Month: April 2021

Must Get This Book

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I just read a review of Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial Class, and the book sounds like a real barn-burner:

Who are the members of the professional managerial class? Neither capitalists nor workers, one strains to define them in purely economic terms. If you have ever dealt with members of the PMC, the first word that comes to mind is annoying. It might be part of a slightly larger summation of annoying and pretentious. But annoying is always going to make the cut because members of the PMC are not just managers by vocation, but also by personality. They love to regulate and micromanage: their subordinates, their children, and even themselves.

Is it due to nature or nature? Occupational hazard or innate insufferableness? No one really knows for sure. What is known is that these are the most annoying people on the planet. People who get positively aroused at the idea of telling you what to do, correcting you, and telling you that they just read an article in The New York Times about just that issue and now have something old to say in a new way. A day without them giving out a did you know factoid is like a day without sunshine. The type of people who can only have an orgasm if they see someone getting a parking ticket.

Catherine Liu lives among these people and seems rather fed up. Her new book Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial Class makes it crystal clear that she is having a lot of passive-aggressive lunch meetings with other members of the University of California, Irvine faculty.

(emphasis mine)

That line made me laugh.

………

However, Liu focuses on another way the PMC mask their will to power: moral preening. She claims the professional managerial class hoards virtue for itself as part of its war against the working class. Which is to say, Liu recognizes that the PMC and the working class are, in fact, class enemies.

Building on the work of Barbara Ehrenreich, she accepts that the PMC at one time played a positive role in society by challenging the barbarity of earlier iterations of capitalism; specifically when members of the PMC were advocates for creating professional standards in fields like medicine and social research, and were advocating for welfare state economic reforms. But as the post-World War 2 capitalist settlement soured and neoliberalism became ascendant, Liu claims “the PMC preferred to fight culture wars against the classes below while currying favor with the capitalists it once despised.”

This was not a moral awakening, but an awokening. A power play by the PMC to secure their class position within the capitalist system using the lofty language of social justice to defend basic material interest.

I also call them Hillary Clinton voters.

………

The main argument of the book, or so it seems to me, is that the professional managerial class of present is actively working against building socialism in the United States. That the PMC could really be considered the prime obstacle to unifying the working class as they continually divide working people along the rigid lines of identity to serve their own class interests:

[The PMC] prefers obscurantism, balkanization, and management of interest groups to a transformative reimagining of the social order. It wants to play the virtuous social hero, but as a class, it is hopelessly reactionary. The interests of the PMC are now tied more than ever to its corporate overlords than to the struggles of the majority of Americans whose suffering is merely background decor for the PMC’s elite volunteerism. Members of the PMC soften the sharpness of their guilt about collective suffering by stroking their credentials and telling themselves that they are better and more qualified to lead and guide than other people.

Looks like someone just got herself uninvited to an 80s party.

What the review, and probably the book, do not address is how so much of this is driven by what the late Dave Graeber called Bullsh%$ Jobs.

I would argue that much of the dysfunction described in this review is an artifact of what Graeber described as the, “profound psychological violence,” of having a career that one knows on some level has no value.

F%$# Howard Dean

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I campaigned for Howard Dean in 2004. 

In 2006, as head of the DNC, he organized the 50 state strategy, which devolved money and power to local organizers, and won back the house and Senate. 

Then he got kicked to the curb by Barack Obama and Rahm Emanuel, and he decided to start lobbying.

I was disappointed, but now I’m just sick and tired of his crap.

The doctor who came closest to the Presidency in at least the past 20 years, is now shilling for big pharma at the costs of many thousands of lives in 3rd world countries. 

His impassioned defense of big pharma looting through the use of patent subsidies just lost me.

I guess that there are 3 kinds of politicians in the United States:

  • Sell-outs.
  • Those who will sell-out one day.
  • Bernie Sanders.

To quote God, “It’s like those miserable Psalms — they’re so depressing.”

Howard Dean, the former progressive champion, is calling on President Joe Biden to reject a special intellectual property waiver that would allow low-cost, generic coronavirus vaccines to be produced to meet the needs of low-income countries. Currently, a small number of companies hold the formulas for the Covid-19 vaccines, limiting distribution to many parts of the world.

“IP protections aren’t the cause of vaccination delays,” Dean claimed in a column for Barron’s last month. “Every drug manufacturing facility on the planet that’s capable of churning out Covid-19 shots is already doing so.”

This is flat out not true, and he knows it.

“Creating a new medicine is a costly proposition,” wrote Dean. “Companies would never invest hundreds of millions in research and development if rivals could simply copy their drug formulas and create knockoffs.”

The drug companies did not, “Invest hundreds of millions in research and development,” we the taxpayers did.

His lying about this serves no one but his corporate clients.

Many of the manufacturing plants prepared to mass produce low-cost vaccines are centered in India, which has committed to supplying the poorest countries in the world. But the waiver petition, Dean wrote, “is unreasonable and disingenuous; it’s a ruse to benefit India’s own industry at the expense of patients everywhere. President Biden would be wise to reject it.”

The strident opposition to the waiver, which is supported by an international coalition of human rights organizations as well as a growing cohort of congressional Democrats, may surprise Dean’s liberal supporters. But while Dean boasts a long history of support for single-payer health insurance coverage and government intervention into lowering domestic drug prices, he has reversed his positions on virtually every major progressive health policy issue since moving to work in the world of corporate influence peddling.

………

Despite publicly funded research and huge infusions of government cash for the development and delivery of vaccines, drugmakers have carefully guarded their monopoly on the intellectual property rights and signaled to investors that they plan to soon hike prices. The pharmaceutical industry, including representatives of Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson, have pushed the Biden administration to oppose the intellectual property waiver petition and go further to even impose sanctions on any country that moves to manufacture vaccines without their express permission.

………

In another recent column, again reflecting the interests of drugmakers, Dean wrote in favor of a last-minute regulation proposed by the Trump administration to narrow the government’s ability to lower the prices of certain pharmaceutical products financed with public money, a rule that could stifle any future attempt to rein in the costs of coronavirus vaccines.

………

“He sorts of pops up whenever you argue against anything that would lower drug prices,” said James Love, director of Knowledge Ecology International, a nonprofit that works to reform intellectual property rights to expand access to medicine.

“It’s appalling because he’s introduced as a progressive; he still gets on ‘Rachel Maddow,’” said Love. “But he’s on the payroll. He’s not a registered lobbyist — he somehow finds a way not to register — but he’s sort of an influencer, he’s paid to influence the debate.”

Another part of my misspent middle age (I was 42 in 2004) is destroyed.

Seriously, Dr. Dean, go back to Vermont, and shut the f%$# up.

Linkage

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An oldie but goody, John Oliver on Ayn Rand:

Time for a Blogger Ethics Panel

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(As Atrios would say)

It turns out that a reporter at Bloomberg news was feeding insider information to a speculator. Hoocoodanode?

Basically, there was a pattern of suspicious trades in the hours before a story from Bloomberg hit the web, and one reporter had a byline on all of the stories:

For more than six months, federal prosecutors say, a New York man used inside information to make illegal profits in the stock market—and a core element of his alleged scheme was his interaction with Bloomberg News, which published several stories shortly after the trader arranged to make significant purchases of the companies’ shares.

Last month, a federal grand jury indicted Jason Peltz on multiple counts of securities fraud, money laundering, tax evasion and lying to the FBI. Peltz, 38, is accused of working with over a half-dozen unnamed and unindicted co-conspirators to learn about impending takeovers and other market-moving news, and to move money between accounts as a way to hide his role and profits.

The indictment notes that Peltz’s moves were timed closely to stories that ran at “a financial news organization.” While the newsroom isn’t named, federal officials cite five stories and their timestamps— all of which match precisely to pieces that ran on Bloomberg News’ website. Each of those stories had shared bylines, but only one reporter is identified as an author for all of the articles: Ed Hammond, who worked at the Financial Times before coming to Bloomberg more than six years ago to cover mergers and acquisitions. In 2017, Hammond was named Bloomberg’s senior deals reporter in New York — a highly prestigious post in that newsroom.

Hmm, I wonder just who could be the source of the insider information?

The feds allege that Peltz used disposable “burner” phones and encrypted apps to communicate with a journalist, and that the reporter provided “material nonpublic information about forthcoming articles” which Peltz used to trade in the market “just prior to publication of an article about each company written by the reporter.” The indictment describes “numerous contacts” between Peltz and a reporter, including at least one in-person meeting.

I might be inclined to dismiss this as an a unfortunate social interaction, except for the fact that Mr. Peltz was using a burner phone.

Assuming that the Bloomberg source was not actively profiting from the transactions, it means that either Peltz was using him to manipulate the timing of the public release M&A information, or using the Bloomberg source to get information regarding future M&A information, or both.

In either case, the reporter still got something of value, a scoop, and while this should not be actionable from a criminal perspective, one would hope that his editor is crawling so far up his ass about this that he can see his tonsils.

A Good Primer on Why We Need Aggressive Antitrust

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Here is how preventing a merger led to lower prices and better products:

Stopping mergers is good for business. Take a very simple consumer product – razors and razor blades for shaving, or disposable wet shave safety razors.

Short version:  A couple of competitors to the disposable razor duoopoly went from online to store shelves, and forced the incumbents to reign in their high prices, particularly when one of the attempts to buy out one of the companies was stopped by the FTC.

It’s a 5-10 minute read, and well worth it.

Oh, the Horror

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If your campaign advisers have you convinced that you need to return a 5K donation from @AOC to win reelection- fire them promptly bc you’re already running a losing campaign https://t.co/umjcPflZCc

— Rachel Bitecofer 📈🔭🍌 (@RachelBitecofer) April 3, 2021

This

It appears that some Democrats in Name Only (DINO) are having conniptions when they discover that they have received campaign donations from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s PAC. 

You just know that if it were Matt Gaetz making the donation, they would be completely fine with it.

The Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) is a profoundly and deeply f%$#ed up institution:

As the midterm campaign’s first fundraising deadline approached this week, several vulnerable House Democrats got an unwelcome surprise in their accounts: $5,000 from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

The New York Democrat sent the contributions to her colleagues to help keep the House majority ahead of a tough cycle without directly contributing to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, with which she’s publicly clashed. But Ocasio-Cortez’s largesse — and an oversight at the campaign headquarters — has instead raised awkward questions among her colleagues as some swing-district Democrats fret over whether to return her money before the GOP can turn it into an attack ad.

………

While some are grateful for the infusion of cash, at least three Democrats have so far either declined the initial transfer or said they would return the money: Reps. Conor Lamb of Pennsylvania, Carolyn Bourdeaux of Georgia and Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, according to multiple sources.

………

Normally, swing-district Democrats are scrounging for every last dollar to help them secure their reelections, particularly in a first quarter that has been tougher than usual for candidates across the board. But the Ocasio-Cortez donation, these Democrats said, was unsolicited and came without warning. Many of their campaigns did not receive a heads-up from the DCCC about the donation until after it hit members’ accounts — a move that surprised senior aides and campaign consultants.

“The GOP has spent four years saying the frontliners are all socialists. Now they’ve got the receipts to prove it. Anyone telling themselves this won’t be in campaign ads is in denial,” said one Democratic consultant who works for swing-seat members.

In the political donation world, wire transfers are commonly used to quickly move large sums of money from one account to another, particularly in the final stretch of a fundraising quarter and during a pandemic. The Ocasio-Cortez transfers carried clear political risk for some members, however, and some sources pointed out that she could have alleviated the current anxiety by giving to the DCCC directly.

Yes, she should use an organization which has consistently gone after her and hers, and whose management shows a profound hostility to everything she professes to believe.

Yeah, right.

………

Still, other Democrats said they saw Ocasio-Cortez’s interest in helping endangered incumbents as a positive sign for party unity, even if they were stunned by the method. And privately, the liberal star already is personally close with some of the frontliners, many of whom were elected in the same blue wave that helped Democrats recapture the House in 2018.

She offered to make similar donations to frontline Democrats during the 2020 election cycle but only contributed to those who took her up on the offer, according to two sources familiar with her political operation.

The sophomore New York Democrat spent years at loggerheads with the campaign arm and is among several progressives who have refused to pay member dues to DCCC, in part because of its treatment of liberal primary challengers.

Her current round of donations alone — an intended total of $160,000 — amount to more than half of Ocasio-Cortez’s entire dues goal for the 2020 cycle, according to a dues report obtained by POLITICO.

Gee, massive donations from a candidate with national stature.  Don’t throw me in that briar patch.

The Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) is craven and worthless.

Headline of the Day

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The Obamanauts Are Rebranding as Evil

—Jacobin

Whether it’s Jay Carney speaking for Amazon, Robert Gibbs working for McDonalds to kill the minimum wage, Seth Harris’ role in drafting the anti-worker Proposition 22, David Plouffe doing PR for Uber, and Tim Geithner being ……… Tim Geithner, it does seem that for all their prior protestations of working for the public weal ring rather hollow.

He May Be the Must Repugnant Member of the Democratic Party Establishment (There Is No Democratic Party Establishment) Today

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No, not Joe Manchin, nor even the twisted wannabe punk Kyrsten Sinema.

I am talking, of course about Rahm Israel Emanuel, a politician so contemptible that he was run out of the Chicago Mayor’s office on a rail.

There seems to be no level of evil and stupidity he won’t support, so now he’s cast his lot against raising the minimum wage, which is arguably the most beneficial, and is certainly the most politically popular policy initiative in the United States today:

As disgraced former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel reportedly keeps floating his name for a Biden administration appointment, he is recycling an old Republican plan to let states opt out of a higher minimum wage. Now, he is slated to headline the annual conference of one of the major corporate lobbying groups fighting against congressional Democrats’ $15 minimum wage legislation.

The National Restaurant Association, the lobbying group which led the fight to block a minimum wage increase in the COVID-19 relief bill passed last month, will be hosting Emanuel as a keynote speaker for the group’s virtual conference on April 20, an event entitled: “Seeking Unity: Conversations on How We Can Come Together.”

The speaking slot follows Emanuel’s Washington Post op-ed last month arguing that omitting a minimum wage increase from the American Rescue Plan was not a big deal, and asserting that Democrats should work with Republicans on a plan that does not guarantee $15 nationwide.

He’s always wrong, he’s not particularly competent, and he’s a bully.

Why is he not flipping burgers at minimum wage for a living?

The Washington Post Sounds Like a Horrible Place to Work

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I can’t see how the Washington Post’s decision to punish Sonmez for being a sexual assault survivor—by banning her from covering stories involving sex offenses, a clear denial of workplace privileges and opportunities—can be squared with DC employment law. https://t.co/fqDaoSZFRx https://t.co/YEwJlM2SrL pic.twitter.com/DKABtgaqun

— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjs_DC) March 28, 2021

Repugnant

You may, or may not, recall that when Kobe Bryant was killed in a helicopter crash, Washington Post reporter Felicia Sonmez retweeted an old story from The Daily Beast detailing the (VERY credible) allegations that had been lodged against the Basketball player in the past.

In response to this, the paper suspended her, and did not give her any assistance in responding to the (literally) thousands of death threats against her.

She was reinstated when outrage from the newsroom became such that the Post editors were forced to reinstate her and provide her security.

Because of her status as a survivor of sexual assault, the Post forbade her from covering any stories that touched on this issue, a prohibition that stands to this day, which means, for example, when accused rapist, and ex-Governor, Eric Greitens announced his run for Senate a few weeks back she was not allowed to cover this.

It should be noted, as in the attached tweet, that this is in violation of DC employment law, and it’s not a good look for the Washington Post. 

The problem is that under then Editor-in-Chief Marty Barron and now, journalistic objectivity is defined at 1301 K Street NW as, “What would an upper-middle class white man think.”

It was supposed to be an upbeat town hall to rally the newsroom, as Washington Post leaders highlighted their moves to defend reporter Seung Min Kim from internet trolls. But sources tell us the March 16 Zoom meeting with hundreds of staffers went off the rails briefly when Felicia Sonmez, a breaking news reporter who has spoken openly about her experience as a sexual assault survivor, typed a pointed comment in the chat box: “I wish editors had publicly supported me in the same way.”

Sonmez was referring to an incident that occurred the day Kobe BryantT died in January 2020. Former top editor Marty Baron and upper management suspended Sonmez for tweeting a reminder that the basketball legend being showered in praise had also been accused of raping a woman. The Post retracted the suspension after more than 300 reporters signed a letter demanding her reinstatement. It also sent physical protection for Sonmez, who had to leave her house after her Bryant missive went viral and she received death threats.

………

She didn’t stop there. Sonmez also publicized that she is barred from writing about anything related to sexual misconduct or #MeToo. According to several people familiar with the decision, the prohibition began around the time that sexual misconduct allegations surfaced against Supreme Court Justice Brett KAavanaugh, and continued recently with news about Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) acknowledging she is a survivor of assault as well as the harassment allegations against New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

Last Monday, Sonmez had to take herself off a story about former Missouri Gov. Eric GreitensS running for Senate, according to comments she made in an internal newsroom Slack channel. (Greitens resigned as governor following allegations that he sexually assaulted and blackmailed a woman.) That came just days after the staff meeting, when a fellow reporter followed up on Sonmez’s comment in the Zoom chat and demanded to know why Post leadership defended some reporters but not her. (Acting Executive Editor Cameron Barr, we are told, said the meeting was not the appropriate venue to address the matter.)

………

Sonmez declined to comment, as did a spokesperson for the Post. But the Post reporters I spoke with about this recently questioned the fairness of the ban. Every reporter has internal biases, they said; part of the job is checking them at the door. One said Sonmez has become something of an advocate for sexual assault victims, making management uncomfortable with her writing on this topic. But even that person said a blanket prohibition is overkill.

It’s white male privilege, and it stinks on ice.

………

“I believe it’s important for you to know that The Post’s decision on this matter has had negative repercussions for me personally in the past,” she wrote. “[I]t’s the tortured explanations I have to give whenever there is breaking news on this topic and I’m not allowed to cover it.”

Sonmez was responding to being informed by Ginsberg earlier that day that the Post would maintain its prohibition on her writing about sexual assault or harassment. His deputy, Peter Wallsten, followed up soon after, acknowledging that while the policy may cause her “emotional distress,” the newspaper stood by the arrangement: “I’m really sorry you are unhappy with the parameters of your assignment … But it is up to The Post to determine coverage assignments and I do not anticipate yours changing anytime soon.”

In addition to being a truly sh%$ty way to treat an employee, this is, as noted above, illegal.

(update)

I just did a quick Google, and when this sh%$ blew up again, the WaPo FINALLY reversed the restrictions on Sonmez’s reporting.

Doesn’t make them look any better, because it’s clear that they are only doing so because they were forced to do the right thing.

So Not a Surprise

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A study of the insurrectionist rioters show that economic hardship did not drive them to be there, it was a fear of losing white privilege.

Why am I not surprised?

The Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol by a violent mob at the behest of former president Donald Trump was an act of political violence intended to alter the outcome of a legitimate democratic election. That much was always evident.

What we know 90 days later is that the insurrection was the result of a large, diffuse and new kind of protest movement congealing in the United States.

The Chicago Project on Security and Threats (CPOST), working with court records, has analyzed the demographics and home county characteristics of the 377 Americans, from 250 counties in 44 states, arrested or charged in the Capitol attack.

Those involved are, by and large, older and more professional than right-wing protesters we have surveyed in the past. They typically have no ties to existing right-wing groups. But like earlier protesters, they are 95 percent White and 85 percent male, and many live near and among Biden supporters in blue and purple counties.

The charges have, so far, been generally in proportion to state and county populations as a whole. Only Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri and Montana appear to have sent more protesters to D.C. suspected of crimes than their populations would suggest.

………

When compared with almost 2,900 other counties in the United States, our analysis of the 250 counties where those charged or arrested live reveals that the counties that had the greatest decline in White population had an 18 percent chance of sending an insurrectionist to D.C., while the counties that saw the least decline in the White population had only a 3 percent chance. This finding holds even when controlling for population size, distance to D.C., unemployment rate and urban/rural location. It also would occur by chance less than once in 1,000 times.

Put another way, the people alleged by authorities to have taken the law into their hands on Jan. 6 typically hail from places where non-White populations are growing fastest.

CPOST also conducted two independent surveys in February and March, including a National Opinion Research Council survey, to help understand the roots of this rage. One driver overwhelmingly stood out: fear of the “Great Replacement.” Great Replacement theory has achieved iconic status with white nationalists and holds that minorities are progressively replacing White populations due to mass immigration policies and low birthrates. Extensive social media exposure is the second-biggest driver of this view, our surveys found. Replacement theory might help explain why such a high percentage of the rioters hail from counties with fast-rising, non-White populations. 

There are legitimate economic causes of unrest in the United States, but a fear of losing privilege seems to be driving the worst of the extremism.

Cuomo Must Really be on the Ropes

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Because that’s the only way that he would allow taxes to be raised on rich people, and “Rat Faced Andy” just cut a deal in Albany.

Cuomo’s political brand has always been his fundraising prowess, and that in turn was driven by his constant kowtowing to the very rich, and protecting them from things like having to pay taxes.

This would not have happened a year ago:

New York State leaders announced they had reached an agreement on Tuesday on a $212 billion state budget that includes tax increases on the wealthy as well as substantial relief for renters, undocumented immigrants and business owners hit hardest by the coronavirus.

Many of the budget’s key initiatives are aimed at jump-starting the recovery of a state that was the onetime epicenter of the pandemic.

It includes $2.3 billion in federal funds to help tenants late on rent; $1 billion in grants and tax credits for small businesses that suffered from the economic downturn; and a $2.1 billion fund to provide one-time payments for undocumented workers who did not qualify for federal stimulus checks or unemployment benefits, according to budget highlights released by the governor’s office.

All were proposals championed by Democratic leaders of the State Legislature, who leveraged Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s weakened political position to forcefully lobby for their priorities, including a long-sought personal income tax rate increase on individuals making over $1 million — overcoming the governor’s longtime aversion to raising taxes on the rich.

Two new brackets would also be introduced for incomes over $5 million and $25 million. The changes mean wealthy residents of New York City would effectively be subject to the highest combined local and state personal income tax rates in the nation, surpassing California.

Good.  Our taxes are too damn low.

Some people will argue that the rich will move to lower tax states, to which I say, f%$# the rich with Cheney’s dick.

As was noted earlier, “The Problem with Living in Florida is that You Have to Live in Florida.” 

If there is a mass exodus of the rich from Manhattan, then the rents will go down, and the 99% will be able to afford to live there again.

Your Charter School Update

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We lead with the story of how Clark and Jeanette Parker of Beverly Hills used charter schools as a piggy bank, following a long history of dodgy accounting in the “charity” sector, moving to a new location whenever their self-dealing and underperformance became known by the local educational regulators.

………

The Parkers have cast themselves as selfless philanthropists, telling the California Board of Education that they have “devoted all of our lives to the education of other people’s children, committed many millions of our own dollars directly to that particular purpose, with no gain directly to us.”

But the couple have, in fact, made millions from their charter schools. Financial records show the Parkers’ schools have paid more than $800,000 annually to rent buildings the couple own. The charters have contracted out services to the Parkers’ nonprofits and companies and paid Clark Parker generous consulting fees, all with taxpayer money, a Times investigation found.

Presented with The Times’ findings, the Parkers did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

How the Parkers have stayed in business, surviving years of allegations of financial and academic wrongdoing, illustrates glaring flaws in the way California oversees its growing number of charter schools.

Many of the people responsible for regulating the couple’s schools, including school board members and state elected officials, had accepted thousands of dollars from the Parkers in campaign contributions.

Like other charter operators who have run into trouble, the Parkers were able to appeal to the state Board of Education when they faced the threat of being shut down; the panel is known for overturning local regulators’ decisions. A Times analysis of the state board’s decisions has found that, over the last five years, it has sided with charters over local school districts or county offices of education in about 70% of appeals.

California law also enables troubled charter operators to escape sanction or scrutiny by moving to school districts more willing to accept them. The Parkers have used this to their advantage, keeping one step ahead of the regulators.

“They’re like cats,” said Kawamoto, who began working at one of the couple’s charter schools in 2006. “They have so many lives.”

Charter schools are technically public schools operated by private entities.  Make the subject to the freedom of information acts that normal schools do.

That Which Can Be Destroyed By the Truth, Should Be

        —P.C. Hodgell

On the “Good News” side, we have a public education advocate turned public education advocacy lawyer Robert Skeels, who has been beating the Charter School establishment like a drum in court:

On Tuesday, March 23, 2021, I got my second big win in court against a charter school corporation. It was also a major victory over their California Charter Schools Association (“CCSA”) trade association, which tried to use the case to carve out immunity to the California Public Records Act (“CPRA”). I represented @DotKohlhaas in the action.

………

My first win against a corporate charter school was a year ago as third chair in a suit to overturn a wrongful expulsion of a student of color. The Partnerships to Uplift Communities (“PUC”) charter chain (of convicted felon Ref Rodriguez fame) had violated the student’s due process rights. Violated isn’t a strong enough word for what they did. PUC unilaterally changed the charges at the appeals hearing and then branded the child as a terrorist in his permanent record. Under the tutelage of the brilliant partners at the law firm I was a part-timer at the time (I am currently transitioning to full time there), plus sage advice from @DrPrestonGreen, we built a strong case.

It was my argument that the charter corporation never proved specific intent — a crucial element to Ed. Code § 48900.7, as well as PUC’s glaring lack of notice afforded to the student, that saw the court overturn the wrongful expulsion and give the student their life back.

This latest case was a charter trying to hide all its dirty secrets by not complying with the CPRA. The scandal-ridden The Accelerated Schools (“TAS”) charter chain’s leaders absconded when the community started pushing back and started asking questions about union busting.

………

I suppose I can’t blame them. The charter industry — long used to unaccountably spending tax dollars in total secrecy — fought tooth and nail the imposition of the CPRAand Brown Act added by Ed. Code § 47604.1(b)(2)(A). When the statute took effect January 2020, charter school corporations were already looking for ways to skirt the law. At the firm where I’m a junior associate, we use the CPRAfor pre-discovery work against charter corporations. Michael Kohlhaas dot org, on the other hand, has used the CPRAto expose some of the ugliest, scandalous conduct by an industry already infamous for scandal. Uncovering the vile Nick Melvoin’s sharing of Los Angeles Unified School District’s (“LAUSD”) confidential legal strategieswith their then party-opponent in a lawsuit(the CCSA) was a blockbuster revelation enabled by the CPRA.

When one looks at the corruption, self dealing, and opacity of the Charter School industry, it’s almost as if the entire process was designed to serve the dual goals of resegregating public education and allowing private operators to loot the public coffers. 

Oh wait, it was.

This:

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Matt Stoller Makes a very good point, “Keep McKinsey Away from Biden’s Infrastructure Push.”

They are corrupt, and will make a dogs breakfast of everything that they touch: 

If there’s one striking feature of the Biden administration so far, it’s the rejection of Barack Obama’s policy framework by his own party. It is now the consensus that Obama’s lack of ambition led to Trump’s election. For instance, party leader Senator Chuck Schumer recently called the Obama stimulus a “mistake” and “a small measly proposal” on CNN, as a way of selling Biden’s much larger proposals.

Biden’s goal, and that of the Democratic Party that controls both houses, is to break from recent politics, and be “more like Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) and the Congress of 1933, and less like Barack Obama and the Congress of 2009.” Biden wants to spend a lot, to go big, instead of the go small vision of Obama.

………

It’s a bold vision. One important question is whether it’s actually possible to spend that amount of money on so many things without immense amounts of corruption or waste. The difference between FDR and Obama, after all, was not just spending amounts. Obama didn’t spend enough, but he did spend a lot. FDR, however, actually built things, whereas Obama’s stimulus money for, say, California’s high-speed rail, evaporated into a cloud of consultants. (A particularly mean joke was that FDR won WWII in less time than it took Obama to build Obamacare web sites that didn’t work.) 

This might be the best business meme of 2019 so far. pic.twitter.com/hTXul3Muy3

— ArtkoCapital (@ArtkoCapital) March 5, 2019

The McKinsey Way

There is an important difference between Joe Biden and Barack Obama, Biden went to the University of Delaware and then Syracuse for law, and Obama went to Columbia University and then Harvard Law School, both of which are Ivy League institutions.

Obama spent his formative years at colleges where McKinsey was actively recruiting, and his fellow students, and likely many of his friends, were eager at the chance to get their start there.

As such, Obama placed a lot of trust in those consultants, because they were his people, a part of the “Clan of the Ivys,” and we got less than stellar results when the consultants were called in on California rail, or Obamacare.

This is what normally happens when you bring in McKinsey:

Skipped an aside about mismanaging Puerto Rico.

………

So what has McKinsey been doing, if it hasn’t been running Puerto Rico? The answer is, McKinsey has been looking out for McKinsey. It has ensured that Puerto Rico will spend the mind-bogglingly large sum of $1.5 billion on professional services, meaning lawyers, bankers, and consultants (including McKinsey), which is five times what Detroit paid in services for its bankruptcy. I don’t know how much the firm will make, but according to the GSA schedule, just one recent college graduate working at McKinsey costs around $3 million a year. Beyond the straight fee extraction, the conflicts of interest are comical; McKinsey’s internal hedge fund actually owns Puerto Rican bonds.

Far from an anomaly, such a situation for McKinsey is common. McKinsey helped ruin the U.S. spying apparatus with a bloated, failed contract. They helped run Trump’s U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement; ICE even hired McKinsey to write its own contract. McKinsey structured France’s terrible coronavirus response, and that of New York state. McKinsey is so brazen that it was caught by the GSA Inspector General for cheating the government out of $65 million. It didn’t seem to matter. In 2019, McKinsey worked for more than 15 federal agencies and departments, and 25 states.

Unfortunately, the government has continued down this path for many decades, removing government capabilities, and even capability for government oversight, and turning it over the private sector. 

That was my experience working for over 2 years on a project run under a “Lead Systems Integrator” model that was so dysfunctional that future LSI contracts were banned by Congress.

………

Roosevelt’s first major infrastructure battle was over Muscle Shoals in Alabama, the great hydroelectric resource. The Morgan interests and the electric utility magnates wanted that resource privatized for their use. Roosevelt said no, and had the government directly build the Tennessee Valley Authority, a publicly owned and operated electric utility for much of Appalachia. TVA was part of a package of reforms to constrain and control Wall Street, to end what FDR called the ‘informal economic government of the United States.’

Over the rest of the New Deal, FDR transformed the physical plant of the country, and spent a lot of money on infrastructure. But Roosevelt first made sure Wall Street had little say over how public money or public resources were spent. Public institutions got bigger and more competent, and the financiers and monopolists lost power. One key result is that the government could do big things. During World War II, military procurement officers had immense capacity and power, imposing tight control over contractors, and ensuring that there were at least a dozen competitors for each major weapon system. They could peer into the books of contractors, and even claw back excessive profits.

America used this governing capacity for decades, constructing the national highway system, winning the space race, deploying the polio vaccine, landing on the moon and building the internet, and running the project Sematech in the 1980s to address foreign threats to semiconductors.

In the 1990s, however, Bill Clinton’s “Reinventing Government” initiative killed the public capacity Roosevelt had constructed. Clinton encouraged the big prime defense contractors to merge, shrinking them from over 100 to just 5 firms. Clinton’s procurement initiative, led by Steve Kelman, invented a whole new vocabulary for ways to let contractors steal. The details get complex, but the gist was a ‘light touch’ approach to negotiating by the government. Procurement officers stopped making hard-nosed demands for better prices, and were stripped of the ability to look at the books of the contractors to make sure there weren’t excess profits.

It actually started under Reagan, and then SecDef Dick Cheney massively expanded this at the Pentagon under GHW Bush, but Clinton took the idea, and ran with it in a way that no administration has before or since. (I will leave the determination of their motives as an exercise to my reader(s)).

We need to return core competencies to government, or will continue to be unable to efficiently do the business of government.

My, How Nick Clegg has Fallen

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Roll Tape!

In 2010, largely on the basis of being telegenic and glib, Nick Clegg and his Liberal Democrats, (Slightly Silly Party) managed to snag enough seats in Parliament, no mean feat in Britains first-past-the-post system, to be the junior member in coalition with David Cameron and the Tories until the next election, where

In the next election, they lost 48 of 57 seats, because the electorate realized that all Clegg cared about was proximity to power.

Speaking of Nick Clegg’s pathological need to be close to power, he is now Facebook’s vice president of global affairs, and so, much like his days in UK politics, defending the indefensible.

In this case, the former head of the Lib Dems is defending Facebook’s algorithms and its reckless and insecure handling of user data. 

Clegg’s descent into an irrelevant joke does not surprise me one bit:

Facebook wants to reintroduce users to its algorithms.

On Wednesday, within the span of a few hours, the company took several steps to encourage users to trust its ranking and recommendation systems. In a blog post, Facebook said it would make it easier for users to control what’s in their feeds, pointing to both new and existing tools. In an apparent attempt to buttress that announcement, Facebook’s vice president of global affairs Nick Clegg published a 5,000-word Medium post defending the company’s ranking algorithms and repudiating the argument that those algorithms create dangerous echo chambers. Clegg also defended Facebook’s algorithms in a wide-ranging interview with The Verge published on the same day.

Taken together, these moves appear to be a concerted campaign by Facebook to repair the negative reputation of its algorithms, which many say actively encourage and incentivize political polarization, misinformation, and extreme content. The efforts come as the company faces heavy criticism from lawmakers for its platform design, and just a week after CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified to Congress during a hearing on misinformation.

In its latest PR blitz, Facebook is pushing the idea that it’s not particularly responsible for the proliferation of polarization and extreme content on its platforms and is taking appropriate steps to combat both. That defies longtime critics, who have said Facebook’s algorithms are engineered to reward the most odious content, a specific narrative that Facebook and Clegg are actively denying.

………

“Nick Clegg’s Medium post is a cynical, breathtaking display of gaslighting on a scale hard to fathom even for Facebook,” a spokesperson for the Real Facebook Oversight Board, a group of scholars and activists critical of Facebook, told Recode. “Clegg asks, ‘Where does FB’s incentive lie?’ A better question might be: Where does Nick Clegg’s incentive lie? The answer to that is clear.”

“Facebook managed to both insult its users for being too dimwitted to understand how its algorithms work while also blaming them for taking advantage of them too effectively,” said Ashley Boyd, the vice president for advocacy at Mozilla, in a Wednesday statement. “The News Feed controls unveiled today amount to nothing more than an admission that its algorithms are the problem.”

Ashley Boyd’s quote is spot on, and I have nothing to add.

Supreme Court Sides With Google on API Copyright

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It should also be noted that the Supreme Court also slapped down the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC, AKA, the “Patent Court”) once again.

This time, the Patent Court big-footed the normal appellate process, it does not normally handle copyright claims, and made an egregiously bad decision, which it pretty much always does, to boot.

Once the Supreme Court noticed, it was over but for the fat lady singing.

The purpose of patents is two fold:  To encourage innovation, and to make the information contained in patents available to the public.

The patent troll friendly CAFC is doing exactly the opposite.

This time the Supreme Court ruled that using the application programming interface (API) is fair use.

An API is a series of rules which describe how a computer program is programmed, or how it interfaces with hardware, and for program compatibility, programs running on the same hardware, or the same operating system, or on a similar language.

It’s not a creative expression (copyright) but a functional description of the system, like the manual for a toaster.  The specific words in the manual are covered by copyright, but the idea that you slide a lever from left to right to set the doneness of your toast is not.

For example, we can look at a “Hello World” program in Java, where Oracle was asserting infringement: (This is also an example of why I don’t want to program in Java, it’s way to obscure and verbose)

import javax.swing.JFrame;  //Importing class JFrame
import javax.swing.JLabel;  //Importing class JLabel
public class HelloWorld {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        JFrame frame = new JFrame();           //Creating frame
        frame.setTitle("Hi!");                 //Setting title frame
        frame.add(new JLabel("Hello, world!"));//Adding text to frame
        frame.pack();                          //Setting size to smallest
        frame.setLocationRelativeTo(null);     //Centering frame
        frame.setVisible(true);                //Showing frame
    }
}

If you want to create an application, or an operating system, which is what Google did, and allow for Java programmers to work in this without learning a completely new way of doing the same thing, then you have to use the same code words, things like “Jlabel”, “Jframe”, “setTitle”, etc. 

That’s what Google did, and what the makers of IBM clones did in the 1980s, and what third party spare parts manufacturers do when they make cheaper parts for your (increasingly computerized) car.

The Supreme Court said that it’s fair use, which is nice, but not as nice as if they had said that it was not subject to copyright:

It’s taken over a decade, but the Supreme Court has finally said that Google’s copying of the Sun Java API for Android was clearly fair use in a 6-2 ruling (Barrett did not take part since she was not on the Court when the case was heard). The background of this case is actually kind of important to understanding what just happened, so here’s a quick(ish) recap.

As you’ll probably know, this case began in 2010 when Oracle, which had just taken over Sun, sued Google for patent infringement. The patent parts were quickly tossed out and what remained was what referred to as a “sideshow” to the main event: a question about whether APIs could be covered by copyright. Pretty much all historical evidence, including an important Supreme Court ruling from the 1990s, said no, interfaces are not covered by copyright.

Oracle and friends then spent the next decade deliberately gaslighting basically everyone who doesn’t understand what an API is, and insisting that it’s the same as executable code. The district court, under Judge William Alsup, who somewhat famously taught himself Java to better understand the issues in the case (he already knew how to code and was a hobbyist programmer), correctly found that APIs are not subject to copyright as they represent a “system or method of operation” which is explicitly not covered by copyright, as per Section 102(b) of the Copyright Act.

Rather than go to the 9th Circuit (as it should have) the case went to the Federal Circuit, which hears all patent appeals. That was because the case began as a patent case, even though it no longer was. CAFC judges are somewhat infamous for never finding a patent issue they couldn’t screw up, and decided to extend that to copyright. In the ruling overturning the lower court, they made it clear that because they were code illiterate they could not understand the difference between executing code and an API, even though it’s like the difference between a novel and a dictionary.

The CAFC bigfooted the case, which is not surprising.  They also do things like change determinations of fact by the lower courts, something that is not supposed to be done by appellate courts, which are only supposed to adjudicate matters of law.

The case went back to the district court, where the jury this time sided with Google, this time saying that the use of the code was covered under fair use. That whole trial was a little weird, because reading between the lines, you could see that nearly all the arguments for why copying an API was fair use were really about why an API shouldn’t be covered by copyright at all (as per Alsup’s original ruling) and then squeezing that square peg into the round hole of fair use to make it work. Once again, however, CAFC got flummoxed by an API looking like code and overturned — which is quite crazy because CAFC had, in its first ruling, insisted that the jury should decide this issue (as a matter of fact) and then when the jury said “fair use” CAFC suddenly decided that it was a matter of law that it could overrule.

It’s taken over a decade, but the Supreme Court has finally said that Google’s copying of the Sun Java API for Android was clearly fair use in a 6-2 ruling (Barrett did not take part since she was not on the Court when the case was heard). The background of this case is actually kind of important to understanding what just happened, so here’s a quick(ish) recap.

So, basically, we have another set of incoherent, and weird rulings from the CAFC, and once it gets on the SCOTUS radar, they shoot it down.

The patent court needs to be abolished.  The argument for it, that there needs to be a court with a specialized focus on patents is simply not justified by the results.

Instead, we have an institution that is completely captured by the patent bar, and has literally allowed for the patenting of a rainy day (Bilski v. Kappos,).

Just shut them down, and reassign the current judges to traffic court.

 

Amazon Fesses Up in Pissgate

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Amazon has been trolling its critics so unhinged lately that their own IT department thought that someone had hacked their Twitter account. 

This is because many public figures, indluding many leading lights in the left wing of the Democratic Party, including Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have been highlighting the brutal inhumanity of Amazon’s treatments of its workers, including allegations that the schedules for its drivers are so tight that they have no time to relieve themselves, and have to use pee bottles.

Amazon furiously denied those allegations, maintaining that they treat their employees well, and no one has to piss in a bottle to make quota.

Or rather, Amazon WAS denying those reports, but now they are saying that their earlier statements were inoperative:  Drivers were using pee bottles after all:

Amazon has apologized to the congressman Mark Pocan, admitting to scoring an “own goal” in its initial denial of his suggestion its drivers were sometimes forced to urinate in bottles during delivery rounds.

“We know that drivers can and do have trouble finding restrooms because of traffic or sometimes rural routes, and this has been especially the case during Covid when many public restrooms have been closed,” the company said in a blogpost.

Its admission came a week after the Wisconsin Democrat criticised working conditions for Amazon staff, saying in a tweet: “Paying workers $15 [an hour] doesn’t make you a ‘progressive workplace’ when you union-bust and make workers urinate in water bottles.”

Amazon responded: “You don’t really believe the peeing in bottles thing, do you? If that were true, nobody would work for us.”

It subsequently walked back that comment.

………

Pocan tweeted that the company should acknowledge “the inadequate working conditions you’ve created for all your workers, then fix that for everyone and finally, let them unionize without interference.”

Indeed.

Amazon is a horrible place, run by a horrible person, and if you buy from them, you are a co-conspirator.

Tweet of the Day

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Matt Gaetz is everything the Republicans were looking for in Hunter Biden.

— Dr. Antifa Rioter-Elect, Esq (@AntifaRioter) April 2, 2021

I have not been writing about the rapidly metastasizing web of sex, drugs, and money laundering surrounding Florida Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz because it’s too weird for me to get a real handle on the whole thing.

But if I were to boil it down to one sentence, I would just quote Dr. Antifa Rioter-Elect, Esq, so I am quoting Dr. Antifa Rioter-Elect, Esq.

If I Were to Say, “Toxic Radioactive Flood,” What State Would You Assume?

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If you said Florida, we have a winner.

A waste pond once operated by Borden Chemical is now leaking and threatening a massive flood of toxic radioactive waste into Tampa Bay. 

This has to be the most Florida thing ever:

The governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, declared a state of emergency on Saturday after a significant leak at a large pond at the old Piney Point phosphate mine threatened to burst a system that stores water polluted with radioactive materials.

Officials ordered more than 300 homes evacuated and closed off a highway near the large reservoir in the Tampa Bay area north of Bradenton.

………

The state department of environmental protection said a break was detected on Friday in one wall of a 77-acre pond that has a depth of 25ft and holds millions of gallons of water containing phosphorus and nitrogen from the old phosphate plant.

Officials brought in rocks and materials to plug the hole but were unsuccessful.

………

Workers were pumping out thousands of gallons per minute to bring the volume down. Pumping the entire pond would take 10 to 12 days. Others were working to chart a path for controlling how the water can flow from the pond into the Tampa Bay.

………

The pond at the old Piney Point phosphate mine sits in a stack of phosphogypsum, a waste product from manufacturing fertilizer that is radioactive. It contains small amounts of naturally occurring radium and uranium. The stacks can also release large concentrations of radon gas.

Obviously, DeSantis is not to blame, this time. 

This is more a consequence of “Same old, same old,” corruption that has characterized Florida politics since at least the days of Carl G. Fisher.

Why people want to live there, or move there, is completely beyond my understanding.