Author: Matthew G. Saroff

About 18 Years Too Late

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Joe Biden has announced that he will be withdrawing all US troops from Afghanistan by September 11, roughly 19 years and 11 months since we invaded the small Asian nation nicknamed, “The Graveyard of Empires.”

I think that “all ” in the statement is likely narrowly defined, but he has specifically eschewed basing it on the conditions on the ground, which can be manufactured by both our own military, and Pakistan’s ISI for their own benefit.

Assuming that this stands, and the soldiers are not relabeled as “Freedom Constables” ore some-such, this is good news:

President Biden will withdraw all American troops from Afghanistan over the coming months, U.S. officials said, completing the military exit by the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that drew the United States into its longest war.

The decision, which Biden is expected to announce Wednesday, will keep thousands of U.S. forces in the country beyond the May 1 exit deadline that the Trump administration negotiated last year with the Taliban, according to a senior administration official who briefed reporters Tuesday under rules of anonymity set by the White House.

While the Taliban has promised to renew attacks on U.S. and NATO personnel if foreign troops are not out by the deadline — and said in a statement it would not continue to participate in “any conference” about Afghanistan’s future until all “foreign forces” have departed — it is not clear whether the militants will follow through with the earlier threats given Biden’s plan for a phased withdrawal between now and September. The Taliban has conducted sputtering talks with the Afghan government, begun under the Trump deal, since last fall. It was also invited to an additional high-level inter-Afghan discussion in Turkey later this month.

Officially, there are 2,500 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, although the number fluctuates and is currently about 1,000 more than that. There are also up to an additional 7,000 foreign forces in the coalition there, the majority of them NATO troops.

………

The goal is to move to “zero” troops by September, the senior administration official said. “This is not conditions-based. The president has judged that a conditions-based approach . . . is a recipe for staying in Afghanistan forever. He has reached the conclusion that the United States will complete its drawdown and will remove its forces from Afghanistan before September 11th.”

About damn time.

We lost, get over it, and get the f%$# out.

Always Read the Footnotes

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holy shit I’ve rarely seen a footnote used to such devastating effect. https://t.co/FjHRNcZYzE pic.twitter.com/sk597elmBR

— Jathan Sadowski (@jathansadowski) April 13, 2021

The Tweet that led me to the footnote

A while ago, (correctly) I called Bill Gates a mass murderer for his efforts to prevent open source vaccines from being released, with his insistence that any vaccine be licensed exclusively to one for-profit entity.

I still say that and now The New Republic says the same thing, complete with a ghastly portrait of Gates with horns.

They go through the history of IP absolutism and how it has harmed people, and refer us to the case of South Africa and AIDS drugs where Big Pharma and their evil minions in government and the media suggested that compulsory licensing and generics would lead to the spread of drug resistant variants of HIV, because Africans are lazy and disorganized people who won’t take their pills regularly.  (In reality, Africans took their pills more reliably than their privileged brothers in the rest.

After mentioning this, there is an asterisk, and at the bottom of the page is a footnote about TNR‘s former editor-in-chief Andrew Sullivan:

*Among journalists echoing this argument was former New Republic editor Andrew Sullivan. When The New York Times reported Sullivan was defending the companies’ lawsuit while taking undisclosed funding from PhRma, the industry trade association, Sullivan remained defiant in the face of evidence-based accusations that he was an unethical journalist. “It behooves me to say I see absolutely no problems with [drug industry sponsorship],” he told Salon. “In fact, I am extremely proud to get some support from a great industry.” It later turned out that Africans adhered more closely to the twice-daily pill regimens than patient populations in rich countries.

They just called their editor in the early 1990s, a racist hypocrite dirtbag. (Mark Ames has a rather good bill of particulars on his entire career).

I think that the publication is distance themseves the damage done by two profoundly toxic people, Sullivan, and former publisher Marty Peretz.

It’s a glorious take-down of a thoroughly contemptible human being.

Just so you know, his “storied career” at TNR included:

  • Publishing articles suggesting from racist eugenicist (and one time cross-burner) Charles Murray  that Black people were genetically inferior.
  • Published articles on public health paid for by the tobacco industry.
  • Brought in serial fabulist Stephen Glass to TNR, and published serial plagiarist and fabulist Ruth Shalit.

And that’s just the sh%$ that he did while he was at TNR. 

H/T Atrios.

Yeah, This is Going to End Well

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You know, when I read the headline, “Wall Street Finds New Way To Finance Unprofitable Tech Firms, I have a feeling of impending doom.

I know that there are cartoons to explain the process, so it does not invoke Saroff’s Rule, “If a financial transaction is complex enough to require that a news organization use a cartoon to explain it, its purpose is to deceive,” but this sounds like it’s another crack-up waiting to happen.

They are called Asset Backed Secularizations, and every sentence seems of the article implies greater and greater leverage and greater uncertainty:

No earnings? No problem. Investors are funneling money to unprofitable software companies through a new type of debt deal.

Nonbank lenders like Golub Capital, AllianceBernstein Holdings LP and Owl Rock Capital Partners LP have issued asset-backed bonds to help finance about $2 billion of loans to such companies since November, according to data from Kroll Bond Rating Agency Inc. and S&P Global Market Intelligence. Many of the loans are to fast-growing, but still unprofitable, software enterprises.

………

The loans backing the complex bonds—known as asset-backed securitizations, or ABSs—can be small, like the $25 million Golub provided to software delivery specialist CloudBees Inc. Other deals run in the hundreds of millions of dollars, like the $300 million Owl Rock lent to back the leveraged buyout of software security company Checkmarx by private-equity firm Hellman & Friedman LLC. Golub has been making the loans since 2013 and has had no defaults, even during the pandemic-induced economic downturn last year, according to a credit-rating report.

………

Still, some fund managers say the new deals pile debt on debt, disregarding the risk of default in the relatively immature companies.

Demand for ABS backed by conventional corporate loans called collateralized loan obligations, or CLOs, surged late last year as markets recovered from the pandemic selloff. But, the new transactions are so unorthodox that large credit-rating firms Moody’s Investors Service and Standard & Poor’s Global Ratings don’t rate most of them, the people involved said.

Instead, the bulk of the deals have gotten ratings from Kroll Bond Rating Agency, one of three smaller firms competing with Moody’s and S&P for credit-ratings business.

………

A single investment bank, MUFG Securities Americas Inc., has arranged all of the deals for the lenders, selling them primarily to U.S. investors specializing in ABS, the people said. A spokeswoman for MUFG, a subsidiary of Japan’s largest bank, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc. declined to comment.

………

The average credit quality of the loans is the equivalent of debt with a single-B or triple-C rating, two of the lowest rungs on the credit-rating ladder, according to research by Kroll. If the borrowers default, it is unclear how much lenders will recover. “It is a relatively new asset class with limited recovery data,” Kroll said in a report.

 Let’s see:

  • Obscure financial product.
  • Single ratings agency participating.
  • Single bank arranging the deals. 
  • Junk bonds (anything less than BB+ is a junk bond)

Bingo!

This is going to blow up.

I Guess Nancy Wants those Donations from the Insurance Industry

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In yet another “Democrats in Disarray” story, the Washington Post notes that there friction between Nancy Pelosi and Bernie Sanders, because Pelosi wants to make Biden’s subsidies to Obamacare permanent, and Sanders wants to expand Medicare. 

This is really pretty simple, making the Obamacare subsidies permanent is a subsidy for the insurance companies, and not of people in need, while expanding Medicare helps everyone.

Pelosi wants to keep feeding money to the insurance companies because she wants to keep raising campaign donations from the insurance companies:

The White House is facing diverging pressure from two powerful allies — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) — over whether to use an upcoming spending package to strengthen the Affordable Care Act or expand Medicare eligibility.

Pelosi’s office is pushing the White House to make permanent a temporary expansion of Affordable Care Act subsidies that were included in the $1.9 trillion stimulus legislation last month, according to a senior Democratic aide who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal conversations.

Sanders said in an interview that he is arguing for lowering the age of Medicare eligibility to 55 or 60 and expanding the program for seniors so it covers dental, vision and hearing care.

The contrasting visions for the next phase of President Biden’s legislative agenda reflect divisions within the Democratic Party about how Biden should further overhaul health insurance in the United States. Pelosi is looking to double down on the ACA, which has become more popular in recent years as it offers insurance subsidies to people well above the poverty line. Sanders, meanwhile, is looking for an opportunity to make progress on his longtime efforts to make government health insurance universal.

Lowering the Medicare age is better policy, because it puts more pressure on expanding the program in the future, while Obamacare, while better than what went before us, still sucks wet farts from dead pigeons.

Also, I would note that expanding Medicare is better policy, because older people vote in higher percentages than younger ones.

My prediction:  Biden goes with expanding subsidies to insurance companies, because, he’s always been a creature of the finance and insurance industries.

Another Case Of, “I Thought It Was My Taser,” Bullsh%$ from a Bad Cop

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The Manual for a Taser

Not at all like firing a Glock

 With the trial of Derek Chauvin for his murder of George Floyd, drawing to a close, we have another completely contemptible shooting by a contemptible cop.

In this case, a 20 year old by the name of Duante Wright (Surprise, he’s black) was once shot to death at a traffic stop by one of Minnesota’s finest.

This is after George Floyd, and Philando Castile who was shot for telling a Minnesota cop that he had on his person a legally owned firearm.

The police chief is now saying that the officer mistakenly drew her Glock instead of her Taser, implying that it was an honest mistake which is unadulterated crap for the following reasons:

  • The Glock and the Taser are carried on opposite sides, so you have to pull the Taser by reaching across your body.
  • The Glock is twice the weight of the Taser unloaded, and the weight difference is even more when carrying a full clip.
  • The Taser is bright kiddie toy yellow, while the Glock is black.
  • The Glock has an automatic safety, while the Taser has to be turned on, or turned off and then on before use, and shuts itself down after 20 minutes to save the battery. (See attached manual)

I’m not saying that the Officer woke up that morning and decided, “I’m going to shoot me a n*****,” nor am I suggesting that she made a snap decision, “He’s an uppity n*****, I’ll shoot him,” but I AM saying that her was reckless and showed callous disregard for human life, and that as a police officer, she is a trained expert in the use of force.

That makes her culpable, and I hope the full force of the law drops the hammer on her.

BTW, when I say, “The full force of the law,” I don’t mean the 1 year that Johannes Mehserle for shooting of Oscar Grant, or the year and a half that Robert Bates got for shooting Eric Harris, both black, both officers claimed, “Oops, I thought that it was my Taser,”  I mean real consequences.

This sh%$ is just f%$#ing evil:

The traffic stop that would end Daunte Wright’s life played out on a Brooklyn Center police officer’s body camera. Officers appeared to try to handcuff him; then he slipped back into the driver’s seat.

A female officer yelled, “Taser, Taser,” and then fired her gun. “Holy sh%$, I just shot him,” she said.

Once again, a Black man died during a police encounter. In an instant, the world’s focus on Minnesota shifted from the trial of Derek Chauvin to a new outrage that brought street protests, promises of reform, and anguish over a relentless pattern of deadly police misconduct.

Military vehicles rumbled down city streets as businesses hastily closed to comply with a four-county 7 p.m. curfew Monday ordered by Gov. Tim Walz. While a massive police presence mobilized to prevent any repeat of the riots after the death of George Floyd, President Joe Biden called for “peace and calm.”

Heeding the demands of protesters, Brooklyn Center’s leaders dismissed the longtime city manager and granted authority over police to Mayor Mike Elliott. Elliott will make a decision Tuesday about whether to fire police Chief Tim Gannon, who described the officer’s use of a firearm instead of a Taser as an “accidental discharge.”

The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension identified the officer as Kimberly A. Potter, 48, who has been a police officer for 26 years. She has been put on leave.

 Officer Potter should not have been a police officer for 26 days.

………

The shooting happened about 2 p.m. Sunday in the area of 63rd and Orchard avenues N. Gannon said he was told during a briefing that officers stopped Wright’s car because it had an expired tag and, when they checked his name, they found he had a warrant.

According to Hennepin County District Court records, a warrant was issued April 2 for Wright after he failed to make his first court appearance on a case filed in March of carrying a pistol without a permit, a gross misdemeanor, and fleeing police, a misdemeanor. It’s unclear whether Wright knew he had a court hearing, as he was charged by summons.

………

Brooklyn Center has a population of about 31,000, roughly 60% of whom identified as people of color in the latest census. Brooklyn Center police officers have killed six civilians since 2012. Four were Black.

That’s a lot of shootings for a community smaller than a full ball park at an Orioles game.

The Brooklyn Center PD has 49 officers.  Shut it down and let the state police take over.

Linkage

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I don’t know if John Oliver realizes it, but he just not-so-inadvertently endorsed Modern Monetary Theory.  Also, “Oh, yeah — the clock was put up by that Durst family. The bathroom murder burp Dursts.”

Why am I Not Surprised?

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I’m shocked! Shocked! To find that gambling is going on this establishment

It appears that white supremacist terrorists are getting extensive support from elements of the Christian right.

I probably should not say that this is because they are one and the same, but it’s because they are one and the same:

A data breach from Christian crowdfunding site GiveSendGo has revealed that millions of dollars have been raised on the site for far-right causes and groups, many of whom are banned from raising funds on other platforms.

It also identifies previously anonymous high-dollar donors to far-right actors, some of whom enjoy positions of wealth, power or public responsibility.

Some of the biggest beneficiaries have been members of groups such as the Proud Boys, designated as a terrorist group in Canada, many of whose fundraising efforts were directly related to the 6 January attack on the United States Capitol.

The breach, shared with journalists by transparency group Distributed Denial of Secrets, shows the site was used for a wide range of legitimate charitable purposes, such as crowdfunding medical bills, aid projects and religious missions.

………

A large proportion of that money came from a number of high-dollar donors who elected to be anonymous on the website, but whose identifying details were nevertheless preserved by GiveSendGo.

………

Of Tarrio’s donors, none immediately responded to requests for comment except for Gerardo G Gonzalez, who anonymously donated $1,000 to Tarrio on 7 January.

………

In a telephone conversation, Gonzalez said that his support of the Proud Boys was motivated by his belief that “there is no systemic racism in this country”, and his opposition to “BLM and Antifa” who he said represented “the real extremism” in the United States. He also used derogatory terms for Latinos and Democrats.

Other Proud Boy fundraisers raised large amounts, and attracted a similar range of high-value anonymous donations.

………

Candyce Kelshall, the president of the Canadian Association for Security and Intelligence Studies-Vancouver, who at at Simon Fraser University researches violent transnational social movements, said that far-right crowdfunding on GiveSendGo was just “the tip of the iceberg”, and similar efforts were happening across up to 54 other crowdfunding sites that her research had revealed.

She said, however, that GiveSendGo was “particularly insidious” due to its presentation of such crowdfunding in the guise of religion-based charity.

This is not “religion-based charity”, the religion is real:  White Christian Fundamentalism in the United States is a part of white nationalism and white supremacism, they simply sell themselves slightly differently.

I call them, “Talibabtists,” thought the term,. “Christo-Fascist,” might also work.

They need to be shown for what they actually are, and it is my belief that a majority of the American public will shun them and their projects.

Headline of the Day

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This Is the Most Embarrassing News Clip in American Transportation History

—Vice Magazine on Elon Musk’s recent video of how its Vegas tunnel “works”.

Seriously, this is literally the Disney ride “Autopia” at about twice the speed of the original.

This is not transportation, it’s not even a demonstrator of the technology.  This is a rip-off of a Disney ride by the greatest humbug of our generation.

But The Boring Company’s cost per mile isn’t as impressive as it sounds. This project avoided all the expensive parts of a mass transportation tunnelling project. The station is a big hole in the ground with a flat parking lot and doesn’t have pedestrian entrances, walkways, platforms, mezzanines, etc. The tunnel itself is also very skinny. But most importantly, tunnelling itself is never the part of American mass transit projects that create the cost overruns, which is why on-street and elevated rail projects also cost way more in the United States than elsewhere. In other words, The Boring Company avoided the most complex and costly aspects of transportation projects, shrunk it in both scale and the number of people it will supposedly serve, then bragged about how little it cost to build.

Support Your Local Police?

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Have you heard the on how the Boston Police Department protected and promoted a child rapist in their ranks for decades?

Not a joke, and thoroughly appalling.  The thin blue line must be shattered: 

A father and his teenage daughter walked into the Hyde Park police station last August and reported a heinous crime.

The girl said she had been repeatedly molested from age 7 through 12 by former Boston police union president Patrick M. Rose Sr. Five more people soon came forward, accusing Rose of molesting them as children over the span of three decades, including the girl’s own father.

Rose being tagged as a child sexual abuser was news to the city when he was arrested and charged last summer. But it wasn’t news to the Boston Police Department where Rose served for two decades as a patrolman.

A Globe investigation has found that the Boston Police Department in 1995 filed a criminal complaint against him for sexual assault on a 12-year-old, and, even after the complaint was dropped, proceeded with an internal investigation that concluded that he likely committed a crime. Despite that finding, Rose kept his badge, remained on patrol for another 21 years, and rose to power in the union that represents patrol officers.

Today Boston police are fighting to keep secret how the department handled the allegations against Rose, and what, if any, penalty he faced. Over the years, this horrific case has come full circle: The father who brought his daughter in last summer to report abuse by Rose was the boy allegedly abused at age 12 in the 1995 case. The department’s lack of administrative action back then may have left Rose free to offend again and again, from one generation to the next.

(emphasis mine)

………

Boston police won’t say what, if any, disciplinary action was taken against Rose. But it is clear the department did little or nothing to limit his contact with children, and allowed him to salvage a career that led to the union presidency, where he became the public face of the city’s 1,500 patrol officers.

The Globe investigation raises significant questions about how the department handled Rose, whose broader history of alleged molestation has only become clear now that he is jailed facing 33 counts of sexual abuse of six victims from age 7 to 16 in Suffolk Superior Court. For security reasons, he is being held in the Berkshire County Jail on $200,000 cash bail.

(emphasis mine)

I’m beginning to think that the best indicator someone is the worst kind of cop is that they are a the president of the Union.

This appears to be the case in Boston, as well as in Minneapolis. (My guess is that bad cops realize  that as a senior union official, taking action against them is far less likely.)

What is the, “Switch in Time That Saved Nine,” Alex

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By way of background, the The switch in time that saved nine – Wikipedia, was a reversal by the Supreme Court after FDR attempted to pack the court in response to their aggressive hostility to the New Deal using the the Lochner decision, which invalidated things like the minimum wage, health and safety regulations, etc.

Well, Biden has now announced that he is creating a commission to study changes in the US Supreme Court, and that everything is on the table, including increasing the number of justices.

I don’t think that anything will come of this, but I do think that this is a fairly sophisticated way to remind the Court that the structure and staffing of the court is determined to the other two branches:

President Biden created a bipartisan commission Friday to study structural changes to the Supreme Court, giving the group 180 days to produce a report on a range of thorny topics including court expansion and term limits.

The commission, composed of 36 legal scholars, former federal judges and practicing lawyers, fulfills Biden’s campaign promise to establish such a group after activists pushed him to back expanding the court following Republicans’ rush to confirm Justice Amy Coney Barrett shortly before last year’s election. Biden has said he is “not a fan” of adding seats to the Supreme Court, but he has declined to say whether he supports any other changes to its structure.

The commission, however, is likely to disappoint liberals who are looking for quick action to blunt the court’s conservative majority, while giving the president cover to avoid wading into the contentious debate. The members are not tasked with giving Biden specific recommendations but rather providing an analysis of a range of proposed changes to the court. The executive order establishing the commission mandates that the group hold public meetings and take input from a range of stakeholders, with the report expected in October.

There are people who talk about the sanctity of the court and its non-political nature, but that has been a lie since the Bush v. Gore in 2000.

When push comes to shove, the conservatives on the court will always go with decisions for little more than their desired partisan benefit.

There are a number of important voting and redistricting decisions coming before the court shortly, and Chief Justice John Roberts has dedicated his career to keeping Black and Brown people from voting.

This is a proverbial brushback pitch directed at Roberts, and other more realist justices on the court.

Back Loaded Bribery

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We really need to do something to stop people from scoring highly remunerative jobs with the companies that they regulated as soon as they leave their position. 

The revolving door is not just unseemly, it is a form of bribery:

Citadel Securities, the US market maker owned by billionaire Ken Griffin, has snapped up Heath Tarbert, the former head of the main US derivatives regulator, to be its new chief legal officer.

Tarbert left the Commodity Futures Trading Commission just 27 days ago, having resigned as its chair after an 18-month tenure.

Citadel Securities’ announcement on Thursday marked the latest in a long list of hires from US regulators by Griffin. Tarbert replaces Steve Luparello, Citadel Securities’ general counsel, who is a former director of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s division of trading and markets.

Griffin also hired Gregg Berman, the SEC’s former head of research who examined the role of high-frequency trading on the world’s largest equity market, as well as Ryan VanGrack, who was an adviser to former SEC chair Mary Jo White, among others.

The move has reawakened accusations of a so-called revolving door from public service to private work.

I’m not sure how to make this illegal, but it needs to be made illegal.

Damn

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The union drive at Amazon in Bessemer, Alabama failed. It failed spectacularly: 

Earlier today the National Labor Relations Board announced the results of the vote on whether workers at the Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Ala., would join a union. The vote was 738 in favor to 1,798 against. It’s bad news, but it doesn’t mean workers in future Amazon campaigns won’t or can’t win. They can. The results were not surprising, however, for reasons that have more to do with the approach used in the campaign itself than any other factor.

The stories of horrific working conditions at Amazon are well-known. Long before the campaign at Bessemer, anyone paying even scant attention would be aware that workers toil at such a grueling pace that they resort to urinating in bottles so as not to get disciplined for taking too much time to use the facilities, which the company calls “time off task.” Christian Smalls was fired a year ago for speaking publicly about people not getting personal protective equipment in his Amazon facility, in bright-blue state New York. Jennifer Bates, the Amazon employee from the Bessemer warehouse, delivered testimony to Congress that would make your stomach turn. Workers at Amazon desperately need to unionize, in Alabama, Germany—and any other place where the high-tech, futuristic employer with medieval attitudes about employees sets up a job site of any kind. With conditions so bad, what explains the defeat in Bessemer?

Three factors weigh heavily in any unionization election: the outrageously vicious behavior of employers—some of it illegal, most fully legal—including harassing and intimidating workers, and telling bold lies (which, outside of countries with openly repressive governments, is unique to the United States); the strategies and tactics used in the campaign by the organizers; and the broader social-political context in which the union election is being held.

First, it needs to be stated that the legal and regulatory environment regarding unionization in the US has been hostile the labor unions since the passing of Taft-Hartley, but the organizers knew that.

I will add that Mike Elk at Payday Report has a very good analysis of what the organizers did wrong:

Today, the union drive at Amazon in Alabama, which drew unprecedented political and media attention, was defeated by a 2-to-1 margin.

………

In our interviews with workers, we discovered most workers held similar views to Beringer. It wasn’t that they hated unions, who were heavily against them, but that they didn’t know much about unions and didn’t feel they could trust them.

In winning union elections, the election feels like more of a formality since the organizing committee has already been acting as a union, winning campaigns in the workplace to change things and standing up for co-workers facing unfair disciplining.

Then, when the union election comes, workers feel like they already know the union and are a part of it. In massive facilities with thousands of workers like Amazon, the process of building a strong organizing committee and building trust in the organizing committee through concerted action can sometimes take years.

RWDSU [Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union] had only started its campaign last June when outrage over unsafe working conditions during COVID was raw. While they had an outpouring of initial momentum and interest, they never developed a strong organizing committee that took the time to build trust through shop-floor action and organizing against the boss.

Instead, they rushed a union election or did what is known in union organizing as “hot shopping,” where union organizers hope to take advantage of an outburst of anger in a facility over things such as poor COVID working conditions to force and win and a quick union election.

A “hot shopping” campaign is were the unionization effort is driven by an immediate issue, think shootings of clerks at a store and management refusing to add security cameras, rather than a long term organizing effort.

This was a case of long standing issues and the philosophy of management, and the effort needed to deeper and broader

However, their initial union enthusiasm support collapsed under the weight of a sophisticated anti-union campaign by Amazon that combined threats of job loss with promises of improvement if workers rejected the union. Many workers in interviews that voted against the union, admitted that they knew little about unions. This allowed the company through anti-union meetings to create fear over the change that unions could bring, warning workers that their wages may actually decrease under a contract or worse that their facility may close.

………

Without a strong organizing committee already engaging the boss in shop-floor action, workers had no ability to see the potential upside of the union because they never got to see the union in action on the shop floor before being asked to vote on joining it.

(emphasis mine)

There are a number of people, including Mike Elk, suggesting that there are the seeds of victory in this loss, but I don’t see that.

If it were, many Walmarts around the nation would already be unionized.

The only people heartened by this development are Jeff Bezos and his Evil Minions™.

Governor Ratf%$# Veto of Police Reform Package Overridden

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I’ve never been a fan of Maryland Governor Paul Hogan.

It’s not just his being a Republican, nor his no new tax pledge, which prevents meaningful improvements in state government, it’s his not-so-subtle appeals to racism, whether it’s his opposition to services going to Baltimore City and PG County, and now, his veto of the repeal of the so-called “Police Bill of Rights,” which gave police officers extraordinary legal protections not afforded to the general population.

Well, the Maryland legislature has had enough of his crap, and overridden his veto of much needed police accountability legislation.

Let me be clear, I am explicitly stating that his motivation here is hostility to minorities for electoral advantage:

Brushing aside vetoes from Gov. Larry Hogan, Maryland legislators on Saturday passed a landmark police reform package into law that supporters hailed as a major step toward transforming policing in the state.

Hogan, a Republican, contended that central provisions of the sweeping four-part Maryland Police Accountability Act go too far and will treat police officers unfairly. He vetoed three bills Friday evening containing those sections.

But Democrats swiftly overruled his objections. By Saturday afternoon, the Democrat-controlled General Assembly had voted to override the vetoes. The first provisions of the Maryland Police Accountability Act will take effect later this year.

The legislation will overhaul the disciplinary process for officers accused of misconduct, allow public scrutiny of complaints and internal affairs files, and create a new legal standard requiring that police use only “necessary” and “proportional” force. Officers who use excessive force will face additional criminal penalties, including up to 10 years in prison. Also, police will be limited on when they can obtain so-called “no-knock” warrants or raid homes at night.

………

Under one of the bills passed Saturday over Hogan’s veto, complaints against officers — even those rejected by internal affairs investigators as baseless — will become public records and subject to potential release. Supporters like Carter have argued that’s essential to pulling back a veil of secrecy over police discipline and making sure agencies hold officers accountable for misconduct.

Critics, including police unions and many Republican lawmakers, feared the transparency measure will end up smearing the reputations of officers by airing baseless complaints. Sen. Robert Cassilly, a Harford County Republican, accused Democrats of “anti-police animus” in passing the legislation. 

………

Among other far-reaching provisions passed over Hogan’s veto is the repeal of Maryland’s Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill of Rights, a 1974 law that guarantees job protections and due process rights for officers accused of wrongdoing that critics have long alleged shields officers from accountability and has been among the biggest impediments to reform. Maryland was the first state in the nation to pass such a law, which dozens of others have copied, and now is the first state to repeal it.

The LEBOR provisions were things like requiring a 5 day waiting period before investigators could talk to a police officer (time for them the coordinate their lies), and the purging of complaints after a time.

These were horrible ideas then, and worse ideas now.

Missed Jobless Thursday, My Bad

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Initial claims increased to 744,000, up by 16,000, and the second straight increase.

I am thinking that initial claims will remain in the mid 700K range for a while yet: 

Workers are slowly pulling away from unemployment assistance as a U.S. economic revival picks up speed, with initial filings for benefits holding near pandemic lows and the number of people receiving help dropping.

Initial jobless claims, a proxy for layoffs, increased by a seasonally adjusted 16,000 last week to 744,000, the Labor Department said Thursday. The four-week average, which smooths out volatility in the figures, rose slightly to 723,750 from 721,250. Claims are still well above the weekly average of around 220,000 in the year before Covid-19’s arrival.

The continued high rate of filings comes amid other signs of recent labor-market improvement. U.S. employers added 916,000 jobs in March, and the unemployment rate slipped to 6.0%, from 6.2% in the prior month.

………

Moreover, the number of people receiving unemployment assistance is slowly declining. Continuing claims, which provide an approximation of the number of people receiving benefits, at the end of March reached their lowest level of the pandemic, declining slightly to 3.73 million. A broader reading that includes state and pandemic-related federal programs also eased slightly to 18.16 million.

As always, I am more of a pessimist, particularly with Coronavirus cases spiking and talk about the re-imposition of some restrictions becoming more common.

Got Vax?

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Got my shot


It kind of went like this (Not really)


Not kidding about the liquor store

I just got my vaccine, singular, as in the Johnson and Johnson vaccine.

We got it because it was the only vaccine which would definitively tell us it was corn free, and Sharon* and Nat have some fairly severe corn allergies. 

No issues to speak of, except for the fact that the Rite Aid Pharmacy is right across the street from the Rite Aid Liquor Store. 

I was in the door, got the shot, and was out in less time than it takes to read this article and laugh at the Peanuts strip. 

Of course, then I had to cool my heels for 15 minutes before leaving.

Then we all went and got rolled ice cream (Thai: ไอศกรีมผัด or ไอติมผัด), except for Nat, who got sushi because the ice cream place did not have anything non dairy.

Rolled ice cream is created by taking liquid ice cream adding fixing, and mixing it and spreading it out on an anti-griddle to freeze, and then peeling it off in a roll and adding toppings.

I had never heard of the stuff before, but I liked it.

Mine had lots of caramel, and, of course, whipped cream.

I think that going out for an ice cream after doing my part to vanquish a scourge upon the world is a good arrangement.

*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.

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: