Year: 2016

Insanity Is Defined as Doing the Same Thing over and over Again and Expecting Different Results

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Barack Obama has decided that terrorizing the population of Yemen with drones, and allowing the House of Saud to indiscriminately bomb civilians is a successful antiterrorism strategy.

The net effect has been to quadrupling the size of al Qaeda in Yemen:

On September 10, 2014, President Obama gave a speech advocating for the same kind of approach to counterterrorism against ISIL his Administration had been using with Yemen (and Somalia).

………

Today, the Soufan Group wrote up an alarming detail from the State Department Country Report on Terrorism for last year: AQAP has quadrupled in size since Obama’s speech.

This is what happens you have a failed policy, and you stick with the conventional wisdom.

It is a failure of intellect.

It is a failure of imagination.

It is an unalloyed failure.

Some Chart Pr0n that Explains Why So the Voters are Pissed Off

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This table shows it all. (click on the picture for a larger popup)

Basically, it shows that the wealthy and powerful have become even more wealthy and powerful by stealing from the rest of us.

Even if people don’t know the actual numbers, they know that our society has descended into a morass of, “Crony capitalism, pay-to-play politics, [and] special interests,” that have further enriched the rich and their pet politicians.

It’s why populism on both sides of the political has been so popular lately.

Mme. la Guillotine is looking increasingly attractive to a lot of people for this reason.

H/t naked capitalism.

Thanks Duncan.

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Ever since the Reagan administration, the “Very Serious People” VSPs in Washington, DC have tried to find a way to cut/privatize Social Security.

For the first time in recent political memory, expansion of Social Security has become a top of serious discussion, and the impetus for this came from one person, Duncan “Atrios” Black:

In May 2012, ABC broke into its daytime coverage to show President Obama endorsing same-sex marriage, the culmination of years of activist work to take the idea from the radical fringe into the mainstream. We saw an economic version of that this week, and while none of the networks fired up their “Breaking News” graphics for it, the impact on society could be just as large, and the people who helped make it happen should be just as lauded.

 “It’s time we finally made Social Security more generous,” said the president in Elkhart, Indiana, to applause, “and increased its benefits so that today’s retirees and future generations get the dignified retirement that they’ve earned.” This was totally unexpected: We knew the Elkhart speech was about the economy, but we didn’t know Obama would concur with a rallying cry on the left for several years now: Expand Social Security.

 This movement crystallized from research into the looming retirement crisis. Too many Americans are headed into their golden years without nearly the kind of savings needed to maintain their standard of living. And their defined-benefit pensions have gradually transitioned into defined-contribution plans like 401(k)s, which have rewarded Wall Street with hidden and excessive fees while eating away at individual gains. The change also shifted market risks from employers onto employees, who must hope to avoid a drop in stocks as they hit retirement age.

 ………

 Despite all this, the initial impulse from the Obama administration was to use Social Security cuts as a bargaining chip in a larger deal with Republicans. Grand bargain talks from 2011 to 2013 repeatedly invoked a different way to calculate the consumer price index (known as “chained CPI”), which would have resulted in $1,000 less a year for the average 85-year-old. Obama put chained CPI in his fiscal year 2014 budget.

 Contrary to some after-the-fact snickering, this was a very credible threat, and it allowed Republicans to point to a Democratic president favoring entitlement cuts. Only the Tea Party’s unwillingness to consider anything resembling a compromise saved retirees from cuts.

 At first, liberal groups played defense on chained CPI, accustomed to mobilizing in opposition rather than staking out a bolder claim. But the expansion movement can really be traced back to one blogger: Duncan Black, popularly known as “Atrios,” who waged an initially lonely crusade in a series of 2012 columns in USA Today, explaining why the retirement crisis was coming and how expanding Social Security represented the cleanest solution.

………

 Lawmakers followed the rank and file consensus. Elizabeth Warren jumped aboard the Harkin bill in late 2013. A House bill quickly got dozens of co-sponsors. Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who holds down the conservative wing of the Democratic Party, endorsed an expansion amendment. Bernie Sanders made it a campaign plank, one that Hillary Clinton eventually had to endorse, albeit in a more targeted fashion.

 Now President Obama, who started this all by embracing the opposite position years ago, has explicitly endorsed the expansion of Social Security. This victory is a great credit to Duncan Black and everyone who moved a minority opinion in the corridors of power in the Democratic Party into the mainstream.

(emphasis mine)

Obama was dragged kicking and screaming into this.  So is Hillary Clinton.

He has seen cutting Social Security as a major legacy goal since he entered office in 2009: He thought could show himself reaching across the aisle if he could ground the proverbial “3rd rail” of American politics.

Thankfully, he was foiled by the Teabaggers in Congress, just as Bill Clinton effort to privatize Social Security was foiled by Gingrich’s impeachment efforts in the late 1990s.

Duncan Black has done this country a service by short-circuiting the efforts of the Wall Street wing of the Democratic Party to divert money from retirees unto the the pockets of the banksters.

So Not Surprised

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It turns out that our attempt to create a viable Iraqi military has largely failed:

A 17-month U.S. effort to retrain and reunify Iraq’s regular army has failed to create a large number of effective Iraqi combat units or limit the power of sectarian militias, according to current and former U.S. military and civilian officials.

Concern about the shortcomings of the American attempt to strengthen the Iraqi military comes as Iraqi government forces and Shi’ite militias have launched an offensive to retake the city of Falluja from Islamic State. Aid groups fear the campaign could spark a humanitarian catastrophe, as an estimated 50,000 Sunni civilians remain trapped in the besieged town.

The continued weakness of regular Iraqi army units and reliance on Shi’ite militias, current and former U.S. military officials said, could impede Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi’s broader effort to defeat Islamic State and win the long-term support of Iraqi Sunnis. The sectarian divide between the majority Shi’ite and minority Sunni communities threatens to split the country for good.

………

Retired U.S. Lieutenant General Mick Bednarek, who commanded the U.S. military training effort in Iraq from 2013 to 2015, said the Iraqi army has not improved dramatically in the past eight months. He blamed a variety of problems, from a lack of Iraqis wanting to join the military to the resistance of some lower-level Iraqi officers to sending units to American training.

This is not a surprise.

Iraq was always a country loosely stitched together by the diktat of the new colonial rulers of the region following the First World War, and the invasion knocked Humpty Dumpty off of that wall, and we cannot put him back together again.

Peter Thiel’s America

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There are a lot of people out there who support Peter Thiel using his billions to harass Gawker through the legal process because they and its founder and CEO Nick Denton are bad people who practice shallow gossip journalism.

Well, this sort of action most often cuts against ordinary citizens who choose to raise their voices against the powerful as is shown in the case of the $30,000,000.00 lawsuit against activists in Uniontown, Alabam who have the temerity to object to Green Group Holdings and Howling Coyote’s poisoning their water by dumping of millions of pounds of toxic coal ash there:

“We all should have the right to clean air and clean water.”

Would you agree with that sentence? Would you say it yourself? It seems uncontroversial — something kids might be taught in school. Something any of us might say without blinking an eye. Unless, that is, you happened to say it in Uniontown, Alabama — an overwhelmingly Black and poor rural town in the heart of the South’s Black Belt. In Uniontown, it turns out that having the audacity to fight for your fundamental human rights — for instance, by saying the exact sentence above — can get you sued for $30 million in federal court by companies seeking to silence their critics.

………

Fighting for justice in Uniontown means opposing the trains that roll into town carrying hazardous coal ash from 33 states to deposit it at the Arrowhead landfill — a dump bewilderingly located in a residential neighborhood, near wetlands, within this spacious county full of rolling fields and open space. It means worrying about the safety of that coal ash — the very same coal ash that catastrophically leaked out of a Tennessee facility in 2008 and destroyed the surrounding environment before it was hurriedly redirected to Uniontown.

………

In the lawsuit, Green Group and Howling Coyote claim that by advocating against hazardous waste in their town, Esther, Ben, Mary, and Ellis have engaged in “defamation” that’s harmed them to the tune of a cool $30 million. But the only harm evident in this lawsuit is the gripping terror that average citizens — not scientists or paid policy wonks — feel after being sued for millions for speaking their truth in order to protect their community. Fortunately, the First Amendment protects a person’s right to do precisely what Esther, Ben, Mary, and Ellis have so bravely done.

Think again about that sentence: We all should have the right to clean air and clean water. Would you say it if you knew a powerful corporation would sue you for (more than) everything you’ve got? No one should have to make that choice.

The law in this case may focus on the First Amendment, but the story of Esther, Ben, Mary, and Ellis is one about racial justice. In Uniontown, racial justice means environmental justice. And the road to justice starts with voices calling out injustice. The ACLU is representing [6] Esther, Ben, Mary, and Ellis to make sure their voices are not silenced.

This is exactly the same thing that Peter Thiel is doing.

The only difference is that these companies are not attempting to claim that this is some sort of act of philanthropy, as the PayPal founder does.

These are all SLAPP suits, and they are all profoundly corrupting and profoundly evil.

Today In Idiocy

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1,014 Miles Distance Might Explain the Coverage

Over at Tablet Magazine,Yair Rosenberg wonders what sort of liberal antisemitism makes The New York Times condemn single sex hours at a Brooklyn swimming pool for Orthodox Jews, but say nothing at all about a similar program for Muslims in Minneapolis.

Ummmm….Here is a clue: One happened in Minneapolis, the other in Brooklyn. Why would the New York Times would take more interest in one than the other?

Perhaps because one is happening in New York, the Times home town and the other is happening a about 1,014 miles away as the crow flies?

Mr. Rosenberg, were you dropped on your head as a youth?

I Have an Irresistable Urge to Live in a Cave for the Next 5 Months

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It appears that a low level Bernie Sanders staffer was doing advance work for a rally in California, and was looking at holding the event at an airport.

It turns out that there was a sky diving concern there, and said staffer name dropped to get a chance at doing a tandem jump with the proprietor of NorCal Skydiving, Jimmy Haliday.

This ended up with (I’m not joking here) international coverage about Bernie Sanders skydiving:

Bernie Sanders will not be skydiving into a California rally, as was briefly, but widely speculated on Friday.

Yet remarkably, it does seem that the Democratic presidential candidate’s campaign team explored the idea of parachuting the 74-year-old candidate into the event.

The unlikely rumor was widely shared on social media after a story in the Press Democrat, a local paper in northern California, suggested the Vermont senator might skydive at an evening rally hosted by a skydiving company at the Cloverdale Municipal airport, about 90 miles north of San Francisco.

The campaign was swift to shoot down the rumor. “Ha I wouldn’t count on it,” Sanders spokeswoman Sarah Ford texted the Guardian when asked for confirmation.

………

On Thursday, Halliday, whose business is renting out airport space to the campaign, even did a trial jump with a member of the Sanders team. “They tested me out … I kind of showed them what Bernie might expect.”

It appears that the staffer who jumped with Halliday was a (possibly overzealous) member of the campaign’s “advance team”, which scouts locations and prepares for rallies. It is unclear if queries about the senator jumping out of an aircraft were sanctioned by his campaign headquarters.

If you had any doubt, we are officially in the silly season, and it’s only going to get worse.

I just want to get away from it all until the damn election is over?

Anyone know of any AirBNB vacancies in Pyongyang?

I’m sick of this crap.

Your Daily Schadenfreude

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Elizabeth Holmes, CEO of Theranos has just had her personal wealth recomputed by Fortune. Yesterday,   it was $4,500,000,000.00 today it is $0.00:

Last year, Elizabeth Holmes topped the FORBES list of America’s Richest Self-Made Women with a net worth of $4.5 billion. Today, FORBES is lowering our estimate of her net worth to nothing. Theranos had no comment.

Our estimate of Holmes’ wealth is based entirely on her 50% stake in Theranos, the blood-testing company she founded in 2003 with plans of revolutionizing the diagnostic test market. Theranos shares are not traded on any stock market; private investors purchased stakes in 2014 at a price that implied a $9 billion valuation for the company.

Since then, Theranos has been hit with allegations that its tests are inaccurate and is being investigated by an alphabet soup of federal agencies. That, plus new information indicating Theranos’ annual revenues are less than $100 million, has led FORBES to come up with a new, lower estimate of Theranos’ value.

FORBES spoke to a dozen venture capitalists, analysts and industry experts and concluded that a more realistic value for Theranos is $800 million, rather than $9 billion. That gives the company credit for its intellectual property and the $724 million that it has raised, according to VC Experts, a venture capital research firm. It also represents a generous multiple of the company’s sales, which FORBES learned about from a person familiar with Theranos’ finances.

At such a low valuation, Holmes’ stake is essentially worth nothing. Theranos investors own preferred shares, which means they get paid back before Holmes, who owns common stock. According to VC Experts, investors in Theranos own a particular kind of preferred equity, called participating preferred shares, which take precedence to common stock in the event of a liquidation. FORBES is not aware of any plans to liquidate. If that were to happen, participating preferred investors would get their money back and more before Holmes gets a cent.

We now know the difference between a typical Silicon Valley company and one that actually has to produce a real physical product:  The emperor’s new clothes are revealed far sooner for the companies who make actuall “stuff”.

It appears that the medical testing industry does not lend itself to the “long con.”

I So Hope that the Banksters Lose This One

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Puerto Rico is in debt, and, as befitting their colonial status, they have very few options to renegotiate their debt. This is a fact of life for colonial societies: Debt peonage to your imperial masters.

That being said, and audit of Puerto Rico’s debt seems to indicate that many of the debts were issued illegally, and so the contracts under which the debt was issued, and hence the debt itself, may be unenforceable:

An audit report published on Thursday suggests that debt-laden Puerto Rico may be able to void some of its borrowing because politicians exceeded constitutional debt limits and their own authority. 

 The report, shared with MarketWatch, states that some of Puerto Rico’s debt may have been issued illegally, allowing the government to potentially declare the bonds invalid and courts to then decide that creditors’ claims are unenforceable. The scope of the audit report, issued by the island’s Public Credit Comprehensive Audit Commission, covers the two most recent full-faith-and-credit debt issues of the commonwealth: Puerto Rico’s 2014 $3.5 billion general-obligation bond offering and a $900 million issuance in 2015 of Tax Refund Anticipation Notes to a syndicate of banks led by J.P Morgan.

Money for those debt payments is not in the commonwealth’s proposed budget, either. On Tuesday Puerto Rico’s governor, Alejandro García Padilla, sent a proposed 2016-17 budget to the island’s legislature that provides for only $209 million of the $ 1.4 billion of current debt-service cost. As García Padilla told reporters at a news conference: “This is simple: either we pay Wall Street or we pay Puerto Ricans. If the legislature decides we pay Wall Street more, well, each has his responsibility. I will continue defending Puerto Ricans. Money I send to Wall Street, I do not have to provide services here.”  

………

The Puerto Rican constitution contains a balanced-budget clause that explicitly prohibits borrowing to finance operating deficits, but its politicians borrowed to cover deficit financing in its 2014 General Obligation Bond Offering, according to the commission’s initial review. The March 2014 General Obligation Bond states that the proceeds would be used in part to cover deficits that had accumulated and that were expected to occur in the year of the offering. The documents include a chart showing deficits financed with borrowing during the past and that were expected to recur.

In addition, Puerto Rico did not inform bondholders that its constitution forbids it from using debt to finance deficits. That, the commission’s report says suggests “substantive” noncompliance with the letter of the constitution.

The U.S. Supreme Court has said in the Litchfield v. Ballou case and, more recently, in litigation related to Detroit’s bankruptcy that borrowing above a debt ceiling may allow the issuer to declare debt invalid and, therefore, unpayable. Detroit went to court to invalidate $1.45 billion in certificates of participation, debt issued by two shell companies called “service corporations.” The parties settled before the case went to trial, but, while refusing two initial proposed settlements, the judge stated that Detroit’s argument had “substantial merit” and that the suit would have had a “reasonable likelihood of success.”

I really hope that the people of Puerto Rico win, and the bond holders lose.

This is Our Dystopian Future

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Couldn’t adjust my air conditioning today because my thermostat was offline. The future is amazing! pic.twitter.com/hlMgaImAiz

— Adam Driscoll (@adamdriscoll) May 31, 2016

People in tech talk about the “Internet of Things” all the time.

They think it will make our lives a paradise.

I think that it will mean that the technology will be less reliabl.

I am also not particularly keen on my regrigerator spying on me when I raid it at 1 in he morning. 

I want to be alone with my fruit stuffed pasties, thank you very much.

H/t naked capitalism.

Well, This is a Fine F%$# You

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The German Parliament just voted to recognize the Armenian Genocide, and Turkish President Erdogan’s head is exploding:

The German Parliament overwhelmingly adopted a symbolic but fraught resolution on Thursday declaring the killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks in 1915 a genocide, escalating tensions with Turkey at a diplomatically delicate juncture.

The Turkish government angrily denounced the vote as “null and void,” and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called his ambassador in Germany back to Ankara for consultations.

“The way to close the dark pages of your own history is not by defaming the histories of other countries with irresponsible and baseless decisions,” Turkey’s foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, wrote on Twitter. In Ankara, Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said, “There is no shameful incident in our past that would make us bow our heads.”

Germany needs Turkey’s help in following through on a deal with the European Union to manage the refugee crisis attributed in large part to the Syrian civil war. At the same time, the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, has been under pressure not to be seen as caving to pressure from Ankara to compromise on Western values, particularly after a recent dust-up over freedom of speech set off by a German comedian’s satire that outraged Mr. Erdogan.

………

Ms. Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union and its coalition partners supported the resolution, which was originally proposed for last year, to mark the centennial of the start of the killings. But it was repeatedly delayed, most recently in February, over concerns about angering Ankara.

As the vote approached, debate intensified in Germany, which is home to an estimated three million people of Turkish descent, many of whom have dual citizenship. About 2,000 Turks demonstrated last weekend in Berlin, rallying to say that Parliament is not a court and therefore should not pass judgment.

………

Her decision to do so, despite those objections, may have been influenced by an episode in March, when a German comic, Jan Böhmermann, lampooned Mr. Erdogan with a crude poem. Ms. Merkel initially criticized the verses, giving the impression — which she later said was a mistake — that she advocated restrictions on freedom of expression in Germany. Critics portrayed her as weak.

Cem Ozdemir, the co-chairman of the opposition Greens and a driving force behind the resolution, accused Ms. Merkel of paying little heed to Turkey for most of her decade in power, until circumstances forced her to engage with Mr. Erdogan.

On Thursday, Mr. Ozdemir said there was “never a favorable time to speak about something as dreadful as genocide.”

Mr. Ozdemir read century-old statements by officials of the German Empire showing they knew that up to 90 percent of Armenians had been killed. “Working through the Shoah is the basis of democracy in Germany,” Mr. Ozdemir said, referring to the Holocaust. “This genocide is also waiting to be worked through.”

There have been people fighting for this for decades.

Merkel is not one of these people. She felt a political need to push this through because she is seen as kowtowing to an increasingly megalomaniacal and despotic Turkish leader.

Still, this is a positive move, and hopefully we will see more of this.

The Clintons Really Do Hate the Working Man

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Yesterday in Cranford, NJ, Bill Clinton discussing Donald Trump’s surprising political success noted that “Non-college-educated Americans need to be brought along to the future.”

I shouldn’t be surpriaed.  After 40 years in politics, demonizing the poor, diminishing labor unions, embracing the powerful, helping send decent middle class jobs to Mexico and China, I guess the fact that they hold the ordinary working American in disdain should have been obvious.

The Clintons think that people who work on their feet, “need to be brought into the future.”

They are avatars of the professional class in the Democratic Party, and smug condescension drips from them.

The Secret Allure of the Sharing Economy

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You can form a big company and create pseudo free agents who are free to be bigots:

This is a story of an Airbnb experience I recently went through. I met this awesome lady Crissie in my Facebook group. Super nice lady, successful business owner, beautiful family, and they live in a small town in Idaho.

Crissie would post these amazing videos of the land and the snow, and the mountains and trees, and I told her one day I would come visit.

It‘s so absolutely beautiful there!

………

I like my space when I travel, and thought it would be fun to find a cool cabin.

………

Everything was set! As usual, I included a bit of info about myself on the Airbnb listing to put the host at ease

………

First response: Dang! No luck, even though the dates were available all of a sudden, the host said she was going to use the place.

………

No biggie, I’m really flexible. Crissie told me late June is good as well, so I rebooked for June.

CANCELLED! Well damn. So it wasn’t really the dates—the host cancelled my new request and ignored all future messages.

So I had a white friend book for my same dates, and all of a sudden her plans changed back. Approved immediately!

There are some similar stories and links described at the article.

I rather expect to find the same thing in all the similar apps.

My guess is that a black man finds getting an Uber or Lyft just as hard as finding an old fashioned taxi.

In fact, it might be harder, because there is no taxi commission collecting data on fares and origination and destination points.

That’s why this sh%$ needs real regulation with teeth.

Even With a Slam Dunk, the Guantanamo Courts Collude with Prosecutors

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You would have to figure that if there were one case where the prosecutors at Guantanamo would have a conviction in the bag, it would be the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

Well, it turns out that the prosecutors and the judge colluded to destroy evidence:

The judge overseeing the premiere military tribunal at Guantánamo Bay effectively conspired with the prosecution to destroy evidence relevant to defending the accused architect of the 9/11 attacks, according to a scathing court document.

Army Col James Pohl, who this week at Guantánamo is presiding over a resumption of pretrial hearings in the already troubled case, “in concert with the prosecution, manipulated secret proceedings and the use of secret orders”, the document alleges, preventing Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s defense team from learning Pohl had permitted the Obama administration to destroy the evidence.

Worst Constitutional Law Professor, Ever!

………

The accusation comes in a 10 May defense filing that the military commissions have recently unsealed. It contains significant detail about an episode that Mohammed’s attorneys say has permanently tainted the most high-profile test of the US’s post-9/11 turn toward military justice for terrorism cases.

………

Mohammed’s attorneys argue that the secret maneuvering left them unable to challenge the destruction of evidence. They contend that the case ought to be scrapped entirely. Their brief quotes a famous 1932 supreme court case, Powell v Alabama, to argue that failing to provide the defense access to evidence “would be little short of judicial murder”.

“Whatever legitimate national security interests might purportedly justify the near-Star Chamber proceedings that have riven this case, there can be no articulable excuse for so clearly misleading Mr. Mohammed’s counsel and preventing them from seeking remedies to prevent the destruction of crucial evidence,” they continued.

………

But on 19 December 2013, Pohl ordered the US to “ensure the preservation of any overseas detention facilities still within the control of the United States” – a reference to the secret “black site” prisons where the CIA and its allies tortured Mohammed and his co-defendants.

According to the defense filing, six months after Pohl issued an evidence-preservation order at the defense’s behest and over the prosecution’s objections, the judge “authorized the government to destroy the evidence in question”. Pohl’s reversal of course was “the result of secret communications between the government and Judge Pohl, which he conducted without the knowledge of defense counsel”, the motion asserts.

That order, issued exclusively to the prosecution, carried with it a direction to provide the defense with a “redacted version”. But Pohl “did not actually instruct the prosecution to proffer any proposed redactions of the order until 18 months after granting the government permission to destroy the evidence, and over a year after it was apparently actually destroyed”, the defense team claims.

“[B]elatedly,” Mohammed’s attorneys say, the commission gave them a version of Pohl’s destruction order “by attaching it to another secret order,” and concluding, “without benefit of ever having examined the actual evidence, that the government’s proffer or a summary of a substitute for the original (now destroyed) evidence provided the defense with an adequate alternative to access to the evidence in question.”

Destroying the evidence in secret while permitting the defense to believe it had been preserved has “substantially gutted” the credibility of the military commission and “irreparably harmed” Mohammed’s ability to defend himself in a death-penalty case, the lawyers say. The episode “call[s] into question Judge Pohl’s impartiality”.

………

Karen Greenberg, the director of Fordham University Law School’s Center on National Security, said the allegation of collusion to destroy evidence could prove to be a tipping point for the military tribunals more broadly.

“This may well be the straw that breaks the camel’s back in underscoring the unviability of the military commissions,” Greenberg said.

“Remember, a main reason they couldn’t have this [trial] in federal court was that it would have been such a circus. And now you have a full-blown circus, with judicial and every other kind of misstepping.”

Gee, you think?

This has been a complete clusterf%$#, and it has been since it’s begun.

They wanted to create a system that would allow for no possibility of acquittal, and they wanted to be able to claim that it was fair.

They got neither.

BTW, Colonel Pohl should be removed from the case, and probably fired from the military, and if he has a civilian law license, he should be disbarred.

This makes a mockery to the very idea of justice and due process.

Yes, I Know that it’s Boris Johnson………

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But when he says that, “The only continent with weaker economic growth than Europe is Antarctica,” he’s right.

Unfortunately, the Germans run the EU, and they are dead set on repeating the mistakes of the Reichsbank during the great depression, where mindless monetary tightening made the impact of the Depression unusually brutal, and led to the rise of the Nazis.

Now we have an EU dominated by the Germans and by their fetish for austerity continues, and the rise of the right wing throughout Europe.

If I were in Britain, I would vote to leave for two reasons:

  • It would cripple the UK’s financial industry, which is a good thing.
  • It would show the rest of the EU that there are alternatives to German hegemony.

The Worst Democrat in Congress Just Did a Good Thing

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Dan Lipinsky is by most measures the worst Democrat in Congress, a light weight who inherited the seat from his father, and has used it to oppose abortion, support anti-gay bigots, oppose healthcare reform, and sh%$ting on immigrants.

He is a complete clusterf%$# as a Democrat, and this is the party that not long ago had Steve Israel heading the DCCC.

That being said, his declaration that, in the event of a contested convention, he will vote for Bernie Sanders because that is how is district voted, is a righteous move:

If there’s a contested Democratic convention this summer, Illinois Congressman Dan Lipinski says he’ll be voting for Sen. Bernie Sanders.

Lipinski, who’ll be a superdelegate at the convention, says he’d support Sanders because the Vermont senator beat Hillary Clinton in Lipinski’s district.

“As a Democratic member of Congress, I have a vote at the Democratic National Convention as a superdelegate. Before the Illinois primary I told Democrats in the 3rd District that I decided that I would pledge my vote to whichever candidate won the district,” Lipinski said Tuesday in a statement. “When the votes were counted, Sen. Bernie Sanders received 54 percent and Secretary Hillary Clinton received 45 percent in my district. Therefore, if there is a contested vote at the Democratic National Convention in July, I will vote for Sen. Sanders.”

Props, but I will still support whoever runs against him in the primary.

What is Wrong with the Clinton Wing of the Democratic Party Succinctly Stated

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I am not at all surprised that it is a Brit who notes that aggressive identity politics has pushed economic justice out of the political spotlight.

I would argue that some political factions, most notably the Clinton political machine, have done so deliberately, because it allows them to check the “right” boxes while still aligning themselves with what Theodore Roosevelt called the “Malefactors of Wealth”.

People like Wal-Mart (Hillary was a member of its board for years) and Goldman Sachs (Hillary’s speeches, and they funded her son-in-law’s hedge fund) are Hillary’s peeps, because they all agree that focusing on identity politics, as opposed to the the increasingly ferocious war on the average American worker or the financialization of our economy, is a good thing:

The rise of identity politics means that the personal is commonly understood to be political. Being a radical today relates as much to who you are as to what you think. Class struggle, at one time the raison d’être of the socialist movement, has been usurped on the left by the personal grievances of women, gays and ethnic minorities.

 Identity politics was an understandable response to some of the injustices of the twentieth century. Despite the loftiness of much left-wing rhetoric, sexism, racism and homophobia have never successfully been eliminated from socialist politics for the simple reason that these movements reflect the societies in which they were conceived. It was often made apparent to women in particular that the priorities for leftists lay strictly within the class framework.

 It would be wrong to imply that today this dynamic has been turned on its head. One can still find sexism, racism and homophobia on the left as easily as one can find it in wider society. In an article for Slate about the US Democratic primaries, Michelle Goldberg wrote in late 2015 about a cultural phenomenon of so-called ‘Bernie Bros’ – male supporters of US presidential candidate Bernie Sanders who ‘seem to believe that their class politics exempt them from taking sexism seriously’.

 ………

 Ultimately, though, the left should seek to move beyond identity politics for the simple reason that it is compatible with neo-liberal economics. Identity politics can co-exist with the corporate boss who makes more money in a week than his cleaner takes home in a year – as long as the chances of being the boss are assigned proportionally among different ethnic groups, sexualities and genders. Individual winners and losers remain as remote from each other as ever; they are simply sorted in direct proportion to their numbers in society. The ultimate aim of identity politics is to ‘tune up’ the elite rather than to abolish it.

 ………

 Class politics must certainly evolve with the times – at the very least it should take account of the legitimate grievances of people who feel marginalised for reasons other than their class. However, liberal identity politics is increasingly a zero-sum game in which white men must invariably lose out so that women, ethnic minorities and LGBT individuals can prosper. With no account for the impact of class, this will simply give rise to another injustice, or at the very least, compound an existing one.

(emphasis mine)

I think that the author, James Bloodworth, undersells the deliberate nature of this transformation.

When one looks at the professional class, doctors, lawyers, and (most significantly) college professors, the top 2-5%, this focus on identity politics benefits them.

While they have not benefited to the degree of the top 1% of 1%, they have benefited, and now it’s easier to for them to find inexpensive domestic help.