Category: Evil

Not Enough Bullets

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After engaging in one of the most brazen and delusional frauds in the history of history, former WeWork CEO Adam Neumann will get even more money as payment for leaving the criminal enterprise that he founded.

Whoever said that crime doesn’t pay has clearly never been funded by Softbank: 

Nearly two years ago, SoftBank Group Corp. sought to part ways with WeWork co-founder Adam Neumann when it bailed out the shared-office company. It hasn’t been an easy divorce.

Securities filings from earlier this month show WeWork in February gave Mr. Neumann an enhanced stock award worth roughly $245 million, a benefit that wasn’t extended to other early shareholders and hasn’t been previously reported.

The deal was part of a renegotiation of the former chief executive’s giant 2019 exit package meant to end a long-running dispute between him and SoftBank and help clear the way for a public listing for WeWork, according to people familiar with the matter.

In addition, the final package gave him nearly $200 million in cash, let him refinance $432 million in debt on favorable terms and allowed an entity Mr. Neumann controls to sell $578 million in WeWork stock.

………

The filings also show how, after Mr. Neumann’s exit in the fall of 2019, WeWork took big losses as it sold off a number of companies acquired at his direction. It garnered just $164 million on 10 investments that were initially purchased for $759 million in cash and WeWork stock.

………

Executive-severance experts said the package stands out not only for its enormous size, but also given Mr. Neumann’s record. The valuation of WeWork, which he co-founded in 2010, fell to around $8 billion when he left from $47 billion in early 2019. In all, WeWork has raised more than $11 billion to build a company worth $7.9 billion, not including debt.

This guy should be sharing a cell with Martin Shkreli, not getting hundreds of millions more dollars in remuneration.

The man looted the company, and has been rewarded for this.

Something is very wrong with our society’s incentives.

Quote of the Day

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There are infinite kinds of irresponsible books that a well-credentialed media insider can write.

First are the total farces of fact. These include former New York Times chief Jill Abramson’s mangling of basic details about her subjects in her book on new media, or the time that Naomi Wolf, once an adviser to Al Gore, learned on the air in an interview with the BBC that the thesis of her latest book was based on her complete misreading of a nineteenth century legal definition.

A second variety of irresponsible books are those whose primary purpose is to market their authors at the expense of humane and rational thinking and behavior. For example, The Problem From Hell allowed Samantha Power to parlay her journalism into a Beltway policy career as the human face of the American forever war. Hillbilly Elegy’s J.D. Vance is reportedly preparing a run for the Republican nomination for Senate in his home state of Ohio.

And then there are books whose fusion of factual inaccuracy and moral sophistry is so total that they can only be written by Malcolm Gladwell.

—Noah Kulwin in The Baffler

I love me a scathing review, and this one is entertaining, and the subject is so eminently deserving of the treatment, that it is a joy to read.

It is also more generally an indictment of the “Very Serious People” sit as gate-keepers to acceptable thought in our society.

Our Government Needs to Stop Hiring Psychopaths

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The Biden Administration has announced that it will be appointing Richard Nephew as assistant envoy to Iran.

He’s kind of a classic foreign policy sadist, particularly as he is a former Obama Administration sanctions expert, but he’s written a book where he brags about hurting ordinary citizens through the sanctions that he devised.

Colloquially, it’s called saying the quiet part out loud. Legally, it’s called a crime against humanity:

The Joseph Biden administration has named Richard Nephew as its deputy Iran envoy. As the former principal deputy coordinator of sanctions policy for Barack Obama’s State Department, Nephew took personal credit for depriving Iranians of food, sabotaging their automobile industry, and driving up unemployment rates.

Nephew has described the destruction of Iran’s economy as “a tremendous success,” and lamented during a visit to Russia that food was still plentiful in the country’s capital despite mounting US sanctions.

Nephew’s appointment to a senior diplomatic post suggests that rather than immediately returning to the JCPOA nuclear deal, the Biden administration will finesse sanctions illegally imposed by Trump to pressure Iran into an onerous, reworked agreement that Tehran is unlikely to join.

Doubling down on bad policy and ignoring agreements that have been signed because ……… American Exceptionalism.  Great policy there.

You see, he wrote a book:

………

Entitled “The Art of Sanctions: A View From The Field,” the book’s cover image features two Caucasian hands drawing a rope for a noose, presumably to strangle some insufficiently pliant Global South government. Its contents read like a list of criminal confessions, detailing in chillingly clinical terms how the sanctions Nephew conceived from inside an air-conditioned office in Washington immiserated average Iranians.

With his candor, Nephew has shattered the official US rhetoric about “targeted sanctions” that exclusively punish “bad actors” and their business cronies while leaving civilian populations unharmed.

………

Nephew also patted himself on the back for tripling the price of chicken “during important Iranian holiday periods,” thereby “contribut[ing] to more popular frustration in one bank shot than years of financial restrictions.”

Next, he boasted of more sanctions targeting civilians to prevent Iranians from obtaining the assistance they needed to repair their cars. “Iran’s manufacturing jobs and export revenue were the targets of this sanction,” Nephew wrote.

………

In response to online criticism, Nephew has claimed that “the main target” of the sanctions regime he designed was “the oligarchs.” But his book on “The Art of Sanctions” tells another story.

Nephew fondly recalls how he structured sanctions to sabotage Iranian economic reforms that would have improved the purchasing power of average people. The Obama administration destroyed the economic prospects of Iran’s working-class majority while ensuring that “only the wealthy or those in positions of power could take advantage of Iran’s continued connectedness,” he wrote. As “stories began to emerge from Iran of intensified income inequality and inflation,” Nephew pronounced another success.

Rather unsurprisingly, the government of Venezuela has submitted Nephew’s books and articles as evidence of war crimes to the ICC

Yesterday, we officially submitted before the International Criminal Court the book “The Art of Sanctions” and the article “Evaluating the Trump Administration’s Approach to Sanctions: Venezuela”, both by @RichardMNephew, advisor to Obama and Biden for the imposition of sanctions pic.twitter.com/lW9d3V4bRW

— Jorge Arreaza M (@jaarreaza) May 18, 2021

Richard Nephew’s books and articles are also evidence that he is too stupid, and too criminal, to hold a security clearance, much less hold a senior position in the any Presidential administration.

Consider the Source

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The New York Times editorial board is a font of conventional thinking. (Note that I did not say, “Wisdom.”)

You won’t find bold new or visionary ideas, but it is a good marker of where the conventional, “Wisdom,” is going, so their OP/ED calling for the end of qualified immunity for police officers might be an indication of a sea change in the elite consensus:

When a Minneapolis jury last month convicted the former police officer Derek Chauvin of murdering George Floyd on May 25, 2020, many Americans celebrated. At last, a moment of accountability, if not quite justice, in the face of persistent police brutality.

But for all the justified relief at the verdict, a troubling reality lurks: Had Mr. Chauvin not been criminally prosecuted — as the vast majority of police who kill in the line of duty are not — he may well have faced no consequences at all.

………

Qualified immunity arose out of an 1871 civil rights law that made government officials, including police officers, financially liable for violating a person’s constitutional rights. In a series of rulings starting in the late 1960s, the Supreme Court decided that an officer is immune from liability unless it can be shown that he or she broke “clearly established” law in the process. The burden is on the plaintiff to make this showing, and the bar is absurdly high: If no other court has previously ruled in a case involving an essentially identical set of facts, the law is determined to be not “clearly established.”

Examples of courts splitting hairs to give a pass to even egregious misconduct abound: the prison guard who pepper-sprayed an inmate in the face “for no reason at all”; the officer who fired at a nonthreatening dog and missed, accidentally hitting a 10-year-old child lying nearby on the ground; the officers who stole $225,000 in cash and rare coins while executing a search warrant; the officer who shot a 14-year-old boy after he had dropped a BB gun and raised his hands.

“I don’t think there’s any serious argument but that the qualified immunity doctrine as it currently exists is completely off the rails,” said Barry Friedman, a law professor at New York University and a founder of the Policing Project, which aims to give the general public a role in shaping law enforcement policy. “It makes no sense whatsoever and gives police officers far more leeway than they ought to have.”

In short, it’s hard to see what is qualified about qualified immunity.

………

In practice, qualified immunity has become what Justice Sonia Sotomayor has called an “absolute shield” that “tells officers that they can shoot first and think later, and it tells the public that palpably unreasonable conduct will go unpunished.”

The court has also expressed the concern that individual cops will be bankrupted by judgments. This simply doesn’t happen. To the contrary, governments virtually always foot the bill for police wrongdoing. One study found that officers personally paid only .02 percent of the dollars that plaintiffs were awarded.

………

Ending or curtailing qualified immunity would not be a cure-all for police brutality. By the time it becomes an issue, the harm has already been done. While holding people and departments accountable is important, it’s even more important to ensure that the harm doesn’t occur in the first place. “Police misconduct is often a systemic problem. These are not just bad apples but bad barrels,” said Joanna Schwartz, a law professor at U.C.L.A. who studies police misconduct. “We should be thinking about how to reduce the harm, not just pay people.”

………

The more immediate solution is legislative. Congress is currently considering the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, a far-reaching bill addressing racial discrimination and excessive force by law enforcement officers. One provision would eliminate the “clearly established” defense and prevent cops from relying on their own belief that their conduct was lawful. Unfortunately, that has become the bill’s main sticking point, as most Republicans have sided with police unions in opposing any liability for individual officers.

………

If the rule of law means anything, it means that those sworn to enforce it should not be above it.

The current state of policing int he United States is needlessly corrupt and brutal. 

It must be reformed, and many, if not most, of its current members need to removed.

He is an Evil Son of a Bitch

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I am referring to Charles Koch, who has been lobbying for increased evictions relaxed regulations while investing in real estate.

The famously Libertarian Koch, whose family fortune came from selling energy technology to Stalin, is engaging in a classic case of rent seeking behavior, basically being a leech on society by the definition of Ayn Rand (יִמַּח שְׁמו) who Charles Koch is a big fan of.

I guess it’s capitalism for thee and socialism for me from him:

Billionaire Charles Koch’s foundation has bankrolled three conservative legal groups leading the court battle to eliminate prohibitions against tenant evictions during the Covid-19 pandemic in America.

At the same time, Koch’s corporate empire has suddenly stepped up its real estate purchases during the pandemic – including making large investments in real estate companies with a potential financial interest in eliminating eviction restrictions.

………

But since the Covid-19 pandemic began, Koch Industries has been plowing money into real estate.

In March this year, the Wall Street Journal published a report headlined Charles Koch Is Betting Big on Distressed Real Estate. The paper reported that the billionaire’s corporate conglomerate “is emerging as a major real-estate investor during the pandemic, using its robust cash reserves to buy properties at beaten-down prices and betting on a longer-term recovery”.

I might suggest that Mr. Koch arrange for burial at see when he passes on, because the line to piss on his grave would be awfully long otherwise.

The Arizona “Vote Audit” Gets Even More F%$#ed Up

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It turns out that Maricopa County may have to trash all of its voting machines as a result of the Cyber Ninjas clown show.

There are requirements that voting authorities maintain control of their voting equipment, and this has been a fairly clear violation of these regulations.

Luckily for county authorities, the bill that passed the state house authorizing this bad guerilla theater vote audit puts the state on the hook for all the costs involved:

Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs told Maricopa County officials in a letter on Thursday that her office may not allow the county to reuse hundreds of vote-counting machines that the county gave the state Senate for its general election audit.

The county broke the chain of custody, or the procedures for properly securing and tracking the machines, when it was required to give the machines to the state Senate under subpoenas, Hobbs wrote in a May 20 letter to the county’s Board of Supervisors, Recorder and Elections Department director.

Hobbs said she consulted with officials at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security who said the machines shouldn’t be used again because there is no way to fully determine whether the machines were tampered with while out of the county’s custody.

Hobbs wrote that if the county tries to use the machines again, even if it performs a full analysis in an attempt to determine whether the machines were still safe to use, her office would “consider decertification proceedings.” In Arizona, voting systems must be certified to be used in elections.

Replacing the machines would cost the county millions. But the Senate signed an agreement with the county that said the county is not liable for any damages to the equipment while in the Senate’s custody, so it’s unclear whether the county would be on the hook for the costs.

The county leases its voting machines from Dominion Voting Systems under a three-year, $6.1 million agreement that runs through December 2022.

Dump the old machines, and use hand marked publicly counted paper ballots.

It won’t cost you any money, it’s all on the state, and you will end up with a more secure system.

The Colonial Pipeline Was Unaffected by the Ransomeware Attack

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It turns out that the systems controlling the pipeline continued to function as intended, it was only the billing systems were hit, which means that the decision to shut down the pipeline, which threw much of the East Coast of the US into a panic, was not about safety, and critical infrastructure was not impacted, it was just that collecting payments from customers became more inconvenient.

The technical term for what Colonial did was irresponsible, and possibly negligent.

Why am I not surprised that Koch Industries, aka, the Koch Brothers, are a major shareholder?

This, “F%$# you, pay me,” attitude is integral to their warped souls:

The cyber attack that shutdown the Colonial pipeline causing a gas panic and stoking fears of gasoline shortages, didn’t actually shut down the pipeline. It impacted the billing system at the Colonial Pipeline Co., which shut it down because they were worried about how they’d collect payments. 

Yes, the fuel-carrying pipeline was shut down last week in order to prevent a company that is entrusted with what should be a public utility from enduring an accounting headache.

I really hope that someone, I’m looking at you Katie Porter, to whip out the old white board, and cut the executives running a new asshole at hearings.

For the problem described, they could have set up a paper system, and faxes, (or scanners and Gmail) to handle billing temporarily in perhaps 48 hours.

It’s Jobless Thursday

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Last week, initial unemployment claims fell to 444,000, down 34,000 from last week.

Once again, it’s an improvement, but with the rush of the stupid states to roll back unemployment benefits, I expect the pace of improvement slow down in those states: 

The number of workers seeking and receiving unemployment benefits through state and federal programs has reached pandemic lows ahead of this summer, when 22 states plan to end a $300 federal benefit early.

Initial unemployment claims through regular state programs dropped to 444,000 last week, marking a new low level since the pandemic hit in mid-March 2020.

The number of people claiming benefits through state and pandemic-related programs also declined in the week ended May 1 to a pandemic low of 16 million people from 16.9 million a week earlier, the Labor Department said on Thursday. That includes benefits through one of several programs, including regular state aid and federal emergency programs put in place in response to the pandemic.

………

Though jobless claims are on a downward trend, April’s job gain of 266,000 fell far short of the one million economists had forecast, fueling concerns about the recovery. Republicans also are concerned that enhanced federal unemployment payments are discouraging people from seeking work.

The low job creation numbers are a fly in the ointment.

States have announced dates ranging from mid-June to mid-July for when they will stop processing pandemic-related benefits. That means nearly 3.7 million individuals could lose the $300 weekly benefits—which were set to expire in early September—beginning in mid-June, according to estimates by forecasting firm Oxford Economics.

Of those, about 1.45 million will also lose pandemic benefits for gig work, and about 1.31 million will no longer have access to extended benefits that kick in after claimants exhaust their regular state benefits.

This is the whole Brood X Cicada emergence in the ointment.

This recovery is driven by government spending, and because they fetishize being cruel, they are knocking the pins out from underneath the recovery.

Sadism as policy is never a good thing.

⅔ of Republicans Vote to Kill Capitol Insurrection Investigation

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This does not surprise me.

Seeing as how many members of the Republican caucus, particularly House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, are hip deep in the conspiracies behind the January 6 insurrection, it comes as no surprise that House Republican leaders aggressively whipped the vote against a commission to investigate the matter.

This is why the idea of a bipartisan commission is a bad thing; unlike 911, Republican Representatives and Senators are suspects, and not just observers: 

The House of Representatives has voted in favor of a bill that would create a 9/11-style commission to investigate the deadly attack on the Capitol in January.

The vote fell largely along party lines, with 35 Republicans joining Democrats in passing the measure. However, 175 Republicans voted against the bill, as Republican leaders endeavored to put the deadly 6 January attack behind them, and reframe the riot as a protest.

………

“It sounds like they are afraid of the truth, and that’s most unfortunate, but hopefully they’ll get used to the idea that the American people want us to find the truth,” Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker, said as she sharply criticized Republicans for opposing the bill.

Three Republicans spoke in favor of the legislation: John Katko, Fred Upton and Peter Meijer. All were among the 10 who had voted days after the attack to impeach Trump for encouraging his supporters to attack the Capitol.

The Republican Party is an enemy of the Republic.

Not Enough Bullets

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Emergent BioSolutions, whose cavalier and incompetent business practices contaminated millions of vaccine doses, still saw fit to give huge bonuses to its top executives.

I’m not sure what the executives did, beyond taking millions of dollars in government subsidies:

Emergent BioSolutions, the biotech company whose Baltimore plant ruined millions of coronavirus vaccine doses, awarded hundreds of thousands of dollars in bonuses to its top executives last year, and the company’s board praised its founder and chairman for “leveraging his critical relationships with key customers, Congress, and other stakeholders,” according to documents released Wednesday by a House subcommittee.

………

Production at the plant was halted a month ago after workers accidentally contaminated a batch of vaccine, forcing Emergent to discard the equivalent of up to 15 million doses of Johnson & Johnson’s coronavirus vaccine.

Records from an Emergent board of directors compensation meeting offer a rare glimpse inside a politically connected federal contractor whose business is built largely around a single customer: the United States government.

The documents reflect earlier reporting by The New York Times, including a series of confidential audits that highlighted repeated violations of manufacturing standards at the Baltimore plant, including failure to properly disinfect the plant and protect against contamination of vaccine batches. Another report in June 2020, by a top manufacturing expert for the federal government, warned that Emergent lacked trained staff and adequate systems for quality control.

………

The board lauded executives for their “exemplary overall 2020 corporate performance including significantly outperforming revenue and earnings targets.”

Since 2018, Mr. El-Hibri and his wife, Nancy, have donated at least $150,000 to groups affiliated with the top Republican on the panel, Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, as well as Mr. Scalise’s campaigns. At least two other members of the subcommittee received donations during the 2020 election cycle from the company’s political action committee, which has given about $1.4 million over the past 10 years to members of both parties.

Mr. Kramer received a $1.2 million cash bonus, the records show; the board found that he had “significantly exceeded expectations.” Three of the company’s executive vice presidents received bonuses ranging from $445,000 to $462,000 each.

Sean Kirk, the executive responsible for overseeing development and manufacturing operations at all of Emergent’s manufacturing sites, received a special bonus of $100,000 last year, over and above his regular bonus of $320,611, in recognition of his “exceptional performance in 2020,” and for significantly expanding the company’s contract manufacturing capability to address Covid-19, the documents show. After the discovery that workers had accidentally contaminated a batch of Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine with the virus used to produced another vaccine at the same plant, the company said Mr. Kirk had taken personal leave from his job.

………

The $628 million contract, awarded by the Trump administration nearly a year ago, was mostly to reserve space at Emergent’s Baltimore plant for vaccine manufacturing. The contract was approved by a former Trump administration official, Dr. Robert Kadlec, who previously consulted for Emergent.

………

Dr. Kadlec has said that while he did not negotiate the contract, he did sign off on it. The documents also show that last August he recommended that Emergent be given a “priority rating” so that suppliers would give preference to its requests.

These guys should be sharing cells with the Capitol Insurrectionists.

So much of our economy these days consists of little more than stealing from the general public, whether with taxpayer money, (these guys) monetizing the public commons (Uber, Lyft, AirBnB, Lime, etc.), through indirect subsidies through IP provisions, (Media, Pharma, etc.) or the granting of special rights not held by ordinary people. (ISDS, TBTF, etc.)

If we stop these folks from stealing from us, there is no reason that we cannot have a better and more just society.

Cowardly Prosecutor Bullsh%$

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Elizabeth City, NC DA Andrew Womble has announced that he will not be charging the officers who unleashed a fusillade of bullets and killed Andrew Brown in his car.

He has also announced that this was a serious investigation, and that he won’t be releasing the body cam footage, because, f%$# you.

This does not fill me with confidence in the integrity of the investigation:

A North Carolina district attorney on Tuesday said officers were justified in the fatal shooting of Andrew Brown Jr, a Black man, in April, and that the sheriff’s deputies who fired will not face charges for killing the 42-year-old father of seven.

Andrew Womble said Brown’s death “while tragic, was justified” because three deputies “reasonably” believed deadly force was necessary to protect themselves and others while serving a warrant for Brown’s arrest on felony drug charges.

………

Brown’s death certificate said he died as the result of a gunshot wound to the head. Brown’s family commissioned an independent autopsy which specified that he was shot five times, once to the back of his head.

Womble said he would not release body-camera video of the confrontation, for which Brown’s family and supporters have repeatedly called to ensure integrity in the investigation of his death.

If the body cam footage were that clear, they would be streaming it on YouTube now.

They are covering it up because they have something to cover up.

This is Contemptible

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It turns that cops and medical examiners are conspiring to use Sickle Cell Trait to excuse police misconduct.

Sickle Cell Trait is the heterozygous form of Sickle Cell Anemia, and it has a limited effect on people.  It is almost universally asymptomatic.

Nevertheless, because it is almost exclusively associated with Black people, cops and their enablers use it as an an excuse for beating people to death:

When they carried the body of a 32-year-old Black man named Lamont Perry out of the woods in Wadesboro, N.C., there were no protests over his sudden death in police custody.

No reporters camped at the scene. No lawyers filed suit.

Instead, the final mark in the ledger of Mr. Perry’s life was made by a state medical examiner who attributed his death in large part to sickle cell trait, a genetic characteristic that overwhelmingly occurs in Black people. The official word was that he had died by accident.

But the examiner’s determination belied certain facts about that night in October 2016, public records and interviews show. Accused of violating probation in a misdemeanor assault case, Mr. Perry was chased by parole and local police officers through the dark into a stand of trees, where only they could witness what happened next.

He had swelling of the brain, and a forensic investigator reported that he had an open fracture of his right leg. He was covered in dirt, and residents of a nearby housing complex told his family that when the officers emerged from the woods, their shoes and the bottoms of their pants were spattered in blood.

Yes, clearly this is a case of Sickle Cell Trait causing a broken leg, closed head trauma, and massive bleeding.

Mr. Perry’s case underscores how willing some American pathologists have been to rule in-custody deaths of Black people accidents or natural occurrences caused by sickle cell trait, which is carried by one in 13 Black Americans and is almost always benign. Those with the trait have only one of the two genes required for full-blown sickle cell disease, a painful and sometimes life-threatening condition that can deform red blood cells into crescent shapes that stick together and block blood flow.

………

The New York Times has found at least 46 other instances over the past 25 years in which medical examiners, law enforcement officials or defenders of accused officers pointed to the trait as a cause or major factor in deaths of Black people in custody. Fifteen such deaths have occurred since 2015.

In roughly two-thirds of the cases, the person who died had been forcefully restrained by the authorities, pepper-sprayed or shocked with stun guns. Scattered across 22 states and Puerto Rico, in big cities and small towns, the determinations on sickle cell trait often created enough doubt for officers to avert criminal or civil penalties, The Times found.

………

“You can’t put the blame on sickle cell trait when there is a knee on the neck or when there is a chokehold or the person is hogtied,” said Dr. Roger A. Mitchell Jr., the former chief medical examiner for the District of Columbia and now chairman of pathology at the Howard University College of Medicine. “You can’t say, ‘Well, he’s fragile.’ No, that becomes a homicide.”

I guess that we need to add, “Living while Black,” to, “Driving while Black,” to the list of offenses that the authorities find worthy of the death penalty.

A Perfect Metaphor for American Startup Culture

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It should surprise no one that gypsy cab company Uber is less of a ride sharing company than it is an exercise in fraud. 

By this, I don’t mean that it has no path to profitability (though it doesn’t), I mean that Uber, and WeWork, DoorDash, and pretty much the entire investment portfolio of Softbank is an attempt to generate buzz through a massive infusion of capital, followed by an IPO that offloads the company to suckers.

It seems to me that in addition to those startups, the management of Softbank should be frog-marched out of their offices in handcuffs when the reckoning comes.

It also turns out that Uber is an example of particularly extreme financial engineering:

Uber is not a business in the traditional sense. It’s a “bezzle” (“the magic interval when a confidence 

trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it”).

The only reason Uber was able to attain growth was because investors gave it billions to lose. First, it was the Saudi Royals, hoping to spend their way to a transportation monopoly.

When that didn’t work, the company’s investors suckered the public into taking their shares off their hands in an IPO premised on two things:

  1. Self-driving cars

  2. All buses and subways in the world being scrapped and replaced with Ubers.

Neither of those things have happened, of course. Uber actually had to pay someone else $400m to “buy” the self-driving car division it sank $2.5b into (the resulting cars could not travel for one mile without a serious accident).

………

Uber’s “innovation” wasn’t self-driving cars. It was cheating. Uber is really f%$#ing good at cheating.

How good? Well, last year, Uber managed to dodge tax on $6b in global revenues by laundering its income through fifty Dutch shell companies.

………

It’s quite a whirlwind of socially useless financial engineering, composed of obvious frauds like “selling” its IP to a Dutch subsidiary financed with a $16b “loan” from a Singaporean subsidiary, garnering 20 years‘ worth of $1b annual tax credits.

The Netherlands may be a bastion of progressive politics, but it’s also one of the world’s leading onshore-offshore tax havens, joining Cyprus, Luxembourg, Delaware, Wyoming and the City of London as a key player in the global money-laundry.

Our multinational financial system is one big case of, “If fraud can happen, it will already have happened.”

If we actually enforced the tax and fraud laws, there would be millions of people nationwide who would be in the dock right now.

For F%$#’s Sake, Why?

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Why the hell does Joe Biden want to appoint Rahm Emanuel ambassador to Japan?

Rahm has a serious claim to be the most overrated man in Politics, he does not speak Japanese, and he is a loud obnoxious bully, which does not play well with Japanese social norms.

Anyone this side of the “My Pillow” guy would have been a better selection.

The man is a cancer on the body politic:

Joe Biden has picked the former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel to be his ambassador to Japan.

………

Some progressives view Emanuel as a major antagonist within the party. He is often criticized among liberals, for example, for his handling of a shooting of an African American teenager during his time in Chicago.

He covered up the shooting, and kept the shooter on the force until the courts forced the release of the video.

I get that political supporters get assignments like this, but why the f%$# do you have to appoint someone so completely ill-suited to the position.

I Feel Very Good About This

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Hennepin County District Judge Peter Cahill has ruled that Derek Chauvin is eligible for a sentence enhancement for up to 40 years in prison. 

He used the terms, “Particular cruelty,” and “Abused a position of trust and authority,” as a cop to justify taking a potential sentence for 2nd degree murder from about 12 years.

Good.  This psychopath is a menace to society:

Derek Chauvin abused his authority as a police officer when he pressed his knee into George Floyd’s neck until he went limp and treated him with “particular cruelty,” qualifying him for a longer prison sentence, a judge said.

In a ruling made public Wednesday, Hennepin County District Judge Peter A. Cahill found state prosecutors had proved beyond a reasonable doubt four of five aggravating factors in Floyd’s killing that they argued should result in a tougher prison sentence for the former Minneapolis police officer.

Chauvin was convicted April 20 of second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter in Floyd’s May 25 killing. Floyd died when Chauvin placed his knees on Floyd’s neck and back for more than nine minutes while he was handcuffed, facedown, on a Minneapolis street. Chauvin, who is being held in solitary confinement at a Minnesota prison, is scheduled to be sentenced June 25.

Although a jury found Chauvin guilty on all three charges he was facing, Minnesota law dictates he will face sentencing only on the most serious charge: second-degree murder. State sentencing guidelines on that charge recommend 11 to 12 years in prison for someone with no criminal history.

But prosecutors last fall and again last month asked Cahill for what is known as an “upward sentencing departure,” citing several factors they argued should open Chauvin up to a maximum of 40 years in prison.

In his ruling, Cahill agreed with prosecutors that Chauvin had “abused a position of trust and authority” as a police officer and that Chauvin “knew from his training and experience” that his restraint was putting Floyd in “danger of positional asphyxia.”

The scary part is that without a video that had gone viral, Derek Chauvin would still be a cop, and he would still be brutalizing people.

“Phants Ditch Liz

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No sympathy for Elizabeth Cheney.  She is an odious person who, along with her whole family have made the Republican Party what it is today

I cannot feel sad at any misfortune she suffers, particularly, as is the case today when House Republicans removed her from the #3 spot in the house, that the whole party is shooting itself in the dick.

I expected it to be close, but I expected a secret ballot, and instead it was a voice vote:

House Republicans began Wednesday by quickly ousting Rep. Liz Cheney (Wyo.) from her leadership post because she continues to challenge former president Donald Trump over his false claim that the presidential election was stolen.

Soon after, several GOP members spoke up to minimize the actions of pro-Trump rioters who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6., an event that led to deadly clashes with police and threatened the orderly certification of President Biden’s electoral victory.

Taken together, the events Wednesday offered the clearest sign yet of how far Republicans are willing to go to support or tolerate Trump’s lies about the election as well the degree to which many members are trying to rewrite the history of Jan. 6 to erase the former president’s culpability.

………

There was no roll call vote Wednesday after McCarthy said he wanted a voice vote to show “unity.” Once the 18-minute meeting was over, Cheney walked up the middle aisle past her colleagues and left the room, according to a person familiar with the meeting who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the private gathering.

Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has learned a lesson it seems, that behind the veil of a secret ballot, he cannot trust his caucus, because he feels, probably with no small justification, that a secret ballot would bring nothing but embarrassment.

Still, he gets embarrassment, because this is f%$#ing embarrassing.

Well, This is Horrifying

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Jeff Bezos is a psychopath who revels in hurting people.

His ethos permeates Amazon, and it’s why you hear so many stories about the inhumanity of its workplace, not just in its warehouses, but in its corporate offices.

It turns out that Amazon gives its a mangers a quote of people to fire each year, which has led to a practice called, “Hire to Fire,” where they hire people for the express purpose of firing them in a few months so that they can hit their numbers.

Why does this world embrace sadists?

Amazon has a goal to get rid of a certain percentage of employees every year, and three managers told Insider they felt so much pressure to meet the goal that they hired people to fire them.

“We might hire people that we know we’re going to fire, just to protect the rest of the team,” one manager told Insider.

The practice is informally called “hire to fire,” in which managers hire people, internally or externally, they intend to fire within a year, just to help meet their annual turnover target, called unregretted attrition (URA). A manager’s URA target is the percentage of employees the company wouldn’t regret seeing leave, one way or the other.

………

The most senior executives at Amazon, including incoming CEO Andy Jassy, closely track their URA goals, according to internal documents obtained by Insider. Jassy, for example, is expected to replace 6% of his division through “unregretted” departures on what appears to be an annual basis.

Something is deeply broken in our society.

I don’t know how to fix this.  My only advice is that if you go postal at work, go after senior executives first.

The DoJ Weighs in About the Arizona Freak Show

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The Department of Justice wants to have a word with Cyber Ninjas’ and their audit of Maricopa County Presidential ballots.

Given the lax security, and the fact that this audit included what appeared to an attempt to intimidate voters, it comes as no surprise that the Feds were profoundly unamused:

The Arizona Senate will hold off on a plan to contact voters as part of a Republican-commissioned election recount that raised concerns from the Justice Department about voter intimidation, state Senate President Karen Fann said Friday.

The head of the department’s civil rights division, Pamela S. Karlan, wrote to Fann (R) on Wednesday suggesting that the recount of nearly 2.1 million ballots in the state’s largest county by a private contractor may not comply with federal law, leaving ballots at “risk of damage or loss.” She also raised questions about the contractor’s stated plans to “identify voter registrations that did not make sense” and interview voters via phone and “physical canvassing.”

The ongoing audit run by Florida-based Cyber Ninjas has been widely criticized as fueling wild theories that fraud and other electoral problems led President Donald Trump to lose the presidential race. Officials in Maricopa County, which went for Joe Biden in November, say the results have been validated repeatedly.

But Republicans have pressed ahead with a new, highly unusual inquiry that has ranged from scrutinizing ballots under UV lights to seeking traces of bamboo. With Cyber Ninjas, they hired a company whose chief has echoed Trump’s unfounded claims of problems with the 2020 election.

Looking for traces of what? 

Are they worried that some snacking Panda was messing with the ballots?

The senator laid out conditions for anyone contacting voters: Canvassers would convey that participation is voluntary; would not select people for characteristics such as race or party affiliation; would not carry a weapon; and would not wear or say something implying an affiliation with police, immigration, tax enforcement or the military, among other requirements.

Karlan, in her letter, raised particular worries about targeting by race. “Past experience with similar investigative efforts around the country has raised concerns that they can be directed at minority voters, which potentially can implicate the anti-intimidation prohibitions of the Voting Rights Act,” Karlan said.

Voter intimidation is the goal here.

Responding to the Justice Department’s security concerns, Fann said that “not a single ballot or other official election document has been destroyed, defaced, lost, or adulterated.” Ballots must be securely maintained for 22 months following a federal election.

Shining bright UV lights on ballots in an attempt to find signs of Panda infiltration cause the ballots to fade.

Their Panda hunt will deface the ballots.  It’s basic physics.

………

Former Arizona secretary of state Ken Bennett, the audit’s spokesman, previously told The Washington Post that Cyber Ninjas had not begun interviewing voters and said the company has pledged to do nothing that would constitute intimidation.

The owner of Cyber Ninjas, an enterprise with no prior experience with vote tabulation or canvassing, has already prejudged the outcome.  Expecting them to follow the law is a fiction.

This is a clearly an attempt to intimidate voters and to manufacture uncertainty on an already twice audited vote tabulation process.

Why do Republicans hate America?

He Won’t, Though

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It appears that there has been an outbreak of extreme naivete at The Nation, where they expect Secretary of State Anthony Blinken to to confront The Ukraine over their embrace of Nazis, Nazi sympathizers, and revisionist history.

This will never happen.

Blinken, and Biden, are a part of a foreign policy establishment who never ended the Cold War, and simply changed the name from “USSR” to “Russia” on their to-do lists.

Fighting Nazis is simply too inconvenient for these folks:

From the moment he was nominated for secretary of state, the media has made much over the Holocaust’s impact on Antony Blinken. Blinken’s stepfather was a famous survivor; his upbringing made the Holocaust an indelible part of Blinken’s identity. Indeed, last month Blinken lambasted America’s callousness during the genocide, going so far as denouncing a World War II–era State Department official for refusing to aid Jews fleeing Europe.

The speech was hailed as a righteous reckoning—and it was. But condemning long-dead officials is one thing. Today, Blinken will have a chance to stand up for Holocaust victims in a far less comfortable environment. He will visit Kyiv, a city where, merely a week ago, hundreds marched in honor of a Nazi SS division. The march was denounced by Germany and Israel, but not the United States.

Blinken’s visit becomes a crucial test, considering that Ukraine is a key US ally: Addressing Kyiv’s blatant glorification of Nazi collaborators would be an opportunity to rise above the failures of his predecessors, placing the Holocaust above geopolitics.

Last Wednesday’s march was in honor of SS Galichina, a Ukrainian volunteer division in the Waffen-SS, the Nazi Party’s military arm responsible for the Holocaust. In 1944, SS Galichina was personally inspected by Heinrich Himmler, Hitler’s second in command and one of the principal architects of the Holocaust. The division’s record of war crimes includes the Huta Pieniacka massacre, when an SS Galichina subunit exterminated around a thousand Polish villagers, chiefly by burning them alive.

………

The US embassy in Kyiv did not respond to a request for comment, while a State Department spokesperson replied, on background, “We welcome President Zelenskiy’s strong statement condemning the march,” and that the department “continues to monitor and systematically refute a longstanding Russian disinformation campaign that conflates support for Ukrainian sovereignty with support for neo-Nazi and fascist ideals.”

The comment did not explain what, if any, connection Kyiv’s SS march has with Russia or disinformation.

But the truly surprising thing is that Kyiv’s SS march made headlines at all. The reality is that glorification of Nazi collaborators and Holocaust perpetrators isn’t a glitch but a feature of today’s Ukraine.

One aided and abetted by the US state security apparatus, as evidenced by the strong support given by the US government during the Maidan protests.  (Victoria Nuland literally brought them cookies)

Shortly after the Maidan uprising of 2013 to ’14 brought in a new government, Ukraine began whitewashing Nazi collaborators on a statewide level. In 2015, Kyiv passed legislation declaring two WWII-era paramilitaries—the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA)—heroes and freedom fighters and threatening legal action against anyone denying their status. The OUN was allied with the Nazis and participated in the Holocaust; the UPA murdered thousands of Jews and 70,000–100,000 Poles on their own accord.

………

The typical reaction to this in the West is that Ukraine can’t be celebrating Nazi collaborators because it elected Zelenskiy, a Jewish president. Zelenskiy, however, has alternated between appeasing and ignoring the whitewashing: In 2018, he stated, “To some Ukrainians, [Nazi collaborator] Bandera is a hero, and that’s cool!”

Zelinskiy is a Kapo, and we should not be supporting what is going on in the Ukraine.  (Same goes to a lesser degree in Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Poland)

If American foreign policy in the 21st century stands for anything beyond corporate profits, we need to be firmly anti-Nazi.

Glorification of Nazis leads to the creation of nativist political movements that eventually corrupt the politics, and lead to the implementation of Fascist policies.