Month: April 2020

Some Garbage Airline ———

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You know, I don’t wanna name an actual airline so let’s just make one up; let’s call it, “Delta Airlines,” just instructed its employees not to tell other employees if they test positive for Covid-19, because allowing employees to take precautions might interfere with the cash flow.

Can we find a way to throw these motherf%$#ers in jail?

Delta Air Lines has directed flight attendants who test positive for the coronavirus to “refrain from notifying” fellow crew members or posting about their health on social media, according to an email HuffPost reviewed.

The email, sent Thursday afternoon to more than 25,000 flight attendants, stated that Delta management will “follow an established process” to alert co-workers who recently came in contact with flight attendants who “are symptomatic or diagnosed with COVID-19,” the respiratory illness caused by the coronavirus.

“Please refrain from notifying other crew members on your own,” read the email, which was sent at 2:20 p.m. Eastern time. “Once you have completed the reporting procedures listed above, leaders will follow the established process to notify any impacted flight attendants.”

Son of a Bitch

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In a good way.

Despite the best efforts of Wisconsin Republicans to suppress the vote, Jill Karofsky defeated right wing hack Daniel Kelly in the race for Wisconsin State Supreme Court judge:

Dane County Circuit Judge Jill Karofsky won the race for Wisconsin Supreme Court, narrowing the conservative majority after a tumultuous election conducted in the midst of a global pandemic, according to unofficial results released Monday.

 Karofsky’s victory marked the first time in a dozen years that a Supreme Court challenger beat an incumbent — and just the second time in more than half a century. Her win over Justice Daniel Kelly will shift conservative control of the court from 5-2 to 4-3.

 Appearing by video conference from her home with her son and daughter behind her, Karofsky thanked her family and supporters and decried the decision to hold the election during the coronavirus outbreak.

………

The pandemic triggered a record surge of absentee balloting as voters looked for a way to stay at home to prevent themselves and others from getting ill. Many voters have complained they never received their absentee ballots, forcing them to choose between giving up the ability to vote and braving the polls on election day.

………

Republicans were so worried about Kelly’s chances that they considered moving the election so it didn’t fall on the same day as Wisconsin’s presidential primary, when Democratic turnout was expected to be high. They abandoned the plan to move the election amid public opposition.

By the time election day rolled around, the Democratic presidential primary had largely fizzled and the world was in the grip of the pandemic. The Supreme Court candidates abandoned their in-person campaigning and both sides urged people to vote by mail instead of going to the polls.

The voters were pissed off, big time, by the machinations of the Republican Party to suppress the vote.

If Democrats don’t see this as a political winner now, they are even more clueless than I had thought.

Never Let a Crisis go Unexploited

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It now appears that the Trump administration is looking to use the Covid-19 pandemic as an excuse to lower agricultural wages.

It is contemptible, but using an emergency as an excuse to shaft the most vulnerable in society is Republican Party 101:

New White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows is working with Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue to see how to reduce wage rates for foreign guest workers on American farms, in order to help U.S. farmers struggling during the coronavirus, according to U.S. officials and sources familiar with the plans.

………

The measure is the latest effort being pushed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to help U.S farmers who say they are struggling amid disruptions in the agricultural supply chain compounded by the outbreak; the industry was already hurting because of President Trump’s tariff war with China.

………

The nation’s roughly 2.5 million agricultural laborers have been officially declared “essential workers” as the administration seeks to ensure that Americans have food to eat and that U.S. grocery stores remain stocked. Workers on the H-2A seasonal guest-worker program are about 10% of all farmworkers.

………

The most recent push to lower wage rates for workers on H-2A visas has drawn pushback from some strange bedfellows: immigrant-rights advocates and immigration hard-liners usually aligned with Trump.

………

It’s unclear how the reforms would be made, including whether they would be taken through executive action or through the federal regulatory process. But Perdue has pushed for adjusting what is known as the adverse effect wage rate, which prevents farmers using the H-2A program from paying all workers — U.S. and guest workers — wages below the prevailing rates in the surrounding area.

Earlier this year, Perdue said the adverse wage rate has set almost a $15 minimum wage for agriculture, noting “no other business in the country has that,” according to the agriculture trade journal DTN.

The “adverse effect wage rates” are based on a USDA survey of what agricultural workers are paid in each state. It’s $11.71 in Florida, $12.67 in North Carolina and $14.77 in California.

Evil is as evil does, I guess.

Signs of the Apocalypse

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Dana Milbank, the quintessential Washington, DC insider know nothing, just got something right when he noted that the Covid-19 response was a direct result of the movement Republican belief that the government should be drowned in a bathtub.

Well a stopped clock, is right once a day, and Dana Milbank is right (maybe) once a year:

I had been expecting this for 21 years.

“It’s not a matter of ‘if,’ but ‘when,’” the legendary epidemiologist D.A. Henderson told me in 1999 when we discussed the likelihood of a biological event causing mass destruction.

In 2001, I wrote about experts urging a “medical Manhattan Project” for new vaccines, antibiotics and antivirals.

………

I repeat these things not to pretend I was prescient but to show that the nation’s top scientists and public health experts were shouting these warnings from the rooftops — deafeningly, unanimously and consistently. In the years after the 2001 terrorist attacks, the Bush and Obama administrations seemed to be listening.

But then came the tea party, the anti-government conservatism that infected the Republican Party in 2010 and triumphed with President Trump’s election. Perhaps the best articulation of its ideology came from the anti-tax activist Grover Norquist, who once said: “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”

They got their wish. What you see today is your government, drowning — a government that couldn’t produce a rudimentary test for coronavirus, that couldn’t contain the pandemic as other countries have done, that couldn’t produce enough ventilators for the sick or even enough face masks and gowns for health-care workers.

The fact that this font of conventional wisdom (the conventional wisdom is always wrong) recognizes that this is a direct result of an ideology is significant.

The pundit class, disdains the discussion of ideology, so the fact that one of their most prominent avatars is assigning the blame to a right-wing ideology constituents a statement against interest, which increases the credibility of the assewrtion.

The GOP is Rolling Out the Brute Squad

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Specifically, they are looking to put retired police and military in voting locations to intimidate voters.

I guess this explains why they are so opposed to postal voting, you cannot send the Brute Squad to everyone’s mailbox:

On Election Day in November, some polling places could be patrolled by off-duty police officers and veterans, according to a plan hatched by Republican operatives.

The idea is a reprisal of once-illegal Election Day “ballot security” intimidation tactics, intended to challenge voter registration and remove voters from the rolls. At a strategy session in February attended by conservative donors and activists, several people expressed a specific need for Republican poll watchers in “inner city” and predominantly Native American precincts, according to audio recordings of the event obtained by The Intercept and Documented.

“You get some [Navy] Seals in those polls and they’re going to say, ‘No, no, this is what it says. This is how we’re going to play this show,’” said Catherine Engelbrecht, founder of True the Vote, a group that lobbies for voting restrictions and organizes volunteers to go into precincts and aggressively challenge voters who they believe are improperly registered. “That’s what we need. We need people who are unafraid to call it like they see it.”

The Republican Party is not the opposition, it is the enemy.

No, Just No

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This is a bad idea. A really bad one, on multiple levels – for starters, it threatens the integrity of Dem voter data & puts Nov prospects in hands of a shady firm w/ a failed track record.

Plenty of orgs bid for contracts. I hope there is enough good sense to reject this one. https://t.co/8kRIog03YM

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) April 10, 2020

As a part of Michael Bloomberg’s efforts to purchase the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment), his campaign organization is making a below cost bid to take over the campaign infrastructure of the Biden campaign, as well as various leadership PACs, and Eric (Place) Holder’s political organization.

If you don’t find this chilling, you are not paying attention.

Also, it should be noted that this is a classic part of the Bloomberg handbook:  Using his money to forestall any meaningful criticism of his actions so that he can secure power.

As an aside, the Sanders campaign should NEVER turn over its data to the DNC for just this reason:

The Bloomberg-owned firm Hawkfish, which ran the presidential campaign of Mike Bloomberg, is in serious talks to serve the presidential campaign of Joe Biden, according to sources with knowledge of the ongoing negotiations. Along with Biden’s campaign, the firm is courting a wide swath of other progressive and Democratic organizations, opening up the possibility of Bloomberg gaining significant control over the party’s technology and data infrastructure.

………

But instead it comes with other enticements to clients. Democratic operatives who’ve been pitched by Hawkfish say that the firm is able to offer extraordinarily low prices by operating at a loss subsidized by Bloomberg, whose wealth dangles as an added benefit that could come with signing the firm. A Hawkfish insider, who spoke on the condition of anonymity so as not to jeopardize employment, confirmed that the company is willing to operate at a loss in order to grab control of the party infrastructure, explaining that the firm hopes to offer a fee that would be small enough to entice the Biden campaign while passing muster with federal regulators. (If a firm offers services for less than fair market value, the discount is considered under campaign finance laws to be an in-kind contribution, and thus subject to legal limits depending on the entity collecting the contribution. A presidential campaign can’t accept more than $2,800 from a single individual per election, or any contributions at all from a company.)

The FEC won’t rule on the in-kind contribution until after the election, if it even could take action, since it still lacks a quorum to operate.


“When the objective isn’t money but control, $18 million is incredibly cheap to become the center of gravity for all Democratic political information, which we would be if both Biden and [House Democrats] have to come through us,” the source said, referring to the amount of money the Bloomberg campaign transferred to the Democratic Party last month, in a reversal of his earlier pledge to create a Super PAC in support of the party’s nominee. “And in the current environment, the public sees this as generosity.”

………

Waleed Shahid, spokesperson for Justice Democrats, which recruits progressive challengers to incumbents, said that Bloomberg’s firm running the party’s data operation would send the wrong signal and could have long-term, damaging repercussions. “The idea of the Democratic nominee potentially rewarding Bloomberg’s firm with this contract is disturbing,” he said. “We shouldn’t be the party of helping billionaires amass huge amounts of mega-data on voters that allow them to keep accruing obscene amounts of power in our democracy.”

In the annals of bad ideas for the Democratic Party, this one is definitely in the top three.

The Return of the Mafia State

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With Italy in crisis over its Covid-19 epidemic and the EU offering little help, the state lacks the resources to help ordinary people.

Rather unsurprisingly, the Mafia is stepping in to help the people, which is a sound investment for them, because if they have the goodwill of the population, then they will be able to function without interference from the local and national law enforcement.

This is going to set back progress against organized crime in Italy by years, if not decades, and their activities will cross borders into the rest of the EU:

As Italy struggles to pull its economy through the coronavirus crisis, the Mafia is gaining local support by distributing free food to poor families in quarantine who have run out of cash, authorities have warned.

………

“For over a month, shops, cafés, restaurants and pubs have been closed,” Nicola Gratteri, antimafia investigator and head of the prosecutor’s office in Catanzaro, told the Guardian. “Millions of people work in the grey economy, which means that they haven’t received any income in more than a month and have no idea when they might return to work. The government is issuing so-called shopping vouchers to support people. If the state doesn’t step in soon to help these families, the mafia will provide its services, imposing their control over people’s lives.”

The ramifications of the lockdown in Italy are affecting the estimated 3.3 million people in Italy who work off the books. Of those, more than 1 million live in the south, according to the most recent figures from CGIA Mestre, a Venice-based small business association. There have been reports of small shop owners being pressured to give food for free, while police are patrolling supermarkets in some areas to stop thefts. Videos of people in Sicily protesting against the government’s stalled response, or people beating their fists outside banks in Bari for a €50 (£44) loan are going viral and throwing fuel on the crisis; a fire the mafia is more than willing to stoke.

From the first signals of mounting social unrest, the Italian minister of the interior, Luciana Lamorgese, said ‘‘the mafia could take advantage of the rising poverty, swooping in to recruit people to its organisation’’. Or simply stepping in to distribute free food parcels of pasta, water, flour and milk.

………

“Mafias are not just criminal organisations,’’ Federico Varese, professor of criminology at the University of Oxford, said. “They are organisations that aspire to govern territories and markets. Commentators often focus on the financial aspect of mafias but they tend to forget that their strength comes from having a local base from which to operate.”

This is the bitter fruit of EU mandated austerity.

Well, This is a Relief

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The US District Court for the District of Columbia has ruled that violating a site’s terms of service is not criminal hacking.

This was a pre-enforcement challenge to the CFAA by researchers who were looking into racial discrimination by websites, but were concerned that these sites would manage to convince a prosecutor to charge them with a felony in response to their discovering embarrassing information.

Given that the general vagueness of the CFAA is a petri dish for prosecutorial abuse, this is a good thing:

A federal court in Washington, DC, has ruled that violating a website’s terms of service isn’t a crime under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, America’s primary anti-hacking law. The lawsuit was initiated by a group of academics and journalists with the support of the American Civil Liberties Union.

The plaintiffs wanted to investigate possible racial discrimination in online job markets by creating accounts for fake employers and job seekers. Leading job sites have terms of service prohibiting users from supplying fake information, and the researchers worried that their research could expose them to criminal liability under the CFAA, which makes it a crime to “access a computer without authorization or exceed authorized access.”

So in 2016 they sued the federal government, seeking a declaration that this part of the CFAA violated the First Amendment.

But rather than addressing that constitutional issue, Judge John Bates ruled on Friday that the plaintiffs’ proposed research wouldn’t violate the CFAA’s criminal provisions at all. Someone violates the CFAA when they bypass an access restriction like a password. But someone who logs into a website with a valid password doesn’t become a hacker simply by doing something prohibited by a website’s terms of service, the judge concluded.

“Criminalizing terms-of-service violations risks turning each website into its own criminal jurisdiction and each webmaster into his own legislature,” Bates wrote.

Well, That’s a Mature Way to Handle This

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In response to stories revealing that Liberty University had called its students back to campus, risking a Covid-19 outbreak, the educational [sic] institution has sworn out arrest warrants against the journalists revealing their reckless behavior.

Here is the Christo-Fascist right in a nutshell:

Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr. on Wednesday said that arrest warrants had been issued for reporters from The New York Times and ProPublica after both publications wrote stories criticizing his decision last month to partially reopen his Virginia-based college.

 Photos of the arrest warrants for New York Times freelance photographer Julia Rendleman and ProPublica reporter Alec MacGillis were published on the website of conservative radio host Todd Starnes. The warrant alleges each committed misdemeanor trespassing on campus while gathering information for their respective stories.

 Falwell’s decision on March 24 to reopen the private evangelical Christian university campus came nearly two weeks after Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam (D) issued a state of emergency.

The university said that some students couldn’t return home in an effort to protect elderly family members living under the same roof, while roughly 750 students were international students who couldn’t return to their home countries.

Five days after the campus reopened, The New York Times reported that, according to the school’s director of student health services, nearly a dozen students had reported symptoms similar to those experienced in positive coronavirus cases.

 ………

 The university said that the reporters committed “trespassing on posted property.”

 “The arrest warrants are issued by a magistrate based on information derived from an investigation conducted by Liberty University Police Department, the police agency with primary jurisdiction, based on reports of criminal trespassing on posted property made by Liberty University,” the university told The Hill in an email.

 The New York Times and ProPublica have each stood by their reporting.

 “Our freelance photographer was engaged in the most routine form of news gathering: taking a picture of a person who was interviewed for a news story,” said a Times spokesperson in an email to The Hill. “We are disappointed that Liberty University would decide to make that into a criminal case and go after a freelance journalist because its officials were unhappy with press coverage of the university’s decision to convene classes in the midst of the pandemic.”

Not Enough Bullets

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People being detained at a privately run detention center were told that they would not be given masks unless they signed away all rights to sue.

This is despicable:

Detainees at Otay Mesa Detention Center had been asking for more protection from the COVID-19 pandemic all week, when a shipment of surgical masks arrived at the facility on Friday.

The women of “A pod” would finally be able to ditch their own constructions made from rubber bands, panty liners and cut up shirts for proper masks.

But by that afternoon, the mood quickly changed from excitement to anger, according to Briseida Salazar, a 23-year-old in the unit, which houses immigration detainees.

………

The new surgical masks arrived Friday, but they initially came with conditions, according to Salazar.

Salazar’s account of what happened when the masks arrived is corroborated by a signed declaration from San Diego attorney Anna Hysell, whose client called her immediately after it happened, as well as messages from other attorneys who heard similar stories from their clients.

Before the masks were to be distributed, the unit manager handed the women contracts written in English, telling them they would have to sign in order to get masks.

Most of the women in the unit do not speak English, Salazar said. Having grown up in the United States, she is one of the few who do.

The document, as read over the phone to the Union-Tribune, included a section saying that detainees agree to “hold harmless” CoreCivic and its agents and employees “from any and all claims that I may have related directly to my wearing the face mask.”

When the unit manager began to verbally translate the document into Spanish, one of the bilingual detainees noticed that she skipped the “hold harmless” section in her translation. She pointed that out to the other detainees, and they became angry.

………

The unit manager reiterated that they would not be given masks without signing, Salazar said.

Every person behind this should have been drowned at birth.

Tweet of the Day

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This was Captain Brett Crozier washing dishes last Thanksgiving in the scullery while @TheRealCVN71 was underway in Pacific so junior crew members could get time for holiday meal. (This is how its done) . US Navy photo Airman DJ Schwartz. pic.twitter.com/mL5A4TuBKN

— Barbara Starr (@barbarastarrcnn) April 7, 2020

This is a man considered to be too honest and competent for the Trump administration, so they fired him.

Truck Fump.

If Only They Could Both Lose

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WeWork has sued SoftBank for cancelling its multi-billion stock buy, which was a part of the rescue package.

While there are some lower level employees who are getting shafted over this, this is primarily about ending the bailout that WeWork co-founder Adam Neumann, and his  Evil Minions™ got for being pushed out of management.

WeWork claims that SoftBank is in breach of contract, and SoftBank is claiming that WeWork did not meet the performance metrics for the purchase:

Just days after SoftBank announced that it would not consummate its $3 billion tender offer for WeWork shares that would have bought out some of the equity held by the company’s co-founder Adam Neumann along with venture capital firms like Benchmark and many individual company employees, the company is now retaliating, suing SoftBank over alleged breach of contract and breach of fiduciary duty.

In a press statement this morning, the Special Committee of WeWork’s board said that it “regrets the fact that SoftBank continues to put its own interests ahead of those of WeWork’s minority stockholders.” WeWork’s Special Committee argues that SoftBank already received the benefits of the contract it signed last year, which included board control provisions. It’s demanding that SoftBank either complete the transaction, or offer cash to cover damages related to its scuttling of the deal.

Under the terms of the tender offer proposed in November last year, SoftBank would buy upwards of $3 billion in shares from existing shareholders with the transaction closing at the beginning of April. As part of the terms of that contract, the co-working company and SoftBank agreed to a set of performance milestones that WeWork agreed to meet in exchange for the secondary liquidity. Such terms are customary in most financial transactions.

SoftBank in its statement last week said that WeWork failed to meet a number of those performance requirements, and said that it was within its rights under the tender offer contract to walk away from the deal. WeWork’s financials have been rocked by the global pandemic of novel coronavirus, which has seen the company’s co-working facilities mostly closed worldwide as part of public health mandates for social distancing. 

Given the Covid-19 related implosion of the market for shared office space, it was inevitable that WeWork would not meet the required performance goals.

I do not know how this might be resolved in court, but it should be amusing.