Month: December 2017

This Ain’t Political Support, This is Looting

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A Little Florid, but On Point

The folks at The Young Turks have come across a memo from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), which appears purpose designed to ensure both that small dollar candidates are disadvantaged, and that consultants extract maximum money from the campaign:

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is making several demands of candidates preparing for the 2018 House elections, according to an internal memo obtained by TYT. The memo dictates policies on campaign spending and sexual harassment, and outlines requirements for Democratic Party “unity.” An email accompanying the memo gives campaigns until Thursday, December 8, to respond.

The memo was sent by DCCC Executive Director Dan Sena on December 1 to candidates and campaign managers. Sena did not respond to a request for comment, nor did DCCC Communications Director Meredith Kelly.

Although the memo does not mention the highly contentious 2016 presidential primary, it includes a requirement that the campaigns must agree “not to engage in tactics that do harm to our chances of winning a General Election.” The memo does not identify what tactics it is prohibiting.

Candidates also must “hold a unity event with their primary opponents following a primary,” the memo says. What would constitute a “unity event” is also not made explicit.

………

The document also requires that candidates “establish a strong written sexual harassment policy for their campaign and all staff” and “complete an extensive online sexual harassment training, to be offered through the DCCC by a third-party vendor.” Rep. Ruben Kihuen, a freshman Democrat from Nevada, has been called on to resign by current DCCC Chairman Rep. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi after allegations surfaced that he sexually harassed his campaign’s finance director in 2016. Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), the longest-serving member of the House, announced his “retirement” Tuesday after a slew of harassment allegations.

So, you have to pay THEIR consultant for training, even though there are a slew of non-profits out there that would do this at a minimal cost.

The memo requires that candidates hire “professional staff and consultants who can help execute a winning campaign” and says that the DCCC “will provide staff resumes and a comprehensive list of consultants” to help satisfy this requirement.

The memo mandates that candidates preserve at least 75 percent of all funds they raise for “paid communications”—which is seen as code for T.V. advertising, a method viewed by much of the new generation of Democrats as outmoded, especially for mobilizing young and minority voters who could be critical in 2018.

Again, you have to spend money on their favorite consultants, and dedicate 75% of your campaign funds to TV, which corresponds to about 22% of your campaign funds to consultants who are paid commission on ad buys.

Seriously, don’t give to the DCCC, don’t give to the DSCC, don’t give to the DNC, give directly to campaigns, and when you do, try to ensure that they aren’t overspending on overpaid Washington, DC consultants.

Right now, the entire Democratic Party establishment resembles a f%$#ing racket.

They are corrupt and incompetent.

Do not feed the flim flam men.

If There Were Only Some Proxy for Value That Could Be Use to Address Labor Shortages

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Over at the NPR program Morning Edition this morning, they were reporting on the Trump administration ending the temporary protected status (TPS) for some refugees because conditions have improved in their countries

They were  because wringing their hands because ending the program might cause shortages of construction workers.

We can argue whether or not TPS status should actually be temporary, but this argument is complete crap.

If there is a shortage of construction workers, the solution is Econ 101:  You pay them more, and you pay to train them.

I understand that people like, for example, NPR correspondents don’t like the idea of paying a few bucks more to have a Jacuzzi installed on their back porch, but for the rest of us, it’s not a huge deal.

I am a Complete Whore, So Where is My Money

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It appears that it is a not uncommon practice for brands to buy coverage on blogs.

Despite my solicitations for such filthy capitalist lucre on the front page of my blog, (right hand column toward the bottom) I have not received any offers:

Please, send me free stuff, and I will consider doing a review.

I am a complete whore, so assume that any review is the result of free stuff, and/or under the table payments.

I will do my level best to reveal such conflicts when I remember to.

I am feeling very neglected right now.

Talk About Mixed Emotions

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Donald Trump just officially declared US recognition of Jerusalem as the Capital of Israel.

This has been reality for 70 years, and I am a proud member of the reality based community, but I feel slightly nausious agreeing with the inverted traffic cone at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue:

President Trump on Wednesday formally recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, reversing nearly seven decades of American foreign policy and setting in motion a plan to move the United States Embassy from Tel Aviv to the fiercely contested Holy City.

“Today we finally acknowledge the obvious: that Jerusalem is Israel’s capital,” Mr. Trump said from the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White House. “This is nothing more or less than a recognition of reality. It is also the right thing to do. It’s something that has to be done.”

The president cast his decision as a break with decades of failed policy on Jerusalem, which the United States, along with virtually every other nation in the world, has declined to recognize as the capital since Israel’s founding in 1948. That policy, he said, brought us “no closer to a lasting peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians.”

“It would be folly to assume that repeating the exact same formula would now produce a different or better result,” Mr. Trump declared.

The failure of the conventional wisdom on this matter is clear, but I am less sanguine about Donald Trumps less-conventional stupidity in solving this, or anything.

The president said the decision to recognize Jerusalem should not be construed as the United States taking a position on whether, or how, the city might ultimately be shared. But he offered little solace to the Palestinians, making no mention of their long-held hopes for East Jerusalem to be the capital of a Palestinian state.

Jerusalem as the capital of Israel has been a fact for 70 years. It’s an incontrovertible fact.

However, the disposition of EAST Jerusalem, which became Israeli territory only after the 6-Day War is NOT a fact, and IS up for negotiation.

At least one former Obama administration official also weighed in with sharp criticism. John O. Brennan, the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, said in a statement that Mr. Trump’s action was “reckless” and would “damage U.S. interests in the Middle East for years to come and will make the region more volatile.”

Well, now we know the position of the House of Saud, because Brennan has been the Saudi Princes’ bitch since early in his CIA career.

Jerusalem is one of the world’s most fiercely contested swaths of real estate, with each side disputing the other’s claims. Palestinians view East Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state, and most of the world considers it occupied territory. Jerusalem’s Old City has the third-holiest mosque in Islam and the holiest site in Judaism, making the city’s status a sensitive issue for Muslims and Jews alike. Jerusalem is also sacred ground to Christians.

Hence the need to clearly state, which he did, that there are still negotiations to be had on this matter.

I don’t think that this will make any difference in the long term situation, because I don’t think that ANYTHING will make a difference in the long term situation.

It will be interesting to watch the Palestinian Authority’s response.

Auferre Trucidare Rapere Falsis Nominibus Imperium, Atque Ubi Solitudinem Faciunt, Pacem Appellant

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I am of course quoting Tacitus:

To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.

It is a quote that he attributes to a speech by Celtic chieftan Calgacus, in his biography of his father in law,  Gnaeus Julius Agricola, though the whole speech is almost universally considered to be a literary creation of Tacitus.

The Agricola is more than a history though, it is a critique of the corruption and lack of freedom of the Roman Empire.

I also see it as a metaphor for Hillary Clinton, whose history evokes the Calgacus speech.

Whether it’s her failure as Chair of the Task Force on National Health Care Reform, her support of the Iraq war well past its sell by date, her advocacy for the destruction of Libya, her vociferous support of gutting welfare and making war on minorities through the crime bill, her 2008 campaign, her 2016 campaign, etc. she is an avatar of a hapless ruling class in a corrupt empire.

She is unable, and likely unwilling, to think beyond the conventional wisdom, she values loyalty over competence, and her staff has been the proverbial bucket of crabs, where internal conflict results in the failure of all.

This has created a record of failure, and generate a reputation for intellect, that rivals that of Richard Bruce Cheney.

She is a marker of imperial decay.

The same cannot be said for Donald Trump.  He is the very archetype of the barbarian at the gate.

He’s is like the Visigoths who sacked Rome.

If you are wondering why I am drawing parallels with the decline and fall of Rome, it is because I see the something very similar going on now in the United States.

John Conyers Has Left the House

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Representative John Conyers Jr., under intense pressure to resign amid multiplying allegations that he sexually harassed former employees, announced Tuesday that he would leave Congress immediately, and he endorsed his son John Conyers III to succeed him.

Mr. Conyers, 88, the “dean” of the House and the longest-serving African-American representative in history, acquiesced to weeks of pressure from fellow Democrats. But by trying to keep his Detroit-area seat in the family, he touched off a family feud between his 27-year-old son and his great-nephew Ian Conyers, a state senator from Michigan who also plans to run in a special House election.

In a phone interview, Ian Conyers said that his great-uncle encouraged him to run for the seat days before deciding to step down. Now the two younger Conyerses will most likely face off in what may become a battle over the legacy of Mr. Conyers, considered an icon to many black people.

“I said, ‘Sir, if you decide that you’re going to retire, give me a heads-up because I’m going to run for your seat and keep doing the work that you have been up to,’” Ian Conyers said. “He said, ‘Absolutely. You go for it. Run.’”

I will note that this sh%$ HAD to have become common knowledge in the Congress at some point in the past 52 years he has served.

Who were his enablers?

Somehow or Other, They Are Going to Get Rat F%$%Ed

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The Indian pharmaceutical company Laurus Labs is planning to start selling low cost HIV drugs in the US as they come off patent:

Among the coconut plantations and beaches of South India, a factory the size of 35 football fields is preparing to churn out billions of generic pills for HIV patients and flood the U.S. market with the low-cost copycat medicines.

U.S. patents on key components for some important HIV therapies are poised to expire starting in December and Laurus Labs Ltd. — the Hyderabad, India-based company which owns the facility — is gearing up to cash in.

Laurus is one of the world’s biggest suppliers of ingredients used in anti-retrovirals, thanks to novel chemistry that delivers cheaper production costs than anyone else. Now, its chief executive officer, Satyanarayana Chava, wants to use the same strategy selling his own finished drugs in the U.S. and Europe. He predicts some generics that Laurus produces will eventually sell for 90 percent less than branded HIV drugs in the U.S., slashing expenditures for a disease that’s among the costliest for many insurers.

………

“The savings for U.S. payers will be so huge when these generic combination drugs are available in the U.S.,” he said in an interview at the factory outside the Southern Indian city of Visakhapatnam. Payers will save “billions of dollars,” he said.

The patent expiries are starting this month when Bristol-Myers Squibb Co.’s Sustiva loses protection. Gilead Sciences Inc.’s Viread follows next month. Both companies didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Would expect to see another round of evergreening, along with regulatory and judiciary road blocks to stop this.

After all, it’s only people’s lives, and the profits must be protected.

Metaphor of the Day

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Over at Naked Capitalism, I suggested in the comments that, as I have here, given the problems creating a majority coalition, Frau Merkel* should at least make a proforma effort to bring in Die Linke (The Left) into the coalition.

Well, this engendered the following response, which is one for the ages:

Sid Finster:

Ain’t gonna happen. It would be the equivalent of asking ‘OK, which one of you just farted?” during an audience with the Pope.

Some things cannot be acknowledged, especially among Europeans, who have created a political system based almost entirely on pretense. Even if the assembled petitioners are turning green and retching from the rancid stank and the Holy Father has s stupid grin on his mug, everyone has to carry on like everything is normal.

Because Europe is so committed the pretense of “More Europe!”, to “fake it until you make it”, it is particularly bad form to point out that Europe is faking it.

I love the f%$#ing internet.

*Horses whinnying.

Schadenfreude, Bill O’Reilly Edition

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One of Bill O’Reilly’s sexual harassment victims is now suing him.

There was a settlement with him some years back, but O’Reilly could not keep his mouth site, and the agreement included mutual non-disparagement clauses, so she gets another bite at the apple:

Looking for a biography of fired Fox News host Bill O’Reilly? Try this one, with the title: “The Man Who Would Not Shut Up.”

Prophetic. The fallen cable news star was sued Monday in a New York federal court for, essentially, failing to shut up. Some background: As the New York Times reported in a career-killing April 1 article, O’Reilly, along with his employer, had settled several cases with female colleagues alleging mistreatment and sexual harassment over a 20-year career at Fox News. One of them was Rachel Witlieb Bernstein, a producer who, in 2002, ended up on the wrong end of an O’Reilly tantrum. Sexual harassment was not alleged, though Bernstein reached a settlement and left Fox News.

………

The complaint filed Monday comes from Witlieb Bernstein, who alleges breach of contract — she and O’Reilly signed non-disparage and confidentiality agreements as part of the 2002 settlement — and defamation. Written by Neil Mullin and Nancy Erika Smith of Smith Mullin, P.C., it spits at O’Reilly’s attempts to save face. The statements published in the media, notes the complaint, try to paint O’Reilly as a “target” of extortionate claims. “This is false,” reads the complaint. “In fact, he is a serial abuser and Ms. Bernstein’s complaints against him were far from extortionate.” Another element of the complaint addresses O’Reilly’s oft-repeated insistence that he was never the subject of a complaint to human resources departments over his career. “I never mistreated anyone,” he said in one interview. He also alleged that the charges against him were “politically and financially motivated.”

“In fact, Mr. O’Reilly is the liar,” says the complaint, which also lists Fox News as a defendant. “He mistreated Ms. Bernstein. She was forced out of her job at Fox News and paid a settlement because of his mistreatment.” Contrary to O’Reilly’s claims, Witlieb Bernstein did indeed go to human resources and “other company executives” to raise her complaints about O’Reilly, argues the suit. That she apparently got nowhere isn’t a surprise: The HR department at the time was a captive hive of Fox News chief Roger Ailes, who was ousted in summer 2016 over sexual-harassment claims and died in May. In response to the Ailes and O’Reilly scandals, Fox News has strengthened its HR functions; the HR chief now reports to 21st Century Fox, and not to Fox News.

I am extremely amused.

Typical MSNBC

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I’ve not watched MSNBC in a few years.

Between firing Olbermann, being in the tank for Clinton in the primaries, and Rachael Maddow’s Mort Sahl style conspiracy theory meltdown, I’ve given up on them.

Really, the only time I notice them these days is when the unresolved mommy issues that Joy Reid addresses with her boosterism of Hillary Clinton make the Twitter machine explode.

Well, now MSNBC has fired Sam Seder because of a Tweet mocking people who wanted Roman Polanski to avoid prosecution for rape because he is a marvelous director:*

MSNBC has decided not to renew its contract with contributor Sam Seder after an old tweet emerged in which Seder joked about Roman Polanski raping his daughter, TheWrap has learned.

Seder’s contract ends in February and he has no scheduled appearances between now and then, a spokesperson for MSNBC told TheWrap.

“Don’t care re Polanski, but I hope if my daughter is ever raped it is by an older truly talented man w/a great sense of mise en scene,” wrote Seder in the now deleted tweet from 2009.

(emphasis mine)

It appears that alt-right bro-blogger Mike Cernovich, promulgator of the Pizzagate fraud, came across the tweet, and the Right wing rent a crowd swung into action, and MSNBC fired Seder.

By comparison, Joy “Mommy Issues” Reid was was found to use bigoted homophobic terms in an attempt to out former Florida Governor Charlie Crist, and management is still cool with her:

Recently resurfaced internet archives show political commentator Joy Reid wrote a dozen blog posts in 2007, 2008, and 2009 that contained homophobic conspiracies and anti-gay jokes.

The MSNBC weekend host ran a blog called The Reid Report — which is the same name as her now-defunct cable news show — a decade ago while she wrote for the Miami Herald. As first resurfaced by Twitter user Jamie_Maz, Reid wrote numerous bigoted blog posts smearing, mocking, and attacking former Florida governor Charlie Crist. These rants included calling Crist “Miss Charlie” and sarcastically using the tags “gay politicians” and “not gay politicians” — despite the fact that the twice-married, heterosexual man has never come-out as gay.

Reid went on to spread the crackpot conspiracy theory that Crist was actually a closeted gay man who refused to come out for fear that his sexual orientation would hurt his political career. Additionally, the AM Joy host claims Crist’s marriages to women are part of this elaborate cover up.

As bad as the conspiracy theory is in itself, Reid doesn’t just suggest Cris is gay — she assumes he is gay and proceeds to attack him for it. “Miss Charlie, Miss Charlie. Stop pretending, brother. It’s okay that you don’t go for the ladies,” wrote Reid in a 2007 post.

Casting homophobic slurs and attempting to out someone is OK, but showing the hypocrisy of people who think that the movie Chinatown is good enough to justify rape is somehow beyond the pale.

MSNBC has become a very f%$#ed up place.

*Actually, I do support an end to his prosecution, but not because of the quality of his movies.  I object to further prosecution because the misbehavior of the prosecutor(s) and judge(s) in this matter are so egregious to demand such an action. Sometimes why matters.

Something Good About the US Senate

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Truth be told, I am not generally a fan of the Senate. I have referred to it as a Petri dish for narcissistic sociopaths in the past.

That being said, on rare occasions, its rather arcane rules occasionally yield positive results:

Congressional Republicans can’t use their tax cuts for the rich to define and codify the view that life begins at fertilization, according to the rules of the U.S. Senate.

The GOP’s initial tax proposals in the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate each conferred 529 college savings plan benefits to an “unborn child…at any stage of development” in an unprecedented attempt to wield the tax code against reproductive rights. Republicans on Capitol Hill have long sought deeply unpopular fetal “personhood” bills that try to classify fertilized eggs, zygotes, embryos, and fetuses as “persons,” and to grant them full legal protection under the U.S. Constitution, including the right to life from the moment of conception. Personhood laws, repeatedly rejected by voters across the United States, would criminalize abortion with no exception and ban many forms of contraception, in vitro fertilization, and health care for pregnant people.

The latest fetal personhood effort ultimately violated rules associated with the fast-track process Republicans are using to pass their tax bill. Under “reconciliation,” Republicans need a simple 51-vote majority in the Senate instead of the 60-vote threshold typically required to bypass a filibuster and pass controversial legislation. But reconciliation is subject to the Byrd rule, which puts the kibosh on provisions that are “merely incidental” to the budget.

In other words, Congress can’t wield the reconciliation process for the sake of a political agenda.

This is a good outcome, but I would still like to see the Senate more like the House, because it is a truly dysfunctional body.

There, It Wasn’t So Hard

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After much complaining, Apple agrees to pay over $15,400,000,000,00 in taxes to Ireland, and Ireland agreed to take it after complaining mightily.

Neither of them wanted that to happen.  Apple cut a tax deal with Ireland, that the EU deemed an illegal subsidy, and so Apple had to pay back taxes, which Ireland objected to even more than Apple.

Basically, Ireland’s economic model is to be an economic vassal of multinational corporations, and so they don’t want to collect taxes due.

Think of it as Amazon’s 2nd city competition writ even larger.

I’d call it corporate welfare, but it’s more like extortion.

Linkage

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The care and feeding of cast iron cookware:

Running America Like a Business: Burning It down for the Insurance Money

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Case in point, Pittsburgh’s increasingly privatized water system, which is now also increasingly lead tainted:

“The government should be run like a great American company,” Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser (who is also an alleged slumlord and the future broker of peace in the Middle East) told The Washington Post last March. “Our hope is that we can achieves successes and efficiencies for our customers, who are the citizens.” President Trump’s administration touts private enterprise as the solution to any and all challenges faced by public projects—from budget waste to bureaucratic delays to low test scores, the market can fix it all.

………

Yet governments, local and federal, frequently look to the private sector to solve their problems. And it’s no wonder: They need help. The American Society of Civil Engineers gave the entire country a D+ on its 2017 infrastructure report card. “From the crumbling bridges of California to the overflowing sewage drains of Houston and the rusting railroad tracks in the Northeast Corridor,” reads a 2016 piece in The New Yorker, “decaying infrastructure is all around us.”

Pittsburgh, in an attempt to deal with entrenched infrastructure problems, turned to the private sector in 2012 when it partnered with the French management firm Veolia North America, the same water-management company that would fail to disclose Flint’s lead-contamination problem in 2015. Alongside aging infrastructure that produced frequent water-main breaks, flush and boil advisories, and wildly incorrect billing statements, PWSA was in massive debt. Veolia promised to streamline the public utility—in fact, its Peer Performance Solutions model, which embeds private-sector consultants with public-sector employees, won the company an award from the National Council for Public-Private Partnerships in 2014, a little more than a year after it began partnering with PWSA. The organization lauded Veolia for identifying $2.3 million in new PWSA revenue and $3 million more in operating savings, a move incentivized by their contract that stipulated the company could keep 40 percent of every dollar it saved the city. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette published a glowing account of PWSA’s partnership with Veolia, despite reports that it laid off 23 employees, many of whom were longtime employees with critical institutional knowledge. The private sector had seemingly done its job, weeding out inefficiencies and saving the authority millions.

But this August, a consulting group hired to assess the organization’s current state announced in a public meeting that PWSA was “a failed organization atop a dangerous and crumbling structure” with “an aging system in demonstrably worse condition than any water utility of its size in the country.” Not only that, water tests showed that since the partnership began, Pittsburgh’s water had been tainted with dangerously high levels of lead.

………

PWSA, like community water systems across the country, had been dealing with the challenges of operating aging infrastructure long before the public-private partnership. And these issues were only complicated further by poor management—the authority was infamous for its high rates and billing mistakes that verged on the absurd. But at least the water didn’t boast dangerously high rates of lead.

In the summer of 2016, when Pittsburgh’s water was tested for the first time since Veolia began instituting changes, the resulting lead levels exceeded the federal limit. Before Veolia, the water authority had long supplemented its water with soda ash, a substance very similar to baking soda that lines the inside of pipes to prevent corrosion. But under Veolia’s management, it switched to caustic soda—which, while approved for use, is generally acknowledged as an inferior, cheaper, means of corrosion control. The switch to caustic soda stripped the inside of PWSA’s pipes, removing the layer of minerals previously deposited by soda ash, helping leach lead into the city’s drinking water.

The mayor and the City of Pittsburgh say they were never notified of the change. The state Department of Environmental Protection demanded immediate testing when notified PWSA had switched back to soda ash and chastised PWSA for making unapproved modifications to the water-treatment process. Veolia says it had no part in the decision, arguing the PWSA board approved the switch—a board made up of half Veolia executives and half members of PWSA’s Board of Directors. And according to The Guardian, “Under Veolia’s management, PWSA’s new executive director, James Good, a longtime Veolia employee and former private water lobbyist, became the second-highest paid public employee in the region. He earned $240,000 a year with generous benefits.”

The Public-Private Partnership (PPP) and its British cousin, the QUANGO (Quasi-Autonomous Non-Governmental Organization) have not proved to be successes.

It’s not surprising.  When you juxtapose taxpayer money with a lack of accountability, incompetence and corruption are what you are paying for.

Not a Currency

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Fundamentally, one of the critical characteristics of currency is that it be current.

It needs to be there when you need to spend it, and not appreciate by 1000% in a year or lose one-fifth of its value in 24 hours.

While there are exceptions, Wiemar Germany Deutschmarks and Zimbabwean Dollars come to mind, currency should be a relatively stable means of exchange of commerce.

Bitcoin is not this.  It’s a trip to the casino:

Bitcoin slid to as low as $9,000 in volatile trade on Thursday, having lost more than a fifth of its value since hitting an all-time high of $11,395 on Wednesday. BTC=BTSP.

The cryptocurrency fell as much as 8 percent on Thursday on the Luxembourg-based Bitstamp exchange to hit $9,000 exactly, marking a fall of well over $2,000 in under 24 hours. It then edged back up to trade at around $9,400 in the hour that followed, still down roughly 4 percent on the day. (Graphic: Bitcoin searches exceeds that of Trump – reut.rs/2zSavA6)

One market-watcher attributed the fall to outages in bitcoin exchanges and the heavy price surge of recent times.

“Naturally a few of the early bitcoin traders are taking some profits off the table,” said Charles Hayter, founder of CryptoCompare.com.

“Volatility is in the market at the moment and that means both positive and negative moves.”

While the technology behind Bit Coin, the block chain, appears to be generally sound, for any crypto-currency to function as a working means of exchange, it needs to have some sort of stability engineered in.

Otherwise, it’s just a speculative vehicle.

Passed in the Dark of Night

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On a 51-49 vote, the Senate has passed its version of tax cuts a few minutes ago.

I would note that, to the best of my knowledge, this was a vote on a bill that Senate Democrats literally could not read the bill because it was full of handwritten scrawls in the margins.

Needless to say, this is f%$#ed up beyond belief.

For their next act, they will try to cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, though since the Senate bill contains the chained CPI, there is already a cut proposed.

This is f%$#ed up.