Month: May 2020

Worst Attorney General Ever

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Despite 2 guilty pleas, the Department of Justice has dropped its case against Michael Flynn, in what is likely the single most egregious case of an Attorney General malfeasance in the history of the Republic.

Legal experts are dumbfounded at the decision, which they see as unprecedented.

After an extraordinary public campaign by President Trump and his allies, the Justice Department dropped its criminal case on Thursday against Michael T. Flynn, Mr. Trump’s first national security adviser.

Mr. Flynn had previously pleaded guilty twice to lying to F.B.I. agents about his conversations with a Russian diplomat during the presidential transition in late 2016.

The move was the latest example of Attorney General William P. Barr’s efforts to chisel away at the results of the Russia investigation. Documents that Mr. Flynn’s lawyers cited as evidence of prosecutorial misconduct were turned over as part of a review by an outside prosecutor whom Mr. Barr assigned to re-examine the case. Mr. Barr has cast doubt not only on some of the prosecutions in the investigation but also on its premise, assigning another independent prosecutor to scrutinize its origins.

The decision for the government to throw out a case after a defendant had already pleaded guilty was also highly unusual. Former prosecutors struggled to point to any precedent and portrayed the Justice Department’s justification as dubious.

By abandoning the case, the department undid what had been one of the first significant acts of the special counsel investigation into possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russia’s 2016 election interference — the prosecution of a retired top Army general turned national security adviser who pleaded guilty to lying to investigators.

This is why the first priority of the next President of the United States must be to fully investigate and prosecute every single member of the Trump administration to the fullest extant of the law, ESPECIALLY Robert Barr.

If he has his law license a year after Trump is out of office, then this is a defeat for a rule of law.

This is Flat Out Fraud

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Yelp, which is in a partnership with Github, and hence shares a portion of the revenues, is publishing false phone numbers for a restaurants in order to generate promotional fees with Github.

This is flat out fraud. They are generating false calls to make fees for their partner, who kicks the money back to them.

It probably won’t result in criminal charges, but it really is Silicon Valley Douchebaggery in its truest form:

A few months ago, I opened the Yelp app, typed in the name of my favorite sushi restaurant, and clicked on the phone number. Two options popped up: “Delivery or Takeout” and “General Questions.”

 That’s new, I thought. I dialed the number for “Delivery or Takeout,” which played a perky greeting—“This call may be recorded to ensure awesomeness”—before a woman at the restaurant picked up. I asked why they were recording the call for awesomeness; she had no idea what I was referring to. I asked about the number I had just dialed; she didn’t recognize it.

………

The Yelp app lists a restaurant’s direct phone number on the actual listing. That’s (212) 262-8300 in the case of Judge Roy Bean Public House. But when you click on the phone number, this dialogue shows up: Delivery or Takeout and General Questions.

When a user clicks on the “Call” button labeled “Delivery or Takeout,” they are taken to a different number, (646) 394-9837, which is owned by Grubhub.

The “Call” button next to “General Questions” leads to the restaurant’s real number.

 Even though restaurants are capable of taking orders directly—after all, both numbers are routed to the same place—Yelp is pushing customers to Grubhub-owned phone numbers in order to facilitate what Grubhub calls a “referral fee” of between 15 percent and 20 percent of the order total, I learned while researching an episode for the podcast Underunderstood.

 Yelp has historically functioned like an enhanced Yellow Pages, listing direct phone numbers for restaurants along with photos, information about the space, menus, and user reviews. But Yelp began prompting customers to call Grubhub phone numbers in October 2018 after the two companies announced a “long-term partnership.”

This is fraud.

State Attorneys General should be proffering criminal charges under fraud statutes against Yelp and Grubhub, and federal prosecutors should be pursuing them under RICO statutes.

Silent Hypoxia

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It turns out that a lot of people who have Covid-19 are suffering from what is called Silent (or Happy) Hypoxia, there they have dangerously low blood oxygen levels but are showing no symptoms.

You can get a finger-tip blood oxygen and heart rate indicator for about a sawbuck online, and I would recommend that you do so:

It is a mystery that has left doctors questioning the basic tenets of biology: Covid-19 patients who are talking and apparently not in distress, but who have oxygen levels low enough to typically cause unconsciousness or even death.

The phenomenon, known by some as “happy hypoxia” (some prefer the term “silent”) is raising questions about exactly how the virus attacks the lungs and whether there could be more effective ways of treating such patients.

A healthy person would be expected to have an oxygen saturation of at least 95%. But doctors are reporting patients attending A&E with oxygen percentage levels in the 80s or 70s, with some drastic cases below 50%.

Using the fingertip sensor takes less than a minute, and it is non-invasive and not painful, so checking yourself occasionally is a good thing.

Not Enough Bullets

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Earnings in a free fall, laying of thousands, but companies are still paying large dividends, because canceling them would drive the stock down, and put senior management stock options under water.

This story is not mentioning the whole control fraud aspect of this, but that is the reality, one that the authors completely ignore:

Since the coronavirus pandemic was declared, Caterpillar has suspended operations at two plants and a foundry, Levi Strauss has closed stores, and toolmaker Stanley Black & Decker has been planning layoffs and furloughs.

 Steelcase, an office furniture manufacturer, and World Wrestling Entertainment have also shed employees.

 And as thousands of their workers were filing for unemployment benefits, these companies also rewarded their shareholders with more than $700 million in cash dividends. They are not alone. As the pandemic squeezes big companies, executives are making decisions about who will bear the brunt of the sacrifices, and in at least some cases, workers have been the first to lose, even as shareholders continue to collect.

 ………
Many large U.S. companies choose to issue a regular, quarterly dividend to shareholders, often increasing it, and they boast about these payments because they help keep the share price higher than it might otherwise be. Those companies might be reluctant to announce that they are cutting or suspending their dividend during a crisis, [deputy director of the Council of Institutional Investors Amy ] Borrus said.

………

William Lazonick, an emeritus economics professor at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, has been one of the leading critics of companies that distribute cash to shareholders through stock buybacks and dividends rather than reinvesting the profits into employees, innovation and production. For companies that are continuing to do buybacks and issue dividends during the crisis, he said, it is business as usual. The lion’s share of dividends goes to higher-income Americans, according to data from the Internal Revenue Service: about 69 percent of all dividends goes to taxpayers with incomes in excess of $200,000.

“In a downturn like this, the first thing a company should do is give up any distributions to shareholders,” Lazonick said. “But in a crisis, companies will differ. Some will care … and some will rob the workers, who should expect that their continued employment will be the company’s first concern.”

You cannot understand these actions unless you know that the senior management of these firms are rewarded almost entirely on the basis of stock price.

This is not a single minded focus on short term shareholder returns, which is bad, it is a single minded focus on THEIR returns.

They don’t carte if the company fails in 2 years, if they can cash in their stock options today.

From the Department of, “About F%$#ing Time”

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The California AG, as well as some DAs have sued Uber and Lyft to treat them as employees as required by the new California law.
This should have been done the day that the law went into effect.

The so-called sharing economy business model has been about regulatory and labor arbitrage in order to make the rest of us pay the cost that they inflict on the rest of us:

California’s attorney general—as well as attorneys from three of the state’s largest cities—have sued Uber and Lyft, accusing the companies of violating the labor rights of thousands of drivers. The plaintiffs argue that state law requires Uber and Lyft to treat their drivers as employees, which would make them eligible for minimum wage protections, overtime pay, expense reimbursements, and other benefits they don’t currently receive.

………

A lawsuit from the state of California is a totally different scenario. Attorney General Xavier Becerra and the city attorneys of San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego have enough combined legal resources for a fair fight against the ride-hailing giants. And if Uber and Lyft lose, they could not only owe hundreds of millions of dollars in back wages and other costs, they could also be forced to fundamentally rethink how they do business in the most populous US state.

“Californians who drive for Uber and Lyft lack basic worker protections—from paid sick leave to the right to overtime pay,” Becerra said in a Tuesday statement. “California has ground rules with rights and protections for workers and their employers. We intend to make sure that Uber and Lyft play by the rules.”

………

Last year, California’s legislature passed landmark legislation that sets a high bar for companies to classify workers as independent contractors rather than employees. Under the so-called “ABC test,” an employer wanting to exclude a worker from employee status must show that the worker meets three criteria:

  1. The person is free from the control and direction of the hiring entity in connection with the performance of the work…
  2. The person performs work that is outside the usual course of the hiring entity’s business.
  3. The person is customarily engaged in an independently established trade, occupation, or business.

To win, Uber and Lyft must prevail on all three of these questions. The companies must show that they don’t control the drivers and that drivers’ work isn’t core to their business and that drivers are engaged in an independent trade.

These companies are a threat to public safety, and they make their money off of the misery of their “independent contractors.”

Here is hoping that this goes to a jury, and the award is massive.

Today in Corruption

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Just days before a high-profile Senate confirmation hearing to fill a vacancy on the prestigious U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, the court’s chief judge has opened the door to an inquiry into whether ethical improprieties occurred in the creation of the coveted opening.

In an order dated May 1, Judge Sri Srinivasan asked Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. to assign another circuit to look into a complaint filed by the progressive advocacy group Demand Justice, which questioned the timing and circumstances of Judge Thomas B. Griffith’s retirement announcement in early March.

………

With the number of federal judicial vacancies to fill nearly exhausted, Mr. McConnell has been urging those contemplating retirement to step aside this year if they want to assure that their successors will be nominated by a Republican president and confirmed by a Republican-controlled Senate.

………

In his order, Judge Srinivasan, who was placed on the appeals court by President Barack Obama, said he decided to request “review and disposition” of the complaint by a judicial council in another circuit to avoid any question of bias about the outcome.

“The organization’s request for an inquiry concerns the decision of a judge of this court to retire from service and the resulting creation of a vacancy on this court, which would be filled by a future colleague on this court,” the judge wrote. He said the circumstances made it obvious that it should be reviewed outside the D.C. circuit court.

Judge Srinivasan said he made his ruling without “any inquiry by this court into the statements contained in the unverified correspondence or the questions posited by the organization in the correspondence about the possibility of judicial misconduct.” He said he decided to make his order public to show that the accusations were not being ignored since the questions raised by the group “about the possibility of judicial misconduct have been reported in various major news outlets.”

………

The organization, formed to raise liberal consciousness about the importance of judicial nominations, appealed to Judge Srinivasan after The New York Times published an article on the judicial efforts by Mr. McConnell.

“The coordinated manner of Majority Leader McConnell’s involvement in the judges’ decision-making is quite unprecedented and raises significant ethical questions for the judges who heed his advice,” the group said in its letter requesting an investigation. It said a “thorough inquiry into the judge’s announcement and scheduled retirement, including when and how the decision to retire was made, and with whose input, is crucial.”

I really want Moscow Mitch to end his life in a jail cell.

Not Enough Bullets

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You just knew that Gilead would be looting the crap out of any potential use of remdesivir, because looting is what they do.

Well now we have an idea, because the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review, (ICER) which is funded in part by pharma and insurance companies has an estimate as to the fair price.

ICER is not generally considered a corrupt organization, or a rent-a-crowd for big pharma, but it very much is a product of the reality that is the US drug industry.

Their number?  $4,460 over the course of treatment, which is positively larcenous:

How much should Gilead Sciences charge for its now-authorized COVID-19 therapy remdesivir? Up to $4,460 per patient, an influential pricing watchdog figures.

While Gilead has yet to present a marketing plan for the first coronavirus treatment to have shown clinical benefits in a well-designed randomized study, the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER)—which routinely weighs in on drug costs—says the drug is cost-effective at $4,460 per course of treatment.

Even at $1,000 per patient, less than a quarter of ICER’s fair price, Gilead could rake in $1 billion in sales this year—at least theoretically. The company’s now bolstering supply with the aim to treat 1 million patients by the end of the year, Jefferies analyst Michael Yee said in a Sunday note.

This drug was developed with US research money, and if further tests show that it does work, the US government should exercise Bayh-Dole march-in rights and give compulsory license generics manufacturers.

Yes!!!! In Your Rat-Face Andy!!!!

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A federal judge has reinstated New York’s June Democratic presidential primary, siding with Andrew Yang, the former candidate, who sued the state in federal court and called the recent decision to cancel the contest “authoritarian and illegal”.

The judge ruled Tuesday that the state had wrongfully removed the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, Yang and eight other former presidential candidates from the ballot.

The decision came after two Democrats on the state’s election commission cancelled the presidential primary last week, relying on a new budget provision allowing them to remove presidential candidates who suspended their campaigns. The move outraged Sanders supporters and other progressives who said New York, a Democratic bastion, was actively disenfranchising voters.

………

The US district judge Analisa Torres wrote that the state had deprived voters of their constitutional guarantee of freedom of association. New York voters, she said, weren’t just voting for a presidential candidate, but also for delegates who could influence the direction of the Democratic National Convention in August. (Sanders and Biden announced an agreement last month to let Sanders keep hundreds of delegates, and make sure the senator is represented at the Democratic national convention.)

“The removal of presidential contenders from the primary ballot not only deprived those candidates of the chance to garner votes for the Democratic party’s nomination … it deprived Democratic voters of the opportunity to elect delegates who could push their point of view in that forum.”

I think that one of the goals of this provision was specifically to depress turnout to disfavor primary challenges and progressive candidates, which is a classic “Rat-Faced Andy” Cuomo dick move.

This Woman is a Walking Cancer

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Despite the recent bailout law making it illegal, Betsy DeVos is still garnishing student debt borrowers wages.
Given that DeVos has consistently sabotaged efforts to offer relief to student loan debtors.  It has been one of her signature initiatives, so I am not buying that this is any sort of oversight, this is flat out malice: 

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is continuing to garnish the wages of federal student loan borrowers who fall behind on payments even though Congress suspended the practice in the economic rescue package, according to a new lawsuit.

An upstate New York woman who works as a home health aide for less than $13 an hour claimed in the lawsuit, filed late Thursday, that the federal government seized more than $70 from her paycheck as recently as last week — nearly a full month after President Donald Trump signed the CARES Act into law. She is suing on behalf of about 285,000 borrowers whose wages are being garnished, according to the lawsuit.

DeVos first announced in March that she would take administrative action to automatically stop the Education Department from seizing the wages —and tax refunds — of defaulted student loan borrowers for at least two months. Congress then included that policy in the CARES Act and extended it, prohibiting the Education Department from garnishing wages or tax refunds through Sept. 30.

But the proposed class action lawsuit claims that the Education Department hasn’t actually halted the practice and is continuing to garnish wages in violation of the CARES Act. It cites a Washington Post story that said the department had not sent formal letters to tell employers to stop withholding money from borrowers’ paychecks on behalf of the government.

She is in the running for being the most contemptible member of the Trump administration, and this is against remarkably stiff competition.

Heroism: Someone Put Their Money Where Their Mouth Is

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Amazon VP Tim Bray, just quit citing what he calls the “chickensh%$” behavior of the company toward whistle-blowers, who they had aggressively harassed and fired.

This guy probably made 7 figures a year over this, and he walked away over the toxic company culture promulgated by Jeff Bezos.

If more people did this, and did this as LOUDLY the world would be a far better place:

Amazon VP Tim Bray, who had been with the company for more than five years, has resigned in protest of Amazon’s treatment of warehouse workers and the firing of other employees who spoke out.

The company fired multiple warehouse and office workers in recent weeks amid organizing efforts to improve conditions in the company’s distribution centers, where individuals have contracted COVID-19. Firing the whistleblowers is “evidence of a vein of toxicity running through the company culture,” Bray said in a blog post explaining his departure. “I choose neither to serve nor drink that poison.”

The alpha and omega of the particularly nasty nature of Amazon is its founder and CEO Jeff Bezos.

It is literally a part of its DNA.

Today in Evil

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Trump and the Republicans want to prevent any sort of accountability for employers who kill their employees through recklessness:

Congressional leaders are girding for a huge fight over the reentry of millions of Americans to the workplace, with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) insisting that employers be shielded from liability if their workers contract the coronavirus. He appears to have the backing of top White House officials.

Democratic leaders have declared they will oppose such blanket protections, putting Washington’s power brokers on opposite sides of a major issue that could have sweeping implications for health care and the economy in the coming months. The battle has unleashed a frenzy of lobbying, with major industry groups, technology firms, insurers, manufacturers, labor unions, and plaintiffs lawyers all squaring off.

The Trump administration and Moscow Mitch want to take basic due process rights from regular Americans, and this is exactly how the Democrats should frame this.

Instead, McConnell will steamroll the hapless Chuck Schumer, and incorporate something minor that the Republicans wanted anyway, and Schumer will declare it a victory, because that is how the Democrats work.

More accurately this is how the Democrats play to lose.

Not a Surprise

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It turns out that Harlem Success Academy, featured prominently in the pro-charter film Waiting for Superman is lying about all of its students going to college.

Instead, they are kicking out students before they fail, a classic scam of the charter school types:

98 Success Academy Students Accepted To College

But is that a lot?

The New York Post seems to think so. Three times in a recent article they suggest that this is 100% of the seniors. The title “Entire Success Academy senior class accepted to college” certainly implies it. The first sentence “Every senior in one of the city’s largest charter school networks has been accepted to a college this year, officials said.” reinforces it. And the second sentence “All 98 of the 12th graders at Success Academy’s HS of the Liberal Arts in Manhattan earned admission to universities — including Yale, Penn, Duke and Georgetown.” further drives the point home.

But a responsible reporter would ask the logical follow up question. Is 98 really all the students in the class of 2020?

The answer is, “No”.

There were 16 more students 6 months ago, and there were 48 fewer students the year before, and this is a school which purports to take the students from elementary school through  graduation from high school.

They cull the weak to juice their numbers.

Think of it as Evolution in Action

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The governor of Mississippi took a step back with continuing to slowly reopen the state after health officials said there was the largest increase of coronavirus diagnosis and deaths.

Gov. Tate Reeves was to proceed with his plan to get people back to work, but announced the change of plans on Friday as 397 new coronavirus cases were confirmed and 20 more people died.

Credit where credit is due, this guy understands that reality trumps ideology.

The same cannot be said for Texas, where reopening continues unabated despite a similar spike in cases:

Texas hit a third straight day of more than 1,000 new coronavirus cases Saturday as the state charged into its first weekend of re-opening the economy with residents allowed to go back to malls, restaurants, movie theaters and retail stores in limited numbers.

State health officials reported 1,293 new cases, the second-highest single-day infection rate, marking the first time the Texas has recorded more than 1,000 three days in a row.

Officials also reported 31 new deaths, the first time Texas has surpassed 30 on four consecutive days, although fatalities declined for a second consecutive day after a peak of 50 deaths on Friday.

The Japanese have a saying, “バカにつける薬はない”.*

*Pronounced in Japanese, “baka ni tsukeru kusuri wanai”, which means, “There is no medicine for stupidity.” Apologies for any inaccuracies in the text, I do not know Japanese.

OK, This Is Real End of the World Stuff

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Changes in ocean circulation may have caused a shift in Atlantic Ocean ecosystems not seen for the past 10,000 years, new analysis of deep-sea fossils has revealed.

This is the striking finding of a new study led by a research group I am part of at UCL, funded by the ATLAS project and published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. The shift has likely already led to political tensions as fish migrate to colder waters.

………

To challenge this point of view, we had to look for places where seabed fossils not only covered the industrial era in detail, but also stretched back many thousands of years. And we found the right patch of seabed just south of Iceland, where a major deep sea current causes sediment to pile up in huge quantities.

………

One of the simplest ways of working out what the ocean was like in the past is to count the different species of tiny fossil plankton that can be found in such sediments. Different species like to live in different conditions.

We looked at a type called foraminifera, which have shells of calcium carbonate. Identifying them is easy to do using a microscope and small paintbrush, which we use when handling the fossils so they don’t get crushed.

………

The effects of the unusual circulation can be found across the North Atlantic. Just south of Iceland, a reduction in the numbers of cold-water plankton species and an increase in the numbers of warm-water species shows that warm waters have replaced cold, nutrient-rich waters.

If the Atlantic Conveyor current shuts down abruptly, we are going to see sh%$# going down that is going to make the 10 Plagues of Egypt look like a an episode of The Partridge Family.

It’s Called Perjury, File Charges

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They should file a criminal perjury complaint.

He lied, and he knew that he lied, and I am sure that Donald Trump’s stooges in the Department of Justice would love have him jailed:

Amazon is in hot water with a powerful congressional committee interested in the company’s potentially anticompetitive business practices.

In a bipartisan letter sent Friday to Jeff Bezos, the House Judiciary committee demanded that the Amazon CEO explain discrepancies between his own prior statements and recent reporting from The Wall Street Journal. Specifically, the letter addressed Amazon’s apparent practice of diving into its trove of data on products and third-party sellers to come up with its own Amazon-branded competing products.

As the Journal notes, Amazon “has long asserted, including to Congress, that when it makes and sells its own products, it doesn’t use information it collects from the site’s individual third-party sellers—data those sellers view as proprietary.”

………

In the letter, the House Judiciary Committee accuses Bezos of making “misleading, and possibly criminally false or perjurious” statements to the committee when asked about the practice in the past.

Seriously, why guys like this are allowed to lie with impunity is beyond me.

A few days, hell a few hours, sitting in a cell, might do him a world of good, and a few years in jail will do the rest of us a world of good.

Equal Time

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Joe Biden has denied the sexual assault allegations made against him by Tara Reade on Morning Joe.

Joe Biden has categorically denied allegations from a former Senate aide that he sexually assaulted her in 1993.

The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee’s first public comment on the allegation came at a delicate moment for his campaign.

“I recognize my responsibility to be a voice, an advocate, and a leader for the change in culture that has begun but is nowhere near finished,” Biden wrote in a Medium post on Friday morning. “So I want to address allegations by a former staffer that I engaged in misconduct 27 years ago. They aren’t true. This never happened.”

So, there you have it.

Where it goes from here, I have absolutely no idea.

Republicans Loot, Because Republicans Loot

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Remember that Republican political operative who terminated his fund raising business to start selling overpriced Covid-19 supplies, likely trading on his political connections, has now had his contract with Maryland terminated, and there has been a criminal referral to the state Attorney General.

It’s pretty clear that this guy was profiteering off of his political connections, but his connections were not sufficient to acquire N-95 masks and ventilators, so now it is revealed that he sold stuff he did not have, and that, my friend, is fraud:

Maryland’s governor is asking the attorney general to investigate a politically connected company that contracted to provide the state with millions of dollars’ worth of medical equipment that never arrived.

The state signed a $12.5 million deal April 1 with Blue Flame Medical LLC for 1.5 million N95 masks and 110 ventilators. The masks and ventilators were supposed to ship April 14, according to documents provided by the state.

The state paid half of the money up front, according to the documents.

The goods never arrived, and Maryland canceled the contract Friday.

“Unfortunately, despite numerous requests for information and order status, Blue Flame Medical has yet to deliver any items under this order, or provide any pertinent data as to a pending shipment,” wrote Danny Mays, the state’s director of procurement, in a letter sent to Blue Flame on Thursday.

Blue Flame Medical was founded just weeks ago by Mike Gula, a former Republican Party fundraiser and consultant whose resume shows no experience in the medical field.

A spokeswoman for Attorney General Brian Frosh confirmed receiving a referral about the contract. The office has a policy not to comment on pending or potential investigations.

………

Gula started Blue Flame in late March with John Thomas, also a Republican consultant and former candidate, according to multiple news reports.

When asked how political consultants could successfully switch to selling healthcare supplies in the midst of a global pandemic, Thomas told Politico in March: “It’s just relationship-based. I can’t say anything else.”

There really is no situation so dire that some Republican won’t look at finding a way to loot it.

Our society being what it is though, this guy will probably never see the inside of a jail cell.