Month: August 2019

Truly Elegant Troll

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Because they have way too much free time, and because they want to force their views on others, the Kentucky legislature pass a law requiring schools to prominently display the national motto, “In God we trust.”

In response, Fayette County Public Schools is hanging framed dollar bills.

Well played:

When Brittany Pike saw the back of a dollar bill framed at Lexington’s Athens Chilesburg Elementary School last week, she couldn’t have been more pleased.

Pike took a photo and posted it on Facebook Wednesday along with this message about Fayette County Public Schools’ response to Kentucky’s new law that requires the national “In God We Trust” motto to be displayed prominently at schools:

“This school year Kentucky began requiring schools to place “In God We Trust” in the building. I absolutely love living in a school district that wants to follow the law while also ensuring EVERY student feels welcomed back regardless of religious beliefs. Thank you so very much Fayette County Public Schools for simply posting a dollar with ‘In God We Trust.’ My kids don’t feel awkward or excluded for not believing in any God.”

Fayette Superintendent Manny Caulk said Wednesday afternoon that in complying with the new law, “all schools in our district have been provided a framed version of an enlarged copy of a $1 dollar bill to display in a prominent location.”

This is beautiful.

The NRA Doth Protest Too Much

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The NRA argued that it was their ad firm, and not them, that was attempting this blatant effort at self dealing.

Well, the Wall Street Journal now has the $70,000 check from the National Rifle Association to a shell company that was to execute the purchase:

In May 2018, the National Rifle Association sent a $70,000 check to an obscure Delaware entity called WBB Investments LLC, which had been incorporated a week earlier.

 The check, a copy of which was obtained by The Wall Street Journal, raises new questions about the NRA’s attempts to explain a tangled transaction involving its then-outside advertising agency and an abortive plan to purchase a $6 million Dallas mansion for NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre.

The advertising agency, Ackerman McQueen, recently turned over documents to the proposed house purchase to the New York attorney general’s office, which is probing Mr. LaPierre’s dealings with the agency as part of a broad investigation of the NRA.

 When the Journal broke the story last week, the NRA initially said the plan to buy the mansion was hatched by Angus McQueen, the ad agency’s late co-CEO, as a kind of safe house for Mr. LaPierre. The NRA chief had concerns about his security in the wake of the February 2018 mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Fla.

 The NRA said the house was to be purchased by a company owned by senior Ackerman executives, and Mr. LaPierre shut down the transaction after discovering that the ad company intended to use NRA funds for the deal. “Not a cent of NRA money was ultimately spent,” the NRA said.



 An NRA check for $70,000 to an obscure Delaware entity called WBB Investments is the most-direct evidence to have emerged of the flow of money in the aborted mansion deal.

Ackerman, for its part, says Mr. LaPierre had wanted the mansion, which it said was to be paid for by the NRA. According to Ackerman’s version of events, Mr. LaPierre had asked Ackerman to help facilitate the deal, and an Ackerman lawyer set up WBB Investments to buy the house so the LaPierre connection wouldn’t become public.

Mr. LaPierre and his wife, Susan, twice visited the house—a 10,000-square-foot residence in a gated golf community—and were preparing to put down $70,000 in earnest money to make an offer, according to people familiar with this version of the transaction.

Enter the check, dated May 25, 2018, and drawn on an NRA account at Wells Fargo . It is the most-direct evidence of the flow of money in the aborted deal to have emerged.

“If there’s a check from the NRA to an LLC, that doesn’t seem consistent with a story that Ackerman was going to pay for it,” said Elizabeth Kingsley, a Washington lawyer who specializes in nonprofit law. “Even if it’s just earnest money, the money is on the line and the check shows NRA money, not Ackerman funds.”

Indeed.

The NRA was laundering money for Wayne LaPierre’s personal benefit.

The Family

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It looks like the Christofascist organization known as “The Family” is getting a documentary on Netflix.

Here is hoping that shedding light on the organization, which among other things was largely responsible for Uganda’s “Kill the Gays” bill, gets some much deserved scrutiny as a result.

From the Illuminati to the freemasons to QAnon, there’s no shortage of conspiracy theories trying to explain how power is accumulated and shared in Washington, D.C. But the wide-ranging network of politicians, world leaders, and men of faith that make up the Fellowship isn’t mere conspiracy theory: it’s 100 percent true. What’s more, some of its members are speaking on the record about it for the first time in the new five-part Netflix series The Family, directed by documentarian Jesse Moss.

The Fellowship, also known as the Family, is a highly secretive group of evangelical Christian men who meet for Bible study and prayer meetings; it’s best known for serving as the organizer of the National Prayer Breakfast, an annual gathering of diplomats and world leaders in Washington, D.C. Founded in 1935 by a man named Abraham Veride, the Fellowship initially arose from Vereide trying to arrange a meeting of business owners to crush laborers’ attempts at organizing. Over the course of the past 75 years, it has evolved into what some have referred to as a secret theocracy, or an underground movement of prominent Christian men who exert their influence not just in the United States, but abroad as well.

………

Fellowship members operate under a veil of secrecy, which is by design; Fellowship head Douglas Coe, who died in 2017, believed that the group could best exert its influence that way. Its members include senators, diplomats, and religious leaders around the world: Sen. Chuck Grassley, Sen. Jim Inhofe, and Rep. Bart Stupak have been linked to the group, while Vice President Mike Pence and attorney general Jeff Sessions have also been referred to as “friends of the Family.” And it’s a testament to the persistence of the production team that a handful of Fellowship members, including former Congressman Zach Wamp, speak on the record for the first time about the organization in the series. Moss attributes their willingness to talk in part to the organization’s attempts to “adapt to the 21st century with a greater degree of transparency, though only time will tell if that’s true.” Sharlet, however, has a slightly different take: “They’re not opening the doors. They’re not becoming transparent. That simply hasn’t happened. But they do want to have their say.”

The primary way the Fellowship maintains influence, the series argues, is through the National Prayer Breakfast, which every president since Eisenhower has attended over the past 50 years. Though many consider the Prayer Breakfast something of a “banal event,” according to Moss, he says, “It’s really quite an impressive demonstration of influence and power.”

………

In its efforts to consolidate its power, the Family has extended its tentacles overseas. One episode of The Family focuses in large part on a trip that Rep. Robert Aderholt, a right-wing politician tied to the group, made to Romania to campaign for anti-LGBTQ rights and advocate for Christian policy. Members of the Family have also aligned themselves with global leaders who had committed atrocities in their home countries, including Libyan dictator Moammar Gaddafi, who once prayed with Coe. “In the face of all these dictators, they don’t say anything at all,” says Sharlet. “They don’t ask any accountability.”

This is a group that literally orchestrated the introduction of a bill that had the death penalty for homosexuality.

They are dangerous fundamentalist extremists.

The System is Finally Working

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Indian body shops are complaining because H-1B visa applications have been rejected at unprecedented rates.

Good.

The H1B visa system is SUPPOSED to companies’ need for skills that are simply unavailable nationally, but the reality is that it’s used for cheap and marginally skilled labor.

The fact that this law is actually being enforced is an unalloyed good:

Denial of work visas to employees of India’s largest IT services exporters has risen to an all-time high, according to data sourced from a US-based research foundation.

The country’s big four software services exporters — Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys, HCL Technologies and Wipro — have seen around half of their work visa applications rejected in the past year as the Donald Trump administration pushed for more employment and higher wages for American workers.

The visa denial rate for TCS has gone up from 6% in FY15 to 37% during the first quarter of FY19 (October-December 2018), according to a report by the National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP). NFAP sourced data from the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) that follows a October-September financial year. 

Shades of Bobby Tables

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Some hacker who thought that he was cleverer than he actually was, decided to get a vanity license plate reading “Null”.

He figured that it might prevent him from getting parking tickets as well.

No such luck. Not only did he get tickets, he also got bills for an additional $12,000.00 in parking tickets that were listed as, “Null.”

So basically, he executed a code injection attack on himself:

The relationship between Americans and their automobiles is a complicated one. More than mere transport, cars can become extensions of one’s personality—think of stereotypes about drivers of a particular model like a Corvette, for instance. Since cars are mass-produced, it’s natural that people want to personalize them. Sometimes it’s covering them with every bit of chromed plastic you can find at JC Whitney. Sometimes it’s plastering them in stickers. And sometimes, it might just be a personalized number plate.

The rules for personalized plates vary depending on the state in which you’re registering your car. These can foster creativity, but today we have a cautionary tale from California, which reveals the risks of being too creative. It’s the story of a security researcher known as Droogie, who presented his experience at the recent DEF CON conference in Las Vegas. Droogie decided his new vanity plate should read “NULL.” While he did this mainly for the giggles, he told the audience that there was an ulterior motive, as reported by Mashable:

Droogie’s hope was that the new plate would exploit California’s DMV ticketing system in a similar manner to the classic xkcd “Bobby Tables” cartoon. With any luck, the DMV’s ticket database would see “NULL” and consign any of his tickets to the void. Unfortunately, the exact opposite happened. 

Oops.

Poster Child for Lack of Moral Standing

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I am referring to the organization generally known as the US Olympic Committee (It’s actually the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee).

They have gotten their panties in a bunch because athletes have used the medal awards ceremonies to protest issues of racism and law enforcement misconduct.

Some have kneeled, some have used an outstretched fist, and not the OSOC is threatening sanctions.

This is an organization that covered up the sexual abuse of Larry Nassar,  was complicit in corruption at the 2002 winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, and was the proximate or contributing cause of dozens of other scandals.

F%$# them.  They  have no moral standing whatsoever to claim to be guardians of the Olympics or of the Olympic ideal.

Linkage

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Saxon Glass Working:  Experimental Archeology looking at how the Saxons recycled glass from the Roman era for the next few centuries:

Russia Gets Antitrust Right

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Russia has not been hobbled by the counterfactual and ahistorical school of though that permeates the United States, so they are actually inclined to take action for monopolistic behavior.

I think that their experience in 1990s, when their country was pillaged by oligarchs and western financial institutions has contributed to these attitudes.

Now, they have have unloaded a well-deserved can of whup-ass on the poster child for anti-competitive behavior, Apple Computer:

Russian officials opened an antitrust investigation into Apple for restricting and removing parental control apps from its App Store shortly after the company released its own competing service, the latest sign of the growing scrutiny of Silicon Valley’s power.

Russia’s Federal Antimonopoly Service said late Thursday that it would investigate whether Apple had violated Russian competition law when it rejected a parental control app made by Kaspersky Lab, a Russian cybersecurity company, from the iPhone App Store. The Russian agency said that after reviewing Kaspersky’s complaint, it concluded that Apple had rejected the app, which it had previously approved, and set unclear requirements for app developers.

The New York Times reported in April that shortly after Apple introduced tools to help people limit the time they and their children spent on iPhones, the company removed or restricted popular apps that offered similar services. Apple said the apps improperly used technologies that gave them too much access to users’ data.

In June, Apple reversed itself and allowed the apps to return with the same technologies, as long as they promised to not “sell, use or disclose to third parties any data for any purpose.” Many of the apps have since returned to the App Store.

………

Kaspersky said in a blog post that despite Apple’s policy reversal, the Silicon Valley company has still put parental control apps at a disadvantage. As part of its complaint, Kaspersky said that Apple’s rules for returning to the App Store were vague, that Apple prohibited the apps from sharing data with third-party analytics firms to improve their services and that Apple did not allow the apps to use the same technology it did to help parents control their children’s phones.

………

Two other developers of parental control apps, Kidslox and Qustodio, have complained to the European authorities that Apple unfairly blocked their apps. At least one American company has lodged similar complaints in conversations with Justice Department officials, according to a person close to the talks who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were private.

This investigation is justified, Apple is an anti-competitive actor: They one of the leaders in the efforts to collude to depress Silicon Valley wages, and now they have placed an (as yet not activated) kill switch on their latest MacBooks to brick machines that are serviced by 3rd parties.

Justice for the Vampire Squid ……… In Malaysia

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The United States could never bring itself to prosecute Goldman Sachs executives for fraud and other financial crimes, but Malaysia has indicted 17 executives at the brokerage firm:

When it comes to serial and systemic frauds perpetrated by big banks on Wall Street, the U.S. Department of Justice typically punts. It will either not charge the bank itself or it will issue a felony charge along with a non-prosecution agreement that lets the bank settle the charges without a trial. These tactics by the Justice Department are why Wall Street crimes remain serial and systemic in nature.

This morning, the Attorney General in Malaysia stunned Goldman Sachs with an indictment of 17 of its former and current executives. That came on the heels of criminal charges filed last December by Malaysian authorities in the same matter against three Goldman Sachs subsidiaries and two former Goldman employees, Tim Leissner and Roger Ng.

Indictments announced this morning included charges against Richard J. Gnodde, Goldman’s top international banker in London and former Goldman executive J. Michael Evans, who is currently president of Alibaba.

The charges stem from a Malaysia state development fund, 1Malaysia Development Bhd (1MDB) for which Goldman Sachs underwrote $6.5 billion in bonds in 2012 and 2013. Goldman made an outsized $600 million in fees on the deals. According to prosecutors, $4.5 billion in 1MDB funds have gone missing, of which at least $2.7 billion was stolen according to prosecutors.

Malaysia Attorney General Tommy Thomas said jail time and criminal fines will be sought against those indicted given the “severity of the scheme to defraud and fraudulent misappropriation of billions in bond proceeds” and “the lengthy period over which the offences were planned and executed….”

………

Contrast how Malaysia has moved to hold key Goldman Sachs executives accountable versus what the U.S. Department of Justice has done. On November 1 of last year, the Justice Department announced charges against former Goldman employees Tim Leissner and Roger Ng and a financier involved in the dealings, Jho Low. But the Justice Department did not bring charges against any of the three units of Goldman Sachs that were involved and its press release is even too timid to mention the name Goldman Sachs. It refers simply to “U.S. Financial Institution #1,” suggesting it believes Goldman Sachs somehow deserves reputational protection.

It’s important to recall that the Justice Department let Goldman Sachs wiggle out of criminal prosecution with a payment of $550 million in 2010 over its role in facilitating a $1 billion fraud called Abacus. Goldman Sachs allowed the hedge fund, John Paulson & Co., to select mortgage bonds that were likely to fail to put into the deal so that the hedge fund could short the deal and end up making $1 billion. Goldman Sachs pitched the deal to its investors as a sound investment. Those investors ended up losing the same $1 billion that Paulson & Co. made in profits. A lowly Goldman Sachs’ salesman on the deal, Fabrice Tourre, was the only Goldman employee to be charged in the matter. Tourre was found guilty at trial but also got off by paying a fine. (See John Paulson and the Ick Factor at NYU.)

For the love of God, please let these prosecutions proceed to completion.

SOMEONE needs to hold these ratf%$#s accountable.

A Good Start, US Forest Service Smackdown Edition

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A judge has ruled that the US Forest Service erred in granting a mining permit, upending decades of policy by the agency, which has literally operated on the assumption that it has no basis do deny a mining claim in almost all circumstances.

Basically, the ruling says that while there is an affirmative right for miners to mine a claim where there is valuable minerals (Gold, Silver, Platinum, Uranium, Tungsten, etc.) on public land, but that if you are dumping millions of tons of tailings on a part of your claim, you are tacitly admitting that there are no valuable minerals under that portion of your claim.

As a matter of law and common sense, this seems to be correct.

Clearly, this will be appealed, and clearly it is clear that the Trump administration, and the Forest Service:

For decades, the U.S. Forest Service has said it can’t say “no” to a mine on its land.

Now, the recent federal court ruling overturning approval of the Rosemont Mine on service land near Tucson will make it harder for the Forest Service to say “yes.”

Legal experts say U.S. District Judge James Soto’s July 31 ruling, if upheld in higher courts, will have national repercussions.

………

The ruling could chill the hard-rock mining industry that has lived under a generally favorable legal climate since Congress passed the 1872 Mining Law to encourage mineral exploration of public lands.

Mining industry lawyers say the ruling usurps the role of government agencies in making such decisions, could bring chaos to federal mining reviews and will add more delays in permitting to an industry already having some of the longest permit times for new mines in the Western world.

Environmental law professors say the ruling is well-grounded factually and could end a century-old practice by mining companies of skirting or dodging federal law by dumping mining wastes on federal lands without proper reviews.

………

Soto’s order is “likely the most significant federal court decision on federal mining law in several decades,” mining industry lawyers James Allen and Michael Ford of the Phoenix-based law firm Snell and Wilmer wrote in an online article.

………

In the meantime, the ruling, if upheld, would make opening a big new mine in the United States on public lands very hard, said Leshy, professor emeritus at the University of California-Hastings College of Law.

………

Soto overturned the Forest Service’s approval of the mine, which would create 500 full-time jobs at high wages and 2,500 construction jobs, but would disturb 3,653 acres of national forest.

Rosemont also would disturb and desecrate 33 ancient Native American burial grounds containing or likely containing human remains of ancestors of the Tohono O’Odham, Pascua Yaqui and Hopi tribes, the judge wrote, as he ruled on two lawsuits, filed by four environmental groups and the other by the three tribes.

The opponents’ lawsuits successfully argued that only public lands directly above valuable mineral deposits are covered by the federal 1872 Mining Law’s definition of mining rights.

The judge found that the Forest Service had erred in approving Rosemont without determining the validity of the mining claims on 2,447 acres of public land where Hudbay Minerals Inc. wants to dump the mine’s waste rock and tailings.

To prove validity under the 1872 law, Soto wrote, Hudbay would have had to show that the land contained valuable mineral deposits, which he said the company had failed to do.

………

Soto’s ruling effectively holds that the feds cannot say “yes” to a proposal to dump mine tailings on invalid mining claims, said Mark Squillace, a University of Colorado law professor. Mining claims can only be used to extract the minerals located there, he said.

“Since dumping tailings on the claims could make it difficult or almost impossible to develop the claims going forward, Rosemont seems to be admitting that the claims do not contain valuable minerals and thus are not valid claims,” Squillace said.

………

Since the 1872 Mining Law passed, mining companies have legally dealt with their need to dispose of waste rock and tailings in two ways.

They have placed them, as Hudbay wants to do, on federal land on which they have filed “unpatented” mining claims, on which they don’t own the land but own its mineral rights.

Or, they have created what are known as mill sites to let them put wastes on those lands. That doesn’t require proof of a valuable mineral deposit but is limited to 5 acres per mining claim.

Legal experts on both sides of the issue say the use of unpatented claim land for mine wastes without a check on their validity has survived largely unchallenged until now.

………

The exceptions would occur when a mining company wants to operate on land where the service has already forbidden mining; when someone applies to “patent” a claim by getting it as their property; and when the service determines that a company’s proposed land use isn’t related to mining.

Nearly seven years later, in the final Rosemont environmental impact statement, the service said that putting waste rock and tailings on forest land is considered to be connected to mining under federal rules.

………

Soto’s ruling bought into Huckelberry’s arguments, saying Rosemont’s proposal to bury its unpatented claim land with waste “was a powerful indication that there was not a valuable mineral deposit underneath that land.”

Geological studies and maps indicate primarily common sand, stone and gravel lie beneath the land: “This does not constitute a valuable mineral,” Soto wrote.

He noted that the Forest Service and Hudbay cited two federal laws passed a half-century apart that say mining can’t be prohibited on federal lands. One, the Multiple Use Act of 1955, also prohibits interfering with “reasonably incidental mining activities” on federal lands, which Rosemont says its waste disposal would be.

But those laws only protect mining activities permitted under the 1872 Mining Law, which isn’t the case for Rosemont’s dumping tailings and waste rock on non-valid claimed land, the judge wrote.

………

Attorney Jensen’s view is what former Interior Solicitor Leshy said he expects will be the industry and government’s arguments during an appeal.

“It’s basically saying, the government can stick its head in the sand and not look at the obvious, and the courts should not intervene to stop it. It’s kind of a ‘prosecutorial discretion’ argument — the government gets to decide when and whether to challenge the validity of mining claims,” he said.

But although the government gets a good deal of deference, it can’t act “arbitrarily and capriciously,” said Leshy, citing a phrase from Soto’s ruling.

“It is arbitrary and capricious for the government to close its eyes to the plain facts in front of it — these mining claims used for tailings piles do not have minerals that can be profitably mined and are therefore invalid, and that means the company does not have a right to use them for that purpose.”

Here is hoping that this ruling survives appeal.

Segregation is a Feature, Not a Bug, of Charter Schools

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Case in point, Sausalito, California, where public schools have become almost completely minority, while the charter school is plurality white.

The state AG has issued a report declaring that the city deliberately segregated their schools.

Clearly, racism is a thing of the past:

Just two taxpayer-funded schools serve the quaint town of Sausalito, Calif. There’s a charter school where a plurality of the students are white, and a traditional district school where almost no one is.

That’s no accident, according to California’s attorney general, who alleges the school district knowingly created and maintained a segregated school, and starved it of funding needed for basic necessities while funneling extra money to the charter school.

On Friday, the Sausalito Marin City School District agreed to a settlement that orders officials to unravel the segregation, compensate graduates who were harmed by it and build a more equitable system. If the district fails, the charter school might lose its Sausalito campus.

………

The settlement, filed in state court Friday, is a rare example of government-mandated school desegregation in recent years. It has been several decades since the state of California forced a district to make these sorts of changes, a Becerra spokeswoman said. Nationwide, most court-ordered desegregation plans have been lifted. The Supreme Court has barred school systems from considering race in student assignment plans, even when the goal is desegregation.

The only people who believe that racism is over in the United States are racists.

Something Bad Happened Near Severodvinsk

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In Russian

There was some sort of event, involving a significant release of radiation, at the Nenoksa naval base:

On the morning of Thursday, August 8, something exploded at the Nenoksa Naval Base in Russia, not far from the city of Severodvinsk. This article is a good summary of what we knew by Friday. Since then, the Russian government has said that a radioactive source was involved in the explosion, along with liquid rocket fuel. Reports have gone back and forth on whether radiation detectors in Severodvinsk detected anything. Five more people have been reported dead. Sarov/VNIIEF, one of the Russian nuclear weapons laboratories, has released a statement, which some folks are rushing to translate.

The translation that I have seen of this video shows it not to be particularly informative, but it does reveal that there was an incident, and there were fatalities.

The New York Times coverage is similarly anodyne, though it does reveal a spike in radiation, albeit one that stays below recommended limits, at a nearby town.

The indications are that this is not a nuclear warhead, both Russian and US nuclear warheads have been designed to survive things like a rocket motor explosion, so it would imply that it was a test of some sort of nuclear propulsion system, along the lines of the 9M730 Burevestnik nuclear powered cruise missile announced by Putin last year.

How Convenient

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I have nothing in the way of direct knowledge of the events, but Jeffrey Epstein’s suicide does appear to solve what was a troubling situation for his rich and powerful friends.

Whether this was the final act of a psychopathic narcissist, or the desperate act of those billionaires who he had damning evidence on, it doesn’t matter.

What does matter is that these people, and there were dozens, if not hundreds, of people who were willing partners in this horror show, and now there will be no accounting:

It was Friday night in a protective housing unit of the federal jail in Lower Manhattan, and Jeffrey Epstein, the financier accused of trafficking girls for sex, was alone in a cell, only 11 days after he had been taken off a suicide watch.

Just that morning, thousands of documents from a civil suit had been released, providing lurid accounts accusing Mr. Epstein of sexually abusing scores of girls.

Mr. Epstein was supposed to have been checked by the two guards in the protective housing unit every 30 minutes, but that procedure was not followed that night, a law-enforcement official with knowledge of his detention said.

Again, how convenient.

In addition, because Mr. Epstein may have tried to commit suicide three weeks earlier, he was supposed to have had another inmate in his cell, three officials said. But the jail had recently transferred his cellmate and allowed Mr. Epstein to be housed alone, a decision that also violated the jail’s procedures, the two officials said.

At 6:30 a.m. on Saturday, guards doing morning rounds found him dead in his cell. Mr. Epstein, 66, had apparently hanged himself.

I’ll be spending the next few days considering the tin-foil hat possibilities.

Joe Biden’s Marijuana Legalization Isn’t Legalization

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What he wants to do is to reschedule from 1 to 2.

This will place in the same category as cocaine and methamphetamines, which means that its distribution will still be tightly restricted, and usage outside of those tight conditions remain a felony.

It also means that he will be making the manufacture and distribution the exclusive purview of big pharma.

It’s actually worse than the status quo, which is not a surprise, “Uncle Joe” has been among the most hardcore of the drug warriors for over 4 decades:

No one person created America’s war on drugs. No individual is responsible for the accompanying manufactured crises of mass incarceration and impoverishment of working class communities of color. But in the same shamed strata as Richard Nixon and Nancy Reagan, in the view of many, you can find Joe Biden, the wobbly 2020 frontrunner and former vice president.

In his 40 years in the Senate, as is now well known, Biden was a key architect of harsh criminal penalties for nonviolent drug users. Undoing much of his own work was one way to make sense of a large part of the criminal justice plan his presidential campaign recently released. Finding a centrist’s safe-and-happy medium on weed in particular, Biden has not embraced legalization—a.k.a. commercialized, recreational pot use—but has claimed to back decriminalization, or removing at least most pot offenses from the criminal justice system.

But Biden is actually pushing a policy that could wreck the growing American weed industry and massively disrupt users’ access to the drug, attorneys, consultants, academics, and entrepreneurs well-versed in US cannabis policy say.

“I view Biden’s plan as a ham-fisted handing over of cannabis to the pharmaceutical industry,” said Gavin Kogan, a California-based cannabis executive and attorney who chairs Grupo Flor, a large, vertically-integrated cannabis firm.

Cannabis is currently listed as a Schedule I controlled substance, the classification intended for drugs with a high potential for abuse and no medical value—a designation contradicted by a 2017 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine review, mocked on a daily basis by dozens of states with medical-use laws, and that even Attorney General William Barr apparently believes is untenable.

Other than cannabis, there are no major state-legal markets for Schedule I drugs. Would making weed Schedule II—intended only for strictly controlled pharmaceutical drugs, and not recreational nor wellness products, the rubrics under which cannabis is often marketed and sold to Americans—make more sense? It might, but here’s the catch: Drugs listed under Schedule II (which include cocaine and methamphetamine as well as prescription opiates like fentanyl) are available legally but only under strict Food and Drug Administration controls. That is, only with a doctor’s prescription, only after a lengthy FDA-overseen approval process that can include years of clinical trials (and then sold only via a licensed pharmacy), and only for limited applications.

In other words, there are no Schedule II drugs grown, processed, and sold in the way cannabis is brought to market in the United States, either—so that label, too, is probably inadequate. More to the point, if strictly enforced to the letter, Biden’s marijuana policy could rip cannabis away from its current producers and sellers and hand over control of commercial weed to corporate interests instead.

“If the federal government actually enforced the CSA [Controlled Substances Act] Schedule II [on cannabis in a Biden administration], then almost all current state-legal activities would be banned and could be shut down,” said Jonathan Caulkins, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College who has served as co-director of the nonpartisan RAND Corporation’s Drug Policy Research Center.

………

It wasn’t just advocates with skin—financial or otherwise—in the game suggesting Biden’s plan would likely amount to a gift to a few key players. Experts said the impact of the policy, if enacted, was pretty cut-and-dried.

“To the extent that FDA regulation always favors bigger companies that can afford to meet the regulations, then, yes, putting cannabis in Schedule II would be a sort of Big Pharma model,” said David Herzberg, a historian at the University at Buffalo who specializes in drug policy and authored Happy Pills in America: From Miltown to Prozac, a review of how prescription drugs have been developed, marketed, and sold.

………

It’s not clear exactly how Biden hit upon Schedule II as the magic solution, or if he took input from drug-policy reform advocates or cannabis industry players—or took cues instead from the anti-legalization activists working against them. A spokesman for Biden’s campaign did not respond to emails, text messages, or a phone call seeking comment.

“There’s no way this [Biden’s plan] will ever go far enough to remedy the damages these communities of color have suffered,” said Solonje Burnett, co-founder of the Brooklyn-based cannabis brand hub Humble Bloom, adding that his was a “half measure” that put him on “the wrong side of history, again.”

………

“His stance is to blow up 90 percent of the existing regulated and traditional market,” said Sean Donahoe, an Oakland, California-based cannabis-industry consultant. That could be a disruption worse, even, than any George Bush or Barack Obama-era crackdown—when many businesses and operators suffered raids or received threatening letters.

This “shows [Biden’s] fundamental worldview is framed through a corporate lens with no regard for existing operators, nor good public policy,” Donahoe added.

As absurd as it might be to list cannabis in Schedule I, lumping weed with opiates, coke, and pharmaceuticals in Schedule II is also intellectually dishonest, critics said.

………

The proposal would do for cannabis “the same thing it’s done for meth: Ensure reduced research initiatives, selective prosecution, and a thriving black market,” said Michael Backes, a Southern California-based cannabis industry consultant and author of Cannabis Pharmacy: The Practical Guide to Medical Marijuana.

This is classic Biden:  It’s wrong, and favors entrenched and predatory incumbents, just like he did with the credit card industry.

Speaking of Cable Company Rat-F%$#ery………

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People hate their internet companies.

Whether it is Comcast, Charter, CenturyLink, Verizon, Frontier, etc. their business plan is all about creating and maintaining a monopoly, and then extracting rents with over-priced and under-performing internet.

It’s why US internet costs are among the highest in the developed world while having the lowest performance.

The response of the incumbent providers has been to lobby to maintain their monopolies, doing things like forbidding municipal broadband.

Well, it appears that their lobbying is losing its effectiveness, even in Republican dominated states like North Carolina:

Broadband expansion legislation that stalled earlier this year after strong opposition from cable and telecommunications providers cleared a key N.C. House committee Thursday, but only after a long debate on the role of government in providing internet access.

House Bill 431, the FIBER NC Act, would eliminate existing state restrictions on local government investments in broadband infrastructure and put in place a system that would allow counties and municipalities to build out the infrastructure and then lease it to a private provider.

Members of the State and Local Government Committee debated for an hour and half before approving the bill in a 13-9 vote.

The majority, a mix of the committee’s Democrats and a handful of Republican legislators from rural districts, also defeated an amendment to require a local referendum on public broadband investment by the same margin.

The bill was introduced early in the session but has been opposed by the state’s main internet providers, who say it is government encroachment into private enterprise.

North Carolina might not be the last place where I would expect to see such a bill progressing, but it’s the second or third to last place where I would expect to see it.

People are getting sick and tired of the looting.

Rule 1 of Connectivity is that Phone and Cable Companies will F%$# You Like a Drunk Sorority Girl

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Rule 2 is SEE RULE 1.

Case in point, AT&T lying to the court about the effects of its merger with Time Warner:

When AT&T acquired Time Warner last year for $85 billion, the companies said the deal would be great for consumers, who would benefit from lower prices and improved service.

The Justice Department said the opposite, predicting the merger would give AT&T so much market power that price hikes and channel blackouts were all but inevitable.

And now we know. The government was right.

AT&T wasted no time in raising the price of its DirecTV satellite-TV service by $5 a month. It then raised the price of its DirectTV Now streaming service by $10 a month. (The company said last week DirecTV Now is being renamed AT&T TV Now.)

More than 6.5 million of AT&T’s DirecTV and U-verse pay-TV customers are currently cut off from CBS channels because AT&T says CBS wants too much money for its programming.

Meanwhile, more than 12 million Dish Network and Sling TV subscribers have lost access to AT&T’s HBO and Cinemax channels because, according to Dish, AT&T wants too much money for its own programming.

Put more succinctly, AT&T, after raising subscriber costs, wants to pay as little as possible for channels included on its pay-TV services. But it wants as much as possible from other pay-TV services for its own channels.

And it’s willing to hold consumers hostage to get what it wants.

“When you start seeing blackouts, it’s obvious you’re looking at a merger that’s not serving consumers very well,” said Herbert Hovenkamp, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the nation’s top antitrust authorities.

………

U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon ruled last year — and was subsequently upheld by an appellate court — that the government was mistaken when it warned of consumers being harmed by the merger.

Leon said it would be counter-productive for a merged AT&T/Time Warner to withhold its own channels from competing pay-TV providers or black out competitors’ channels, and thus the likelihood of this happening was low.

“The evidence of his being wrong is bordering on the absurd,” said Christopher Sagers, a professor at the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law.

………

“Plain and simple, the merger created for AT&T immense power over consumers,” Andy LeCuyer, Dish’s senior vice president of programming, said in a statement.

“AT&T no longer has incentive to come to an agreement on behalf of consumer choice,” he said. “Instead, it’s been given the power to grab more money or steal away customers.”

………

Einer Elhauge, a professor at Harvard Law School, said the current circumstances “seem to be precisely what the Department of Justice predicted would happen after the merger of AT&T and Time Warner, and precisely what AT&T successfully persuaded the trial court was implausible for it to ever do post-merger.”

His verdict? “It looks like the court just got it wrong.”

If so, what if anything can be done?

There was once a time when regulators decided AT&T had too much power over the phone industry and decided to break up the company.

I wonder if the same case now can be made for AT&T’s power over the TV industry.

………

The antitrust experts I spoke with said AT&T’s post-merger behavior makes a strong case for separating pay-TV and programming companies — but it may be too late to fix the problem.

I hope that it’s not too late, but once again, Robert Bork’s laissez faire theories of monopolies and competition are shown to be wrong.

In fact they are not just wrong, they are delusional, and I would argue deeply hypocritical.

Canada Concludes that the US Drug Market is Insane

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Canada uses a sophisticated formula to set drug prices.

They have just updated the algorithm to eliminate US drug prices from their calculations because they are completely out of line.

Pharma is unamused, but they can go and Cheney themselves:

The Canadian government on Friday announced final regulations to reduce patented drug prices it said would save Canadians C$13.2 billion ($10 billion) over a decade, overriding heavy opposition from pharmaceutical companies.

………

The new rules, described in a statement by Health Canada, were largely in line with a December 2017 draft. They came after months of delay prompted speculation the government would back down in the face of industry lobbying or simply run out of time before Canada’s October election.

………

Under the new rules, Canada will change the countries the federal drug price regulator, the Patented Medicine Prices Review Board (PMPRB), compares domestic prices to, dropping the United States and Switzerland where prices are highest, and let the agency consider the cost-effectiveness of new medicines.

It will also force drugmakers to disclose some confidential discounts to the PMPRB, which sets maximum prices.

………

Global drugmakers, including Johnson & Johnson, Merck & Co and Amgen Inc, argued against the draft plan.

Petitpas Taylor said the new rules would lay the foundation for a new national pharmaceutical care program. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government is expected to announce a program to cover the cost of prescription drugs for some or all Canadians, but the program’s scope is not yet clear.

Good.

Big pharma needs to be taken down.

Be Still My Beating Heart

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House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler has announced that his committee is conducting an impeachment inquiry of Trump.
I think that there is plenty of probably cause for an inquiry, but I can’t help but wonder if this is just some sort of ploy to take the heat off of House leadership:

House Democrats have begun impeachment proceedings against President Trump. A key Democrat admitted as much Thursday.

“This is formal impeachment proceedings,” the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), told CNN on Thursday, after weeks of dancing around whether his committee would formally consider impeaching Trump.

“We are investigating all the evidence, gathering the evidence,” Nadler added. “And we will [at the] conclusion of this — hopefully by the end of the year — vote to vote articles of impeachment to the House floor. Or we won’t. That’s a decision that we’ll have to make. But that’s exactly the process we’re in right now.”

His statement makes clear what a lawsuit filed Wednesday by his committee states: that the “Judiciary Committee is now determining whether to recommend articles of impeachment against the President based on the obstructive conduct described by the Special Counsel.”

I would also suggest looking into tax evasion, fraud, and mob connections.