It’s almost as if a shadowy cabal figured out how to get people to pay more to die faster. pic.twitter.com/9yvlvNZN0d— Honest Hillary (@Honest_Hillary) February 8, 2017
H/t Naked Capitalism.
Yes. I know, it’s an old tweet. I was cleaning up drafts, and felt the need to share this. 
It appears that while teaching law school courses, Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch made much over how women “abused” their employers over maternity benefits:
A former law student of Judge Neil Gorsuch, President Trump’s nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court, alleges that in a course she took from Gorsuch at the University of Colorado Law School last year, the judge told his class that employers, specifically law firms, should ask women seeking jobs about their plans for having children and implied that women manipulate companies starting in the interview stage to extract maternity benefits.
The concerns were shared in a letter, posted Sunday evening by the National Employment Lawyers Association and the National Women’s Law Center, written by Jennifer Sisk, a 2016 graduate of the University of Colorado Law School. It was sent on Friday to the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Ranking Member Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.
………
On April 19, 2016, Sisk wrote, Judge Gorsuch used a hypothetical from the prepared material for the class, in which a female law student applies for jobs at law firms because the student has a large debt to pay off. The student also intends to have a family with her husband.
“He interrupted our class discussion to ask students how many of us knew women who used their companies for maternity benefits, who used their companies to — in order to have a baby and then leave right away,” Sisk said.
She recalled that few students raised their hands and Gorsuch became animated. “He said, ‘Come on, guys. All of your hands should be up. Many women do this,'” Sisk said.
Sisk offered overall praise of Gorsuch as a teacher and legal mind, outside of this incident.
Apart from that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?
This whole Handmaidens Tale thing is a feature, not a bug of conservative jurists.
Democrats will roll over on his nomination anyway.
Jacobin, is an excellent place to find reasoned and concise writing from an unabashedly socialist* perspective.
I find this article a bit Panglossian, I believe that the reports of the death of Neoliberalism have been greatly exaggerated, it does raise some interesting issues.
What’s more the lede for the article is a hoot:
PBS NewsHour is generally pretty staid stuff — like Ambien but less habit-forming.
They owe me a screen wipe.
*A firmly democratic socialist perspective. No Trotskyites here.
We have finally seen a the first non-US commercial satellite with all electric propulsion delivered to a customer:
Eutelsat’s new 172B satellite marks a new step in the operator’s push toward widespread use of electric propulsion. Company executives believe all conditions are gradually being met to make such power both a reliable and economical option. There is more than one launcher available for this size spacecraft, a trade-off has been found between efficiency and transfer time to orbit, and an Ariane 6 feature will further reduce time to market.
Mainly thanks to electric propulsion, the weight of 172B has been limited to 3.5 metric tons (7,700 lb.) instead of 6 tons for a more conventional satellite. For that weight class, the lower position under Ariane 5’s fairing had long been the only option for launch, Eutelsat’s chief technology officer Yohann Leroy, notes. Other options that were technically feasible were not economical. Satellite operators are leery about relying on a single launcher, Leroy emphasizes, and that reluctance had stalled the advent of electric propulsion. “SpaceX’s Falcon 9 changed the game,” he says.
As a second launcher became available for the new weight class in commercial communications geostationary satellites, Eutelsat forged ahead, and in 2015 a Falcon 9 launched Eutelsat 115 West B, the operator’s first satellite using electric power for both station-keeping and orbit-raising.
The Eutelsat 115 West B was built by Boeing. But the France-based operator no longer has to depend on the U.S. industry. Thales Alenia Space and Airbus now also offer all-electric platforms, thus increasing the number of supplier options.
In 2014, Eutelsat ordered 172B from Airbus. The satellite uses Airbus’s upgraded Eurostar 3000 EOR (electric-orbit-raising) platform. “It is the first fully electric satellite not developed in the U.S.; it is a first for us and the European industry,” says Nicolas Chamussy, head of space systems at Airbus Defense and Space. Airbus was hoping to source the thrusters from Safran, in an attempt to have an entirely European spacecraft. Autonomy in space technology is a goal shared by the European Commission and the Continent’s industry.
………
Energy use onboard 172B is optimized thanks to two robot arms—two thrusters can be found at the end of each arm. Thrust can thus be precisely vectored. The axis of the thrust always goes through the satellite’s center of gravity, Arnaud de Rosnay, Airbus Defense and Space’s director for communications satellites, explains. Moreover, the arms help remove heat from the electronics hardware inside the spacecraft.
Assuming that VASIMR technology can reach a commercially acceptable state, it could provide relatively high thrust at lower efficiencies for orbital transfer, and lower thrust, and higher efficiency for station keeping, which would allow for both the advantages of Ion and Hall effect thrusters.
In either case, this promises to reduce the cost of satellites, because, much like ground round, you pay for launches by the pound.
By a wide margin, the most popular politician on America’s national scene right now is Bernie Sanders, and the Democratic Party establishment appears to think that its first priority is taking him, and his supporters, down:
If you look at the numbers, Bernie Sanders is the most popular politician in America – and it’s not even close. Yet bizarrely, the Democratic party – out of power across the country and increasingly irrelevant – still refuses to embrace him and his message. It’s increasingly clear they do so at their own peril.
A new Fox News poll out this week shows Sanders has a +28 net favorability rating among the US population, dwarfing all other elected politicians on both ends of the political spectrum. And he’s even more popular among the vaunted “independents”, where he is at a mind boggling +41.
………
One would think with numbers like that, Democratic politicians would be falling all over themselves to be associated with Sanders, especially considering the party as a whole is more unpopular than the Republicans and even Donald Trump right now. Yet instead of embracing his message, the establishment wing of the party continues to resist him at almost every turn, and they seem insistent that they don’t have to change their ways to gain back the support of huge swaths of the country.
Politico ran a story just this week featuring Democratic officials fretting over the fact that Sanders supporters may upend their efforts to retake governorships in southern states by insisting those candidates adopt Sanders’ populist policies – seemingly oblivious to the fact that Sanders plays well in some of those states too.
Sanders’ effect on Trump voters can be seen in a gripping town hall this week that MSNBC’s Chris Hayes hosted with him in West Virginia – often referred to as “Trump country” – where the crowd ended up giving him a rousing ovation after he talked about healthcare being a right of all people and that we are the only industrialized nation in the world who doesn’t provide healthcare as a right to all its people.
One would think with numbers like that, Democratic politicians would be falling all over themselves to be associated with Sanders, especially considering the party as a whole is more unpopular than the Republicans and even Donald Trump right now. Yet instead of embracing his message, the establishment wing of the party continues to resist him at almost every turn, and they seem insistent that they don’t have to change their ways to gain back the support of huge swaths of the country.
These are people who have made their careers sucking up to Wall Street and other corporate interest.
If the Democratic Party moves back toward actually protecting ordinary people from the “Malefactors of Great Wealth,”† they will lose power, and likely their phony baloney jobs.
*That power WITHIN an organization will be pursued at the even at the expense of the power OF that organization.
†Ironically, I am quoting a Republican, Theodore Roosevelt.
We have now discovered that our healthcare system has even corrupted the world renowned Mayo Clinic:
Mayo Clinic, one of the country’s top hospitals, is in the midst of controversy after its CEO said that the elite medical facility would prioritize the care of patients with private health insurance over those with Medicare and Medicaid.
The prioritization by the Rochester, MN-headquartered medical practice was recently revealed by the Minneapolis Star Tribune. And it has quickly drawn out some sharp critics—as well as sympathizers.
In a statement to the Minnesota Post Bulletin, Dr. Gerard Anderson, the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Hospital Finance and Management, compared the prioritization to policies seen in developing countries. “This is what happens in many low-income countries. The health system is organized to give the most affluent preference in receiving health care,” he wrote.
Likewise, Minnesota Department of Human Services Commissioner Emily Piper, expressed surprise and concern by the statements of Mayo’s CEO, Dr. John Noseworthy. “Fundamentally, it’s our expectation at DHS that Mayo Clinic will serve our enrollees in public programs on an equal standing with any other Minnesotan that walks in their door,” she said. “We have a lot of questions for Mayo Clinic about how and if and through what process this directive from Dr. Noseworthy is being implemented across their health system.”
………
Mayo can use its standing as a prestigious institution to negotiate higher prices with commercial insurance companies, but it can’t do the same with the government. As such, those with private insurance can bring more money to the hospital than patients with the same treatments on government programs. Under the ACA, the number of people covered by Medicare and Medicaid has expanded. However, the law also decreased the number of uninsured, which can be costly to hospitals.
In his speech, Noseworthy said that Mayo had reached a “tipping point” with a recent 3.7 percent surge in Medicaid patients. “If we don’t grow the commercially insured patients, we won’t have income at the end of the year to pay our staff, pay the pensions, and so on,” he said. “So we’re looking for a really mild or modest change of a couple percentage points to shift that balance.”
Nevertheless, the nonprofit still generated substantial profits in 2016: $475 million.
Seriously: We need to burn down the existing healthcare system.
Concealed within the 123 pages of legislative verbiage and dense boilerplate of the House Republican bill repealing the Affordable Care Act are not a few hard-to-find nuggets. Here’s one crying out for exposure: The bill encourages health insurance companies to pay their top executives more.
It does so by removing the ACA’s limit on corporate tax deductions for executive pay. The cost to the American taxpayer of eliminating this provision: well in excess of $70 million a year. In the reckoning of the Institute for Policy Studies, a think tank that analyzed the limitation in 2014, that would have been enough that year to buy dental insurance under the ACA for 262,000 Americans, or pay the silver plan deductibles for 28,000.
As part of an effort to rein in soaring executive pay, the ACA decreed that health insurance companies could deduct from their taxes only $500,000 of the pay of each top executive. That’s a tighter restriction than the limit imposed on other corporations, which is $1 million per executive. The ACA closed a loophole for insurance companies enjoyed by other corporations, which could deduct the cost of stock options and other “performance-based” pay; for insurance companies, the deduction cap is $500,000 per executive, period.
The idea was to signal that the ACA, which cemented health insurance companies into the center of American healthcare, wasn’t a pure giveaway to the industry.
“Consumers across America should know that when they pay their hard-earned dollars to cover the soaring cost of premiums, they are not just chipping in to pay for the CEOs’ next new yacht,” said then-Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa).
………
The House Republican bill repeals the compensation limit as of the end of this year. The GOP hasn’t exactly trumpeted this provision; it’s six lines on page 67 of the measure, labeled “Remuneration from Certain Insurers” and referring only to the obscure IRS code section imposing the limit. Repeal of the provision apparently means that the insurers will be able to deduct $1 million in cash per executive, plus the cost of “performance-based” stock awards and options, like other corporations.
This is just how Republicans roll.
Take money from poor people so that rich folk can afford that 3rd yacht.
They really should have been drowned at birth, all of them.
I was in kitchen, and the radio show Wait Wait ……… Don’t Tell Me was on, and they were talking about the Canadian sex toy manufacturer who has been sued for collecting data from their internet enabled vibrator.
I casually commented to Charlie, who was drinking a Coke at the time, “They caught them coming and going.”
Charlie was caught mid drink, started to laugh, and proceeded to spew Coke from his nose, thankfully he made it to the trash can before he started to completely lose it.
This raises the obvious question, what is the term for spewing a drink from your nose caused by laughter?
According to the Urban Dictionary, there are two words, snork, and schnarf.
I should note that it was not my intention to get Charlie to schnarf his drink, but I might have chuckled.
I am a bad, bad man.
It looks like Wall Street is looking to capitalize on the collapse of the American Mall for its next speculative cash cow:
Wall Street speculators are zeroing in on the next U.S. credit crisis: the mall.
It’s no secret many mall complexes have been struggling for years as Americans do more of their shopping online. But now, they’re catching the eye of hedge-fund types who think some may soon buckle under their debts, much the way many homeowners did nearly a decade ago.
Like the run-up to the housing debacle, a small but growing group of firms are positioning to profit from a collapse that could spur a wave of defaults. Their target: securities backed not by subprime mortgages, but by loans taken out by beleaguered mall and shopping center operators. With bad news piling up for anchor chains like Macy’s and J.C. Penney, bearish bets against commercial mortgage-backed securities are growing.
In recent weeks, firms such as Alder Hill Management — an outfit started by protégés of hedge-fund billionaire David Tepper — have ramped up wagers against the bonds, which have held up far better than the shares of beaten-down retailers. By one measure, short positions on two of the riskiest slices of CMBS surged to $5.3 billion last month — a 50 percent jump from a year ago.
If history is any guide, they will make out like raped apes, and the rest of us will be left holding the bag.
I don’t know how exactly they will f%$# the rest of us, but history shows that their profits are financed by our money.
Nicola Sturgeon Announces Plans to Rebuild Hadrian’s Wall, and England Is Going to Pay for It
It’s from News Hump, a parody site, but it is a wonderful mocking of the Brexit, the Scottish independence movement, and Donald Trump.
Well done.
We just had the 2nd credit union failure of the year, Florida Conference AME Church Federal Credit Union of Tallahassee, FL.
Bank closings looks to be progressing about the same rate as last year, so no “Trump effect” so far.
Here is the Full NCUA list.
on the one hand I love the #oxfordcomma, on the other hand these sentences truly are SO GOOD pic.twitter.com/Gst0OSY0Wo— Jules (@scuttling) March 6, 2017
There is a dispute in linguistic circles as to whether or not you should the Oxford comma, which is the comma used by some before the,”And,” of the last item of a list.
If you use the Oxford comma, you write, “I love my parents, Lady Gaga, and Humpty Dumpty” and if you eschew this convention, “I love my parents, Lady Gaga and Humpty Dumpty.”
To my mind, the latter form strongly states that your parents are Lady Gaga and Humpty Dumpty, so I am, and likely always will be, a strong supporter of the Oxford (aka serial) comma.
Well, it appears that a judge in Maine agrees with me, ruling that an employer is liable for overtime pay for their truckers because of a missing comma:
Never let it be said that punctuation doesn’t matter.
In Maine, the much-disputed Oxford comma has helped a group of dairy drivers in a dispute with a company about overtime pay.
The Oxford comma is used before the words “and” or “or” in a list of three or more things. Also known as the serial comma, its aficionados say it clarifies sentences in which things are listed.
………
In a judgment that will delight Oxford comma enthusiasts everywhere, a US court of appeals sided with delivery drivers for Oakhurst Dairy because the lack of a comma made part of Maine’s overtime laws too ambiguous.
The state’s law says the following activities do not count for overtime pay:The canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of:
(1) Agricultural produce;
(2) Meat and fish products; and
(3) Perishable foods.The drivers argued, due to a lack of a comma between “packing for shipment” and “or distribution”, the law refers to the single activity of “packing”, not to “packing” and “distribution” as two separate activities. As the drivers distribute – but do not pack – the goods, this would make them eligible for overtime pay.
Previously, a district court had ruled in the dairy company’s favour, who argued that the legislation “unambiguously” identified the two as separate activities exempt from overtime pay. But the appeals judge sided with the drivers.
Circuit judge David J. Barron wrote:We conclude that the exemption’s scope is actually not so clear in this regard. And because, under Maine law, ambiguities in the state’s wage and hour laws must be construed liberally in order to accomplish their remedial purpose, we adopt the drivers’ narrower reading of the exemption.
The AP REALLY needs to rewrite its style guide on this matter.
I’m sure that Merle Haggard’s wives would agree.
It’s an essay about economists by an economist titled, The Wrongest Profession, and the can of whup ass that it’s author, CEPR economist Dean Baker, unleashes on the dismal science is a thing of beauty:
Over the past two decades, the economics profession has compiled an impressive track record of getting almost all the big calls wrong. In the mid-1990s, all the great minds in the field agreed that the unemployment rate could not fall much below 6 percent without triggering spiraling inflation. It turns out that the unemployment rate could fall to 4 percent as a year-round average in 2000, with no visible uptick in the inflation rate.
As the stock bubble that drove the late 1990s boom was already collapsing, leading lights in Washington were debating whether we risked paying off the national debt too quickly. The recession following the collapse of the stock bubble took care of this problem, as the gigantic projected surpluses quickly turned to deficits. The labor market pain from the collapse of this bubble was both unpredicted and largely overlooked, even in retrospect. While the recession officially ended in November 2001, we didn’t start creating jobs again until the fall of 2003. And we didn’t get back the jobs we lost in the downturn until January 2005. At the time, it was the longest period without net job creation since the Great Depression.
When the labor market did finally begin to recover, it was on the back of the housing bubble. Even though the evidence of a bubble in the housing sector was plainly visible, as were the junk loans that fueled it, folks like me who warned of an impending housing collapse were laughed at for not appreciating the wonders of modern finance. After the bubble burst and the financial crisis shook the banking system to its foundations, the great minds of the profession were near unanimous in predicting a robust recovery. Stimulus was at best an accelerant for the impatient, most mainstream economists agreed—not an essential ingredient of a lasting recovery.
While the banks got all manner of subsidies in the form of loans and guarantees at below-market interest rates, all in the name of avoiding a second Great Depression, underwater homeowners were treated no better than the workers waiting for a labor market recovery. The Obama administration felt it was important for homeowners, unlike the bankers, to suffer the consequences of their actions. In fact, white-collar criminals got a holiday in honor of the financial crisis; on the watch of the Obama Justice Department, only a piddling number of bankers would face prosecution for criminal actions connected with the bubble.
I think that the last graph is a bit to kind to Obama, but it’s well worth the read.
Adjusted for inflation, American spending to reconstruct Afghanistan now exceeds the total expended to rebuild all of Western Europe under the Marshall Plan.
—Andrew Bacevich, writing in the New York Times
Step one when you are in a hole: Stop digging.
The Simpsons have some Nostra Dumbass moments:
Geert Wilders and his right wing racist Party for Freedom massively under-performed pre election polls:
The Dutch political establishment appeared Wednesday to fend off a challenge from anti-Muslim firebrand Geert Wilders, according to initial vote counts, a victory in a closely watched national election that heartened centrist leaders across Europe who are fearful of populist upsets in their own nations.
The result was embraced by other leaders inside and outside the Netherlands as a major blow to anti-immigrant populism, breaking a streak of disruption that started with the Brexit vote and continued with the election of Donald Trump, a skeptic of European integration. Instead, as the Netherlands’ famed tulip season gets underway, Prime Minister Mark Rutte will remain in office as he tries to form a coalition.
The vote in the prosperous trading nation was seen as a bellwether for France and Germany, which head to the polls in the coming months and have also been shaken by fierce anti-immigrant sentiment.
Wilders nose-dived in recent weeks after topping opinion polls for most of the past 18 months, as Dutch voters appeared to turn away from an election message that described some Moroccans as “scum” and called for banning the Koran and shuttering mosques.
Wednesday is “an evening where the Netherlands, after Brexit, after the American elections, said no to the wrong kind of populism,” Rutte told a cheering crowd in The Hague. He said he had already spoken to other European leaders to accept their congratulations.
Note that Wilders STILL picked up a seat or two, and there is another story to this election:
With 84 percent of the voting districts reporting results early Thursday, Rutte’s center-right People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy remained the largest party, but it was on track to lose nearly a quarter of its seats in parliament, forcing the prime minister to form a new, broader coalition across the political spectrum. His coalition partner, the center-left Labor Party, was wiped out as a political force, a punishing blow in response to cooperation with a longtime rival that had a sharply different approach to the core issues of working citizens.
(emphasis mine)
This is something that happens time and time again: The “Center Left” gets wiped out, and to my mind, there is a simple reason for this: as the consensus has moved rightward with the general adoption of the so called “Washington Consensus,” the Center-Left has followed this consensus, and under those conditions, it can simply not deliver.
This is worse in Europe, because the EU, and even more so the Euro, are not just conservative institutions, but reactionary institutions, which favor capital over labor and finance over all, and the mainstream “left” in Europe is so wedded to the EU that they are effectively political conservatives.
To paraphrase Harry S Truman, people will chose a real conservative over a fake one every day of the week.
My hope is that that the far left prevails rather than the far right, but betting on the left getting its sh%$ together is a sucker bet. and history shows that the center right and center left will hitch their wagon to fascists before they partner with the real left..
Coal miner thanks bernie for advocating for him more than his own senator McConnell. looking forward to how people twist this into misogyny pic.twitter.com/4GLkdRpAIO— Katie Halper (@kthalps) March 14, 2017
H/t naked capitalism
Someone has proposed an Exchange Traded Fund (ETF) of corporate welfare recipients:
It stands to reason that tax-shy companies outperform, so why not create an ETF for them?
We’ve had funds for sin stocks (the Vice mutual fund which invests in tobacco, booze and gambling) and those for biblical values (The Inspire Global Hope Large Cap ETF recently launched).
Now PassiveBeat presents a new twist on the vice/not vice idea: the Corporate Welfare ETF. This putative fund is chock full of megacaps that pay no tax and have outperformed the S&P 500. What’s not to like?
We’ve taken our cue from a report released earlier this month by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (Itep) highlighting companies that have benefited from what may charitably be termed corporate welfare – tax loopholes, subsidies and so on.
Is this a joke, or is this an investment strategy. I really cannot tell.
The long-simmering war between Sens. John McCain and Rand Paul boiled over on Wednesday when the Arizona lawmaker directly accused his colleague of working for Russian President Vladimir Putin.
While speaking from the Senate floor in support of a bill advancing Montenegro’s bid to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), McCain noted objection from his Kentucky colleague, saying that if you oppose the measure, “You are achieving the objectives of Vladimir Putin… trying to dismember this small country which has already been the subject an attempted coup.”
McCain continued: “If they object, they are now carrying out the desires and ambitions of Vladimir Putin and I do not say that lightly.”
Several moments later, after the 80-year-old senator asked for unanimous consent to move the bill forward, Paul took the mic to raise his objection before dramatically exiting the room.
In response, McCain began railing against Paul, his voice trembling with anger: “I note the senator from Kentucky leaving the floor without justification or any rationale for the action he has just taken. That is really remarkable, that a senator blocking a treaty that is supported by the overwhelming number—perhaps 98, at least, of his colleagues—would come to the floor and object and walk away.”
He then directly connected Paul to the Russian government: “The only conclusion you can draw when he walks away is he has no justification for his objection to having a small nation be part of NATO that is under assault from the Russians.
“So I repeat again, the senator from Kentucky is now working for Vladimir Putin.”
Rather unsurprisingly, the Mitch McConnell chose not to cite Senate Rule XIX, which says in part, “No Senator in debate shall, directly or indirectly, by any form of words impute to another Senator or to other Senators any conduct or motive unworthy or unbecoming a Senator,” because it’s OK if you are a Republican to accuse your colleague of being a Russian mole, but it’s somehow wrong to quote Coretta Scott King from the Senate record in a debate if you are a Democrat.
May to send Article 50 letter strapped to a bulldog in a Spitfire
They owe me a screen wipe.