The Obamanauts Are Rebranding as Evil
Whether it’s Jay Carney speaking for Amazon, Robert Gibbs working for McDonalds to kill the minimum wage, Seth Harris’ role in drafting the anti-worker Proposition 22, David Plouffe doing PR for Uber, and Tim Geithner being ……… Tim Geithner, it does seem that for all their prior protestations of working for the public weal ring rather hollow.
No, not Joe Manchin, nor even the twisted wannabe punk Kyrsten Sinema.
I am talking, of course about Rahm Israel Emanuel, a politician so contemptible that he was run out of the Chicago Mayor’s office on a rail.
There seems to be no level of evil and stupidity he won’t support, so now he’s cast his lot against raising the minimum wage, which is arguably the most beneficial, and is certainly the most politically popular policy initiative in the United States today:
As disgraced former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel reportedly keeps floating his name for a Biden administration appointment, he is recycling an old Republican plan to let states opt out of a higher minimum wage. Now, he is slated to headline the annual conference of one of the major corporate lobbying groups fighting against congressional Democrats’ $15 minimum wage legislation.
The National Restaurant Association, the lobbying group which led the fight to block a minimum wage increase in the COVID-19 relief bill passed last month, will be hosting Emanuel as a keynote speaker for the group’s virtual conference on April 20, an event entitled: “Seeking Unity: Conversations on How We Can Come Together.”
The speaking slot follows Emanuel’s Washington Post op-ed last month arguing that omitting a minimum wage increase from the American Rescue Plan was not a big deal, and asserting that Democrats should work with Republicans on a plan that does not guarantee $15 nationwide.
He’s always wrong, he’s not particularly competent, and he’s a bully.
Why is he not flipping burgers at minimum wage for a living?
We lead with the story of how Clark and Jeanette Parker of Beverly Hills used charter schools as a piggy bank, following a long history of dodgy accounting in the “charity” sector, moving to a new location whenever their self-dealing and underperformance became known by the local educational regulators.
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The Parkers have cast themselves as selfless philanthropists, telling the California Board of Education that they have “devoted all of our lives to the education of other people’s children, committed many millions of our own dollars directly to that particular purpose, with no gain directly to us.”
But the couple have, in fact, made millions from their charter schools. Financial records show the Parkers’ schools have paid more than $800,000 annually to rent buildings the couple own. The charters have contracted out services to the Parkers’ nonprofits and companies and paid Clark Parker generous consulting fees, all with taxpayer money, a Times investigation found.Presented with The Times’ findings, the Parkers did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
How the Parkers have stayed in business, surviving years of allegations of financial and academic wrongdoing, illustrates glaring flaws in the way California oversees its growing number of charter schools.
Many of the people responsible for regulating the couple’s schools, including school board members and state elected officials, had accepted thousands of dollars from the Parkers in campaign contributions.
Like other charter operators who have run into trouble, the Parkers were able to appeal to the state Board of Education when they faced the threat of being shut down; the panel is known for overturning local regulators’ decisions. A Times analysis of the state board’s decisions has found that, over the last five years, it has sided with charters over local school districts or county offices of education in about 70% of appeals.
California law also enables troubled charter operators to escape sanction or scrutiny by moving to school districts more willing to accept them. The Parkers have used this to their advantage, keeping one step ahead of the regulators.
“They’re like cats,” said Kawamoto, who began working at one of the couple’s charter schools in 2006. “They have so many lives.”
Charter schools are technically public schools operated by private entities. Make the subject to the freedom of information acts that normal schools do.
—P.C. Hodgell
On the “Good News” side, we have a public education advocate turned public education advocacy lawyer Robert Skeels, who has been beating the Charter School establishment like a drum in court:
On Tuesday, March 23, 2021, I got my second big win in court against a charter school corporation. It was also a major victory over their California Charter Schools Association (“CCSA”) trade association, which tried to use the case to carve out immunity to the California Public Records Act (“CPRA”). I represented @DotKohlhaas in the action.
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My first win against a corporate charter school was a year ago as third chair in a suit to overturn a wrongful expulsion of a student of color. The Partnerships to Uplift Communities (“PUC”) charter chain (of convicted felon Ref Rodriguez fame) had violated the student’s due process rights. Violated isn’t a strong enough word for what they did. PUC unilaterally changed the charges at the appeals hearing and then branded the child as a terrorist in his permanent record. Under the tutelage of the brilliant partners at the law firm I was a part-timer at the time (I am currently transitioning to full time there), plus sage advice from @DrPrestonGreen, we built a strong case.
It was my argument that the charter corporation never proved specific intent — a crucial element to Ed. Code § 48900.7, as well as PUC’s glaring lack of notice afforded to the student, that saw the court overturn the wrongful expulsion and give the student their life back.
This latest case was a charter trying to hide all its dirty secrets by not complying with the CPRA. The scandal-ridden The Accelerated Schools (“TAS”) charter chain’s leaders absconded when the community started pushing back and started asking questions about union busting.
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I suppose I can’t blame them. The charter industry — long used to unaccountably spending tax dollars in total secrecy — fought tooth and nail the imposition of the CPRAand Brown Act added by Ed. Code § 47604.1(b)(2)(A). When the statute took effect January 2020, charter school corporations were already looking for ways to skirt the law. At the firm where I’m a junior associate, we use the CPRAfor pre-discovery work against charter corporations. Michael Kohlhaas dot org, on the other hand, has used the CPRAto expose some of the ugliest, scandalous conduct by an industry already infamous for scandal. Uncovering the vile Nick Melvoin’s sharing of Los Angeles Unified School District’s (“LAUSD”) confidential legal strategieswith their then party-opponent in a lawsuit(the CCSA) was a blockbuster revelation enabled by the CPRA.
When one looks at the corruption, self dealing, and opacity of the Charter School industry, it’s almost as if the entire process was designed to serve the dual goals of resegregating public education and allowing private operators to loot the public coffers.
Oh wait, it was.
In 2010, largely on the basis of being telegenic and glib, Nick Clegg and his Liberal Democrats, (Slightly Silly Party) managed to snag enough seats in Parliament, no mean feat in Britains first-past-the-post system, to be the junior member in coalition with David Cameron and the Tories until the next election, where
In the next election, they lost 48 of 57 seats, because the electorate realized that all Clegg cared about was proximity to power.
Speaking of Nick Clegg’s pathological need to be close to power, he is now Facebook’s vice president of global affairs, and so, much like his days in UK politics, defending the indefensible.
In this case, the former head of the Lib Dems is defending Facebook’s algorithms and its reckless and insecure handling of user data.
Clegg’s descent into an irrelevant joke does not surprise me one bit:
Facebook wants to reintroduce users to its algorithms.
On Wednesday, within the span of a few hours, the company took several steps to encourage users to trust its ranking and recommendation systems. In a blog post, Facebook said it would make it easier for users to control what’s in their feeds, pointing to both new and existing tools. In an apparent attempt to buttress that announcement, Facebook’s vice president of global affairs Nick Clegg published a 5,000-word Medium post defending the company’s ranking algorithms and repudiating the argument that those algorithms create dangerous echo chambers. Clegg also defended Facebook’s algorithms in a wide-ranging interview with The Verge published on the same day.
Taken together, these moves appear to be a concerted campaign by Facebook to repair the negative reputation of its algorithms, which many say actively encourage and incentivize political polarization, misinformation, and extreme content. The efforts come as the company faces heavy criticism from lawmakers for its platform design, and just a week after CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified to Congress during a hearing on misinformation.
In its latest PR blitz, Facebook is pushing the idea that it’s not particularly responsible for the proliferation of polarization and extreme content on its platforms and is taking appropriate steps to combat both. That defies longtime critics, who have said Facebook’s algorithms are engineered to reward the most odious content, a specific narrative that Facebook and Clegg are actively denying.
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“Nick Clegg’s Medium post is a cynical, breathtaking display of gaslighting on a scale hard to fathom even for Facebook,” a spokesperson for the Real Facebook Oversight Board, a group of scholars and activists critical of Facebook, told Recode. “Clegg asks, ‘Where does FB’s incentive lie?’ A better question might be: Where does Nick Clegg’s incentive lie? The answer to that is clear.”
“Facebook managed to both insult its users for being too dimwitted to understand how its algorithms work while also blaming them for taking advantage of them too effectively,” said Ashley Boyd, the vice president for advocacy at Mozilla, in a Wednesday statement. “The News Feed controls unveiled today amount to nothing more than an admission that its algorithms are the problem.”
Ashley Boyd’s quote is spot on, and I have nothing to add.
Amazon has been trolling its critics so unhinged lately that their own IT department thought that someone had hacked their Twitter account.
This is because many public figures, indluding many leading lights in the left wing of the Democratic Party, including Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have been highlighting the brutal inhumanity of Amazon’s treatments of its workers, including allegations that the schedules for its drivers are so tight that they have no time to relieve themselves, and have to use pee bottles.
Amazon furiously denied those allegations, maintaining that they treat their employees well, and no one has to piss in a bottle to make quota.
Or rather, Amazon WAS denying those reports, but now they are saying that their earlier statements were inoperative: Drivers were using pee bottles after all:
Amazon has apologized to the congressman Mark Pocan, admitting to scoring an “own goal” in its initial denial of his suggestion its drivers were sometimes forced to urinate in bottles during delivery rounds.
“We know that drivers can and do have trouble finding restrooms because of traffic or sometimes rural routes, and this has been especially the case during Covid when many public restrooms have been closed,” the company said in a blogpost.
Its admission came a week after the Wisconsin Democrat criticised working conditions for Amazon staff, saying in a tweet: “Paying workers $15 [an hour] doesn’t make you a ‘progressive workplace’ when you union-bust and make workers urinate in water bottles.”
Amazon responded: “You don’t really believe the peeing in bottles thing, do you? If that were true, nobody would work for us.”
It subsequently walked back that comment.
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Pocan tweeted that the company should acknowledge “the inadequate working conditions you’ve created for all your workers, then fix that for everyone and finally, let them unionize without interference.”
Indeed.
Amazon is a horrible place, run by a horrible person, and if you buy from them, you are a co-conspirator.
It appears that the Santa Clara Police Officers Association is attempting to shake down local businesses.
Is it time to replace ACAB (All Cops Are Bastards) with ACAM (All Cops Are Mobsters)?
In a move that seems straight out of a mafia playbook, the union representing Santa Clara’s police officers solicited donations from businesses in exchange for police department support.
In its “2021 Business Supporter” flyer, sent to local retailers, the Santa Clara Police Officers’ Association said, “Place our decal in your window, and we will direct our ‘FRIENDLY’S’’ to support you!”
The message appears to imply special treatment for those businesses displaying the decal after donating money to the union. The idea of the police department playing favorites based on donations contradicts claims that it values fairness and “will perform this service professionally and with integrity.“
Santa Clara Councilmember Anthony Becker expressed alarm over the flyer.
“I want answers to what they mean by ‘friendly’s,’” Becker said. “If they aren’t paying in, are you not going to protect them? Why would you put that on your flyer if you’re not going to really mean something out of it?”
The debacle led to Santa Clara City Hall releasing a statement saying donations made to the police union “are not related to the level of police service received.”
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Another question raised by the flyer is what the requested donations will be used for. Union president Alex Torke publicly said donations made during annual campaigns are “deposited in a distinct account that is used strictly for donations to charities and charitable causes.” However, some speculate the money might be leveraged to influence elections or political causes.
“You can see…how they have used the money in the past,” said a Santa Clara City Hall insider who asked for anonymity. “A lot of their money has been used towards the PACs for political purposes.”
[Councilman Anthony] Becker said he would like to see a full accounting by the union of its budget.
“They don’t divulge they fund political candidates during elections,” Becker said. “I think they need to be a little more transparent about where that money’s going…and who they’re supporting with it. I’d really like to see that money going towards things we need, not political agendas.”
Becker claims some businesses told him they were directed by the police to not display his political signs during the last election cycle.
When the cops are racketeers.
It’s rather more common than one would like to think.
Civis Analytics, one of the constellation of grifters sucking the life out of consultants for the Democratic Party, founded by Obama Alumni, purged their workforce of people because they were labor organizing.
Trouble found Sunny Rao early the morning of October 30. By the time the Washington State–based data scientist woke up, the group text she shared with several co-workers at the Democratic data firm Civis Analytics had already begun to buzz. “Someone said that they had been fired,” she recalls. Worried, Rao tried to log in to her work computer, only to find it locked. Then she checked her email, and there it was, the news she’d feared: She was terminated effective immediately. No one “even met with me to tell me that I was getting fired or why,” she tells Intelligencer.
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Rao and Klem say the company gave them no explanation for their dismissals. The timing was odd, too: Civis was working on Joe Biden’s presidential campaign, and the election was only days away. On the Google Hangout meetings, managers did not give a reason for laying off so many staff members at once, according to the fired employees. With nothing else to do, the group text began to put the pieces together. By the end of the day, they’d learned that Civis had fired 11 people. All were vocal activists at work, known among co-workers for their willingness to question company practices in meetings. Instead of experiencing confusion, Klem and Rao began to feel betrayal.
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Twelve current and former Civis employees say the company’s internal practices fell short of its public promise to be a progressive place to work. “We were working to make Civis live up to the values posted on their website,” says an employee who was fired on October 30. In December, seven of those terminated filed a charge with the National Labor Relations Board, alleging Civis had illegally fired them for organizing. Last month, the NLRB dismissed the charge. An official for the regional board said its decision owed to a Trump-era precedent, according the attorney who represented the Civis employees, that had raised the standard for workers to prove unlawful retaliation. The seven workers say they plan to appeal this week, placing their hopes in the same Biden administration they helped to elect.
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Wagner said he was “shocked” by the NLRB charge. “Civis has worked with labor unions since we were founded, and we strongly support the rights of workers to organize. We had no knowledge of any potential union organizing efforts and no evidence of it – no emails, no request for meetings, nothing.”
Still, if Wagner is telling the truth, and Civis had no idea that anyone wanted a union, the firings could still violate the National Labor Relations Act. Workers have the right to organize, whether it’s for a union or for leading protests at work. Retaliation is unlawful, and the NLRB can order employers to reinstate workers and offer them back pay — as the company’s new attorneys could tell them. Civis retained Jackson Lewis, a law firm an AFL-CIO official once called “the devil incarnate,” to handle its case at the NLRB.
Because, of course they did.
Ethics, schmethics, there is grifting to be done.
The allegations against Civis sting more given its origins. Wagner, who was the chief analytics officer for Barack Obama’s reelection campaign, built the company to put liberals in power. The pitch was simple. Democratic campaigns needed a network of reliable number-crunchers, and rather than build new analytics teams every four years, candidates could now turn to a single company. During the 2020 election cycle, the firm earned $8.5 million for work on the campaigns of Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Cory Booker, and Elizabeth Warren and on other Democratic ventures. While political campaigns still generate much of the company’s revenue, it also works in public health and for various government agencies and, yes, labor unions, like the American Federation of Teachers, to the tune of almost $1 million since 2014.
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On its website, Civis makes a lot of promises to prospective workers with principles. “No a**holes,” reads its mission statement. But the former workers all say a banal reality lurked behind the buzzwords: Civis was not all that different from any other corporate employer. In a 2019 incident that still rankles former employees, Wagner announced a companywide pivot — and that meant layoffs — that he called a “CTRL-alt-delete moment” for Civis in a staff meeting. The flippancy infuriated workers, who cite it in conversations with Intelligencer as a sign that portended battles to come.
Kind of like how the Obama White House was a “Genuinely hostile workplace to women.”
Talking the talk, but not walking the walk.
In March 2020, as the pandemic began and the Democratic primary hit its most frantic tempo, contract employees struggled with heavy workloads and waited for permanent jobs that had been promised but never appeared. Right after the pandemic hit and staff moved to remote work, the company introduced a controversial new policy. Members of its government team now had to hit a quota of billable hours, starting at an average of 37 and a half a week. Civis told staff the new policy would be more equitable than the status quo, which saw some employees billing at much higher rates than others. Quotas aren’t all that unusual for consulting companies, but Civis paired its quota with unlimited paid time off, which was. Workers also had non-billable job responsibilities to perform on top of the quota, and former employees say that when staff took sick leave, even in the middle of a pandemic, they had to make up the hours later. The company had several initiatives designed to improve Civis from within — like a diversity-and-inclusion working group — but, staffers grumbled, where was the time to participate?
37½ billable hours a week is the equivalent of at somewhere between 55 and 75 actual hours a week.
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“I was the highest-level woman of color on the government team,” she says. In regular one-on-one meetings with a Civis executive, she says she repeatedly asked for anti-racism training for employees at work. The organization hosted implicit-bias trainings and donated money to five charities, but she felt that didn’t go far enough. Particularly galling for Rao was a summertime presentation by her managers, which singled her out as proof that Civis prized diversity. “When we hired Sunny, we met the Rooney Rule but only interviewed two people,” said one of the slides reviewed by Intelligencer.
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Workers say they coordinated with each other via a private Slack channel and phone calls on how to press Civis for changes. They wanted better paid-leave policies, clearer career progression for contract workers, professional development, and an end to what they called “the progressive pay cut” — a below-market wage offered to young workers in search of jobs that don’t offend their principles. When they raised these issues in staff meetings or one-on-one conversations, three former employees say, managers thanked them for speaking up.
This is explicitly protected activity under the NRLA, and Civis CEO Dan Wagner knows this, because if he’s hired the biggest union busting law firm in the nation, Jackson Lewis, they have told him that it is explicitly protected activity, and how to evade the requirements of the law.
Around the same time, in late May, a senior Civis analyst named David Shor tweeted himself into trouble. Amid mass protests over the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, Shor shared a link to research that showed a decrease in Democratic votes after similar unrest in 1968. Critics accused him of racial insensitivity. Six days later, Civis fired him, putting the company under a harsh spotlight. Former and current employees say Shor’s firing exacerbated unease with the way Civis managed employees. While commentators dissected the Shor case and its implications for free speech, Civis employees viewed it more as a labor issue, a sign that management was capricious and everyone was vulnerable.
By the fall, the resentment inside Civis came to a boil. Early in October, four former employees recall, a co-worker learned mid-meeting that her grandmother had died. Devastated, she left the call, then asked for bereavement leave in a one-on-one meeting with her manager. It didn’t go well, she later told co-workers who spoke to Intelligencer. The woman’s manager told her that she could take leave — but only if she made up the hours when she returned, her former co-workers recall her saying. Watching the billable-hours policy directly affect a co-worker and friend “made me personally angry and motivated to organize to affect change,” one co-worker tells Intelligencer. Within days of the incident, two employees reached out to a contact at the AFL-CIO for advice on the process of organizing a union.
Separately, Civis employees asked for greater transparency regarding the way the company chose its clients. As the presidential election approached, a Civis contract with Facebook worried a number of staff, including workers who weren’t involved in any conversations about unionization. The employees felt Facebook spread too much hate and had done too little to drive the violent far right off its platform. At an October 20 meeting open to the entire company, employees wanted to know how exactly Civis chose its clients, including Facebook: What good was the Civis litmus test if staff had no say in how it worked?
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Ten days after that Facebook meeting, Sunny Rao, Sarah Klem, and nine other people were fired. Asked whether they believed their Facebook criticisms contributed to their firings, the workers would not comment. It’s certain, though, that they’d already been vocal company critics for months. Former and current employees tell Intelligencer that the 11 people who lost their jobs were all known internally for their activism at work, though only seven filed a charge with the NLRB.
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Though the NLRB’s Chicago office, where Civis workers filed the original charge, didn’t deliver the finding the workers had hoped for, it may not have vindicated Civis either. The employees’ former attorney says the NLRB made it clear that Trump-era precedent had tied its hands: A divided 2019 ruling from the national board raised the bar for workplace activists to prove they’d been fired as retaliation. The case, Electrolux Home Products, Inc. and J’vada Mason, made it easier for employers to invent a pretext and still slide through the board’s review process, says Brandon Magner, a labor lawyer and the author of the Labor Law Lite newsletter.
Now that the seven who filed the NLRB charge have said they will go to the NLRB’s Office of Appeals, the Civis case could end up being more influential than they anticipated. Control of the national board is about to switch parties, as current appointees see their terms expire. “If everything goes the way it should, the ‘Biden board’ will be in place,” Magner explains. If the timing’s right, there’s “a chance” Civis could become a test case for overturning Electrolux, he adds.
If the NLRB overturns Electrolux on these assholes backs, I will be amused.
Did you know that if the minimum rose as fast as Wall Street bonuses, it would be $44 an hour now?
I don’t know about you, but it makes me want to find a way claw to it all back, because, to quote Billie Ray Valentine, “Billy Ray Valentine principle, “The best way you hurt rich people is by turning them into poor people.”
The chaos that the coronavirus pandemic unleashed on America’s economy turned out to be a major boon for Wall Street traders, according to new data from the New York state comptroller’s office.
Wall Street firms paid their New York City-based traders an average bonus of $184,000 last year, a 10% increase from 2019, New York’s comptroller, Thomas DiNapoli, said in a press release Friday.
But those paydays have been skyrocketing for decades. Since 1985, Wall Street traders’ bonuses have grown 1,217% — and that’s just part of their overall pay, which was more than $406,000 on average in 2019, according to data from DiNapoli’s office.
By comparison, the federal minimum wage has flatlined at $7.25 an hour — or $15,080 annually — for 12 consecutive years. When adjusted for inflation, it has actually decreased by 11% since 1985.
If the minimum wage had instead grown at the same rate as Wall Street bonuses, it would be $44.12 an hour today.
We really need to levy a tax on financial transactions, and place a limit on fees for tax advantaged accounts (IRAs, 401(K)s, etc) of less than 10 basis points. (.1%)
These parasites have been doing nothing but extracting wealth from the rest of us for decades.
The NLRB has ruled that Tesla has openly and repeatedly broken labor law in its anti-union drives.
Seeing as how the car company has been killing and injuring its workers while offering them free frozen yogurt, they pretty much have to break the law to keep the unions out:
Tesla has been ordered to correct its unlawful labor practices, and its supremo Elon Musk must delete a related tweet from three years ago.
In a ruling issued on Thursday, the US National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) concluded that Tesla violated federal labor law in its efforts to discourage workers from unionizing. It directed the company to cease various anti-union actions and policies like claiming workers would lose benefits if they vote for union representation.
The NLRB found that Tesla violated labor law by coercively interrogating employees, threatening them with the loss of stock options if they supported unionization, and enacting unlawful policies like a confidentiality agreement that banned speaking to the press.
The ruling directs the vehicle maker to offer to rehire plaintiff and former employee Richard Ortiz and pay him lost wages, and to strike unlawful disciplinary information from the record of both Ortiz and another employee, Jose Moran.
It further requires Tesla to rescind portions of its 2016 confidentiality agreement that disallow lawful union-related activity under Sections 7 and 8 of the National Labor Relations Act, which the NLRB acknowledged “protects employees when they speak with the media about working conditions, labor disputes, or other terms and conditions of employment.”
The decision also directs self-styled “Technoking” Musk to delete a May 20, 2018, tweet because it implies workers must give up their stock options if they unionize.
I still think that the only to get the lawbreaking to stop is to frog-march Elon Musk out of his offices in handcuffs.
It turns out that only 12 people are responsible for the overwhelming majority of anti-vaxx content online.
It really is amazing what a few horrible people can do:
They’ve been dubbed the “Disinformation Dozen”: 12 individuals or organizations are tied to up to 65 percent of anti-vaccine content circulating on major social media networking sites, according to an analysis of popular anti-vaccine content on Facebook and Twitter.
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The report accuses Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — who was banned from Instagram last month — Joseph Mercola, Ty and Charlene Bollinger — whose Twitter accounts were briefly suspended at the beginning of the pandemic — Sherri Tenpenny, Rizza Islam, Rashid Buttar, Erin Elizabeth, Sayer Ji, Kelly Brogan, Christiane Northrup, Ben Tapper and Kevin Jenkins of spreading disinformation and claims that their social media accounts “have repeatedly violated Facebook and Twitter’s terms of service agreements.” And the CCDH has receipts — the report is full of screenshots of “example violations” that range from misleading to antisemitic.
It’s not a surprise. The past few years have shown us the potential effects of a few toxic individuals in the right (wrong?) places.
Amazon Denies Workers Pee in Bottles. Here Are the Pee Bottles
—Vice
What a surprise, the PR department of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Amazon lies through its teeth.
They claim that their workers are well treated, and are free to take pee breaks, which is belied by the pictures of pee bottles in Amazon trucks and warehouses.
Amazon claims its workers don’t pee in bottles; defenders say it’s an urban legend. But these photos sent to me by a former driver for a former @amazon contractor called Synctruck in a California facility suggest strongly otherwise. https://t.co/hp4zCqOxRO pic.twitter.com/StHNvV9B1x
— Ken Bensinger (@kenbensinger) March 25, 2021
A memo specifically telling workers to remove their urine bottles at the end of a shift
What’s more, Amazon actually has posted notices telling workers to clean up their urine bottles at the end of a shift. (See attached Tweet)
They demand a schedule that allows no time to pee, and it is impossible to make schedule unless you pee in a bottle, because it’s (at least) 15 minutes to find and use a bathroom and return to deliveries.
In a just world, Jeff Bezos would be sentenced to a life of working for ……… Jeff Bezos.
One of the responses to that tweet is telling:
And yes, I know, that Crassus did not actually die in this manner, though he was almost as contemptible as Bezos:
The first ever Roman fire brigade was created by Crassus. Fires were almost a daily occurrence in Rome, and Crassus took advantage of the fact that Rome had no fire department, by creating his own brigade—500 men strong—which rushed to burning buildings at the first cry of alarm. Upon arriving at the scene, however, the firefighters did nothing while Crassus offered to buy the burning building from the distressed property owner, at a miserable price. If the owner agreed to sell the property, his men would put out the fire; if the owner refused, then they would simply let the structure burn to the ground. After buying many properties this way, he rebuilt them, and often leased the properties to their original owners or new tenants.
This is an attitude toward public service that I am sure Jeff Bezos would admire.
At the New York Times, they are describing the response to Black Lives Matter protests by the police as, “Mishandled.”
This is patently wrong, and IMHO deliberately misleading.
The brutality of police in confronting what were largely non-violent protesters were police riots.
Their behavior was deliberate and premeditated:
For many long weeks last summer, protesters in American cities faced off against their own police forces in what proved to be, for major law enforcement agencies across the country, a startling display of violence and disarray.
In Philadelphia, police sprayed tear gas on a crowd of mainly peaceful protesters trapped on an interstate who had nowhere to go and no way to breathe. In Chicago, officers were given arrest kits so old that the plastic handcuffs were decayed or broken. Los Angeles officers were issued highly technical foam-projectile launchers for crowd control, but many of them had only two hours of training; one of the projectiles bloodied the eye of a homeless man in a wheelchair. Nationally, at least eight people were blinded after being hit with police projectiles.
Now, months after the demonstrations that followed the killing of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police in May, the full scope of the country’s policing response is becoming clearer. More than a dozen after-action evaluations have been completed, looking at how police departments responded to the demonstrations — some of them chaotic and violent, most peaceful — that broke out in hundreds of cities between late May and the end of August.
In city after city, the reports are a damning indictment of police forces that were poorly trained, heavily militarized and stunningly unprepared for the possibility that large numbers of people would surge into the streets, moved by the graphic images of Mr. Floyd’s death under a police officer’s knee.
The police were prepared. Their goal was to create violence, and some property damage, in an attempt to discredit protestors, and to a significant degree, they succeeded.
This was malice, not ineptitude.
It turns out that Purdue Pharmaceuticals conducted an in-depth probe of the Sackler family, but they are refusing to release the results.
If the results exonerated anyone, they would been in a press release:
Purdue Pharma, the maker of Oxycontin, conducted what may be the most extensive investigation yet of the Sackler family, exploring whether they committed crimes or financial improprieties, but the company has kept most of its findings secret.
In a bankruptcy filing late Monday, the drugmaker acknowledged hiring attorneys, forensic accountants and other financial experts to probe members of the family who own the company and profited billions from opioid sales.
According to the filing, the team searched for evidence of wrongdoing by the family, reporting to a special committee of Purdue’s board between April 2019 and earlier this month.
Yet in its filing, Purdue Pharma chose to reveal almost nothing of what investigators uncovered, a decision that infuriates opioid activists and some government officials.
“They’re still trying to cover up the facts,” said Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey, who has sued the company and it owners, in a statement.
“Purdue’s disclosure filing says it paid its lawyers for a 22,000-hour investigation of the Sacklers, but it doesn’t disclose any of their findings,” she added.
First, the Sacklers decided to become drug pushers, and when they got caught, the Sacklers decided to loot the company before declaring bankruptcy.
Once again, I think that the best way to deal with this is to apply the Billy Ray Valentine principle, “You know, it occurs to me that the best way you hurt rich people is by turning them into poor people.”
In a story about how a candidate for Erie County Sheriff (Buffalo, NY), completely screwed up a drug raid and the warrant he swore out to allow it, we have the following testimony from another member of his team:
[Detective Joseph M.] Cook had shot other dogs in drug raids. He did not dispute during the deposition that he had shot 26 dogs over roughly a three-year period.
So, he shot a dog about once every six weeks.
The owner of the job got a $110,000 settlement. Nothing wrong here, I guess.
Support your local police.
McConnell Threatens to Hold a Scorched-Earth Senate Hostage Unless He Can Keep the Filibuster to Hold the Senate Hostage
Damn. Alexandra Petri uses just 20 words to say what took me 8 paragraphs, and at least twice as much quoted material.
I am impressed, and nonplussed by her mastery of the English language.
Mitch McConnell is threatening to be completely obstructionist if the Democrats make any change to the filibuster.
We saw how he behaved 2009-2016, and how he has behaved this far this year, so I don’t think that he has a claim to have engaged in any good faith dealing during his entire career.
Does the phrase, “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.,” ring a bell?
Mitch McConnell and good faith are as distantly related as Richard Feynman and a slime mold.*
As I am wont to say, F%$# him with Cheney’s dick:
The fight over the Senate filibuster escalated sharply on Tuesday, as President Biden for the first time threw his weight behind changing the rules even as Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, threatened harsh reprisals if Democrats moved to weaken the procedural tactic.
In an interview with ABC News, Mr. Biden gave his most direct endorsement yet of overhauling the filibuster, saying that he favored a return to what is called the talking filibuster: the requirement that opponents of legislation occupy the floor and make their case against it.
“I don’t think that you have to eliminate the filibuster; you have to do it, what it used to be when I first got to the Senate back in the old days,” the president said. “You had to stand up and command the floor, and you had to keep talking.” The comments were a significant departure for Mr. Biden, a 36-year veteran of the Senate who has been frequently described by aides as reluctant to alter Senate procedure.
………
Mr. Biden’s comments came as Mr. McConnell issued his stark warning and as the president’s allies on Capitol Hill began building a public case for the elimination of the tactic.
After Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Senate Democrat, called for changes to reduce its power, Mr. McConnell, of Kentucky, bluntly promised a “scorched earth” response and pledged to grind the Senate to a standstill and derail Mr. Biden’s agenda if Democrats took that step.
“Everything that Democratic Senates did to Presidents Bush and Trump, everything the Republican Senate did to President Obama, would be child’s play compared to the disaster that Democrats would create for their own priorities if — if — they break the Senate,” Mr. McConnell said.
………
Seeking to slow Democrats and get the attention of the White House, Mr. McConnell was adamant that Republicans would tie the Senate into knots in retaliation if they took the step. He made his declaration after Mr. Durbin, a respected veteran of the institution, had said on Monday that it was time to stop allowing the minority party to routinely block legislation by requiring a three-fifths majority to advance most bills. It was the most explicit call yet by a Democrat leader to take action.
McConnell is already tying the institution in knots. He cannot do any more evil than he is already doing now, and as such, he is at absolutely no risk of being gleeped by the Todal.†
Mr. Durbin noted that it was Mr. McConnell who institutionalized the use of the filibuster, which historically had been used rarely before the Kentuckian was in charge. Mr. Durbin said the procedural weapon was a particularly sore point for him, since it is has for two decades prevented Democrats from enacting the so-called Dream Act, a popular bipartisan bill that he wrote that would create a path to legal status for undocumented immigrants brought into the United States as children. Though it has majority support, it has never been able to clear the 60-vote threshold.
………
In his comments, Mr. McConnell threatened that Republicans would turn the rules against Democrats and try to make it virtually impossible to do anything in the Senate if they proceeded with the change. He referred to the fact that the chamber operates under arcane rules often bypassed through what is known as a unanimous consent agreement where no senator objects. If Democrats plunged ahead to gut the filibuster, he warned, Republicans would deny consent even on the most mundane of matters, effectively bogging down the Senate.
“Let me say this very clearly for all 99 of my colleagues,” Mr. McConnell said. “Nobody serving in this chamber can even begin — can even begin — to imagine what a completely scorched earth Senate would look like — none. None of us have served one minute in a Senate that was completely drained of comity, and this is an institution that requires unanimous consent to turn the lights on before noon.”
Yes we can, because you have been making it so for decades.
To the degree that Mitch McConnell sheds tears over any change to the filibuster, I will use them to salt my soup.
*Yes, I AM aware that I am probably insulting slime molds.
†The Todal is a punishment sent by the Devil to punish evildoers for not doing sufficient evil. Read James Thurber’s The 13 Clocks. It is a masterpiece.
In response to the brutal and negligent killing of Breonna Taylor by out of control police, the Kentucky State Senate has passed a bill making it illegal to insult police, because apparently police officers are beautiful cinnamon rolls too perfect for this world.
OK,the bit about cinnamon rolls came from The Onion, but God help us, the rest of this is true:
Kentucky’s Republican-majority Senate on Thursday moved forward a bill that would make it easier to arrest protesters for insulting a police officer, a measure that critics say would stifle free speech.
The bill, passed two days before the anniversary of the fatal police shooting of Breonna Taylor, would make it a misdemeanor to taunt or challenge an officer with words or gestures “that would have a direct tendency to provoke a violent response from the perspective of a reasonable and prudent person.” Conviction would be punishable by up to 90 days in jail and fines of up to $250.
State Sen. Danny Carroll (R), who sponsored the bill, said it would enable officers to arrest someone inflaming them before the encounter turns violent. The provision is meant to apply to comments that are “obviously designed to elicit a response from the officer — something to push them to making a mistake, pushing them to violence,” he said, although courts would have the final say in interpreting the rule.
“You don’t have a right to accost a police officer,” Carroll said.
In addition to criminalizing taunting police, the bill would expand the category of protest behavior considered illegal, heighten sentences for offenses related to “riots” and prevent early release for those violations. It comes as Louisville, Kentucky’s largest city, prepares for hundreds of people to gather downtown Saturday to recognize the first anniversary of Taylor being fatally shot during an early-morning raid.
………
The American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky called the measure “an extreme bill to stifle dissent” with broad and ambiguous language.
“It’s criminalizing speech in a way that’s directed at protesters and people who are speaking out against police action,” said Corey Shapiro, ACLU of Kentucky’s legal director. “It is a bedrock principle of the First Amendment that people should be able to criticize police action, even if it’s using offensive speech.”
The provision of the bill that would ban insulting police was modeled on laws in other states prohibiting comments that could reasonably push a person to violence, said Carroll, himself a former police officer. Those statutes, which are not specific to anti-police comments, rely on an exception to the First Amendment known as the “fighting words doctrine,” which holds that words inciting immediate violence are not constitutionally protected.
I am going to go out on a limb here, but I think that dealing with violent and verbally abusive people is a central part of a police officer’s job.
Also, the, “Fighting Words Doctrine,” has largely been vitiated over the past 4 or 5 decades, and
If you cannot deal with someone calling you a pig-felching racist douche bag without resorting to violence, you probably are:
As an aside, if you do not know the definition of the word, “Felch,” DON’T look it up.
Trust me on this one.
It turns out that the Trump family tradition of exploiting charities for personal gains even extends to rescue dogs.
In this case, it’s Eric’s wife Lara, who has diverted millions of dollars to the Trump organization from Big Dog Ranch Rewsuc Rescue.
It’s pretty cold to steal from rescue dogs.
On the bright side, it probably means that her campaign for US Senate is dead before it even started:
A dog rescue charity that has links to Lara Trump, the former president’s daughter-in-law, has spent almost $2m at Trump properties in the last seven years, according to US media reports.
While other companies and groups have distanced themselves from the Trumps since the 6 January attack on the capital, the Florida-based Big Dog Ranch Rescue is expected to spend another $225,000 at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago country club for an event this weekend, according to a permit filed with the town of Palm Beach, which was reported by HuffPost.
………
HuffPost reported that Internal Revenue Service (IRS) filings show that the charity has spent as much as $1,883,160 on fundraising costs for events at Mar-a-Lago and a nearby Trump golf course since 2014. Lara Trump, who is married to Eric Trump, has been a chairwoman for charity events since 2018.
Donald Trump’s Trump Foundation, which was dissolved in 2019, and Eric Trump’s Eric Trump Foundation are known to have used money from donors for events and other expenses at Trump properties. Donald Trump admitted in court documents that he used charity money to buy a portrait of himself.
They really are a repulsive lot, aren’t they?
In Arizona, State Representative John Kavanagh kist said. “We don’t mind putting security measures in that won’t let everybody vote – but everybody shouldn’t be voting.”
We’ve always known it to be the case that Republicans don’t just object to the Democratic Party, they object to Democracy:
A Republican lawmaker in Arizona has defended GOP-sponsored legislation to restrict ballot access as a means to protect “the quality of votes” and arguing that “everybody shouldn’t be voting” as Republicans in at least 43 states introduce dozens of bills to curb voting rights, compelled by spurious fraud claims and election conspiracy theories in the wake of 2020 elections and disproportionately impacting Black voters.
Arizona state Rep John Kavanagh, who chairs the state legislature’s Government and Elections Committee, told CNN that Democrats are “willing to risk fraud” by expanding voter access, and that “Republicans are more concerned about fraud, so we don’t mind putting security measures in that won’t let everybody vote – but everybody shouldn’t be voting.”
Mr Kavanagh was referencing a measure that could purge thousands of people from a list of voters who automatically receive popular mail-in ballots during elections. Arizona lawmakers are considering roughly two dozen other bills.
………
Mr Kavanagh also suggested that Democrats’ voter registration and ballot collection drives can “greatly influence the outcome of the election” by targeting “uninformed” voters.
When Dick Tuck said, after losing a campaign for Congress, said, “The people have spoken, the bastards,” he was making a joke to liven up what was a somber moment.
The Republicans really mean it.
It has been common knowledge for years that Andrew Cuomo deliberately managed a, “Toxic Workplace,” so the allegations of sexual harassment should not be a surprise:
Cuomo’s leadership style often confuses ruthlessness with greatness, abuse with strength. Interviews with dozens of former Cuomo employees and those who have worked with or adjacent to his administration reveal a governing institution that has been run, at times, like a cultish fraternity, and at others, like a high-school clique — a state executive chamber in which the maintenance of power, performance of pecking orders, and pursuit of competitive resentments matter as much as policy.
Sexual harassment is not really a matter of sex, it is a matter of power, and since before his days as New York State Attorney General, Cuomo has been consistently crapping on people who are under his authority.
What’s more, Cuomo has always operated in a thoroughly corrupt manner, not just with his quid pro quo with nursing home chains, “You donate to me, and I’ll get you immunity,” but in other more profoundly explicit ways, such as his steering bond deals to donors in direct contravention of federal law.
He’s not just a bully and a dirt-bag, he is a corrupt bully and dirt bag: (Even if he never personally touches that money)
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has since 2012 taken in more than $131,000 in campaign contributions from three major financial firms that were then tapped by his administration to manage state bond work, according to an International Business Times review of campaign finance documents and state bond prospectuses. The Democratic governor accepted the money — and his officials handed out the government business without competitive bids — despite federal rules that bar campaign contributors from receiving taxpayer-financed state bond work.
Last week, Cuomo officials designated the three banks that contributed the campaign funds — JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and Bank of America — as the dealers for a $33 million bond issue, enabling the firms to reap lucrative fees. That came on top of the Cuomo administration assigning the firms to manage a $68 million bond issue last fall, even as federal law enforcement officials were investigating allegations that New York lawmakers were doing favors for political donors.
Federal rules bar states from awarding bond work to parties who have donated to gubernatorial campaigns within the last two years (more than $86,000 of the campaign cash from the firms flowed to Cuomo in the last two years). The rules aim to prevent financial firms from gaining influence over officials who have the power to select which firms receive the lucrative bond business. The rules explicitly seek to stop financial companies from circumventing those strictures: They prohibit firms from channeling contributions to bond overseers through PACs, which are giant pools of money distributed to multiple campaign war chests.
“The pay-to-play rules are very clear,” said Craig Holman, an ethics expert at the watchdog group Public Citizen. “If Andrew Cuomo’s receiving any money from a PAC controlled by a municipal dealer, he’d be in violation of pay-to-play rules.”
On the sexual harassment front, we now have a much larger number of women claiming inappropriate behavior, as well as an increase in the severity of the behavior reported, which has resulted in a formal referral of the matter to the Albany police.
In addition, leaders in the state house, and most of New York’s Democratic Congressional delegation have called for him to resign, including Chuck Schumer and Kristen Gillibrand, who wouldn’t take a dump without poll testing it.
I really hope that he is done. He is a truly odious human being.