Category: Evil

Not Enough Bullets

No Comments

Peter Diamandis, a tech entrepreneur who seems to won every single game of bullsh%$ bingo that he has ever played, just topped himself.

He held a conference that doubled ad a Covid-19 superspreader event, and then he tried to convince people to buy his quack cures. 

No charges, of course, because nothing is a crime any more if you are rich:

In late January, tech impresario Peter Diamandis hosted an exclusive, indoor conference for a group of ultra-wealthy patrons in Los Angeles. As MIT Technology Review reported last month, the get-together, where no masks were required, became a covid-19 superspreader event.

Four days later, as staff, speakers, and attendees began testing positive for the virus, an email went out to those who had taken part. It invited them to join an “informational webinar” featuring a doctor who had been at the event—an attempt to put their minds at ease.

Diamandis had held the Abundance 360 Summit, or A360, in violation of a ban on private gatherings during a covid surge. At least 86 people were present, some having flown in from around the world; many had paid $30,000 in assorted fees for the privilege of attending in person. Everyone was tested daily, but the virus took hold nonetheless, and at least 32 people contracted covid either directly or indirectly as a result of the four-day program.

The webinar on January 30 featured Matt Cook, a trained anesthesiologist from the San Francisco Bay Area who had started a medical practice using alternative therapies. A follow-up email sharing the URL to view a recording of the call was accompanied by an order form for products from Fountain Life, a company focused on longevity treatments, of which Diamandis is a cofounder and director.

Between the webinar and the Fountain Life order form, attendees were told about a range of products that were claimed to either treat covid-19 or prevent it outright. What they were not told was that seven of the recommended products were also classified by the US Food and Drug Administration as “covid-19 fraudulent.”

The fraudulent cures included amniotic fluid, the liquid that surrounds a baby in utero and is rich in stem cells, and colloidal silver, a suspension of metal particles often touted as having antimicrobial effects, but which the FDA has said “is not safe or effective for treating any disease or condition.” Cook recommended taking both of them as an inhaled mist using a nebulizer, an electric machine similar to an asthma inhaler.

In a more enlightened time, this guy would be in jail awaiting trial. 

If it were just the rich people who were exposed, I would not be outraged, but you have to figure that a lot of people who caught this were ordinary Joes who were bartending, serving canapes, and generally submitting to the whims of said rich folks.

I Picked the Right Time to Switch to Verizon®

No Comments

As I noted yesterday, my family and I changed my provider from Sprint® to Verizon®.

To be sure, the problem was not with Sprint® per se, it was because Verizon® gave us a better deal, particularly since we were already FIOS®, the land line fiber service, customers, particularly with regard to getting new phones for Sharon, Natalie, and Charlie.  (We’ll be saving about $50 a month including various discounts, and replacing Sharon’s* and the kid’s decrepit cell phones for free.)

That being said, I have had some misgivings about the T-Mobile®‘s takeover of Sprint® a few years back, and the increasing move to T-Mobile®-ize Sprint was concerning.

What I did not expect T-Mobile® to do though was to attempt to aggressively spy on its customers to collect ad dollars, but is what they did, as the folks at The Register noted, ” Privacy Purists Prickle at T-Mobile Us Plan to Proffer People’s Personal Web, App Pursuits to Ad Promoters.” (Seriously, El Reg’s headline writers should get a Pulitzer) 

T-Mobile is requiring users to opt out in order for them not to share data like, phone location, apps installed on the phones,  web browsing habits.

T-Mobile® is claiming that the data is “Anonymized”, but each phone user will have a unique identifier, and by aggregating as few as 5 data points, the likelihood of specifically identifying a user becomes well more than 90%. (The term is “Profiling” or “Stalking”)

What’s more, as the folks at Ars Technica note the opt-out process is (unsurprisingly) not working reliably, “We’ve heard from customers who say they’ve had problems opting out so you may have to try multiple links or make multiple attempts,” because ATAB (All Telcos Are Bastards).

It’s a rather depressing turn of events for a wireless company that markedly improved consumer treatment in the US market a few years ago.

*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.

Another Shoe Drops

No Comments

In a strong statement, the New York State Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins has called for Governor Andrew “Rat-Faced Andy” Cuomo to resign. 

New York State House Speaker Carl Heastie has expressed doubts that Cuomo can continue to be effective as a leader.

There are now five women who have accused him of inappropriate behavior, and unlike many politicians, Cuomo has no reservoir of goodwill to draw upon among his fellow politicians in Albany.

Everyone in that town hates him, and the no longer fear him, so his political power, along with his once-prodigious fundraising ability are waning.

I do not think that he will resign though, too much hubris there, so either he loses the Democratic primary election, loses the general election, or is indicted on some sort of criminal charges.   (I hope for the latter)

In a potentially crippling defection in Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s efforts to maintain control amid a sexual harassment scandal, the powerful Democratic leader of the New York State Senate declared on Sunday that the governor should resign “for the good of the state.”

The stinging rebuke from the Senate leader, Andrea Stewart-Cousins — along with a similar sentiment from the Assembly speaker, Carl E. Heastie, who questioned the “governor’s ability to continue to lead this state” — suggested that Mr. Cuomo, a third-term Democrat, had lost his party’s support in the State Capitol, and cast doubt on his ability to withstand the political fallout.

Once hailed as a pandemic hero and potential presidential contender, the governor has seen his political future spiral downward over eight perilous days in the wake of a New York Times report about Charlotte Bennett, a former aide to Mr. Cuomo.

In a series of interviews with The Times, Ms. Bennett, 25, said that Mr. Cuomo, 63, had asked her invasive personal questions last spring about her sex life, including whether she had slept with older men, and whether she thought age made a difference in relationships.

Ms. Bennett is one of five women who have come forward in recent days with allegations of sexual harassment or inappropriate behavior against Mr. Cuomo, with one predating his tenure as governor.

………

Ms. Stewart-Cousins is the most prominent New York State official to call for Mr. Cuomo’s resignation, and her statement carries significance: Her Senate would be the jury for any impeachment trial of the governor, if such an action were passed by the Assembly.

It also carries symbolic weight: In 2008, when Gov. Eliot Spitzer resigned during a prostitution scandal, his decision was partially precipitated by a loss of support from Albany’s legislative leaders.

Mr. Heastie did not call for Mr. Cuomo to resign, but suggested that it was time for him “to seriously consider whether he can effectively meet the needs of the people of New York.”

The writing is on the wall, and I hope that eventually Cuomo’s (metaphorical) blood is on the floor of the Senate.

She is a Psychopath

No Comments

Senator Sinema a little too happy for poverty wages to remain pic.twitter.com/ze2T2CGtML

— RootsAction (@Roots_Action) March 5, 2021

Horriffic

It’s one thing to vote against raising the minimum wage, even if you are, as Kyrsten Sinema (D=AZ) is, nominally a member of the Democratic Party.

It’s quite another to show up dressed like a Japanese school girl, and then cast your vote with a thumbs down as one is a roman emperor.

It’s even worse when one sees the unholy glee she expresses in crushing MILLIONS of American workers.

Kyrsten Sinema is even more of a psychopath than is Mitch McConnell.

At least HE has the decency to skulk in the shadows while he does evil.

Sinema revels in the evil that she is doing.

Getting rid of her and Manchin is worth losing the Senate.

Well, Now We Know Why Moscow Mitch Is Angling to Leave the Senate

No Comments

We are now seeing reports that Mitch McConnell is aggressively trying to change Kentucky law in an attempt to prevent the Democratic Governor of the state from appointing someone should he leave office.

The question is, “Why?”

There have been questions as to his health, but I think that it is rather more likely that he is deeply involved in his wife’s corrupt abuse of her office as Secretary of Transportation to benefit her family business. 

My hope is that McConnell thinks that he will at some point in the not so distant future be forced to resign as a part of a plea deal for public corruption. (I prefer his living in misery to his dying)

It has been an open secret that Elaine Chao is relentlessly corrupt, and now that it is a matter of public record, via an Inspector General report, I don’t think that it will be allowed to fade away as it did when she was Bush, Jr.’s Secretary of Transportation:

While serving as transportation secretary during the Trump administration, Elaine Chao repeatedly used her office staff to help family members who run a shipping business with extensive ties to China, a report released Wednesday by the Transportation Department’s inspector general concluded.

The inspector general referred the matter to the Justice Department in December for possible criminal investigation. But in the weeks before the end of Trump administration, two Justice Department divisions declined to do so.

Ms. Chao, the wife of Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, announced her resignation on Jan. 7, the day after the Capitol riot. At the time of her departure, an aide to Ms. Chao said her resignation was unrelated to the inspector general’s investigation.

The investigation of Ms. Chao came after a 2019 report in The New York Times that detailed her interactions with her family while serving as transportation secretary, including a trip she had planned to take to China in 2017 with her father and sister. The inspector general’s report confirmed that the planning for the trip, which was canceled, raised ethics concerns among other government officials.

As transportation secretary, Ms. Chao was the top Trump administration official overseeing the American shipping industry, which is in steep decline and is being battered by Chinese competitors.

………

The investigators did not make a formal finding that Ms. Chao violated ethics rules. But they detailed more than a dozen instances where her office took steps to handle matters related to her father, who built up a New York-based shipping company after immigrating to the United States from Taiwan in the late 1950s, and to her sister, who runs the company now.

These included an interview with a Chinese-language television station at the New York City headquarters of Foremost Group, the shipping company. The focus of the conversation there, according to a Transportation Department translation of the media plan prepared for the interview, was to discuss how Ms. Chao’s father, James Chao, had been “dubbed ‘Chinese Ship King,’ how Foremost Group ‘ascended to its status in the world,’ and Dr. Chao’s business endeavors.”

………

Ms. Chao had declined to respond to questions from the inspector general and instead provided a  memo that detailed the importance of promoting her family as part of her official duties.

“Anyone familiar with Asian culture knows it is a core value in Asian communities to express honor and filial respect toward one’s parents,” the September 2020 memo said. “Asian audiences welcome and respond positively to actions by the secretary that include her father in activities when appropriate,” it continued.

That explanation is complete bullsh%$, because:

The investigators found that Ms. Chao had used her staff to arrange details for Mr. Chao’s trip to China in October 2017, including asking, through the State Department, for China’s Transport Ministry to arrange for two cars for a six-person delegation, which included Ms. Chao’s younger sister Angela Chao, who had succeeded their father as head of the family shipping company, and Angela Chao’s husband, the venture capitalist Jim Breyer.

The trip had been scheduled to include stops at locations in China that had received financial support from the company and also a meeting with “top leaders” in China that was to include Elaine Chao’s father and sister, but not other members of Transportation Department staff. The trip was canceled just before Ms. Chao’s planned departure after ethics concerns were raised by officials at the State and Transportation Departments.

The investigators also found that she repeatedly asked agency staff members to help do chores for her father, including editing his Wikipedia page and promoting his Chinese-language biography. They said she directed two staff members from her office to send a copy of Mr. Chao’s book “to a well-known C.E.O. of a major U.S. corporation” to ask if he would write a foreword for it.

No one in China ever heard about the above.  This was about using government resources to corruptly benefit her immediate family.

………

The report said that none of the Transportation Department employees interviewed “described feeling ordered or coerced to perform personal or inappropriate tasks for the secretary.”

In deciding not to take up a potential criminal case, the report said, the Justice Department notified the inspector general that “there may be ethical and/or administrative issues to address but there is not predication to open a criminal investigation.”

Of course they did not find a reason to open a criminal investigation, William Barr was acting as Donald Trump’s personal consigliere rather than as Attorney General.

I am not suggesting that Joe Biden should tell Merrick Garland to criminally investigate Elaine Chao, it is an inappropriate for a President to give these sorts of instructions to the Department of Justice.

However, I do think that it is appropriate for Joe Biden to tell Merrick Garland that he should make all resources possible available for investigations of official wrongdoing that might have been short-changed under William Barr.

This would include, of course the behavior of both William Barr and Elaine Chao, and that if professional prosecutors determine there is probably cause for an investigation, that all resources necessary be allocated to clear up such matters as expeditiously as possible.

Cuomo Advisers Altered Report on Covid-19 Nursing-Home Deaths – WSJ

No Comments

It now appears that members of the Cuomo administration falsified reports on nursing home deaths from Covid-19, one would assume to give their boss some political cover.

Falsifying official government documents is a crime, and you can be pretty dam sure that hizzonner knew.

The response to this news should be the AG opening a criminal investigation:

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s top advisers successfully pushed state health officials to strip a public report of data showing that more nursing-home residents had died of Covid-19 than the administration had acknowledged, according to people with knowledge of the report’s production.

………

The changes Mr. Cuomo’s aides and health officials made to the nursing-home report, which haven’t been previously disclosed, reveal that the state possessed a fuller accounting of out-of-facility nursing-home deaths as early as the summer. The Health Department resisted calls by state and federal lawmakers, media outlets and others to release the data for another eight months.

No, they falsified their reports.

That is a very different. and quite illegal, thing.

State officials now say more than 15,000 residents of nursing homes and other long-term-care facilities were confirmed or presumed to have died from Covid-19 since March of last year—counting both those who died in long-term-care facilities and those who died later in hospitals. That figure is about 50% higher than earlier official death tolls.

………

Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn asked the Cuomo administration in February for information about nursing-home deaths, The Wall Street Journal has reported. Federal prosecutors expressed interest in the July report, people familiar with the matter said.

Cuomo has aided and abbeted corruption as a way to further his power for over a decade, see the convictions of New York House Speaker Sheldon Silver and New York Senate leader Dean Skelos for corruption, as well as his actions to shut down his own anti-corruption commission, the Moreland Commission, when it too close to him and his.

In response to questions from the Journal, administration officials said Thursday that Mr. Cuomo’s advisers advocated against including data on out-of-facility deaths because they had concerns about its accuracy.

Concerns about accuracy, my ass.  This was a coverup to maximize Cuomo’s political advantage as he attempted to sell himself to the American public as “Governor Covid”.

………

State lawmakers from both parties have said the out-of-facility death data was critical for them to evaluate nursing-home policies that could prevent future fatalities. They said the Cuomo administration’s decision to delay its release constitutes a coverup of data the governor knew would be damaging to his political stature.

………

The Justice Department, through its Civil Rights Division, began requesting information about nursing-home deaths from New York and other Democratic-leaning states in August.

………

The initial version of the report submitted to Mr. Cuomo’s team for review included both data on deaths of nursing-home residents in hospitals and deaths of residents inside nursing homes, people familiar with the report’s production said.

………

In January, a report by the New York Attorney General said the state had undercounted nursing-home deaths and said the governor’s directive may have spread the disease.

It’s corruption all the way down, and I really would like to see Governor Cuomo become defendant Cuomo.

Well, This Is a Right Rat-F%$#ing

1 Comment

In an attempt to sabotage the national popular vote compact, a growing agreement between states to allocate presidential electors on the basis of a national popular vote, the North Dakota Senate has passed a bill making it illegal for the vote totals to be released before the actual electoral college vote.

The theory here is that if North Dakota does not report the vote, there is no popular vote count, and hence, no basis for the national popular vote compact to execute.

My suggestion for the states that have already entered into the vote compact, about 190 EVs so far, is to change the vote compact to reflect the total REPORTED vote.

This means that the state of North Dakota loses representation, but f%$# them with Cheney’s dick:

The North Dakota Senate this week passed a bill which aims to forbid election officials from disclosing how many actual votes are cast for each candidate in upcoming presidential elections. The total tallies would only be disclosed after future Electoral Colleges convene to select an official victor.

The measure, Senate Bill 2271, was introduced by Sen. Robert Erbele, a Republican from Lehr, N.D., who represents a district situated southeast of Bismarck. It would withhold the state’s vote count from the public and allow officials to only reveal the percentage of the total vote each candidate receives.

“[A] public officer, employee, or contractor of this state or of a political subdivision of this state may not release to the public the number of votes cast in the general election for the office of the president of the United States until after the times set by law for the meetings and votes of the presidential electors in all states,” the bill states. “After the votes for presidential electors are canvassed, the secretary of state may release the percentage of statewide votes cast for each set of presidential electors to the nearest hundredth of a percentage point, a list of presidential candidates in order of increasing or decreasing percentage of the vote received by presidential electors selected by the candidates, and the presidential candidate whose electors received the highest percentage of votes.”

………

The bill is designed to prevent implementation of the national popular vote compact – a multi-state agreement aimed at circumventing the Electoral College.

………

The national popular vote compact is a nascent agreement amongst a coalition of states which have enacted statutes dictating that their presidential electors only cast votes for the presidential candidate who wins the popular vote across all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The compact—which would effectively neuter the Electoral College—takes effect once the coalition of states involved possess 270 or more electoral votes. According to nationalpopularvote.com, the agreement has been passed into law in 16 states possessing a total 196 Electoral College votes, including New York, California, Illinois, Massachusetts, and New Jersey.

………

Appearing on the political podcast Plain Talk, the former chairman of the Michigan Republican Party, Saul Anuzis, said the measure was “almost a politburo situation from Soviet Russia,” referring to the political policymaking committee in the former Soviet Union.

The comments of former chairman of the Michigan GOP lickening this action to the Soviet Politburo is completely unfair though, to the Soviet Politburo.

They were way more respectful of the will of the people than the North Dakota Republican Party.

Honestly, I think that it is time to right a historic wrong, and merge North and South Dakota, who were only created as separate states to create partisan advantage.

Today in Evil, Facebook Edition

No Comments

This time, it’s not Zuck, it’s Sheryl Sandburg, who shut down people that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan did not like. 

What’s more, it is clear from the internal communications, they did so despite Facebook’s publicly stated affection for freedom of speech, because it was more profitable to side with despots.

No big surprise. 

Also not a surprise, Facebook structured it to make it look like a network error, so as few people as possible would know.

They Should down the Whole Corrupt Sh%$-Show

No Comments

Following the payment of massive fines for unethical, and quite possible illegal benavior, the global managing partner (basically CEO) of the consulting firm McKinsey & Company has been given his walking papers. 

The proximate cause is the $600 million settlement that the consulting firm had to pay out over their truly heinous recommendations to the manufacturers of opioids, where (among other things) they suggested that pharmacies be paid a bounty for drug overdoses to boost sales.* (They called it, “Rebates,” but it was a bounty for overdoses.)

McKinsey & Co. is, and has been for as long as I have been aware of it, an evil and corrupt organization.

The sole reason for its existence is to assist overpaid executives engaging in short sighted and destructive policies for the person enrichment of said overpaid executives. (And McKinsey & Co. partners, but that goes without saying)

When one considers the long litany of evil that they have been associated with, mass layoffs, excessive CEO pay, facilitating corruption in South Africa, assisting in setting up Trumps immigration gulags, looting Puerto Rico, facilitating the House of Saud’s frequently murderous campaigns against its critics, etc.

McKinsey is a cancer on society, and if it goes the way of Arthur Andersen tomorrow, it will not be a moment too soon:

Partners at McKinsey & Company voted out the consulting firm’s top executive, Kevin Sneader, this week as it continues to face blowback over its role in fueling the opioid crisis.

The decision to deny Mr. Sneader a second three-year term as global managing partner came in a vote by more than 600 senior partners, according to a company executive. Earlier this month, McKinsey had agreed to pay 49 states a historic settlement of almost $600 million because of sales advice the company had given to drugmakers.

It is highly unusual for a sitting managing partner at McKinsey to be refused a follow-on term. The last time a firm leader was denied a second term was in 1976, according to the company’s internal history book.

Mr. Sneader, 54, did not even make it to the final round of balloting, according to the company executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The final candidates for Mr. Sneader’s replacement are Bob Sternfels, based in San Francisco, and Sven Smit, based in Amsterdam. The shake-up at the prestigious consulting firm was first reported by The Financial Times.

It should be noted that McKinsey is as much a symptom as it is a cause of the ills that it is associated with, and the solution in the long run is greater accountability for businesses, managers, and consultants for the actions that they take.

As I noted over 2 years ago, studies have shown that when managers and holders of capital are allowed to skirt responsibility, whether through bankruptcies, corporate indemnity, or (as is the case of my earlier post) through changes in marital property laws, bad things happen. 

If the mantra of, “Personal responsibility,” and, “Real consequences,” held so dear by Republicans needs to be applied anywhere, it is to the boardroom.

*As Anna Russel would say, “I’m not making this up, you know,

Not Enough Bullets

No Comments

In the latest edition of awful Wipipo, we discover that rich white people in te LA area have set up a scheme to secure Covid-19 vaccines intended for poorer and more darkly complected folks, because ……… Karen, I guess.

Color me disgusted:

A California program intended to improve COVID-19 vaccine availability to people in hard-hit communities of color is being misused by outsiders who are grabbing appointments reserved for residents of underserved Black and Latino areas.

The program to address inequities in vaccine distribution relies on special access codes that enable people to make appointments on the My Turn vaccine scheduling website. The codes are provided to community organizations to distribute to people in largely Black and Latino communities.

But those codes have also been circulating, in group texts and messages, among the wealthier, work-from-home set in Los Angeles, The Times has learned. Many of those people are not yet eligible for the vaccine under state rules.

Some people able to make appointments have been driving to Cal State Los Angeles to get the shots.

I know that I have been over-using the phrase lately, but I want to see these folks frog marched out in hand cuffs.

Yeah, This Will Driver the Black Farmer Vote

No Comments

Former Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack, who is (or should be) notorious for fighting against equity for black farmers and lying about it, is Secretary of Agriculture once again. (He’s also in the tank for large agribusiness, but that’s another story)

Right now, he’s my choice for worst member of the Biden administration, but the term is still young:

After a 92-7 vote, the former governor of Iowa will reprise his role heading up USDA.

Three weeks after a cakewalk of a confirmation hearing, Tom Vilsack was confirmed as President Biden’s Agriculture Secretary on Tuesday in a 92-7 vote, garnering support from both parties. Vermont Independent Bernie Sanders and Republicans Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Rand Paul were among those voting against his confirmation. Senators had scheduled twenty minutes to debate the nomination but no one spoke out against Secretary Vilsack on the floor. Democrats voted unanimously in favor of the former governor of Iowa.

Vilsack’s nomination drew sharp criticism from civil rights advocates and various food safety and progressive farm groups, though he ultimately won support from major players including the Farm Bureau and the National Farmers Union.

………

Under Vilsack, USDA distorted data and concealed decades of discrimination against Black farmers.

Back in 2019, we published a two-year investigation exploring how USDA spun a fictional narrative about a renaissance in Black farming during the Obama years. Under Vilsack’s watch, USDA employees foreclosed on Black farmers with outstanding discrimination complaints, sent a lower share of loan dollars to Black farmers than it had under President Bush, and underrepresented the frequency of new discrimination complaints.

When Vilsack’s nomination was announced in December, Lawrence Lucas, president emeritus of the USDA Coalition of Minority Employees, told us his phone had been ringing off the hook with people telling him they did not support Biden’s nomination. “This brings tears to my eyes,” he said.

During his confirmation hearing, members of the Senate did not ask Vilsack about his record on civil rights, but he did say he anticipated forming an equity commission.

Yes, a f%$#ing commission.  That will solve the problem of bigotry and racism, a problem that Vilsac studiously avoided doing anything about, go away. 

It’s not, and if the past is prelude, Vilsack will continue to sacrifice family farms, regardless of color, on the altar of Big Ag.

Support Your Local Police

No Comments

It turns out that the Capitol Insurrection rioter who attempted to gouge out the eyes of a Capitol Police officer was a cop.

This is a definition of, “Professional Courtesy,” I was previously unaware of:

A retired NYPD officer turned himself in to the FBI this Monday for his role in the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, after being accused of using a pipe to attack Capitol police officers.

According to NBC New York, Thomas Webster was once assigned to work perimeter security at City Hall and at Gracie Mansion, which is the mayor’s official residence.

………

Webster was also known as the “eye gouger” on social media, due to images showing him allegedly jabbing his thumb into the face of a Capitol police officer.

Please, no bail for this guy.

It Was Racism that Killed the Beast

No Comments

Dan Froomkin has a must-read analysis on the testimony of former Capitol Police Chief Steve Sund before Congress.

In it he conclusively shows that Sund is deliberately deceptive to Congress, focusing on a poorly distributed FBI memo (the January 5 memo) from the day before the assault on the Capitol, while misleading about a far more detailed and extensive report from his own Capitol police from two days earlier, which was given to him, where his own intelligence unit warned about the very real possibility of a actions by the protesters where, “Congress itself is the target.”

I agree with Froomkin’s assessment:  Lund’s lackadaisical response stems not from bad intelligence, but from racism:

Steven Sund, the disgraced former chief of the Capitol Police Department, was explicitly warned in a Jan. 3 memo from his own intelligence unit that thousands of desperate, violence-prone Trump supporters were planning to target Congress on Jan. 6, encouraged by the president himself.

The memo didn’t really say much more than was already obvious to anyone paying attention, but it was authoritative, detailed, and, of course, prescient.

Sund waved it off. He didn’t bother to share it with the rank and file. He didn’t equip his frontline officers with tear gas, or other non-lethal crowd-control weapons, or riot gear. Instead, he sent them out in street uniforms to man barricades made of bike racks, and get the shit beaten out of them, in one case fatally. He let the Capitol fall to a mob.

But in his first public comments on Tuesday, Sund had the breath-taking gall to blame the breach of the Capitol not on his own poor decision-making, but on a “clear lack of accurate and complete intelligence across several federal agencies.”

………

The Feb. 5 FBI report was shared with the Capitol Police intelligence unit. Sund said he didn’t get it, however, and under leading questioning from Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon blamed the unit’s director, John Donahue, for that.

………

Sund’s story is that because of flawed intelligence, he judged the danger posed by the Jan. 6 protests as similar in scale to that posed by previous pro-Trump rallies nearby, none of which amounted to much.

But take a few moments to read this one, “redacted” excerpt from the internal Jan. 3 memo that the Post made public. Sund’s excuses fall apart. (The public really needs to see the full, unredacted memo, by the way.)

Due to the tense political environment following the 2020 election, the threat of disruptive actions or violence cannot be ruled out. Supporters of the current president see January 6, 2021, as the last opportunity to overturn the results of the presidential election. This sense of desperation and disappointment may lead to more of an incentive to become violent. Unlike previous post-election protests, the targets of the pro-Trump supporters are not necessarily the counter-protesters as they were previously, but rather Congress itself is the target on the 6th. As outlined above, there has been a worrisome call for protesters to come to these events armed and there is the possibility that protesters may be inclined to become violent. Further, unlike the events on November 14, 2020, and December 12, 2020, there are several more protests scheduled on January 6, 2021, and the majority of them will be on Capitol grounds. The two protests expected to be the largest of the day – the Women for American First protest on the Ellipse and the Stop the Steal protest in Areas 8 and 9 — may draw thousands of participants and both have been promoted by President Trump himself. The Stop the Steal protest in particular does not have a permit, but several high profile speakers, including Members of Congress are expected to speak at the event. This combined with Stop the Steal’s propensity to attract white supremacists, militia members, and others who actively promote violence, may lead to significantly dangerous situations for law enforcement and the general public alike.

Imagine reading that memo and failing to put your own officers on red alert; failing to prepare them to repel what seemed like an inevitable onslaught.

The closest any senator came to asking about that was Vermont Democrat Patrick Leahy. “It’s not that we had inadequate resources, but a failure to deploy the people that we were supposed to,” he told Sund. He noted that Sund had in a previous letter acknowledged knowing that white supremacist groups and other extremist groups were expected on Jan. 6 and might become violent.

………

As Rep. Cori Bush – a veteran of many Black Lives Matter protests – put it on MSNBC the very evening of the insurrection: “Had it been people who look like me, had it been the same amount of people, but had they been Black and brown, we wouldn’t have made it up those steps… we would have been shot, we would have been tear gassed.”

The reporting on this element of the story – why Sund and the House and Senate sergeants-at-arms, also older white males, weren’t particularly alarmed by the MAGA horde – has been terrible. Nearly nonexistent.

The one exception has been an article by Joaquin Sapien and Joshua Kaplan for ProPublica, based on interviews with 19 current and former U.S. Capitol Police officers. They reported:

The interviews… revealed officers’ concerns about disparities in the way the force prepared for Black Lives Matter demonstrations versus the pro-Trump protests on Jan. 6. Officers said the Capitol Police force usually plans intensively for protests, even if they are deemed unlikely to grow violent. Officers said they spent weeks working 12- or 16-hour days, poised to fight off a riot, after George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police — even though intelligence suggested there was not much danger from protesters.

“We had intel that nothing was going to happen — literally nothing,” said one former official with direct knowledge of planning for the Black Lives Matter demonstrations. “The response was, ‘We don’t trust the intel.’”

By contrast, for much of the force, Jan. 6 began like any other day.

“We normally have pretty good information regarding where these people are and how far they are from the Capitol,” said Keith McFaden, a former Capitol Police officer and union leader who retired from the force following the riot. “We heard nothing that day.”

But nobody at the Senate hearing even mentioned the issue of race. Not once.

Nobody asked Sund to compare and contrast his preparedness for Jan. 6 with his preparedness for Black Lives Matter protests that weren’t even nearby. Nobody asked why Sund didn’t give front-line officers tear gas. Nobody asked Sund or the two sergeants-at-arms if the white privilege they shared with the mob had made it seem unthreatening to them, unlike the “other”.

This was willful blindness driven by (at best) privilege, and the Congressmen questioning should have (metaphorically) strung up Sund by his entrails over this.

He just lied to Congress, and he deliberately hung men under his command out to dry, but the story of the mainstream media is going to be about how this mook is a victim of circumstance.

I Hope That This Is Illegal

No Comments

Not that anyone will be prosecuted for it, because it is Alabama, but Amazon offering $2,000 “Resignation Bonuses” so that it can replace potentially pro-union workers with scabs ahead of the vote is skeevy as hell.

Bribes in union elections are expressly forbidden under the NLRA, and I am pretty sure that this is a bribe not to vote, particularly since they are giving the impression that they will hiring folks back after the union election: (Yeah, sure)

As the historic union election at Amazon in Alabama heats up, Amazon is pulling all the tricks to stop the union.

In violation of Amazon’s social distancing policy, Amazon has forced workers to attend anti-union meetings and sent workers constant text messages daily, hinting that a union could possibly lead to the warehouse closing. Amazon has even gotten the local authorities to shorten the time of stoplights outside of the plant so that union organizers can’t hand out pro-union literature to workers passing in their cars.

Now, Amazon is doing something that labor observers have never seen before in a union election; they are offering $2,000 “resignation bonuses” to quit.

Last night, workers throughout the plant received emails offering them bonuses if they simply quit their jobs. The emails offer workers, who worked for 2 peak seasons, at least $2,000 to quit. If workers have been there at least 3 peak seasons, they are offering them $3,000.

Some Amazon workers, who dislike their job at the warehouse, may find the bonuses a tempting bridge to quit their job and seek something better. Workers are even being told that if they quit now that they could regain their jobs later after the union election.

However, if workers quit now, they won’t be eligible to vote in the ongoing union election. In the meantime, many labor observers expect that Amazon will seek to hire replacements that will vote solidly anti-union.

“That should be illegal, how can you pay someone to resign,” says 48-year-old Black Amazon worker Jennifer Bates “They are going all the way, they are pulling out all the stops”.

Under federal labor law, the bonuses could be considered a bribe and could lead to the union election being thrown out. Employers are strictly forbidden from improving the material conditions of workers in the lead up to elections and the “resignation bonuses” could be grounds for the union to petition the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to order a new union election if RWDSU loses this round.

Keeping this in litigation for the next decade is a part of Amazon’s strategy.

You won’t stop this without frog marching senior executives out of corporate offices in handcuffs.

Do Not Imagine that Mark Zuckerberg is Your Friend

No Comments

Whether he agrees with Alex Jones and the rest of his wacko, my parents are first cousins, X-Files wannabe, black helicopter, tinfoil hat wearing, stupid, dim-witted, thinks pro wrestling is real, lunatics*, or just thinks that they are good for his bottom line, Mark Zuckerberg’s choice to put right wing nut Joel Kaplan in charge of Facebook policy is an indication that Zuckerberg is dangerous and needs to be brought to heel.†

Case in point, when Facebook finally came up with a policy to deal with fabulists fomenting violence, Mark Zuckerberg killed it to make sure that Alex Jones still had a platform.

I am not sure how to handle such issues on social media, but making sure that sociopaths like Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandburg are not making what are literally life or death decisions about terrorist groups on the basis of web site engagement seems to me to be a good start:

In April 2019, Facebook was preparing to ban one of the internet’s most notorious spreaders of misinformation and hate, Infowars founder Alex Jones. Then CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally intervened.

Jones had gained infamy for claiming that the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school massacre was a “giant hoax,” and that the teenage survivors of the 2018 Parkland shooting were “crisis actors.” But Facebook had found that he was also relentlessly spreading hate against various groups, including Muslims and trans people. That behavior qualified him for expulsion from the social network under the company’s policies for “dangerous individuals and organizations,” which required Facebook to also remove any content that expressed “praise or support” for them.

But Zuckerberg didn’t consider the Infowars founder to be a hate figure, according to a person familiar with the decision, so he overruled his own internal experts and opened a gaping loophole: Facebook would permanently ban Jones and his company — but would not touch posts of praise and support for them from other Facebook users. This meant that Jones’ legions of followers could continue to share his lies across the world’s largest social network.

“Mark personally didn’t like the punishment, so he changed the rules,” a former policy employee told BuzzFeed News, noting that the original rule had already been in use and represented the product of untold hours of work between multiple teams and experts.

………

Zuckerberg’s “more nuanced policy” set off a cascading effect, the two former employees said, which delayed the company’s efforts to remove right-wing militant organizations such as the Oath Keepers, which were involved the Jan. 6 insurrection at the US Capitol. It is also a case study in Facebook’s willingness to change its rules to placate America’s right wing and avoid political backlash.

Internal documents obtained by BuzzFeed News and interviews with 14 current and former employees show how the company’s policy team — guided by Joel Kaplan, the vice president of global public policy, and Zuckerberg’s whims — has exerted outsize influence while obstructing content moderation decisions, stymieing product rollouts, and intervening on behalf of popular conservative figures who have violated Facebook’s rules.

In December, a former core data scientist wrote a memo titled, “Political Influences on Content Policy.” Seen by BuzzFeed News, the memo stated that Kaplan’s policy team “regularly protects powerful constituencies” and listed several examples, including: removing penalties for misinformation from right-wing pages, blunting attempts to improve content quality in News Feed, and briefly blocking a proposal to stop recommending political groups ahead of the US election.

………

An integrity researcher who worked on Facebook’s efforts to protect the democratic process and rein in radicalization said the company caused direct harm to users by rejecting product changes due to concerns of political backlash.

“Out of fears over potential public and policy stakeholder responses, we are knowingly exposing users to risks of integrity,” they wrote in an internal note seen by BuzzFeed News. They quit in August.

Those most affected by Jones’ rhetoric have taken notice, too. Lenny Pozner, whose 6-year-old son Noah was the youngest victim of the Sandy Hook shooting, called the revelation that Zuckerberg weakened penalties facing the Infowars founder “disheartening, but not surprising.” He said the company had made a promise to do better in dealing with hate and hoaxes following a 2018 letter from HONR Network, his organization for survivors of mass casualty events. Yet Facebook continues to fail to remove harmful content.

“At some point,” Pozner told BuzzFeed News, “Zuckerberg has to be held responsible for his role in allowing his platform to be weaponized and for ensuring that the ludicrous and the dangerous are given equal importance as the factual.”

………

When Kaplan joined Facebook to lead its DC operation in 2011, he had the connections and pedigree the company needed to court the American right. A former clerk for conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, he served as a White House deputy chief of staff under President George W. Bush after participating in the Brooks Brothers riot during the 2000 Florida presidential election dispute. During a Senate confirmation hearing in 2003 for a post with the Office of Management and Budget, Kaplan was questioned about his role in the event, which sought to stop the tallying of votes during the Florida recount.

Though he initially maintained a low public profile at Facebook, Kaplan — COO Sheryl Sandberg’s Harvard classmate and former boyfriend — was valued by Zuckerberg for his understanding of GOP policymakers and conservative Americans, who the CEO believed were underrepresented by a liberal-leaning leadership team and employee base.

(Emphasis mine)

Kaplan is a man who literally pretended to be a Florida resident and then used the threat of violence to shut down vote counting in Miami/Dade County in the 2000 election, but because he went to Harvard (Zuckerberg’s alma mater) and dated Sheryl Sandberg, so because he’s “someone like them”, and because they just ……… don’t ……… care, this individual is  Facebook’s VP of global public policy.

That this man has the ear of Mark Zuckerberg says a lot of things about the CEO of Facebook, none of it good.

The most important thing to note here is not that Kaplan is a bad person, but that Zuckerberg is a horrible person, and a horribly dangerous one as well.

*Sorry, I think that I just channeled the con Denis Leary.
†Sorry, I think that I just channeled the non even a bit of a comedian Hillary Clinton.

Because They Cannot Resist Hippie Punching

No Comments

Joe Biden is looking to appoint Rahm Emanuel ambassador to Japan.

I get it.  Rahm was once an important member of the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment), but there is no reason to appoint him to anything.

He is so incredibly awful that he was forced out as mayor, and under his watch, the police literally operated a black torture site, he sold his city to any well dressed charlatan with a few buck of campaign donations.

The only reason for Rahm to be given a position like ambassador to Japan, where, let’s be clear, he won’t have anything substantive to do, career bureaucrats in the US and Japanese have been handling the important stuff for years, is to show progressives in the Democratic Party that they are neither respected nor valued:

Former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel appears poised to take on a high-profile ambassadorship for President Biden, a step likely to trigger contention with progressives who’ve balked at him taking a Cabinet role.

Emanuel is the front-runner to be Biden’s nominee as ambassador to Japan, sources familiar with the matter told The Hill.

He’s also being considered for the post in China, but sources said Japan is the more likely landing spot for former President Obama’s chief of staff. Former State Department official Nicholas Burns is the likely front-runner to end up in Beijing.

The diplomatic role in Asia would mark a high-profile return to the federal government for Emanuel, who built a reputation as a brash but effective political tactician in the Democratic Party.

Emanuel led Democrats to the House majority in 2006, working closely with Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to return the party to power for the first time since the Gingrich revolution in that cycle.

What he has is a gift for self-promotion.

He dropped millions on candidates who stood for nothing, and lost, while Howard Dean’s 50 state strategy generated seats that Rahm wrote off completely.

Furthermore, “Brash but effective,” is the WORST POSSIBLE combination for dealing with Japan.

Brash does not play well in Japan, though they do understand that the position is a political plum:

Japan has been seen as a top diplomatic post. Past ambassadors to Japan include the 1984 Democratic presidential nominee Walter Mondale, the legendary GOP senator Howard Baker and Caroline Kennedy.

See what I mean?

These are people who understood their role was not to make (or even implement) policy, but to show that the ambassadorship is prestigious, and hence the relationship is valued.

Even if we weren’t dealing with a crass and venal incompetent who had spent his political life failing up, he is spectacularly unsuited to this position.

Of Course They Are

No Comments

In response to surprise Senate and Presidential campaign defeats, Georgia Republicans are trying to make voting as difficult as possible.

When your policies are bad, the response of the GOP is not to change those policies, or even to try to sell their policies better.  Their response is to pick and choose their voters, because they are a bunch of racist fascists:

Georgia Republicans have unveiled sweeping new legislation that would make it dramatically harder to vote in the state, following an election with record turnout and surging participation among Black voters.

The measure is one of the most brazen efforts to make it harder to vote in America in recent years. The bill would block officials from offering early voting on Sundays, a day traditionally used by Black churches to mobilize voters as part of a “souls to the polls” effort. It would place new limits on the use of mail-in ballot dropboxes, restrict who can handle an absentee ballot, and require voters to provide their driver’s license number or a copy of other identification with their application for a mail-in ballot. It would also require voters to provide the same driver’s license information on the mail-in ballot itself or the last four digits of their social security number if they do not have an acceptable ID.

The bill gives voters less time to request and return mail-in ballots, not only moving up the deadline to return an application but also limiting requests to start 78 days ahead of an election instead of the current 180. It requires election officials to reject ballots mistakenly cast in the wrong precinct and bans organizers from offering food or water to voters standing in line to cast a ballot.

“With exacting precision, the bill targets voters of color,” said Nse Ufot, chief of the New Georgia Project, one of the groups that mobilized voters of color in Georgia. “Georgia Republicans saw what happens when Black voters are empowered and show up at the polls, and now they’re launching a concerted effort to suppress the votes and voices of Black Georgians.”

Working to find common ground with these people is a fools errand.

They only care about power (theirs) and hatred (of those who do not look or pray like them).

Today in Evil

No Comments

After discovering that municipal broadband is better and cheaper than what you can get from the incumbent carriers, House Republicans introduce legislation banning the practice, because there is not enough opportunity for graft campaign donations the private sector when the government does the job better and cheaper.

Everyone hates their private ISP, the Dems should run on this, but the moderates want to continue to extract protection money campaign donations from the Baby Bells as well:

House Republicans this week proposed legislation that would ban the creation of municipal broadband networks at a federal level, and shutter networks in areas where some private competition exists – purportedly to improve internet access across the US.

Dubbed the CONNECT Act (Communities Overregulating Networks Need Economic Competition Today), the bill [PDF] says: “A State or political subdivision thereof may not provide or offer for sale to the public, a telecommunications provider, or to a commercial provider of broadband internet access service, retail or wholesale broadband internet access service.”

The CONNECT Act would also ban states from operating municipal broadband networks in areas where two or more private operators exist. The language here is fairly vague, and it doesn’t state how affected operators should dispose of their existing infrastructure. It’s also fairly limited about what constitutes a “private operator”, deferring only to the barebones definition in the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR).

………

Twenty-two states have passed laws that either prohibit municipal broadband entirely, or impose restrictions that make municipal broadband projects significantly harder to launch and operate. Minnesota, for example, requires municipalities to obtain a supermajority (65 per cent) of voters in a referendum before providing telecommunications services. Montana and Pennsylvania only permit projects if there is no private competition. Texas and Missouri have outright bans on municipal broadband.

The Democratic response should be to pass legislation preempting the state bans and offering subsidies (which would be smaller than those given to the likes of AT&T and Verizon) for the establishment of municipal broadband.

They should, but they won’t.

Get, Ya Think?

No Comments

Why yes, I am inclined to believe that, “Release of intelligence on Khashoggi killing could push U.S.-Saudi relations to new lows,” as well it should.

They murdered a US resident in their consulate, and the Clown Crown Prince ordered it. 

It makes for awkward conversations during the cocktails:

Facing court cases and its own promises of transparency, the Biden administration is about to release a long-sought U.S. intelligence report concluding that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered the 2018 killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

The report, an unclassified summary of findings across the intelligence community produced by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), will be made public as early as next week, according to people familiar with the matter.

Plans for the release come as U.S.-Saudi relations have tumbled to a new low in recent weeks, with the administration canceling arms sales, criticizing human rights abuses and the harassment of dissidents, and pledging to “recalibrate” ties with the kingdom.

The administration has said it will continue to supply Saudi Arabia — the world’s biggest customer for U.S. weaponry — with the means to defend itself against regional adversaries, including Iran and the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in neighboring Yemen, and has indicated it wants to continue a robust counterterrorism partnership.

But it has also made clear that it will, in contrast to its predecessor, press the Saudis toward a diplomatic end to their war in Yemen and to moderate their own extremism, and it will not allow Riyadh to interfere with its plans to rejoin the Obama-era nuclear deal with Iran.

………

President Donald Trump made Saudi Arabia a linchpin of his administration’s Middle East policy. Choosing Riyadh as the destination for his first presidential trip abroad in 2017, he hailed the kingdom as the leader of the Muslim world and a major profit-maker for the U.S. defense industry.

Khashoggi, a self-exiled Saudi journalist who wrote critically of the kingdom’s leadership from his home in Virginia, including in columns for The Washington Post, was brutally murdered in October 2018. Lured to the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul to pick up paperwork required for his planned marriage to a Turkish citizen, he was drugged and his body dismembered by Saudi agents, according to investigations by the Turkish government and the United Nations.

Suspicion immediately fell on the ambitious heir to the throne, who was consolidating his power within the often fractious royal family. Despite Saudi government claims that he was not involved, the CIA concluded, in an assessment leaked later that year, that Mohammed had ordered the assassination.

………

In early 2019, Congress passed a law giving the Trump administration 30 days to submit an unclassified report by the ODNI with “a determination and evidence with respect to the advance knowledge and role of any current or former official of Saudi Arabia . . . over the directing, ordering or tampering of evidence in the killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.” It specifically ordered a release of names.

Trump ignored the mandate. In February 2020, his ODNI informed congressional leaders that it was “unable to provide additional information . . . at the unclassified level,” and sent them a copy of the classified CIA assessment.

………

At Avril Haines’s confirmation hearing to become Biden’s national intelligence director, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) asked if she would release the ODNI report.

“Yes, Senator. Actually, we’ll follow the law,” Haines replied.

………

Even without Haines’s determination and pressure from Congress, efforts to force release have been moving rapidly through federal court in the Southern District of New York.

The first of two cases filed by the Open Society Justice Initiative under the Freedom of Information Act is a broad 2019 request for “all records” related to the killing and who was responsible, including the classified CIA report. Ordered by the court to produce an index of anything that might be responsive, the Trump administration in December asked for an extension of the deadline. The Biden administration has now asked for an additional extension, until next month.

………

Some experts believe that if both sides are willing, and nuanced diplomacy is pursued, they can still find a way to work productively together. “Once this report comes out, and it’s very damning to the crown prince, it’s going to be tense,” Karen Young of the American Enterprise Institute said in an interview. “But I think everybody has sort of factored that in. . . . Everybody understands that this was a decision that he had something to do with.”

………

Mohammed also serves as his country’s defense minister, and the administration is likely to focus on his role there as the proper level of contact.

“But will there be Oval Office visits?” she said. “No, definitely not.”

I’m not going to talk the moral issues here, the House of Saud is an absolute monarchy and is corrupt and it is not a reliable ally in any matter, so as a matter of basic common sense, tightly embracing Riyadh as a central pillar of our foreign policy is stupid.

Also, it’s increasingly clear, particularly now that the psychopathic moron Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud is running things, is that the House is doomed, and it will be overthrown sooner rather than later.

The best outcome would be that the House of Saud is overthrown in the manner of the House of Windsor, and so a lot of the (very) extended clan would need to find real work, and a few would serve as figureheads, and open hospitals and the like.

The worst outcome would be that the House of Saud is overthrown in the manner of the House of Romanov, which would be a horror show, considering the not-inconsiderable hydrocarbon assets in the kingdom and the fact that 2 of Islam’s holiest sites are located there, Medina and Mecca.

The longer that we prop up the House of Saud, and the longer that we prop up Mohammed bin Salman, the more likely that the transition to post-monarchy in that country will be violent and messy.

Of Course They Are Getting Screwed

No Comments

That was the whole purpose of the massive funding for Proposition 22 in California, to get a license to treat their employees like crap.

Anyone who says that they voted for Prop 22 because they thought that it would improve the lot of the Gypsy cab drivers and food delivery folks is either a liar or an idiot:

Weeks after Proposition 22 went into effect in California and exempted some major tech firms from fully complying with labor laws, workers for rideshare and delivery apps in the state claim poor working conditions have persisted and pay has decreased.

Drivers and labor groups opposed Prop 22, saying it would allow companies to sidestep their obligations to provide benefits and standard minimum wages to their workers even as they make billions of dollars. But the measure passed at the ballot box.

“It’s clear that as soon as Prop 22 passed, it was open season to start cutting my pay again,” said Peter Young, a rideshare driver for four years in Los Angeles. “I’m looking for other work. I can’t keep doing this at this pay. I’m doing food delivery right now. Everyone is ordering food online so there’s demand. It’s just that what they are choosing to pay me isn’t reliable any more and it’s getting lower.”

………

“I was under the impression that I was going to get an additional $0.30 per mile after Prop 22,” said [Uber driver Ben] Valdez, but he hasn’t received that extra compensation because, according to Uber’s metrics, his pay exceeds their calculation of 120 percent of minimum wage.

A studyby labor economists at the University of California, Berkeley, in October 2019 found Prop 22 guarantees a minimum wage of $5.64 an hour, as only engaged time is accounted for in the wage calculations.

“A lot of drivers were duped because they expected they were magically going to be able to qualify for benefits that the companies made it sound like they were going to pay for up front and that drivers were going to be getting reimbursement for the mileage,” said Valdez. “They also made drivers believe that if Prop 22 didn’t pass then Uber and Lyft were going to leave the state of California because they couldn’t afford to pay drivers as employees.”

It’s pretty simple.  The gig companies won because they lied and because they spent a lot of money.

Start collecting signatures for a repeal, and come back again, and again.

Uber, Lyft, Doordash, and have lots of venture capital money, but no meaningful profits.

Between the lies, and the limits of their VCs, eventually they will lose.