Why Do Taxpayers Subsidize Rich Farmers?
Because the poor ones cannot afford to make large campaign donations.
If you have to ask, you can’t afford it.
Year: 2020
Implicit Bias Training Does Not Work
Yet another study shows that implicit bias training of police does not work.
This is not a surprise. The training was never intended to work, it was intended to do 3 things:
- It gives the illusion that the powers that they give a damn, and are actually address the problem.
- It provides a bullsh%$ job to a member of the Professional Managerial Class (PMC) who would otherwise be forced to do something productive.
- It comforts the comfortable, and assuages their guilt over their privileged lives without actually addressing the fact that they are beneficiaries of a corrupt system..
The late Dave Graeber had this whole phenomenon nailed.
If you want to stop cops from being brutal racists, you have to make sure that when they step out of line, they are punished.
Linkage
- Blockchain, the amazing solution for almost nothing (The Correspondent) Lots of hoopla, but nobody seems to doing anything with it, even on the down low, probably because it’s not really a solution for anything.
- The Broken Algorithm That Poisoned American Transportation (Vice) Travel Demand Modeling (TDM) appears to be snake oil, but everyone makes money off of new highways, so who cares?
- AT&T reportedly trying to sell DirecTV after massive customer losses (Ars Technica) AT&T’s Underpants Gnome strategy, “Treat your customers poorly and raise their rates, ?????, profit,” did not work, and now they will sell at a loss.
- The architecture of heat: how we built before air-con (Financial Times) We have abandoned the architectur that was used to deal with extreme heat.
- Pinterest cancels huge SF office lease in unbuilt project, citing work-from-home shift (SF Chronicle) Commercial real estate is not even near close to seeing the bottom.
- Why Isn’t Modern Monetary Theory Common Knowledge? (Economics from the Top Down) Seriously, this sh%$ ain’t rocket science.
- Andrew Sullivan: The ‘polite’ fascist is a fascist nonetheless. (Conquest of the Useless) And a bigot too, and honestly not to bright.
The making of Rush’s Wye, Wye, Zed. remarkable:
Would You like Cheese to Go with Your Whine?
The FBI has issued a warning that doorbell cams may tip off residents that the police are planning a raid on their home.
Typical cops. More surveillance, until it touches on them:
The rise of the internet-connected home security camera has generally been a boon to police, as owners of these devices can (and frequently do) share footage with cops at the touch of a button. But according to a leaked FBI bulletin, law enforcement has discovered an ironic downside to ubiquitous privatized surveillance: The cameras are alerting residents when police show up to conduct searches.
A November 2019 “technical analysis bulletin” from the FBI provides an overview of “opportunities and challenges” for police from networked security systems like Amazon’s Ring and other “internet of things,” or IoT, devices. Marked unclassified but “law enforcement sensitive” and for official use only, the document was included as part of the BlueLeaks cache of material hacked from the websites of fusion centers and other law enforcement entities.
The “opportunities” described are largely what you’d expect: Sensor-packed smart devices create vast volumes of data that can be combed through by curious investigators, particularly “valuable data regarding device owners’ movements in real-time and on a historic basis, which can be used to, among other things, confirm or contradict subject alibis or statements.”
The downside for police, who have rushed to embrace Ring usage nationwide as the Amazon subsidiary aggressively marketed itself to and sealed partnerships with local departments, is that networked cameras record cops just as easily as the rest of us. Ring’s cameras are so popular in part because of how the company markets their ability to detect motion at your doorstep, providing convenient phone alerts of “suspicious activity,” however you might define it, even when you’re out of the house. But sometimes the police are the unannounced, unwanted visitor: “Subjects likely use IoT devices to hinder LE [law enforcement] investigations and possibly monitor LE activity,” the bulletin states. “If used during the execution of a search, potential subjects could learn of LE’s presence nearby, and LE personnel could have their images captured, thereby presenting a risk to their present and future safety.”
The document describes a 2017 incident in which FBI agents approached a New Orleans home to serve a search warrant and were caught on video. “Through the Wi-Fi doorbell system, the subject of the warrant remotely viewed the activity at his residence from another location and contacted his neighbor and landlord regarding the FBI’s presence there,” it states.
Sauce for the Gander.
Tweet of the Day
Pelosi helped a Kennedy lose in Massachusetts for the first time ever. LMAO https://t.co/mbbQs9R9gG— Krystal Ball (@krystalball) September 2, 2020
I think that she is right.
Kennedy’s numbers were falling before the Pelosi endorsement, but he went into free-fall after the Pelosi endorsement, and he ended falling more than 25% from his earlier polls.
Pelosi is increasingly toxic among the party rank and file, and now she has tied her star to the only losing Kennedy campaign in Massachusetts ever.
Cheap Harleys at Estate Sales
We now have the first Covid-19 death traced back to the Sturgis rally reported:
A Minnesota biker who attended the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally has died of covid-19 — the first fatality from the virus traced to the 10-day event that drew more than 400,000 to South Dakota.
The man was in his 60s, had underlying conditions and was hospitalized in intensive care after returning from the rally, said Kris Ehresmann, infectious-disease director at the Minnesota Department of Health. The case is among at least 260 cases in 11 states tied directly to the event, according to a survey of health departments by The Washington Post.
Epidemiologists believe that figure is a significant undercount, due to the resistance of some rallygoers to testing and the limited contact tracing in some states. As a result, the true scope of infections stemming from the rally that ran from Aug. 7 to Aug. 16 is unlikely to ever be known. Public health officials had long expressed concern over the decision to move forward with the annual event, believed to be the largest held anywhere in the U.S. since the pandemic shelved most large-scale gatherings.
Now, just over two weeks after the conclusion of the rally, the Midwest and the Dakotas in particular are seeing a spike in coronavirus cases even as infections decline or plateau in the rest of the country. South Dakota’s seven-day averages for new cases stood at 347 on Sept. 2 compared to 107 two weeks earlier and its total caseload was 14,003, up from 10,566, according to The Post’s tracking. In North Dakota, the seven-day averages for new cases was 257, up from 142 two weeks earlier and its total caseload was 12,267, compared to 8,968.
If you are looking for a deal on a low mileage Harley, you are in luck.
Not so much the idiots who went to Sturgis.
H/t BS at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.
Only Took 43 Years
The Federal Reserve has been required to place equal weight on full employment and prices stability since the passage of the Humphrey-Hawkins act in the late 1970s.
It hasn’t. Instead, it has gone for real unemployment while fighting imaginary inflation.
It only took a few decades, but now the Fed has decided to change its policy, and so will no longer engage in monetary tightening just because unemployment is low, they will wait for actual inflation to show up:
In a historic break with decades of policy, the Federal Reserve announced Thursday that it will no longer deliberately keep millions of Americans unemployed at all times.
America’s central bank has a dual mandate — to promote full employment and price stability. These two aims were long presumed to be in tension: If unemployment fell too low — such that there was no slack in the labor market (i.e., no reserve of jobless workers for employers to draw on) — then workers would gain the upper hand on their bosses and demand wage gains in excess of their own productivity, which would force companies to raise the prices of their goods to keep up with their labor costs, which would then cause workers to demand still-higher wages to keep up with prices, in a vicious inflationary cycle.
For this reason, the Fed defined “full employment” as an unemployment rate significantly above the level one would expect from mere job-switching frictions. And when the labor market tightened beyond the level the Fed deemed conducive with price stability, it would start raising interest rates — to choke off credit creation, slow growth in the money supply, and thus, deliberately keep Americans out of work — even if inflation had not yet exceeded its official target.
………
In the aftermath of the Great Recession, the inequity of the central bank’s longtime prioritization of avoiding theoretical inflation — over the certain unemployment of millions of workers — became more conspicuous. The Fed’s official inflation target is 2 percent. But for a variety of reasons — among them, the tepid pace of the recovery and the weak bargaining power of American workers in an age of trade-union decline — price growth remained stubbornly below those levels, even as the central bank kept interest rates near zero. Nevertheless, despite the absence of any hint of excessive inflation, the Fed began raising interest rates in 2015, on the grounds that the U.S. could not sustain an official unemployment rate of below 5 percent without triggering a wage-price spiral.
………Progressive (and a few growth-oriented conservative) economic-policy wonks pushed back on this move. Then, when a Republican president with a penchant for easy money came to power — and the GOP’s inflation hawks went dutifully silent — Trump’s appointed Fed chair, Jerome Powell, adopted a more accommodative stance. And America proceeded to learn that its economy could not only abide a 3.6 percent unemployment rate without suffering runaway inflation, but that such a rate wasn’t even sufficient to bring inflation to its target level of 2 percent. The theorized hard trade-off between unemployment and price stability did not appear to exist, which meant that America’s finest economic minds had been slowing growth and killing jobs for no good reason.
………
(1) The Fed will no longer presume that it knows what the maximum level of employment in the U.S. economy is, and will therefore refrain from raising interest rates until there are clear signs of excessive inflation.
(2) The Fed will not treat its 2 percent inflation target as a maximum, but rather as the average rate it wishes to promote over an extended period of time. Which is to say: If inflation runs a bit below that target for years on end, then the Fed will tolerate inflation a bit above that target for a few years after.
I am not surprised that the Fed Chair who did this is not an economist.
Stopped Clock Again
Trump really does not give a sh%$ about people at risk of eviction, but he does have a very real low cunning regarding politics, and his order to use the CDC authority to prevent evictions is a smart move politically.
It’s not going to be renewed, because it expires after the election is over, and then, why bother?.
Still, it shows that he’s doing something while Congress is on vacation:
The Trump administration Tuesday announced a four-month halt on eviction proceedings against cash-strapped renters, invoking federal public health laws out of concern that a national homelessness crisis could worsen the country’s coronavirus outbreak.
The new moratorium seeks to cover families experiencing financial hardship as a result of the pandemic, aiming to help as many as 40 million Americans who are already struggling to pay their monthly housing costs in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, according to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who referenced that an action was imminent earlier in the day.
The policy comes roughly a month after President Trump signed an executive order tasking the U.S. government, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, with exploring ways to protect renters as talks broke down on Capitol Hill over a new round of coronavirus relief. Brian Morgenstern, a spokesman for the White House, said the goal has been to ensure that families “struggling to pay rent due to the coronavirus will not have to worry about being evicted and risk the further spreading of, or exposure to, the disease.”
Doing the right thing poorly and for the wrong reasons.
Good News, and Bad News
The Massachusetts primary was today, and Ed Markey beat Joseph P. Kennedy III in the Senate race:
Senator Edward J. Markey, who rebranded himself from dutiful career politician to fierce progressive warrior over the course of a volatile 11-month campaign, won the Democratic primary for Senate on Tuesday, fending off a challenge from a much younger Representative Joseph P. Kennedy III, whose increasingly bare-knuckled offensive failed to capture the imagination of Massachusetts voters.
Kennedy called Markey to concede around 10 p.m. and the Associated Press called the race soon thereafter.
The Malden native had achieved a singular feat: He beat a Kennedy in Massachusetts.
Kennedy was significantly more conservative than Markey, and had little to run on beyond the family name, but he was leading by double digits for much of the race.
On the downside, the three most conservative members of the Massachusetts Congressional delegation, including the Dem’s biggest opponent of Medicare for All, and biggest supporter of the Carried Interest Loophole in Washington, DC, Richard Neal won their primaries:
U.S. Rep. Richard Neal of Massachusetts, the powerful chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, held off Democratic challenger Alex Morse in Tuesday’s primary after an acrimonious campaign that included allegations of sexual misconduct leveled at his younger opponent.
The contest was one of four in Massachusetts where U.S. House candidates were competing Tuesday for the chance to represent their party in the November general election.
In the 6th Congressional District, U.S. Rep. Seth Moulton, a Marine Corps veteran who saw combat in Iraq and mounted a brief campaign for president last year defeated to fellow Democratic challengers — Jamie Belsito and Angus McQuilken.
………
In the state’s 8th Congressional District, which stretches from portions of Boston south to Bridgewater, Robbie Goldstein, a 36-year-old South Boston resident, lost a challenge to longtime incumbent Rep. Stephen Lynch.
Molton is a member of the corporate stooge New Democrat caucus, and Lynch is an anti-abortion conservative.
While progressives did not win every primary challenge, they won some big ones, and none of the incumbent progressives so far have lost a race, so I’ll call the glass half full.
Can You Say ……… Dystopian? Good — I Knew You Could
Google is looking at providing information services to employers to help them control their healthcare costs.
To put that into English, Google will collect enormous amounts of data about its clients employees in order flag people who are engaging in “Unhealthy Lifestyles” and mitigate employer exposure to healthcare costs.
Basically, they will spy on employees, and provide information that employers can use to meddle in their employees eat, when they sleep, etc.
And, though Google (Alphabet) will deny it, employers will use this data to fire employees who are flagged as healthcare cost risks.
If you want a picture of the Google’s future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever:*
Without much fanfare, Verily, Alphabet’s life sciences unit, has launched Coefficient Insurance. It was only a matter of time before Google’s parent got into the health insurance business — in fact, one wonders what took it so long. With Google’s intimate knowledge of our daily patterns, contacts and dreams, the search engine group has for years had a far better picture of risk than any insurer.
That Coefficient Insurance, which is also backed by Swiss Re, would initially focus on the relatively arcane area of stop-loss insurance to protect employers from staff health cost volatility should not obscure its ambitious agenda for the rest of the industry. Thus, according to Verily’s senior management, it might soon start monitoring at-risk employees via their smartphones and even coaching them towards healthier lifestyles.
………
As with many services out of Silicon Valley, there is not much reflection about the probable reconfigurations of power among social groups — the sick and the healthy, the insured and the uninsured, the employers and the employees — that are likely to occur once the digital dust settles.
One would need to be extremely naive to believe that a more extensive digital surveillance system — in the workplace and, with Alphabet running the show, now also at home, in the car and wherever your smartphone takes you — is likely to benefit the weak and the destitute. Some good might come out of it — a healthier workplace, maybe — but we should also inquire who would bear the cost of this digital utopia.
………
Privacy law does not offer an adequate solution either. Under pressure from employers, most workers acquiesce to being monitored. This was obvious even before Alphabet’s foray into insurance, as plenty of smaller players have been pitching employers sophisticated workplace surveillance systems as a way of lowering healthcare costs.
If this does not scare the hell out of you, you have not been paying attention.
*Apologies to George Orwell.
Burying the Lede
So, Gabriel Debenedetti of the New York Times has reviewed Michael Schmidt’s book, DONALD TRUMP V. THE UNITED STATES (Inside the Struggle to Stop a President).
What is interesting how this very chatty review completely buries the lede.
11 paragraphs, and this waits until the penultimate paragraph before this reveal:
More interesting, however, is the constant flow of shocking anecdotes: Schmidt writes that Mitch McConnell fell asleep during a classified briefing on Russia, for example, and he details the F.B.I.’s shambolic reaction to evidence of the hacking in 2016, including an unresolved disagreement over how to handle the material. Describing Trump’s unexpected November 2019 visit to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, he reports the White House wanted Mike Pence “on standby to take over the powers of the presidency temporarily if Trump had to undergo a procedure that would have required him to be anesthetized.” (The vice president never had to take this step.)
(Emphasis mine)
How is an allegation that Trump had a medical emergency that sent him to Walter Reed, and then covered it up not the lede?
H/t Southpaw for tweeting this.
Saying the Quiet Part Out Loud
Maryland Governor rat-f%$#, aka Paul Hogan, has just fired Arthur (Mac) Love IV, his now former deputy director of the Governor’s Office of Community Initiatives for social media posts lauding white supremacist terrorist Kyle Rittenhouse.
Hogan has always had a racist undertones to his campaigns, but the rule is that you don’t say it out loud:
A member of the Hogan administration who had been posting statements, photos and memes on social media that appear to applaud the 17-year-old vigilante who allegedly shot three protesters on the streets of Kenosha, Wis., this week, was fired on Saturday afternoon.
The posts by Arthur (Mac) Love IV, who had been the deputy director of the Governor’s Office of Community Initiatives, have attracted widespread attention on social media over the last several hours, sparking a furor. The chairman of the Maryland Legislative Black Caucus called on the staffer to be fired.
Shortly after 2 p.m. Saturday, Steven J. McAdams, executive director of the Governor’s Office of Community Initiatives, issued a statement saying Love had been “relieved…of his duties.”
“These divisive images and statements are inconsistent with the mission and core values of the Office of Community Initiatives,” McAdams said. “Earlier today, I relieved this employee of his duties. Kevin Craft, administrative director of the Governor’s Commission on African Affairs, will assume these duties effective immediately.”
Hold off the Praise
There are a lot of people praising Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler to the skies for cutting Donald Trump a new one at a press conference.
I also know that he is right when he says, “It’s you who have created the hate and the division. And now you want me to stop the violence that you helped create. What America needs is for you to be stopped so that Americans can come together,” among other things in a remarkably similar vein.
He’s right, and I appreciate what he said.
That being said, most of the people do not understand Portland, Oregon’s form of government, because they have never lived there.
I did. My family Moved there in 1977, and I went to high school there, and my dad lived there almost continuously for the next 42 years.
Portland, and Portland politics, were fodder at the kitchen table. (My dad thought that former Portland Mayor Neil Goldschmidt was a bit of a skunk, which was proved by later developments)
One of the peculiarities of Portland is that it has a city commission form of government, an increasingly rare form of government, a form of government that originated in Galveston, TX in 1900, but it is increasingly rare, having generally been replaced by the council-manager form of government since the end of the first world war.
The peculiarity of the city commission form of government is that each city councilman is the head of some part of the municipal bureaucracy.
One might be the head of sanitation, one of housing, one of transportation, one of water, one of Fire/EMS, and one of them is ……… wait for it ……… police commissioner.
Mayor Wheeler is the police commissioner, and has been since he was sworn in as Mayor at the beginning of 2017, he has been in charge of the cops, and he has done nothing about the racist and right-wing cesspool that is the Portland Police Bureau, nor anything about their flagrantly abusive and unconstitutional behavior toward the protesters, and their support for white supremacist terrorists.
A former ally on the Portland City Commission called him for his unwillingness to confront the police over their misconduct, saying that the police misconduct had made Trump’s federal intervention inevitable.
Meanwhile, he has presided over a police crackdown on the homeless. (also here and here)
The protests in Portland have been exacerbated and intensified by the brutality and the bias of the police, Mayor Ted Wheeler’s police, which he was, and is, in charge of.
He a part of the problem, not a part of the solution.
Linkage
- Hangover Cure Successfully Tested on Drunk Subjects in Finland (Bloomberg) Something that might make the mornings after long winter nights in Finland more bearable.
- Workers Blow the Whistle on Mass Death (In These Times) Private equity has been stripping the hospitals that it buys for parts.
- Tardigrades Have DNA Armour, And We Just Got Closer to Understanding How It Works (Science Alert) These are profoundly weird creatures.
- Monopolization as a Challenge for Both Parties (American Compass) Why Robert Bork’s shallow, corrupt, and hypocritical view of antitrust law fails.
- Bird deaths down 70 percent after painting wind turbine blades (Ars Technica) Paint one blade black.
- Why Police Unions Are Not Part of the American Labor Movement (Consortiumnews) Over 100 years as the foot-soldiers of anti-labor capital, a quick historical primer.
- How to Make Thermite: 11 Steps (with Pictures) (wikiHow) Seriously, this is nasty sh%$. If you want to do it, start small, do it outside, and make sure that you have some seriously fire-proof material, probably ceramic, for the test.
Breaking Ancient and Forgotten British laws (The Fish Runner):
Don’t Throw Me in That Briar Patch
Facebook is completely losing its sh%$ because the next version of the iPhone operating system will require that users explicitly opt in to being spied on by advertisers.
They have actually issued an apology of sorts, which is just about as sincere as their apologies for spying on their users:
Facebook has apologized to its users and advertisers for being forced to respect people’s privacy in an upcoming update to Apple’s mobile operating system – and promised it will do its best to invade their privacy on other platforms.
The antisocial network that makes almost all of its revenue from building a vast, constantly updated database of netizens that it then sells access to, is upset that iOS 14, due out next month, will require apps to ask users for permission before Facebook grabs data from their phones.
“This is not a change we want to make, but unfortunately Apple’s updates to iOS14 have forced this decision,” the behemoth bemoans before thinking the unthinkable: that it may have to end its most intrusive analytics engine for iPhone and iPad users.
“We know this may severely impact publishers’ ability to monetize through Audience Network on iOS 14, and, despite our best efforts, may render Audience Network so ineffective on iOS 14 that it may not make sense to offer it on iOS 14 in the future.”Amazingly, despite Facebook pointing out to Apple that it is tearing away people’s right to have their privacy invaded in order to receive ads for products they might want, Cupertino continues to push ahead anyway.
………
Facebook wants advertisers to know however that it has their back. It will continue to suck as much information as possible off every other device and through every other operating system.
………
Facebook closes out by promising that it will do all it can to prevent user privacy from being respected in future. “We believe that industry consultation is critical for changes to platform policies, as these updates have a far-reaching impact on the developer ecosystem,” it said. “We’re encouraged by conversations and efforts already taking place in the industry – including within the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the recently announced Partnership for Responsible Addressable Media (PRAM). We look forward to continuing to engage with these industry groups to get this right for people and small businesses.”
What can I say but, “F%$# Zuck.”
How Utterly British
The British Ministry of Devense is saying that it cannot give details on payouts made in response to claims against their troops for torture and abuse because there are too many to count, which is why they want a law passed indemnifying their troops for war crimes.
This is like some twisted take on a Gilbert and Sullivan light opera:
The UK government has received so many complaints from Iraqis who were unlawfully detained and allegedly mistreated by British troops that its defence ministry says it is unable to say how many millions of pounds have been paid to settle the claims.
Ministry of Defence (MoD) officials in London say they can provide approximate figures for the thousands of Iraqis who have lodged complaints against British forces involved in the 2003 US-led invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq.
However, they maintain that they cannot disclose how much UK taxpayers’ money has been spent settling their claims, saying that it would take weeks for civil servants to collate the figure.
The department is claiming that it is unable to disclose the sums paid at a time when the UK parliament is about to debate a deeply controversial law which would introduce a partial amnesty for the country’s service personnel who have committed serious crimes – including murder and torture – while serving outside the country.
Known as the Overseas Operation Bill, the proposed new law has alarmed human rights groups, the UK government’s political opponents and many ex-soldiers, who fear that it will effectively sanction war crimes by British forces.
………
Even the country’s most senior retired soldier, 81-year-old Field Marshal Charles Guthrie, wrote to the Sunday Times newspaper to warn that the proposed new law would provide room for “de facto decriminalisation of torture”.
Guthrie added that the measures “appear to have been dreamt up by those who have seen too little of the world to understand why the rules of war matter”.………
Frank Ledwidge, a former army intelligence officer and military historian, warns that the bill – which he calls a “squalid piece of legislation” – could cause more problems than it solves for the MoD and British government ministers.
Ledwidge, who has experience of tracking down war criminals in Bosnia and Kosovo, points out that the International Criminal Court (ICC), which is currently conducting a preliminary investigation into allegations of British war crimes in Iraq, is unlikely to target the interrogators.
“When the ICC does come for us, which it will if this bill is enacted, it won’t be the soldiers they’ll be after,” Ledwidge says. “The men we hunted down in Bosnia were not the trigger-pullers. They were the commanders, the generals and the politicians who sent them and allowed these crimes to happen.”
There are a whole bunch of people who should be in the dock at The Hague for crimes against humanity during the Iraq invasion, and the important ones are the, “Commanders, the generals and the politicians who sent them and allowed these crimes to happen.”
This Was Inevitable
The right-wing organized a driving Trump rally in Portland, and after repeatedly driving through crowds of protesters, something that has not been covered by the main stream media, one of the right-wingers was shot to death.
At this point, there is no information as to where the shot came from.
It could have been the protesters, the counter-protesters, or the cops.
Portland Police Bureau (PPB) say the unidentified victim died around 8:45 pm from a gunshot wound to the chest. Videos shared by reporters on the scene show a man lying on his back near SW 3rd and Alder, surrounded by officers and medics attempting to treat him.
A video posted on Facebook shows the minutes leading up to the shooting from across the street. The clip captures several people on a sidewalk in front of a parking garage shouting at each other before the sound of two gunshots go off, accompanied with a puff of smoke.
The shooting coincided with a pro-Trump car caravan winding its way through downtown Portland. It’s not immediately clear if the shooting was directly connected to this protest.
The caravan, dubbed a “Trump cruise rally,” met around 4 pm at the Clackamas Town Center parking lot. In the Facebook page for the pro-Trump event, organizers encouraged attendees to bring firearms with them, as long as they followed concealed carry laws.
After gathering at the shopping mall, several hundred vehicles—many waving large American and Trump 2020 flags—then drove to downtown Portland, where they were met by groups of counter-protesters. Portland police dressed in riot gear stood by as caravan members drove through groups of people in the street. Other drivers jumped out of their cars to confront counter-protesters on the street, some getting into fistfights.
One rally member turns to avoid counter-protesters but another drives right through them hitting several people. pic.twitter.com/i3aLRQg9tJ— Cory Elia (@TheRealCoryElia) August 30, 2020
This is assault with a deadly weapon, and the cops are ignoring it.
The New York Times coverage, by comparison diminishes the right-wing violence to, “Trump supporters shooting paintball guns from the beds of pickup trucks.”
Killing Social Security and Boosting His Reelection Chances
The Trump administration is rolling out his plan to defer social security taxes.
He is hoping to force Congress to make this a permanent tax cut, because the bill comes due in January, millions of Americans may be owing thousands of dollars in back taxes.
It will have the effect of increasing take home pay in the short term, which might give the economy a temporary boost, particularly for a tax as regressive as the Social Security tax, which cuts off at $137,700.00.
It will also have the effect of emptying the Social Security Trust Fund in about 2 years.
On the bright side, I think that many, and possibly most, of employers are going to collect the taxes anyway, because the money is still owed, just deferred, particularly since there is a cost to rewrite their payroll withholding software:
The Treasury Department began implementing President Trump’s plan to allow a payroll tax deferral, an executive action he says will help households weather the pandemic-ravaged economy but which faces significant practical hurdles and skepticism from employers.
The government’s announcement came late Friday, just four days before it is scheduled to take effect. It postpones some payroll taxes that would normally be due between Sept. 1 and Dec. 31 and makes them due between Jan. 1 and April 30, 2021. Under this approach, employers who opt to stop some paycheck withholding now could withhold twice as much as usual early next year.
Mr. Trump on Aug. 8 ordered the Treasury Department to allow the tax deferrals under a law that lets the Treasury secretary postpone tax deadlines after a disaster. It still could take time for private payroll companies to reprogram their systems, and employers concerned about costs and legal exposure may not bother changing workers’ tax withholding.
………
The government’s action doesn’t actually change the underlying taxes, because only Congress can do that. Employees would still owe the taxes eventually. So someone making $75,000 annually could save as much as $1,550 in 2020 but would have to pay that same amount later.
Mr. Trump wants Congress to forgive that tax liability. The IRS document issued late Friday says employers must pay those taxes in the first four months of 2021 or “may make arrangements” to collect the taxes from employees.
“The guidance makes it clear the only purpose of this scheme is to give the illusion of a tax cut before the election,” said Seth Hanlon, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a group aligned with Democrats.
………
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Council of Chain Restaurants and other trade associations warned that it would be unfair to impose potential future costs on workers and said a system where employees could choose whether to participate would be unworkable.
………
One very large employer looks likely to participate—the federal government that Mr. Trump controls. The National Finance Center at the Department of Agriculture, which processes payrolls for more than 600,000 federal workers at multiple agencies, said last week it was preparing to implement the tax deferral in September.
Forcing hundreds of thousands of federal employees to take tax deferrals could put pressure on lawmakers to forgive the taxes later, as Mr. Trump wants them to do.
When a policy developed to help Republican electoral prospects runs afoul of the U.S Chamber of Commerce, you know that this policy is f%$#ed up and sh%$.
Not a Surprise
Is anyone surprised that,”Nearly half of Twitter accounts pushing to reopen America may be bots?”
The question is who, and who benefits? (Cui Bono)
Kathleen M. Carley and her team at Carnegie Mellon University’s Center for Informed Democracy & Social Cybersecurity have been tracking bots and influence campaigns for a long time. Across US and foreign elections, natural disasters, and other politicized events, the level of bot involvement is normally between 10 and 20%, she says.
But in a new study, the researchers have found that bots may account for between 45 and 60% of Twitter accounts discussing covid-19. Many of those accounts were created in February and have since been spreading and amplifying misinformation, including false medical advice, conspiracy theories about the origin of the virus, and pushes to end stay-at-home orders and reopen America.They follow well-worn patterns of coordinated influence campaigns, and their strategy is already working: since the beginning of the crisis, the researchers have observed a greater polarization in Twitter discourse around the topic.
They follow well-worn patterns of coordinated influence campaigns, and their strategy is already working: since the beginning of the crisis, the researchers have observed a greater polarization in Twitter discourse around the topic.
So, who is behind this?
We need to find these people, and expose them, and end their grip on power.
This is Not a Calm Man
The largest of recipient of corporate PAC money among the Democrats in Congress, Richard Neal has a primary in a few days, and it is pretty clear that he is crapping his pants over this, as shown by his campaign has sent a cease and desist letter threatening a libel suit to media outlets to suppress ads by his primary opponent.
This is not someone confident of the outcome of the primary:
Facing a spirited progressive primary challenge, U.S. Rep. Richard Neal, D-Mass. is pressuring a local television station to pull down an ad criticizing his reliance on corporate PAC money, according to a letter obtained by TMI from Neal’s attorney. Neal’s attempt to block Democratic primary voters from seeing the ads about his campaign financing comes at the very moment his reelection bid is being bankrolled by donors from industries with business before his congressional committee.
Justice Democrats’ super PAC, the group behind the ad, spent at least $150,000 to have the 30-second television spot run through the entire Democratic National Convention. The ad alleges that Neal “took more money from corporations than any other member of Congress” and says he “hasn’t held a town hall in years.” The group says the station has not pulled down the ad.
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“You have full power to reject the ad for any reason,” wrote Neal’s attorney Brian Svoboda of the Democratic powerhouse law firm Perkins Coie to WWLP-22News, a local NBC affiliate. “To attack Representative Neal’s reputation in his community, the ad purposely confuses the illegal corporate contributions of which it falsely accuses him, with the entirely legal contributions he actually received from PACs — i.e., entities which receive voluntary, personal contributions from corporate and union employees, shareholders and their families, and make lawful contributions from those funds.”
Neal’s counsel called the commercial “defamatory” and implied that the station could face legal consequences: “Because you need not run this ad, you enjoy no immunity from liability for its false claims, and are fully responsible for the defamation and any other torts that might result from their dissemination.”
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In February, Sludge reported that Neal had been the largest congressional recipient of money from corporate and business-affiliated political action committees (PACs) in 2019. Neal has received nearly $2 million from these PACs this cycle, and it accounts for more than 53 percent of his total fundraising, according to OpenSecrets. On Tuesday alone, Neal received donations from a slew of corporate PACs including $2000 from Allstate’s PAC, $2,500 from Microsoft’s PAC, and $2,500 from WalMart’s PAC, according to federal records reviewed by TMI.
The most recent polls have Neal up by less than 10%, and undecideds tend to break for the challenger, so I do understand why his campaign is freaking out.
This has been an amazingly good year for primary challenges by progressives, and taking out Neal, who is the head of the Ways and Means Committee, would still be a big f%$#ind deal.