Author: Matthew G. Saroff

Today in Language

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Another reminder that the word ‘ultracrepidarian’ (19th century) describes someone who loves holding forth on matters they know absolutely nothing about.

— Susie Dent 💙 (@susie_dent) March 8, 2021

As my reader(s) have no doubt noticed, I rather like to use the archaic word, “Snollygoster,” to refer to dishonest people, particularly politicians. 

I find the word wondrously evocative, and believe that it should enter general use again.

Well, I must thank Susie Dent for informing me about another wonderful word that has fallen out of use, “Ultracrepidarian,” which means someone who ……… Hell, it means almost every pundit on the planet earth with NY Times pundit Tom Friedman being the apogee (or perhaps nadir) of the form.

When You Follow a Defeat with an Own Goal

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Following years or organizing, progressive Democrats in Nevada took 4 of 5 of the leadership positions in the state Democratic Party, out organizing the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) there.

The Nevada Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) then shot itself in the foot by convincing the entire staff of the party to quit. 

You see, you want your people there, picking up the mail, conducting polls, and managing the budget, because they are the ones best placed to sabotage the new leadership, as evidenced by the years long campaign of sabotage against Jeremy Corbyn by the professional staff of the Labour Party in the UK.

Not only will the new leaders be able to hire people that they trust, but should they refuse to resign when there is a change of power, they will be difficult, or at least embarrassing, to fire: 

Not long after Judith Whitmer won her election on Saturday to become chair of the Nevada Democratic Party, she got an email from the party’s executive director, Alana Mounce. The message from Mounce began with a note of congratulations, before getting to her main point.

She was quitting. So was every other employee. And so were all the consultants. And the staff would be taking severance checks with them, thank you very much.

(Emphasis mine) 

As an aside, make sure that the consultants stay resigned.  They are useless.

On March 6, a coalition of progressive candidates backed by the local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America took over the leadership of the Nevada Democratic Party, sweeping all five party leadership positions in a contested election that evening. [I have gotten conflicting reports on this, it appears that the party Treasurer might be the old guard candidate] Whitmer, who had been chair of the Clark County Democratic Party, was elected chair. The establishment had prepared for the loss, having recently moved $450,000 out of the party’s coffers and into the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee’s account. The DSCC will put the money toward the 2022 reelection bid of Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, a vulnerable first-term Democrat.

Again, asking for unity, and when your side does not win, sabotage the winners.

Democrats never do this for Republicans, but false Democrats always do this to real Democrats. 

………

Despite the pushback, Whitmer ultimately won the election, in which the state party’s governing members voted. In the certified election results, she received 244 to Segerblom’s 214; Jacob Allen won first vice chair by 101 votes; Dr. Zaffar Iqbal, on Whitmer’s progressive slate, was reelected second vice chair by 127 votes; Ahmad Adé won secretary by 39 votes; and Howard Beckerman won treasurer by three votes. [Again, note, the Las Vegas Review-Journal story has Beckerman losing.]

After the results, Mounce sent the email making clear that everyone on the small staff had resigned, including the party operations director, communications director, research director, and finance director.

An interesting coda to this is that, “The Democratic National Committee hired Mounce as their new political director last month.”

The final word on all of this is a reworking of Lyndon Johnson an old Lyndon Johnson quote:  “It is better to have them outside the tent pissing in than it is to have them inside the tent pissing in.”

Reid’s machine will try to take power back, and they will do so until the sun collapses into a cinder, but with all of their inside people gone, it will become much harder for them to do so.

Thank You George Washington

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George Washington was a number of things, some good, he led the Revolutionary Army successfully against the British, some awful, he owned slaves, and one thing that was absolutely remarkable, he completely shut down any suggestion that he, or anyone, be king of the United States.

Even if you have a good king, the various retainers and hangers on are toxic, because it becomes a snake pit, as is shown by the recent interview between Harry Mountbatten-Windsor and Meghan Markle and Oprah Winfrey.

I’ve read some short reports of the interviews, and realized that beyond my immeasurable pleasure in NOT having a royal family in the United States, I really don’t care.

I am grateful to the choices made by George Washington, and the more I know of him, the more I admire him.

Another Slander Thrown at the PRO Act

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As I have mentioned before, the PRO Act significantly expands the right for workers to organize as well as increasing their protections against the nefarious actions of employers and their consultants.

Rather unsurprisingly, the champions of capital over labor do not like this bill, and equally unsurprisingly, they are claiming that the Pro Act would kill freelancing. 

This is a lie, and the freelancers pushing this are useful idiots:

Private opposition to the Protecting the Right to Organize Act has so far been surprisingly muted. The proposed bill is remarkably comprehensive in nature, encompassing the most far-reaching rewrite of the National Labor Relations Act since the Taft-Hartley Act passed in 1947. Perhaps this is because few insiders believe the PRO Act can pass a deadlocked Senate without a clearer commitment by Democratic politicians to gut the legislative filibuster, but whatever the case, you have to do some digging to see any real organized campaign against the bill as a whole. Even then, it’s the usual suspects ringing the alarm bells: the Chamber of Commerce, the Associated Builders and Contractors, the HR Policy Association, and other organizations which historically have strongly opposed unionism and any pro-worker legal amendments.

The exception to this is coming from a small but vocal community of freelance writers who have taken to Twitter and other social media platforms to signal their opposition to the bill’s inclusion of the so-called “ABC Test.” The test, which contrary to popular belief has appeared in numerous state laws long before California’s Dynamex/Prop 22 episode, states that a worker is presumed to be an employee unless the employer can show that all three of the following conditions are satisfied:

  1. The worker is free from the control and direction of the hiring entity in connection with the performance of the work;
  2. The worker performs work that is outside the usual course of the hiring entity’s business; and
  3. The worker is customarily engaged in an independently established trade, occupation, or business of the same nature as that involved in the work performed.

………

However, the rest of these articles demonstrate a deep misunderstanding of labor law, invoking themes of forced unionization and ruined careers. These predictions are unfounded. The ABC Test, if passed as part of the PRO Act, would only affect the analysis of employee vs. independent contractors status for the purposes of the NLRA. Put simply, the relevant question is whether certain workers possess rights under Section 7 of the NLRA, which guarantees employees (and employees only) the right to strike, collectively bargain, and engage in various other “concerted activities” for “mutual aid or protection.” Those deemed independent contractors under the NLRA have no such rights, and indeed would likely be engaged in price-fixing under antitrust law if attempting such tactics.

What would the PRO Act not affect? Literally anything else. It would not change a worker’s employment status for the purposes of state laws, such as those involving minimum wage, overtime, unemployment compensation, or various benefit schemes. Thus, a worker could feasibly be classified as an employee with unionization rights under the NLRA while still qualifying as an independent contractor under said state laws. Just ask SAG-AFTRA or IATSE, who count many “freelancers” in the entertainment industry as members; they have no consistent employer but still collectively bargain for superior wages and benefits compared to non-union counterparts.

The whole, “Pity the poor freelancer,” screed becomes even more ludicrous when one sees the actual plight of the actual stringers who do work for news outlets.

A few “Superstars” might get their noses out of joint about having to pay union dues, but I care about their lot almost as little as they care about the lot of their coworkers.

A Good Start

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The White House has announced that anti-monopoly and net neutrality activist Tim Wu will be appointed to its National Economic Council.

I hope that this means that the Biden administration will take concrete steps to reign in the monopoly power of big tech and the telecommunications incumbents, but I fear that this is just window dressing:

Longtime tech critic Tim Wu is joining the Biden administration as an adviser on technology and competition, a signal that the White House is likely to push for policies that rein in Big Tech.

Wu will be serving on the National Economic Council as special assistant to the president for technology and competition policy, the White House said this morning. Wu confirmed the news in a tweet.

Wu is best known in tech circles as the man who coined the term “net neutrality” in the early 2000s. He has held several positions at the federal level before, including advisory roles with both the Federal Trade Commission and the National Economic Council. He has also been a full professor at Columbia University law school since 2006, where he teaches First Amendment and antitrust law.

His 2010 book The Master Switch argued that the open Internet as we knew it was barreling toward a closed-off, walled-garden future. In 2018 he published another book, The Curse of Bigness, in which he argued that US regulators’ failure to enforce antitrust laws had led to “a new gilded age” and all its attendant problems. 

The rubber hits the road in two places, DoJ enforcement and Congressional legislation.

Hopefully, we will see some action there.

This Will Not End Well

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

— ArtkoCapital (@ArtkoCapital) March 5, 2019

Pretty much

As history shows, the appointment of technocratic apolitical experts to run governments does not run well

This is because if you have a problem, the conventional wisdom, which is ideology that the aforementioned, “Technocratic apolitical experts,” subscribed to, is ALWAYS wrong.

And yes, I mean ALWAYS, because if the conventional wisdom were correct, then the problem would have been solved.

In the latest case of subverting democracy on the alter of “expertise”, the Italian government has been handed to former ECB president Mario Draghi, and he has decided the notoriously corrupt consulting firm McKinsey & Company will help run things, because, given their paying of bounties for opioid overdose deaths, white-washing of mass layoffs, instructing hospitals to game the bailout system that they were managing, suggesting that immigration detainees be starved and denied medical care, self-dealing in bankruptcies, aiding the House of Saud’s persecution of its critics, and aiding and abetting corruption in South Africa.

So, going with McKinsey to fix things in Italy is not going to be the panacea that Draghi think it will be: 

Upon its formation last month, Mario Draghi’s new government was heralded by almost all Italian and international media as a rescue operation. Where the former European Central Bank (ECB) chief Draghi had “saved the euro” in the 2010s, most outlets gushed over “Super Mario” and his plan to “save Italy” by splashing a mooted €209 billion in European recovery fund cash while “reforming” its lackluster economy.

The kind of “reforms” this meant went unmentioned — and after all, this government bears no relation to voter decisions, or the coalitions that ran in the last general election. But for the fourth time since the 1990s, a president called on a technocrat from the world of finance and banking to form a cabinet, halfway through a parliament. Eight of Draghi’s twenty-three ministers are unelected technocrats, in a so-called government of experts.

If these figures are not party-political, they have similar backgrounds and instincts. Economy minister Daniele Franco is a former Bank of Italy official who drafted the famous 2011 ECB letter instructing the government to implement privatizations and cut back collective bargaining. Former Vodafone CEO Vittorio Colao — today innovation and digital transition minister — is a former partner at private consultants McKinsey & Company.

Now, it has been revealed that McKinsey is going to be tasked with writing Italy’s economic plan for the coming period, to be submitted for review by the European Commission at the end of next month. Notorious for its role in the Enron scandal as well as the 2008 financial crisis — as it promoted the boundless securitization of mortgage assets — and the botched vaccine rollout in France, the firm is now being called on to shape the Draghi government’s “reform” agenda.

………

The suggestion that this is a purely “technical” collaboration — that McKinsey’s choices will not be political — is patently absurd, not least given that this claim is also widely made for Draghi’s “technical” government itself. For decades, the imposition of neoliberal recipes in Italy has been advanced through this same procedure, with the agenda advanced by privatizers couched in the dogma of “unavoidable choices.”

………

As Lorenzo Zamponi writes, it is quite possible that there is some shift since the “expansive austerity” of the 2010s — that is, Draghi will put economic reforms above a simple reduction in overall spending. Yet the appointment of McKinsey and Bocconi-school ideologues points toward the same gospel of privatization and deregulation that technocrats have been imposing on Italy for decades, without ever winning popular backing.

………

Government by experts may sound good — but only so long as we forget all the previous rounds of such “cures,” which have helped push Italian GDP below the level it was at in 1999. But La Repubblica is, in its own way, quite right to compare this move to a corporation calling in McKinsey. For a failing business isn’t a democracy either — and when the consultants call for restructuring, it’s the workers who get screwed.

Once again, the very serious people in the EU are going to take the wrong actions, based on the wrong world view, on behalf of the people already rich and powerful, and right wing populists will gain yet more ground.

This will not end well.

A Very Important Point

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The single worst political mistake in Mitch McConnell’s tenure as leader was blocking the $2000 checks that Trump wanted. McConnell lost not only the policy battle, but the Senate. https://t.co/Xqj1Ruwhgr

— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) March 6, 2021

Roll Tape!

The politics here are simple, and VERY important: When people see direct benefits from government, they support government, and when people do not see the benefits of government action, things like tax credits to employers, and Obamacare, which took years to cut in, they see government as a failure.

All of the “clever” actions taken by members of the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) to make sure that the benefits are as indirect and invisible as possible, which was a central conceit of the Obama administration, only serve to create a political backlash against good policies.

The same goes for means testing, which is far more likely to reject someone “deserving” of the aid than someone who is not, because the latter, having more resources, are better equipped to navigate the maze of petty bureaucrats holding “Bullsh%$ Jobs.”

Another Shoe Drops

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In a strong statement, the New York State Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins has called for Governor Andrew “Rat-Faced Andy” Cuomo to resign. 

New York State House Speaker Carl Heastie has expressed doubts that Cuomo can continue to be effective as a leader.

There are now five women who have accused him of inappropriate behavior, and unlike many politicians, Cuomo has no reservoir of goodwill to draw upon among his fellow politicians in Albany.

Everyone in that town hates him, and the no longer fear him, so his political power, along with his once-prodigious fundraising ability are waning.

I do not think that he will resign though, too much hubris there, so either he loses the Democratic primary election, loses the general election, or is indicted on some sort of criminal charges.   (I hope for the latter)

In a potentially crippling defection in Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s efforts to maintain control amid a sexual harassment scandal, the powerful Democratic leader of the New York State Senate declared on Sunday that the governor should resign “for the good of the state.”

The stinging rebuke from the Senate leader, Andrea Stewart-Cousins — along with a similar sentiment from the Assembly speaker, Carl E. Heastie, who questioned the “governor’s ability to continue to lead this state” — suggested that Mr. Cuomo, a third-term Democrat, had lost his party’s support in the State Capitol, and cast doubt on his ability to withstand the political fallout.

Once hailed as a pandemic hero and potential presidential contender, the governor has seen his political future spiral downward over eight perilous days in the wake of a New York Times report about Charlotte Bennett, a former aide to Mr. Cuomo.

In a series of interviews with The Times, Ms. Bennett, 25, said that Mr. Cuomo, 63, had asked her invasive personal questions last spring about her sex life, including whether she had slept with older men, and whether she thought age made a difference in relationships.

Ms. Bennett is one of five women who have come forward in recent days with allegations of sexual harassment or inappropriate behavior against Mr. Cuomo, with one predating his tenure as governor.

………

Ms. Stewart-Cousins is the most prominent New York State official to call for Mr. Cuomo’s resignation, and her statement carries significance: Her Senate would be the jury for any impeachment trial of the governor, if such an action were passed by the Assembly.

It also carries symbolic weight: In 2008, when Gov. Eliot Spitzer resigned during a prostitution scandal, his decision was partially precipitated by a loss of support from Albany’s legislative leaders.

Mr. Heastie did not call for Mr. Cuomo to resign, but suggested that it was time for him “to seriously consider whether he can effectively meet the needs of the people of New York.”

The writing is on the wall, and I hope that eventually Cuomo’s (metaphorical) blood is on the floor of the Senate.

Because ……… Texas

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It turns out that even under the insane rules under which the Texas energy markets operate, producers overcharged distributors and consumers to the tune of $16 billion.

Runnign the math, that’s about $550 for every man, woman, and child residing in Texas.

There are no plans to claw this back, because ……… Texas.

I’m thinking that we should allow Mexico to claw back the whole state:

An independent market monitor said the Texas power-grid operator made a critical mistake that resulted in $16 billion in electricity overcharges last month, and recommended that the charges be reversed.

The monitor concluded that Texas kept wholesale prices high for 33 hours longer than warranted as the state dealt with a major winter storm that led to power shortages and mass blackouts and should correct this mistake by retroactively repricing its wholesale power market for that period.

A Public Utility Commission of Texas spokesman said the issue was slated for discussion at a scheduled meeting on Friday.

A reversal of the charges would be a boon to many participants in the market—from retailers to electric cooperatives, wind farms to multistate generators—that suffered significant financial harm when they needed to buy power at the peak price of $9,000 per megawatt hour.

The entire culture of government in Texas is deeply and pervasively corrupt, both at the elected official level as well as at the bureaucratic level.

It needs to be addressed, with many senior Texas political officials, and senior bureaucrats, frog-marched out of their offices in hand cuffs.

She is a Psychopath

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Senator Sinema a little too happy for poverty wages to remain pic.twitter.com/ze2T2CGtML

— RootsAction (@Roots_Action) March 5, 2021

Horriffic

It’s one thing to vote against raising the minimum wage, even if you are, as Kyrsten Sinema (D=AZ) is, nominally a member of the Democratic Party.

It’s quite another to show up dressed like a Japanese school girl, and then cast your vote with a thumbs down as one is a roman emperor.

It’s even worse when one sees the unholy glee she expresses in crushing MILLIONS of American workers.

Kyrsten Sinema is even more of a psychopath than is Mitch McConnell.

At least HE has the decency to skulk in the shadows while he does evil.

Sinema revels in the evil that she is doing.

Getting rid of her and Manchin is worth losing the Senate.

As Atrios Says

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“Time for another blogger ethics panel.”

It’s a catch phrase of his dating back to the early aughts, that he used, and still uses, whenever a reporter or columnist at one of the major news outlets is caught profiting off of an undisclosed conflict of interest.

This time, it’s David Brooks, who was caught taking a full time salary from the Aspen Institute as well as running the Weave Project,  both of which have taken money from Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, the Walton (Walmart) family, and a plethora of corporate sources that he routinely shills for.

Brooks has resigned from the Aspen institute, the status of the rest of his affairs is unclear:

David Brooks has resigned from his position at the Aspen Institute following reporting by BuzzFeed News about conflicts of interest between the star New York Times columnist and funders of a program he led for the think tank.

Eileen Murphy, a spokesperson for the Times, said in a statement that editors approved Brooks’s involvement with Aspen in 2018, when he launched a project called Weave. But current editors weren’t aware he was receiving a salary for Weave.

Spoiler, he is receiving a salary for Weave.

………

Brooks’s resignation comes after BuzzFeed News discovered further evidence of conflicts of interest and entanglements with corporate and billionaire donors to Weave.

Brooks did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

BuzzFeed News first revealed Brooks never disclosed to Times readers that he takes a full-time salary for his work on Weave, or that its funders include Facebook, the father of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and other wealthy individuals and corporations. Brooks recently wrote a blog post for Facebook’s corporate website in praise of Facebook Groups, a product that has often been a fount of misinformation and hate speech.

………

If you know someone who lives alone ask them to join NextDoor, which is Facebook for neighborhoods. It helps them stay in touch with those right around them. Vital in a crisis.

— David Brooks (@nytdavidbrooks) March 14, 2020

Over the past 24 hours, BuzzFeed News discovered new evidence of potential conflicts. On March 15 of last year, as Americans faced a deadly pandemic, Brooks appeared on “Meet The Press”and offered some advice.

“We need to take moral steps to make ourselves decent neighbors to each other as we go through this thing. I think people should get on Nextdoor, this sort of ‘Facebook for neighbors,’” he said.

Left unsaid by Brooks was that Nextdoor, a social network for neighborhoods, had donated $25,000 to Weave. A day before his appearance on the nationally televised NBC program, Brooks also tweetedto his nearly 250,000 followers, “If you know someone who lives alone, ask them to join NextDoor.”

Another new revelation: Last month, Brooks appeared in a Walton Family Foundation video and did not disclose that the organization, run by the billionaire family that founded Walmart, also funds his project.

Brooks’s failure to disclose these conflicts of interest added to the string of ethically questionable actions by the columnist and author related to his work on Weave.

Brooks will survive this, he fits the NYT narrative for a, “Reasonable Conservative,” but in a less toxic workplace than the Times newsroom, he would be gone.

They Do Want Vaccines, You Racist Dirt-Bag

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Sites in PG County mostly serve (White) folks from outside the County

So, now Maryland Governor Larry “Ratf%$#” Hogan is claiming that it’s not his policies that are undervaccinating Black people, it’s that Black folks don’t want vaccines. 

While the never Trumpers see Hogan as the future of the party, it is clear that he as extensively relied on racist appeals to maintain his popularity, particularly by deliberately short-changing Baltimore City and Prince George’s County, the which have the two largest minority communities in the state:

A 94-year-old veteran got so tired of waiting for an appointment that he drove around his Washington suburb at random, hunting for a vaccine.

A partially blind 81-year-old wanted a shot but had no computer or smartphone to register online. Yet another elderly Black resident of Maryland’s hardest-hit county, this one 102 years old, relied on church friends a few decades younger to help her through a distribution system best navigated by Gen Z.

Amid concern that prioritizing speed has heightened vaccine inequity statewide, Prince George’s County stands out: The majority-Black suburb has by far the most coronavirus cases in Maryland, and the lowest percentage of vaccinated residents.

Gov. Larry Hogan (R) has repeatedly cited vaccine hesitancy among minority groups as the key cause for the lagging rates, saying at one point that African American and Latino residents in Prince George’s, who represent 84 percent of the county’s population, are “refusing to take the vaccine.”

But local, state and federal leaders from across Maryland — all of them Democrats — blame the state’s decentralized sign-up system, which they say prioritizes those with more time, technology and information at their disposal over those who are disproportionately dying.

In interviews, more than a dozen vaccine-seeking Prince Georgians agreed.

………

Statewide, Black people represent 31 percent of Maryland’s population but only 16 percent of vaccine recipients for whom race has been reported. That disparity has grown wider over the past two months, according to a state analysis. Prince George’s lags far behind other counties, with just 8.3 percent of residents having received their first shot as of Thursday. 

………

An equity task force Hogan created released plans on Thursday to target underserved communities with pop-up clinics and other efforts, and solicit ideas from community groups about how best to deliver vaccine doses. The governor acknowledged the state was “not where we need to be with the Black community or the Hispanic community.”

But Hogan also said he believes the state has done far more than others to acknowledge and address racial inequity in vaccine distribution.

“I’m not going to respond to every criticism of every person who does not like what we say or do,” he said.

To quote John Mulaney, “That’s what I thought you’d say you dumb f%$#ing horse.”

Last week, the governor outraged Democratic lawmakers when he said Baltimore City was receiving more doses than it was “entitled to.” 

Yes, massah. 

He’s got more class than Trump, who doesn’t, but he’s pandering to the same racist dirt-bags.

About F%$#ing Time

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It appears that at least some economists are willing to learn, and they have that the headline unemployment rate is artificially low because it does not take into account discouraged workers. 

This has been true basically forever, but economists, who favor low wages for everyone but economists, and people who sit on their tenure committees have only now begun to realize this:

When Brianna Kipnis was laid off from a fitness start-up last June, she thought it would be nice to take a month off before returning to the jobs market. She cancelled the lease on her New York City apartment and moved in with her parents in neighbouring New Jersey.

………

The hopelessness felt by Kipnis and many others is one of the reasons that US policymakers, from the Federal Reserve to the Biden administration, have lost faith in the unemployment rate as an indicator of the strength of the jobs market.

The rapid decline in the US jobless rate has so far exceeded the forecasts of private sector economists and Fed officials alike. The latest reading, for February, will be published on Friday.

But the headline figure has obscured far less encouraging trends in America’s labour market, and is now considered an incomplete and unreliable guide to the trajectory of the US recovery.

“Published unemployment rates during Covid have dramatically understated the deterioration in the labour market,” Jay Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, said during a speech last month, noting that a more realistic unemployment rate was closer to 10 per cent.

Powell is not an economist, which is the second time that this has happened since (I think) William McChesney Martin left the post in 1970, (G. William Miller was in for about a year in the late 1970s, and his time in office was ……… problematic) and I would argue that he has been the best Fed Chair since then. 

You know what you call 1000 economists at the bottom of the ocean?  “A good start”

Why the Hell Haven’t I Been Banned from Twitter?

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And I am outraged that James Hodgkinson was not a better shot.

— Jack Dorsey Is Objectively Pro-Nazi (M.G. Saroff) (@40_Years) March 4, 2021

Seems bannable to me

In response to a Tweet from Steve Scalise (R-LA) wherein he expressed, “Outrage,” over the House of Representatives passing a bill to make it easier for people to vote, I replied, “And I am outraged that James Hodgkinson was not a better shot.”

James Hodgkinson, as you probably already know, was the left-wing gunman who opened fire on a baseball practice being conducted by Congressional Republicans, severely wounded Representative Scalize. (He nearly died, both from the immediate effects of the shooting, and later from a post operative infection.)

Not only am I still on Twitter, but I haven’t even been called an asshole.

At least this time, unlike the last time, I will actually have done something meriting a banning.   (Last time, it was (I think, I never got an answer) for using the term “Wymyn” as a part of a joke.)

You have to love automated content moderation, where things like discussions of chess get flagged as hate speech.

Well, Now We Know Why Moscow Mitch Is Angling to Leave the Senate

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We are now seeing reports that Mitch McConnell is aggressively trying to change Kentucky law in an attempt to prevent the Democratic Governor of the state from appointing someone should he leave office.

The question is, “Why?”

There have been questions as to his health, but I think that it is rather more likely that he is deeply involved in his wife’s corrupt abuse of her office as Secretary of Transportation to benefit her family business. 

My hope is that McConnell thinks that he will at some point in the not so distant future be forced to resign as a part of a plea deal for public corruption. (I prefer his living in misery to his dying)

It has been an open secret that Elaine Chao is relentlessly corrupt, and now that it is a matter of public record, via an Inspector General report, I don’t think that it will be allowed to fade away as it did when she was Bush, Jr.’s Secretary of Transportation:

While serving as transportation secretary during the Trump administration, Elaine Chao repeatedly used her office staff to help family members who run a shipping business with extensive ties to China, a report released Wednesday by the Transportation Department’s inspector general concluded.

The inspector general referred the matter to the Justice Department in December for possible criminal investigation. But in the weeks before the end of Trump administration, two Justice Department divisions declined to do so.

Ms. Chao, the wife of Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, announced her resignation on Jan. 7, the day after the Capitol riot. At the time of her departure, an aide to Ms. Chao said her resignation was unrelated to the inspector general’s investigation.

The investigation of Ms. Chao came after a 2019 report in The New York Times that detailed her interactions with her family while serving as transportation secretary, including a trip she had planned to take to China in 2017 with her father and sister. The inspector general’s report confirmed that the planning for the trip, which was canceled, raised ethics concerns among other government officials.

As transportation secretary, Ms. Chao was the top Trump administration official overseeing the American shipping industry, which is in steep decline and is being battered by Chinese competitors.

………

The investigators did not make a formal finding that Ms. Chao violated ethics rules. But they detailed more than a dozen instances where her office took steps to handle matters related to her father, who built up a New York-based shipping company after immigrating to the United States from Taiwan in the late 1950s, and to her sister, who runs the company now.

These included an interview with a Chinese-language television station at the New York City headquarters of Foremost Group, the shipping company. The focus of the conversation there, according to a Transportation Department translation of the media plan prepared for the interview, was to discuss how Ms. Chao’s father, James Chao, had been “dubbed ‘Chinese Ship King,’ how Foremost Group ‘ascended to its status in the world,’ and Dr. Chao’s business endeavors.”

………

Ms. Chao had declined to respond to questions from the inspector general and instead provided a  memo that detailed the importance of promoting her family as part of her official duties.

“Anyone familiar with Asian culture knows it is a core value in Asian communities to express honor and filial respect toward one’s parents,” the September 2020 memo said. “Asian audiences welcome and respond positively to actions by the secretary that include her father in activities when appropriate,” it continued.

That explanation is complete bullsh%$, because:

The investigators found that Ms. Chao had used her staff to arrange details for Mr. Chao’s trip to China in October 2017, including asking, through the State Department, for China’s Transport Ministry to arrange for two cars for a six-person delegation, which included Ms. Chao’s younger sister Angela Chao, who had succeeded their father as head of the family shipping company, and Angela Chao’s husband, the venture capitalist Jim Breyer.

The trip had been scheduled to include stops at locations in China that had received financial support from the company and also a meeting with “top leaders” in China that was to include Elaine Chao’s father and sister, but not other members of Transportation Department staff. The trip was canceled just before Ms. Chao’s planned departure after ethics concerns were raised by officials at the State and Transportation Departments.

The investigators also found that she repeatedly asked agency staff members to help do chores for her father, including editing his Wikipedia page and promoting his Chinese-language biography. They said she directed two staff members from her office to send a copy of Mr. Chao’s book “to a well-known C.E.O. of a major U.S. corporation” to ask if he would write a foreword for it.

No one in China ever heard about the above.  This was about using government resources to corruptly benefit her immediate family.

………

The report said that none of the Transportation Department employees interviewed “described feeling ordered or coerced to perform personal or inappropriate tasks for the secretary.”

In deciding not to take up a potential criminal case, the report said, the Justice Department notified the inspector general that “there may be ethical and/or administrative issues to address but there is not predication to open a criminal investigation.”

Of course they did not find a reason to open a criminal investigation, William Barr was acting as Donald Trump’s personal consigliere rather than as Attorney General.

I am not suggesting that Joe Biden should tell Merrick Garland to criminally investigate Elaine Chao, it is an inappropriate for a President to give these sorts of instructions to the Department of Justice.

However, I do think that it is appropriate for Joe Biden to tell Merrick Garland that he should make all resources possible available for investigations of official wrongdoing that might have been short-changed under William Barr.

This would include, of course the behavior of both William Barr and Elaine Chao, and that if professional prosecutors determine there is probably cause for an investigation, that all resources necessary be allocated to clear up such matters as expeditiously as possible.

Cuomo Advisers Altered Report on Covid-19 Nursing-Home Deaths – WSJ

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It now appears that members of the Cuomo administration falsified reports on nursing home deaths from Covid-19, one would assume to give their boss some political cover.

Falsifying official government documents is a crime, and you can be pretty dam sure that hizzonner knew.

The response to this news should be the AG opening a criminal investigation:

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s top advisers successfully pushed state health officials to strip a public report of data showing that more nursing-home residents had died of Covid-19 than the administration had acknowledged, according to people with knowledge of the report’s production.

………

The changes Mr. Cuomo’s aides and health officials made to the nursing-home report, which haven’t been previously disclosed, reveal that the state possessed a fuller accounting of out-of-facility nursing-home deaths as early as the summer. The Health Department resisted calls by state and federal lawmakers, media outlets and others to release the data for another eight months.

No, they falsified their reports.

That is a very different. and quite illegal, thing.

State officials now say more than 15,000 residents of nursing homes and other long-term-care facilities were confirmed or presumed to have died from Covid-19 since March of last year—counting both those who died in long-term-care facilities and those who died later in hospitals. That figure is about 50% higher than earlier official death tolls.

………

Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn asked the Cuomo administration in February for information about nursing-home deaths, The Wall Street Journal has reported. Federal prosecutors expressed interest in the July report, people familiar with the matter said.

Cuomo has aided and abbeted corruption as a way to further his power for over a decade, see the convictions of New York House Speaker Sheldon Silver and New York Senate leader Dean Skelos for corruption, as well as his actions to shut down his own anti-corruption commission, the Moreland Commission, when it too close to him and his.

In response to questions from the Journal, administration officials said Thursday that Mr. Cuomo’s advisers advocated against including data on out-of-facility deaths because they had concerns about its accuracy.

Concerns about accuracy, my ass.  This was a coverup to maximize Cuomo’s political advantage as he attempted to sell himself to the American public as “Governor Covid”.

………

State lawmakers from both parties have said the out-of-facility death data was critical for them to evaluate nursing-home policies that could prevent future fatalities. They said the Cuomo administration’s decision to delay its release constitutes a coverup of data the governor knew would be damaging to his political stature.

………

The Justice Department, through its Civil Rights Division, began requesting information about nursing-home deaths from New York and other Democratic-leaning states in August.

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The initial version of the report submitted to Mr. Cuomo’s team for review included both data on deaths of nursing-home residents in hospitals and deaths of residents inside nursing homes, people familiar with the report’s production said.

………

In January, a report by the New York Attorney General said the state had undercounted nursing-home deaths and said the governor’s directive may have spread the disease.

It’s corruption all the way down, and I really would like to see Governor Cuomo become defendant Cuomo.

It’s Unemployment Claim Thursday

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And in a REMARKABLY circuitous headline, the Wall Street Journal announces that, “U.S. Jobless Claims Hold Nearly Steady,” because they rose only 9,000 from the (revised upward from 730,000 to 736,000) jobless claims of the week before.

It is a remarkably awful headline, and you know that if claims had fallen by 9,000 it would have been called a drop:

Filings for unemployment benefits in the latter half of February reached their lowest level in nearly three months amid signs of slow labor-market improvement.

The Labor Department said jobless claims, a proxy for layoffs, rose slightly to 745,000 for the week ended Feb. 27, from a revised 736,000 the prior week. The four week moving-average, which smooths out week-to-week volatility in claims numbers, was just under 800,000, its lowest level since early December.

So the numbers went up, and are still higher than they were in early December.

Screwing with headlines to minimize this is not a good look.

Tomorrow’s job numbers should be interesting.

FWIW, I don’t think that the Texas energy f%$#-up had much to do with this number, while there were certainly many people in Texas unable to work because of their delusional free-market energy dystopia, it is abundantly clear that none of them could file, because there was no power to run the unemployment offices.

Linkage

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 This describes just how corrupt the SPAC is: