issued by a secretary of state. Applications are sent to senior ministers who can then approve either a targeted interception warrant or a targeted examination warrant, depending on what information the agency applying for the warrant – which could be anyone from a huge range of organisations – wants to see.
But for members of parliament and other politicians, extra rules have been introduced. Those warrants must also be approved by the prime minister.
That rule applies not only to members of the Westminster parliament but alos [sic] politicians in the devolved assembly and members of the European Parliament.
Lovely: Politicians are saying “Rule of law for me, but not for thee.”
Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine are throwing a party at the Plaza hotel on Dec. 15 to thank those who donated millions to the campaign. The party will be held in the Grand Ballroom on the third floor, to honor the Hillary for America finance leadership council. Guests expected are big bundlers including Harvey Weinstein, Anna Wintour, Alan Patricof, Tory Burch and Marc Lasry. One insider said, “Hopefully there’s no balconies so nobody can jump.”
Hopefully, there is a balcony, and they will ALL jump.
Stegosaurus is world-famous for its lime-sized brain and the quartet of nasty-looking spikes on its tail. A 1982 “Far Side” strip decided to have a little fun with the latter attribute. In that cartoon, we find an early human anachronistically lecturing his fellow cavemen about dinosaur-related hazards. Pointing at the rear end of a Stegosaurus diagram, he says “Now this end is called the thagomizer … after the late Thag Simmons.” Without meaning to, Larson’s strip plugged a gap in the scientific lexicon. Previously, nobody had ever given a name to the unique arrangement of tail spikes found on Stegosaurus and its relatives. But today, many paleontologists use the word “thagomizer” when describing this apparatus, even in scientific journals.
This is so full of awesome that there is a risk of injury.
What if Texas blew billions of dollars because someone misread an obscure business report 15 years ago?
n March, the Observertook a close look at the state’s largest corporate welfare program, the Texas Economic Development Act, which is meant to attract new business to the state by offering companies big breaks on their property tax bills. The program, often called “Chapter 313” after its place in the tax code, was born 15 years ago out of a fear that Texas was losing its competitive edge to Louisiana, Arizona and other states with generous incentives. As we wrote in March:
For years, Texas had been a perennial finalist for the Governor’s Cup, awarded annually by Site Selection magazine to the state with the year’s most million-dollar development projects. But by 2000, Texas had dropped to 37th.
That was a key piece of evidence used by proponents of the program to sway lawmakers. First cited at a committee meeting at the Capitol in 2001, the No. 37 ranking was later repeated by lawmakers, nonprofits and media outlets (including this one) dozens of times.
……… Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick included a review of the Chapter 313 program in his interim charges for the Legislature, and the Senate Committee on Natural Resources and Economic Development released its findings in mid-November. The report is critical of the program for a number of reasons, but its greatest revelation is that Chapter 313 was initially sold to lawmakers on a lie — or, at least, a typo. ……… “The unavoidable conclusion,” according to the report, “is that the case for passing the largest economic development incentive program in the State’s history may have been based on the fear incited by a magazine’s typographical error.”
Of course, spending taxpayer money on rich people is a part of Texas’ political DNA.
I wonder how much we would have to pay Mexico to take it back.
While congressional Democrats were certainly slow to come to grips with Donald Trump’s election and therefore appeared hesitant to back the calls for resistance that flooded the streets in major American cities in the immediate aftermath, they’ve since embraced their role as the loyal opposition. But even as most Senate Democrats gear up for confirmation battles with a whole host of questionable Trump Cabinet picks, some of their Democratic colleagues are already willing to kowtow to the president-elect’s most fundamental decisions.
……… Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown argued for a strategy of Democratic obstruction to a Trump agenda by pointing to Republicans’ past intransigence. “We’re going to help them confirm their nominees, many of whom are disqualified? It’s not obstruction, it’s not partisan, it’s just a duty to find out what they’d do in these jobs,” he said. Brown pointed out that Republicans have “been rewarded for stealing a Supreme Court justice,” referring to the nearly yearlong delay of hearings on President Obama’s nominee to succeed deceased Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia. Still, nearly all the five Democratic senators facing re-election in 2018 in states that strongly supported Trump — by 19 percentage points or more — apparently disagree with their more progressive colleagues and have rushed to signal their willingness to cooperate with the new regime. “That’s just bullsh%$,” West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, [Whose daughter was (until it became public0 given a phoney degree and also runs Mylan which gouges people on EpiPens] whose state supported Trump by 42 percent, said of his fellow Democrats’ strategy of opposition. “I’m going to help [Trump] when I can. But I’m going to be holding him accountable when I need to,” he added.
“When I need to,” means “I will never hold him accountable.”
North Dakota Sen. Heidi Heitkamp was quick to suggest that she is ready to work with Republicans on legislation to invest in “clean coal” technologies, as she praised a decision to boot oil pipeline protesters from Standing Rock. Heitkamp was one of the first Democrats to meet with the president-elect and his transition team at Trump Tower last week. Trump won North Dakota by more than 36 points and there’s speculation he is considering Heitkamp for secretary of agriculture or energy.
Supporting police brutality against Indian protestors forever. Gotta love it.
Indiana Sen. Joe Donnelly, who is also up for re-election in 2018 and who represents a state that went for Trump by 19.3 percentage points, has already said he is ready to work with the incoming Trump administration on military mental health care issues, curbing the exodus of U.S. jobs to foreign countries and combating the opioid epidemic. “We can’t just say ‘no’ because the idea comes from the other side of the aisle,” argued Montana Sen. Jon Tester last week. Tesler has long signaled a willingness to work with Trump. He chairs the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee that failed to orchestrate his party’s wresting control of the upper chamber from the GOP. In May, Tesler said about Trump that “he’s got some pretty goofy opinions, but hopefully we’ve got some stuff we can work on,” Tesler is now up for re-election in a state that preferred Trump by 20 points.
I have identified the differences between conservative Democrats and liberal (moderate) Republicans:
A liberal (moderate) Republican will:
Talk about the need to work across the aisle.
Plead for moderation.
Chastise his party for extremism.
Sometimes vote against his party.
When the vote is close, and it is important, he will vote with the Republicans.
A conservative Democrat will:
Talk about the need to work across the aisle.
Plead for moderation.
Chastise his party for extremism.
Sometimes vote against his party.
When the vote is close, and it is important, he will vote with the Republicans.
So-called experts are puzzled as to why voters, “Vote against their own interests,” for Republicans.
It’s simple: With people like this in our party leadership, they know that we’ll never deliver on promises to make their lives better.
Hell, Hillary Clinton’s whole f%$#ing campaign was a promise not to make ordinary folks’ lives better, and we saw how well THAT worked out.
You know, if I were in the business of, “Draining the swamp,” I would start in the places that a most obviously mixture of muck and water that risk sucking people under.
At the top of that list is that large funny shaped building across the Potomac from the Jefferson Memorial:
The Pentagon has buried an internal study that exposed $125 billion in administrative waste in its business operations amid fears Congress would use the findings as an excuse to slash the defense budget, according to interviews and confidential memos obtained by The Washington Post.
Pentagon leaders had requested the study to help make their enormous back-office bureaucracy more efficient and reinvest any savings in combat power. But after the project documented far more wasteful spending than expected, senior defense officials moved swiftly to kill it by discrediting and suppressing the results.
The report, issued in January 2015, identified “a clear path” for the Defense Department to save $125 billion over five years. The plan would not have required layoffs of civil servants or reductions in military personnel. Instead, it would have streamlined the bureaucracy through attrition and early retirements, curtailed high-priced contractors and made better use of information technology.
High-priced contractors is how DoD officials and General Officers insure that they have a comfortable retirement: If you overpay private players for stuff you should do yourself, when it comes time to retire, you get a very respectable sinecure from those same contractors.
………
The data showed that the Defense Department was paying a staggering number of people — 1,014,000 contractors, civilians and uniformed personnel — to fill back-office jobs far from the front lines. That workforce supports 1.3 million troops on active duty, the fewest since 1940. ……… or the military, the major allure of the study was that it called for reallocating the $125 billion for troops and weapons. Among other options, the savings could have paid a large portion of the bill to rebuild the nation’s aging nuclear arsenal, or the operating expenses for 50 Army brigades. But some Pentagon leaders said they fretted that by spotlighting so much waste, the study would undermine their repeated public assertions that years of budget austerity had left the armed forces starved of funds. Instead of providing more money, they said, they worried Congress and the White House might decide to cut deeper. So the plan was killed. The Pentagon imposed secrecy restrictions on the data making up the study, which ensured no one could replicate the findings. A 77-page summary report that had been made public was removed from a Pentagon website. ……… Afterward, board members briefed Work. They were expecting an enthusiastic response, but the deputy defense secretary looked uneasy, according to two people who were present. He singled out a page in the report. Titled “Warfighter Currency,” it showed how saving $125 billion could be redirected to boost combat power. The money could cover the operational costs for 50 Army brigades, or 3,000 F-35 Joint Strike Fighters for the Air Force, or 10 aircraft-carrier strike groups for the Navy. “This is what scares me,” he said, according to the two people present. Work explained he was worried Congress might see it as an invitation to strip $125 billion from the defense budget and spend it somewhere else. ……… In briefings that month, uniformed military leaders were receptive at first. They had long groused that the Pentagon wasted money on a layer of defense bureaucracies — known as the Fourth Estate — that were outside the control of the Army, Air Force and Navy. Military officials often felt those agencies performed duplicative services and oversight. But the McKinsey consultants had also collected data that exposed how the military services themselves were spending princely sums to hire hordes of defense contractors. For example, the Army employed 199,661 full-time contractors, according to a confidential McKinsey report obtained by The Post. That alone exceeded the combined civil workforce for the Departments of State, Agriculture, Commerce, Education, Energy, and Housing and Urban Development.
As I noted above, these contracts are a part of the system of back end bribery that permeates our government:
Give goodies to contractors
Retire
Get a good paying not particularly rigorous job so that they next guy in your position knows which side his bread is buttered on.
???
Profit!†
At some point, this whole rotten edifice is going to collapse like a bunch of overcooked broccoli.
*I would like to offer my sincere and heartfelt apology to whoever plays the tuba in the Marine Corps band: I was a bit drunk when I took a crap in it. †Underpants gnomes, dude, underpants gnomes. Get with the program.
Yes, I am aware that this is a very high bar to clear, but there is no competition here, Carol Felsenthal, writing for Chicago magazine, has made the most mind bogglingly moronic political analysis of this political season.
Baldrick would say that, “It’s so cunning that you could put a tail on it and call it a weasel.”
Blackadder would say, “Your brain for example- is brain’s so minute ……… that if a hungry cannibal cracked your head open, there wouldn’t be enough to cover a small water biscuit.”
Not that he asked me, but here’s some advice for Rahm Emanuel: Run for the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee. The new DNC chairman will be elected when all 447 members meet on February 24, but the auditions are on right now. Get in the mix. Get out of Dodge. Leave behind the burden of running a city tortured by homicides that this year top 700 with a month to go. Leave behind the stubborn unpopularity with African Americans who make up one third of the city’s population. (Even before Laquan McDonald became a household name in Chicago, Rahm’s support among African Americans was eight percent.)
When I first read this, I thought that it was a joke.
I could not believe that anyone was that profoundly and deeply stupid.
If you read the comments, this opinion is nearly universally shared, with such comments as, “Why not Zoidberg?”
The article is garbage, but the comments are amusing.
A jury deadlocked Monday in the case of a former South Carolina police officer charged with murder after he was recorded on video last year firing a barrage of bullets at the back of Walter Scott, a fleeing driver, in one of the most high-profile shootings to rattle the nation in recent years. “We as the jury regret to inform the court that despite the best efforts of all members, we are unable to come to a unanimous decision,” the jury wrote in a note that Circuit Court Judge Clifton Newman read aloud in the courtroom. Newman declared a mistrial shortly before 3:40 p.m. and thanked the jurors for their “hard work in trying to reach a unanimous verdict in this case.” Prosecutors as well as attorneys for Michael Slager, the former officer, also thanked the jurors for their effort in the case. Several jurors wiped tears from their eyes as Newman made his announcement following more than 20 hours of deliberations. It was the second time in a matter of weeks that a mistrial was declared in a case involving an officer charged with murder after being recorded shooting someone, following a similar outcome in Ohio last month. Prosecutors in South Carolina, echoing their counterparts in Ohio, vowed to seek another trial for Slager. ……… “I was scared,” Slager said during the trial, holding back tears. He described feeling “total fear that Mr. Scott was coming toward me.” The video showed Scott’s back to the officer as he fired the fatal shots. Slager said that while he tried to subdue Scott, the driver had grabbed the Taser during a struggle over the device. ……… In the footage that captured Scott’s death, Slager could be seen placing an item — his Taser — near Scott’s body after the shooting.
Slager shot Scott repeatedly in the back, and as he was lyuing on the ground dying, he dropped his taser next to the body, much in the same way that cops have, since time immemorial, carried a throw away gun to make a bad shoot look good.
Not only is it clear that shooting was unnecessary, the perp was a cop which means that he has extensive training about the use of force.
Much like a boxer can be charged with assault with a deadly weapon for punching someone, a cop needs to be held to a higher standard in their application of violence.
The jury’s foreman, the panel’s only black member, said in a separate note that the group was mostly in agreement that Mr. Slager should be convicted: “It’s just one juror that has the issues.” The foreman also said: “That juror needs to leave. He is having issues.”
Yeah, he was having issues convicting a white man for killing a black man.
Matteo Renzi was roundly defeated in a referendum to change Italy’s constitution, marking a major victory for anti-establishment and rightwing parties and plunging the eurozone’s third largest economy into political chaos.
The prime minister conceded defeat in an emotional speech at his residence, Palazzo Chigi, and said he would submit his resignation to Italy’s president, Sergio Mattarella, on Monday afternoon.
“My experience in government ends here … I did all I could to bring this to victory,” Renzi said. “If you fight for an idea, you cannot lose.”
It was a not an unexpected defeat but it was nevertheless a humiliating one, with about 60% of Italians voting against the proposed reforms, which would have made sweeping changes to Italy’s constitution and parliamentary system. Pointing to the high voter turnout – about 68% of eligible voters cast ballots in the referendum – Renzi said the vote represented a “feast of democracy”.
………
The prime minister, who started his political career as the mayor of Florence and was the youngest-ever prime minister when he assumed office in 2014, made constitutional reform a central plank of his premiership and argued for months that the changes would make Italy more stable and likely to adopt tough-but-needed economic and labour policies.
For the uninitiated , the phrase, “Adopt tough-but-needed economic and labour policies,” translates to “F%$# the ordinary working man like a drunk sorority girl.”
And once again, the response of the ruling elites is to see how they can game the system to make sure that they don’t have to face the fallout of their own failures, “The immediate task facing the current government – with or without Renzi – will be to pass a change in the electoral law that will make it far more difficult for either the Five Star Movement or the Northern League to win strong majorities in the parliament in the next election.”
Once again, this is all about the “Brussel’s Class” dividing up the spoils.
The EU has moved toward unification too quickly, it has decided that democratic opposition to its agenda is to be crushed, and the Germans are running the show.
It is a toxic and self-destructive mix, and it likely will force the collapse of the EU.
Donald Trump has just 
