Category: Politics

Looters Gotta Loot

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It’s not enough that schools get tax dollars, and get showered with funds from private “charities” dedicated to destroying public education, they want taxpayers to pay for their rent as well:

Eva Moskowitz said she would go to the president of the United States to help her students if she had to. For now, she’s stopping at Andrew Cuomo.

 Moskowitz, C.E.O. of Success Academy charter schools in New York City, helped organize a massive rally outside the state Capitol on Tuesday, where she said she was “delighted” to have the governor’s support.

 ………

 During the mayoral campaign, de Blasio threatened to charge charter schools rent and pledged that Moskowitz’s schools specifically would not enjoy the same treatment under his administration as they did under Michael Bloomberg’s. He fulfilled that promise last week when he overturned three Bloomberg administration approvals for co-locations, all Success Academy schools.

 “We never expected… I mean, I frankly thought the rhetoric of the mayor would change once he got into government,” Moskowitz said, responding to de Blasio’s decision to reverse the co-locations. “Campaigning is generally different, so I didn’t expect to be in this position. And we’re feeling very vulnerable.”

So, in addition to your getting taxpayer money, you want your basic overhead paid by the taxpayers as well, meaning that the schools are getting more funding than the regular public schools, which cover both their and your building costs.

And while we are at it, I would note that she pays herself a lot of money with taxpayer dollars:

The 990s for Success Academy are public record and located here, so see for yourself: http://www.guidestar.org/FinDocuments/2012/205/298/2012-205298861-095c435d-9.pdf

 According to their 2012 tax filings, in 2011, Eva’s salary was $475,244.00 with an additional $12,459.00 in other compensation, totaling $487,703.00. The tax statement also says that was for providing “management and administrative supporting services to nine district charter schools…” Let me repeat, NINE SCHOOLS in 2011.

 By comparison, the pay the same year for NYC Schools Chancellor Walcott for managing 1,700 schools was $212,614.00. Let me repeat, ONE THOUSAND AND SEVEN HUNDRED SCHOOLS. Then there is US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who oversees the massive federal Department of Education and earns a base salary of $179,700.

 Eva’s salary is obscene. Charters want to be called public schools except when it’s more convenient to be labeled private, such as when asking for CEO salaries similar to private corporations, but their revenue is tax dollars –and for schools that pay no rent. If Eva wants a CEO salary similar to private enterprises, she should open up her own privately funded schools, not raid the public coffers.

See also here, where we discover that the “hero” of Waiting for Superman Geoffrey Canada pays himself over ½ million dollars a year.

Like I said, looters gotta loot.

H/t Atrios.

Hillary Drops the H-Bomb

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No, I do not mean thermonuclear weapons, I mean the full up Godwin.

She invoked Hitler on the events in the Ukraine:

Hillary Clinton Likens Russia’s Passport Move In Ukraine To Nazi Germany

Hillary Clinton likened aspects of Russia’s involvement in Crimean Ukraine to Nazi Germany during a fundraising event, according to two people present.

Buzzfeed, citing two sources, reported that the former secretary of State said at a fundraiser on Tuesday that Russia’s move to start issuing passports in Crimean Ukraine was akin to “population transfers” that happened in Nazi Germany during World War II.

“Now if this sounds familiar, it’s what Hitler did back in the 30s,” Clinton said according to the Long Beach Press-Telegram. “All the Germans that were … the ethnic Germans, the Germans by ancestry who were in places like Czechoslovakia and Romania and other places, Hitler kept saying they’re not being treated right. I must go and protect my people and that’s what’s gotten everybody so nervous.”

Seriously, her need to go to war at the drop of a hat was why she did not get the nomination in 2008, and here she is making John McCain look like Timothy Leary.

She is not going to be the President-Elect in November of 2016. Hillary Clinton just flushed that down the toilet.

John Adams is Spinning in His Grave

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The Senate has defeated the appointment of Debo Adegbile’s appointment as head of the DoJ’s Civil Rights division because he defended a black man accused of murdering a cop:

Senate Democrats on Wednesday rejected President Obama’s nominee to lead the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division in an embarrassing rebuke of the president on the choice of a key legal adviser and one that left senior White House officials “furious” with members of their own party.

The nominee, Debo P. Adegbile, was litigation director of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund when it represented Mumia Abu-Jamal on an appeal of his death sentence for killing a Philadelphia police officer decades ago. He could not overcome a campaign by Republicans, conservative activists and law enforcement organizations still infuriated by the murder of the officer, Daniel Faulkner.

But it was the votes of seven Democratic senators to reject Mr. Adegbile that doomed the nomination despite what White House officials described as a sustained closed-door effort by Mr. Obama and his top aides to save the nomination. The president personally appealed to Senate Democrats at a recent caucus meeting and made several calls to Democratic senators in the last week, officials said. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Denis R. McDonough, the White House chief of staff, continued making calls Tuesday night and Wednesday morning.

I’m not blaming the Republicans here. They would oppose the appointment of Pope Francis to head the Office of Faith Based outreach.

Additionally, I can understand why they oppose Adegbile’s record of strong protection of civil rights, particularly voting rights.

After all, if there is a defining characteristic of the Republican party in the ‘Teens, it is that they want to stop n***ers from voting.

I do blame the 7 Democrats, who seem to find that the idea of a black man getting competent counsel is somehow a bad thing, and I do blame the various elements in law enforcement who seem to think that being a good lawyer should be a crime.

This is is evil, runs counter to the constitution, and hundreds of years of British jurisprudence before that.

It is a sacred duty for the defendant to have competent legal counsel. That is why John Adams defended the British soldiers who shot the demonstrators at the Boston Massacre.

If you have a problem with this, you should not be a lawyer, a legislator, or a cop.

Anyone involved in this effort, and the cowards who folded to it, are unAmerican, and need to have no further role in our public discourse.

This is a Fabulous F%$# You to the Homophobes

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The mayors of Boston and New York are boycotting their respective St. Patrick’s Day Parades because of the organizer’s homophobic policies:

Boston Mayor Martin Walsh is threatening to boycott the St. Patrick’s Day parade unless organizers allow a group of gay military veterans to march, joining New York’s mayor in protesting parade policies on gay groups.

Walsh, the son of Irish immigrants, said Thursday he’s been trying to broker a deal with the city’s parade organizers to allow a gay veterans group sponsored by MassEquality to march in this year’s parade. He said allowing gay groups to participate is long overdue.

“It’s 2014 — it’s far beyond the time where we should be even having this discussion because they’re veterans who fought for this country just like any other veteran,” Walsh said.

“I made a commitment during the campaign … that I would fight for equality and that’s what this is all about.”

But parade planners appeared unwilling to budge.

Lead parade organizer Philip Wuschke Jr. said gay people are not prohibited from marching with other groups. But he said organizers do not want the parade to turn into a demonstration for a particular group.

“The theme of the parade is St. Patrick’s Day. It is not a sexually oriented parade,” he said. “All we want to do is have a happy parade. The parade is a day of celebration, not demonstration.”

In New York, Mayor Bill de Blasio said he will skip the nation’s largest St. Patrick’s Day parade in Manhattan because participants are not allowed to carry signs or banners identifying themselves as gay.

“I will be participating in a number of other events to honor the Irish heritage of this city,” de Blasio said during a press conference earlier this month. “But I simply disagree with the organizers of that parade.”

Let the bigots stew in their own hate alone.

A Correction:

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While still feel that the the government transition in the Ukraine will likely lead to an upsurge in anti-semitism.

The Ukraine has a long and inglorious tradition of virulent Jew hatred, and periods of social unrest lead to an upsurge in bigotry of all kinds.

That being said, Mark Ames, former editor in chief of the eXile, a former Moscow based English language tabloid, knows a LOT more about the former Soviet Union than I do.

One of the things that he knew was that Rabbi Moshe Reuven Azman, whom I quoted as advising that Jews leave Kiev, is a Chabad rabbi, and Chabad is really tight with the Kremlin.

So, I have to question the reliability of Reb Azman’s pronouncements.

Ames’ thesis is basically that the sh%$ is f%$#ed up and sh%$, and that teasing out alliances and philosophies is simply not a productivity, or as he sums up, “Everything you know about Ukraine is wrong“:

………

Everyone looking for a proxy side to support or oppose in the Ukraine political dynamic will be disappointed. Ukraine politics go by their own rules. Today’s neoliberal ultranationalist could be tomorrow’s Kremlin ally, and visa-versa. Just look at what happened to the Orange Revolution—nothing. To wit:

a) One Orange Revolution leader, Yulia Tymoshenko, wound up turning against her partner Viktor Yushchenko and allying with Yanukovych to strip Yushchenko of presidential powers; later, Tymoshenko allied with the Kremlin against Yushchenko; now she’s free from jail and the presumptive leader of the anti-Yanukovych forces.

b) The other Orange leader—the pro-EU, anti-Kremlin Viktor Yushchenko—wound up allying with pro-Kremlin Yanukovych to jail Yulia Tymoshenko.

c) John McCain has been the big driving force for regime change against Yanukovych, but McCain’s 2008 campaign chief’s lobby firm, Davis Manafort, managed Yanukovych’s political campaigns and his lobbying efforts in the US.

d) Anthony Podesta, brother of President Obama’s senior advisor John Podesta, is another Yanukovych lobbyist; John Podesta was the chief of Obama’s 2008 transition team.
4. Yanukovych was not fighting neoliberalism, the World Bank, or oligarchy — nor was he merely a tool of the Kremlin.

There’s another false meme going around that because the World Bank and IMF are moving in to “reform” Ukraine’s economy — for the umpteenth time — that somehow this means that this was a fight between pro-neoliberal and anti-neoliberal forces. It wasn’t.

Yanukovych enthusiastically cooperated with the IMF and pledged to adhere to their demands. Six months after Yanukovych was elected president, the headline read “International Monetary Fund approves $15 billion loan to Ukraine”. ………

………

The point is this: Ukraine is not Venezuela. This is not a profoundly political or class fight, as it is in Venezuela. Yanukovych represents one faction of oligarchs; the opposition, unwittingly or otherwise, ultimately fronts for other factions. Many of those oligarchs have close business ties with Russia, but assets and bank accounts—and mansions—in Europe. Both forces are happy to work with the neoliberal global institutions.

In Ukraine, there is no populist left politics, even though the country’s deepest problem is inequality and oligarchy. Memories of the Soviet Union play a big role in turning people off to populist-left politics there, for understandable reasons.

So Mark Ames thesis is that the political culture of the Ukraine is largely one of corrupt politicians and oligarchs grasping for advantage.

This does not mean that Jews in the Ukraine are not likely to see harassment, because (as Ames notes) the ultra-nationalist parties were at the lead of the most recent protests, and because the history of that part of the world.

Former Bush Aide Matt Dowd Goes There

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He compares the anti-gay right to Islamic Terrorists.

Of interest is his invocation of the history of religious justifications supporting slavery:

“This is one of those problems when people use religion as a way to sort of enforce discriminatory practices,” he continued. “People used religion back in the 1860s when they defended slavery. They used religion to defend slavery.”

 “We’ve used religion to go to war. People have criticized Islam because they use religion to fight people and kill people. This is the problem with that [bill].”

That first bit seems to me to be a subtle slam at the Southern Baptists, whose genesis was a schism with the American Baptists over the morality of slavery. (The Southern Baptists were on the wrong side of the argument.)

I’m not quite sure what, if anything, was his intent in saying this, but I agree with Max Blumenthal’s analysis, which is that Dowd is primarily an opportunist, so I think that there is some sort of an angle on this.

The Shock Doctrine Being Applied Again in Venezuela

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And the major powers in Latin America are aware of this and stop it:

When is it considered legitimate to try and overthrow a democratically-elected government? In Washington, the answer has always been simple: when the US government says it is. Not surprisingly, that’s not the way Latin American governments generally see it.

 On Sunday, the Mercosur governments (Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Venezuela) released a statement on the past week’s demonstrations in Venezuela. They described “the recent violent acts” in Venezuela as “attempts to destabilize the democratic order”. They made it abundantly clear where they stood.

 The governments stated:

their firm commitment to the full observance of democratic institutions and, in this context, [they] reject the criminal actions of violent groups that want to spread intolerance and hatred in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela as a political tool.

We may recall that when much larger demonstrations rocked Brazil last year, there were no statements from Mercosur or neighboring governments. That’s not because they didn’t love President Dilma Rousseff; it’s because these demonstrations did not seek to topple Brazil’s democratically-elected government.

The US has declared the Chavezista government to be our “Hitler of the week”:

An anonymous State Department spokesman was even clearer last week, when he responded to the protests by expressing concern about the government’s “weakening of democratic institutions in Venezuela”, and said that there was an obligation for “government institutions [to] respond effectively to the legitimate economic and social needs of its citizens”. He was joining the opposition’s efforts to de-legitimize the government, a vital part of any “regime change” strategy.

 Of course we all know who the US government supports in Venezuela. They don’t really try to hide it: there’s $5m in the 2014 US federal budget for funding opposition activities inside Venezuela, and this is almost certainly the tip of the iceberg – adding to the hundreds of millions of dollars of overt support over the past 15 years.

You can go to C&L for a more explicit critique of US foreign policy and our media’s lapdog reporting:

Would it help your perspective if I reminded you Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world, that Hugo Chavez nationalized the oil industry even more industries and that powerful interests have never stopped trying to take them back?

There’s an alternate version, one in which the usual suspects (World Bank, IMF) manipulate the currency, drive hyperinflation, cause food shortages and subsequent unrest. Add the former ruling class, once made wealthy by oil industry corruption, whose now-grown children still harbor resentment and anger over what their families lost (much like the members of the Cuban ruling class who fled after Castro) and are leading the opposition.

Netfa Freeman is even less circumspect.

And then you have the attempt to make the thoroughly corrupt Leopoldo Lopez a into a poster boy for a potential revolution.  Despite his role in the 2002 attempted coup, where it appears that he was knowingly involved in the sniping incident that was used as a justification:

Lopez played a key role instigating opposition demonstrators into taking an illegal march route towards the presidential palace, where snipers fired on protesters as part of the opposition’s plan to justify the coup.

See also here for Max Blumenthal’s take on Lopez.

Chavez was to a large degree a product of US Government meddling, but it appears that Obama and Kerry see the solution to any problems therein is more US government meddling.

This is not only wrong, but stupid.

Liberals Win One vs. Barack Obama

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The “Grand Bargain” Is Officially Off the Table by Ed Kilgore | Political Animal | The Washington Monthly:

The White House budget to be released early next month will propose $56 billion in new spending on domestic and defense priorities and drop a proposal that was included in last year’s budget as a way to attract Republican support — a plan that would have included less generous payouts of Social Security benefits.

The budget would aim to reduce the emphasis on austerity that has been the preoccupation of American politics for the past four years and also highlights top Democratic priorities in a year when Democrats hope to save their majority in the Senate.

A White House official said President Obama decided to release a budget that fully represents his “vision,” rather than to continue to pursue a fiscal agreement, because Republicans have refused to engage in good-faith negotiations over the nation’s top priorities. Obama is planning to pay for fresh spending by closing tax breaks that disproportionately benefit the wealthy.

Make no mistake though, Obama and His Evil Minions™ REALLY wanted to do this:

………One of the White House’s most poorly kept secrets is that many of Obama’s economic advisers support Chained CPI on the merits………

Because hurting the poors is a good thing, because ……… I can haz bipartisanship!

When the f%$# is the Democratic party going to nominate a Democrat for President?

What, You Mean that the Union has Seats on the VW Board of Directors?!?!?!?

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The head of the union at Volkswagon is saying that the the labor environment in the South means that VW should conduct future expansion elsewhere.

Seeing as how labor unions effectively control a majority of the seats on the board, this looks to revealing Senator Bob Corker, who claimed that VW told him that not having a union was key to expansion, to be a lying sack of sh%$:

Volkswagen’s top labor representative threatened on Wednesday to try to block further investments by the German carmaker in the southern United States if its workers there are not unionized.

Workers at VW’s factory in Chattanooga, Tennessee, last Friday voted against representation by the United Auto Workers union (UAW), rejecting efforts by VW representatives to set up a German-style works council at the plant.

German workers enjoy considerable influence over company decisions under the legally enshrined “co-determination” principle which is anathema to many politicians in the U.S. who see organized labor as a threat to profits and job growth.

Chattanooga is VW’s only factory in the U.S. and one of the company’s few in the world without a works council.

“I can imagine fairly well that another VW factory in the United States, provided that one more should still be set up there, does not necessarily have to be assigned to the south again,” said Bernd Osterloh, head of VW’s works council.

“If co-determination isn’t guaranteed in the first place, we as workers will hardly be able to vote in favor” of potentially building another plant in the U.S. south, Osterloh, who is also on VW’s supervisory board, said.

The 20-member panel – evenly split between labor and management – has to approve any decision on closing plants or building new ones.

Here’s a thought: If you want to locate a plant in a 3rd world country, actually set it up in a real 3rd world country, as opposed to the 3rd world country wannabees in the south.

Reconstruction Was Ended Way Too Soon

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And now the s%$4 has hit the fan coal ash has hit the drinking water ………

Maddow is all over how NC Governor Pat McCrory’s Department of Environment and Natural Resources Department of Environment and Natural Resources is aggressively protecting lawbreaking polluters like Duke Energy, by aggressively preventing private actions against the firm, as opposed to actually enforcing the law:

North Carolina regulators’ penchant for seemingly protecting Gov. Pat McCrory’s (R) former employers from repeated lawsuits over their environmental practices was only stopped following a devastatingly toxic spill, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow reported on Monday.

 On two prior occasions, Maddow said, officials at the state Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) invoked a provision in the federal Clean Water Act allowing them to step in as plaintiffs against Duke Energy when Duke was being sued by environmental activists over the toxic coal ash ponds at its facilities. The state reached settlements worth a collective $99,000 for those incidents.

 But Monday night, she explained, a third such settlement was delayed in the wake of a pond spill that produced up to 82,000 tons of coal ash and 27 million gallons of contaminated water — the third-biggest spill of its’ kind in U.S. history.

 And despite not making any statement about the Feb. 3 disaster until four days after it happened, McCrory — who worked with the company for 28 years — used the first two DENR settlements to boast that his administration took “legal action” against Duke Energy.

 “Right,” Maddow said skeptically. “By stepping in and blocking other peoples’ lawsuits against the company, and then settling with the company for nearly no money, and, importantly, [requiring] no promise from Duke Energy that they would fix what they were doing wrong.”

Talk about a cheap date.  Even the Department of Justice requests a lie from the offenders to refrain from future wrongdoing.

Obamacare Is a Subterfuge

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When one looks at Obama, and the neoliberal free market mousketeers who surround him, one has to to wonder just how much Obama, who actually taught at the University of Chicago, is in thrall to Chicago School economic theory.

While I do think part of the motivation for putting forward what became the PPACA was an attempt to “fix” the thoroughly dysfunctional healthcare delivery system in the United States, I also think that there has been an unspoken agenda, which is to sever the relationship between employers and their employees insurance.

If you talk to most economists, and all of the conservative “freshwater” economists, they will vehemently maintain that employer provided healthcare is economically unjustified, and so should be abolished.

When you look at the implementation of healthcare reform, it seems that one constant is that the employer mandate has been repeatedly delayed and weakened.

And today, they did it again:

For the second time in a year, the Obama administration is giving certain employers extra time before they must offer health insurance to almost all their full-time workers.

Under new rules announced Monday by Treasury Department officials, employers with 50 to 99 workers will be given until 2016 — two years longer than originally envisioned under the Affordable Care Act — before they risk a federal penalty for not complying.

Companies with 100 workers or more are getting a different kind of one-year grace period. Instead of being required in 2015 to offer coverage to 95 percent of full-time workers, these bigger employers can avoid a fine by offering insurance to 70 percent of them next year.

How the administration would define employer requirements has been one of the biggest remaining questions about the way the 2010 health-care law will work in practice — and has sparked considerable lobbying. By providing the dual phase-ins for employers of different sizes, administration officials have sought to lighten the burden on the small share of affected employers that have not offered insurance in the past.

As word of the delays spread Monday, many across the ideological spectrum viewed them as an effort by the White House to defuse another health-care controversy before the fall midterm elections. The new postponements won over part, but not all, of the business community. And they caught consumer advocates, usually reliable White House allies, by surprise, particularly because administration officials had already announced in July that the employer requirements would be postponed from this year until 2015.

Congressional Republicans seized on the announcement as the latest justification for scrapping the health-care law. In particular, they renewed their opposition to the law’s requirement that most Americans have insurance, saying it is unfair to delay rules for businesses and not for individuals.

Of course it’s unfair.

That’s a feature not a bug.

It is my belief that the goal of these actions is to create a space which will allow the minimization, and eventual elimination, of employer provided healthcare, because ……… freedumb and free markets.

This also explains why Obama has been so eager to cut a “grand bargan” with the ‘phants, and why he is so enthusiastic about trade deals like the TPP where freedumb and free markets trump democracy, labor rights, and environmental protections.

I did Not Expect this From the New York Times

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The Times when writing about the debate about raising the minimum wage, calls out a so called “think tank” as being a subsidiary of the hospitality industry:

Just four blocks from the White House is the headquarters of the Employment Policies Institute, a widely quoted economic research center whose academic reports have repeatedly warned that increasing the minimum wage could be harmful, increasing poverty and unemployment.

 But something fundamental goes unsaid in the institute’s reports: The nonprofit group is run by a public relations firm that also represents the restaurant industry, as part of a tightly coordinated effort to defeat the minimum wage increase that the White House and Democrats in Congress have pushed for.

 “The vast majority of economic research shows there are serious consequences,” Michael Saltsman, the institute’s research director, said in an interview, before he declined to list the restaurant chains that were among its contributors.

 The campaign illustrates how groups — conservative and liberal — are again working in opaque ways to shape hot-button political debates, like the one surrounding minimum wage, through organizations with benign-sounding names that can mask the intentions of their deep-pocketed patrons.

Those are the first 4 paragraphs.

Seriously, the New York Times led with the fact that that a lot of the think tanks are little more than whores for their donors.

And then they name the lead pimp:

………

 The Employment Policies Institute, founded two decades ago, is led by the advertising and public relations executive Richard B. Berman, who has made millions of dollars in Washington by taking up the causes of corporate America. He has repeatedly created official-sounding nonprofit groups like the Center for Consumer Freedom that have challenged limits like the ban on indoor smoking and the push to restrict calorie counts in fast foods.

 ………

 The sign at the entrance is for Berman and Company, as the Employment Policies Institute has no employees of its own. Mr. Berman’s for-profit advertising firm, instead, “bills” the nonprofit institute for the services his employees provide to the institute. This arrangement effectively means that the nonprofit is a moneymaking venture for Mr. Berman, whose advertising firm was paid $1.1 million by the institute in 2012, according to its tax returns, or 44 percent of its total budget, with most of the rest of the money used to buy advertisements.

 Disclosure reports filed by individual foundations show that its donors in recent years have included the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, a longtime supporter of conservative causes. Mr. Berman and Mr. Saltsman would not identify other donors, but did say they included the restaurant industry. But its tax return shows that the $2.4 million in listed donations received in 2012 came from only 11 contributors, who wrote checks for as much as $500,000 apiece.

I am not sure why the New York Times has decided to stop channeling Claude Rains, but it is a refreshing change for the “paper of record”.

Normally this sort of “business as usual” is studiously ignored by the Washington press corps(e).

If You Did Not Already Think that the TPP Sucked

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The gushing endorsement of the international trade deal by corrupt subprime lendor, union buster, and enthusiastic Obama supporter Commerce Sec. Penny Pritzker should remove all doubt:

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and other U.S. trade relationships are outdated and need an “upgrade”, U.S. Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker said on Tuesday during a trade visit to Mexico.

Attitudes toward labor and the environment as well as e-commerce and new technology have shifted trade concerns since NAFTA was signed, so the U.S. government is focusing on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which would establish a free-trade bloc stretching from Vietnam to Chile, she said.

“NAFTA was a groundbreaking agreement 20 years ago and it has served all of the North American countries well,” Pritzker said of the 1994 treaty between the U.S., Mexico and Canada. “But now it’s time to be looking at how can we upgrade our trade relationships.”

In the article, she is described as a, “a businesswoman and heiress to the Hyatt Hotel fortune who has been a prolific fundraiser for U.S. President Barack Obama,” but that is a weak description of their relationship.

She has bankrolled his career from the very start. She was his first patron, and arguably his biggest supporter among the top tenth of the 1%.

She has also been virulently anti-labor in her business and public actions, and she and her family paid themselves big bucks as they drove Superior Bank into the ground.

Between, her, Rahm Emanuel, and Arne Duncan, and the full throated support of all of them from Barack Obama, it is no wonder that I’ve concluded that the President is a corporate tool.

H/t Crooks & Liars.

Hizonner Does Good

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New York Mayor Bill De Blasio jas just announced that will not march in the St. Patrick’s day parade because of the organizers anti-gay policies:

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) on Tuesday said that he will not march in the city’s annual St. Patrick’s Day parade because organizers of the event will not allow participants to carry gay pride signs.

“No, I am not planning on marching in the parade,” de Blasio said at a press conference. “I will be participating in a number of other events to honor the Irish heritage of this city, but I simply disagree with the organizers of that parade.”

Fabulous!

Here’s hoping that the blow-back changes the calculus used the bigots who run the parade to make their decisions.

Would You Let the Vampire Squid Get a Hold of Your Dong?

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It appears that the coalition in Denmark has collapsed over this issue:

After a recent spate of controversies and ministerial resignations, the Danish centre-left government suffered another blow on Thursday when the Socialist People’s party (SF) left the ruling coalition amid anger over Goldman Sachs‘s investment in Denmark’s state-owned energy company.

 Goldman’s 8bn kroner (£900m) purchase of a 19% share in Dong Energy has been championed by the government but caused a revolt among SF’s parliamentary group. After a night of tension and discussions, SF’s leader, Annette Vilhelmsen, announced her resignation and said her party was leaving the coalition.

 “It has been a dramatic 24 hours,” Vilhelmsen said. “Yesterday it became clear to me that it wasn’t possible to unite the party. For the sake of SF, I take the consequence of this.”

 The Goldman Sachs deal was approved by the parliament’s finance committee on Thursday, but it has come under widespread scrutiny and criticism in recent weeks. A poll showed 68% of Danes were against the sale, and close to 200,000 people signed an online petition opposing the deal.

(emphasis mine)

Even worse, like most privatization deals, it is a hand out from taxpayers to overpaid CEOs:

My friend Niels-Jakob Harbo Hansen and I calculated some of the financial aspects of the deal, and they don’t look that good. The bidders are offering about 107.25 kroner per share, supposedly valuing the company at 31.5 billion kroner before the investment. In addition to a healthy package of minority rights, they also get a put option for 60% of the shares: if DONG doesn’t go public within 4 years or so (and Goldman can veto that), the investors can sell 60% of their shares at a strike price equal to the purchase price of 107.25 kr per share, plus a healthy return of about 3% per year.

 That’s like an insurance policy that covers not only your loss, but also the insurance premium you originally paid, plus interest.

 Once you account for the put option, the deal values the shares at 24.5 billion kr., around 47% of book value. Maybe that’s fair because DONG just had a big loss and will be constrained by its business plan to invest in windmills and such, but it still seems awfully low. On the other hand, the investment bankers have deemed it Fair™, so who am I to question that.

 The main thing we did was to compare the deal to the most obvious alternative: the Danish government (AAA rating, 26% debt/GDP, 45% including local government) could borrow at an interest rate of about 1%, and make the investment itself. The expected loss from the deal compared to a government investment is about 2.5 billion kroner.

So, it costs the taxpayer 3x as much as a public investment, and you can be certain that rates will go up faster than they would if the company were to remain completely publicly owned.

Thank You Harry Reid

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The Majority Leader of the Senate has come out against fast track authority for trade deals:

President Barack Obama’s push for authority to fast-track trade deals has hit a big setback in the form of opposition from his top fellow Democrat in Congress, but it is far from dead.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s warning to policymakers on Wednesday “just to not push this right now” reflects concern about the domestic political agenda ahead of November’s congressional elections, when free trade could be a damaging issue for many Democrats.

The unusually blunt public opposition came less than 24 hours after Obama noted the need for fast-track power in his State of the Union address, albeit less forcefully than business lobbyists and pro-trade Republicans would have liked.

The White House called Reid’s office shortly after his comments to voice displeasure, a top Democratic party aide said.

“They were really upset,” the aide said. But the aide said the White House did not try to get Reid to shift his position.

These guys were really upset because they, like the staffers who negotiated NAFTA for Clinton and Bush I, made some serious bank as lobbyists and consultants.

I really hope that it’s not, as Yves Smith’s sources say,  “Another gambit is more likely: to make some cosmetic changes and try to get the bill passed during the lame duck session, on the assumption that some Democrats (particularly those who are leaving office) will use the cover and change positions.”

The TPP, and it’s European equivalent, the TTIP, are egregiously bad deals, not just for the United States, but for the whole world, because they are predicated on the idea that democracy and transparency must be almost completely eschewed in the interest of unregulated global investment flows and IP based looting through draconian copyright and patent provisions.

These are abysmally bad deals for everyone but banksters, big pharma, and the cocaine addicted brothers in law of senior studio and record label executives.

Mixed Emotions

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When something bad is happening to an group of truly awful people, I frequently experience schadenfreude.

When it in suggest negative implications for the rest of us, my feelings are more mixed.

Case in point, the defamation suit that may bankrupt the National Review:

National Review, founded by William F. Buckley Jr. in 1955, has had an enormous impact on the nation’s politics. Its writers formulated the ideology that animated the quixotic Barry Goldwater campaign of 1964, and then Ronald Reagan’s successful run for the White House in 1980. In the years since, National Review has often worked to keep Republican presidents focused on implementing its vision of conservatism, while bucking up the conservative troops when the movement has found itself out of power.

Today the magazine enjoys circulation roughly equivalent to that of The Nation, the American Left’s leading journal of opinion, and more than twice that of William Kristol’s The Weekly Standard, its primary competition on the Right.

And now, National Review may be fighting for its life.

Climate scientist Michael Mann is suing National Review and Mark Steyn, one of its leading writers, for defamation. It’s a charge that’s notoriously hard to prove, which is no doubt why the magazine initially refused to apologize for an item on its blog in which Steyn accused Mann of fraud. Steyn also quoted a line by another conservative writer (Rand Simberg) that called Mann “the Jerry Sandusky of climate science, except that instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data.” (Simberg and the free market think tank for which he works, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, are also named in the suit.)

The lawsuit has not been going well for the magazine. In July, Judge Natalia Combs Greene rejected a motion to dismiss the suit. The defendants appealed, and last week D.C. Superior Court Judge Frederick Weisberg rejected the motion again, opening the door for the discovery phase of the lawsuit to begin.

That’s not all. On Christmas Eve, Steyn (who regularly guest hosts Rush Limbaugh’s radio show) wrote a blog post in which he excoriated Greene, accusing her of incompetence, stupidity, and obtuseness. As a result of this outburst, the law firm that had been representing National Review and Steyn (Steptoe & Johnson) has dropped Steyn as a client and reportedly has plans to withdraw as counsel for the magazine as well.

Part of me hopes that The National Review gets sued into oblivion.    It is a pernicious organization, and it has been since Buckley founded it, and filled it with Oh-So-Civilized support for segregation.

Part of me worries that the Kochs will start funding SLAPP suits against in an attempt to intimidate real news gathering organizations.

And so I leave it with all of you: Which came out of the opened door – the lady, or the tiger?

H/t Salon.

You Sure Picked the Wrong Guy to go All ‘Roid Rage On, Representative Grimm………

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After the State of the Union Address, a NY1reporter Michael Scotto asked Congressman Michael Grimm about his fundraising scandal.

Grimm, expecting questions about the SOTU address, was upset and walked off.

Then he walked back, and threatened to break reporter Scotto in half and throw him off of the Congressional Balcony.

This does make the persisistent rumors of anabolic steroid abuse more credible.

But he picked the wrong reporter to threaten.

You see Michael Scotto is the nephew of Anthony Scotto, a former head of the Brooklyn longshoremen’s union and a former boss in the Gambino crime family.

Grim went postal, and, to my non-lawyer eyes, it was technically assault, on the nephew of a Gambino crime bus.

Sucks to be you.

BTW, before he was a Congressman, he was an FBI agent, and I have to agree with Alex Pareene when he says, “We shouldn’t let people like him have badges and guns.”

The only thing worse than a goon is a goon with a gun and a badge.

Deep Thought

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The death of Pete Seeger has me thinking of Woody Guthrie:

See the label on his guitar saying, “This machine kills fascists?”

Folk songs are about not some sort of generic emotional warm fuzzies.

They are about life, and they are about deep moral outrage.

H/t TPM for the picture (c. 1943).