US Reroutes Flights Around Alaska Beach in Attempt to Avoid Walrus Stampede
I just love this hed.
Author: Matthew G. Saroff
The Handmaiden’s Tale, Alabama Edition
In the can you top this world of Talibaptist abortion restrictions in the United States, Alabama has started giving legal counsel to the embryo, but not the girl:
Ever since Sandra Day O’Connor resigned from the Supreme Court in 2006, anti-abortion activists have been playing a game of chicken with the justices. On one side are the activists, who want to push anti-abortion laws as far as they can without getting slapped down by the court. On the other side is Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wants to let states make abortions harder and harder to obtain without actually outlawing them. For more than 20 years, Kennedy has approved literally every anti-abortion law he’s encountered, leading some liberals to fear he’d finally abandoned Roe v. Wade altogether.
Soon, however, Kennedy may finally be forced to balk. On Tuesday, the ACLU sued to halt an extreme new Alabama law targeting minors who are seeking abortions. The measure is very clearly designed to degrade and humiliate teenage girls, far beyond what any state has previously attempted (and what the Supreme Court has allowed). Alabama already requires a minor to secure parental consent before obtaining an abortion, but if she cannot—if, for instance, it was her parent who raped and impregnated her—she can ask a judge to bypass this requirement. The new law takes that judicial bypass and turns it on its head, permitting the judge to appoint a lawyer to represent the minor’s fetus and advocate for its best interests. The judge may bring the district attorney into court to question the minor. And, worst of all, the district attorney can call witnesses to testify against the minor—and in favor of her fetus.
All of this is quite heinous. But it gets much worse. If the judge rules in favor of the minor, the district attorney is now permitted by law to appeal the ruling and make his case all over again to a higher court. By letting the district attorney call an endless number of witnesses then appeal an unfavorable ruling, the law creates a loophole that could let the state delay a minor’s abortion to the point that she couldn’t even legally receive one. (In Alabama, that’s 20 weeks, unless there is a threat to the mother’s health.) If Alabama gets away with this law, in other words, it’ll have effectively nullified young women’s constitutional right to an abortion.
I would also note that parental notification laws, in more than a few of the cases, means that the girl has to ask permission from her rapist.
This is undiluted evil, and should no more be compromised with than we would with Osama bin Laden,
Huh, It Wasn’t the Polio Vaccine
One of the theories about the origin of HIV/AIDS, related to my by my younger brother, Daniel, well over a decade ago, was that its origins began with an early variant of the Polio vaccine, the Salk vaccine, which grown in monkey kidney cultures, provided an avenue for SIV (Simian Immunodeficiency Virus) to become HIV (Immunodeficiency Virus).
Well, if the result of a recent DNA sequencing is accurate, the jump to humans occurred well before the first tests of any of the Polio vaccines:
The deadly virus responsible for the global HIV/AIDS pandemic emerged around 1920 in the city of Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, according to new research that has relevance to the effort to understand how another deadly virus, Ebola, reestablished itself in West Africa.
The study, published in the journal Science, reveals that the HIV virus was already established and spreading in Africa long before the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention first took note of it. The CDC’s first record of the illness occurred on June 5, 1981, when an unusual type of “pneumonia” was detected in five homosexual men from Los Angeles.
No one then knew that the deadly strain of the virus, which has since killed an estimated 39 million people, had already taken hold in the Congo some 60 years earlier.
“It seems a combination of factors in Kinshasa in the early 20th century created a ‘perfect storm’ for the emergence of HIV, leading to a generalized epidemic with unstoppable momentum that unrolled across sub-Saharan Africa,” co-author Oliver Pybus, an Oxford University zoologist, said.
Lead author Nuno Faria, also from Oxford University’s Department of Zoology, explained that “by the end of the 1940’s, over one million people were traveling through Kinshasa on the railways each year.” At the time, what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo was under Belgian colonial rule and experiencing steady urban growth.
Faria and his team examined the genetics of 348 “HIV-1 group M” samples from the former Belgian Congo, and 466 additional samples from nearby regions. This particular viral strain, “M,” has proven to be the deadliest in humans, but virologist Beatrice Hahn of the University of Pennsylvania explained to Discovery News that it represents just one of several different instances where the illness jumped from a non-human primate to people — likely by the consumption or handling of bushmeat.
That’s about 30 years before the Polio vaccine tests.
BTW, I would also note that while AIDS attracted the attention of medical authorities in the early 1980s, the earliest case in the US, though the doctors at the time did not know it, was the death of a teen in St. Louis in 1969.
On the Way Out the Door, Eric Holder Goes After Our Privacy ……… Again
For the gazillianth time, he’s seeking the crippling of computer security and privacy system with a back door for law enforcement:
Attorney General Eric Holder, the US top law enforcement official, said it is “worrisome” that tech companies are providing default encryption on consumer electronics. Locking the authorities out of being able to physically access the contents of devices puts children at risk, he said.
“It is fully possible to permit law enforcement to do its job while still adequately protecting personal privacy,” Holder said during a Tuesday speech before the Global Alliance Against Child Sexual Abuse Online conference. “When a child is in danger, law enforcement needs to be able to take every legally available step to quickly find and protect the child and to stop those that abuse children. It is worrisome to see companies thwarting our ability to do so.”
Holder’s remarks, while he did not mention any particular company by name, come two weeks after Apple announced its new iPhone 6 models would be equipped with data encryption that prevents authorities from accessing the contents of the phone. At the same time, Google said its upcoming Android operating system will also have default encryption.
The encryption decision by two of the world’s biggest names in tech is a bid to gain the trust of customers in the wake of the Edward Snowden surveillance revelations.
Holder said he wants a backdoor to defeat encryption. He urged the tech sector “to work with us to ensure that law enforcement retains the ability, with court-authorization, to lawfully obtain information in the course of an investigation, such as catching kidnappers and sexual predators.”
Mr. Holder, I need to explain something to you, and I will talk slowly.
A backdoor is a security hole, and once you create a security hole, it can be used by anyone.
You are asking every American citizen to make their systems less secure for your convenience.
This is a very bad idea.
Hurray! Facebook Blinks!
Facebook has apologized to cross dressing LGBT members who want to use their stage name, and looks to be allowing “Drag Queen” names in the near future:
Two weeks ago, Facebook was forced to address a firestorm over its real-name policy after “several hundred” drag queens and performers were targeted in a spree of user reports. On that day, Facebook responded by sending a message to those account holders: either switch their public Facebook names to “legal” names or convert their accounts to public “pages,” which lack certain normal-profile features. The affected users had two weeks to do so, which ran out today.
However, instead of disabling those hundreds of accounts, Facebook went in a decidedly different direction. A meeting between affected performers, including original complainant Sister Roma, and company officials took place at the Facebook campus today, and according to a Valleywag report, it ended with Facebook issuing an official apology and promising “substantive changes” to the real-name policy.
“Facebook agreed that the real names policy is flawed and has unintentionally hurt members of our community,” San Francisco Supervisor David Campos said to Valleywag. “Facebook apologized to the community and has committed to removing any language requiring that you use your legal name. They’re working on technical solutions to make sure that nobody has their name changed unless they want it to be changed and to help better differentiate between fake profiles and authentic ones.”
Fabulous!
Good News Everyone!
I invented a device that makes you read this in your head using my voice!
In response to yet another attempted shakedown by a patent troll, the courts, in response to recent Supreme Court rulings, have started to issue significant sanctions:
This summer, the Supreme Court made it easier for defendants to collect fees when they win patent cases. The decision is starting to have an effect—the nation’s largest patent troll just got slapped with an order to pay $1.4 million in attorneys’ fees to NetApp, which it sued in 2010.
The case brought by Summit Data Systems, a branch of Acacia Research Corp., hinged on an accusation that NetApp infringed when its server-based software interacted with an end user on a Microsoft operating system. The two patents-in-suit, 7,392,291 and 7,428,581, relate to “block-level storage access over a computer network.”
But just two months before Summit filed its lawsuit, it sold licenses for those patents to 43 companies that were member companies of defensive patent aggregator RPX—including Microsoft.
“Nonetheless, Summit brought suit against NetApp barely two months after executing the Licensing Agreement,” wrote US District Judge Gregory Sleet in his order (PDF), which was unsealed on Tuesday. “It then took Summit 18 months to disclose the existence of the Licensing Agreement to NetApp.”
Summit’s expert said that Microsoft users infringe the patents, but he couldn’t determine whether Linux or UNIX systems infringed because he “didn’t have time.”
Sleet continued:The facts of this case demonstrate that Summit pursued an action against NetApp without any basis for infringement, delayed disclosing the existence of the Licensing Agreement for eighteen months, extracted settlements from co-defendants worth a fraction of what it would actually cost them to defend the lawsuit, and then voluntarily dismissed its claims with prejudice prior to the court issuing a ruling on the merits… The claims were frivolous—Microsoft’s initiator software [was] licensed, so no system employing it could infringe the asserted patents. Summit’s motivation was to extract quick settlements that were dwarfed by the costs to litigate. Summit was objectively unreasonable in bringing a lawsuit against NetApp mere months after executing the Licensing Agreement that effectively eliminated its theory of infringement. Finally, the court is convinced that an award of attorneys’ fees in this case is necessary to deter this sort of reckless and wasteful litigation in the future.
………
Acacia is a patent-holding company that’s publicly traded on NASDAQ, and it’s sometimes considered the largest “patent troll,” since its various subsidiaries have filed more patent lawsuits than any other single company. The NetApp fee order is Acacia’s second major setback in recent months. In July, an Acacia unit holding an old Polaroid digital imaging patent lost a big case in which it was seeking royalty payments from 31 companies.
Here is the pertinent bit about the recent Supreme Court decision:
The Supreme Court overruled the lower courts. In their unanimous opinion for Octane Fitness v. Icon Health & Fitness, the justices found the Federal Circuit had taken a wrong turn in 2005 when it rejected the “holistic, equitable” approach toward attorneys’ fees and took up a “more rigid and mechanical formulation.” In order to get fees in a case, a party had to show that a litigation is both “objectively baseless” and “brought in subjective bad faith.”
That’s almost an impossible standard to meet, Octane’s lawyer Rudy Telscher told Ars in an interview before the February oral arguments. “You’ve got to show that the plaintiff brought a ‘zero merit’ case, and they knew that’s what they were doing.”
Instead, the Supremes said today that fees should be awarded in an “exceptional” case. That’s what the statute calls for, and the word “exceptional” should be given its ordinary meaning. “An ‘exceptional’ case is simply one that stands out from others with respect to the substantive strength of a party’s litigating position… or the unreasonable manner in which the case was litigated,” wrote Sotomayor.
The “Federal Circuit Court” above is formally known as the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, but is probably better known as the “Patent Court,” which has had a ridiculously broad view of IP rights, they have literally allowed the patenting of a rainy day.
Thankfully, SCOTUS has begun routinely overturning the more extreme rulings of the patent court.
The great charter school rip-off: Finally, the truth catches up to education “reform” phonies – Salon.com
About a week ago, Bill Clinton dropped a verbal bomb on the charter school movement:
Bill Clinton weighed in on the debate over charter schools this week, warning that the publicly funded yet autonomous schools must keep their “original bargain” if they want support as alternatives to traditional public schools.
The Huffington Post reports that in remarks before a dinner hosted by the Clinton Global Initiative on Tuesday, the former president hailed the potential of charter schools, even as he called on them to be held to high standards. Clinton cited New Orleans, whose post-Katrina public schools are 100 percent charter. While casting New Orleans’ experience with charters as a success story, he added an important caveat. Charter schools aren’t worth supporting, Clinton suggested, unless they perform better than traditional public schools.
“They still haven’t done what no state has really done adequately,” Clinton told the group, “which is to set up a review system to keep the original bargain of charter schools, which was if they weren’t outperforming the public model, they weren’t supposed to get their charter renewed.”
Clinton’s statement is stunning once you consider its implications. Research shows that the vast majority of charter schools in the U.S. haven’t cleared that hurdle. A study at Stanford University last year found that only 25 percent of charter schools fare better than traditional schools in reading. In math, only 29 percent of charters do better. Nineteen percent of charters actually did worse in reading, while 31 percent were worse in math; the rest weren’t significantly different from traditional public schools.
While Democratic Party centrists in Clinton’s mold have been some of the most enthusiastic cheerleaders for charter schools, Clinton’s comments come as many within the Democratic Party are pushing back against so-called education reformers who want to dismantle teacher protections and increase the number of charter schools. In response to the rise of such groups as Campbell Brown’s Partnership for Educational Justice (chaired by Democratic trial lawyer David Boies) and Democrats for Education Reform, Democrats including operative Donna Brazile, former Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland and former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm this summer formed Democrats for Public Education. The group’s launch underscored that while many of the party’s financial backers support an anti-union, pro-charter agenda, the “reform” movement’s actions are starting to trigger a powerful reaction within the party.
Let’s be clear here. This isn’t about Bill Clinton having an epiphanies.
Bill Clinton isn’t the sort of guy who has epiphanies.
He is a very smart guy who surveys the terrain, and chooses a path, and chooses the best possible path forward for him.
What’s more, Clinton has a record of being just far enough ahead of the curve on these sort of trends to win politically.
My guess, (hope) is that the increasingly dubious claims of the charter school industry, will gain currency in the next year or so, and this is what Clinton has picked up on:
But the word is out, and resistance to charter takeovers is stiffening in more places than York. In school systems such as Philadelphia, Bridgeport, Pittsburgh, and Chicago, where charter schools are major providers, parents and local officials have increasingly opposed charter takeovers of their neighborhood schools. A recent poll in Michigan, where the majority of charter operations are for-profit, found that 73 percent of voters want a moratorium on opening any new charter schools until the state department of education and the state legislature conduct a full review of the charter school system.
I so hope that I’m not being a Pollyanna here,
Student Athletes, My Ass. It’s Legalized Slavery
In the middle of the rout of the University of Michigan football team by the University of Minnesota football team, the coach, Brady Hoke not only declined to pull a student who was clearly concussed, but he put him back in the game after pulling him:
But, by the third quarter against Minnesota, things were slipping through Hoke’s fingers. Once again, Michigan’s offense was discombobulated, this time with quarterback Shane Morris rather than Devin Gardner, and the Wolverines looked to be in serious trouble when two turnovers in a span of less than two minutes propelled the Gophers to increase their lead from 10-7 to 27-7. At this point, I finally caved and believed that there was little chance for Hoke to save his job, but I still thought he should finish out the season.
And then this happened:
2:05 – 3:58
Morris remains in the game, and then something happens that we never want to see as college football fans. Morris drops back to pass and rolls to his left. As Morris flings the football, Minnesota defensive end Theiren Cockran closes in at full speed, drops his helmet, and unleashes a dirty and ejectionable helmet-to-helmet hit on Morris. Morris’ pass is overthrown and incomplete, but, when the ESPN cameras come back to Morris after the play, we see him walk around dazed for a few seconds and then this:
………
Morris clearly wobbles and tries to prop his head on Ben Braden’s right arm to remain upright. Braden recognizes this and uses both arms to catch Morris and prevent him from falling to the ground. Braden then keeps his right arm wrapped around Morris’ back to keep him standing. Khalid Hill then walks over and says something to Morris, which prompts Morris to look to the Michigan sideline and wave off a substitution.
………
But, not only does Morris remain in the game for another snap, Michigan allows him to drop back for a pass, which could lead to him being on the receiving end of another bone-crushing hit delivered by Minnesota’s pass rush. Absolutely abhorrent. Thankfully, Morris releases his pass before any Gophers can get in the vicinity to do so.
After the play, the ESPN cameras get a shot of Morris staring at the Michigan sideline, and anyone and everyone with a brain can see that Morris is completely dazed and confused. As Morris drops his head, Hoke and the Michigan staff finally realize that Morris is in no condition to be on a football field and motions for Gardner to replace him.
One play too late, though.
………
5:05 – 6:33
At the end of Gardner’s third play on the field, during which he scrambled, his helmet was ripped off by a Minnesota defender. Accordingly, by rule, Gardner must sit out the following snap unless a timeout is called by either team.
The decision here for Hoke should be pretty simple: (1) send out third-string quarterback Russell Bellomy for the next play; or (2) use one of Michigan’s remaining two timeouts and keep Gardner in the game.
But that is not what happens, and what does happen next is a fireable offense.
As Bellomy removes his headset and begins scrambling to find his helmet, Morris, who had finally taken off his helmet, starts walking towards the field of play, puts back on his helmet, and jogs onto the field. No Michigan coach, including Hoke, or any member of Michigan’s training staff stop him. At this point, Bellomy retrieves a helmet — one I do not believe is actually his — and starts to sprint onto the field before halting when he sees Morris is already in the huddle.
………
For starters, Morris never should have been in this huddle. But look at the play clock in the graphic above. THERE ARE A FULL 25 SECONDS ON THE PLAY CLOCK. That is plenty of time for Hoke to either: (1) call Morris back to the sideline and sub in Bellomy, who now has a helmet; (2) call a timeout, which still remains an option every second until the ball is snapped; or (3) PUT IN ANY PLAYER — WILTON SPEIGHT, BRIAN CLEARY, ALEX SWIECA, LINEBACKER JAKE RYAN, DEFENSIVE TACKLE WILLIE HENRY, ETC. — THAT IS NOT CONCUSSED.
Even the umpire looks over to Michigan’s sideline and asks Hoke if he wants to take a timeout, to which Hoke declines, before starting the play clock.
Disgusting. Reprehensible. Despicable. Atrocious. Disturbing. None of these adjectives can truly describe just how horrifying it is that Hoke had absolutely no problem reinserting Morris back into this game. None.
(all emphasis original)
People are upset that coach Hoke did this.
I’m appalled that Hoke, and the athletic director David Brandon, whose tenure as a Domino’s Pizza CEO and as a Republican political apparatchik (but I repeat myself) presaged his aggressively capitalist management of his “student athletes”, have not been fired yet.
This is not a just a failing of U. Mich, it symptomatic of the fundamentally abusive nature of top tier collegiate athletics.
It’s not education, it’s not athletics, it’s human trafficking.
If it were anything else, everyone involved in this debacle would already be suspended pending termination.
I hope that the QB, Shane Morris, is talking to a lawyer.
Cows, They are Better Organized than You’d Think
It appears that cows are conspiring to destroy us all.
H/t DC at the Stellar Parthenon BBs.
This is a Question that Desperately Needs to Answered
Charles Pierce wonders why Democrats refuse to call batsh%$ insane Republicans batsh%$ insane:
Back in 2010, as part of a biannual act of madness by which the magazine endeavors to analyze every congressional race in the country, I had occasion to talk to Tarryl Clark, who was challenging Michele Bachmann on behalf of the splendidly name Democratic Farmer-Labor Party for Bachmann’s job in Minnesota’s Sixth Congressional District. How, I asked Clark, does one make good use of the rich trove of lunacy that is Bachmann’s entire public career.
“Well,” Clark told me. “I’m not going to call her crazy, if that’s what you mean.”
In fact, that was exactly what I meant.
The great failing of the Democratic party over the past three-and-a-half decades has been the party’s failure to take political advantage of the obvious prion disease that has afflicted the Republican party since it first ate all the monkey-brains in the mid-1970’s. ………
Seriously.
Michelle Bachmann, for example, got started on politics by opposing the Disney feature Aladdin (the one with Robin Williams) because she felt that it promulgated witchcraft.
The so-called expert political operatives in the Democratic Party seem to think that it is either unseemly, or perhaps unnecessary, to point out the complete insanity of many Republican candidates.
I guess that they think it’s a loser, but if it is, why the f%$# did Bachmann get elected for anything?
Not only does it not serve the Democratic party to ignore this mishugas, it ends up defining deviancy down, because silence is most certainly perceived as assent.
People need to remember Hubert Humphrey’s stirring speech at the 1964 Democratic convention, and its refrain, “But not Barry Goldwater,” put the final nail in the coffin of Goldwater’s campaign.
Calling out the crazy is both the right thing and the smart thing to do.
F%$# You for that Mental Image
Talking with a Gentile cow-orker about Rosh Hashanah, and the blowing of the Shofar.
We talked about how some are short (ram’s horns) some are longer. (some sort of gazelle, and rather more melodic)
I noted that while the Shofar is played much like any brass instrument, i.e. with buzzing lips, but it differ in that the Shofar blower traditionally blow from the corner of the mouth, not the middle.
He said, “Kenny G. style“.
GAH!!!!
M of A – The (NED Financed) Hong Kong Riots
Guess what? It looks like the CIA front known as the National Endowment for Democracy is dumping money into yet another so called color revolution:
Some organized “student groups” in Hong Kong tried to occupy government buildings and blocked some streets. The police did what it does everywhere when such things happen. It used anti-riot squads, pepper spray and tear gas to prevent occupations and to clear the streets.
………………
Peter Lee aka Chinahand has an excellent piece on the issue at Asia Times Online. But Lee is making one mistake in that he does not consider outside influence:Occupy Hong Kong decided to light it, starting with a class boycott and demonstrations organized by the Hong Kong Federation of Students. And, since I’m never afraid to mix a metaphor, the Hong Kong government poured fuel on the fire by pepper-spraying and teargassing it.
Who really “decided to light this”? To me the protests, and the “western” reporting about it, have the distinct smell not of tear gas but of some expensive Color Revolution perfume of “western” origin.
So lets look up the usual source of such exquisite fragrance. The 2012 annual report of the U.S. government financed National Endowment of Democracy, aka the CCA – Central Color-Revolution Agency, includes three grants for Hong Kong one of which is new for 2012 and not mentioned in earlier annual reports:National Democratic Institute for International Affairs – $460,000
To foster awareness regarding Hong Kong’s political institutions and constitutional reform process and to develop the capacity of citizens – particularly university students – to more effectively participate in the public debate on political reform, NDI will work with civil society organizations on parliamentary monitoring, a survey, and development of an Internet portal, allowing students and citizens to explore possible reforms leading to universal suffrage.
So the U.S. government in 2012 (2013 numbers are not yet available) hands over nearly half a million to “develop the capacity” of “university students” related to the issue of “universal suffrage” in the election of Hong Kong’s chief executive.
Why do we keep doing this sh%$?
Not only does it reduce the credibility of protesters in country, but the results (the Ukraine, Georgia, etc.) have been spotty, to put it mildly.
If the definition of insanity is, “Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results,” the US state security and foreign policy apparatus are insane.
Silly Rabbit, Religious Freedom is Just for Christians
In their 41-14 drubbing of the New England Patriots, Kansas City Chiefs safety Husain Abdullah intercepted Tom Brady and ran it back for a touchdown, and then gave thanks to God.Unfortunately, this was a Muslim prayers, so he was given an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty.
I don’t ever recall that ever happening to Tim Tebow.
Today, the NFL actually called out the Zebras, and apologized:
The N.F.L. said Tuesday that Kansas City Chiefs safety Husain Abdullah was mistakenly penalized by a game official when he knelt to pray after scoring a touchdown Monday night.
In the fourth quarter of the Chiefs’ 41-14 victory over the New England Patriots, Abdullah, who is Muslim, intercepted a pass by Tom Brady and returned it 39 yards for a touchdown. After he entered the end zone, he slid on his knees and bowed forward in prayer, with his head touching the turf.
He was given a 15-yard penalty for unsportsmanlike conduct.
An N.F.L. spokesman said Tuesday that Abdullah should not have been penalized. “Officiating mechanic is not to flag player who goes to ground for religious reasons,” Michael Signora, the spokesman, said on Twitter.
Players routinely gesticulate and thank God after scoring touchdowns. Most prominently, Tim Tebow, the former Denver Broncos quarterback, knelt on one knee after scoring. Tebowing became an Internet meme.
If Abdullah had Tebowed, he would not have gotten a penalty.
You know it, I know it, and even the generally clueless National Football League knows this.
I Will Write No More of Alisa Zinov’yevna Rosenbaum, Forever
At some point, you realize that all you need to hear about Ayn Rand has been told by someone else.
In this case, it’s John Oliver, or more accurately, it’s his show, Last Week Tonight:
I’m not sure how I can top this.
The Eu Gets Real, Beotches
The EU has routinely insisted that in accordance with EU rules, countries in crisis have to impoverish their ordinary citizens, cutting wages and the social safety net.
Well it looks like the EU will start going after money for the big guys now with Eurocrats going after Ireland’s tax deal with Apple, and Luxemburg’s and the Netherland’s deals with FIAT and Starbucks:
In a warning shot to companies shopping for tax deals around the globe, the European Commission publicly accused Ireland on Tuesday of giving illegal subsidies to Apple and cautioned that the country might need to collect back taxes from the company, which outside analysts said could reach into the billions of dollars.
These findings, which constitute a preliminary indictment of Apple’s past arrangements with Ireland, come as policy makers in the United States and Europe try to block some of the inventive maneuvers multinationals use to limit taxes in their home countries and reduce their worldwide payments as much as possible.
“The light bulb has gone off that trade wars by another name and conducted through the tax system are just as ruinous,” said Edward D. Kleinbard, a professor at the University of Southern California’s Gould School of Law and a former chief of staff to the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation.
And from the European lowlands:
The European Union is to accuse US tech giant Apple of taking illegal aid from the Irish state through sweetheart tax deals over two decades, the Financial Times reported Monday.
A European Commission investigation into Apple’s tax affairs in Ireland, where it has enjoyed a rate of less than 2.0 percent, found that the company benefitted from illegal state aid, the FT reported citing sources close to the matter.
Ireland’s Department of Finance confirmed that the EU would be publishing a document on Monday but stressed that “the Commission has not formally decided that there is state aid” at play.
“Ireland is confident that there is no breach of state aid rules in this case and has already issued a formal response to the Commission earlier this month, addressing in detail the concerns and some misunderstandings contained in the opening decision,” the department added.
The European Union launched a probe in June into sweetheart tax deals negotiated by Apple, Starbucks and Fiat with three member states.
The investigation seeks to determine whether such arrangements offered by Ireland, Netherlands and Luxembourg give the companies an unfair competitive advantage and thus amount to illegal state aid.
Here’s a phrase that I did not expect to say, “Good job, European Union Bureaucrats.”
Follow this to its logical conclusion, please, and ban this sh%$.
Everyone but the corporations lose in this beggar thy neighbor strategy, and besides, Ireland really needs the money.
The Wisest Thing Said so Far this Year
Donald Trump is going bankrupt for the 5th time, Richard Fuld is still a rich man, Goldman Sachs is still a going concern, airlines and other businesses routinely declare bankruptcy to cheat their workers.
It’s no surprise that recent studies have found the wealthy to be less ethical than the general populace.
And when a deal goes bad? They just walk away.
Basically, the much of the obscene levels of wealth that have been accumulated, particularly by the MBA class, come from their monetizing our ethics and their lack thereof.
John Oliver Certainly has a Way With Words
John Oliver’s monologue about the US drone policy notes that US drone policies are like, “Harvey Keitel’s balls,” because, “From a distance you think, ‘Well, I understand the contours of those.’ But if you were to really examine them, you’d discover that they’re actually lost in a haze of fuzziness and gray areas. Much like the rules for our drone strikes.”
Barack Obama is giving Henry Kissinger some serious competition for “Worst American recipient of the Nobel Prize ever.”
Nope, No Partisan Politics Here
In another 5-4 decision split along ideological lines, the Supreme Court has blocked early voting in Ohio, at least until an appeals court rules:
With just sixteen hours before polling stations were to open in Ohio, the Supreme Court on Monday afternoon blocked voters from beginning tomorrow to cast their ballots in this year’s general election. By a vote of five to four, the Justices put on hold a federal judge’s order providing new opportunities for voting before election day, beyond what state leaders wanted.
The order will remain in effect until the Court acts on an appeal by state officials. If that is denied, then the order lapses. It is unclear when that scenario will unfold. The state’s petition has not yet been filed formally.
The practical effect of the order will mean that, at the least, early voting will not be allowed this week — a period that supporters of early balloting have called “Golden Week.” That permits voters to register and cast their ballots on the same day.
Depending upon the timing of the state’s filing of a petition for review and the Court’s action on it, Monday’s order may also mean that early voting will not be permitted on most Sundays between now and election day, November 4, and will not be permitted during evening hours — that is, after 5 p.m.
I will make a note here any suggestion that Justice Kennedy is anything but a partisan hack has been thoroughly debunked.
Then again, we knew that after his vote in Bush v. Gore in 2000.
For the Past two Decades or so, not Having a Substantive Conflict of Interest Policy has been Goldman’s Business Model
In looking at the recent ProPublica and This American Life coverage of the capture of the Federal Reserve regulators by the Vampire Squid (Goldman Sachs) it’s important to note that they miss a basic point, which is that, as
Justin Fox so ably points out in the Harvard Business Review, Goldman Sachs has been using conflicts of interest as a mechanism to generate much, if not most of their profits.
I recommend that you read the ProPublica story, and then listen to the This American Life podcast, but Mr. Fox does make a legitimate complaint about the coverage.
Specifically one of the big reveals is that a Goldman executive said that consumer protection laws do not apply to rich clients.
This is in fact true under US law:
In the first, Carmen Segarra, the former Fed bank examiner who made the tapes, tells of a Goldman Sachs executive saying in a meeting that “once clients were wealthy enough, certain consumer laws didn’t apply to them.” Far from being a shocking admission, this is actually a pretty fair summary of American securities law. According to the Securities and Exchange Commission’s “accredited investor” guidelines, an individual with a net worth of more than $1 million or an income of more than $200,000 is exempt from many of the investor-protection rules that apply to people with less money. That’s why rich people can invest in hedge funds while, for the most part, regular folks can’t. Maybe there were some incriminating details behind the Goldman executive’s statement that alarmed Segarra and were left out of the story, but on the face of it there’s nothing to see here.
The theory here is that the very rich, by virtue of having a lot of money, are assumed to be knowledgeable investors, and so are more able to protect themselves.
Simply put, they are saying that they are not the general public, because they either have, or can hire, financial knowledge.
In highlighting this, they underplay the 2nd reveal of the story, and what is clearly the reason for Ms. Segarra’s unjustified termination, the fact that Goldman Sachs never had a meaningful conflict of interest policy:
The other smoking gun is that Segarra pushed for a tough Fed line on Goldman’s lack of a substantive conflict of interest policy, and was rebuffed by her boss. This is a big deal, and for much more than the legal/compliance reasons discussed in the piece. That’s because, for the past two decades or so, not having a substantive conflict of interest policy has been Goldman’s business model. Representing both sides in mergers, betting alongside and against clients, and exploiting its informational edge wherever possible is simply how the firm makes its money. Forcing it to sharply reduce these conflicts would be potentially devastating.
(emphasis mine)
Mr. Fox makes another interesting point, that any organization that is responsible for the stability and the viability of the banks, such as the Federal Reserve, have an inherent interest in ensuring that those organizations are profitable, because profitable banks are more stable than unprofitable.
Carmen Segarra, in pushing for Goldman having a conflict of interest policy, was attacking the attacking the viability of a bank.
This raises a larger question, whether we really want to have an organization for which has unethical behavior at the core of both its culture and profits to remain viable.
This was the question that no one has asked about Wall Street in general, and Goldman Sachs in particular.
It needs to be asked.
Linkage
- Court blasts US Navy for scanning civilians’ computers for child porn (Ars Technica) Posse Comitatus Act? What Posse Comitatus Act?
- The Overpaid CEO (The Democracy Journal) Makes the very interesting point that the very nature of the modern corporation incentivizes control fraud and looting by senior management.
- Hamster Wheel Standing Desk helps you stay fit at the office (Gizmag) It is stupid as it sounds. Vid at link.
How wolves literally changed the geography of Yellowstone Park: