Yet another interview/profile of Larry Summers where the word “Epstein” never appears and where he’s never asked how many times he visited Epstein’s private island. I’m genuinely fascinated by how he’s *so* good at avoiding that question. https://t.co/xItFzoIgED
— Felix Salmon (@felixsalmon) June 25, 2021
There is a LOT in this seemingly innocuous question.
One of the reasons that liberals and progressives are given no respect is because when the rubber hits the road, and they need to abide by their own morality, they refuse to do so.
Case in point, the Paulo Freire Social Justice Charter School in Massachusetts, where administrators are going scorched earth over a unionization effort by teachers.
In case you don’t recognize the name, “Paulo Freire,” he was a Marxist educator, who wrote extensively on how the current model of education did not meet the needs of the poor and downtrodden.
Not exactly the sort of philosophy that is compatible with going Walmart on your staff:
In 1968, Paulo Freire, a famous Brazilian philosopher, authored the book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, a Marxist argument for using education to empower the downtrodden. In 2013, a charter school named in his honor was founded: the Paulo Freire Social Justice Charter School (PFSJCS), located in Chicopee, Massachusetts. Now, in a display of the universe’s sense of humor, teachers at PFSJCS say that the school’s leadership is engaging in union busting.
In March 2020, the school’s professional staff of about 26 people — mostly teachers, along with a few other employees such as guidance counselors — unionized with UAW Local 2322 in Massachusetts. Zack Novak, one of the teachers who helped lead the union drive, said that several years of experience working in unionized public schools had led him to expect certain standards of treatment that he didn’t see at PFSJCS. “At charter schools in general, the climate is much different. I noticed people being treated unfairly by the administration,” Novak said. “The only way to get ahead was if the powers that be liked you. That’s not an equitable environment for teaching staff.”
Novak sent out an email notifying everyone at the school that the staff had unionized in March of last year. The same day, he says, he was pulled into a meeting with administrators, which he interpreted as an assertion of their power. At the end of the school year, he said, he was offered a new contract to come back — but that contract was rescinded before the next school year began, for no apparent reason. He believes that his involvement in organizing the union was the motivating factor.
In July 2020, the school hired Gil Traverso as its new executive director, to replace a retiring predecessor. Since then, union members say, labor relations have been awful. According to Carol Huben, a PFSJCS teacher, the first ominous sign was “a really strong pattern of not responding to union communications.” Next, she said, teachers were warned or disciplined after posting innocuous pro-union messages in their Zoom backgrounds at bargaining meetings.
Then, Huben said, came the most serious blow to the union: a dozen teachers whose contracts were up last year were ordered to reapply for their own jobs — and none of them were rehired. The union said in a press release that “no explanation was offered for their non renewal of contracts.” Huben also said that management is warning newly hired teachers to beware of the union. The union has filed complaints over more than 20 incidents since Traverso’s hiring, teachers said.
Primates in general, and humans in particular, are hard wired for fairness, and when they see, “Liberalism for thee and not for me,” it disinclines them from considering the idea of people working for the collective good.
It’s the hypocrisy, stupid.
I’m referring, of course, to the Chocolate Factory, AKA Google, who has shuttered a diversity training program because the graduates were systematically underpaid, and too many of the quit.
This is racism presented as performative anti-racism:
Google has scrapped a scheme designed to train and hire engineers from diverse backgrounds – after people who made it through the program to become Googlers complained they were screwed over in pay.
The engineering residency program, known as Eng Res, has run since 2014. It’s aimed at those who don’t quite qualify as entry-level engineers; these folks are then trained up in various departments in the Chocolate Factory, and after a year they’re either hired as a proper developer or dropped.
The idea is to identify and top up the skills of people who show potential but have not had the same opportunities as others to learn and grow, or have faced unfair career-limiting hurdles, prior to applying for a role at Google. Newbie coders get a place at one of the world’s biggest names in tech, and Google gets a workers from a diverse range of backgrounds.
But after completing the program, alumni are given lower salaries, smaller bonus payments, and no stock units compared to their peers, a group of over 500 current and former Googlers have claimed.
Over time, this pay gap creates “systemic pay inequities,” according to presentation given to the web giant’s top brass by Eng Res graduates, Reuters reports.
Now, Google has dropped Eng Res altogether. A spokesperson told The Register a new program will be put in place.
It appears that the salary/bonus/stock option deficit was on the order of tens of thousands of dollars, and followed them throughout their careers.
I gotta figure that this blatant racism is central to Google corporate culture. They think that “Those People” should be grateful for having a place at Google, and that this justifies underpaying them.
Guck Foogle.
Mitch Mcconnell and Evil Minions™ just filibustered the”For the People” act, because if there is anything that Republicans agree on, it’s that N*****s should never vote:
Senate Republicans banded together Tuesday to block a sweeping Democratic bill that would revamp the architecture of American democracy, dealing a grave blow to efforts to federally override dozens of GOP-passed state voting laws.
The test vote, which would have cleared the way to start debate on voting legislation, failed 50-50 on straight party lines — 10 votes short of the supermajority needed to advance legislation in the Senate.
Republicans, particularly Senate Republicans, are not the opposition, they are the enemy, and must be treated as such.
It turns out that Uber and Lyft were paying community groups to act as AstroTurf in favor of the Gypsy cab companies.
Hoocoodanote?
At the end of February, an impassioned op-ed appeared in The Chicago Crusader, a well-established Black newspaper in the city. Titled “Why Independent Workers Want to Stay Independent,” the op-ed argued that gig economy companies like Uber and Lyft are a “lifeline” to communities of color by providing “a flexible way to work.”
One week later the exact same op-ed was published in the bilingual El Dia Newspaper. Two months later, a version of it appeared again in Crain’s Chicago Business newspaper.
Similar articles and op-eds riffing on the theme of “protecting” independent work have popped up in local publications all over the country, from Colorado to Massachusetts to New Jersey to New York.
In some of these states the articles have a common thread: Their authors represent organizations that serve communities of color and have received recent donations from Lyft, and in some cases Uber or DoorDash.
The op-eds are one facet of a multimillion-dollar lobbying campaign aimed at fighting regulations that would require the companies to treat drivers and delivery workers as full-fledged employees. Over the past several months, news outlets have detailed political action committees set up by Uber and Lyft in New York and Illinois. The Markup found that the practice was even wider spread, occurring in other states and often involving alliances with local community groups.
It’s not an alliance, it’s prostitution.
A street fair celebrating diversity and food trucks was canceled after a furor over their banning a food truck operated by Israeli immigrants.
That’s kind of like banning a Chinese food truck because of the PRC’s treatment of the Uighurs, or a Turkish one because of the treatment of the Kurds, or an Indian one for the treatment of the Muslims in India, or an Irish one for their status as a tax dodge, etc.
This is inexcusable, it is bigotry, pure and simple, and the BDS crowd in Philadelphia is really, really stupid.
To quote (not) Tallyrand, “This is worse than a crime, it is a mistake.”
A decision to disinvite a food truck selling Israeli food from a Philadelphia food festival scheduled for Sunday drew public criticism and dismay that resulted in the cancellation of the event.
Moshava Philly, a mobile Israeli food business, was supposed to participate in Taste of Home, billed as an “event celebrating diversity through food, art, entertainment, community,” presented by nonprofits Eat Up the Borders and Sunflower Philly.
On Saturday, Moshava posted on Instagram that the organizers told the food truck not to come because of rumors of a protest because of the Israeli business’ presence and that they opted to “uninvite us for fear that the protesters would get aggressive and threaten their event.”
With ongoing backlash, Sunflower Philly, one of the North Fifth Street event sponsors, announced Sunday on social media that the entire fair was canceled.
“Due to the ongoing situation with one of our events partners @eatuptheborders and @moshava_philly we have decided to cancel the ‘Taste of Home’ event,” said the group Facebook post.
The only people who win here are the proprietors of Moshava Philly, who are going to do a land office business over the next few weeks.
So now, Amazon is blaming social media for the plague of false reviews on its site.
If they have the resources to dedicate to tracking their shoppers’ habits, and the resources to surveil and harass their employees at the slightest whiff of a unionization effort, they have the resources to fix this:
Amazon today said it can’t stop fake product reviews without help from social media companies, and it blamed those companies for not doing more to prevent solicitation of fake reviews.
In a blog post, Amazon said its own “continued improvements in detection of fake reviews and connections between bad-actor buying and selling accounts” has led to “an increasing trend of bad actors attempting to solicit
fake reviews outside Amazon, particularly via social media services.”
Amazon doesn’t handle the fake review problem because they don’t want to. Anything near a full accounting would reveal just how badly they are screwing their customers, and they make a lot of money by screwing these same customers.
That’s also why they are so lackadaisical about pursuing counterfeit product in their market.
A police officer in the Portland (Oregon) Police Bureau “Rapid Response Team” (Goon Squad) was caught on video wailing a journalist, and when he finally forced her to the ground, he continued to strike her with his night stick in her head.
Today, for the first time in the history of Portland, Oregon, an officer was indicted for his actions in suppressing a protest.
It was only 4th degree assault, a misdemeanor, but in response, the PPB Goon Squad voted to disband, because they are afraid of the rule of law.
They are still on the force, but the “Rapid Response Team” is now shut down.
Considering their behavior, I would say, “Good Riddance,” because they are a bunch of bad cops who should not be allowed close to a water pistol, but Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler is (once again) taking the side of the abusive cops, even as more evidence piles up against other members of the unit:
Portland’s public safety landscape has undergone tectonic shifts in under 72 hours.
On June 15, the day after the Portland Police Association filed for closed-door mediation to hash out its contract with the city, the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office announced that a grand jury had indicted Portland police officer Corey Budworth on one count of assault in the fourth degree for his use of force at an Aug. 2020 protest.
Budworth, now on administrative leave, was a part of the police bureau’s Rapid Response Team, a 50-member unit most known for its management of protests. RRT members, whose assignment on the team is voluntary, receive specialized training in “crowd psychology and behavior [and] team formations and movements,” according to PPB.
Hours after Budworth’s indictment, news broke that Erik Kammerer, a squad leader for RRT who is also a homicide detective for the police bureau, is under review by the Oregon Department of Justice for potential criminal prosecution. (WW has reported extensively on complaints alleging Kammerer used excessive force during protests.)………
In response, Mayor Ted Wheeler—who said he learned of the RRT dissolution late Wednesday night—has activated mobile law enforcement units in PPB and requested assistance from Oregon State Police.
………Wheeler also said that he heard directly from RRT members during an impromptu Thursday morning Zoom meeting between the mayor’s office and law enforcement.
“I want to acknowledge the toll this past year has taken on them and their families—they have worked long hours under difficult conditions,” Wheeler said. “I personally heard from some of them today, and I appreciate their willingness to share their concerns about managing the many public gatherings that often were violent and destructive.”
It is a disgrace that this piece of sh%$ mayor is still in office. (He’s also in the pocket of real estate developers)
………
Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty, a longtime advocate of police reform in Portland, called the RRT resignations “an opportunity to commit change.”
“We should formally disband the RRT, but through Council action,” Hardesty said in a statement Thursday. “The good old boy network is crumbling and we can either be a part of the change or part of the status quo—but the arc of justice is bending quickly and it’s imperative that the Portland City Council lands on the right side of history.”
Hardesty went on to describe the RRT members as “staging their own protest” through their resignations, which she said occurred “the moment there is a possibility for accountability for inappropriate and potentially illegal conduct.”
This is my assessment too.
The fact that the police are SO shocked that they are held accountable is a mark of just how bad the culture of policing in Portland is right now.
Until some police officers are disabused of the notion that they can act with impunity, and their fellow cops are disabused of the notion that it is OK for them to look the other way, it will never be fixed.
A leaked audio of a Senator Joe Manchin (DINO-WV) call with rich donors has revealed, among other things, that he asked donors at the group, “No Labels,” to bribe fellow Senator Roy Blunt.
Joe Manchin is not just a conservative Democrat, he is a disloyal one, and given that a recording of his call was leaked, one who who has people close to him looking to give him a well deserved shiv between his shoulder blades:
West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, in a private call on Monday with a group of major donors, provided a revealing look at his political approach to some of the thorniest issues confronting lawmakers.
The remarks were given on a Zoom teleconference session that was obtained by The Intercept.
The meeting was hosted by the group No Labels, a big money operation co-founded by former Sen. Joe Lieberman that funnels high-net-worth donor money to conservative Democrats and moderate Republicans. Among the gathering’s newsworthy revelations: Manchin described an openness to filibuster reform at odds with his most recent position that will buoy some Democrats’ hopes for enacting their agenda.
………
The wide-ranging conversation went into depth on the fate of the filibuster, infrastructure negotiations, and the failed effort to create a bipartisan commission to explore the January 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol, and offers a frank glimpse into the thinking of the conservative Democrat who holds the party’s fate in his hands.
Manchin told the assembled donors that he needed help flipping a handful of Republicans from no to yes on the January 6 commission in order to strip the “far left” of their best argument against the filibuster. The filibuster is a critical priority for the donors on the call, as it bottles up progressive legislation that would hit their bottom lines.
OK, this is not an invalid comment, though a US Senator asking high dollar donors to act as his enforcers is pretty damn skeevy.
………
When it came to Sen. Roy Blunt, a moderate Missouri Republican who voted no on the commission, Manchin offered a creative solution. “Roy Blunt is a great, just a good friend of mine, a great guy,” Manchin said. “Roy is retiring. If some of you all who might be working with Roy in his next life could tell him, that’d be nice and it’d help our country. That would be very good to get him to change his vote. And we’re going to have another vote on this thing. That’ll give me one more shot at it.”
That is flat out corrupt. He is asking, in an open Zoom call with big donors, that they condition any future employment for Roy Blunt on his current votes.
He is actively calling for a bribe, or at least extortion based on the threat of withholding a bribe, which is pretty much the same thing.
Following announcements by G-7 countries about standardizing a minimum tax for trans-national corporations and cracking down on tax evasion and tax havens, the UK has decided to go to the mat for its finance industry, AKA the “City of London”, whose core competency is tax evasion and money laundering:
U.K. Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak is pressing for the City of London to be exempt from a plan by global leaders to make multinationals pay more tax to the countries where they operate.
Finance ministers from the Group of Seven advanced economies struck a historic deal last weekend that could force the world’s biggest companies to pay a minimum corporate tax rate of 15%.
Sunak is expected to make the case that financial services, including global banks with head offices in London, should be exempt from the plan when talks move to the G-20 next month.
………
A European Union official pushed back against the idea of an exemption. The EU expects all companies to pay their fair share of taxation, the official said at a briefing for journalists on Wednesday.
If they get an exemption, the City of London will spend its time turning client companies, and their subsidiaries into finance institutions so that hey can continue to evade taxes.
The UK would be hurt by this as much as any other nation, but they are the poodles of their finance industry, they have been since at least Margaret Thatcher.
A bipartisan group in the Senate has come up with a new infrastructure bill.
Why am I not surprised that whenever you add Republicans to a group, their first move is to put the kibosh on any tax increases for the rich?
Basically, the Republicans in the group with the acquiescence of the corporate “Democrats” in the group, are determined to make their bill as meaningless as possible:
A bipartisan Senate group is taking tax increases off the table as lawmakers try to craft an infrastructure proposal after GOP talks with the White House collapsed Tuesday.
Raising taxes on high-income earners and corporations has been a key part of President Biden‘s infrastructure plan, making it nearly impossible to garner enough GOP support for legislation that can clear the Senate.
Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), who is in the bipartisan group, said tax increases are not under consideration as senators attempt to reach consensus on how to pay for their plan.
………
Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), another member of the bipartisan group, also told reporters on Wednesday that Republicans won’t agree to tax increases as part of infrastructure talks.
The group is expected to be looking at a proposal of around $900 billion, but they’ve been careful not to publicly release a number, saying the level of spending isn’t yet locked in. Biden’s initial infrastructure proposal exceeded $2.2 trillion.
This is why you don’t waste your time trying to cut a deal with Republicans.
They are never going to agree to raising taxes on the rich, one of the most popular policies in the United States right now, and they don’t want the country to succeed, because it would hurt their electoral chances.
Negotiating in good faith is in opposition to core Republican values.
One of the most depressing things about Washington, DC is how the establishment zealously defends their prerogatives and immunity, even if they are completely unjustified.
You can talk about Ford pardoning Nixon, GHW Bush pardoning his Iran Contra co-conspirators, and now the Biden Department of Justice insisting that the government should defend Donald Trump from a libel suit, because they need to, “Protect the institution.”
The case involves behavior prior to Trump’s time in office, and the statements in question were made in a personal capacity, but the institution must be preserved.
It stinks to high heaven:
The Justice Department is keeping up the previous administration’s fight to defend former president Donald Trump against a private defamation lawsuit brought by a woman who accused him of rape — an effort that President Joe Biden had criticized on the campaign trail.
On Monday, lawyers for the Justice Department as well as Trump’s personal legal team were due to file the next round of briefs — marking the first major deadline for the department under the new administration to weigh in. In the government’s latest brief, the Justice Department lawyers continued to press arguments that the lower court judge got it wrong when he concluded that Trump wasn’t shielded from being sued and was acting within the scope of his official duties as president when he accused Carroll of lying.
“When members of the White House media asked then-President Trump to respond to Ms. Carroll’s serious allegations of wrongdoing, their questions were posed to him in his capacity as President,” the Justice Department wrote in Monday’s reply brief. “Elected public officials can — and often must — address allegations regarding personal wrongdoing that inspire doubt about their suitability for office.”
Bullsh%$.
The Justice Department under Biden inherited numerous pending Trump-era legal fights, but Carroll’s case was one of the few that Biden had offered an opinion about when he was running for office. A turnover in the White House can create sticky situations for DOJ to navigate — the department historically defends the authority of the executive branch and senior administration officials in court, even as the politics of the party in power changes across presidents.
………
DOJ’s effort to intervene in the case last fall was widely criticized as a misuse of government resources on behalf of Trump. During a nationally televised town hall event in October, Biden had highlighted the Carroll case as an example of Trump trying to use the Justice Department as his “own law firm.”
“Can you remember any Republican president going out there, or former Democratic president, ’Go find that guy and prosecute him’? You ever hear that? Or: ‘By the way, I’m being sued because a woman’s accused me of rape. Represent me. Represent me.’ … What’s that all about? What is that about?” Biden said at the time.
Biden was right then, and he is wrong now.
………
Carroll sued Trump in state court in New York in November 2019. Trump had litigated the case for months using privately retained lawyers. In September, however, DOJ filed notice that it was moving the case to federal court and intended to take over Trump’s legal defense on behalf of the US government.
The department argued at the time that Trump was covered by a federal law that protects federal employees from being sued as individuals over actions they take as part of their work, known as the Westfall Act. When Trump, as president, denied Carroll’s allegation and accused her of making it up to sell copies of her book, the Justice Department argued that this law applied.
If DOJ succeeded, the US government would become the defendant instead of Trump as an individual. That would likely end the lawsuit, since the government is shielded by a legal principle known as “sovereign immunity” against a range of civil claims, including libel.
And now the Biden DoJ has decided to try to extend this decision.
In an opinion in late October, US District Judge Lewis Kaplan found that Trump wasn’t a government “employee” under the Westfall Act, which refers to “officers or employees of any federal agency.” Even if Trump was an “employee” within the meaning of that law, the judge wrote, his comments about Carroll didn’t fall within the scope of his official duties as president, so the law still wouldn’t cover his situation.“A comment about government action, public policy, or even an election is categorically different than a comment about an alleged sexual assault that took place roughly twenty years before the president took office. And the public’s reasons for being interested in these comments are different as well,” Kaplan wrote in the opinion. “The president’s views on the former topics are interesting because they alert the public about what the government is up to. President Trump’s views on the plaintiff’s sexual assault allegation may be interesting to some, but they reveal nothing about the operation of government.”
………
Carroll’s lawyer Roberta Kaplan also issued a statement saying they were confident they’d win on appeal.
“It is horrific that Donald Trump raped E. Jean Carroll in a New York City department store many years ago. But it is truly shocking that the current Department of Justice would allow Donald Trump to get away with lying about it, thereby depriving our client of her day in court. The DOJ’s position is not only legally wrong, it is morally wrong since it would give federal officials free license to cover up private sexual misconduct by publicly brutalizing any woman who has the courage to come forward. Calling a woman you sexually assaulted a ‘liar,’ a ‘slut,’ or ‘not my type,’ as Donald Trump did here, is not the official act of an American president,” Kaplan said.
The Department of Justice is functioning as the personal lawyer for a government official, and not as a representative of the government, or the people here.
This is a disgrace.
And they let him because they don’t want to get anything done.
I am referring, of course, to Joe Manchin, who latest Jihad for moderation literally threatens the right to franchise in the United States.
Seriously, Manchin can throw a monkey wrench into the works because it feeds his ego, and there are on consequences.
It’s one thing to have an big tent and working with conservative Democrats, and it’s another to work with disloyal Democrats.
Make him face consequences, and if he wants to bolt to the Republican Party, let’s see how he fares in a Republican primary in 2024: (He won’t, particularly since he voted for impeaching Trump)
Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia said on Sunday in no uncertain terms that he would not vote for the Democrats’ far-reaching bill to combat voter suppression, nor would he ever end the legislative filibuster, a written promise that imperils much of President Biden’s agenda.
The bill, which all the other Senate Democrats had supported and the party had portrayed as an urgent effort to preserve American democracy, would roll back dozens of laws being passed by Republican state legislatures to limit early and mail-in voting and empower partisan poll watchers. The measure, known as the For the People Act, would also restore many of the ethical controls on the presidency that Donald J. Trump shattered.
………
The 818-page bill would end partisan gerrymandering, tighten controls on campaign spending and ease voter registration. It would also force major-party candidates for president and vice president to release 10 years’ worth of personal and business tax returns and end the president’s and vice president’s exemption from conflict-of-interest rules, which allowed Mr. Trump to maintain businesses that profited off his presidency.
With Mr. Manchin’s vow, passage of the full For the People Act appears to be impossible, though parts of it could pass in other ways if Democrats are willing to break up the bill, a move that they have resisted. Mr. Manchin’s blockade of filibuster changes makes other Biden initiatives far less likely to pass, including any overhaul of immigration laws, a permanent expansion of the Affordable Care Act, controls of the price of prescription drugs and the most serious efforts to tackle climate change.
………
House liberals were more scathing. “Manchin’s op-ed might as well be titled ‘Why I’ll vote to preserve Jim Crow,’” Representative Mondaire Jones, Democrat of New York, wrote on Twitter.
Senate Democrats should kick Manchin loose and stop obliging his narcissism.
First, Manchin has no where else to go, and second, it’s better to have him outside the tent pissing in than to have him inside the tent pissing in.
There is literally no upside to making even the smallest accommodation Joe Manchin. It makes Democrats appear weak, and reinforces the belief among the electorate that Democrats cannot be trusted to deliver on their promises because they are cowards.
Cowardice is not a good look for any political institution.
I am not at all surprised that, Amazon’s warehouses have an 80% higher injury rate than the industry norm.
This is completely not a surprise:
Employees at US Amazon warehouses are injured at a higher rate than those doing similar jobs at other companies’ warehouses, a new report has found.
A union-backed study of safety data found Amazon workers had 5.9 serious injuries per 100 people – almost 80% higher than the rest of the industry.
The study’s organisers blamed Amazon’s “obsession with speed” as a main cause of the problem.
It is the latest in a string of controversies around worker safety.
………
This new study comes from the Strategic Organizing Center (SOC), a coalition of labour unions. It analysed workplace safety data reported to the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration from 2017 to 2020.
It found that “workers at Amazon warehouses are not only injured more frequently than in non-Amazon warehouses, they are also injured more severely”.
………
And compared to its largest retail competitor Walmart, Amazon’s overall injury rate was more than double, at 6.5 per 100 employees compared with three.
An independent analysis of the same data by The Washington Post reached similar conclusions.
The Post conducted its own analysis of the OSHA data, and came to the same conclusions.
The Washington Postis owned by Amazon chief Jeff Bezos, so this qualifies as a statement against its own interest..
The SOC characterised the report as an “epidemic of workplace injuries”.
………
But technology news site Motherboard has this week published an Amazon warehouse pamphlet issued under the “working well” branding, which tells workers they should think of themselves as “industrial athletes”.
“Just like an athlete who trains for an event, industrial athletes need to prepare their bodies to be able to perform their best at work,” it warns.
“Some positions will walk up to 13 miles a day… [others] will have a total of 20,000lb (9,072kg) lifted before they complete their shift,” it said.
The pamphlet, from a Tulsa warehouse, also offers tips on health and fitness. It encourages exercise on days off, a good diet to fuel the 400 calories an hour the company expects employees to burn, and tips on buying shoes to fit swollen feet from the active working environment.
Amazon told Motherboard that the pamphlet had been created in error and removed – though the employee who gave it to the publication said it was available on-site for months.
So, it appears that Amazon thinks that its employees should be Olympians, and sets metrics accordingly.
Your Amazon order is literally being paid for with the blood of its employees.
It’s time to find another online marketplace.
The NFL has been engaging in “Race Norming” in evaluating players for brain damage from concussions.
To the uninitiated, race norming means that the Football league was assuming that Black people were stupid when evaluating players for impairment from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).
Gee, racism much?
The NFL and the lead attorney for about 20,000 former players on Wednesday both promised to end “race-norming” — a controversial practice that curves Black players’ cognitive test scores with data that assumes a lower level of function — as part of the payout process in the $1 billion-plus settlement of class-action concussion litigation against the league.
The statements from the NFL and attorney Chris Seeger came as the practice of race-norming in the settlement payout process, first brought to public attention last year in a lawsuit by two former players, has drawn heightened scrutiny in the courts and media.
………
The NFL, in its statement, maintained that no discrimination had occurred in the administration of the settlement, finalized in 2017, which has paid more than $800 million to more than 1,000 former players diagnosed with dementia, Alzheimer’s, and other brain-related diseases. But U.S. District Judge Anita Brody, who has overseen the settlement, has been so troubled by the revelation of race-norming that she took the unusual step of appointing a mediator earlier this year to investigate.
………
The use of race norms in the NFL’s concussion settlement payouts first came to light last August, when two former players accused the league in a lawsuit of discriminating against hundreds — and potentially thousands — of Black former players. In their suit, former players Najeh Davenport and Kevin Henry alleged that race-norming prevented them from getting settlement payouts. In Davenport’s case, he claimed that a doctor initially diagnosed him with dementia, but the NFL appealed and demanded his test scores get curved using race-normed data, which resulted in a reversal of the diagnosis.
Clearly the goal here was to maximize profits at the expense of black players.
Come to think of it, “Maximize profits at the expense of black players,” could be the motto for the NFL.
The explosion of arbitration clauses in business contracts, and the Supreme Court’s enthusiastic embrace of keeping ordinary folks away from fair courts, has led to a situation where there is often no recourse for people cheated by businesses.
People have now created companies that automate the application for arbitration, completely overwhelming the ability of the companies, and the arbitrators, to process:
For years, AT&T worked tirelessly to erode its customers’ legal rights, using mouse print in its terms of service preventing consumers from participating in lawsuits against the company. Instead, customers were forced into binding arbitration, where arbitrators, chosen and paid by the companies under fire, unsurprisingly rule in favor of companies more often than not. Initially, the lower courts derided this anti-consumer behavior for what it was, noting that however brutally flawed the class action is, binding arbitration, at least the way we let companies designed it, in many ways made things worse.
But these lower court roadblocks quickly evaporated when the Supreme Court ruled in 2011 (Mobility v. Concepcion) that what AT&T was doing was perfectly OK. While lower courts saw this as an “unconscionable” abuse of consumer rights and the law, the Supreme Court bought into the ongoing myth that binding arbitration is a hyper-efficient, modern alternative to class actions. In reality, it shifted things to a form of binding arbitration that was costly, lopsided, and cumbersome for consumers, and less transparent for those used to visiting Pacer to dig up legal histories.
Fast forward to a few years ago, when a growing number of companies and services (like Fairshake) began streamlining the arbitration process, making it easier and less expensive for consumers (and yeah, class action lawyers). This shifted the balance of power back toward consumers, and starting in 2018 or so companies like Uber, AT&T and Comcast began to complain they were being swamped with arbitration feuds. Now, a year later, even giants like Amazon are being forced to take consumer complaints back to the courtroom, in part because a system they constructed to dodge accountability is no longer helping them do that:
………In short, corporations (beginning with AT&T) spent the better part of the last decade fighting for an arbitration system that resulted in fewer payouts, fewer successful complaints, and less overall transparency. And while happy about that initially, the second the internet and technology shifted the balance of power in the other direction, they were eager to flee back to the devil they knew. It should be curious to see if other giants like AT&T also begin stripping binding arbitration out of their end user agreements, or if this is just a temporary setback on the path toward less accountability.
By way of example, Uber has had 12,500 requests for arbitration filed, and it has refused to start the process, which is now being litigated, and Amazon has thrown in the towel, and is allowing customers to file in court:
Amazon.com Inc. has stopped requiring customers to pursue claims in arbitration — rather than a court of law — after tens of thousands of people inundated the company with complaints that the Alexa digital assistant was improperly collecting voice recordings.
Amazon’s terms of service, which govern everything from buying products on the company’s web store to using its consumer gadgets, now lets customers file class-action suits against the company in state or federal court. Previously claimants had to enter arbitration as individuals. All cases must be filed in King County, Washington, where Amazon is based, according to rules that were last updated on May 3.
The change follows the filing of some 75,000 Alexa-related arbitration claims — almost entirely from people represented by Chicago law firm Keller Lenkner LLC — in the last 16 months. The cases likely added up to tens of millions of dollars in filing fees payable by Amazon, according to the Wall Street Journal, which reported the move earlier Tuesday.
Companies have created a biased process, and gone as far as possible to convince any litigant that this process is completely unfair so as to discourage filing.
Someone made it as simple as going to a web site, and clicking, “I agree,” and now they are clicking their asses off.
West Hazleton, Pennsylvania (why does ALL this crap seem to happen in the Keystone State?) police chief Brian Buglio threatened an online critic with arrest on trumped up charges.
The FBI got involved, and he’s now pled guilty to federal civil rights charges.
Am I a cynic for thinking that the only thing special about this story is that THIS time, the dirty cop got caught:
A police chief in Pennsylvania who threatened a critic with false arrest unless the person deleted Facebook posts attacking him has agreed to plead guilty to a federal civil rights violation.
The chief, Brian Buglio of the West Hazleton, Pa., Police Department, made the threats in March 2020 to a private citizen, telling the person that he would pursue felony charges in retaliation for several social media posts that were directed at him and the police, the authorities said.
The person agreed at the time to remove the posts from Facebook and to refrain from making future comments about Chief Buglio and the police, according to a criminal complaint that was filed on Thursday in federal court in Scranton, Pa.
“During the meeting, Brian Buglio acknowledged that the threatened felony charges lacked merit,” federal prosecutors said in the criminal complaint, adding that Chief Buglio and the person had shaken hands over the “deal.”
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Chief Buglio could face up to a year in prison and a $100,000 fine, according to the plea agreement, which still must be finalized in court.
Here is hoping that the judge will throw the book at him.
It should surprise no one that the Stanford chapter of the Federalist Society attempted to get a law student expelled for making fun of them.
I guess that in the Federalist Society, they only believe in the 1st Amendment if it applies to union busting businesses and themselves.
I’m pretty sure that the OED has “The Federalist Society” as an alternate definition of hypocrisy:
Facing forceful criticism and many questions, Stanford University moved Wednesday to allow a law-school student full graduation privileges after the student’s “satirical” letter, sent months ago, provoked the ire of a conservative student organization and a strong defense from a student-rights group.
Law student Nicholas Wallace was poised to graduate June 12, but his degree was held up while the school probed the missive, which took the form of a flyer advertising a made-up event titled “The Originalist Case for Insurrection,” supposedly sponsored by the campus chapter of the right-wing Federalist Society. According to the flyer, the “event” would include appearances by U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Missouri, and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton “to discuss violent insurrection.” It added that “riot information” would be emailed the morning of the event.
“Violent insurrection, also known as doing a coup, is a classical system of installing a government,” the flyer said. “Although widely believed to conflict in every way with the rule of law, violent insurrection can be an effective approach to upholding the principle of limited government.”
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Despite Wallace’s flyer being sent January 25 and advertising an event to be held three weeks earlier, on January 6, Stanford put his upcoming degree on hold two weeks before he was to graduate, after Stanford Law’s student Federalist Society chapter complained about the flyer.
After a Slate report Wednesday on the school’s action went viral on social media, and this news organization asked the university to explain its actions, Stanford announced Wednesday that its investigation was done, the flyer was
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The school’s Federalist Society chapter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Of course the, “school’s Federalist Society chapter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.” Bullies hate it when you fight back.
Also: Shame on Stanford University not laughing this out of the in-box.
It appears that Donald Trump shut down his blog, because not enough people were clicking in to his musings.
I’ve been blogging since 2007,* and I’m not giving up.
In fact, I think that I have missed fewer than 10 days since I’ve started blogging.
To be fair, if I did not have this outlet for my unsolicited opinions, I am certain that Sharon† would have murdered me long ago:
Former president Donald Trump’s blog, celebrated by advisers as a “beacon of freedom” that would keep him relevant in an online world he once dominated, is dead. It was 29 days old.
Upset by reports from The Washington Post and other outlets highlighting its measly readership and concerns that it could detract from a social media platform he wants to launch later this year, Trump ordered his team Tuesday to put the blog out of its misery, advisers said.
On its last day, the site received just 1,500 shares or comments on Facebook and Twitter — a staggering drop for someone whose every tweet once garnered hundreds of thousands of reactions.
It should surprise no one that delicate snow-flake Donald Trump threw a tantrum about not being treated like a king.
What a prima donna.
*Holy sh%$. That’s almost 14 years. I need to get a life.
†Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.
After making nice to the drivers in order to get Proposition 22 passed, Uber and Lyft have reversed their employee friendly policies, because their drivers are disposable, and they have no more need to make nice with them.
This outcome was completely predictable:
Last year, the ride-hailing service Uber gave its drivers unprecedented control over their fares and working conditions.
The goal was to win drivers’ support for Proposition 22, through which Uber and other gig companies aimed to rewrite California labor law in the companies’ favor.
The firms’ pitch was that the ballot measure would preserve the “flexibility” in hours and earnings that their workers valued, and that they said would be threatened unless the labor law was changed.
Uber’s new options seemed to make that flexibility more real: The company gave drivers more latitude to set their own fares, and more visibility into the trips they were offered before deciding whether to accept them.
Proposition 22 was passed by an overwhelming margin in the November election. Since then, some drivers say, Uber has taken the flexibility options away, and even cut the drivers’ income on many trips.
Lyft executives raised the same alarm during a Wall Street conference call after the firm released its first-quarter financial results on May 4.
Driver advocates have greeted these remarks skeptically, noting that the firms could attract more drivers quickly by improving their pay.
………
But when California codified labor rules to mandate that such workers receive all the benefits of employees, Uber, Lyft and other gig companies drafted Proposition 22 to exempt their drivers, delivery workers and others from the employment rules and allow them to be classified as independent contractors.
After a campaign in which the companies spent more than $200 million, a national record for a ballot measure, Proposition 22 passed with nearly 60% of the vote.
“A huge part of their Proposition 22 campaign was to get the drivers on their side,” says Veena Dubal, a labor law expert at UC Hastings College of the Law and a critic of Uber and Lyft. “So they rolled out these things they knew that drivers would be excited about and would make them feel independent. And of course they’ve thrown them away.”
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Support for the bill has been waning since organized labor took a closer look at its terms. They discovered that it would bar workers from striking or taking any other job action and forbid local governments from imposing a minimum wage for gig workers.
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Uber also has sharply cut drivers’ pay for trips originating at Los Angeles International, San Francisco and San Diego airports. At LAX and San Diego, drivers say, they now receive 32 cents per mile, regardless of the distance traveled.
That’s down from about 60 cents before the passage of Proposition 22, drivers say. It’s also well below the 56 cents per mile that the Internal Revenue Service has set as the deductible cost of ownership of cars driven for business use, counting fuel, maintenance, insurance and wear and tear.
It’s like the tale of the scorpion and the frog, it’s in their nature.
You should not be surprised when it stings you.