Tag: Evil

Not Enough Bullets

By agreeing to pay penalties without admitting wrongdoing, the pharmaceutical companies that flooded the United States with opioids will be able to deduct billions from their taxes as a result.

Needless to say, the laws involving this need to change, pronto:

Four companies that agreed to pay a combined $26 billion to settle claims about their roles in the opioid crisis plan to deduct some of those costs from their taxes and recoup around $1 billion apiece.

In recent months, as details of the blockbuster settlement were still being worked out, pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson and the “big three” drug distributors — McKesson, AmerisourceBergen and Cardinal Health — all updated their financial projections to include large tax benefits stemming from the expected deal, a Washington Post analysis of regulatory filings found.

The Dublin, Ohio-based Cardinal Health said earlier this month it planned to collect a $974 million cash refund because it claimed its opioid-related legal costs as a “net operating loss carryback” — a tax provision Congress included in last year’s coronavirus bailout package as a way to help companies struggling during the pandemic.

The deductions may deepen public anger toward companies that prosecutors say played key roles in a destructive public health crisis that kills tens of thousands of Americans every year. In lawsuits filed by dozens of states and local jurisdictions, public officials have argued that the companies, among other corporate defendants, flooded the country with billions of highly addictive pills and ignored signs they were being steered to people who abused them. 

Gee, you think that allowing these companies to turn their malevolent activities into tax breaks might be a bit controversial? 

………

All four firms disavow any wrongdoing or legal responsibility. The companies have said they produced government-approved prescription pills, distributed them to registered pharmacies and took steps to try to prevent their misuse.

U.S. tax laws generally restrict companies from deducting the cost of legal settlements from their taxes, with one major exception: damages paid to victims as restitution for misdeeds. Still, Congress has placed stricter limits on such deductions in recent years, and some tax experts say the Internal Revenue Service could challenge the companies’ attempts to deduct opioid settlement costs.

Harry Cullen, a Brooklyn-based activist who has worked to hold drug companies accountable for the epidemic, said it is “incredibly insulting” that companies would try deduct the settlement payments. “As if they are donating it to these people who they harmed in the first place.”

I would also note that the entire “No admission of guilt” settlement regime needs to end.

When the end result is, “No harm, no foul, pay 15% of what you made thought your evil deeds,” these companies will continue to do harm to society.

It’s Now Boris’ England


Yes, it is

It appears that the British National Health Service has decided to issue do not resuscitate orders for learning and developmentally disabled patients with Covid-19, because the UK was never properly de-Nazified at the end of the 2nd World War, I guess.

It’s something that I take kind of personally, since I have a nephew who, if he lived in the UK, would be subject to this sort of bigotry:

People with learning disabilities have been given do not resuscitate orders during the second wave of the pandemic, in spite of widespread condemnation of the practice last year and an urgent investigation by the care watchdog.

………

The Care Quality Commission said in December that inappropriate Do Not Attempt Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation (DNACPR) notices had caused potentially avoidable deaths last year.

DNACPRs are usually made for people who are too frail to benefit from CPR, but Mencap said some seem to have been issued for people simply because they had a learning disability. The CQC is due to publish a report on the practice within weeks.

The disclosure comes as campaigners put growing pressure on ministers to reconsider a decision not to give people with learning disabilities priority for vaccinations. There is growing evidence that even those with a mild disability are more likely to die if they contract the coronavirus.

………

Younger people with learning disabilities aged 18 to 34 are 30 times more likely to die of Covid than others the same age, according to Public Health England.

Most people would call this horrifying, but I imagine that the Tories consider this an unintended benefit, because it reduces costs.

Trump Acquitted in Impeachment Trial*

So, Donald Trump was acquitted in his second impeachment trial, by a vote of 57-43, which means that 7 Republicans voted to impeach.

It’s clear that he was guilty as hell, but the Senate Democrats decide not to call witnesses, after the House managers wanted to call witness because, Chris Coons (D-DE) was planning a hot date with his wife for Valentines day, (also here). seriously? 

Former president Donald Trump was acquitted Saturday of inciting the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, becoming the first president in U.S. history to face a second impeachment trial — and surviving it in part because of his continuing hold on the Republican Party despite his electoral defeat in November.

That grip appeared to loosen slightly during the vote Saturday afternoon, when seven Republicans crossed party lines to vote for conviction — a sign of the rift the Capitol siege has caused within GOP ranks and the desire by some in the party to move on from Trump. Still, the 57-to-43 vote, in which all Democrats and two independents voted against the president, fell far short of the two-thirds required to convict.

The tally came after senators briefly upended the proceeding by voting to allow witnesses — only to reverse themselves amid Republican opposition and following hours of negotiations with House Democrats and Trump’s defense team.

I am not exaggerating about the Valentines day thing:

During the Senate break after the witness vote Saturday, Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) twice came into the managers’ room off the Senate floor, according to multiple Democratic sources. Coons pressed House Democrats to relent, saying their quest for witnesses would cost them Republican votes to convict and maybe even some Democrats.

“The jury is ready to vote,” Coons told the managers, according to a senior House Democratic aide. “People want to get home for Valentine‘s Day.”

Coons is up for reelection in 2026, and it would do well for Democratic voters to remember his bit of rat-f%$#ery during the impeachment.  

If wants to spend every valentines day with his wife, he can get himself a job that he is better suited to.

*I sure picked the wrong month to stop swearing.

And the Poland Shouts, “Leeroy Jenkins!”

I’ve made a lot of mention of the Ukraine’s Holocaust denial, antisemitism, and Neonazi predilections, on this blog, and while many former Eastern Bloc nations might respond with the equivalent of, “Hold my beer,” it appears that Poland and its judicial system has gone that extra contemptible mile, declaring historians to be criminals, and requiring a formal apology by them for pointing out the Nazi

On Tuesday, a Polish court found Professors Barbara Engelking and Jan Grabowski, two of the most renowned historians of the Holocaust in Poland, guilty of defamation and spreading “inaccurate information.” The two historians had been sued by the niece of Edward Malinowski, the mayor of a Polish town during World War II, for a passage that appears in their 1,700 page Night Without End about the genocide of Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland. In the 2018 volume, testimonies are quoted which suggest that Malinowski was implicated in the local massacre of Jews by German soldiers. Engelking and Grabowski were ordered to write an apology to the niece for allegedly defaming her uncle and “providing inaccurate information.”

The trial represents a new milestone in the assaults on historical truth and democratic rights by the Polish state and the ruling Law and Justice Party (PiS). In addition to the trial against Engelking and Grabowski, a journalist, Katarzyna Markusz, is threatened with a three-year prison sentence for “defaming the Polish nation,” because of a passage she wrote on Polish complicity in the Holocaust.

These actions are part of a state-orchestrated campaign, aimed at promoting anti-Semitism and far-right forces. In 2018, the Polish government passed a law criminalizing any mention of Polish collaboration in the Holocaust. Since then, historians have faced increasing pressure, including threats of lawsuits, along with hate mail and death threats from far-right forces which feel so emboldened that they often do not even hide their names anymore. While the lawsuit against Engelking and Grabowski was brought by Filomena Leszczyńska, it was heavily backed and driven by the Polish League against Defamation, a far-right outfit that is directly funded by the state. For many years, the League has been harassing Holocaust historians with threats of lawsuits.

………

The two-volume Night Without End (2018), which they edited together and which formed the basis of the trial, provides an extensive analysis of the life and fate of 140,000 Polish Jews in the countryside in the Nazi-occupied General Government of Poland. The work highlights, in particular, the role played by the Polish police (“Blue police”), a force that the Polish right has long sought to whitewash.

Poland has criminalized publishing the accounts of Holocaust survivors. 

The people of Poland, or the Ukraine, or Germany, or the Baltic States are not responsible for the horrible things that some of their ancestors when the enthusiastically supported Hitler’s “Final Solution.

However, they are responsible for promulgating lies and antisemitism, as well as aggressively condoning, to the point of erecting statues, of the worst of the collaborators criminals who did this.

What they are doing NOW is a stain on their national honor, and makes genocide more likely in the future.

Republican Family Values

It’s good that we have people such as protecting our morality.

If they weren’t busy supervising our morals, they might actually be practicing theirs on a larger scale:

A former Republican Senate staffer was arrested in Washington on Friday on federal child pornography charges in what investigators said was a crackdown on an online group that traded numerous illicit files and videos in recent months.

Ruben Verastigui is accused of receiving and possessing child pornography between last April and this month, according to a criminal complaint in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

The 27-year-old was arrested Friday evening at his apartment in Northeast Washington, where police executed a search warrant. Investigators said they found “several files of child pornography” on his cellphone, along with a chat conversation in which he allegedly discussed exchanging the files and videos. During an interview with investigators, Verastigui admitted to receiving some of the files, according to the complaint.

Verastigui worked as a digital strategist for the Senate Republican Conference as recently as last July.

………

In one conversation in April, Verastigui allegedly told a user identified as “S-1” that pornography involving “babies” was his “absolute favorite.” The user later sent him a graphic video of child abuse, court records show, followed by nine more illicit clips the following day. During the same conversation, Verastigui asked that the user come to Washington “for the purpose of sexually abusing a minor,” records show.

Investigators said they identified Verastigui from a naked photo he took in his kitchen and sent to the chat. They said the details of the room and a tattoo visible on his left arm matched a picture from his Instagram account.

………

Verastigui was active in Republican politics, most recently working as a communications manager for the nonprofit Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions, which supports Republicans who back clean-energy legislation. He was no longer employed at the organization as of Saturday, according to a statement provided by spokesman Ross Gillfillan.

………

He also worked as a digital strategist for the Senate Republican Conference as recently as July, meaning some of his alleged offenses took place while he was a congressional staffer. A conference spokesperson told The Washington Post in an email: “We have just learned about this investigation and arrest. The individual has not worked at SRC since July 2, 2020.”

Before that, congressional records show that Verastigui worked as a digital director for the GOP staff of the U.S. Joint Economic Committee in 2018. A spokesperson for former committee chairman Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

A LinkedIn page for Ruben Verastigui says he also worked as a senior designer for the Republican National Committee in 2017 and 2018, designing social media ads for the Trump Make America Great Again Committee and Donald J. Trump for President. A committee spokesperson didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

………

According to the LinkedIn page bearing the name Ruben Verastigui, the user was involved in several antiabortion rights organizations before his work in government, including March for Life, Students for Life America and Live Action.

Well, with THIS guy, we know why he wants more babies born, he wants more explicit photos.   **shudder**

Students for Life confirmed Verastigui worked there from Sept. 5, 2014, to Dec. 2, 2016, after he was a student involved with the group.

………

At the 2013 March for Life rally, Verastigui was introduced as the president of his college’s Students for Life group, according to a C-SPAN video of the antiabortion rights event.

“We are the generation that has been led to believe that the killing of innocent pre-born children is okay,” he told the crowd. “How many of us are missing brothers, sisters, cousins, friends because of abortion?”

We’ve hears a lot of reports of fowl foul play among Republicans, and this one is worse, though tragically less strange than the auto-asphyxia death of a Jerry Fallwell ally a few years back.

Not Enough

No jail time in a settlement with McKinsey and Company for actively aiding Perdue Pharma in maximizing addictions to its opioids.

If there is a case for a corporate death penalty, this is it.

What’s more there should be criminal prosecutions against its executives:

Consulting giant McKinsey & Co. has reached a $573 million settlement with states over its work advising OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma LP and other drug manufacturers to aggressively market opioid painkillers, according to people familiar with the matter.

The deal, reached with 47 states and the District of Columbia and expected to be publicly announced Thursday, would avert civil lawsuits that attorneys general could bring against McKinsey, the people said. The majority of the money will be paid upfront, with the rest dispensed in four yearly payments starting in 2022.

McKinsey said last week it is cooperating with government agencies on matters related to its past work with opioid manufacturers, as state and local governments sue companies up and down the opioid supply chain. At least 400,000 people have died in the U.S. from overdoses of legal and illegal opioids since 1999, according to federal data.

The consulting firm stopped doing opioid-related work in 2019 and said in December its work for Purdue was intended to support the legal use of opioids and help patients with legitimate medical needs.

That statement from McKinsey is a lie.  They literally suggested that druggists be paid a bonus for overdose deaths to, “Turbocharge sales.” 

Shut them down.

Prop 22 Lawsuit Dismissed by California Supreme Court

So, it appears that the Gypsy cab companies attempt to strip rights from their workers will proceed as planned.

This sucks: 

The California Supreme Court today shot down the lawsuit filed by a group of rideshare drivers in California and the Service Employees International Union that alleged Proposition 22 violates the state’s constitution.

“We are disappointed in the Supreme Court’s decision not to hear our case, but make no mistake: we are not deterred in our fight to win a livable wage and basic rights,” Hector Castellanos, a plaintiff in the case, said in a statement. “We will consider every option available to protect California workers from attempts by companies like Uber and Lyft to subvert our democracy and attack our rights in order to improve their bottom lines.”

As an aside, now is the time to start getting signatures to repeal the bill. 

The “Gig Economy” companies will have 2 years of showing that their so-called worker protections are a lie, so, unlike Prop 13, getting another bite at the apple is a good thing.

If He Were Black, They Would Have Already Shot Him Multiple Times

Instead, it appears that, on the recommendation of an anonymous Kenosha police captain, teen murderer Kyle Rittenhouse and his legal team has been deliberately deceiving the court as to his whereabouts.

Obviously, this from my perspective as a non-lawyer, but this appears to be a BIG no-no for someone who is out on bail:

Prosecutors apparently couldn’t find admitted Kenosha killer Kyle Rittenhouse, so now they are seeking a warrant for his arrest.

On Wednesday, the Kenosha County District Attorney’s office said Rittenhouse had violated the conditions of his release. Prosecutors said they need a new arrest warrant specifically because Rittenhouse failed to inform the court after changing his address. The defense, however, responded by saying they intentionally concealed Rittenhouse’s true whereabouts because a local police captain instructed them to lie about where he was staying.

………

According to the conditions of his bond, Rittenhouse was supposed to relay such a change within 48 hours of moving. The motion asks Judge Bruce E. Schroeder to issue a new arrest warrant and increase Rittenhouse’s bail by $200,000.

………

The Illinois teenager was charged with first-degree intentional homicide, first-degree reckless homicide, attempted homicide, and two additional felonies over the admitted shooting deaths of Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber. Rittenhouse also severely wounded Gaige Grosskreutz with a rifle carried across state lines. He further faces one misdemeanor charge of possession of a dangerous weapon by a person under the age of 18. Rittenhouse was 17 at the time of the August shooting and is now 18.

………

In sum, the defense says it intentionally wrote the wrong address on the release papers after being advised to do so by local law enforcement. This, the defense claims, was to protect the location of a “safe house” for Rittenhouse.

The motion notes [emphasis in original]: “Pierce was directly informed by a high-ranking member of the Kenosha Police Department not to provide the address of the Rittenhouse Safe House because of the numerous threats made against Kyle and his family.”

………

“While I was completing this form, I was approached by a Kenosha Police Department Captain, who offered his assistance,” Pierce continued [emphasis in original]. “I asked the Kenosha Police Captain what address to put on the form. The Kenosha Police Captain told me that I ‘absolutely should not‘ provide the address of the physical location of the Rittenhouse Safe House on the form, but to instead provide his home address in Antioch, Illinois.”

There are a couple of points here:

  • What lawyer doesn’t pass this by the f%$#ing judge? (I’m already regretting ending my swearing for February)
  • What cop tells a defendant in a murder trial to lie to the court?

Well, I guess the answers to this question are pretty straightforward, and the expression, “Racist dirtbag,” figures prominently in both.

Rittenhouse needs to spend his pre-trial in jail, and his lawyer should be his cell-mate, at least until he gives up whatever police captain told him to lie to the court.

The Coup in Myanmar


Yes, the coup was caught on an aerobics video

I’m hoping that there is a way for both sides, a genocidal and dictatorial military and a genocidal Nobel Peace Prize Winner, can both lose as a result of the military seizing power in Myanmar.

Last time around, Aung San Suu Kyi had the support of human rights activists everywhere, but after years of her enthusiastic support for the genocide of the Rohingya, the blush is off the rose.

One hopes that whatever happens, that the end result will be a true multiparty democracy where all of its citizens, including the Rohingya, can fully and freely participate:

Myanmar’s military said Monday that it took control of the country and declared a state of emergency for a year, after detaining civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi and other leaders of her ruling National League for Democracy (NLD) in a predawn operation, staging a coup against the democratically elected government.

The raids came hours before a new session of parliament was scheduled to open and members who won the November elections were set to take their seats. Suu Kyi’s NLD won those elections in a landslide, capturing 396 out of 476 seats. It was Myanmar’s second democratic election since the country’s fragile transition from military rule to democracy.

………

Several hours after the raids, the military in a television broadcast said that a state of emergency had been declared in Myanmar and that power would be transferred to the commander in chief, Min Aung Hlaing. Myint Swe, a former general and the military-backed vice president, will become the president, the broadcast added.

The sweep also included other prominent democracy activists who have been fighting against military rule for decades, leaders of other political parties and NLD lawmakers, according to social media posts and news reports.

………

Suu Kyi spent 15 years under house arrest before her release in November 2010, and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 for her resistance to military rule. The military-drafted constitution prevents her from leading Myanmar as president, but she is unequivocally the nation’s leader, revered as a deity, and rules through proxies. The military-drafted constitution also allows the army to step in in a situation that may “disintegrate” the country and national solidarity.

Since taking power, though, she has disappointed old allies in the West, particularly for defending Myanmar — and its military in particular — against charges of genocide over the persecution of the Rohingya ethnic minority. Suu Kyi has in recent years moved closer toward powers such as China and India, and grown increasingly estranged from countries such as the United States and Britain, which once led advocacy efforts to get her released from house arrest.

She is up there with Henry Kissinger, Barack “DronesR Us” Obama, Jimmy “Bought 4 decades of war in Afghanistan” Carter, and Elihu Root (Philippine insurrection) on a list of horrible recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize.

For some reason, I tend to take it personally when people engage in religiously based genocide, and the Junta and Suu Kyi have.

Trump Writ Small

I am referring, of course to Andrew “Rat-Faced Andy” Cuomo, the Governor of the great state of New York, who thinks that he is smarter than public health experts, which, among other things, has led to vaccines being thrown out because of fears of draconian fines under Cuomo’s directives:

The deputy commissioner for public health at the New York State Health Department resigned in late summer. Soon after, the director of its bureau of communicable disease control also stepped down. So did the medical director for epidemiology. Last month, the state epidemiologist said she, too, would be leaving.

The drumbeat of high-level departures in the middle of the pandemic came as morale plunged in the Health Department and senior health officials expressed alarm to one another over being sidelined and treated disrespectfully, according to five people with direct experience inside the department.

Their concern had an almost singular focus: Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo.

Even as the pandemic continues to rage and New York struggles to vaccinate a large and anxious population, Mr. Cuomo has all but declared war on his own public health bureaucracy. The departures have underscored the extent to which pandemic policy has been set by the governor, who with his aides crafted a vaccination program beset by early delays.

The troubled rollout came after Mr. Cuomo declined to use the longstanding vaccination plans that the State Department of Health had developed in recent years in coordination with local health departments. Mr. Cuomo instead adopted an approach that relied on large hospital systems to coordinate vaccinations not only of their own staffs, but also of much of the population.

I’m wondering if there are any major Cuomo donors at the “Large Hospital Systems.”

In recent weeks, the governor has repeatedly made it clear that he believed he had no choice but to seize more control over pandemic policy from state and local public health officials, who he said had no understanding of how to conduct a real-world, large-scale operation like vaccinations. After early problems, in which relatively few doses were being administered, the pace of vaccinations has picked up and New York is now roughly 20th in the nation in percentage of residents who have received at least one vaccine dose.

When I say ‘experts’ in air quotes, it sounds like I’m saying I don’t really trust the experts,” Mr. Cuomo said at a news conference on Friday, referring to scientific expertise at all levels of government during the pandemic. “Because I don’t. Because I don’t.

How very Trumpian.

………

In Albany, tensions worsened in recent months as state health officials said they often found out about major changes in pandemic policy only after Mr. Cuomo announced them at news conferences — and then asked them to match their health guidance to the announcements.

That was what happened with the vaccine plan, when state health officials were blindsided by the news that the rollout would be coordinated locally by hospitals.

But it also occurred earlier with revisions in a host of state rules from the fate of indoor dining and businesses like gyms to capacity limits on social gatherings, according to a person with direct experience inside the department.

………

But at least nine senior state health officials have left the department, resigned or retired in recent months. They include Dr. Elizabeth Dufort, the medical director in the division of epidemiology; Dr. Jill Taylor, the head of the renowned Wadsworth laboratory — which has been central to the state’s efforts to detect virus variants — and the executive in charge of health data, according to state records.

Additionally, the Health Department’s No. 2 official left for another job in state government, and another official, who helped oversee contact tracing, is expected to leave the department, also for another state government job.

………

Mr. Cuomo’s handling of the pandemic has come under criticism in recent days after the state attorney general, Letitia James, said his administration had undercounted the tally of Covid-19 deaths of nursing home residents by not publicly disclosing deaths of those residents that occurred at hospitals.

Given just how much of a control freak hizzoner is, this was not an accident.

This is Cuomo playing politics with the numbers, because he went to bat for his nursing home donors to get them immunity from their own malfeasance.

He knows that the horrific death numbers from New York nursing homes, if reported accurately, will be a source of criticism for any future elections.

Current and former health officials agreed to be interviewed about the crisis inside the public health bureaucracy only on condition of anonymity, saying that they feared retaliation for speaking out against the governor.

Also, he’s a vindictive son of a bitch, and managing through fear does not work.

………

The departures came as the state prepared for and then stumbled through the early weeks of its vaccine campaign, in which experts said speed was paramount because of the threat posed by more contagious variants of the coronavirus.

………

………

Mr. Cuomo said his approach had delivered results in New York, including a positivity rate that has been declining after a peak in early January and better vaccination rates. New York saw the worst of the pandemic in the spring, and roughly 43,000 have died, more than in any other state.

………

In the fall, Mr. Cuomo shelved vaccine distribution plans that top state health officials had been drawing up, one person with knowledge of the decision said. The plans had relied in part on years of preparations at the local level — an outgrowth of bioterrorism fears following Sept. 11 — and on experience dispensing vaccine through county health departments during the H1N1 pandemic in 2009.

………

But elements of the state’s approach hindered the rollout, New York City officials contended.

“Extensive red tape and unnecessary rigidity over who we could vaccinate and when — all with the looming threat of millions of dollars in punitive fines — made an extraordinarily difficult task all the more challenging in those first initial weeks of the rollout,” said Avery Cohen, a spokeswoman for Mayor de Blasio.

In his own planning for the vaccine rollout, Mr. Cuomo spoke with hospital executives, outside consultants and a top hospital lobbyist in closed-door meetings. In December, Mr. Cuomo announced that the state would rely on large hospital systems as “hubs” to coordinate vaccinations, not simply for their own staff but also for ordinary New Yorkers.

Again, I gotta figure that the hospital systems are major Cuomo donors.

The state designated as a regional vaccination hub in New York City not the city’s 6,000-person Health Department, but rather the Greater New York Hospital Association, a trade group with a multimillion-dollar lobbying arm that had been a major donor to the governor’s causes.

Ka-ching!

The approach included narrow eligibility rules and suffered from a lack of urgency by some hospitals. That led to fewer doses being administered in the early weeks, followed by abrupt shifts in policy that created a kind of free-for-all among those searching for vaccine appointments, according to interviews with more than two dozen current and former health officials, county leaders, vaccination experts and elected officials.

“The governor’s approach in the beginning seemed to go against the grain in terms of what the philosophy was about how to do this,” said Dr. Isaac Weisfuse, a former deputy commissioner at New York City’s Health Department who often served as an incident commander during emergencies. “It did seem to negate 15 to 20 years of work.”

Sounds like the Donald, doesn’t it?

………

For help in planning the vaccination campaign, the governor turned to consultants from Deloitte and Boston Consulting Group. The in-house lobbyist for New York’s largest hospital system, Northwell Health, had direct involvement in the rollout.

For about a month, starting in mid-October, the Northwell lobbyist, Dennis Whalen, worked from an office inside the State Health Department and helped shape the state’s approach. Mr. Whalen had worked previously as the department’s No. 2 official.

Yeah, Cuomo was rat-f%$#ing the vaccine roll-out to accommodate lobbyists.  Hoocoodanode?

………

Still, Dr. Denis Nash, a professor of epidemiology at the City University of New York and a former senior city health official, said that giving such a large share of doses directly to hospitals meant that the government lost control of the pace of vaccinations during the program’s first month.

“That was the bottleneck,” Dr. Nash said. “To put hospitals in charge of a public health initiative — for which they have no public health mandate, or the skills, experience or perspective to manage one — was a huge mistake, and I have no doubt that’s what introduced the delays.”

This is Cuomo considering his donors, and his ego, before the well being of the people of New York.

I am wrong.  That does not sound like Donald Trump at all.

Not Walking the Walk

In response to years of poor decisions by upper management, they Ohio Democratic Party is laying off most of its employees and replacing them with temps, because the new management thinks that short term MBA style thinking and abusing your employees is a good look for the Democratic Party.

This is the single stupidest thing that I’ve ever heard of a member of the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) doing who was not working on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Presidential campaign:

More than half of the permanent staffers at the Ohio Democratic Party have been let go under the leadership of the party’s new chairman, multiple Democratic sources have confirmed.

………

Earlier this month Democrats installed a new chairman, Liz Walters, an elected official from Summit County, to replace ex-chairman David Pepper, who decided to step down after the election.

Ms. Walters promised an overhaul of the party, which has struggled in recent statewide election cycles. Both parties are now looking ahead to a newly competitive U.S. Senate race with Rob Portman’s surprise retirement announcement and a gubernatorial race in 2022.

Sam Melendez, director of the party’s Main Street Initiative, said on Twitter on Friday that he was being let go. The program he headed was started in 2015 to recruit and train local candidates.

………

The party’s data department staffers are among those also let go, sources say.

Yeah, outsourcing your IT to high priced consultants always results in lower costs and more effective services, said no one ever.

Employees were laid off with no more than a week’s notice and no severance, sources say, and the staffers being let go are expected to be replaced with independent contractors in a bid to save money.

………

“I have a bunch of information to share with stakeholders before I comment to the press,” [Liz Walters] said.

………

In 2018 the Ohio Democratic Party became the first state party to recognize a chapter of the Campaign Workers Guild, which represented seasonal campaign organizers during the 2018 midterm election who sought better pay and working conditions.

Interesting factoid at the end, and I can’t help but wonder if maybe this is about taking out the union as well.

Outsource the seasonal campaign organizers to a Washington consultancy group, and let them treat your workers like shit, because this is what the Democratic Party is all about in Ohio, I guess.

Hypocrites and morons.

Bill Gates is now a Mass Murderer

Oxford promised to make their vaccine open source, and then Bill Gates strong-armed them into selling exclusive rights to AstraZeneca, because Bill Gates is philosophically opposed to the free exchange of information.

There will be tens of thousands of people will die of Covid-19, particularly in poor countries, because open source gives him butt-hurt.

Next time you see Bill Gates, ask him why he decided to kill thousands.

More chilling is that the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation is dedicated to promulgating his twisted view of public health on the rest of the world:

In a business driven by profit, vaccines have a problem. They’re not very profitable — at least not without government subsidies. Pharma companies favor expensive medicines that must be taken repeatedly and generate revenue for years or decades. Vaccines are often given only once or twice. In many parts of the world, established vaccines cost a few dollars per dose or less.

Last year only four companies were making vaccines for the U.S. market, down from more than 20 in the 1970s. As recently as Feb. 11, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, complained that no major drug company had committed to “step up” to make a coronavirus vaccine, calling the situation “very difficult and frustrating.”

Oxford University surprised and pleased advocates of overhauling the vaccine business in April by promising to donate the rights to its promising coronavirus vaccine to any drugmaker.

………

A few weeks later, Oxford—urged on by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation—reversed course. It signed an exclusive vaccine deal with AstraZeneca that gave the pharmaceutical giant sole rights and no guarantee of low prices—with the less-publicized potential for Oxford to eventually make millions from the deal and win plenty of prestige.

………

Even as governments shower money on an industry that has not made vaccines a priority in the past, critics say, failure to alter the basic model means drug industry executives and their shareholders will get rich with no assurance that future vaccines will be inexpensively available to all.

“If there were ever an opportunity” to change the economics of vaccine development, “this would have been it,” said Ameet Sarpatwari, an epidemiologist and lawyer at Harvard Medical School who studies drug-pricing regulation. Instead, “it is business as usual, where the manufacturers are getting exclusive rights and we are hoping on the basis of public sentiment that they will price their products responsibly.”

………

Oxford backed off from its open-license pledge after the Gates Foundation urged it to find a big-company partner to get its vaccine to market.

“We went to Oxford and said, Hey, you’re doing brilliant work,” Bill Gates told reporters on June 3, a transcript shows. “But … you really need to team up.” The comments were first reported by Bloomberg.

AstraZeneca, one of the U.K.’s two major pharma companies, may have demanded an exclusive license in return for doing a deal, said Ken Shadlen, a professor at the London School of Economics and an authority on pharma patents—a theory supported by comments from CEO Soriot.

“I think IP [intellectual property, or exclusive patents] is a fundamental part of our industry and if you don’t protect IP, then essentially there is no incentive for anybody to innovate,” Soriot told the newspaper The Telegraphin May.

Some see the Gates Foundation, a heavy funder of Gavi, CEPI and many other vaccine projects, as supporting traditional patent rights for pharma companies.

“[Bill] Gates has staked out this outsized role in the vaccine world,” Love said. “He has an ideological belief that the intellectual property system is a wonderful mechanism that is necessary for innovation and prosperity.”

In just the next year, it is clear Bill Gates will ultimately be responsible for more deaths than Osama bin Laden was on 9/11.

In Case You Were Wondering Just How Toxic the BJP Is………

It appears that the veneration of Nathuram Godse, the man who assassinated Mahatma Gandhi, is now a thing in India.

I would argue that India is further down the road to Fascism and genocide that Trump ever got, and that the opposition, though careerism and incompetence, cannot seem to do anything to stop it:

Last Sunday, in a nondescript building in the India city of Gwalior, 200 miles south of Delhi, a large crowd of men gathered. Most wore bright saffron hats and scarves, a colour evoking Hindu nationalism, and many held strands of flowers as devotional offerings.

They were there to attend the inauguration of the Godse Gyan Shala, a memorial library and “knowledge centre” dedicated to Nathuram Godse, the man who shot Mahatma Gandhi. The devotional yellow and pink flowers were laid around a black and white photograph of Godse, the centrepiece of the room.

On 30 January 1948, Godse stepped out in front of Gandhi and shot him three times at point-blank range. A fervent believer in Hindu nationalism, Godse thought Gandhi had betrayed India’s Hindus by agreeing to partition, leading to the creation of Pakistan, and by championing the rights of Muslims. In 1949, Godse was hanged for Gandhi’s murder.

In the following decades, Godse was widely decried as a terrorist and traitor, the murderer of the “father of India”. Yet, in recent years, as Hindu nationalism has moved from an extremist fringe to mainstream Indian politics – the ruling Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) has a Hindu nationalist agenda at their core – Godse’s public reputation has steadily shifted from being condemned as traitor to being venerated as a misunderstood Indian patriot.

Meanwhile, Gandhi’s vision of a secular India with equal rights for all religions has been eroded and subjugated since the BJP came to power in 2014.

“Godse did the right thing by killing Gandhi,” said Devendra Pandey, 53, national secretary of Hindu Mahasabha, the Hindu nationalist organisation behind the memorial library. He was vocal in his belief that India should be declared “a country rightfully for Hindus” and that its 200 million Muslims should move to Pakistan.

“Godse considered Gandhi as his father, so to kill him must have caused him great pain but he had a very real reason,” he said. “Godse took action because Gandhi betrayed India – this library will teach the next generation how Godse was a true nationalist martyr.”

At some point there will be a reckoning in India over the country’s embrace of bigotry and its increasingly aggressive attempts to expel and subjugate Muslim Indians.

Meanwhile, in DC

Republicans in Congress are using the right-wing insurrection on January 6 as an excuse for bills targeted primarily at peaceful protesters like Black Lives Matter.

Republicans never miss an opportunity to use a crisis to rat-fuck the country, do they?

In September, Florida governor and Trump ally Ron DeSantis proposed a bill dubbed the Combating Violence, Disorder and Looting and Law Enforcement Protection Act to create new criminal penalties for offenses commonly committed during protests. He said it was needed to stop the “professional agitators bent on sowing disorder and causing mayhem in our cities” following months of largely peaceful Black Lives Matter protests.

Hours after a far-right mob stormed the Capitol at the behest of the president, Florida Republicans introduced a version of the bill. That night, DeSantis said the violence in Washington shows that lawmakers “have no time to waste to uphold public safety” and must “swiftly pass this bill.”

DeSantis isn’t alone. Within the past year, lawmakers in 24 states have introduced at least 45 bills to create new penalties or increase criminal penalties for offenses related to protesting, discourage cuts to police funding, and provide protections to people who drive their cars into protesters or shoot protesters in an alleged act of self defense. Six of those bills—one in Utah, one in Mississippi, one in West Virginia, one in Tennessee and two in South Dakota—have been signed into law.

But the bills aren’t aimed at reining in the kind of violent insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol, and federal prosecutors already have a litany of charges at their disposal to hold the perpetrators accountable. The bills seek to criminalize conduct typically associated with Black Lives Matter protests, like blocking streets or highways and camping out at state capitols. Provisions of DeSantis’s bill seek to discourage local governments from cutting police budgets, but what happened on Jan. 6 can’t be pinned on a lack of police funding or intelligence—the FBI knew extremists were planning to commit violence in Washington days before, and Capitol Police rejected offers for additional manpower from the National Guard. While some police officers were brutally attacked or took action to protect the lives of others, others shook hands with a member of the mob. One police officer even took a selfie with the insurrectionists.

This is why I oppose changes to the current laws in response to the January 6 insurrection.

The people who will be enforcing these laws, cops, prosecutors, etc.  are objectively pro-fascist and institutionally, if not necessarily personally, racist.

All that more laws get you is more opportunities for abuse.

Antitrust Smoking Gun

It turns out that Google and Facebook colluded to keep Facebook out of the advertising market in exchange for preferential rates.

This is pretty much a slam dunk, and yes, both organizations should broken up in the long term (Other limits fail over time) and be prevented from acquiring any other companies in the short term:

In 2017, Facebook said it was testing a new way of selling online advertising that would threaten Google’s control of the digital ad market. But less than two years later, Facebook did an about-face and said it was joining an alliance of companies backing a similar effort by Google.

Facebook never said why it pulled back from its project, but evidence presented in an antitrust lawsuit filed by 10 state attorneys general last month indicates that Google had extended to Facebook, its closest rival for digital advertising dollars, a sweetheart deal to be a partner.

Details of the agreement, based on documents the Texas attorney general’s office said it had uncovered as part of the multistate suit, were redacted in the complaint filed in federal court in Texas last month. But they were not hidden in a draft version of the complaint reviewed by The New York Times.

Executives at six of the more than 20 partners in the alliance told The Times that their agreements with Google did not include many of the same generous terms that Facebook received and that the search giant had handed Facebook a significant advantage over the rest of them.

………

The disclosure of the deal between the tech giants has renewed concerns about how the biggest technology companies band together to close off competition. The deals are often consequential, defining the winners and losers in various markets for technology services and products. They are agreed upon in private with the crucial deal terms hidden through confidentiality clauses.

Google and Facebook said that such deals were common in the digital advertising industry and that they were not thwarting competition.

………

The Wall Street Journal had reported on aspects of the draft complaint earlier.

………

“This idea that the major tech platforms are robustly competing against each other is very much overstated,” said Sally Hubbard, a former assistant attorney general in New York’s antitrust bureau who now works at Open Markets Institute, a think tank. “In many ways, they reinforce each other’s monopoly power.”

Because maintaining a monopoly is more profitable than developing a superior product.

One need only look at the cost and speed of broadband in the US to know that this is true.
The agreement between Facebook and Google, code-named “Jedi Blue” inside Google, pertains to a growing segment of the online advertising market called programmatic advertising. Online advertising pulls in hundreds of billions of dollars in global revenue each year, and the automated buying and selling of ad space accounts for more than 60 percent of the total, according to researchers.

In the milliseconds between a user clicking on a link to a web page and the page’s ads loading, bids for available ad space are placed behind the scenes in marketplaces known as exchanges, with the winning bid passed to an ad server. Because Google’s ad exchange and ad server were both dominant, it often directed the business to its own exchange.

A method called header bidding emerged, in part as a workaround to reduce reliance on Google’s ad platforms. News outlets and other sites could solicit bids from multiple exchanges at once, helping to increase competition and leading to better prices for publishers. By 2016, more than 70 percent of publishers had adopted the technology, according to one estimate.

Seeing a potentially significant loss of business to header bidding, Google developed an alternative called Open Bidding, which supported an alliance of exchanges. While Open Bidding allows other exchanges to simultaneously compete alongside Google, the search company extracts a fee for every winning bid, and competitors say there is less transparency for publishers.

The threat of Facebook, one of the biggest ad buyers on the internet, supporting header bidding was a grave concern at Google. The draft of the complaint reviewed by The Times cited an email from a Google executive calling it an “existential threat” that required “an all hands on deck approach.”

………

Before Google and Facebook signed the deal in Sept. 2018, Facebook executives outlined the company’s options to Mark Zuckerberg, its chief executive, according to the draft of the complaint: hire hundreds more engineers and spend billions of dollars to compete against Google; exit the business; or do the deal.

………

Facebook disclosed that it had joined Google’s program in one line in a Dec. 2018 blog post. But it did not reveal that Google, according to the draft complaint, provided Facebook with special information and speed advantages to help the company succeed in the auctions that it did not offer to other partners — even including a guaranteed “win rate.”

In this market, where fractions of a second count, a speed advantage was decisive. Facebook had 300 milliseconds to bid for ads, according to court documents. But the executives at Google’s partner companies said they usually had just 160 milliseconds or less to bid.

Facebook had yet another advantage: Direct billing relationships with the sites where ads would appear, according to the court documents. For most other partners, Google controlled pricing information, effectively putting up a wall between Open Bidding participants and site owners and hiding how much of winning bids sites end up receiving, the executives at other companies said.

………

Facebook promised to bid on at least 90 percent of auctions when it could identify the end user and committed to spending a certain amount of money — as much as $500 million a year by the fourth year of the agreement, according to the draft of the complaint. Facebook also demanded that data about its bids not be used by Google to manipulate auctions in its own favor, a level playing field not explicitly promised to other Open Bidding partners.

Perhaps the most serious claim in the draft complaint was that the two companies had predetermined that Facebook would win a fixed percentage of auctions that it bid on.

“Unbeknown to other market participants, no matter how high others might bid, the parties have agreed that the gavel will come down in Facebook’s favor a set number of times,” the draft complaint said. A Google spokeswoman said Facebook must make the highest bid to win an auction, just like its other exchange and ad network partners.

While both companies said that the deal is not an antitrust matter, they included a clause in the agreement that requires the parties to “cooperate and assist” each other if they are investigated for competition concerns over the partnership.

“The word ‘antitrust’ is mentioned no less than 20 times” throughout the agreement, the draft complaint said.

Seriously, this is not just unlawful, this is an actual criminal offense.

Executives used to be jailed for this sort of crap, at least until the 1980s, when Reagan gutted antitrust enforcement.

I’d like to see Sundar Pichai, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg frog marched out of the corporate offices in handcuffs.

Homophobic When It Suits Them

I am referring, of course, to the Massachusetts Democratic Party, which unleashed an orgy of gay bashing innuendo when Holyoke Mayor Alex Morse challenged Richard Neal (D-CIGNA) in the primary.

UMASS, which is very much a part of the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) in Massachusetts has bent over backwards to avoid embarrassment, but you cannot put lipstick on a pig:

A recently released report by the University of Massachusetts at Amherst has added new evidence of the state Democratic Party’s involvement in the public attack on Alex Morse just ahead of his primary against Rep. Richard Neal. It also found that Morse, formerly an adjunct professor at the school, did not violate university policies, yet the report still delved deeply into Morse’s private dating life with other adults.

In early August, just a few weeks prior to the election against Neal, chair of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, a number of college students made vague accusations of impropriety against Morse, the youngest and first openly gay mayor of Holyoke.

The involvement of state party officials, who coordinated with the Massachusetts College Democrats to accuse Morse of sexual impropriety, was first revealed by The Intercept and later confirmed by an internal review by the Massachusetts Democratic Party. The new report, however, includes emails and text messages indicating that party attorney Jim Roosevelt took a more active role in the dissemination of the smear than previously known. It also reveals that party leaders were more involved in walking students through media and legal strategies than they had previously admitted. In an interview with The Intercept, Roosevelt denied the allegations; Mass Dems Executive Director Veronica Martinez implied in an email that the new report exonerated party leadership.

………

Investigators made a detailed exploration into the psychology of the students who ultimately launched the attack on Morse, saying that a key figure in the scandal did not find his interactions online with Morse remotely problematic until other students convinced him in hindsight that they were. A second student also told investigators that he considered his interactions platonic and innocent but that they took on a different connotation when put in the context of rumors being spread by other students.

The report’s authors included trivial information they had collected. “Witness Three reports that he was later told by other students that Morse gave him a ‘look’ when he entered the [October] event (indicating romantic or sexual interest). Witness Three did not observe anything of that nature,” the report found fit to inform the public.

Matt Walsh, a member of the Massachusetts Democratic State Committee and a board member of the Bay State Stonewall Democrats, said the exoneration of Morse is welcomed, but that in his view, the manner in which the report was written lingered on salacious details and sensationalized the mayor’s private life.

“I expected an official investigative report by a state university to be an objective assessment of facts, not a tabloid-style gossip piece,” said Walsh. “I’m glad UMass cleared Morse of wrongdoing, but they could have done so without legitimizing homophobic tropes that paint gay men as ‘creepy’ for engaging in consensual relationships.”

………

The Intercept’s previous reporting revealed that some students had planned to entrap and expose Morse in order to do political damage to the mayor and secure themselves internships with Neal. Neal has denied any involvement in the scheme. Campaign spokesperson Peter Panos told The Intercept in an email that the latest report makes the congressman’s innocence clear.

“This report confirms what Chairman Neal has always said, that he and his staff had nothing to do with these allegations,” said Panos. “We commend the University for their thorough investigation into the facts.”

The report doesn’t conclude anything either way on Neal’s involvement, but does note that there is no evidence of it.

………

The report makes clear that at least some of the allegations against Morse that later went public were rumor-driven group think, as is often the case in a college setting.

………

Those concerns extended beyond the school’s group. Student A, a student at UMass, said a friend of hers had had sexual contact with Morse and later felt uncomfortable because of the “power dynamic.” Witness One described her to investigators as “especially adamant that the group needed to go public with what they knew.”

Student A wanted to take the statement to Twitter in July and went so far as to work with Witness One to draft a statement to post to the site, though she ultimately declined to do so.

According to The Intercept’s previous reporting, the report produced for the Mass Dems by attorney Cheryl Jacques, and the emails and text messages reproduced in the new UMass report, the leadership of the UMass College Democrats and the College Democrats of Massachusetts took their allegations against Morse to the state party. College Democrats of Massachusetts President Hayley Fleming reached out to Massachusetts Democrats Chair Gus Bickford and Executive Director Veronica Martinez for guidance as the group prepared to bar Morse from future meetings.

………

Evidence in the new UMass report implicates Roosevelt in the writing of a letter for the College Democrats to send out to chapters. As one student said in a text on July 29 to other members of the CDMA executive board, Roosevelt advised the students through Bickford and Martinez that “if we want to move forward on leaking it to the press, someone would contact BLANK and tell him (on the record but unattributable so that their name doesn’t get published) that the CDMA eboard voted on this and sent it to the CM.” The full message exchange is attached to the report.

It’s clear that the Neal campaign knew that people who wanted jobs with him were engaging in vicious gay baiting, and would have been impossible for Nancy Pelosi not to know this as well when she pulled out all the stops to support the corrupt Ways and Means Chairman, but I guess those big dollar campaign donations from bad people don’t grow on trees.

Here is Hoping that the Lawsuit Succeeds

The SEIU is suing to overturn Proposition 22, which was intended by Uber and the rest of the “Gig Economy” companies to keep their employees as peons.

Shame on them for pushing that plebiscite, and shame on the voters in California for voting yes: 

A group of rideshare drivers in California and the Service Employees International Union filed a lawsuit today alleging Proposition 22 violates California’s constitution. The goal of the suit is to overturn Prop 22, which classifies gig workers as independent contractors in California.

The suit, filed in California’s Supreme Court, argues Prop 22 makes it harder for the state’s legislature to create and enforce a workers’ compensation system for gig workers. It also argues Prop 22 violates the rule that limits ballot measures to a single issue, as well as unconstitutionally defines what would count as an amendment to the measure. As it stands today, Prop 22 requires a seven-eights legislative supermajority in order to amend the measure.

………

This suit is the latest in a long battle between gig workers and tech companies. Meanwhile, Uber and Lyft have their eyes on pursuing Prop 22-like legislation elsewhere. Given Uber and Lyft’s anti-gig-workers-as-employees stance, it came as no surprise when Uber and Lyft separately said they would pursue similar legislation in other parts of the country and the world.

The Gypsy cab companies and the rest of them figured that if they spent enough money, they could get the voters to approve their abomination, and that once it passed, they could continue to mistreat their employees.

If this gets overturned, it will be much harder to get a second bite at the apple, because they, and other companies, have taken the law as an opportunity to be evil, and people will not forget this.

I Am Amused

A few days back, I offered a thoroughly insincere Thoughts and Prayers to the National Rifle Association over the revelations of fraud and self dealing, and their hypocritical attempts to dodge accountability via bankruptcy and relocating their incorporation location.

Now,  a major NRA donor will be filing a lawsuit to prevent the discharge of the debts, because debts incurred by criminal action (in this case fraud) are not subject to relief:

A major donor to the National Rifle Association is poised to challenge key aspects of the gun group’s bankruptcy filing, in an attempt to hold executives accountable for allegedly having defrauded their members of millions of dollars to support their own lavish lifestyles.

Dave Dell’Aquila, a former tech company boss who has donated more than $100,000 to the NRA, told the Guardian on Saturday he was preparing to lodge a complaint in US bankruptcy court in Dallas, Texas. If successful, it could stop top NRA executives discharging a substantial portion of the organisation’s debts.

It could also stop Wayne LaPierre, the NRA’s controversial longtime chief executive, avoiding ongoing lawsuits that allege he defrauded the pro-gun group’s members to pay for luxury travel to the Bahamas and Europe and high-end Zegna suits.

………

Dell’Aquila’s complaint, likely to be brought within the next few weeks, would use a provision of the bankruptcy code to prevent the NRA from sidestepping more than $60m of debt on grounds it was improperly incurred. The law stipulates that debts acquired through malfeasance can be deemed by the court to be an exception to bankruptcy arrangements.

Speaking from his home in Nashville, Tennessee, Dell’Aquila said: “We intend to invoke this provision. We are going to ask the judge to determine that our claim was incurred as a result of fraud and should be deemed non-dischargeable.”

The NRA declared bankruptcy in the Dallas court on Friday. The organization also said it would be relocating from New York, where it was founded in 1871, to Texas.

I’m hoping that LaPierre gets reduced to penury over this.

In addition to being an extremist who foments violence, he’s a crook.