Steve Cox runs the numbers on just how little it would mean to Jeff Bezos to fix the Flint water system:
$1 Billion is 1000 million. It will cost about $65 million to fix Flint’s water supply.Jeff Bezos is worth 140,000 million dollars. He has a million dollars 140,000 times. He does nothing but hoard it.
Imagine having $140,000 and it’s only $65 to fix Flint’s water…
— Steve Cox (@RealSteveCox) March 12, 2019
It’s true, every billionaire is a policy failure.
As soon as a particularly gullible judges signed off in its merger with Time Warner, AT&T raised its prices, the exact opposite of what it claimed:
In light of AT&T’s decision to raise the prices on DirecTV Now subscribers by $10/month, and to drop channels like MTV, Comedy Central, BET, and BBC America (while adding more AT&T-owned content to the bundle), it’s worth reviewing some of what the telecom giant claimed during the recent trial over its merger with Time Warner:
[C]onsumer prices will not go up.
Modern antitrust law recognizes that mergers between suppliers, such as Time Warner, and distributors, such as AT&T, almost always create efficiencies and synergies that lead to lower consumer prices and greater innovation.
Vertical integration raises antitrust concerns only in the rare case where the government can prove that the merger will hobble rivals’ ability to check the merged firm’s pricing conduct, thereby allowing the merged firm to raise its own prices above competitive levels.
[T]his merger is likely to enhance competition substantially, because it will enable the merged company to reduce prices.
You can read more for yourself here and here. The rest of AT&T’s arguments were just about as (in)accurate, and it’s not the first time AT&T’s rosy claims have been proved false.
The current standards for antitrust in the US are way too lax.
The U.S. FAA, relying on refined satellite tracking data and new physical evidence that more closely links two crashes of Boeing 737 MAX 8s, grounded Boeing’s newest narrowbody Mar. 13, with immediate effect.
The move ends three days of cascading groundings after the Mar. 10 Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 (ET302) accident, and leaves the world’s MAX fleet grounded.
“On Mar. 13, 2018, the investigation of the ET302 crash developed new information from the wreckage concerning the aircraft’s configuration just after takeoff that, taken together with newly refined data from satellite-based tracking of the aircraft’s flight path, indicates some similarities between the ET302 and [October 2018 Lion Air Flight] JT610 accidents that warrant further investigation of the possibility of a shared cause for the two incidents that needs to be better understood and addressed,” FAA said in its emergency order.
FAA Acting Administrator Dan Elwell, speaking to reporters after the order was released, made it clear that FAA made the decision to ground the aircraft. “The FAA is the safety authority for emergency airworthiness directives and orders,” he said. “FAA made the decision.”
After the EU grounded the aircraft in Europe, the FAA really had no choice.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez once again completely owns someone who tries to shame her by claiming that after going after unethical banksters, she will go after hard working bartenders.
It turns out that this is already the law of the land:
Actually, in NYC if you’re a bartender and knowingly over-serve to someone, you *ARE* liable for things they do after they leave the bar, because you knowingly put them at risk for $.Its called the Dram Shop Act. It’s a big reason why bartenders cut people off. And it works. https://t.co/u2XMRuNOyb
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) March 12, 2019
It’s a legitimate question: Why is a bartender held to a higher liability for their work than the head of Wells-Fargo?
As Henry Farrell observes, this is a strength of AOC, that her, “Retorical style is that it often starts from the fact that non-professional classes know stuff and then builds up – a strong implicit contrast both to common liberal condescension and conservative cult of know-nothing-ism.”
I so want to vote for her to be President in 2024.
Here is a quote:
We’re Not Talking about Donating a Building ………We’re Talking about Deception and Fraud.
—Andrew Lelling
Who is Andrew Lelling, you ask?
He is the US Attorney for Massachusetts who filed multiple indictments for people falsifying tests and bribing university officials to get their kids into exclusive schools.
I do not see how this is different from how Jared Kushner got into Harvard.
America: Where people who are born on third base, and think that they have a triple, still need their parents to buy their way into school.
We are dealing with the myth of meritocracy and the reality of kakistocracy, and I fear that it is only going to get worse.
With the recent crash in Ethiopia, facing flight operations bans in much of the world, the problem seems to be a business decision to minimize these changes when selling the plane to airlines, and minimie transition costs:
Has the world’s aviation community lost faith in the FAA? Country by country and airline by airline the past 48 hours have seen more than half the global 737 MAX fleet grounded in response to the crash of Ethiopian Airlines flight ET302 on Sunday. Both Boeing and the FAA say it is still too soon to act; they lack confirmed and compelling data to determine the cause of the crash and any potential remediation efforts. But the world is not willing to wait.
China was first to act, a strong play given that the country is home to the largest active fleet of the type with 93 flying. Indonesia followed shortly thereafter. That country was already on edge with respect to the type, with the Lion Air crash the first hull loss for the MAX just months ago. Ethiopia joined as well, grounding the remaining four frames in its flag carrier’s fleet.
And many other countries, including all of the EU.
On Tuesday morning in Chicago, after half the world’s 737 MAX planes were grounded either by regulators or the airlines that operate them, Boeing issued an updated statement. It implies that the actions are premature, but acceptable as a response to local sentiment.
Safety is Boeing’s number one priority and we have full confidence in the safety of the 737 MAX. We understand that regulatory agencies and customers have made decisions that they believe are most appropriate for their home markets. We’ll continue to engage with them to ensure they have the information needed to have confidence in operating their fleets. The United States Federal Aviation Administration is not mandating any further action at this time, and based on the information currently available, we do not have any basis to issue new guidance to operators
………
In the meantime, a global revolt of sorts is calling both Boeing and the FAA’s judgement into question. Is the regulator effective or is it granting the companies it oversees too much control of the process? Can the manufacturers be trusted to place safety above profits? Can the regulators?
This is not the first time that questions have been raised about the willingness of the Agency to make tough regulatory calls that adversely affect businesses in the name of safety. And there is absolutely a balance that it must strike. Proving a negative – the plane will never crash – is impossible and there are very real costs with every ruling it makes. But a growing collection of nations believes that inaction by Boeing and the FAA is a mistake.
Gee, you think?
There has to be an MBA at the bottom of this.
Pharma & Insurance Gave $43M to the 129 House Democrats Not Backing Medicare for All
What is distressing is not that this is corrupt as hell, but that it is all completely legal.
These folks are desperately in need of a thorough primarying:
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington) recently rolled out House Democrats’ version of a Medicare for All proposal that would ensure all Americans have guaranteed healthcare.
The bill (H.R. 1384) has an impressive 106 co-sponsors, and has been called “the most ambitious Medicare-for-All plan yet” by Vox, which also reported the benefits the House bill contained were even more significant than the companion bill Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) first introduced in his chamber. Under Jayapal’s plan, private, for-profit health insurance plans would be eliminated, and all Americans would be covered by a government-administered single-payer healthcare plan.
Additionally, Rep. Jayapal’s bill — the Medicare for All Act of 2019 — calls for a two-year transition from the current system to the one she proposes, rather than a four-year transition, as Sanders proposed. The House bill would put everyone under the age of 19 and over the age of 55 on the single-payer plan after one year, and then everyone in between the following year.
………
However impressive 106 House Democrats co-sponsoring the bill may be, that number falls short of the 218 votes needed for a bill to pass the House of Representatives with a majority vote. Even though there are 235 House Democrats, 112 of the 129 House Democrats currently not listed as co-sponsors on Rep. Jayapal’s bill would need to come on board in order for the bill to be able to pass the chamber and go to the Senate.………
Using campaign finance data made publicly available by the Center for Responsive Politics, Grit Post calculated that donors in the insurance and pharmaceutical industries gave a combined $43,740,947 in career campaign donations to the 130 House Democrats who have not yet signed on as co-sponsors to Rep. Jayapal’s bill. House Democrats received anywhere from $9,570 in financial support from pharma and insurance to $3.2 million, depending on the member.
If you can’t take their money, drink their booze, screw their women and look them in the eye and vote against them, you don’t belong here.
—Jesse Unruh, former Speaker of the California Assembly and State Treasurer
I could not help but reflect on Unruh’s quote when I read Politico wringing its hands over Elizabeth Warren getting thousands of dollars in Silicon Valley and then calling for the Breakup of Amazon, Google, and Facebook.
While I still favor Bernie Sanders, I have to say that Elizabeth Warren has taken Jesse Unruh’s advice to heart, and I approve:
While Sen. Elizabeth Warren was railing against big tech companies, she was taking their money — plenty of it.
The Massachusetts Democrat, who is powering her presidential campaign with a bold proposal to break up the likes of Amazon, Google and Facebook, in September accepted a $2,700 contribution from Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer. But Sandberg, whose donation went unnoticed at the time, was just the biggest name from Silicon Valley to give to the senator: Warren took at least $90,000 from employees of Amazon, Google and Facebook alone between 2011 and 2018.
The figure includes only donors who gave at least $200 over either of her two Senate campaigns; and just those who listed their employer. Warren is carrying over millions of dollars she raised for the Senate in the last cycle to her 2020 presidential run.
While the donations flowed to Warren’s committee, she was accusing Google, Amazon as well as Apple of using their powerful platforms to “lock out smaller guys and newer guys,” including direct competitors. She’s also criticized the huge sums Silicon Valley firms spend on federal lobbying and taken on Amazon and others over their treatment of workers.
Now, Warren has put the trust-busting message front and center in her presidential campaign. In a blog post last week, which she repeatedly referred to at the tech industry conference South by South last weekend in Austin, Texas, Warren called for unwinding Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp and Instagram; Amazon’s consumption of Whole Foods and Zappos; and Google’s takeovers of Waze, Nest and DoubleClick. Warren later confirmed that her plan would apply to Apple, the biggest player in tech and one of the world’s biggest companies.
“Either they run the platform or they play in the store,” she said over the weekend. “They don’t get to do both at the same time.”
I approve.
Actually, tweets of the day.
It’s a tweet storm on why Japan is the only industrialized nation to have two grids operating at two different frequencies:
Just learned a real-world example of the cost of “meh, we can refactor this later”:
Japan is the only modernized country in the world to run on two independent electricity grids, by historical accident. When the 2011 tsunami happened, half the country was knocked off-grid…
— Denise Yu (@deniseyu21) March 10, 2019
And the other half was unable to help out, because the two grids run on different frequencies.
How did this happen?!
In the 1800s, Tokyo entrepreneurs bought a 50 Hz generator from a German company that would later become AEG. Osaka bought one from the US that ran on 60Hz.
— Denise Yu (@deniseyu21) March 10, 2019
This design is a reflection of the political facts of the era: power was consolidated in the hands of local authorities. Centralization came later.
If this isn’t a perfect physical illustration of Conway’s Law I don’t know what is: https://t.co/yOUEErpUe2
— Denise Yu (@deniseyu21) March 10, 2019
In the world wars the Japanese government floated the idea of unifying the two grids, but ultimately the idea was dismissed because — you guessed it! — it was too expensive. Also, the cultural rivalry between Tokyo and Osaka didn’t help.
— Denise Yu (@deniseyu21) March 10, 2019
I suggest read the whole series of tweets.
They are a hoot.
It appears that everything in Singapore is just hunky-dory for him though:
Mark Zuckerberg laid out his vision for Facebook’s pivot to privacy on Wednesday in a lengthy blog, but it hasn’t taken long for the shine of some of his pronouncements to be dimmed.
Detailing plans to keep user information safe, the Facebook CEO boasted that the company has chosen not to store data in countries that “have a track record of violating human rights like privacy or freedom of expression.”
“If we build data centers and store sensitive data in these countries, rather than just caching non-sensitive data, it could make it easier for those governments to take people’s information,” he said.
………
But within hours of Zuckerberg publishing his 3,200-word missive, it was pulled apart by human rights groups.
In September last year, Facebook announced that it was spending $1 billion building a new data center in Singapore. Zuckerberg posted about the news on his Facebook page, saying it would be the company’s 15th data center and its first in Asia.
………
“Singapore is a seriously rights-abusing government that spends an inordinate amount of time trying to intimidate and harass those who express views the government doesn’t like,” Phil Robertson, deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia division, told Business Insider.
In related news, Roger McNamee, an early investor in Facebook, and what I assume is a former friend of the Facebook founder, called out his “Facebook Manifesto” as unmitigated bullsh%$.
They really need to find someone with more credibility than Zuckerberg, or Sheryl Sandberg as their spokesperson.
I would suggest Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, AKA Baghdad Bob, as an improvement.
David “Joe Isuzu” Leisure would work too.
Wall Street could face fresh restrictions on bonus payments as regulators appointed by President Donald Trump consider dusting off post-crisis rules that have long been on the back burner, according to two people familiar with the matter.
U.S. agencies including the Federal Reserve have discussed re-proposing the regulations after previous attempts to approve them in 2011 and 2016 failed, said the people, who asked not be named because the efforts are very preliminary. Required by the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, the controversial rules were meant to curb incentive pay that could encourage traders to take the kinds of dangerous risks that contributed to the 2008 meltdown.
While the rules would seem at odds with Trump’s de-regulatory agenda, banks might be better off if agency heads he’s appointed pass them. That’s because any limits on bonuses implemented during his administration could be less onerous than what might be approved should a Democrat win the White House in 2020.
The ironic thing here is that if someone like Joe Biden, or Kamala Harris, or Corey Booker becomes President in 2020, they will never pass any limits on Wall Street pay.
Still it’s a start.
A former aide of Kirsten Gillibrand has alleged that she did nothing about a senior aide harassing her:
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), one of the most outspoken advocates of the #MeToo movement who has made fighting sexual misconduct a centerpiece of her presidential campaign, spent last summer pressing legislators to update Congress’ “broken” system of handling sexual harassment.
At the same time, a mid-20s female aide to Gillibrand resigned in protest over the handling of her sexual harassment complaint by Gillibrand‘s office, and criticized the senator for failing to abide by her own public standards.
In July, the female staffer alleged one of Gillibrand’s closest aides — who was a decade her senior and married — repeatedly made unwelcome advances after the senator had told him he would be promoted to a supervisory role over her. She also said the male aide regularly made crude, misogynistic remarks in the office about his female colleagues and potential female hires.
Less than three weeks after reporting the alleged harassment and subsequently claiming that the man retaliated against her for doing so, the woman told chief of staff Jess Fassler that she was resigning because of the office’s handling of the matter. She did not have another job lined up.
The woman was granted anonymity because she fears retaliation and damage to her future professional prospects.
“I have offered my resignation because of how poorly the investigation and post-investigation was handled,” the woman wrote to Gillibrand in a letter sent on her final day to the senator’s personal email account. Copied were general counsel Keith Castaldo and Fassler, who is now managing the senator’s presidential bid.
………
Gillibrand, who was not made available for an interview, issued a statement to POLITICO defending her office’s handling of the incident.
“These are challenges that affect all of our nation’s workplaces, including mine, and the question is whether or not they are taken seriously. As I have long said, when allegations are made in the workplace, we must believe women so that serious investigations can actually take place, we can learn the facts, and there can be appropriate accountability,” she said. “That’s exactly what happened at every step of this case last year. I told her that we loved her at the time and the same is true today.”
Her office said no one responded to the letter because it determined that “engaging again on an already settled personnel matter was not the appropriate course of action.” It said the letter came after she’d given three weeks’ notice, “contained clear inaccuracies and was a major departure from the sentiments she shared with senior staff in her final days in the office.”
Since she left last summer, the woman has been doing part-time contract work. The male aide, Abbas Malik, kept his job.
Two weeks ago, however, POLITICO presented the office with its own findings of additional allegations of inappropriate workplace conduct by Malik. Among the claims were that he made a “joke” about rape to a female colleague — a person whom the office had failed to contact last summer despite repeated urgings by Malik’s accuser to reach out to the person.
It’s not enough to talk the talk, you need to walk the walk.
I have no doubt that Gillibrand is sincere in her publicly stated positions on this issue, but her, and her office’s, response to this.
Even now, being presented with additional evidence from POLITICO, the response is dismissive.
I understand how difficult it is for someone to deal with allegations when it involves a valued employee, but this is her signature issue, so I expect that there will be significant consequences to her campaign.
She needs to address this, and maybe spend less time at fund raisers with big pharma executives.
Bloomberg’s @mcbridesg asked @TimDraper if he’d back Elizabeth Holmes again:
“I’d back her as chief science officer, not CEO. Good question.” pic.twitter.com/DJqguX9wGA
— Sam Dean 🦅 (@SamAugustDean) March 8, 2019
Seriously?
She defrauded people out of billions on a scheme that could never have worked.
At the core of this scheme was her completely nonsensical pseudoscientific ideas.
And this guy things that she should be in charge of science at a startup?
That’s like putting Jean-Baptiste Lamarck in charge of your evolutionary biology department.
Well, she has a career as a poster child for white privilege, I guess.
F%$# Daylight F%$#ing Savings F%$#ing Time.
Any politician who comes out against DST, will get my serious consideration.
By extension, it is an indictment of how the various colonial wars that the US has engaged in over the past 30 or so years.
Undoubtedly, the punishment for telling the truth will be swift and severe:
A senior French officer involved in the fight against Islamic State in Syria faces punishment after launching a scathing attack on the U.S.-led coalition’s methods to defeat the group in its remaining stronghold of Hajin, the army said on Saturday.
Colonel Francois-Regis Legrier, who has been in charge of directing French artillery supporting Kurdish-led groups in Syria since October, said the coalition’s focus had been on limiting its own risks and this had greatly increased the death toll among civilians and the levels of destruction.
“Yes, the Battle of Hajin was won, at least on the ground but by refusing ground engagement, we unnecessarily prolonged the conflict and thus contributed to increasing the number of casualties in the population,” Legrier wrote in an article in the National Defence Review.
“We have massively destroyed the infrastructure and given the population a disgusting image of what may be a Western-style liberation leaving behind the seeds of an imminent resurgence of a new adversary,” he said, in rare public criticism by a serving officer.
The coalition could have got rid of just 2,000 militant fighters – who lacked air support or modern technological equipment – much more quickly and effectively by sending in just 1,000 troops, he argued.
………
Legrier’s article has embarrassed French authorities just hours before the coalition is expected to announce the defeat of the hardline Islamist group.
“A punishment is being considered,” French army spokesman Patrick Steiger said in a text message.
The article was removed from the review’s website on Saturday.
I wholeheartedly agree with Colonel Legrier, and I expect that his career is over.
I would note that, until dozens of alternate sources had, and revealed the footage, the New York Times had bought into the previous narrative:
The narrative seemed to fit Venezuela’s authoritarian rule: Security forces, on the order of President Nicolás Maduro, had torched a convoy of humanitarian aid as millions in his country were suffering from illness and hunger.
Vice President Mike Pence wrote that “the tyrant in Caracas danced” as his henchmen “burned food & medicine.” The State Department released a video saying Mr. Maduro had ordered the trucks burned. And Venezuela’s opposition held up the images of the burning aid, reproduced on dozens of news sites and television screens throughout Latin America, as evidence of Mr. Maduro’s cruelty.
But there is a problem: The opposition itself, not Mr. Maduro’s men, appears to have set the cargo alight accidentally.
Unpublished footage obtained by The New York Times and previously released tapes — including footage released by the Colombian government, which has blamed Mr. Maduro for the fire — allowed for a reconstruction of the incident. It suggests that a Molotov cocktail thrown by an antigovernment protester was the most likely trigger for the blaze.
At one point, a homemade bomb made from a bottle is hurled toward the police, who were blocking a bridge connecting Colombia and Venezuela to prevent the aid trucks from getting through.
But the rag used to light the Molotov cocktail separates from the bottle, flying toward the aid truck instead.
Half a minute later, that truck is in flames.
The same protester can be seen 20 minutes earlier, in a different video, hitting another truck with a Molotov cocktail, without setting it on fire.
Accidentally?
This guy threw Molotov Cocktails at at least 2 trucks over a period of 20 minutes, and you are calling it a f%$#ing, “Accident”?
More like a deliberate false flag.
BTW, in related news, another New York Times story, about the widespread power outages in Venezuela buries the lede:
The blackout will further depress Venezuela’s already collapsing economy, which is being squeezed by bad governance, graft and sanctions imposed by the United States. The sanctions have affected Venezuela’s ability to import and produce the fuel required by the thermal power plants that could have backed up the Guri plant once it failed.
(emphasis mine)
This is why, when I want accurate stories regarding US foreign policy, I go to the foreign press.
Cornel West has just endorsed Bernie Sanders:
In an interview with The Intercept published Thursday, philosopher Cornel West endorsed Bernie Sanders’ bid for the White House.
West, who endorsed Sanders in 2016 and campaigned for him, explained that the Vermont senator fulfils “Martin Luther King-like” criteria when it comes to issues of race, war, materialism, and poverty.
“And this is the first time I’ve had a chance to publicly endorse him again, but yes, indeed. I’ll be in his corner that we’re going to win this time,” he said, adding, “my dear brother Bernie stands shoulders above any of the other candidates running in the Democratic primary when it comes to that Martin Luther King-like standards or criteria.”
Bernie Sanders is often accused by his opponents — despite his activist past and lifelong dedication to civil rights — of having a “problem” with black voters. But according to Cornel West that will be a non-issue in 2020.
In 2016 Sanders was facing two major issues: The “Clinton machine” and lack of name recognition. Since then, African Americans have “had the chance to discover” who Bernie Sanders really is, according to the philosopher, and this is now reflected in the polls.
I find the endorsement a big over the top (“Martin Luther King-like standards”), but considering the alternatives, his endorsement is not surprising.
When you come across a headline reading:
It does give one pause to reflect upon the vicissitudes of life.
With Bloomberg Out, Wall Street Desperately Turns to Biden
Being Wall Street’s “Great White Hope” is never a good thing.
They aren’t calling it that, of course, they are calling it a “Tax on non-resident owners,” but basically, it’s money laundering: (The London property market even more so)
Pressure to find revenue to finance a $40 billion fix for New York’s subways, buses and regional commuter rail has sparked renewed city and state interest in a tax on wealthy non-residents who own luxury city apartments.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s budget director, Robert Mujica, jump-started the idea Wednesday in a statement that totaled up potential revenue sources for regional transit funding: $15 billion from congestion pricing, $5 billion from Internet sales, and $2 billion from yet-to-be-legalized cannabis. The so-called “pied-à-terre tax” on non-resident owners could raise as much as $9 billion, Mujica said.
………
Mayor Bill de Blasio has preferred a millionaires’ income tax on city residents. Since that proposal hasn’t received support in the legislature, the mayor said Thursday he could back the luxury-apartment tax.
………
The proposal has been opposed by the Real Estate Board of New York, the trade group for an industry that accounts for more than 30 percent of the city’s tax revenue. The board has said it would harm the city’s economy by suppressing investment, cutting jobs and lowering demand for high-priced apartment towers.
Mandy Rice-Davies applies to the statement by the Real Estate Board of New York, “Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they?”
If there is a sure fire way to destroy your community, it is pandering to realtors, developers, and bankers.