Year: 2020

Why the Anti-Lockdown Rent-a-Crowd Should Have Been Arrested

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This Looks Like a Graphic from the Movie Contagion

Because when they were allowed to walk away, they brought Covid-19 back to their home towns and neighbors.

We are not talking a minor spike either.  We are talking about a 50%-200% spike in cases.

This is cops should have arrested these morons, and put them in quarantine for 3-4 weeks.

Remember the April 15th “Operation Gridlock?” in Lansing Michigan? In my piece on April 21st I said we needed to start tracking these protesters to show that they will spread the virus to other communities. Well, someone did.

The people at the Committee to Protect Medicare released data which shows the protesters dispersing to smaller communities across Michigan in the following days. The map above shows that cellphones that were in Lansing on April 15 scattered across the state. (Link)

Rob Davidson, executive director of The Committee to Protect Medicare said on Lawrence O’Donnell on April 30th that they saw a rise of 50-200% in COVID19 cases at the places those cell phones ended up.

For what it’s worth, many of the protesters were not just carrying, but brandishing their weapons, which is literally assault with a deadly weapon, so the cops should have arrested them and if they resisted, pried their guns from their cold, dead hands.

14.7%

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The Scariest Jobs Chart Ever ………
Just Got Scarier

Yes, this was the level of unemployment in mid-April, and there have been SIXTEEN MILLION new jobless claims since then, which implies that the next unemployment report will show U-3 unemployment at something north of 25%.

It should be noted though, that my estimate was off by 1.1%, so you should have taken the under.

The good folks at Calculated Risk have the rundown:

• U-3 (normal) Unemployment 14.8%.
• U-6 Unemployment (Total unemployed + discouraged workers, + involuntary part time) 22.8%
• Year over year workforce change -19.42M
• Monthly workforce change -20.5M
• Labor force participation in April 60.2%
Down 2.5%
• Employment-population ratio in April 51.3%
Down 8.7%

This is Russian “Market Liberalization” under Yeltsin bad, which makes it a catastrophe.

Literally Turning Down Free Money in Order to Hurt the Poors

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Once Again, Andrew “Rat Faced Andy” Cuomo, decides that pissing on the poor is more important than doing the right thing.

The Governor has decided that he’s going to cut Medicaid, even though it will cost the state $6.7 billion in federal aid.

Basically, this is some sort of twisted affirmation of manhood, and it’s poor women and children who suffer as a result.

Actually everyone suffers as a result, because by removing capacity from the New York healthcare system, the next epidemic would be even worse:

On Sunday, amid his regular coronavirus updates, inspirational slides, and Italian family dinner anecdotes, Governor Andrew Cuomo was asked to respond to New York Senator Chuck Schumer’s charge that the governor was rejecting billions in federal funding from emergency federal COVID-19 legislation simply because Cuomo wanted to tinker with the state’s Medicaid system. “It would be nice if he passed a piece of legislation that actually helped the state of New York,” Cuomo shot back.

Cuomo has been feuding with Schumer over the past couple of weeks, accusing the senator of trying to hamper his plans to make changes to Medicaid, the public health program that insures roughly a third of New Yorkers. Cuomo has made it clear that he is determined to cut Medicaid in the midst of a massive public health crisis—even if it means risking federal funds designated to provide relief.

New York stood to gain up to $6.7 billion through the federal legislation Schumer helped pass (that’s if the intervention program lasts a full year) but only under the condition that it didn’t put any new restrictions on Medicaid eligibility.

Andrew Cuomo is a profoundly evil son of a bitch.

3.2 Million New Claims

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Last weeks initial unemployment claims hit 3.2 million, which would have been an unprecedented record 7 weeks ago:

U.S. workers have filed nearly 33.5 million applications for unemployment benefits in the seven weeks since closures were put in place to combat the coronavirus pandemic, showing a wave of layoffs that likely pushed April job losses to record levels.

U.S. workers filed 3.2 million jobless claims last week, the Labor Department said. It was the fewest since the week ended March 14, before the pandemic caused claims to spike, but still fifteen-times early March readings.

Recent layoffs are expected to cause nonfarm payrolls to fall by 21.5 million and the unemployment rate to climb to 16% in the April jobs report, which will be released on Friday, according to economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal. Both numbers would be highs on records back to the late 1930s and late ’40s. The previous peak unemployment rate was 10.8% in 1982. The largest monthly jobs loss, 1.96 million, occurred at the end of World War II.

The decline in payrolls is expected to show U.S. employers in one month cut all the jobs they added in the past decade. Combined with the rise in unemployment and the loss of jobs in March, Friday’s figures are expected to show the labor market’s sharp reversal since February, when joblessness was at a half-century low of 3.5% and the country notched a record 113 straight months of job creation. 

The article quotes experts saying that this indicates that maybe we are past the worst of this, but my assessment is that we are running out of people who can lose their jobs.

Tomorrow, we get the April unemployment numbers, or more accurately the unemployment rate as of April 15.

I’m going to put the unemployment rate at 15.8%, and it’s likely to break 20% in the May numbers.

By way of perspective, if the jobs recovery happens at ten times that of the numbers following the Great Recession, it will take over 2 years to recover to where we were in February.

Not good.

Well, Duh, Dumbass

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The person running Sweden’s Covid-19 hands-off response is surprised that the death toll is spiking:

The man leading Sweden’s coronavirus response says the country’s elevated death toll “really came as a surprise to us.”

Dr. Anders Tegnell, Sweden’s state epidemiologist, appeared on “The Daily Show with Trevor Noah” on Tuesday, when he described the country’s controversial approach.

“We never really calculated with a high death toll initially, I must say,” he said.

“We calculated on more people being sick, but the death toll really came as a surprise to us.”

As of Tuesday, Sweden reported more than 2,700 COVID-19 deaths and more than 23,000 infections. That death toll is far higher than its Nordic neighbors’ and many other countries that locked down.

This was pretty much a lead pipe cinch from day one.

Covid-19 is ferociously contagious, and not particularly amenable to treatment,  so if you have more cases, you have more deaths.

Q.E.D.

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.