While I am generally opposed to bitcoin, I make an exception for South Florida. Miami is the rightful home of everything fraudulent, weird, and sleazy. And I say this with love. https://t.co/7erEwDjSDK
— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) February 12, 2021
This succinctly sums up both the current cryptocurrency craze and south Florida.
As Zathras would say, “But at least there is symmetry.”
For decades, the Fed comported itself as an expert witness for deficit hawks on Capitol Hill.
Now, under the leadership of a Republican banker, the Fed is using its technocratic credibility to bolster big stimulus (and marginalize Larry Summers)https://t.co/LyyZxcssS8
— Eric Levitz (@EricLevitz) February 11, 2021
Because he is NOT an Economist
Specifically, he put Jerome Powell in charge of the Federal Reserve, whose background is as an investment banker rather than an economist, and because of this, he has not dedicated himself to fighting invisible mythical inflation preemptively, nor has he attempted to create prosperity by invoking the equally mythical confidence fueled austerity fairy.
It turns out that there is a profession more useless than that of the investment banker, it is that of the economist.
While Trump always found him too hawkish on monetary policy, he has been the most dovish Fed chair in at least 30 years, largely because he is not comparing penis size with other economists:
For most of the past four decades, the Federal Reserve has comported itself as a corroborating witness for deficit hawks on Capitol Hill, and a security system for anti-inflation paranoiacs on Wall Street.
In the late 1970s, stubbornly high inflation taught the central bank that the conflict between its dual objectives — to promote full employment and price stability — was fiercer than it had previously thought. Specifically, the Fed decided that it would need to preemptively cool the economy when unemployment got too low, so as to snuff out inflationary spirals before they took hold. This was because tight labor markets allowed workers to hold their employers hostage to unreasonable wage demands; with no reserve army of the unemployed to draw new hires from, bosses were forced to placate existing staff. Thus, employers ended up overpaying their workers and then trying to compensate by overcharging consumers. Workers, being consumers themselves, responded to such price hikes by extracting even higher wages from their employers, causing employers to enact even more extortionate price increases, setting off a vicious inflationary cycle. Therefore, central banks had to proactively preserve slack in the labor market — both by slowing economic growth through interest-rate hikes when unemployment got too low, and by encouraging Congress to rein in deficit spending lest it spur excessive demand for labor.
………
But times have changed — and so has the Fed.
Under Jerome Powell, the central bank has brought American monetary policy into belated alignment with federal law and empirical economics. Instead of attempting to preempt high inflation by sustaining a cushion of unemployment, Powell has waited for inflation to actually show itself before deliberately cooling the economy, a posture he has justified by emphasizing the myriad economic and social benefits of maximizing employment.
As a result, the Fed’s role in America’s fiscal policy debates has flipped. This week, Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion stimulus plan took on some friendly fire from center-left economists Larry Summers and Olivier Blanchard. While both endorsed the necessity of significant stimulus spending, they suggested that Biden’s package was excessively large, and would risk “overheating” the economy — which is to say, the stimulus would risk injecting more demand into the economy than the nation can satisfy, given the size of its labor force and the productive capacity of its capital stock. And when demand outstrips supply, the result is inflation.
On Wednesday, the Fed effectively intervened in this debate on Biden’s behalf. In remarks to the Economic Club of New York, Powell argued that America’s actual unemployment rate is not 6.3 percent (as official data suggest) but 10 percent, once classification errors are accounted for; that it will take “continued support from both near-term policy and longer-run investments” to restore maximum employment; and that had the pandemic not intervened, there is “every reason to expect that the labor market could have strengthened even further without causing a worrisome increase in inflation.” That last statement is key. Not only does it suggest that Powell believes the U.S. economy can support an unemployment rate significantly below the 3.5 percent we saw in early 2020, the statement also implicitly rebukes the Congressional Budget Office’s official estimate of how much more demand the economy can accommodate without overheating. Which is significant, since Summers built his “overheating” argument around the CBO’s (historically unreliable) estimate of that figure.
………
The Federal Reserve’s authority over monetary policy — and technocratic credibility on questions of spending — gives it considerable power to shape the economic paradigm within which democratic politics operates. In the late 1970s, the central bank used this power to consolidate a reactionary turn in American economic policymaking. In 2021 — under the leadership of a Trump-appointed, Republican investment banker — it is doing its darnedest to consolidate a progressive one.
IMHO, Trump got it right by mistake, but he got this one very right.
It would have been nice if the Republicans had dealt with this, but given that she has repeatedly called for the assassination of member of the House, but the Democrats (plus 11 Republicans) had to take action, meaning that Marjorie Taylor Greene will sit on no committees at all, the first time since, IIRC, Steve King was removed from his committees by the Republican Caucus after he explicitly supported white nationalism in 2019. (Before that, the Democrats refused to assign Jim Trafficant after he voted for the Republican Rpeaker of the House in 2001)
Normally, removal from committees is done by the Congressman’s own party, but Kevin McCarthy is too much of a wimp to do the right thing:
The House on Thursday exiled Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene from congressional committees, blacklisting the first-term Georgian for endorsing the executions of Democrats and spreading dangerous and bigoted misinformation even as fellow Republicans rallied around her.
The House voted 230 to 199 to remove Ms. Greene from the Education and Budget Committees, with only 11 Republicans joining Democrats to support the move. The action came after Ms. Greene’s past statements and espousing of QAnon and other conspiracy theories had pushed her party to a political crossroads.
The vote effectively stripped Ms. Greene of her influence in Congress by banishing her from committees critical to advancing legislation and conducting oversight. Party leaders traditionally control the membership of the panels. While Democrats and Republicans have occasionally moved to punish their own members by stripping them of assignments, the majority has never in modern times moved to do so to a lawmaker in the other party.
In emotional remarks on the House floor, Ms. Greene expressed regret on Thursday for her previous comments and disavowed many of her most outlandish and repugnant statements. She said she believed that the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks “absolutely happened” and that school shootings were “absolutely real” after previously suggesting that aspects of both were staged.
………
Democrats argued that Ms. Greene’s comments — and Republican leaders’ refusal to take action against her — had required unusual action. In social media posts made before she was elected, Ms. Greene endorsed executing top Democrats, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi; suggested a number of school shootings were secretly perpetrated by government actors; and repeatedly trafficked in anti-Semitic and Islamophobic conspiracy theories.
………
Ms. Greene also told the House that she had broken away from QAnon in 2018. “I was allowed to believe things that weren’t true,” she said, “and I would ask questions about them and talk about them, and that is absolutely what I regret.”
However, that does not square with a series of social media posts she made in 2019, including liking a Facebook comment that endorsed shooting Ms. Pelosi in the head and suggesting in the same year that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had been replaced with a body double, an element of QAnon’s fictional story line.
………
But the majority party, at least in modern history, has never before leveraged its power to dictate the minority party’s committee assignments. Democrats, who have been particularly incensed by Ms. Greene’s previous calls for violence after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, have insisted that Ms. Greene’s conduct demanded extraordinary measures.
………
“If anybody starts threatening the lives of members of Congress on the Democratic side, we’d be the first to eliminate them from committees,” Ms. Pelosi said.
Of course, when the Republicans regain power in the Congress, I’m sure that they will do this to Muslim members of Congress, claiming that this is a precedent, because acting in profoundly bad faith is their thing.
Finally, legislation proposed to reverse the absurd requirement that the US Post Office prefund its pension and benefits for 50 years has a chance to pass the Congress:
This is literally the only reason that the USPS is in dire financial straits, and this been the case for almost 15 years:
A bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced a bill to ease a major financial burden on the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) by eliminating a requirement that it fund retirement benefits decades ahead of time.
The USPS Fairness Act would do away with a 2006 law that mandated the USPS to form a $72 billion fund to pay for retirement health benefits for over 50 years, a requirement that is not imposed on any other federal agency.
The legislation was introduced in the House by Reps. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.), Tom Reed (R-N.Y.), Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.), Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) and Colin Allred (D-Texas) and in the Senate by Sens. Steve Daines (R-Mont.) and Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii).
“The unreasonable prefunding mandate has threatened the survival of the USPS and placed at risk vital services for the millions who rely on it. The prefunding mandate policy is based on the absurd notion of paying for the retirement funds of people who do not yet, and may not ever, work for the Postal Service,” DeFazio said in a statement.
The introduction of the legislation comes as President Biden faces pressure from the biggest Postal Service union to install new USPS leadership. The department was thrust into the national spotlight late in the Trump administration for changes to mail delivery that critics said would impact the collection of mail-in ballots in a way that would benefit then-President Trump.
A similar bill to the USPS Fairness Act was passed in the House last year but languished in the GOP-controlled Senate.
Here’s hoping that this actually happens.
The original bill was an attempt to privatize the post office as a way of breaking its union, and Donald Trump used the chaos in an attempt to subvert the 2020 election.
This needs to be repealed today.
Now that Joe Biden has fired corrupt National Labor Relations Board general counsel Peter Robb, it appears that Scabby the Rat is safe for now.
Robb, a former union busting lawyer, has been on a jihad against the union mascot Scabby the Rate, First Amendment be damned.
Hopefully, the new NLRB council won’t be such a corrupt unethical bastard:
The fate of Scabby the Rat is up in the air after President Joe Biden forced out National Labor Relations Board general counsel Peter Robb, who had made it one of his top priorities to deflate the union protest symbol, and tapped a new acting general counsel on Monday.
In one of his first actsafter taking office Jan. 20, Biden sent the Trump-appointed Robb and deputy NLRB general counsel Alice Stock packing. On Monday, Biden tapped NLRB Chicago regional director Peter Sung Ohrto be acting general counsel.
Legal experts say those shake-ups could mean the end of Robb’s attempt to muzzle the ratbased on a legal theorythat unions violate the National Labor Relations Act when they deploy the fanged, red-eyed rodent in so-called secondary boycotts.
………
And the general counsel has the authority to decide which cases can continue to proceed before the board, said Alyssa Busse, a union-side attorney at Allison Slutsky & Kennedy PC, which could mean the end of cases that seek to upend precedent protecting the inflatable pest.
“Even though the general counsel is separate from the board, the general counsel still has significant influence on which cases are brought before the board,” Busse said.
………
The general counsel’s office is challenging an NLRB administrative judge’s ruling that the display, which shamed Lippert “for harboring rat contractors,” may have embarrassed company officials but did not block customers or workers. Robb wanted the board to consider doing away with two Obama era decisions that gave workers the right to use banners and Scabby during secondary protests as long as they were not confrontational or disruptive.
In October, the NLRB sought public inputon whether it “should alter its standard” and limit workers’ rights to display the rat and banners during secondary protests.
Those comments, now submitted to the board, put the case even closer to a decision that could upend the current law, clarify it or leave it untouched.
………
But a more likely path is that the acting general counsel will drop the case against Lippert Components, according to Andrew D. Midgen, an attorney at labor-side firm Pitta LLP.
“Even though the [Lippert] case is fully briefed, the acting GC has the authority to withdraw the complaint. There are good grounds within the NLRA and Supreme Court precedent that decides prosecutorial and adjudicatory decision-making within the agency,” Midgen said. “As long as it’s a prosecutorial decision, then the final authority rests within the acting GC. The decision as to whether to pursue a complaint is a prosecutorial decision.”
Whether the board issues a decision on the Lippert case, or another case pending at the board over Scabby, Ohr could also change the guidance to NLRB regional offices on how to handle relevant cases and what legal theories they must pursue, experts said.
Robb’s office issued multiple memos in recent years ordering regional offices to pursue cases in which unions allegedly violated the NLRA by using the rat and other long-recognized symbols of labor protests that often pop up during union demonstrations.
Here’s hoping that this is the beginning of a trend.
One of the worst things that Obama did when he got into office was to knife labor in the back by abandoning the the Employee Free Choice Act.
It was horrible policy, and worse politics.
The International Monetary Fund, which has never found an austerity program it didn’t like, and has consistently argued for the emasculation of worker rights, has just issued a report saying that workers rights must be restored in the US.
Seriously, this is not something that I expected from this organization.
The IMF has been on the side of the banks and the oligarchs since its inception:
Systematic erosion of workers’ power relative to their employers has suppressed US wages
Politicians in both US political parties now acknowledge wage stagnation and have adopted narratives claiming that “the system is rigged.” Some focus on the number of immigrants and on what they see as unfair trade with China. Others focus on monopolies charging higher prices and reaping huge profits. There is, however, no agreement on what, and who, rigged the system.
In fact, as my new paper with colleagues Josh Bivens and Heidi Shierholz, “Explaining Wage Suppression” shows, wages have been kept low in the United States because workers have been systematically disempowered as a result of corporate practices and economic policies that were adopted—or reforms that were blocked—at the behest of business and the wealthy. This lack of worker power has caused wage suppression, increased wage inequality, and exacerbated racial disparities. The specific mechanisms behind this shift in power are excessive unemployment, globalization, eroded labor standards and their lack of enforcement, weakened collective bargaining, and corporate structure changes that disadvantage workers. To reestablish patterns of growth that benefit the vast majority requires new policies that center on rebuilding worker power.
Coming from someone like me, this would be considered pinko ranting, but from the IMF, even publishing this paper represents a shift.
One of the 1st votes I ever cast broke w/ my party over House rules that strangled transformative legislation for working people + climate. It was honestly terrifying.
Now, CPC has pushed these critical rule changes in House negotiations. Grateful for @RepMcGovern’s leadership🙏🏽 https://t.co/4N0NfF5Arz
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) January 2, 2021
One of the great failures of the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) is their insistence on austerity politics.
Nothing exemplifies this more, and hamstrings the progressives in the Congress more, than the PAYGO rules, which the Democrats have assiduously followed over the past 3 decades, even while Republicans ignore it.
Basically, it says that any legislation has to be scored by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), and if it costs money, then there have to be offsetting spending cuts or tax hikes in that bill.
It means that unelected staff in the CBO can hold up a bill, and kill it with the numbers that they generate.
It also means that conservative Democrats, Nancy Pelosi (Seriously, look at her record, and who she gives committee chairmanships to) who are more interested in careerism and getting large campaign checks in, have an excuse not to do anything to help the average American.
It suits them just fine, but it also gave us Donald John Trump.
Well now, clearly as a result of pressure from the progressive wing of the Democratic Caucus, I honestly think that this was a price of their vote for Pelosi as speaker earlier today, House rules have been change to both soften Pay Go and the motion to recommit. (The motion to recommit was frequently used by Republicans, and almost never by Democrats, to force meaningless votes that could be used as election fodder)
The House rules package for the 117th Congress, released Friday, would weaken a procedural tool of the minority, provide key exemptions to a budget rule requiring the cost of legislation to be offset and strengthen congressional oversight provisions.
………
The rules package is expected to get a vote on Monday, the second day of the new Congress.
One of the main requests from Democrats across the caucus was that leadership either eliminate or defang the motion to recommit, or MTR, which is a vote afforded to the minority on most bills.
The MTR has been used in the past as a procedural vote to kill legislation by sending it back to committee, but in recent years it has become a substantive vote that would actually amend the bill if adopted. In either scenario, it is mostly used as a political messaging vote in which the minority tries to trap the majority into going on the record on controversial policies.
The new rules would prevent MTRs from being used to alter bills on the floor. Instead, the minority would only be able to use the motion to send a bill back to committee.
The change makes it easier for Democrats — concerned about opposing whatever policy Republicans use the MTR to highlight — to vote against the motion as purely a procedural maneuver.
………
Progressives were also pushing for the rules package to eliminate a longstanding pay-as-you-go, or PAYGO, provision that requires legislation that would increase the deficit to be offset.
While the rules package does not get rid of PAYGO, it would provide the Budget Committee chairperson the authority to declare legislation providing economic and heath responses to the pandemic, as well as measures designed to combat climate change, as having no cost — effectively a PAYGO exemption.
One of the main reasons progressives wanted to repeal PAYGO was to make it easier to pass measures to respond to the climate crisis, so the rule change may be enough to satisfy them.
Basically, if you can credibly argue that a bill pertains to the pandemic, or climate change, it can proceed without all the rigamarole that has been required up to now.
It’s a good start, and I would note that the only reason the Pelosi is still speaker is because she has meticulously prevented any alternatives to her rule to come forward.
This should be the next item on the Progressive Caucus, because even if the Democrats to not retain control of the house in 2022, pretty likely giving the Joe “Nothing will Fundamentally Change” Biden will be in the White House, Pelosi is an impediment to the success of the Democratic Party and the well-being of the nation.
The Secret Service is shuffling the staff for the Presidential detail, and it is strongly implied that this is because some members of Trumps detail are seen as unreliable.
This is what happens when you take a wrecking ball to the civil service, as Trump has:
The Secret Service is making some staff changes in the presidential detail that will guard President-elect Joe Biden, amid concerns from Biden allies that some current members were politically aligned with President Trump, according to two people familiar with the changes.
As Biden readies his new administration, the Secret Service plans to bring back to the White House detail a handful of senior agents whom Biden knows well from their work more than four years ago guarding him and his family when he was vice president.
Staff changes are typical with the arrival of a new president and are designed to increase the trust and comfort the incoming president feels with his protective agents, who often stand by the president’s side during sensitive discussions and private moments.
But the shifts underway occur at a particularly contentious time, as Trump has blamed his reelection loss on unfounded allegations of voter fraud and has sought to block his administration from treating Biden as the president-elect. Some in the Secret Service also came under criticism during Trump’s tenure for appearing to embrace his political agenda.
For instance, some presidential detail members urged other agents and Secret Service officers not to wear masks on presidential trips this year — against the administration’s own public health guidance — as the president felt wearing masks projected weakness, The Washington Post has reported.
This will not end well.
The Progressive Caucus in the House of Representatives has has adopted new rules and a new structure to make it more like a parliamentary caucus, with a single chairman, and the ability to whip its members.
The changes:
Additionally, Jaypal has made it clear that if people find this too restricting, she is fine with them leaving the caucus. (i.e. don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out)
Given the narrow Democratic margin in the next Congress, 10 seats if the members leaving to join the Biden administration are replaced by Democrats, a cohesive Progressive caucus, even if it drops to 50 members or so, can exert real power.
It appears that Trump is cutting off military support to CIA death squads: (Details on the whole child murdering death squads are here)
Years from now, we will forgive historians who, when documenting the Donald Trump presidency — its cold indifference to hundreds of thousands of Covid-19 deaths, its pandemic denialism, its migrant family separations, its use of the Justice Department as a political cudgel and the attorney general as a Mafia lawyer, the president’s genuine attempt to subvert the 2020 election results, and his impeachment — fail to note a bureaucratic dust-up between the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon in the waning days of the administration.
Last week, news broke that Trump’s acting defense secretary, Christopher Miller, sent a letter to the CIA notifying the agency that the Pentagon would review the terms of its military support to CIA operations. News reports suggested that the Pentagon was planning to strip the CIA of its support for counterterrorism missions around the world almost immediately. Drones, elite soldiers, fuel, and medical evacuation of casualties, for example, would disappear almost overnight. CNN reported that the Pentagon was “planning to withdraw most support for CIA counter-terror missions by the beginning of next year.” The New York Times suggested that the purpose was to “make it difficult” for the CIA to conduct its covert war in Afghanistan as Trump reduces the number of U.S. troops there. ABC News described the decision as “unprecedented.” The cuts would leave CIA paramilitary officers to die should they suffer casualties, former officers told the press.
But interviews with six current and former national security officials, including some directly involved in the Pentagon’s review, suggest it is neither immediate nor controversial. Instead, the review serves as a coda for the Trump administration’s chaos — and as an unintentional gift to the incoming Biden administration.
Miller’s letter to CIA Director Gina Haspel informed her that the Pentagon would update a classified 2005 memorandum of understanding outlining the terms of Defense Department support to CIA missions. The Donald Rumsfeld-led Pentagon wrote the memo in the early years of what the George W. Bush administration called the global war on terror. In the immediate weeks and months after the September 11 attacks, the Pentagon discovered that it had neither the intelligence capability nor the nimbleness that the CIA showed in their quick deployment to Afghanistan, where Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda conceived of and trained for the attacks; the CIA needed special operations forces to buttress their tiny paramilitary division.
As an aside, United States Special Operations Command (USSICOM) was established in 1987, so it appears that the need to use CIA paramilitaries, particularly given its extensive expansion over the intervening 33 years, is to ensure that those operations are not subject to the purview of any potential war crimes investigations.
………
Fast forward to Donald Trump. He campaigned in 2016 on pulling out U.S. troops from the wars which began after 9/11 and later, as president, declared victory over the Islamic State. In 2018, the Pentagon, led by Defense Secretary James Mattis, published a new national defense strategy as a blueprint for a new era. Counterterrorism was no longer the country’s “primary concern.” The new strategy called long-term strategic competition with China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran the top priorities.
………
Trump reportedly tried several times to pull troops out of Afghanistan but was said to have been blocked or slow-rolled by the national security establishment. After he lost the November election, Trump fired Esper because he was said to have resisted the move. As a result, Miller replaced Esper and quickly went about announcing that troops were indeed coming home. As almost an afterthought, Miller and the acting undersecretary of defense for intelligence, Ezra Cohen-Watnick, also pushed to update the 2005 sharing agreement to fall in line with the change in national security policy, several defense officials told The Intercept. They said that fears of resource cuts to the CIA are unfounded overall.
………
A secondary justification for rewriting the agreement is to allow the Pentagon to answer a simple question that has plagued military officials for years: How much support do we provide to the CIA, and how is it used?
………
For military officials, the support to the CIA has become just like any other part of the Pentagon’s self-licking ice cream cone: one with no end. The agreement has persisted for 15 years, even as national security priorities have changed. Two military officials who spoke with The Intercept said the Pentagon couldn’t answer congressional committees’ questions about how the CIA used the Pentagon’s resources. As a result, the new memo will insist that the CIA provide more information to the Pentagon on where and how their support, including forces, is used.
………
According to the senior Pentagon official involved in the review, the Pentagon is asking the CIA to use military support in the so-called great nation competition and use fewer resources in their counterterrorism efforts. It is all part of a more considerable effort to move the military’s resources away from hunting suspected Islamic militants worldwide and toward the now two-year-old focus on other global powers. The military is letting the CIA know that they are ending its forever wars in a strategic sense.
“[Director Haspel] wants out of the war on terror,” the senior Pentagon official continued. “She thinks that takes the CIA away from its core mission of going after Russia and China. And it’s 20 years later, and we had to do [that] at the time, it’s 20 years now, and a shift has to be made.”
So Haspel is a moron who has never left the Cold War.
And people wonder why the Russians think that the war against them by the US never ended.
………
CIA counterterrorism veterans believe the review stems from Trump making a last-minute effort to punish the CIA for various offenses, but mostly because the agency concluded that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help him become president. A retired senior intelligence official told The Intercept that a senior congressional aide on an intelligence committee asked the White House last week to explain Miller’s letter to the CIA. The retired official said the aide was told, “It’s because the president’s followers believe the agency played a role” in Trump’s election loss last month. The retired official said the White House acknowledged that the claim of CIA involvement in Trump’s election loss was unfounded, but the facts didn’t matter. The message from the White House, according to the retired official, was that “it matters what Trump’s supporters think, and they think that’s the case.”
Given Trump’s pettiness and thin-skinned demeanor, it may very well be that Trump ordered the Pentagon to take its toys away from the CIA, but it also doesn’t matter.
………
But it does provide Biden with an unintentional gift. By forcing the incoming administration to respond to the review shortly after taking power, Trump’s team provides Biden with an opportunity to quickly take stock of 20 years of lethal operations, both in direct view and secret — and make a decision to end an unwinnable war.
………
A lame-duck president agitating for a useful bureaucratic change as a parting shot at the deep state is the same delusional logic that came with much of Trump’s four years: occasionally doing the right thing for all the wrong reasons.
Given the nature of CIA paramilitaries, their primary benefits appear to be evading the laws of war, and to maintain a military presence in an area in defiance of civilian leadership (Syria most recently), reducing this capability is an unalloyed good, regardless of the motivations.
Congress just passed a bill requiring that shell companies detail who their beneficiaries are.
This means that the shenanigans like Wyoming corporations will hopefully be a thing of the past:
The U.S Senate on Friday passed a bill overhauling anti-money laundering rules and banning anonymous shell companies, a victory for law enforcement and rights groups which have long sought changes to make it easier to police illicit money flows.
The bill requires most companies to report their true beneficial owners to the government, allows greater information sharing between law enforcement and regulators, and authorizes the use of new suspicious activity monitoring tools.
Unfortunately, it does not make this information available to the general public, which it should, but it is a marked improvement on the status quo.
The FCC has decided not to end its ban on mobile phone voice calls during commercial flights.
There is very little that could make today’s airline experience worse, but having some asshole in the seat next to me berating his executive assistant via his mobile is something much, MUCH, worse.
We dodged a bullet here.
It appears that Donald Trump’s efforts to f%$# with the US Census will come to naught, because there are data processing issues that will not allow them to get the final results in time:
In a blow to the Trump administration’s efforts to strip unauthorized immigrants from census totals used for reapportionment, Census Bureau officials have concluded that they cannot produce the state population totals required to reallocate seats in the House of Representatives until after President Trump leaves office in January.
The president said in July that he planned to remove unauthorized immigrants from the count for the first time in history, leaving an older and whiter population as the basis for divvying up House seats, a shift that would be likely to increase the number of House seats held by Republicans over the next decade.
But on Wednesday, according to three bureau officials, the Census Bureau told the Commerce Department that a growing number of snags in the massive data-processing operation that generates population totals had delayed the completion of population calculations at least until Jan. 26, and perhaps to mid-February. Those officials spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals from the Trump administration.
………
Under law, the White House must send a state-by-state census tally to the House of Representatives next year that will be used to reallocate House seats among the states. On Mr. Trump’s order, the Census Bureau is attempting to compile a separate state-by-state tally of unauthorized immigrants so that their numbers can be subtracted from official census results before they are dispatched to the House.
Good.
You will not believe what we got in the mail on Wednesday.
Yes, we got a notice from the US Postal Service to make sure to vote early if we plan to vote by mail.
TWO WEEKS AFTER THE ELECTION.
I know that the Post Office performs many essential services, try getting a your medications through email, for one, and I am loath to make all the standard jokes, but seriously ……… What is up with this?
I guess I should feel grateful about this, because how often do I get to look for and then watch a video of guy in a bear suit rocking out about mail delivery.
Last week, I wrote about how the CEO of Pfizer may have timed their vaccine announcement to maximize his profit at prescheduled stock sales.
Today I discover that it wasn’t just Pfizer, it was Moderna and Novavax as well:
Pfizer, Moderna, Novavax: executives at several American laboratories developing COVID-19 vaccines have recently pocketed millions of dollars by selling shares in their companies—raising questions about the propriety of such a move in the midst of a national health crisis.
On the very day that pharmaceutical giant Pfizer announced preliminary data showing its vaccine was 90 percent effective against the coronavirus, its chief executive Albert Bourla sold shares worth $5.6 million.
There was nothing illegal about this, Pfizer said: the sale took place according to rules allowing company heads to sell shares under predetermined criteria, at a date or for a price set in advance, to avoid any suspicion of insider training.
Under the same rules, several Moderna officials have sold shares worth more than $100 million in recent months.
That company has not placed a single product on the market since its creation in 2010, but the federal government has committed to paying it up to $2.5 billion if its vaccine proves effective.
………
Accountable US, a nonpartisan taxpayers’ advocacy group, has calculated that from the start of the federally coordinated effort to develop vaccines on May 15 until August 31, officials at five pharmaceutical companies made more than $145 million by selling shares.
Meanwhile, over at Moon of Alabama, we have an account of how Anthony Fauci, big Pharma, and the FDA conspired to f%$# Donald Trump’s reelection chances.
Personally, I’m on the side of greedy pharma execs, because of Occam’s Razor, but I am a cynic:
………
During the summer Trump had been hopeful that a vaccine against the Covid-19 disease could be announced before the election. It would have been proof that his strategy to (not) fight the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic had at least one success. The announcement of a vaccine was part of President Trump’s planned ‘October surprises’ to win the election.
Trump’s summer hope that a vaccine success could be announced during October was not unreasonable. Two important vaccines candidate, one from Pfizer with BioNTech and one from Moderna, had been successful tested in their first phases and were ready launch their large phase 3 trials.
In a phase 3 vaccine trial several ten thousand people are put into two groups. The people in one group receive the vaccine, the people in the other one a placebo. One then has to wait and see how many people will get the disease. At certain points a statistical team will look at those cases and check how many occurred in each group. The differences of the number of people in each group who catch the disease is a scale for the vaccines efficacy. For a known group size one can estimate in advance after how many disease cases determinations should be made to show statistical significance.
………
The time plan, on which Trump was certainly briefed, foresaw that the first interim analysis would likely occur in late September or early October.
However Pfizer did not publish any results when the first two interim analysis points were met. On November 9, after the election, Pfizer announced very positive results at the third interim analysis point:
As an aside, I read Moon of Alabama regularly, they regularly have top drawer commentary, particularly on the Middle East, and while they are sometimes contrarian for its own sake, Michael Kinsley disease, and it sometimes tends to be just a bit conspiratorial, they are well worth the read.
Is anyone surprised that U.S. tech firms are refusing to obey EU data transfer regulations?
Criminality is an integral part of the Silicon Valley ethos. That’s what, “Move Fast and Break Things,” means.
Technology firms’ compliance with European restrictions on transatlantic data transfers is shockingly poor, Austrian privacy campaigner Max Schrems said on Monday, publishing a survey here of companies including Facebook and Netflix.
The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) ruled in July that the data arrangement set up in 2016, called Privacy Shield, was invalid under Europe’s privacy framework because of concerns about U.S. surveillance.
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Exercising the right of customers to ask companies how their data is handled under the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the survey drew a mixed bag of responses – some firms did not respond and others gave misleading answers.
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“Overall, we were astonished by how many companies were unable to provide little more than a boilerplate answer,” said Schrems.
“The companies that did provide answers largely are simply not complying with the CJEU judgment. It seems that most of the industry still does not have a plan as to how to move forward.”
This IS their plan for moving forward: Break the law and force the EU to go after them.
Until assets are seized, or executives are arrested, the lawbreaking will continue.
It turns out that the butcher who was routinely sterilizing ICE detainees was not a board certified OB/Gyn.
My conclusion at this point is that either Dr. Mahendra Amin was getting all of the sterilization jobs because he was paying kickbacks, or someone at the facility wanted mass sterilizations at the facility, and he was a willing conspirator, or both:
The doctor at the center of a scandal over unwanted hysterectomies at an immigrant detention facility in Georgia is not a board certified OB-GYN, The Daily Beast has learned.
Dr. Mahendra Amin came under scrutiny after immigrant rights groups issued a report accusing him of conducting unnecessary or unwanted gynecological procedures on women detained at the Irwin County Detention Center in Ocilla, Georgia.
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ICE declined to comment on the record about Amin’s certification or policies concerning board-certified physicians. The agency has previously said it “vehemently disputes the implication that detainees are used for experimental medical procedures,” and cautioned that “anonymous, unproven allegations” should be treated with skepticism.
Reached by text message, Amin declined to comment on his board certification and deferred all questions to his lawyer, who did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the issue.
Amin has practiced in Douglas, Georgia for at least two decades, both in his own private practice and as the medical director for the labor and delivery department at Irwin County Hospital. Business records reviewed by The Daily Beast show he also incorporated a new “Amin Surgery Center for Women” in September 2019, and sought state approvals to build the facility two months afterward. Gayle Evans, a consultant for the project, said the surgical center is still under construction and has not started seeing patients.
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Since then, lawyers representing 17 detainees have claimed their clients received unnecessary medical gynecological procedures from Amin, according to the office of Rep. Pramila Jayapal. The Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general has launched an investigation into the allegations, and the chair of the House Homeland Security Committee said his panel would also look into them.
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Board certification is a voluntary process meant to enhance a specialist’s expertise beyond state licensure. (Georgia state law requires only one year of education after medical school to obtain a license.) Physicians seeking ABOG certification must pass a written and oral exam and demonstrate experience in treating women’s health care. They are also required to participate in a program to keep them abreast of the latest evidence-based treatments.
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Court records show Amin has previously settled lawsuits with at least two patients or their family members outside the detention center. In one case, Amin was accused of discharging a pregnant patient despite “life threatening abnormal lab values.” According to the suit, the woman returned to the hospital 48 hours later with contractions, blurred vision, high blood pressure and vaginal bleeding. She received an emergency cesarean section and died shortly thereafter. In a court filing, Amin denied any negligence and any knowledge of the abnormal lab values.
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Amin and eight other doctors at the Irwin County Hospital also agreed to pay $520,000 to the federal government in 2015, after the Department of Justice accused them of fraudulently billing Medicare and Medicaid for services they did not provide. The complaint named Amin as the owner of MGA Health Management, which was contracted to run the hospital, and also identified him as a part owner of the institution.
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The complaint further identifies a kickback scheme whereby Amin and other physicians directed patients to ICH instead of other institutions. Because of Amin’s ownership stake in ICH, he allegedly profited off every such referral.
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Shahshahani said her organization is still working on discerning the total number of women who received surgery against their will. While she described the attention given to the hysterectomies as “well-deserved,” she cautioned against putting all the blame on an individual doctor.
“At the end of the day, it was the doctor that was performing these procedures but the buck really stops with ICE,” she said. “The U.S. government had the responsibility for the welfare and protection of these women.”
So, we know that he’s corrupt, and we know that ICE is deeply and pervasively racist.
You do the math.
Well, the NLRB has filed a complaint against them for firing union organizers.
Considering the fact that this is the Trump National Labor Relations Board, the ironically named No Evil Foods (I wrote about them previously here) had to be pretty egregiously over the line:
Earlier this year, the vegan meat company No Evil Foods—which sells socialist-branded products at 5,500 grocery stores nationwide, including Whole Foods—fired two production workers at its Weaverville, North Carolina production plant who led a union drive at the company and circulated a petition asking for hazard pay during the COVID-19 pandemic.
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This week, the National Labor Review Board (NLRB) found merit that the company illegally terminated the two workers, an NLRB spokesperson confirmed to Motherboard. According to a federal complaint issued Wednesday and obtained by Motherboard, the company violated the law by firing workers because they “assisted a union” and “circulat[ed] a petition seeking hazard pay…for the purposes of mutual aid and protection.”
Under the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, it is illegal for employers to discriminate or retaliate against workers for organizing coworkers to improve their working conditions or for attempting to form unions.
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On Wednesday, the NLRB issued a federal complaint against No Evil Foods, alleging the company violated the NLRA by “interfering with, restraining, and coercing employees in the exercise of the rights guaranteed.” According to the complaint, on April 1, 2020, a No Evil Foods HR manager interrogated employees about their union organizing and the petition for hazard pay, creating the impression management was “surveilling employees” by telling them they knew who had circulated the petition in the parking lot outside the production plant.
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The firing of the two union organizers fits within an ongoing trend of ostensibly progressive companies like Kickstarter and Whole Foods taking anti-union stances when employees seek to improve their working conditions.
Jon Reynolds, the other fired No Evil Foods production worker, told Motherboard, “part of what helped us is that we kept notes, and documented and recorded everything. Throughout the unionization process, we amassed as much evidence as possible [that No Evil Foods was against our union].”
Note to would be labor organizers: DOCUMENT EVERYTHING.
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Following a series of compulsory anti-union meetings led by management, workers voted against joining the United Food and Commercial Workers union in a landslide 43-15 vote in February.
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A spokesperson for the National Labor Review Board says that a trial for No Evil Foods has been scheduled for December 7.
“The finding that our case had merit is a cause for any worker anywhere to see that there is an actual law that allows people to organize without fear of retaliation,” said Roche, the fired No Evil Foods worker. “Companies that fire people who organize aren’t on the right side of history. “
I really hope that the hypocrites at No Evil Foods get what’s coming to them.
A federal judge has issued a temporary injunction against Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s attempt to cripple the Post Office in an attempt to suppress Democratic vote.
Now, the only question is whether or not they go full Andrew Jackson on this:*
A federal judge in Washington state on Thursday granted a request from 14 states to temporarily block operational changes within the U.S. Postal Service that have been blamed for a slowdown in mail delivery, saying President Trump and Postmaster General Louis DeJoy are “involved in a politically motivated attack” on the agency that could disrupt the 2020 election.
Stanley A. Bastian, chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Washington, said policies put in place under DeJoy “likely will slow down delivery of ballots” this fall, creating a “substantial possibility that many voters will be disenfranchised and the states may not be able to effectively, timely, accurately determine election outcomes.”
“The states have demonstrated that the defendants are involved in a politically motivated attack on the efficiency of the Postal Service,” Bastian said in brief remarks after a 2½-hour hearing in Yakima. “They have also demonstrated that this attack on the Postal Service is likely to irreparably harm the states’ ability to administer the 2020 general election.”
The ruling — the first major decision to come out of several lawsuits filed by states against the Postal Service — was a victory for Democratic state officials who view Trump’s persistent attacks on mail voting and DeJoy’s operational changes as part of a concerted effort to impede the vote on Nov. 3. Partisan tensions are running high as millions of Americans prepare to cast mail ballots because of the coronavirus pandemic, and mail delays have heightened concerns that voters unfamiliar with the process will be disenfranchised.
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“It is easy to conclude that the recent Postal Services’ changes is an intentional effort on the part the current Administration to disrupt and challenge the legitimacy of upcoming local, state, and federal elections,” he wrote.
Hopefully, this ruling will be followed.
*In case you are wondering, after the Supreme Court ruled against his Indian policies, Jackson is reported to have said, “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!”
The Baltimore post office sat on 65,000 pieces of political mail for at least 5 days before the primary.
Not ballots, mind you, but this is just the dress rehearsal.
It’s a great way to depress turnout at the (overwhelmingly Democratic) Baltimore City:
An audit of U.S. Postal Service performance during this year’s primary election season has found 68,000 pieces of political mail sat untouched at a Baltimore mail processing facility for five days ahead of the June 2 primary.
The audit published Monday says the mail, sent May 12, “sat unprocessed” for five days before being discovered by management at the facility.
Baltimore was in the midst of several contentious political races at the time, including those for mayor, comptroller and City Council president. Numerous candidates for those offices spent thousands of dollars on campaign mailers in an attempt to sway voters in close primaries.
Ballots destined for those voters also were in the mail stream during the window when the political mail sat at the facility, but the audit specifically stated the delayed pieces were not ballots. “This was First-Class campaign mail from a political candidate,” according to a footnote in the report.
I’m going to drop off my ballot this year.