Year: 2020

The Return of the Mafia State

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

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

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

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

………

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

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

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

………

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

This is the bitter fruit of EU mandated austerity.

Well, This is a Relief

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well, That’s a Mature Way to Handle This

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

Here is the Christo-Fascist right in a nutshell:

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

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

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

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

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

 ………

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

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

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

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

Not Enough Bullets

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

This is despicable:

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

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

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

………

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

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

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

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

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

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

………

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

Every person behind this should have been drowned at birth.

Tweet of the Day

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

— Barbara Starr (@barbarastarrcnn) April 7, 2020

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

Truck Fump.

If Only They Could Both Lose

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Actually a Significant Tweet

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There has been a lot of Bernie supporters blowing off steam about 3rd parties on Twitter, but THIS tweet has significance

Day by day I am steadily more disgusted with both of the parties in the USA.

There is no country. The corporations with their govemental stand ins are strip mining our resources.

Speaking for myself, I think it is critical to entertain a 3rd party discussion immediately.

— RoseAnn DeMoro (@RoseAnnDeMoro) April 5, 2020

If the name RoseAnn DeMoro sounds familiar, it’s because she is:

  • The former executive director of National Nurses United
  • The former head of the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee
  • The former national vice president and executive board member of the AFL-CIO

You know, perhaps the motto used by the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) to implore party unity, “Shut the f%$# up you communist moron Russian stooges,” is not the best motivation for about half of the Democratic Party.

The Current Crisis is the Direct Result of the For Profit Healthcare System

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It should go without saying, but no one actually discusses it, so it has to be said, that the reason that the US health care system is in such bad shape because we have spent the past 40+ years reserve capacity out of the system in the name of “efficiency”.

To quote Bill S., “It is a tale. Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury. Signifying nothing.”

Capitalism leads to just in time, and just in time leads to a fragile system:

By the middle of this week, nearly fifty thousand residents of New York City were confirmed to have the coronavirus. The actual number of coronavirus cases is of course much higher, as testing has been elusive. But the crisis is visible: over a thousand New Yorkers have died. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has sent the city eighty-five refrigerated trucks to be used as mobile morgues.

Hospitals are overwhelmed. The volume of calls for ambulance rides has nearly doubled. Nurses are comparing the situation to “battlefield triage.” In response, the city has transformed the Javits Convention Center and a tennis stadium into ad-hoc hospitals. A Navy hospital ship has docked at Pier 90 and opened its doors to overflow patients.

In Central Park, an evangelical Christian organization erected a field hospital with the blessing of the city and at the request of Mt Sinai. The organization, Samaritan’s Purse, is run by Franklin Graham, who’s known for his homophobic extremism. Mayor Bill de Blasio promised that the facility wouldn’t discriminate.

When you’ve reached the point where the mayor is assuring the public that the makeshift tent hospital in the city’s park won’t deny treatment to those condemned to an eternity in hell by the founder of the charity organization supplying the beds, something has gone terribly wrong.

Of course, desperate times call for desperate measures. But these times didn’t have to be so desperate to begin with. Typically if one hospital is overcrowded, a patient can be transferred to another hospital in the vicinity. But all of New York City’s hospitals are overcrowded. This wasn’t inevitable: New York City has lost nearly twenty hospitals, and tens of thousands of hospital beds, in the last two decades. In 2000, New York City had 73,931 hospital beds. Now it has 53,000, a reduction of nearly thirty percent.

The problem is not unique to New York City. Across the country, in rural and urban environments alike, hospitals are shuttering. A report by Morgan Stanley analysts “found that 8% of U.S. hospitals were at risk of closing and another 10% were considered weak.” At least thirty US hospitals entered bankruptcy last year alone.

If you want cheap underwear, capitalism works.

If you want public health and safety in an emergency, capitalism leaves you bereft of resources.

Ka-Ching

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A Republican fund-raiser has decided to to go into the corona virus supplies business.

I wonder how an ally of Donald Trump things that he can make obscene profits from this activity?

A longtime Republican fundraiser sent an email to his clients on Thursday abruptly announcing that he would no longer be working for them.

 The reason: He saw an opportunity to capitalize on the coronavirus response.

 “Over the last 14 days I have built another business outside politics and will be focusing my full attention there,” he wrote in the email, which was obtained by POLITICO.

 The fundraiser, Mike Gula, didn’t specify his new line of work in the email. But in an interview, he said he’d started a new company selling medical equipment that’s been in short supply during the coronavirus pandemic.

The company, Blue Flame Medical LLC, was formed Monday in Delaware, according to state records. Its website says it sells coronavirus testing kits, N95 respirator masks, “a wide selection” of personal protective equipment and other “hard to find medical supplies to beat the outbreak.”

Asked how he’d managed to procure such equipment when there are shortages in hospitals across the country, Gula said, “I have relationships with a lot of people.”

Yeah ……… how come I think that the “People” involved have names that sound like Karrod Jushner?

Linkage

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A documentary on the creation of the BBC’s spaghetti harvest documentary:

Evil and Chickensh%$

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After firing an organizer at one of the Long Island offices after he led protests against their indifference to Covid-19 infections, it now appears that senior executives planning to smear smear him, because that’s how Amazon rolls:

Leaked notes from an internal meeting of Amazon leadership obtained by VICE News reveal company executives discussed a plan to smear fired warehouse employee Christian Smalls, calling him “not smart or articulate” as part of a PR strategy to make him “the face of the entire union/organizing movement.”

“He’s not smart, or articulate, and to the extent the press wants to focus on us versus him, we will be in a much stronger PR position than simply explaining for the umpteenth time how we’re trying to protect workers,” wrote Amazon General Counsel David Zapolsky in notes from the meeting forwarded widely in the company.

The discussion took place at a daily meeting, which included CEO Jeff Bezos, to update each other on the coronavirus situation. Amazon SVP of Global Corporate Affairs Jay Carney described the purpose to CNN on Sunday: “We go over the update on what’s happening around the world with our employees and with our customers and our businesses. We also spend a significant amount of time just brainstorming about what else we can do” about COVID-19.

(emphasis mine)

The fish rots from the head.

Amazon is evil because Jeff Bezos is evil.