Cold War: The Sequal

We now have credible reports that Russia is relaunching production of its Tu-160 Strategic Bomber:

The serial production of the upgraded Tupolev Tu-160M2 (NATO reporting name: Blackjack) strategic bomber will begin in 2020, a source in Russia’s defense and industrial sector told TASS.

There are plans to produce two or three Tu-160M2 planes annually, the source added.

“Work to manufacture the plane has begun. Under the contract signed between the United Aircraft Corporation and the Defense Ministry, the Tu-160M2 plane is expected to perform the first flight in 2018,” the source said.

“The Gorbunov Aircraft Plant in Kazan [an affiliate of the Tupolev Company] is expected to launch the serial production of the plane in 2020. It will produce two or three strategic bombers for the Aerospace Force annually,” the source added.

According to the source, it will be an absolutely new plane.

“The upgraded Tu-160M2 plane will retain only the airframe of the baseline model, which meets all modern standards. The plane’s equipment, including its avionics, electronics, cockpit, communications and control systems and a number of weapons, will be replaced. This will considerably improve the plane’s operational capabilities, in particular, the thrust of the NK-32 engines and the unrefueled range,” the source added.

What a waste, and our response will be more waste.

To quote Ike,  “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”

Stating the Obvious

In the Guardian, Jamie Peck, a columnists for the online publication Death and Taxes, observes that the Democratic party establishment finds it more important for real Democrats to lose than for the Democratic Party to win:

Since losing the presidency to a Cheeto-hued reality TV host, the Democratic party’s leadership has made it clear that it would rather keep losing than entertain even the slightest whiff of New Deal style social democracy.

 The Bernie Sanders wing might bring grassroots energy and – if the polls are to be believed – popular ideas, but their redistributive policies pose too much of a threat to the party’s big donors to ever be allowed on the agenda.

 Even a symbolic victory cedes too much to those youthful, unwashed hordes who believe healthcare and education are human rights and not extravagant luxuries, as we saw when the Democratic establishment recruited Tom Perez to defeat the electorate-backed progressive Keith Ellison for DNC chair.

 The Democrats demonstrated this once more this week when, in a special election triggered by Trump’s tapping of Mike Pompeo for CIA director, a Berniecrat named James Thompson came painfully close to winning a Kansas Congressional seat that had been red for over two decades, and his party didn’t even try to help him.

 ………

 After beating an establishment Democrat in the primary, Thompson promised to take on Trump and the Republicans, as well as the state’s unpopular Republican governor Sam Brownback and Kansas-headquartered oligarchs the Koch brothers.

………

 Given our current political climate, you’d think the Democrats would have jumped at the chance to take back a Congressional seat and demonstrate opposition to Trump, but you’d be wrong. While Thompson managed to raise $292,000 without his party’s help, 95% of which came from individuals, neither the DNC, DCCC, nor even the Kansas Democratic Party would help him grow that total in any substantial way. His campaign requested $20,000 from the state Democratic Party and was denied.

 They later relented and gave him $3,000. (According to the FEC, the Party had about $145,000 on hand.) The national Democratic Party gave him nothing until the day before the election, when it graced him with some live calls and robo-calls. He lost by seven percentage points.

 ………

 In defending their decision, party mouthpieces have taken the absurd line that giving Thompson money would have actually hurt his chances of winning, because then everyone would have known he’s a Democrat, and Kansans hate Democrats. (Let’s take a moment to appreciate these are the same people who keep saying the party doesn’t need a new direction.)

 ………

One person the party does not think will be hurt by their help is Jon Ossoff, who is running in a similarly red, but much wealthier, district in Georgia. To date, the DNC has raised some $8.3m for him and has committed to sending nine field staffers to organize on-the-ground efforts.

Although he is young, he’s an acolyte of the Democratic establishment, having worked for Representatives John Lewis and Hank Johnson, and he endorsed Hillary Clinton in the primary. He went to Georgetown followed by the London School of Economics and speaks fluent French. He has the support of several Hollywood celebrities.

Democrats think Ossoff is just the guy to bring his affluent suburban district back into the fold. (Clearly, losing a national election was not enough to reverse course on that most doomed of 2016 strategies: trading blue collar whites for wealthy, suburban ones.)

………

 By refusing to fund the campaigns of anyone but centrist, establishment shills, the Democratic Party aims to make the Berniecrats’ lack of political viability a self-fulfilling prophecy: starve their campaigns of resources so they can’t win, then point to said losses as examples of why they can’t win.

It’s very simple.  Refer to the Iron Rule of Institutions:

The people who control institutions care first and foremost about their power within the institution rather than the power of the institution itself. Thus, they would rather the institution “fail” while they remain in power within the institution than for the institution to “succeed” if that requires them to lose power within the institution.

These guys need to be taken down.  They are a cancer on the body politic.

This is an Interesting Way to Deal with Anti-Vaxxers

No amount of objective discussion or scientific data may ever be enough to convince some people that vaccines are indeed safe and effective at wiping out a slew of hellish and deadly diseases. But what does seem to work at convincing people to vaccinate their children? Bureaucratic hassle.

By adding an extra, in-person step to the process of obtaining a vaccination waiver (which allowed a child to forego the necessary vaccinations), Michigan quickly and significantly boosted its vaccination rate, as Kaiser Health News reports.

In the 2013-2014 school year, the state had the fourth highest rate in the country of children entering kindergarten with a vaccine waiver. But just one year after the extended waiver application process went into effect in 2015, the number of waivers issued dropped by 35 percent statewide. Vaccination rates rose accordingly.

………

“The idea was to make the process more burdensome,” Michigan State University health policy specialist Mark Largent, who has written extensively about vaccines, told KHN. “Research has shown that if you make it more inconvenient to apply for a waiver, fewer people get them.”

………

State legislators added the inconvenience factor after outbreaks of whooping cough and measles hit Michigan children. At the time, parents who didn’t want to vaccinate their kids could easily apply for a waiver over the Internet, by mailing in a form, or even via phone call in some places. But in a quiet, unfussy ruling in December of 2014, the state’s Joint Committee on Administrative Rules changed the waiver application process to require that parents consult in person with a county health educator before a waiver would be granted. 

It used to be easy for politicians to pander to anti-vaxxers, but since outbreaks in California and other states, the general public has become aware that they are a menace, and politicians have been less accomodating.

This is a very good thing.

Facebook Post of the Day

Mitchell Robinson

 April 11 at 11:33pm · Okemos, MI ·

The best argument yet for public schools…

 Donald Trump, Kew-Forest School and New York Military Academy, private

 Betsy DeVos, Holland Christian Schools, religious

 Sean Spicer, Portsmouth Abbey School, private

 Steven Mnuchin, Riverdale Country School, private

 Mick Mulvaney, Charlotte Catholic High School, religious

 Wilbur Ross, Xavier Prep High School, private

 Alex Acosta, Gulliver Schools, private

 Jared Kushner, Frisch School, religious

 Ivanka Trump, Chapin School, private

H/t Diane Ravitch.

OK, this is a Big F%$#ing Deal

Recently revealed tape recordings indicate that the Bank of England actually ordered some of the illegal manipulation of the LIBOR rates:

A secret recording that implicates the Bank of England in Libor rigging has been uncovered by BBC Panorama.

The 2008 recording adds to evidence the central bank repeatedly pressured commercial banks during the financial crisis to push their Libor rates down.

Libor is the rate at which banks lend to each other, setting a benchmark for mortgages and loans for ordinary customers.

………

The recording calls into question evidence given in 2012 to the Treasury select committee by former Barclays boss Bob Diamond and Paul Tucker, the man who went on to become the deputy governor of the Bank of England.

………


In the recording, a senior Barclays manager, Mark Dearlove, instructs Libor submitter Peter Johnson, to lower his Libor rates.

He tells him: “The bottom line is you’re going to absolutely hate this… but we’ve had some very serious pressure from the UK government and the Bank of England about pushing our Libors lower.”

Mr Johnson objects, saying that this would mean breaking the rules for setting Libor, which required him to put in rates based only on the cost of borrowing cash.

Mr Johnson says: “So I’ll push them below a realistic level of where I think I can get money?”

His boss Mr Dearlove replies: “The fact of the matter is we’ve got the Bank of England, all sorts of people involved in the whole thing… I am as reluctant as you are… these guys have just turned around and said just do it.”

………

Banks have been fined more than £6bn for allowing submitters to be influenced by requests from traders or bosses to take into account the bank’s commercial interests, such as trading positions.

Central bank independence, and central bank secrecy have led to corruption, as evidenced by the this incident, as well as the resignation of the resignation of Richmond Federal Reserve President Jeffrey Lacker for leaking insider information to Medley Advisors,  a so-called “Expert Network”.  (An expert network is basically a cut out to supply inside information to speculators, most notoriously by Steve Cohen).

It is the inevitable result of how this organizations are structured:  When you combine extreme power with a complete lack of accountability, corruption follows.

Pull All of His Security Detail, and Let Market Forces Rule

Scott Pruit, environment hating wingnut and current head of the Environmental Protection Agency, is requesting a round the clock security detail in his next budget.

It appears that in addition to being a corrupt stooge of the energy industry, he’s also an abject coward:

The administrator of the US Environmental Protection Agency, historically, has had some measure of government-funded personal security detail. Agents routinely picked Gina McCarthy from the airport, for example, or accompanied her on site visits during her time as EPA administrator from July 2013 to Jan 2017. But Scott Pruitt, the new EPA chief, wishes to be guarded 24/7.

………

The Times calls it a first for an EPA chief, and notes that the 10 additional agents would more than double the agency’s current security staff, which has hovered between six and eight agents in recent years. Similarly, security detail for education secretary Betsy DeVos has reached unprecedented levels: Typically, the secretary of education is guarded by about six agents from within the Department of Education. Since her contentious confirmation, DeVos has been under the protection of the US Marshals Service, costing $8 million over eight months.

What security menace is Pruitt guarding against? According to Myron Ebell, who led Trump’s EPA transition team but is no longer employed by the administration, Pruitt is at risk from his own employees—and “the left.”

Seriously, the wingnuts spend their days soiling their pants in abject terror.

This is Brilliant

Over at Pando, they have a positively brilliant take-down of Rachel Whetstone’s exit from Uber.

The short form is that the senior vice-president of communications and public policy for Uber is a rat, and knows when a ship is sinking, and this is brilliantly brutal:

Okey dokey.

As regular Pando readers will know, the idea that Whetstone would leave Uber to avoid drama is so far beyond laughable that it has travelled the entire circumference of the globe and returned back to laughable again. Rachel Whetstone started out in Westminster — where she and her husband Steve “I support Donald Trump” Hilton helped reinvent the UK’s “nasty” conservative party as the friendly, lovable, electable party that regained power and brought the world… Brexit.

Having left London, for a variety of dramatic reasons, she then headed to Google where she is most famous for picking a very public and highly dramatic fight with (her old pal) Rupert Murdoch. Finally she ended up at Uber where she immediately began bringing even more drama to the already dramatic company, starting with the infamous dinner at which Emil Michael pledged to spend a million dramatic dollars dramatically smearing Pando’s own Sarah Lacy.

Simply put, Rachel Whetstone hates drama like David Mamet hates drama, like Shakespeare hates drama, like Ru Paul performing Tom Stoppard at Devin Nunes High School For Thirteen-Year-Old Girls hates drama.

No, Rachel Whetstone didn’t leave Uber because she hates drama.

For Rachel Whetstone to leave Uber there can only be one reason: Uber is totally, irreversibly f%$#ed. So irreversibly f%$#ed that anyone left behind when the other shoe drops will be so irreparably damaged by association that THE PERSON WHO MADE THE TORIES ELECTABLE AGAIN doesn’t want the karma.

(%$# mine)

Paul Bradley Carr owes me a screen wipe.

Linkage

Cats and leashes, not an optimal juxtaposition:

Quote of the Day

And so, contrary to Hayek’s expectations, financial globalisation has proved that it is market fundamentalism, and not the regulatory state that is leading the world into an era of authoritarianism and totalitarianism – in the US, Eastern Europe, India and China.

—Ann Pettifor

This is not surprising the relentless concentration of power by monopolists has always had this effect. 

As an aside, Hayek in fact loved authoritarianism and totalitarianism, as shown by his full-throated support of the brutal Pinochet regime in Chile, and his only slightly more muted defense of the Apartheid regime in South Africa.

So not a Surprise

Tesla is facing a unionization effort from employees who say that their manufacturing facility is abusive and dangerous:

Along Silicon Valley’s interlocking freeways, low-slung tech offices with obscure names like Way.com or Oorja are populated by fresh-faced technologists in badges and pleated slacks, striving to create the next great app. But off the I-880 in Fremont, a white colossus rises from the landscape, a 5.3-million-square-foot monster that stretches across two interchanges. The gray lettering is a full story high: TESLA.

Here, the company makes high-end, zero-emission vehicles, luxury cruisers for a climate emergency. Chief executive officer Elon Musk has cultivated a reputation as an economic visionary and has been hailed for solving the world’s great challenges with panache. Tesla’s Fremont factory brought hope to a blue-collar, racially diverse town with a manufacturing tradition. And this week, after reports of a 69 percent increase in first-quarter sales, the automaker passed Ford in market value. But though its products epitomize the future, workers like Richard Ortiz say Tesla’s labor conditions are mired in the past. Ortiz is a production associate in the closures department, assembling hoods, doors—“anything that opens or closes”—on Model S sedans and Model X SUVs. Though videos of the Tesla factory emphasize robotic automation, over 6,000 workers engage in intense manual labor to build the cars.

“I have an eight-pound rivnut gun,” Ortiz said, referring to a tool that installs rivet nuts. “I’m doing that all day long. I’m to the point where, if I pick something up with any weight, within 30 seconds I have to drop it. That scares me; I want to be able to use my arm when I retire.”

Tesla workers say circumstances like Ortiz’s are commonplace at a factory that prioritizes production goals over health and safety. Now they’re fighting back against low pay, hazardous conditions, and a culture of intimidation, seeking to unionize through the United Auto Workers. Tesla is the only U.S. automaker using nonunion workers at a stateside plant, and breaking through would give organized labor a foothold in the tech industry as well. Until then, the Tesla experience reveals that green jobs aren’t necessarily good jobs without worker power. “They want to make sustainable cars,” says Ortiz. “We need sustainable employment.”

………


But after originally describing Tesla as “union neutral,” Musk said on an earnings call in February that “there are really only disadvantages to someone to want the UAW here.” In a later email to workers, Musk delivered a point-by-point rebuttal to Moran’s Medium post, arguing that overtime had decreased and incident rates were below average. Instead of offering workers better wages and input on production, Musk promised “a really amazing party” for the launch of the Model 3, “free frozen yogurt stands” at the factory, and “a Tesla electric pod roller coaster” connecting the parking lots. “It’s going to get crazy good,” Musk concluded.

………

Labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein expressed horror at Musk’s rhetoric. “It was the worst kind of caricature of a capitalist, like it’s 1898,” he said. “They have these sophisticated systems of production and distribution, but their social arrangements are utterly retrograde.”

Mr. Lichtenstein may not know it, but his categorization of Musk’s rhetoric can be more broadly applied to the tech industry.

Until the drones at places like Tesla, Facebook, Uber, and Google come to understand that providing free frozen yogurt is not a sign of respect from their employers, but rather an indicator that management thinks that the employees are easily manipulated rubes, this situation will not improve.

The autoworkers are sharper than the Stanford educated programmers when they say about this attidude is that, “It’s insulting, it shows you what he thinks of us.”

Headline of the Day

What Is ‘Global Britain’? A Financier and Arms Merchant to Brutal Dictators

—Nick Dearden in an OP/ED in the Guardian

This is a pretty good description of what the UK’s global footprint these days.

For a very long time, the UK has aggressively moving away from productive work and toward a financialized economy which is little more than a vehicle for parasitism.

It is what is happening to the US as well, but it’s not moving quite as quickly, if just because our government is less centralized, and because our economy is so much bigger.

Well, Isn’t This Special

It appears that the current poster child for corrupt corporate behavior, Uber, was using its software to cheat both drivers and passengers:

Uber has devised a “clever and sophisticated” scheme in which it manipulates navigation data used to determine “upfront” rider fare prices while secretly short-changing the driver, according to a proposed class-action lawsuit against the ride-hailing app.

When a rider uses Uber’s app to hail a ride, the fare the app immediately shows to the passenger is based on a slower and longer route compared to the one displayed to the driver. The software displays a quicker, shorter route for the driver. But the rider pays the higher fee, and the driver’s commission is paid from the cheaper, faster route, according to the lawsuit.

“Specifically, the Uber Defendants deliberately manipulated the navigation data used in determining the fare amount paid by its users and the amount reported and paid to its drivers,” according to the suit filed in federal court in Los Angeles. Lawyers representing a Los Angeles driver for Uber, Sophano Van, said the programming was “shocking, “methodical,” and “extensive.”

The first, and most obvious, point, is that sh$# like this is why we need aggressive and competent regulation.

The second point, and perhaps it’s just my inner pinko showing, is that if a company mistreats its employees, there is a pretty good chance that they will f%$# the customers as well.

Good News in Florids ……… Wait ……… What? Florida?

Actually it is good news, not another Florida Man story.

A court in Florida has ruled that, unlike a physical examination of brakes and tires of a vehicle, authorities need a warrant to extract data from vehicle black boxes:

An interesting decision has been reached by the Florida Appeals Court as to Fourth Amendment protections for vehicle “black boxes.” The black boxes — which are a mandatory requirement in new vehicles — record a variety of data in the event of a crash. (h/t FourthAmendment.com)

Charles Worsham Jr. was the driver in a crash in which his passenger was killed. His vehicle was seized and impounded by police. Twelve days later, police accessed the data in the black box without obtaining a warrant. Worsham challenged the lawfulness of the warrantless search. The police maintained the black box was full of third-party records which required no warrant or consent from the vehicle’s owner.

The court sees the issue differently. In a relative rarity, the state Appeals Court decides [PDF] to get out ahead of the issue, rather than wait for precedential decisions to trickle down from the federal courts. It looks at the data harvested by the black box and suggests the amount gathered will only increase in the coming years. Rather than wait until then to make a call on the Fourth Amendment merits, it draws the line now.

Citing the Supreme Court’s Riley decision (which introduced a warrant requirement for cell phone searches), the court concludes the crash data contained in the black box has an expectation of privacy.

A car’s black box is analogous to other electronic storage devices for which courts have recognized a reasonable expectation of privacy. Modern technology facilitates the storage of large quantities of information on small, portable devices. The emerging trend is to require a warrant to search these devices.
[…]
Although electronic data recorders do not yet store the same quantity of information as a cell phone, nor is it of the same personal nature, the rationale for requiring a warrant to search a cell phone is informative in determining whether a warrant is necessary to search an immobilized vehicle’s data recorder. These recorders document more than what is voluntarily conveyed to the public and the information is inherently different from the tangible “mechanical” parts of a vehicle. Just as cell phones evolved to contain more and more personal information, as the electronic systems in cars have gotten more complex, the data recorders are able to record more information.

Also of importance is the difficulty of extracting the information from the black boxes.

Extracting and interpreting the information from a car’s black box is not like putting a car on a lift and examining the brakes or tires. Because the recorded data is not exposed to the public, and because the stored data is so difficult to extract and interpret, we hold there is a reasonable expectation of privacy in that information, protected by the Fourth Amendment, which required law enforcement in the absence of exigent circumstances to obtain a warrant before extracting the information from an impounded vehicle.

Not only that, but recent legislation (the Driver Privacy Act of 2015) specifically states that the contents of data recorders belong to the vehicle’s owner, not the manufacturer or any other third party.

Outstanding.