Trump’s Lawyers Are Not the Most Contemptible Attorneys of this Season

Neither is it Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton whose plea for a pardon attempt to invalidate all the votes in 4 states was dismissed by the Supreme Court. 

In fact, the lawyer in question wasn’t working on the election at all.

Rather it was Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) stalwart and Clinton confidant Neal Katyal who aggressively supported the use of slaves by Nestle on chocolate farms, explicitly stating that companies that participated in the Holocaust should not be held to account for their actions.

Every one has a right to a lawyer, no mater how contemptible that client is, and the lawyer has an obligation to provide a competent and rigorous defense, but there is a ethical requirement that you not simply argue on behalf on evil.

Lawyers are not just advocates, they are officers of the court, and there is a requirement for basic human decency, and Neal Katyal has failed that test. (I need to note that I am an engineer, not a lawyer, or ethecist, dammit!*)

The United States has a political class that mistakes its professional norms for ethics. Mainstream political journalists mindlessly grant anonymity to professional liars. Elected officials put collegiality and institutional procedure over the needs and interests of their constituents. And as for lawyers, they have refined this tendency into what amounts to a religion of self-justification.

The Sixth Amendment to the Constitution establishes that every American has the right to “the Assistance of Counsel” if they are prosecuted for a crime. This was a pointed rejection of English common law, which barred felony defendants from hiring counsel to represent them. Over time, the Assistance of Counsel clause came to mean that everyone prosecuted for a crime had the right to competent and effective representation, even if they could not afford it. From that right, the American legal community developed a core tenet: Everyone deserves representation.

But once the American legal community invented corporate law and the large firm, it continued developing that tenet until it became so divorced from notions of liberty or equality under the law that it now works as a kind of force field preventing lawyers from facing any social or professional repercussions for their actions on behalf of their clients. Everyone has a right to counsel, and every lawyer has a right to earn a buck.

It is that mutated creed that explains why Neal Katyal went to the Supreme Court last Tuesday to argue that children enslaved to work on cocoa plantations should not be allowed to sue the corporations that abetted their enslavement.

Katyal is among the most prominent and decorated attorneys in the country. He is a Democrat who has been in and out of government since Bill Clinton’s second term. He returned to his private firm, Hogan Lovells, after serving as acting solicitor general for Barack Obama’s Justice Department. He is omnipresent on television and newspaper op-ed pages as a voice of “The Resistance” to Donald Trump. He is about as close as you could come to the embodiment of Big Law’s connection to the institutional Democratic Party.

And last week he argued that because the corporation that supplied Zyklon B to the Nazis for use in their extermination camps was not indicted at Nuremberg, Nestle and Cargill should not be held liable for their use of child slave labor. In his argument before the court, Katyal espoused a view of corporate immunity so expansive that even the conservative judges seemed skeptical. If you took him at his word, he was effectively asking the Supreme Court to make it impossible for any foreigner to sue any company for any harm done to them, up to and including kidnapping and enslavement.

An argument that repulsive coming from such a high-profile attorney—someone who could very likely serve in the incoming Biden administration or end up a judge—naturally caught the attention of left-of-center critics of corporate power. Most of them were not very impressed with the argument and expressed some less-than-flattering opinions about the person making it.

As always, public criticism of a successful attorney led inevitably to the creation and publication of a new version of the inexhaustible opinion piece classic: It is simply unfair to criticize a lawyer for making any argument on behalf of any client.

………

The point is not that Katyal should be disbarred or something for representing a client. The point is that the cases Katyal chooses to take, the arguments he chooses to make, even the firm he chooses to work for, all speak to his values. He cannot separate his politics, whatever he thinks they are, and whatever he wants everyone else to think they are, from his decision to defend Nestle against the threat of potential lawsuits from enslaved children. That is a statement about how one believes the world should be organized and on whose behalf the legal system should operate.

To defend an accused murderer or rapist in a criminal trial is a straightforward endorsement of the idea of the presumption of innocence, not an endorsement of murder or rape. That’s the act enshrined in our Bill of Rights. To make a career out of defending and expanding corporate power at the expense of employee and consumer power, on the other hand, is simply to endorse those things.

………

Instead of continuing to argue about these ideas in public, the American legal community largely decided to close ranks around a highly ideological understanding of professionalism and independence that happens to support the right of an elite attorney to make a fortune. Now any time someone—take, for example, Richard Kahlenberg, who went to Harvard Law and wrote a book about how that institution turns would-be idealists into corporate stooges in training—broaches concerns like Berle’s, they are met immediately with derisive sneers from law professors about not understanding the majesty of the legal profession.

People like those law professors and Neal Katyal illustrate something I wish more professional Democrats understood: The professional norms of the political class are not only not a substitute for actual values, they are, frequently, actively harmful to the project of liberalism these people claim to be advancing.

………

Neal Katyal’s professional project—one that I believe to be sincerely ideological and not simply mercenary—has been to protect corporations from the consequences of harming consumers and workers. Liberals should find that horrifying. If you want to make a fairer society or more equitable economy, Katyal is not your ally, no matter how many good deeds he has done. The professional norms that allow people like Katyal to get a pass on their lucrative private sector work are not actually essential components of our political system; they exist because no one in revolving-door Washington wants to feel bad about how they pay the bills.

The Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) is a product of this amoral calculus.

They are subscribing to the philosophy of Ayn Rand crush William Edward Hickman, who said, “What is good for me is right.”

William Edward Hickman also  kidnapped a 12 year old girl, ransomed her, and dismembered her, which is pretty much what the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) has done to both the party, and the American people.

*I love it when I get to go all Dr. McCoy!

Motherf%$#ing Tweet of the Motherf%$#ing Day

Rep. Pascrell writes to Pelosi and Lofgren asking them to look into not seating the 126 amici in the new Congress, invoking Reconstruction era constitutional “safeguards to cleanse from our government ranks any traitors and others that would destroy the union.” pic.twitter.com/WR0lJEMepK

— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) December 11, 2020

I don’t know if Pascrell will be running for reelection in 2022, he is 83 years old after all, but I’m pretty sure that if he is, any primary is unlikely.

Given that Pascrell got more than 80% in the primary, and over 70% in the general, I’m inclined to believe that the only way that he’s leaving the district is feet first.

Then again, they said the same thing about Bill Crowler, and AOC took him down, and he is pretty conservative for a Democrat.

Today, however, I’m just amazed.

Full letter after the break as a PDF.

Original link.

Finally,

The Federal Trade Commission and 47 states have filed a lawsuit to break up Facebook.

This is long overdue.

As an aside, at the top of the list should be the replacement of all the class B shares of Facebook, the ones with special voting rights that allow Zuckerberg to maintain complete control of the company, with class A shares, at least on a temporary basis.

Mark Zuckerberg’s 58% of the vote would become 5.8% of the vote, and the slightly less psychopathic “adults in the room” could deal with take charge.

A breakup will take years and millions of dollars. Changing the class of shares could be done almost instantly, and the the cost of this would be minimal.

The lawsuit is calling for Instagram and WhatsApp to be spun out from Facebook:

The Federal Trade Commission and a coalition of 47 states attorneys general today filed a pair of long-awaited antitrust suits against Facebook, alleging that the company abused its power in the marketplace to neutralize competitors through acquisitions and prevent anyone else from presenting a more privacy-friendly alternative to consumers.

“By using its vast troves of data and money, Facebook has quashed or hindered what the company perceived as potential threats,” New York Attorney General Letitia James, who led the states’ effort, said. “In an effort to maintain its market dominance, Facebook has employed a strategy to impede competing services.”

The lawsuit brought by the states (PDF) asks the court to prohibit Facebook from engaging in “any anticompetitive conduct” or practice going forward. That includes a request for Facebook to be blocked from any acquisitions valued at greater than $10 million without first getting permission from the states.

The states also explicitly ask that Facebook’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp be found in violation of the Clayton Act and that Facebook be required to divest those businesses if necessary “to restore competitive conditions” in the marketplace.

The suit filed by the FTC (PDF) also calls for Facebook to face more scrutiny when it acquires other firms and to be broken up if necessary to restore competition in the marketplace.

………

As we’ve explained before, antitrust law isn’t just about being a literal monopoly or even about being the biggest player in a sector. Instead, it’s about power—how much you have, and what you do with it. Antitrust investigators basically want to answer the question: did you become the biggest naturally, or did you cheat along the way?

In that framing, then, Facebook stands accused of cheating to beat out any potential competition—a lot.

………

Emails obtained by Congress earlier this year as part of its investigation into Big Tech’s outsized power revealed that Zuckerberg explicitly thought of Instagram as a threat before acquiring it.

If apps such as Instagram were allowed to grow, Zuckerberg wrote in a 2012 email, it “could be very disruptive” to Facebook, and he added that an acquisition “will give us a year or more to integrate their dynamics before anyone can get to their scale again.”

………

The FTC and the states both launched their antitrust investigations back in the long-long ago of 2019, as did Congress, European Union competition regulators, and regulators from several other nations. The Congressional report, published in October, now seems like a harbinger of today’s suit: the House committee found that Facebook (as well as Apple, Google, and Amazon) exerts monopoly power in the marketplace and should be forced to split up.

It’s incredibly rare in the modern era for the courts actually to force a company to break up for antitrust reasons. The last major breakup came more than 35 years ago, when AT&T finally split up in to the seven regional “Baby Bells” after a decade-long legal fight with the Justice Department. The court initially ordered a breakup in the Microsoft antitrust case that began in the late 1990s, but Microsoft appealed the ruling and, in 2001, reached a settlement with the DOJ that left its business intact.

Some of Facebook’s app updates from earlier this year seem to have been designed with a potential antitrust suit in mind: the company in late 2019 began a plan to integrate WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Instagram Direct messaging into a single service. The integration between Instagram’s and Facebook’s messaging services began in August; when all three platforms are combined, Facebook will reach an estimated 3.3 billion users on a single messaging service.

Which is, in and of itself, evidence of bad faith and monopolistic behavior.

………

“The claims being reported—serial predatory acquisition and withholding interoperability—set up a strong case,” said Charlotte Slaiman, competition policy director at Public Knowledge. “This action reflects a lot of work from advocates, experts, and enforcement officials to build the case, first that Facebook was deserving of scrutiny, and then that the company really has run afoul of our antitrust laws. To fix the harms to competition, we need to see changes to Facebook’s business and the company should be required to open up its network to competitors so that users are not locked in.”

Whatever the plaintiffs are trying to achieve, they have to be as disruptive as possible to Facebook, because otherwise, they are going to pull crap that makes IBM’s shenanigans in its antitrust defense look like tiddly winks.

*At one point, IBM literally submitted trailer loads of documents as evidence as a delaying tactic.  The lawsuit spanned 3 decades.

The Velocity of a Dead Cat at the Apex is Zero

It’s jobless Thursday, and initial jobless claims rose by 137,000 to 853,000 last week, an almost 20% jump in claims.

I have long maintained that the current “recovery” is a dead cat bounce*, and while one week does not make a trend, when combined with the recent Covid explosion, strongly suggest that we are in for a bumpy ride:

The economic recovery has downshifted, with job growth slowing and layoffs persisting at a high level amid rising coronavirus cases and related restrictions.

The number of workers seeking unemployment benefits, a proxy for layoffs, climbed sharply by 137,000 to 853,000 last week, the Labor Department reported.

The level of applications was the highest since September, but still well down from a peak of nearly seven million in late March. The number of applications for a separate federal pandemic program also rose sharply last week.

The claims figures add to signs the recovery continues, but at a cooler pace. Job growth eased in November and the number of job openings edged down in early December. The labor market’s partial rebound has been a key component in the overall economic recovery from a pandemic-related downturn in the spring.

………

Economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal this month cut their projections for economic growth and job creation in the first quarter of 2021, but they expect the expansion to accelerate later in the year after coronavirus vaccines are more widely available.

 This will not end well.†

*I’ve been talking how the current “recovery” is a Dead Cat Bounce, which posits that. “even a dead cat will bounce if it falls from a great height”, for a while now.
†Thanks to my brother, Bear Who Swims, for a new catch phrase.

F%$# 2020

The Bad Sex In Fiction Awards have been cancelled, because its organizers have concluded that 2020 already has a surfeit of badness:

It’s one of life’s simplest, funniest, most bewildering pleasures: Literary Review’s Bad Sex In Fiction Awards. Year in and year out, this annual event brings us throbbing members, swollen mounds, allusions to train tunnels and outer space, dubious meditations on female anatomy, and proliferate of use of the word “seed.” This year, not so, as its judges have “after weeks of deliberation” and a hopefully hilarious emergency meeting, decided to cancel this year’s awards. The reason: 2020 sucked enough as it is, and no one should have to endure mixed metaphors about jism, too.

Here’s Literary Review’s official word on the decision:

The judges felt that the public had been subjected to too many bad things this year to justify exposing it to bad sex as well. They warned, however, that the cancellation of the 2020 awards should not be taken as a licence to write bad sex. A spokesperson for the judges commented:

“With lockdown regulations giving rise to all manner of novel sexual practices, the judges anticipate a rash of entries next year. Authors are reminded that cybersex and other forms of home entertainment fall within the purview of this award. Scenes set in fields, parks or back yards, or indoors with the windows open and fewer than six people present will not be exempt from scrutiny either.”

Damn you.

I’ve Called This Out for a While

A study has shown that The Lincoln Project’s ads actually had a negative impact, something which I noted on my blog a month ago and at least 6 months ago on the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

As long as I’ve known of the Lincoln Project, I have maintained that it has two purposes:

  • Enriching its principals.
  • To embrace and extend the Neoliberal capture of the Democratic Party.

It comes as no surprise then that this enterprise actually had negative utility on the matter of delivering votes to the Democratic Party.  That was never its purpose:

At various junctures during the 2020 campaign an attack ad would pop online that had observers on Twitter buzzing about how devastating for Donald Trump it would be. Except, more often than not, the ads weren’t effective, at least not for the nominal point of the election: persuading on-the-fence voters to back Joe Biden.

That’s the conclusion the Democratic Party’s top super PAC reached after doing analytical research into a handful of spots that went viral on Twitter.

The PAC, Priorities USA, spent a good chunk of the cycle testing the effectiveness of ads, some 500 in all. And, along the way, they decided to conduct an experiment that could have potentially saved them tons of money. They took five ads produced by a fellow occupant in the Super PAC domain—the Lincoln Project—and attempted to measure their persuasiveness among persuadable swing state voters; i.e. the ability of an ad to move Trump voters towards Joe Biden. A control group saw no ad at all. Five different treatment groups, each made up of 683 respondents, saw one of the five ads. Afterwards they were asked the same post-treatment questions measuring the likelihood that they would vote and who they would vote for.

The idea wasn’t to be petty or adversarial towards the Lincoln Project, which drew both fans and detractors for the scorched-earth spots it ran imploring fellow Republicans to abandon Trump. It was, instead, to see if Twitter virality could be used as a substitute for actual ad testing, which took funds and time. If it turned out that what the Lincoln Project was doing was proving persuasive, the thinking went, then Priorities USA could use Twitter as a quasi-barometer for seeing how strong their own ads were.

But that didn’t turn out to be the case. According to Nick Ahamed, Priorities’ analytics director, the correlation of Twitter metrics—likes and retweets—and persuasion was -0.3, “meaning that the better the ad did on Twitter, the less it persuaded battleground state voters.” The most viral of the Lincoln Project’s ads—a spot called Bounty, which was RTed 116,000 times and liked more than 210,000 times—turned out to be the least persuasive of those Priorities tested.

The  Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) and the useful idiots at MSNBC who were so enamored of of these ad campaigns were suckers for a group of con men.

The lesson to be learned here is beware of Republicans bearing gifts.

Terrorism as a Feature, not a Bug

In discussions with Republican lawmakers, there is a telling quote, where the Republican leader of the state senate unequivocally states that she and her family are at risk of violence if she does not support Trump’s claims of vote fraud. 

We need to deal aggressively with the problem of stochastic terrorism.

This is far more corrosive to American society than anything that Osama bin Laden could have ever dreamed of:

Last week, allies of President Trump accused Republican leaders in Pennsylvania of being “cowards” and “liars” and of letting America down.

Mr. Trump himself called top Republicans in the General Assembly in his crusade to twist the arms of officials in several states and reverse an election he lost. The Pennsylvania lawmakers told the president they had no power to convene a special session to address his grievances.

But they also rewarded his efforts: On Friday, the State House speaker and majority leader joined hard-right colleagues — whom they had earlier resisted — and called on Congress to reject Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s 81,000-vote victory in Pennsylvania.

………

Kim Ward, the Republican majority leader of the Pennsylvania Senate, said the president had called her to declare there was fraud in the voting. But she said she had not been shown the letter to Congress, which was pulled together hastily, before its release.

Asked if she would have signed it, she indicated that the Republican base expected party leaders to back up Mr. Trump’s claims — or to face its wrath.

“If I would say to you, ‘I don’t want to do it,’” she said about signing the letter, “I’d get my house bombed tonight.”

It is clear that there is a large undercurrent of right-wing terrorism in US society, and it is equally clear that law enforcement has been completely penetrated by these folks. 

Dealing with this is going to be like peeling an onion, you have to do it layer by layer, and there will be lots of tears.

Good Idea, but It Won’t Make It to the President’s Desk

The annual defense policy bill has language that requires federal agents, both law enforcement and military will be required to wear insignia and identify themselves when arresting people during civil disturbances.

I do not believe that this will make it out of Congress, but it should:

Congress is set to approve a defense policy bill that bars unidentified federal law enforcement officers from policing protests. The bill responds to a phenomenon that Mother Jones flagged in June: Unidentified federal law enforcement officers with no identifying insignia joined in the Trump administration’s coordinated crackdown on protests against police violence in several cities earlier this summer.

The 4,500-page annual defense policy bill that emerged from a House-Senate policy committee Thursday requires any armed forces personnel, including National Guard members, and federal law enforcement agents who respond to a “civil disturbance,” to display either their name or some other “individual identifier,” as well as the organization or branch of the Armed Forces for whom they work.

This provision is a direct response to the presence in multiple cities of unidentified federal officers last summer. I first reported on this issue on June 3 during a protest in Washington. Agents I approached would only say that they worked for the “Department of Justice” or the “federal government.” Other reporters elicited similar responses.

Basically, this means that they need to wear a badge identifying which agency that they work for, and a badge number so that they can be personally identified for complaints.

This is long overdue, and should be adopted at the state and local level too.

Na Ga Na Happen

A candidate for new head of the DCCC, Sean Patrick Maloney, is promising a major overhaul of the House Demococratic campaign apparatus. 

He is claiming that it is inefficient, ineffective, and technologically moribund.

He may be sincere, but inefficiency is money in the pockets on the consultants, who cycle through the Democratic Party establishment’s (There is no Democratic Party establishment) functionary positions, so anything that he tries will be fought tooth and nail by the staff:

The polling is antiquated. Money is being frittered. Diversity is lacking. And digital outreach lags far behind the times.

These are the warnings from Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, a four-term New York Democrat who’s vying to lead the party’s campaign arm in the next Congress.

Democrats are expecting a tough environment in the 2022 midterms, and Maloney’s message is a foreboding one: Modernize the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), he says, or President-elect Joe Biden will be battling a House under Republican control come 2023.

………

To move the party into the future, Maloney is vowing to listen to younger progressives when it comes to social media and digital outreach; to shift away from “stuffy old traditional crappy polling” and adopt community-based focus groups; and to reject the idea that big fundraising hauls are synonymous with election success — a formula that didn’t play out this year, when Democrats raised historic amounts of campaign cash but still lost House seats.

“When I look at the amount of money that the major committees on both sides and independent groups deployed this cycle, I think there must be a big room in Washington somewhere where they bring big bags of money and burn it. Because I don’t know what the hell anybody got out of it,” Maloney said.

The consultants get their kid’s tuition to tony private schools out of it.

“We have been seduced by this notion that big money and big TV wins elections, and I just don’t see the evidence for that,” he added.

The consultants get a proportion of the ad buy, so the consultants go for the most expensive media buys possible.  KA-CHING!!!

Maloney will square off with Rep. Tony Cárdenas (D-Calif.) in an internal, secret-ballot election that will decide who becomes the next DCCC chairman. That vote is scheduled after Thanksgiving.

Cárdenas, 57, who’s run the Congressional Hispanic Caucus’s (CHC) campaign arm Bold PAC for the past six years, has pitched himself as a proven fundraiser and someone who can help Democrats make up lost ground with the tens of thousands of Hispanic voters who backed President Trump this year in places like Texas and Florida.

Well, we know who the consultants will support.

My Family Just Got Tickets to the Defend The Majority Rally Featuring Vice President Mike Pence in Augusta Georgia

We aren’t going, so if someone wants to download the PDF and go in our place, you can download the PDF here.

You can also get a ticket at Evenbrite for yourself. It’s free. 

My suggestion is that if you go, you wear a K-Pop T-shirt, and when Mike Pence walks onto stage, start chanting, “How’d you launder the Saudi kickback money, Vice President Pence.”

Toxic Wokeness

The recent mayoral elections in Portland Oregon are a classic example of toxic wokeness. 

The short version is that the corporateist cop-fluffer mayor won reelection, because of a write in campaign (Teressa Raiford) which pulled exclusively from the progressive candidate who advanced past the runoff.

I have come to the conclusion that this sort of dysfunction is being openly (look at Raiford’s press coverage) and surreptitiously supported by people who live comfortable lives and don’t want to give up anything:  (College professors, pundits, right-wingers, and the rest of the Professional Managerial Class)

So you might recall that over the summer we here in Portland were In Flames!!!

The antifa hordes were rampaging through our streets, the dead were rising from their graves, dogs and cats were living together, and only the Thin Blue Line of Portland Police Bureau was holding us back from being – even though we were, mind you, the President hissown self said so! – an “anarchist jurisdiction”.

But…remember back in June?

When I asked you whether we would face the brutally obvious reality that “policing” in the United States f%$#s with and kills poor and dark and mentally disturbed people at a ridiculously inflated rate? What we would do if no amount of “reform” had changed or would change that? What we would do now, after decades of useless wanking had left us with a Police Bureau that is a sort of Proud Boys Local #432 only all with blue clothing?

………

And I answered my own question with:

“I know for a fact that Portland Police Bureau has been the home for wannabe Klansmen and Nazis for decades…I knew perfectly well (that this) was so baked into PPB that the only way to “do something” would be to do a Saddam’s Army on the whole outfit – just fire 99% of the sonsofbitches, burn the bastard to the ground, and start over?
Will we do anything about those problems now?
Don’t make me laugh. You know better and so do I. We’ll throw clubs and gas and “non-lethal” rounds at whoever makes a fuss. Christ on a crutch, we can’t even do anything semi-intelligent about a f%$#ing Plague, you think we’re going to do anything sane about this, the miserable way we’ve treated our poor and our former slaves and current subjects, and everyone else who can’t play the “get out of jail free” card?

Nope. I got nothin’ for you on that.”

And, as surely as the sun still rises, we – we here in “anarchist jurisdiction” Portland did…

Nothing.

Instead we re-elected the empty-suit-cop-fluffing incumbent mayor instead of his lefty challenger who promised to take the f%$#ing cops by the stacking swivel. A large part of that was because us commies, once again, managed to form up the circular firing squad – another local activist, Tessa Raiford, ran a very organized write-in campaign that siphoned off about 13 percent of the vote, all from the Left – and shot ourselves dead square in the ass because it was in a race that the OTHER lefty candidate, Iannarone, lost 40 to 46 percent.

Do the math.

F%$#. We’re our own worst goddamn enemies.

(%$# mine) 

No, we are not our own worst enemies.

The powers that be have been paying trolls for years,* and sometimes, when they find useful idiots, like Teressa Raiford, they don’t even need to pay.

It can be both monetarily and emotionally profitable, because useful idiots get laudatory press coverage, and donations from avatars of the status quo.

*Hillary paid people to troll online and to pretend to be Bernie Bros in 2016, (also here) Obama advisor Cass Sunstein advocated for government trolls, Lauren “Uncle Meat” Bandler on Netslaves, for example, and that is just citing my sh%$ty little blog.

Brexit and Differential Equations

As you may or may not be aware, one of the sticking points on Brexit is that the French and the Spanish are demanding the right to continue to fish (strip mine) British waters.

What I know is that if there is no deal, and Europeans are not allowed to fish those waters, then the pressure on the fishery will be reduced, at least until the British fishing fleet is expanded.

If you have been following this, this is pretty obvious.

The thing that I know, and you probably don’t, is that if the continental fishing fleets are excluded, then the percentage of selachians, sharks skates, and rays, of the catch, will go up.

The short version is that with reduce human predation, other predators will take up the slack.

The longer version, and the one that I learned in differential equation class in college is that  Lotka–Volterra equations were developed to describe the changes in catches in Italian fisheries during the First World War. 

With many fishermen at the front, the total catch declined, and the percentage of sharks and related fish increased.

The instructor described this as the first application of differential equations to what could generally be called ecology, though I had to explain to him what selachians were .

So, a no-deal Brexit is a happy time for sharks in UK waters.

Now you know.

Arthur Anderson Squared

It increasingly appears that accounting firm Ernst & Young covered up fraud by the defunct German electronic payments firm Wirecard.

Here’s hoping that regulators go medieval on their ass:

Germany’s audit watchdog suspects EY partners knew they were issuing a “factually inaccurate” audit for Wirecard in 2017, according to four people familiar with the matter.

Apas, the Berlin-based audit oversight body, has reported EY to prosecutors, telling them that the firm may have acted criminally during its work for Wirecard, which collapsed into insolvency earlier this year in one of Europe’s largest fraud scandals.

Wirecard, a once high-flying German payments company, was audited by EY for more than a decade and until 2019 always received unqualified audits.

However, in 2017 EY was just days away from denying Wirecard the crucial all-clear, according to documents reviewed by Apas. On March 29 of that year EY warned Wirecard that a qualified audit was imminent and shared a draft version of a qualified opinion with its client, people familiar with the documents told the FT.

………

Just days later, the auditors changed their minds. On April 5, they signed an audit opinion that stated: “Our audit has not led to any reservations.”

Apas found that it was unreasonable to believe that the issues could have been resolved within a few days, according to people familiar with the matter. The watchdog told prosecutors that therefore EY’s unqualified audit was “factually inaccurate”.

Last week the EY auditing partners, Andreas Loetscher and Martin Dahmen told MPs that they were being probed by Apas over their work for Wirecard and declined to give testimony to the parliamentary inquiry commission into Wirecard.

………

Munich prosecutors are evaluating the evidence sent by Apas and have not decided whether to open a criminal investigation of EY partners. Under German law, auditors found guilty of such misconduct can be punished with up to three years in jail.

I’m rooting for Munich prosecutors to do the right thing here, which, in light of prosecutions in Munich, feels a bit strange to me.

Prosecutions, even without convictions serve as a deterrent, and convictions, even with relative short sentences are a real deterrent.

I Call This a Win-Win for Biden

Joe Biden has announced that he will be appointing Xavier Becerra as Secretary of Health and Human Services. 

I did not expect this, given Becerra’s support for Medicare for All, so it’s a win on a policy level. 

Additionally, it’s a win, because it means that Becerra will no longer be California Attorney General, where he has been a dedicated fluffer to bad cops and cop unions: (See also here, and here)

In his two years on the job, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra has crafted an image as a progressive warrior, suing the Trump Administration dozens of times and delivering the Democrats’ Spanish-language rebuttal to the President’s State of the Union speech.

But there’s one major area where the Democrat isn’t allied with progressives: accountability for law enforcement. There, Becerra is at odds with the push by many in his own party to better police the police.

The attorney general is refusing to provide records on police misconduct that media outlets requested under a new law signed last year by Democratic former Gov. Jerry Brown. The legislator who wrote the law, also a Democrat, says the documents must be disclosed. But Becerra has sided with police who want the courts to weigh in before releasing records about officers who were involved in shootings, sexual assault or lying on the job.

………

Numerous police unions have filed lawsuits in recent weeks to try to block their departments from releasing misconduct records under the new law, Senate Bill 1421, which took effect on Jan. 1. The officers argue that the law only applies to records created on or after Jan. 1, while the legislator who wrote the law says it applies to any records in the police departments’ possession, including those from past years.

………

The records they released, all of abuses that were confirmed by internal investigations, showed one officer was fired after he offered to help a woman deal with drunk-driving charges if she had sex with him. In another case, an on-duty police officer had sex with a member of the public. Numerous other officers were dishonest or used force that resulted in severe injuries. It was the first time in many decades that such information has been made public in California, which has had one of the nation’s most restrictive police records laws.A broad coalition of media outlets have been requesting misconduct records from law enforcement agencies big and small since the new law took effect at the start of the year. Some agencies have complied—including police departments in Fairfield,Rio Vistaand Burlingame.

The records they released, all of abuses that were confirmed by internal investigations, showed one officer was fired after he offered to help a woman deal with drunk-driving charges if she had sex with him. In another case, an on-duty police officer had sex with a member of the public. Numerous other officers were dishonest or used force that resulted in severe injuries. It was the first time in many decades that such information has been made public in California, which has had one of the nation’s most restrictive police records laws.

Becerra refused to disclose any misconduct records regarding officers employed by the state Department of Justice. Then the free-speech nonprofit, the First Amendment Coalition, suedhim, arguing that his refusal has had a ripple effect, giving “a green light to other departments to disregard the new law.”

………

Becerra is not the first California Attorney General to side with police on accountability issues—or to take heat for it from the left. Democratic presidential candidate and U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris, for instance, refusedas attorney general to support statewide standards for police body cameras, endorsing instead the law enforcement argument that such rules should be determined at the local level, even if the result was a patchwork. She also opposed a bill to put the state Department of Justice in charge of investigating police shootings.

Becerra has held a similar position on more recent versions of the bill, marking another instance in which he sided with law enforcement against efforts toward greater transparency. Progressive advocates for criminal justice reform argue that the state Department of Justice could be more objective than local prosecutors in determining if shootings are justified, because local prosecutors work so closely with police. Even Becerra’s Republican opponent saidthe state should be in charge of investigating police shootings.

………

Becerra’s office agreed to review the Sacramento Police Department after officers killed an unarmed man in his grandmother’s backyard, but that was only because local officials requested it. And even though his review has made some strong recommendations—including that the Sacramento police should overhaul their use-of-force policies—Becerra stopped short of endorsing a tougher statewide standardto justify police shootings, something progressive Democrats are fighting forthis year.

Hopefully, the next California AG will not be so beholden to crooked cops.

Tweet of the Day

We need union busters who look like America. https://t.co/wqcefA7vd1

— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) December 7, 2020

This is a feature, not a bug.

It’s performative diversity, where all manner of parasitic and evil enterprises can be excused if it is staffed such that Non-Hispanic white are 60.1% of the staff, Hispanic and Latino (of any race) are 18.5% of the staff, African Americans are 13.4%, Asians are 5.9% of the staff, and the CEO is a non-binary BIPOC who grow up on welfare.

I am increasingly convinced that this is a deliberate attempt to prevent real change from happening.

We Live in Hell

According to Microsoft®, Microsoft Excel® is the most used programming in the world. 

This almost makes me feel grateful that I had to write bbCodeWebEx in JavaScript. (Almost)

Microsoft will let users create custom functions in Excel using the number wrangler’s own formula language.

“Excel formulas are the world’s most widely used programming language, yet one of the more basic principles in programming has been missing, and that is the ability to use the formula language to define your own re-usable functions,” said Microsoft.

Please, for the love of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, make it stop.

Linkage

What an honest flight safety video looks like:

And the “Bipartisan Deal” Gets Even Worse

It turns out that the “Bipartisan Stimulus Package” that Pelosi and Schumer have caved on is even worse than I had originally noted.

It contains a provision that will completely indemnify irresponsible and negligent employers, no matter how egregious their behavior is.

It can’t be bipartisan unless it shafts ordinary workers, I guess:

In early October, Harvard researchers sounded an alarm: they released a report showing a pattern of coronavirus deaths surging soon after workers filed requests for workplace safety assistance from the US labor department. The takeaway was clear: workers are desperately begging the government to help protect them from a deadly pandemic, the government has been unresponsive, and lots of workers have subsequently died preventable deaths.

Today, a little more than a month after the study came out, the federal government is finally responding: a bipartisan group of Senate and House lawmakers have announced legislation to shield corporations from lawsuits when their lax safety standards kill more workers.

In practice, the legislation, which is being tucked into a larger Covid relief package, is a holiday-season gift for corporate donors: it would strip frontline workers of their last remaining legal tool to protect themselves in the workplace – at the same time the unemployment system is designed to financially punish those workers if they refuse to return to unsafe workplaces during the pandemic.

The legislation comes not only as workers continue to die, but also as roughly 7- 9% of the total Covid-19 death count are “take home” infections traced to employees unwittingly spreading the disease to their families and friends.

At the behest of corporate lobbyists, the liability shield initiative has spread like a virus in America’s political system: as the Daily Poster first reported, it coursed through state legislatures across the country after the New York Democratic governor, Andrew Cuomo, responded to a Covid-19 mass death in nursing homes by shielding nursing home executives from lawsuits – after a healthcare lobby group funneled $1m into his political machine.

………

US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been one of the few Democratic lawmakers to spotlight what’s really going on. Last week, she tweeted: “If you want to know why Covid-19 relief is tied up in Congress, one key reason is that Republicans are demanding legal immunity for corporations so they can expose their workers to Covid without repercussions.”

The bipartisan initiative aims to obscure its Dr Evil level of depravity by superficially depicting the liability shield as merely temporary. But that seems like a ruse, as indicated by private equity mogul and senator Mitt Romney of Utah, who said the federal Covid-19 liability shield provision “provides a temporary suspension of any liability-related lawsuits, state or federal level associated with Covid-19, giving states enough time to put in place their own protections”.

Though full legislative language has not been released, the goal seems clear: to give state legislatures more time to permanently prevent workers from suing employers who endanger them, and to permanently block their families from mounting such lawsuits when the workers die.

………

With liability shields, those same employers will know that they can get away with all kinds of cost-slashing and corner-cutting that endangers workers and denies them access to basic protective gear.

In other words, corporations will know they can drive the Covid-19 body count ever higher, and they won’t even have to worry about being called into a courtroom to answer for their crimes.

This is why people think that the only way that you can get true reform is to wreck the whole thing.

The very serious people in DC only come together to f%$# the ordinary people.