Year: 2019

They Don’t Make Minions Like They Used To

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It looks like the Connecticut prosecutor that William Barr chose to trump (pun not intended) up charges against the US State Security Apparatus has been able to find evidence that the investigations of Russian election meddling were evidence of a deep state conspiracy.

Let me be clear, there is evidence that the Russians were involved in the 2016 Presidential election on a level not seen since Winston Churchill and British intelligence meddled in the 1940 election.

That being said, the election wasn’t won the the Russians, or even by Trump, it was lost by Hillary Clinton, her egregiously incompetent campaign, and the stunningly inept Democrat Party establishment.

Still, in the fever dreams of the right wing, there is still a vast conspiracy of the deep state that is implacably opposed to the modern Jesus that is Donald Trump.

Bullsh%$:

The prosecutor handpicked by Attorney General William P. Barr to scrutinize how U.S. agencies investigated President Trump’s 2016 campaign said he could not offer evidence to the Justice Department’s inspector general to support the suspicions of some conservatives that the case was a setup by American intelligence, people familiar with the matter said.

Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s office contacted U.S. Attorney John Durham, the prosecutor Barr personally tapped to lead a separate review of the 2016 probe into possible coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia, the people said. The inspector general also contacted several U.S. intelligence agencies.

Among Horowitz’s questions: whether a Maltese professor who interacted with a Trump campaign adviser was actually a U.S. intelligence asset deployed to ensnare the campaign, the people said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the inspector general’s findings have not been made public.

But the intelligence agencies said the professor was not among their assets, the people said. And Durham informed Horowitz’s office that his investigation had not produced any evidence that might contradict the inspector general’s findings on that point.

………

Trump and his allies have relentlessly criticized the FBI probe, which was taken over by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, as a “witch hunt” and pushed for investigations of those who launched it. They have been eagerly anticipating the release of Horowitz’s report in hopes the watchdog with a nonpartisan reputation might validate their attacks.

Barr told CBS News in May that some of the facts he had learned about the Russia case “don’t hang together with the official explanations of what happened.” He declined to be more specific. In response to recent reports about Barr’s skepticism about the forthcoming inspector general report, Justice Department spokeswoman Kerri Kupec said in a statement that the watchdog’s investigation “is a credit to the Department of Justice.”

………

Horowitz’s draft report concludes that political bias did not taint how top FBI officials running the investigation handled the case, people familiar with the matter said. But it details troubling misconduct that Trump and his allies are likely to emphasize as they criticize the bureau.

Don’t think that this will prevent Barr from lying about this.

Lying about the results of investigations in order to protect the President, whether it be Trump or GHW Bush, is kind of his secret super power.

McKinsey is Really a Plague on the World

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Between justifying layoffs, financializing businesses out of relevance, laundering money for corrupt politicians, and generally justifying unlimited stupidity and cruelty, the consultants at McKinsey & Company have been making the world a much worse place since 1926.

But they’ve outdone themselves this time.

They are consulting with the Trump administration about detaining and deporting illegal immigrants, and they are (not joking) suggesting that detainees be starved and provided inadequate medical care:

Just days after he took office in 2017, President Donald Trump set out to make good on his campaign pledge to halt illegal immigration. In a pair of executive orders, he ordered “all legally available resources” to be shifted to border detention facilities and called for hiring 10,000 new immigration officers.

The logistical challenges were daunting, but as luck would have it, Immigration and Customs Enforcement already had a partner on its payroll: McKinsey & Company, an international consulting firm brought on under the Obama administration to help engineer an “organizational transformation” in the ICE division charged with deporting migrants who are in the United States unlawfully.

The Obama administration brought in McKinsey.  There is a whole bunch of stupidity and evil in that sentence.

ICE quickly redirected McKinsey toward helping the agency figure out how to execute the White House’s clampdown on illegal immigration. But the money-saving recommendations the consultants came up with made some career ICE staff uncomfortable. They proposed cuts in spending on food for migrants, as well as on medical care and supervision of detainees, according to interviews with people who worked on the project for both ICE and McKinsey and 1,500 pages of documents obtained from the agency after ProPublica filed a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act.

McKinsey’s team also looked for ways to accelerate the deportation process, provoking worries among some ICE staff members that the recommendations risked short-circuiting due process protections for migrants fighting removal from the United States. The consultants, three people who worked on the project said, seemed focused solely on cutting costs and speeding up deportations — activities whose success could be measured in numbers — with little acknowledgment that these policies affected thousands of human beings.

In what one former official described as “heated meetings” with McKinsey consultants, agency staff members questioned whether saving pennies on food and medical care for detainees justified the potential human cost.

But the consulting firm’s sway at ICE grew to the point that McKinsey’s staff even ghostwrote a government contracting document that defined the consulting team’s own responsibilities and justified the firm’s retention, a contract extension worth $2.2 million. “Can they do that?” an ICE official wrote to a contracting officer in May 2017.

………

McKinsey has faced mounting scrutiny over the past two years, as reports by The New York Times, ProPublica and others have raised questions about whether the firm has crossed ethical and legal lines in pursuit of profit. The consultancy returned millions of dollars in fees after South African authorities implicated it in a profiteering scheme. The exposure of its history advising opioid makers on ways to bolster sales induced the usually secretive firm to declare publicly that its opioid work had ended. Last month, the Times reported that McKinsey’s bankruptcy practice is the subject of a federal criminal investigation. The firm has denied wrongdoing in each case, but it apologized for missteps in South Africa.

………

The consulting team became so driven to save money, people involved in the project said, that consultants sometimes ignored — and even complained to agency managers about — ICE staffers who objected that McKinsey’s cost-cutting proposals risked jeopardizing the health and safety of migrants.

………

McKinsey also looked to cut costs by lowering standards at ICE detention facilities, according to an internal ICE email and two former agency officials. McKinsey, an ICE supervisor wrote in an email dated March 30, 2017, was “looking for ways to cut or reduce standards because they are too costly,” albeit, the supervisor added, “without sacrificing quality, safety and mission.”

………

But the McKinsey recommendations remain on the books at ICE. The consultants analyzed how the agency could save money at detention centers beyond those where they helped renegotiate contracts — including several near the border, like ICE’s largest family detention facility, in Dilley, Texas — and Cox said these analyses remain reference points for future efforts to curb spending. A report issued this summer by the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general raised concerns about food quality and upkeep at several ICE facilities, both categories on which McKinsey recommended ICE spend less.

One of the more prominent ex-employees of McKinsey & Company these days, is Pete Buttigieg, and he has refused to talk about what he did when working for them, claiming tht he is constrained by a non-disclosure agreement.

Yeah, right.

Bye Felicia

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And by Felicia, I mean Kamala Harris, who has ended her presidential campaign:

Sen. Kamala D. Harris, proud of being one of the only presidential candidates to spend Thanksgiving in Iowa and not at home, invited reporters into her temporary residence in Des Moines on the holiday to show off her turkey preparation skills.

What she didn’t say at the time was that she was also having intensive conversations with her husband, her sister Maya Harris and Maya’s family as the tightknit group grappled with whether there was any path forward for her campaign.

The talks extended into late Monday night, as Kamala Harris stayed up until 2 a.m. futilely trying to find a way to push on. But Tuesday around 12:45, she called her staffers to tell them it was all over.

It was a sobering finish to a once-dazzling campaign. Harris (D-Calif.) proved an uneven campaigner and was ultimately engulfed by low polling numbers, internal turmoil and a sense that she was unable to provide a clear message amid the roiling, impassioned politics of the moment.

I can’t say that I’m upset that she is out of the race.

Her campaign was equal parts misrepresentation of her records, pandering to rich donors, and empty platitudes.

I’m never going to vote for Tulsi Gabbard, but I am grateful for her making Harris’ actual record as a prosecutor an issue in the debates.

It’s what took her out of contention.

Bullsh%$

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Is this an act? I do not believe Mr. Harvard Rhodes Scholar had to serve as mayor for several years before he realized residential segregation exists. South Bend has been under a desegregation consent decree since 1981. It’s still in effect today. He’s saying he didn’t know that? https://t.co/6lLqJV6bpU

— Max Kennerly (@MaxKennerly) December 2, 2019

In a campaign stop is South Carolina, South Bend Mayor Pete “Sentient Mayonnaise” Buttigieg explained his horrible record as mayor on racial issues by stating that, “‘I was slow to realize’ South Bend schools were not integrated.”

Considering the fact that there has literally been a consent decree mandating that South Bend desegrate its schools for longer than the Sentient Mayonnaise has been alive, his alibi falls flat.

It is literally impossible for him not to have known about this as soon as he had the slightest interest in a political career in his home town.

This is such a toxic mix of white privilege and duplicity that I thought that it exceeds the human capability for mockery, or so I thought. (The Onion has proved me wrong with their article “Pete Buttigieg Admits Only Recently Realizing Black People Can Vote,”  which is an amazingly well-done beat-down Buttigieg’s racial insensitivity.)

Damn

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Dorothy “D.C.” Fontana has died at age 80.

She, and Gene L. Coon were major formative figures in Star Trek who never got the credit that they deserved:

D.C. Fontana, the famed TV writer best known for Star Trek: The Original Series and who blazed a trail for storytelling and women in science fiction, died Monday after a brief illness. She was 80.

The American Film Institute announced today the news of Fontana’s passing.

Fontana, whose full name was Dorothy Catherine, wrote several episodes of Star Trek (some under the pseudonym Michael Richards) and was most noted for creating Spock’s backstory and expanding Vulcan culture. In the episode “Journey to Babel,” she established the characters of Spock’s father Sarek and mother Amanda. In the “Yesteryear” episode of Star Trek: The Animated Series, for which Fontana served as story editor and associate producer, she created Spock’s childhood history.

………

She is survived by her husband, Oscar-winning visual effects cinematographer Dennis Skotak. In lieu of flowers, her family asks that donations be made to the Humane Society, Best Friends Animal Society, or the American Film Institute in her memory.

We have lost a giant.

Leaving Congress to Spend More Time with His Parole Officer

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I am referring, of course, to Duncan Hunter, Jr., who will plead guilty to embezzling campaign funds and resign from Congress.

Given that his district is pretty safely Republican, I believe that the Douglas Adams rule applies, and that he will be replaced by something even more bizarrely inexplicable:

After years of denials and claims that he was the target of a political witch hunt, Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Alpine) is scheduled to appear in federal court Tuesday morning to plead guilty in a sweeping campaign finance investigation.

The announcement was posted on the U.S. District Court docket Monday morning, then KUSI aired an interview with Hunter in which he said he would plead guilty to one of the 60 criminal charges against him. He suggested that he is likely to spend time in custody.

“The plea I accepted is misuse of my own campaign funds, of which I pled guilty to only one count,” Hunter told the station. “I think it’s important that people know that I did make mistakes. I did not properly monitor or account for my campaign money. I justify my plea with the understanding that I am responsible for my own campaign and my own campaign money.”

The reversal comes nearly six months after Hunter’s wife and former campaign manager, Margaret Hunter, admitted to her role in a widespread scheme that saw the couple allegedly spend more than $200,000 in campaign donations on family expenses like vacations, gas, groceries, school lunches and oral surgery. Such spending is prohibited to prevent undue influence by contributors.

No analysis here, I’m just gloating.

Bobby Kennedy, Jr., Would You Please Dine on Excrement and then Expire?

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Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. took his antivax sh%$ show to Samoa, where 42 people, including 22 infants, have now died of measles.
Kennedy is a murderer:*

It was probably inevitable that the success of the anti-vaccination movement would eventually lead to an outbreak with substantial casualties. It has now happened in Samoa, where 48 people so far have died from measles, including 22 infants. Public health officials do not believe the outbreak has peaked, and expect those numbers to rise, possibl considerably. Why is the outbreak (which has hit much of Oceania in recent months) particularly bad and particularly deadly in Samoa? 

Yep, drops in vaccination rates?

And who was front and center of this?  Bobby, Jr.

As you might expect, the decline in vaccination rates wasn’t due solely to domestic causes; it was assisted by a well-resourced global movement, with some familiar faces.

Anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a nephew of President John F. Kennedy, visited the country in June, appearing next to officials at Samoan independence celebrations. His visit was “for a program that is not government-related,” an official in the prime minister’s department told Samoan news media at the time.

Kennedy has asserted that vaccines cause autism, a claim disproved by extensive research. Members of the Kennedy family have publicly criticized him for helping “spread dangerous misinformation.”

An Instagram photo shows Kennedy embracing the Australian Samoan anti-vaccine activist Taylor Winterstein in Samoa on June 4. “I am deeply honored to have been in the presence of a man I believe is, can and will change the course of history,” Winterstein wrote in the caption, adding hashtags #makinginformedchoices #investigatebeforeyouvaccinate.

………

As appalling and reckless as their advocacy is in their home countries, it’s considerably moreso in lower income countries like Samoa, where measles fatality rates are likely to be considerably higher, as we’re seeing here.

But don’t worry, antivaxxers are sending vitamins, so everything is cool.

What the f%$# is wrong with these folk?

*FWIW, Charlie, my son on the autism spectrum, spotted by Sharon when he was about 3 days old, well before any vaccines, agrees with description of Kennedy as a murderer.

Well, He Would Say That, Wouldn’t He?*

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Now that the DoJ’s inspector general has found no wrongdoing about the FBI investigation of the Trump campaign, Attorney General William Barr is looking to subvert the report:

Attorney General William P. Barr has told associates he disagrees with the Justice Department’s inspector general on one of the key findings in an upcoming report — that the FBI had enough information in July 2016 to justify launching an investigation into members of the Trump campaign, according to people familiar with the matter.

The Justice Department’s inspector general, Michael Horo­witz, is due to release his long-awaited findings in a week, but behind the scenes at the Justice Department, disagreement has surfaced about one of Horowitz’s central conclusions on the origins of the Russia investigation. The discord could be the prelude to a major fissure within federal law enforcement on the controversial question of investigating a presidential campaign.

Barr has not been swayed by Horowitz’s rationale for concluding that the FBI had sufficient basis to open an investigation on July 31, 2016, these people said.

Barr’s public defenses of President Trump, including his assertion that intelligence agents spied on the Trump campaign, have led Democrats to accuse him of acting like the president’s personal attorney and eroding the independence of the Justice Department. But Trump and his Republican allies have cheered Barr’s skepticism of the Russia investigation.

It’s not yet clear how Barr plans to make his objection to Horowitz’s conclusion known. The inspector general report, currently in draft form, is being finalized after input from various witnesses and offices that were scrutinized by the inspector general. Barr or a senior Justice Department official could submit a formal letter as part of that process, which would then be included in the final report. It is standard practice for every inspector general report to include a written response from the department. Barr could forgo a written rebuttal on that specific point and just publicly state his concerns.

Barr is not Attorney General, he is Trump’s consigliere. 
This man is arguably guiltier than John Mitchell was during the Nixon administration.

*Mandy Rice-Davies Applies?  Seriously, learn your history.

Live in Obedient Fear, Citizen

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The Owellian named Department of Homeland Security is looking to change regulations to require facial scans of US citizens at the border:

Homeland Security wants to expand facial recognition checks for travelers arriving to and departing from the U.S. to also include citizens, which had previously been exempt from the mandatory checks.

In a filing, the department has proposed that all travelers, and not just foreign nationals or visitors, will have to complete a facial recognition check before they are allowed to enter the U.S., but also to leave the country.

………

But although there may not always be a clear way to opt-out of facial recognition at the airport, U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents — also known as green card holders — have been exempt from these checks, the existing rules say.

Now, the proposed rule change to include citizens has drawn ire from one of the largest civil liberties groups in the country.

“Time and again, the government told the public and members of Congress that U.S. citizens would not be required to submit to this intrusive surveillance technology as a condition of traveling,” said Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union .

………

Citing a data breach of close to 100,000 license plate and traveler images in June, as well as concerns about a lack of sufficient safeguards to protect the data, Stanley said the government “cannot be trusted” with this technology and that lawmakers should intervene.

Our surveillance state is out of control.

The Most Evil Bureaucracy in Government

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Matt Stoller is on this.

He is talking, of course about one of the (many) misbegotten spawn of the Clinton administration, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) which among other things, literally assigned a price to raping children in prison. (adults too)

This is just one of the abominations, coal ash comes to mind, that these people have been hip deep in:

Today I have a treat for you, an issue of BIG written by an anonymous government lawyer buried deep in the bowels of American bureaucracy. One of the reasons Americans are losing faith in our political institutions is because laws passed by democratically elected officials increasingly don’t matter. One of my favorite regulators, Rohit Chopra at the Federal Trade Commission, said explicitly, as a sort of challenge to the commission, that “FTC orders are not suggestions.”

Of course, laws and regulators that affect the powerful are increasingly suggestions, and that’s why we’re in a political crisis. This anonymous lawyer is going to lay out one of the key institutional mechanisms by which economists and corporate interests wreck our ability to actually have laws take effect once they’ve been passed.

His explanation of how bureaucracy works will show that we should be paying attention this Wednesday to an obscure nomination of a corporate lawyer, Paul J. Ray, to be head of an agency of economists, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, or OIRA. Because OIRA is where power really lives in Washington. It’ll be interesting to see if any Senators show up; Democratic Presidential nominee Kamala Harris is on the relevant Senate committee.

Why Congress Couldn’t Outlaw Prison Rape

Prison rape is one of the most horrifying and abhorrent practices in American culture. Prison rape is pervasive, a form of soft torture so extensive it is the butt of endless jokes in popular culture (as John Oliver noted in a long segment on how Hollywood jokes about the practice). In 2003, Congress unanimously passed the Prison Rape Elimination Act, a bill directing the Attorney General to issue regulations detecting and eliminating prison rape in Federal jails. In 2012, Erich Holder finally did so.

Congress gave discretion to the Attorney General, but because of an obscure regulatory agency, Holder didn’t have the final word. Instead, the Department of Justice was required to conduct an extensive cost-benefit analysis of its proposed rule and submit it to a small group of economists in the White House for their thumbs up on whether the Attorney General would be allowed to finalize the rule.

This group of economists is located in an obscure agency called the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, or OIRA, staffed at the time by a close friend of Obama, legal legend Cass Sunstein. Most agencies wishing to put out a must draft an extensive Regulatory Impact Analysis (RIA) detailing the costs and benefits of the rule, justify the need for the rule to OIRA, and make any changes OIRA economists demand. In this instance, technocrats issued a 168-page RIA questioning how much money the rape victims would be willing to pay to avoid rape, or how much they would be willing to accept in exchange for being raped. (The estimates were $310k to $480k for an adult victim, and $675k for a juvenile victim, for the ‘highest’ form of sexual assault.)

In the end, the regulations put forward were cruel and weak, exempting immigration facilities and putting “tight restrictions on inmates who report rape.” It also removed the requirement that prisons actually *do* anything except have a plan to reduce prison rape. Failure to execute on the plan meant they’ll need another plan.

………

The Regulatory Impact Assessment is here, if you want to to go through the cost/benefit analysis of prison-based sexual assault. Or you can just read a key paragraph, which details the amount it is ‘worth’ per victim.-

They also did their best to stop Congressionally mandated regulations for backup cameras (backing over your own kids), coal ash, favored vapes, etc.

OIRA has the authority to do all of this because of Executive Order 12,866, which was signed by President Clinton in 1993 “to reform and make more efficient the regulatory process.” Every president since Clinton has reaffirmed E.O. 12,866, often with their own “twist;” Obama emphasized that agencies should “consider…values that are difficult or impossible to quantify,” and Trump has put in place a regulatory budget. Regardless (especially since OIRA never took consideration of values impossible to quantify seriously), E.O. 12,866 has the end result of elevating economists above scientists and public health experts and giving economists a veto over all health, safety, and environmental regulations.

This may be worse than Clinton’s crime bill, devastation of the social safety net through “Welfare Reform”, and the repeal of Glass Steagall.

The good news is that OIRA is established by executive order, and so can be shut down by executive order.

Unfortunately, the only candidate likely to do this is Bernie Sanders.

Read the whole article for more horror stories about how OIRA has monetized the public good.

Speaking of Horrible Companies You Should Never Do Business With………

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That perennial fan favorite Amazon is lighting up the statistics for workplace injuries, a data point that surprise no one:

Amazon is facing renewed scrutiny over working conditions at its warehouses following two new reports published Monday.

In one report, Gizmodo analyzed injury reports that Amazon had submitted as required by law to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, a federal workplace-safety agency. According to Gizmodo, by Amazon’s own count, injury rates at its facility in the New York City borough of Staten Island were more than three times the industry average.

Gizmodo also found that the injuries were often apparently severe, with Amazon workers missing an average of 64 days an injury.

………

In a separate investigation published by Reveal and The Atlantic, injury reports obtained from 23 of Amazon’s 110 warehouses in the US showed that the rates of serious injuries at those locations were more than twice the industry average.

………

The Reveal investigation also included several workers’ accounts of their experience at the company, including an incident during a gas leak at a warehouse in California, in which workers accused Amazon management of refusing to stop operations — even after a 911 dispatcher instructed workers to evacuate the building — telling workers to use personal time if they wanted to leave.

Amazon is claiming that this is because they are the only company out there accurately reporting workplace incidence.

The technical term for this is bullsh%$.

Again, I will note that if they treat their employees like crap, they will do the same to their customers.

Finance Ruins Everything

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Case in point, the orgy of self dealing and corruption that is ICANN’s plans to approve the sale of the .org domain to a hedge fund connected to ICANN executives:

Earlier this month, within the domain name world, there were significant concerns raised upon the news that Internet Society (ISOC), the (perhaps formerly?) well-respected nonprofit that helps “provide leadership in Internet-related standards, education, access, and policy” had agreed to sell off the Public Interest Registry, which is the registry that manages all .org top level domain (TLD) names, to a private equity company called Ethos Capital. Just having a public interest nonprofit selling off a part of its operations to a private equity group would be trouble enough, but the details make the story look much, much worse.

Just a few months ago, ICANN, a different non-profit that is in charge of coordinating and managing the various top level domain namespaces, and figuring out who gets to manage the associated registries (and, which has been subject to years of controversy regarding poor accountability and transparency, along with accusations of self-dealing), had announced that it was eliminating the price caps on the .org TLD. For most of the past decade, the ICANN agreement regarding the .org TLD space had held that .org domains had a maximum top price of $8.25 per year per domain.

ICANN claimed that it was making changes to the .org contract to “better conform” with the base registry agreement that ICANN had with other TLDs, tons of which have come on the market over the past few years. However, seeing as the .org TLD is one of the oldest ones on the web, and which has generally been considered (though, not exclusively) to be used for things like non-profits and community organizations, many people were reasonably concerned about the lifting of the price cap. Indeed, in response to ICANN’s request for comment, the comments went overwhelmingly against the removal of the price cap.

But ICANN did it anyway.

And, then, just a few months later, the Internet Society sells off the registry to a private equity firm.

And it gets worse. Remember how I mentioned earlier the years-long concerns about ICANN and self-dealing?

Ethos Capital is a new private equity firm lead by Erik Brooks. Brooks was at Abry Partners until earlier this year. Abry Partners acquired Donuts and installed former ICANN President of Global Domains Akram Atallah in the top spot there.

………

Oh, and it gets even worse:

Despite stating that Ethos Capital “understands the intricacies of the domain industry” its founder and CEO Erik Brooks has no experience within that industry. The firm’s website lists only Brooks and one Nora Abusitta-Ouri – who joined the outfit last month as its “chief purpose officer” – as employees.

But there is a common thread between those two and it is Fadi Chehade, a former CEO of ICANN, the organization that oversees the domain-name system and awards the contracts to run internet registries.

………

Oh, and it gets even worse. While Ethos Capital does not list Chehade as an employee, it appears that he started the organization:

………

May 7th, [When Chehade registered the Ethos Capital domain] eh? the timing is notable:

That date is significant because it is one day after ICANN indicated it was planning to approve the lifting of price caps through its public comment summary.

In case you were wonder about the “thread” that ties Brooks, Abusitta-Ouri and the CEO of Public Interest Registry:

The founder of Ethos Capital is Erik Brooks. He left ABRY Partners this year after spending two decades at the investment firm.

Does the name Abry ring a bell? That’s because it’s the company that bought new top level domain name company Donuts last year.

That deal involved Abry Senior Advisor Fadi Chehade. Chehade is the former CEO of ICANN, the group that oversees the domain name industry.

Now we have a twenty year veteran of Abry, who worked on the Donuts deal and was (or still is) a member of Donuts’ board, leaving this year to form a new entity that buys a registry, much like how Abry bought Donuts.

And the CEO of Public Interest Registry is Jon Nevett, one of the founders of Donuts.

Oh, and:

The other person listed on Ethos Capital’s website is Nora Abusitta- Ouri. She worked for Chehadi at ICANN as SVP, Development and Public Responsibility Programs.

In other words, the folks involved here are all very closely connected, and it happened right after ICANN, going against the public’s clearly stated interests, suddenly made the .org domain space much more open to profit exploitation. The whole thing is incredibly sketchy.

………

As more and more anger rose about this whole mess, ISOC is trying to calm the waters
It also insists that the lifting of price caps had absolutely nothing to do with this, and that this wasn’t all planned out in advance, but in September — a claim that almost no one believes. The one “new” fact in this statement is finally admitting what everyone already suspected, that Chehade is associated with Ethos Capital as an “adviser” though it downplays that role and tries to talk up how he advises lots of companies. Thing is, mere “advisers” aren’t usually the people registering the domain names…

Seriously, finance these days is all about looting, and in this case, it is looting a public commons.

FWIW, Ethos is saying that they will be good stewards of the domain, with “Price increases of up to 10 percent,” which means that the price will double every 7 years, if it holds to that promise, which, spoiler, it won’t.

We really need to change tax and bankruptcy laws to shut these motherf%$#ers down.

Walmart Really Sucks

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Walmart, reversing policy, has stopped offering holiday pay for workers over Thanksgiving, instead offering a discount on employee purchases, for 2 days.

How wonderfully generous of them:

Thanksgiving and Black Friday mark the beginning of the festive season in the US, but Walmart workers are not feeling the cheer. The world’s largest retailer will not be offering staff extra pay for working some of the busiest days of the year. Instead they will be offered a discount to shop at their own store.

………

Several large retailers including Barnes & Noble, Costco and Trader Joe’s have decided to close on Thanksgiving in recent years, arguing staff should have time with their family on the national holiday. But Walmart is one of several big-box retailers who are open on Thanksgiving Day and will start its Black Friday sale at 6pm.

Walmart is also one of the few big companies that does not offer employees increased hourly wages for working shifts on a holiday. At Target and Amazon, workers are paid time and a half for each hour worked.

“Walmart doesn’t offer holiday pay. They have a discount you have to work certain days to receive and one discount only lasts two days,” said a Walmart worker in Idaho who requested to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation. They are re scheduled to work full-time shifts on Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday this year.

“No one is getting paid extra. You can’t get overtime unless it’s approved.”

………

A Walmart spokesperson said: “We simplified our paid time-off policies in 2016 to combine vacation, holiday, sick and personal time into one bucket. We did this to give our associates greater flexibility and more choice to use their time off when and how they want to. As part of this change, we no longer pay holiday pay. Associates can now cash out any unused PTO at the end of the year.”

This is a contemptible company, and it treats its employees like crap.

Do you really think that they won’t nickel and dime customers in the same way.

And it Gets Worse for Boeing

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First, Transport Canada is saying that any recertification of the Boeing 737 MAX with MCAS is a non-starter, which means that there won’t be a shared type certificate with the earlier Boeing 737NG, which means extensive retraining and possibly a more extensive, and extensive, approval process:

In a growing line of whistleblowers and skeptics voicing their concerns before the expected re-certification of the Boeing 737 MAX, another rogue agent has emerged. In an email sent to regulators in the U.S., Europe and Brazil, a Transport Canada safety official called for the entire removal of the MCAS system from the 737 MAX. The official believes that the U.S. plane maker should remove the software, largely blamed for the two deadly 737 MAX 8 crashes, before the aircraft is cleared to fly again.

“The only way I see moving forward at this point… is that the MCAS has to go,” Jim Marko, manager of Aircraft Integration and Safety Assessment at Canada’s aviation regulator – Transport Canada – wrote in the email, according to The New York Times, which first reported the news.

In the email, sent to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) and Brazil’s National Civil Aviation Agency (ANAC) on November 19, 2019, Marko expressed his “uneasiness” about Boeing’s attempts to fix the MCAS software.

“Judging from the number and degree of open issues that we have, I am feeling that final decisions on acceptance will not be technically based,” he was quoted as saying by Canada’s National Post. “This leaves me with a level of uneasiness that I cannot sit idly by and watch it pass by…”

Marko continues to say that, according to him, the only feasible option at this point is to remove the MCAS software altogether, with all the compliance issues that such move would entail, if regulators and the public were to regain confidence in the sign-off on the 737 MAX.

………

However, Marko’s counterpart at the FAA, to whom the email was addressed, seems to share his concerns about the multiple identified problems with the MCAS and its update. “I have held similar perspective (questioning the need for MCAS, at least from the system safety standpoint),” Linh Le, a system safety engineer at the FAA, wrote in a separate email to his colleagues, according to The New York Times, which reviewed the emails.

Boeing desperately wants to recertify with MCAS, and it increasingly looks like they are not going to get that.

Additionally, Boeing will no longer be able to perform the final inspection on aircraft before they are shipped to airlines:

In the latest hurdle confronting Boeing Co.’s bid to get its grounded 737 MAX fleet back in the air, federal regulators now intend to inspect and sign off on every jet individually before delivery to airlines.

The move, spelled out Tuesday by the Federal Aviation Administration in a letter to the plane maker, signals that resuming MAX flights will be more complicated and perhaps time-consuming than previously projected.

The FAA stripped Boeing of longstanding authority to perform such routine, pre-delivery safety checks and signoffs of MAX planes on its own, amounting to another public pushback by the agency against company pressure to accelerate the reinstatement.

It is very likely that both the approval of the aircraft, and the approval of individual aircraft shipped to airlines, will be delayed.

Election Meddling or Profit Making?

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We know that there was a lot of political posting on the various social media in 2016.

Some was domestic, some was from obscure new nations, most notably Macedonian teens, and various groups in Russia.

Well, an analysis has been published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), about the actual effect on votes, and the answer is very little if any:

Conclusion

Coordinated attempts to create political polarization in the United States by Russia and other foreign governments have become a focus of public concern in recent years. Yet, to our knowledge, no studies have systematically examined whether such campaigns have actually impacted the political attitudes or behaviors of Americans. Analyzing one of the largest known efforts to date using a combination of unique datasets, we found no substantial effects of interacting with Russian IRA accounts on the affective attitudes of Democrats and Republicans who use Twitter frequently toward each other, their opinions about substantive political issues, or their engagement with politics on Twitter in late 2017.

If the goal is profit, then one will preach to the converted, particularly on the right-wing, because that is where the money is.

Of course, teasing out politics and profit are always problematic.

Not the Source I Expect for Hard Investigative Journalism

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The Hollywood Reporter has done a deep dive on the 2014 Sony Hack and finds convincing evidence that it was not the DPRK that hacked the studio:++

The massive cyberattack just before Thanksgiving 2014 crippled a studio, embarrassed executives and reshaped Hollywood. The FBI blamed a North Korea scheme to retaliate for the comedy ‘The Interview,’ but many whose lives were upended have doubts. Says Seth Rogen: “The fact that [co-director Evan Goldberg and I] were never really specifically targeted always raised suspicions in my head.”

On Jan. 23, 2015, a manager at Sony Pictures Entertainment shot off an email to a group of 12 in the studio’s distribution department that offered intel about an upcoming film from rival Disney. “Midwest exhibitors went into McFARLAND USA expecting a boring track & field movie but came away pleasantly surprised,” the manager noted about the sports drama that had been screened the day before. It was a mundane missive: a Hollywood executive sizing up the competition.

What is extraordinary about the email is what sources say it reveals about the 2014 Sony Pictures hack — and the official FBI narrative that pins it on North Korea. The email was drafted nearly nine weeks after the now infamous cyberattack ostensibly had been contained. It was passed along to a U.S. cyber researcher in February 2015 by a Ukrainian hacker as alleged proof that his Russian associate had breached Sony and could still do so at will. Despite FBI director James Comey’s “very high confidence” that Kim Jong Un was to blame, the Ukrainian source was maintaining that hackers were still accessing Sony’s system — and they weren’t North Korean.

Exactly five years have passed since the Sony hack, a seismic event that announced itself just before the Thanksgiving holiday on Nov. 24, 2014, when a menacing skeleton simultaneously popped up on thousands of Sony computer screens with the message: “We’ve obtained all your internal data including your secrets.”

That was followed by 22 days of massive data dumps that exposed embarrassing executive email exchanges (like one between then-co-chairman Amy Pascal and producer Scott Rudin in which he refers to Angelina Jolie as “a minimally talented spoiled brat”), trade secrets (including overtures from Marvel to bring Sony-owned Spider-Man into its universe) and five upcoming full-length films (such as Brad Pitt’s Fury). The breach, which former National Intelligence director James Clapper dubbed “the most serious cyberattack ever made against U.S. interests,” rocked the industry and forever altered how studios think about cybersecurity and the global impact of their content. In the aftermath, nearly all of Sony’s top management was swept out.

Although the FBI’s North Korea attribution was swift (it took just 25 days) and has never wavered, many of those impacted still harbor questions about what exactly happened when a previously unknown hacker group named Guardians of Peace decimated Sony’s computer infrastructure and brought one of the six major studios to its knees. THR spoke to more than two dozen insiders and executives who worked at Sony at the time, including some who still do, and more than half say they harbor doubts about the FBI’s official narrative, which maintains that the hack was a response from North Korea because leader Kim Jong Un objected to his depiction in Seth Rogen’s comedy The Interview.

………

Although the disgruntled-staffer angle generated headlines back in 2014, less explored is the prospect of someone using the hack as a weapon to manipulate the Sony share price. A number of investors sold large chunks of stock in 2014 between the supposed late September breach and the day the world learned of the attack on Nov. 24. There was also one spike in short-selling activity in the weeks leading up to Nov. 24. It is unclear if the SEC ever looked into Sony shortings or sell-offs given that SEC investigations are confidential unless it files an action in court.

This is not a smoking gun that the FBI was wrong, but it certainly raises significant doubts.

Also, it would not be the first time that the FBI ssemed more concerned with closing the case than it did with catching the actual malefactor.

Ireland’s Economy is Based on Tax Evasion

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This probably applies to even a greater degree to Luxembourg.

This is why they, and 10 other nations, torpedoed a proposal to add transparency in transnational tax avoidance:

Twelve EU countries, including Ireland, have blocked a proposed new rule that would have forced multinational companies to reveal how much profit they make and how little tax they pay in each of the 28 member states.

The proposed directive was designed to shine a light on how some of the world’s biggest companies – such as Apple, Facebook and Google – avoid paying an estimated $500bn a year in taxes by shifting their profits from higher-tax countries such as the UK, France and Germany to zero-tax or low-tax jurisdictions including Ireland, Luxembourg and Malta.

Ireland is one of the biggest beneficiaries of the current rules. The country hosts corporate offices that collect revenue and profits generated by many multinational companies across the EU bloc. Ireland allows global technology companies to pay corporation tax at rate as low as 6.25%, compared with 19% in the UK.

Ireland’s decision to vote against the proposed directive – which would have forced companies to report their revenues and profits on a country-by-country basis – came as the Irish tax-and-spending watchdog warned that the country’s economy could collapse if there was a global clampdown on tax avoidance.

The Irish Fiscal Advisory Council (IFAC) warned on Thursday that the country’s economy has become so reliant on taxes paid by multinationals that half of all of corporate taxes paid in the nation come from just 10 global companies. The firms are not named, but they are believed to include US technology giants Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Dell, Google and Oracle.

Other countries that have set themselves up as low-tax environments helping to shelter the profits of the world’s biggest companies were also among those that voted against. They include Luxembourg, Malta, Cyprus, Latvia, Slovenia, Estonia, Austria, Czech Republic, Hungary, and Croatia.

………

The vote came more than three years after the European commission promised to expose multinational corporations’ tax avoidance measures following the Panama Papers revelations. The proposal would have made country-by-country reporting mandatory for companies with an annual turnover of more than €750m.

Elena Gaita, a senior policy officer at anti-corruption charity Transparency International, said: “It’s an outrage that member states have once again put the interests of big business above those of citizens.

………


The IFAC said corporation tax receipts had risen to account for one in every five euros of tax collected by the Irish government. It warned that between €2bn-€6bn (£1.7bn-£5bn) of the €10bn total corporate tax take is what it calls “excess”. “In other words, beyond what would be expected based on the economy’s underlying performance and historical and international norms.”

The budgetary watchdog said the Irish government had become increasing reliant on corporate tax receipts, which rose to a record €10.4bn last year, more than double the amount collected in 2014. “The reliance on these volatile receipts leaves the government vulnerable to changes to the global tax environment, including the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) base erosion and profit shifting initiative,” IFAC said.

The OECD is trying to force big-tech companies, such as Facebook, Amazon and Google, to pay more tax in countries where they actually sell their products and services.

Ireland’s corporate tax rate is 12.5% but it charges only 6.25% for profits linked to a company’s patent or intellectual property.

Ireland’s tax base is based on tax evasion and money laundering. So is much of its economy.

Celtic Tiger, my ass.

No, This is Not the Onion

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So there I am, looking at the headlines, and I come across Boris Johnson Replaced by Ice Sculpture after Dodging Election Debate on Climate Crisis.

It’s not a parody:

Boris Johnson was criticized by party leaders and represented by a dripping ice sculpture after refusing to appear in a televised election debate focusing on climate change, sparking a row between the UK broadcaster and the Prime Minister’s Conservative Party.

The Conservatives complained to the UK’s broadcasting watchdog Ofcom ahead of the Channel 4 event, which saw Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, Liberal Democrat Jo Swinson and the heads of the UK’s other main parties quizzed on their plans to tackle the climate crisis ahead of next month’s poll.

The party said its offer of having minister Michael Gove stand in for Johnson was rejected by Channel 4, complaining the decision “effectively seeks to deprive the Conservative Party of any representation and attendance at the Channel 4 News debate.”

The network said the event was only for party leaders, and opposition leaders have lambasted Johnson for dodging scrutiny by refusing to appear.

………

Before the debate started, the program’s editor had earlier said Johnson “sent his two wing men” — Gove and Johnson’s father, Stanley — to attempt to “argue their way into” a program intended only for leaders. Stanley Johnson was there to conduct interviews in the so-called spin room after the debate, he later clarified.

Johnson and fellow no-show Nigel Farage, the leader of the Brexit Party, were ultimately replaced at the debate with ice sculptures bearing their parties’ logos, which Channel 4 said was intended to “represent the emergency on planet earth.”

Johnson’s refusal to appear in the debate gave further fuel to charges that he is avoiding media appearances during the campaign. Several opposition figures have also criticized him for refusing to confirm he would take part in an interview with BBC presenter Andrew Neil, which all of the other major leaders have done.

They should have put a blond wig on top of the ice sculpture.

Honestly, if I were to replace BoJo with anything, it would be a Goatse* sculpture.

*If you do not know what Goatse is, Do Not Google It ……… EVER.

Sub-Hed of the Day

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Former Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick’s resume reads like a dystopian novel about the nihilism and brutality of contemporary capitalism. He should leave public life forever.

—Jacobin

The headline is, “Deval Patrick Is Everything That’s Wrong With the Democratic Party.”

Patrick’s resume is a litany of the most toxic practices of capitalism., and it should exclude him from serious consideration in the Democratic Party Presidential primaries.