Month: March 2020

Profoundly Depressing Quote of the Day

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But that will be a heavy lift indeed with a health care system geared above all to price-gouge sick people out of as much money as possible.

—Ryan Cooper at The Week explaining just why America is not equipped to handle COVID-19

Between millions with no sick leave, a healthcare system which is primary about looting, no meaningful childcare, and a public health system which has been shut down and privatized over the past 40 years.

Seriously, Bulgaria is probably better equipped to handle something like this than the United States is.

Super Tuesday Results

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Biden is exceeding expectations, but Bernie Sanders is winning decisively in California, so it looks like under the Democratic Party formula, (Proportional apportionment of delegates above a 15% cutoff) Sanders will get more delegates.

Not a great night for Sanders, but not horrible either.

The losers tonight, Warren, who will place third in her home state of Massachusetts and finish completely out of the delegate count in California, and Michael Bloomberg, who appears to have won only the primary in American Samoa.  (Tulsi Gabbard actually won her only delegate there)

See ongoing returns here.

When You are Paying $3500 for a Coronavirus Vaccine, Thank Mainstream DEmocrats

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We now see the sordid story of how the Clinton administration, with an assist from Joe Biden killed the possibility of meaningful price controls of drugs:

Before a vaccine to combat the coronavirus pandemic is within view, the Trump administration has already walked back its initial refusal to promise that any remedy would be affordable to the general public. “We can’t control that price because we need the private sector to invest,” Alex Azar, Health and Human Services secretary and a former drug industry executive, told Congress.

After extraordinary blowback, the administration insisted that in the end, any treatment would indeed be affordable. President Donald Trump on Monday morning tweeted that he would be meeting with “the major pharmaceutical companies today at the White House about progress on a vaccine and cure. Progress being made!” The federal government, though, under the Clinton administration, traded away one of the key tools it could use to make good on the promise of affordability.

………

That’s how much of the pharmaceutical industry’s research and development is funded. The public puts in the money, and private companies keep whatever profits they can command. But it wasn’t always that way. Before 1995, drug companies were required to sell drugs funded with public money at a reasonable price. Under the Clinton administration, that changed.

In the 1994 midterms, the Republican Revolution, built largely around a reaction to Bill Clinton’s attempt to reform the health care system, swept Democrats out of Congress. On its heels, in April 1995, the Clinton administration capitulated to pharmaceutical industry pressure and rescinded the longstanding “reasonable pricing” rule.

………

The move was controversial, and a House member from Vermont, independent Bernie Sanders, offered an amendment to reinstate the rule. It failed on a largely party-line vote, 242-180.

Then in 2000, Sanders authored and passed a bipartisan amendment in the House to reimpose the “reasonable pricing” rule. In the Senate, a similar measure was pushed by the late Paul Wellstone of Minnesota.

………

Then-Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware voted to table Wellstone’s amendment, and it was defeated 56-39.

This shot of sh%$ is why the the status quo, and Status Quo Joe, are not a viable alternative for the future.

In order for progressive policies to work, the Neoliberal embrace of looting must be abandoned.

Trump Ignored a Pogrom While He Was in India

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This is not a surprise. Trump has always had affection for racist demagogue authoritarians.

Still, the fact that there was a pogrom against Muslims in Delhi while Trump was visiting is a mark of both Trump’s venal nature, and Narendra Modi’s brazen bigotry:

The violence unleashed against Muslims in Delhi by armed Hindu mobs during President Donald Trump’s visit to India is a portent and a lesson. As Trump sat down to dine with India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, on Tuesday, Hindus in the same city were beating and shooting Muslims, and Muslims were fighting back, trying to defend their homes and businesses from looters and arsonists. More than 40 people were killed—including an 85-year-old woman too frail to flee her burning home—and more than 200 people, mostly Muslims, were injured.

The Delhi police, who report directly to Home Minister Amit Shah, either stood idly by or escorted the mobs. Videos of police breaking CCTV cameras and taunting prone and bleeding Muslim men while filming them with their smartphones circulated on social media. The violence echoed that of 2002, when Modi was chief minister of Gujarat and authorities there did nothing to stem carnage that killed some 1,000 people, the majority of them Muslims. It also brought back memories of the revenge killings of at least 3,000 Sikhs in Delhi after the assassination of former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by two of her Sikh bodyguards in 1984.

In all these cases, mobs targeting a single religious group were allowed to run riot, unchecked by police. This is the definition of a pogrom.

This is particularly disgraceful, though the US has been very accommodating Modi’s bigotry since his ascension to PM in 2014.

If you want a good, and engaging summary of just who and what Modi is, see this John Oliver video (banned in India):

Because, F%$# You, French Edition

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Emanuel Macron’s plan to reform (cut) pensions in France have proved spectacularly unpopular.

It’s so unpopular that even with overwhelming majority that he has in Parliament, its passage would push into municipal elections, so he has implemented his pension cuts through Presidential decree, because ……… well, you know:

The French government forced through its pension reforms by decree in a move designed to undercut opposition parties’ efforts to plague parliamentary debates with more than 40,000 amendments to the bill.

The pension overhaul, which aims to unify the country’s 42 different profession-specific retirement schemes, sparked the longest public transport strike in France’s history before making it to parliament. On Saturday evening, Edouard Philippe, prime minister, caught his parliamentary majority off guard by announcing he would trigger the 49.3 article in the constitution allowing the government to override parliament to adopt the legislation.

………

Philippe Martinez, head of the leftwing CGT trade union, told French news service AFP that the unions would take to the streets once again next week against the reforms. The leader of the far-left political party, La France Insoumise — France Unbowed — decried the “extraordinarily violent” methods of the government while Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right Rassemblement National, or National Gathering, said: “The French will not forgive this outrageous manoeuvre.”

I understand that politics ain’t beanbag, but this sort of sh%$ is why the right wing is on the rise in the EU.

The continual use anti-democratic tactics to strip protections from ordinary citizens while bailing out bankers and their ilk will make this worse, and not better.

Turkey Launches Offensive to Protect al Qaeda

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Turkey has initiated major military operations (an invasion) of Idlib province in Syria.

Turkey has a number of justifications, including concerns about an additional influx of refugees, but any any realistic assessment would strongly suggest that this is about installing client mini-states along the Turkish border as a part of Erdogan’s desire for greater sway in the area, along with his desire to enforce Sunni hegemony in Syria.

It should be noted that the rebels are al Nusra/al Qaeda in the Levant/Jabhat Fatah al-Sham/ Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, and as such are al Qaeda.

Turkey is looking for Nato support, because ……… Everything is f%$#ed up and sh%$.

In related news, Turkey is aggressively moving refugees to the the Greek border in an attempt to coerce the EU into supporting his adventure.

This will not end well.

Bye Felicia Tweety

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It appears that Chris Matthews has been fired from MSNBC. (Technically, it’s a retirement ……… with basically no advance notice ……… It’s a firing)

What took them so long?  This guy has been an embarrassment for well over a decade.

Chris Matthews, the veteran political anchor and voluble host of the long-running MSNBC talk show “Hardball,” resigned on Monday night, an abrupt departure from a television perch that made him a fixture of politics and the news media over the past quarter-century.

Mr. Matthews, 74, had faced mounting criticism in recent days over a spate of embarrassing on-air moments, including a comparison of Senator Bernie Sanders’s campaign to the Nazi invasion of France and an interview with Senator Elizabeth Warren in which the anchor was criticized for a condescending and disbelieving tone.

On Saturday, the journalist Laura Bassett published an essay accusing Mr. Matthews of making multiple inappropriate comments about her appearance, reviving longstanding allegations about the anchor’s sexist behavior. By Monday, his position at the news network he helped build had become untenable.

Accompanied by his family, Mr. Matthews walked onto the “Hardball” set inside NBC’s Washington bureau shortly before 7 p.m. to deliver a brief farewell. His longtime crew members, who had been told of his plans roughly an hour earlier, looked on stunned.

“I’m retiring,” Mr. Matthews told viewers in a solemn and brief monologue as his broadcast began at 7. “This is the last ‘Hardball’ on MSNBC.”

His sudden signoff took many colleagues by surprise — “Wait. What?” the MSNBC anchor Katy Tur wrote on Twitter — but it followed days of discussions with Phil Griffin, the president of MSNBC and one of the early executive producers of “Hardball.”

Mr. Griffin, who is close with Mr. Matthews, traveled to Washington over the weekend to discuss his future in person, according to three people who requested anonymity to describe sensitive conversations.

On the air on Monday, Mr. Matthews made clear that the timing of his exit was not entirely his choosing. “Obviously, it isn’t for a lack of interest in politics,” he said, going on to apologize for his past insensitive comments.

So Many Graves, So Little Urine

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I spend a couple of years working at GE, so it goes without saying that I am not a fan of the recently dead “Neutron Jack”* Welch, who just died at age 84.

I literally refuse to buy their light bulbs to this day.

In 1999, Fortune called him the manager of the decade.

His basic business strategy, financialize a manufacturing company for a quick bump in profits, along with making the ordinary people who actually do the work miserable, has not aged well.

*He was called “Neutron Jack” because the people were gone, but the buildings remain standing.

How Our System Screws the Ordinary People

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The Cost of Thriving Index

A right wing economist has come up with a concept called the, “Cost of Thriving” which describes how well being of the average American has been declining.

The argument is that core expenses have increased more rapidly than the CPI, and additionally that “Hedonic Adjustments” which subtracts a deflator because the quality of the products consumed increase, makes the government supplied cost of living data inaccurate.

At its core, a TV shows you shows you shows, no matter how flat it is, a car moves you no matter how many options have become standard features:

Economists and financial experts have been telling us for years how great things are for U.S. workers and consumers. The stuff we buy is dirt cheap, and living standards are higher than ever. Wages are keeping pace with inflation. Inequality probably isn’t as bad as you’ve been led to believe. The stock market is booming!

So why, then, do so many of us feel like we can barely make ends meet?

A new report published by the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, offers a clear explanation for the disconnect between the economy described by economists and the one experienced by regular people. It all boils down to the startling shift illustrated in the chart below. (Above and to the right here)

Lead author Oren Cass distills it as follows: “In 1985, the typical male worker could cover a family of four’s major expenditures (housing, health care, transportation, education) on 30 weeks of salary,” he wrote on Twitter last week. “By 2018 it took 53 weeks. Which is a problem, there being 52 weeks in a year.”

Cass calls this calculation the Cost-of-Thriving Index. It measures the median male annual salary against four major household expenditures:

  • Housing, defined as the annual rent for a three-bedroom house in the 40th percentile of the local housing market.
  • Health care, defined as the annual premium on a typical family health insurance policy.
  • Transportation, defined as the average cost of owning and operating a car driven 15,000 miles per year.
  • Education, defined as the average cost of tuition, fees, and room and board at a four-year public college.

………

It’s these realities, Cass writes, that are most salient for the middle-class families who tell pollsters they live paycheck to paycheck and worry that their kids’ standard of living will be lower than theirs. Traditional economists might look at the plummeting price of flat-screen TVs as a sign that standards of living are increasing. But how useful is a cheap TV when you can’t afford your insulin?

The fact that a very right wing economist understands that the current metrics of the cost of living are wrong, and that they are obscuring a fall in standard of living.

This is not the sort of thing that I would expect the Manhattan Institute.

Cue Freddie Mercury

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Pete “Mayo” Buttigieg has announced that he he is ending his run for President:

Pete Buttigieg, the former small-city Indiana mayor and first openly gay major presidential candidate, said Sunday night he was dropping out of the Democratic race, following a crushing loss in the South Carolina primary where his poor performance with black Democrats signaled an inability to build a broad coalition of voters.

The decision comes just 48 hours before the biggest voting day of the primary, Super Tuesday, when 15 states and territories will allot about one-third of the delegates over all. The results were widely expected to show him far behind Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Senator Bernie Sanders.

Buttigieg’s problem is that he could never make inroads with minority voters, because they (IMHO correctly) saw that his record as mayor was profoundly racist, and you cannot win the Democratic Primary without black and Latino support.

Oh, Snap!

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A federal judge has ruled that Ken Cuccinelli was unlawfully appointed to head the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), and so all of the rulings that he has made are invalid:

A federal judge ruled on Sunday that Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II was unlawfully appointed to lead United States Citizenship and Immigration Services and that two policies he put in place that limited asylum seekers’ access to counsel should be nullified.

The judge, Randolph D. Moss of United States District Court in Washington, said the Trump administration violated a federal law that stipulates who can fill vacant leadership positions at federal agencies when Mr. Cuccinelli was tapped in June to be the acting director of the agency that oversees legal immigration.

………

The statute related to Mr. Cuccinelli’s appointment is the Federal Vacancies Reform Act, which says an official temporarily filling a cabinet-level position before Senate confirmation must be next in the line of succession by serving as the “first assistant” or must have worked as a senior official in the agency for at least 90 days. Mr. Cuccinelli, the former Virginia attorney general who aggressively defended Mr. Trump’s immigration agenda on television in the months before his appointment, did not meet either of those requirements, according to the ruling.

………

But Nitin Shah, senior counsel at Democracy Forward, one of the plaintiffs in the case, said lawyers would examine how other policies could be affected.

“It raises serious questions about the legality of a number of policies that Cuccinelli has enacted and may yet enact, and we and others will be taking a closer look at that in the coming days,” Mr. Shah said. He called the voiding of the asylum directives “a big blow for the Trump administration’s racist agenda.”

The only saving grace of the Trump administration is that they are incompetent.

How This Works

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Someone is Gaming the System

At The Markup, a news org created to do deep dives on technical news story, has found that there are significant differences in the ways that Gmail handles emails from different presidential campaigns.

The Buttigieg andYang campaigns are achieving disproportionate success in getting into the Gmail primary inbox.

The implication of this story is that Google could alter its algorithms to favor one candidate over another.

I do not think that this is a credible concern, at least not yet.

However, it is entirely possible that there are people inside Google who favor one candidate over another who would provide detailed information to the campaigns about how to game the filters.

IMHO, the two campaigns most likely to have a Google insider feeding them information would be those of Buttigieg and Yang, and it is their emails that have achieved the most success in reaching the primary email tab.

It’s called a man on the inside attack:

Pete Buttigieg is leading at 63 percent. Andrew Yang came in second at 46 percent. And Elizabeth Warren looks like she’s in trouble with 0 percent.

These aren’t poll numbers for the U.S. 2020 Democratic presidential contest. Instead, they reflect which candidates were able to consistently land in Gmail’s primary inbox in a simple test.

The Markup set up a new Gmail account to find out how the company filters political email from candidates, think tanks, advocacy groups, and nonprofits.

We found that few of the emails we’d signed up to receive —11 percent—made it to the primary inbox, the first one a user sees when opening Gmail and the one the company says is “for the mail you really, really want.”

Half of all emails landed in a tab called “promotions,” which Gmail says is for “deals, offers, and other marketing emails.” Gmail sent another 40 percent to spam.

For political causes and candidates, who get a significant amount of their donations through email, having their messages diverted into less-visible tabs or spam can have profound effects.

“The fact that Gmail has so much control over our democracy and what happens and who raises money is frightening,” said Kenneth Pennington, a consultant who worked on Beto O’Rourke’s digital campaign.

………

It’s well known that Facebook and Twitter curate which posts people see through the news feed, highlighting some while others are scarcely shown. What’s received less attention is how email has also become an algorithmically curated and monetized platform—essentially another feed—and the effect that can have. Some nonprofits and political causes said inbox curation is reducing donations and petition signatures.

Google communications manager Katie Wattie said in an email that the categories “help users organize their email.”

………

Google communications manager Katie Wattie said in an email that the categories “help users organize their email.” 

………

The tabs also serve another purpose: ad inventory. While Gmail does not sell ads in the primary inbox, advertisers can pay for top placement in the social and promotions tabs in free accounts.

The Bloomberg Picture Gets Worse and Worse

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Now we learn that the Sackler family attempted to enlist Michael Bloomberg and his media empire to rehabilitate their public image.

It should note that there is no evidence of any direct actions by Bloomberg on behalf of the notorious opioid pushing family, but it DOES present an image of a media organization whose culture is deliberately and aggressively shaped to provide positive coverage to the billionaire class.

As such, this is something which will not play well in either the primary or the general election:

Long celebrated as civic-minded philanthropists, the Sacklers were becoming pariahs. The billionaire family whose company created and pushed the addictive painkiller OxyContin had managed to escape connection with the opioid crisis for years, but now two magazine pieces were portraying them as pain profiteers. Museums that had sought their donations were being asked about giving the money back. Mortimer D.A. Sackler — son of a co-founder of the company, Purdue Pharma, and a member of its board — was openly furious.

 And so he turned to a person he knew and admired in the media industry. A person known as a devoted public health crusader, widely recognized for banning smoking in public places and pushing soda taxes around the country: Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire ex-mayor of New York City and founder of Bloomberg L.P.

 “I am meeting with Michael Bloomberg tomorrow morning at 10 am to seek his help and guidance on the current issues we are facing,” Sackler wrote to Purdue’s top executives in December 2017. “I plan to discuss the following with him: 1. Current narrative vs the truth. 2. What advice does he have on how best to deal with it? 3. Does he have a journalist that he would recommend who could get the FULL story out there”?

 ………
 Previously undisclosed emails, including some filed in lawsuits against Purdue and others provided by sources, reveal a little-known relationship, forged in part by mutual philanthropic interests, between the Sacklers and Michael Bloomberg. They show that when the Sacklers were facing critical media coverage, they looked to Bloomberg and his news and philanthropic organizations for help. Bloomberg advised Mortimer Sackler on how to handle negative coverage in 2017, and steered the family to a crisis communications specialist who had been his mayoral press secretary. In 2018, Bloomberg Philanthropies staff met with Sackler to discuss launching a joint initiative to combat the opioid crisis.

 Now that Michael Bloomberg has joined the Democratic presidential campaign, his history in public life, his role as a news executive and his business history are being re-examined. As his rivals criticize his wealth and accuse him of trying to buy the nomination, his relationship with the Sacklers could prove problematic. Unlike some other candidates, including Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, Bloomberg has not publicly denounced the Sacklers for their role in fostering the opioid epidemic. While “it is not Mike’s usual practice to call out individual companies or company owners,” a spokesperson for Bloomberg Philanthropies said, he has “certainly called out” opioid manufacturers as a group.

 ………

When it came to coverage of their family and its business, the Sacklers felt comfortable reaching out. In fall 2014, Theresa Sackler called then-Serpentine Galleries director Julia Peyton-Jones to express concern about a forthcoming Bloomberg Businessweek story.

“Theresa Sackler rang me about a reporter from Bloomberg who is tracking everyone in the Sackler family and is writing what she believes will be an unflattering article referring to Sackler ‘dirty drug money,’” Peyton-Jones emailed Jemma Read, the London-based head of Bloomberg Corporate Philanthropy. “Theresa thinks that MB’s name could be mentioned in the article. She has no wish to interfere editorially in any way, however, she does want to alert Mike to the situation, and I would be grateful if you could make him aware of it.”

Read then emailed Theresa Sackler, asking for the reporter’s name. Sackler responded by identifying David Armstrong, then a reporter on Bloomberg’s investigations team. “We REALLY don’t want to interfere in any journalist’s work,” she wrote. “Just would not wish MB to be embarrassed by his association with the Serpentine Sackler gallery.” Read followed up by emailing Armstrong (now a senior reporter at ProPublica), asking when the story was scheduled to appear.

The piece was dropped from the magazine’s lineup a day before the issue closed and later ran in a shortened version on Bloomberg’s website and terminal. Editors who worked on the story say that it was handled on its journalistic merits, and that such last-minute changes were common.

………

Aware that Bloomberg Businessweek was working on the Sackler story, Brendan Coffey, then a member of the billionaires team, started to build a model to evaluate their wealth. But he realized it wasn’t a priority for his editors, and didn’t finish the project. “After Mike came back, the wind shifted,” said Coffey, who has since left Bloomberg. “It was a culture of not wanting to upset billionaires.”

………

That same year, Bloomberg threatened to shutter Bloomberg View, part of the news organization’s opinion section, after getting a call from a friend, the billionaire hedge fund manager John Paulson. Paulson was upset about a snarky column that suggested his record-breaking donation to Harvard should have gone to “literally any other charity.” Bloomberg cooled down over the weekend and decided that Bloomberg View could stay open, but the columnist was given a talking to, according to people familiar with the incident.