Month: November 2013

F%$# Ronald Reagan for Gutting Mental Health Care in the US

Former Virginia gubernatorial candidate Creigh Deeds was stabbed by his mentally ill son, who then shot himself.

Yesterday, his son was released early from what would be a 48 hour psyche evaluation because there were no beds available:

Dennis Cropper, executive director of the Rockbridge County Community Services Board, told the Richmond Times-Dispatch that the emergency custody order, or ECO, allowed Gus Deeds to be held as long as four hours to determine whether he should be kept longer, up to 48 hours, under a temporary detention order.

The son was evaluated Monday at Bath Community Hospital, Cropper said, but was released because no psychiatric bed could be located across a wide area of western Virginia.

(emphasis mine)

It’s kind of trite to blame Ronald Reagan, except for the fact that Reagan WAS to blame, having aggressively gutted the public psychiatric health system, first in California, and then, after he was elected, nation wide.

Linkage

Science, bitches:

Specifically the Prince Rupert’s drop.

How About F%$#ing Paying Your Employees a F%$#ing Decent Wage Instead?

Walmart just held a food drive for its own employees:

The storage containers are attractively displayed at the Walmart on Atlantic Boulevard in Canton. The bins are lined up in alternating colors of purple and orange. Some sit on tables covered with golden yellow tablecloths. Others peer out from under the tables.

This isn’t a merchandise display. It’s a food drive – not for the community, but for needy workers.

“Please Donate Food Items Here, so Associates in Need Can Enjoy Thanksgiving Dinner,” read signs affixed to the tablecloths.

The food drive tables are tucked away in an employees-only area. They are another element in the backdrop of the public debate about salaries for cashiers, stock clerks and other low-wage positions at Walmart, as workers in Cincinnati and Dayton are scheduled to go on strike Monday.

Is the food drive proof the retailer pays so little that many employees can’t afford Thanksgiving dinner?

Norma Mills of Canton, who lives near the store, saw the photo circulating showing the food drive bins, and felt both “outrage” and “anger.”

“Then I went through the emotion of compassion for the employees, working for the largest food chain in America, making low wages, and who can’t afford to provide their families with a good Thanksgiving holiday,” said Mills, an organizer with Stand Up for Ohio, which is active in foreclosure issues in Canton. “That Walmart would have the audacity to ask low-wage workers to donate food to other low-wage workers — to me, it is a moral outrage.”

Gee, you think?

Don’t shop Walmart.

Remember When I Wrote that High Frequency Trading was Front-Running?

Well, Yves Smith has found a whistleblower video that is a must watch: (Background on front-running here):

Yes, it’s almost an hour long but the short version:

Mr. Bodek had been using common “limit orders,” which specify a price limit at which to buy or sell. Mr. Davidovich, according to Mr. Bodek, suggested that he instead use an order type called Hide Not Slide, which Direct Edge had introduced in early 2009, about the same time Trading Machines’ performance started to suffer.

Mr. Bodek says Mr. Davidovich told him Direct Edge had created this order type—which lets traders avoid having their orders displayed to the rest of the market—to attract high-frequency trading firms…

Mr. Bodek says he realized the orders he was using were disadvantaged, compared with Hide Not Slide orders. He says he found that in certain situations, the fact that a Hide Not Slide order was hidden allowed it to slip in ahead of some one-day limit orders that had been entered earlier. He also learned that other stock exchanges had order types somewhat like Hide Not Slide, with different twists.

“Man I feel like an idiot. Never grasped the full negative alpha embedded in a normal day limit,” Mr. Bodek emailed Mr.

We really need to start prosecuting these rat-f%$#s.

Is Anyone Surprised That the NSA Tried to Get Backdoors in Linux?

I’m not surprised, given that they have conspired to make security protocols less secure in order to make it easier for the NSA to hack into systems:

The NSA has asked Linus Torvalds to inject covert backdoors into the free and open operating system GNU/Linux. This was revealed in this week’s hearing on mass surveillance in the European Parliament. Chalk another one up of the United States NSA trying to make information technology less secure for everyone.

The father of Linus Torvalds, Nils Torvalds, is a Member of the European Parliament for Finland. This week, Nils Torvalds took part in the European Parliament’s hearing on the ongoing mass surveillance, and brought a revelation:

The United States security service NSA has contacted Linus Torvalds with a request to add backdoors into the free and open operating system GNU/Linux.

The entire inquiry is available here on YouTube (uploaded by Hax).

Nils Torvalds’ revelation was presented in an episode which started (at 3:06:58) by me pointing out to the Microsoft representative in the panel, that in a system like GNU/Linux, built on open source, you can examine the source code to see that there aren’t any back doors. In Microsoft’s systems, this possibility is absent, since the source code is secret to outsiders.

Backdoors are deliberate security holes in a system, and notwithstanding the claims of its proponents, (largely debunked by the evidence of abuse by NSA personnel) regarding checks and balances, this is just a complete clusterf%$# for American tech.

Any foreign company that does not think twice about working with a US tech firm is deluded.

A Victory for Copyright Sanity

Google wins an federal court ruling for Google Books:

Google’s idea to scan millions of books and make them searchable online seemed audacious when it was announced in 2004. But fast-forward to today, when people expect to find almost anything they want online, and the plan seems like an unsurprising and unavoidable part of today’s Internet.

So when a judge on Thursday dismissed a lawsuit that authors had filed against Google after countless delays, it had the whiff of inevitability. Even the judge, Denny Chin of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, said during a September hearing on the case that his law clerks used Google Books for research.

“It advances the progress of the arts and sciences, while maintaining respectful consideration for the rights of authors and other creative individuals, and without adversely impacting the rights of copyright holders,” Judge Chin wrote in his ruling. “Indeed, all society benefits.” (Judge Chin handled the case in district court because he was a judge there when it began.)

The Authors Guild said it disagreed with the decision and planned to appeal. Google said it was “delighted” with the outcome.

I’m delighted too.

Generally the courts look at any technological advance as an excuse to expand IP holder privileges, and in this case, the judge actually looked at societal benefit, which is the purpose of our IP regime under the Constitution.

This is an astonishingly useful research tool, and copyright does not mean that the holder can extract every possible dollar for every use.

There is an increasing realization in society that expansive IP privilege is a hindrance to the well being of the society, when it should be an asset.

So Not a Surprise

Geithner defended Wall Street and prevented any real consequences for their actions, and now he gets his back end bribe for doing this:

Timothy F. Geithner will join the private equity firm Warburg Pincus as president, the firm announced on Saturday. It would be his first prominent position since leaving office as Treasury secretary this year.

The unusually low-key announcement — made with little fanfare on a Saturday morning — is Mr. Geithner’s first foray into the private sector in 25 years, after serving in the Treasury Department, the International Monetary Fund and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

As president of the New York Fed in 2008, Mr. Geithner helped lead the federal government’s response to the financial crisis, including the sale of Bear Stearns and the bailout of the American International Group.

………

Mr. Geithner follows in the path of past Treasury secretaries who, after leaving government, have accepted lucrative Wall Street posts. After leaving the Clinton administration, Robert E. Rubin joined Citigroup. And John W. Snow, a Treasury secretary in the George W. Bush administration, joined the private equity firm Cerberus.

Note that Geithner has never worked as an investment banker or stock broker, and he’s president of a private equity firm.

This is a payment for not rocking the boat, and f%$#ing the average American in the mortgage crisis.

And any future regulator knows that if they do right by the banksters, the banksters can throw them some multimillion dollar crumbs when they leave government service.

Rob Ford Just Stopped Being Funny

Everyone’s (Or at least Jon Stewart and his writing team’s) favorite Chris Farley tribute band, Toronto Mayor Rob Ford has put on quite a show over the past few months.

I’ve not written about him, because I had nothing to add that The Daily Show has already covered.

Well, we now have credible reports that he was beating his wife:

New details from a months-old police report revealed on Friday indicated that Mayor Rob Ford’s wife, Renata, displayed bruises indicative of domestic violence and was possibly inebriated, according to a Toronto Star story published by columnist Rosie DiManno.

“The mayor’s wife was slurring her words and belligerent with the driver. She either refused to pay the fare or did not have the money,” DiManno wrote. “Their argument became so heated that the cabbie called for police assistance.” The columnist said the incident occurred “nearly a year ago” and began with a dispute between Renata Ford and a cab driver outside her parents’ home.

When police arrived, DiManno wrote that they “observed that Mrs. Ford appeared to have bruising on her limbs.”

“When asked about it, she refused to say how the injuries had been suffered. She was, in fact, too incoherent to say much of anything — either inebriated or on drugs,” explained DiManno.

According to DiManno, no one was charged after the argument between Renata Ford and the driver. However, DiManno said police “tried following up” with Renata Ford afterward because they were concerned “domestic abuse may be involved.” DiManno described Renata Ford as having been “not cooperative” with the police.

This is not the first time there have been questions about domestic violence in the Ford household. In 2008, Ford, then a member of the City Council, was charged with assault and making a death threat against his wife. Those charges were dropped after prosecutors found inconsistencies in Renata Ford’s allegations that they said raised “credibility issues.”

The Toronto Star has pulled the story, saying that it wasn’t ready for release, but is serves to reinforce something we should all be aware of when we are tempted to make jokes: There are people who are collateral damage to this sort of bullsh%$, and I am not referring to the embarrassment suffered by the citizens of Toronto.

I’m no particularly surprised by this.  Ford is a product of the sort of nihilistic self-destructive hostile populism that was detailed in Mark Ames’ magnificent essay, Spite the Vote.

What he is, and what he does, is not motivated by a desire to fix things, but by a hatred by the other, which in his case are mass transit users and bicyclists. (?!?)

It is an illustration of the old Chinese adage, “If you are out for revenge, dig two graves.

Here is Jon Stewart is weighing in on the distinguished Mr. Ford:

Linkage

And in the, “I wish that I had thought of that,” department:

Thank You, Julian Assange

Wikileaks has released a draft of IP provisions of the super-secret draft of the Trans Pacific partnership, and rather unsurprisingly, it sucks wet farts from dead pigeons: (See also NC’s analysis here and here)

The more you know about the odious Trans-Pacific Partnership, the less you’ll like it. It’s made for corporate intellectual property and profits

Among the many betrayals of the Obama administration is its overall treatment of what many people refer to as “intellectual property” – the idea that ideas themselves and digital goods and services are exactly like physical property, and that therefore the law should treat them the same way. This corporatist stance defies both reality and the American Constitution, which expressly called for creators to have rights for limited periods, the goal of which was to promote inventive progress and the arts.

In the years 2007 and 2008, candidate Obama indicated that he’d take a more nuanced view than the absolutist one from Hollywood and other interests that work relentlessly for total control over this increasingly vital part of our economy and lives. But no clearer demonstration of the real White House view is offered than a just-leaked draft of an international treaty that would, as many had feared, create draconian new rights for corporate “owners” and mean vastly fewer rights for the rest of us.

I’m talking about the appalling Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, a partial draft of which WikiLeaks has just released. This treaty has been negotiated in secret meetings dominated by governments and corporations. You and I have been systematically excluded, and once you learn what they’re doing, you can see why.
The outsiders who understand TPP best aren’t surprised. That is, the draft “confirms fears that the negotiating parties are prepared to expand the reach of intellectual property rights, and shrink consumer rights and safeguards,” writes James Love a longtime watcher of this process.

The Obama administration is rushing to reach a new deal intended to lower barriers to trade with a dozen Pacific Rim nations, including Japan and Canada, before the end of the year.

But the White House is now facing new hurdles closer to home, with nearly half of the members of the House signing letters or otherwise signaling their opposition to granting so-called fast-track authority that would make any agreement immune to a Senate filibuster and not subject to amendment. No major trade pact has been approved by Congress in recent decades without such authority.

Two new House letters with about 170 signatories in total — the latest and strongest iteration of long-simmering opposition to fast-track authority and to the trade deal more broadly — have been disclosed just a week before international negotiators are to meet in Salt Lake City for another round of talks.

“Some of us have opposed past trade deals and some have supported them, but when it comes to fast track, members of Congress from across the political spectrum are united,” said Representative Walter B. Jones Jr. of North Carolina, who circulated the Republican letter.

Without fast-track authority, however, the other countries in the negotiations might balk at American requests since they wouldn’t be sure the final deal would remain unchanged. And getting both houses of Congress to agree to the final deal might be close to impossible without the fast-track authority, which the Obama administration has requested and which is being pursued in the Senate by Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana and the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, along with the top Republican on the committee, Orrin G. Hatch of Utah.

It’s not just liberal papers like the Guardian that are finding the draft extreme, so is The Washington Post, aka the former Kaplan Test Prep Company.

It should be noted that while the administration is sharing progress with a number of industries, they are treating sharing progress with the Congress like the NSA spying program, which has resulted in some pushback:

The Obama administration is rushing to reach a new deal intended to lower barriers to trade with a dozen Pacific Rim nations, including Japan and Canada, before the end of the year.

But the White House is now facing new hurdles closer to home, with nearly half of the members of the House signing letters or otherwise signaling their opposition to granting so-called fast-track authority that would make any agreement immune to a Senate filibuster and not subject to amendment. No major trade pact has been approved by Congress in recent decades without such authority.

Two new House letters with about 170 signatories in total — the latest and strongest iteration of long-simmering opposition to fast-track authority and to the trade deal more broadly — have been disclosed just a week before international negotiators are to meet in Salt Lake City for another round of talks.

“Some of us have opposed past trade deals and some have supported them, but when it comes to fast track, members of Congress from across the political spectrum are united,” said Representative Walter B. Jones Jr. of North Carolina, who circulated the Republican letter.

Without fast-track authority, however, the other countries in the negotiations might balk at American requests since they wouldn’t be sure the final deal would remain unchanged. And getting both houses of Congress to agree to the final deal might be close to impossible without the fast-track authority, which the Obama administration has requested and which is being pursued in the Senate by Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana and the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, along with the top Republican on the committee, Orrin G. Hatch of Utah.

The TPP has been kept tightly secret because they know that the reality will create immediate and widespread opposition that will make the SOPA affair look like a tea party.

If it passes, it will be put over the top by Republican votes, which must boil the Tea Party’s ass.

Not Eleventy Dimensional Chess, Just a Clusterf%$#

The latest adjustment to Obamacare is a complete mess.

This is why he should have pushed for single payer, and settled for a public option, but Obama buys into the neoliberal consensus, so he took a rather uninspired idea from the f%$#ing Heritage Foundation, brushed off the dust, and presented it as the liberal “Great White Hope.”

While I will be saving a chunk of change next year, Obama chose what is the worst possible way of improving our failed healthcare system.

Jeebus, Now I Have to Defend Dick Cheney

Joan Walsh is now accusing Dick Cheney of being an even bigger monster because he’s not trying to look into the background of his heart donor:

Still, I was a little startled to hear the former vice president express total indifference to questions about his heart donor in a revealing interview on Politicking with Larry King (it airs Thursday night; here’s a clip). It’s a window into his utter entitlement and self-absorption, and he comes off as an even bigger monster than I’d thought. Most people would at least feign interest in the donor; Cheney can’t manage it.

When King asks if he knows the identity of the person whose heart keeps him alive, Cheney, who is promoting a book about his transplant experience, says no, and adds, “it hadn’t been a priority for me.” ………

Seriously, why should Dick Cheney feel compelled to find out about his donor?

The idea that Cheney should somehow engage in some sort of narcissistic quest for information about his donor, with the likely effect of causing pain from his surviving loved ones?

If my heart ended up in Richard Bruce Cheney, I wouldn’t want anyone to know.

These Rat-F%$#s Keep Failing Up

Now that education privatization advocate (and general failure) Paul Vallas appears to be on the way out in Bridgeport (background here), it looks like he will land on his feet.

It appears that Illinois Governor Pat Quinn will have Vallas on the ticket as his Lieutenant Governor:

The nation’s largest union panned the Friday afternoon announcement that Illinois’ Democratic governor is tapping an education reform lightning rod to join his reelection ticket.

“We are less than thrilled by the selection of Mr. Vallas,” Illinois Education Association president Cinda Klickna told Salon in a Friday email. “As head of the Chicago Public School System, he was known as a top-down administrator who routinely chose confrontation with the Chicago Teachers Union over collaboration.” Klickna’s comments came in response to an inquiry to the IEA’s parent union, the National Education Association. American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten, who leads the country’s other top teachers’ union, sent Salon a three-word comment on Vallas’ selection: “We were surprised.”

As I’ve reported, Vallas is currently serving as superintendent of Bridgeport, Conn., schools, following past stints helming school districts in Philadelphia, New Orleans and Chicago – each marked by conflict with critics of the bipartisan education reform consensus. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported in 2006 that Vallas was “blasted” by the majority of the School Reform Commission, the agency overseeing city schools, for “his handling of a deficit that will force midyear cuts in the school system.” In New Orleans, PBS noted in 2010, “charters have exploded” from 2 percent to a majority of city schools. In Tuesday school board elections framed by activists as a referendum on the education agenda of Vallas and Bridgeport Mayor Bill Finch, a dissident faction grew to a bare majority of the board’s nine seats, putting Vallas’ future there in jeopardy.

People of Illinois, missing Rod Blagojevich yet?

Your Police State in Action

Yes, the FBI is trying to suppress the activities of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) wielding activist because he might actually learn what is going on:

Ryan Shapiro has just wrapped up a talk at Boston’s Suffolk University Law School, and as usual he’s surrounded by a gaggle of admirers. The crowd­, consisting of law students, academics, and activist types, is here for a panel discussion on the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, a 2006 law targeting activists whose protest actions lead to a “loss of profits” for industry. Shapiro, a 37-year-old Ph.D. student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, contributed a slideshow of newspaper headlines, posters, and government documents from as far back as the 1800s depicting animal advocates as a threat to national security. Now audience members want to know more about his dissertation and the archives he’s using. But many have a personal request: Would Shapiro help them discover what’s in their FBI files?

He is happy to oblige. According to the Justice Department, this tattooed activist-turned-academic is the FBI’s “most prolific” Freedom of Information Act requester—filing, during one period in 2011, upward of two documents requests a day. In the course of his doctoral work, which examines how the FBI monitors and investigates protesters, Shapiro has developed a novel, legal, and highly effective approach to mining the agency’s records. Which is why the government is petitioning the United States District Court in Washington, DC, to prevent the release of 350,000 pages of documents he’s after.

Invoking a legal strategy that had its heyday during the Bush administration, the FBI claims that Shapiro’s multitudinous requests, taken together, constitute a “mosaic” of information whose release could “significantly and irreparably damage national security” and would have “significant deleterious effects” on the bureau’s “ongoing efforts to investigate and combat domestic terrorism.”

………

When he started using privacy waivers, Shapiro realized he was on to something. Suppose you and I volunteered for the animal rights group PETA. If Shapiro requested all PETA-related FBI documents, he might get something back, but any references to us would be blacked out. If he requested documents related to us, he’d probably get nothing at all. But if he filed his PETA request along with privacy waivers signed by us, the FBI would be compelled to return all PETA documents that mention us—with the relevant details uncensored.

……….

Armed with signed privacy waivers, he sent out a few experimental requests—he calls them “submarine pings”—and when the FBI returned more than 100 pages on a close friend, he knew he’d struck gold. The response included pages of information that Shapiro had requested previously, but that the FBI had claimed didn’t exist. Using case details from those documents and a handful of additional waivers, he filed a new set of requests.

The FBI wants a Seven Year Stay on his requests.

Remember also, we are not talking about al Quaeda, we are talking about animal rights activists, folks who have not only killed fewer fewer people than Osama’s bully boys, but they have also killed fewer people than the militia movement and the anti-abortion movement.

I’d really like to see him at the helm of a well funded non-profit to continue his work once that he is done with dissertation.

We desperately need to enshrine the Swedish concept of Offentlighetsprincipen (openness) in our constitution.

Here is a video of one of his talks.

What he shows, it appears that there are no real security issues, but any close examination of their techniques and focus is pathetic and embarrassing.

This is the most common Real reason for the state security apparatus for invoking secrecy.  It’s not about protecting us, it is about covering their own asses.

Good Point ………

Say what you will about the batsh%$ insane wing of the Republican Party, but unlike liberals who seem to invest all their hopes in the Presidential primary they managed to take control of the party:

But the huge reaction to Scheiber’s piece just reminds me that ever since Sen. Ted Kennedy’s 1980 primary challenge to Jimmy Carter – maybe since Gene McCarthy’s insurgency, followed by Bobby Kennedy’s, convinced Lyndon Johnson not to seek re-election in 1968 – progressives have been over-invested in finding a primary campaign vehicle for their hopes and dreams. And until Barack Obama came along, that hadn’t worked out very well.

Even Obama’s emergence is a cautionary tale for Warren backers, because I’d argue that investing the freshman Illinois senator with magic progressive properties was a bad bet. He was never more progressive, ironically, than Hillary Clinton, except maybe on Iraq – and his national security policies can’t make any of his anti-war, pro-civil-liberties backers comfortable that they did the right thing.

Joan Walsh, the author, misses the point here: Obama was never in the remotest sense a progressive.

He lied in 2008, which is yet another reason why liberals play a suckers game by investing too much effort in the primaries.

If you take down an sitting President of your own party, the electoral consequences down ticket are huge.

If you pick off Representatives, and state reps, and board of ed members, and everything including dog catcher, in the primaries, as the (thoroughly repulsive) Club for Growth did, you get results, and these people become front runners when a Senator’s seat opens up, and eventually the bench from where candidates are selected becomes more in line with your ideology.

BTW, while we are at this, don’t give to the DCCC. As Down With Tyranny has repeatedly documented, the Democratic Party in general, and DCCC chair Steve Israel in particular, are determined to reconstruct the Blue Dog caucus, even if it results in fewer seats for the Dems.