Tag: inequality

Not Enough Bullets

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In their crusade to make the world safe for rich white people, the New York Times takes on the horror that is a new Massachusetts law that requires au pairs be paid minimum wage for caring for children.

I get it, you feel entitled for cheap/free labor from the people who watch your kids:

When Stephanie Mayberg, a physician assistant, learned that a court ruling meant her child care costs were about to increase by 250 percent, she was stunned. The recent federal court decision, that au pairs were entitled to the rights of domestic workers in Massachusetts, including being paid a minimum wage, left Ms. Mayberg, of Southborough, wondering how she and her husband could afford to keep their au pair from Colombia for a second year.

………

Of the legal finding that au pairs — young people from other countries who come to the United States to live with families and care for their children — were entitled to a minimum wage and protected by Massachusetts’s Domestic Workers Bill of Rights, passed in 2014, she added, “I’m a big supporter because au pairs are unprotected.”

………

In Massachusetts, the decision has thrown families who host au pairs into chaos as they sort through their new responsibilities as employers, and cope with significantly increased child care costs.

………

The minimum wage in Massachusetts, $12.75 per hour, means that families who employ au pairs will now have to pay them roughly $528 a week for 45 hours of work, when factoring in overtime and a $77 deduction for room and board. The lawsuit, which was brought in 2016, had been working its way through the courts for several years, but it appeared that many au pair agencies had not warned host families about the pending case or the possibility that the domestic workers rules might apply.

………

But some former au pairs disagreed with the parents and the view of the federal government. Thaty Oliveira, 35, who is from Brazil, was an au pair in Massachusetts in 2003. While she said she had a great experience with the family, and worked at most 30 hours a week, she said that was not the norm among her fellow au pairs, many of whom spent too many hours doing child care to get a rich exposure to American culture. Even in her case, she said, she considers the child care she performed to have been real work, deserving of a minimum wage.

“We’re not asking for a lot,” she said. “It’s really just minimum rights.”

But it’s too much for the self-absorbed assholes to offer basic human dignity to the people that they have hired to safeguard their families.

Tweet of the Day

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If 1024 fair coins are each tossed 10 times, chances are good (> 63%) that at least one will come up heads 10 times in a row; and that coin will be proud to explain how its skill, faith, guts & determination made its achievement possible, and how that combo can work for you too.

— Marian Farah (@bayesiangirl) January 8, 2020

Far too many people are born on 3rd base, and think that they have won a triple.

Winning the birth lottery does not make you a better person.

Maybe Cleaning up the Air?

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This is interesting, but it begs the question, “Doesn’t it work everywhere? If so, why not clean up ALL the air?”

Also, how does this effect adults breathing our polluted air?

An emergency situation that turned out to be mostly a false alarm led a lot of schools in Los Angeles to install air filters, and something strange happened: Test scores went up. By a lot. And the gains were sustained in the subsequent year rather than fading away.

That’s what NYU’s Michael Gilraine finds in a new working paper titled “Air Filters, Pollution, and Student Achievement” that looks at the surprising consequences of the Aliso Canyon gas leak in 2015.

The impact of the air filters is strikingly large given what a simple change we’re talking about. The school district didn’t reengineer the school buildings or make dramatic education reforms; they just installed $700 commercially available filters that you could plug into any room in the country. But it’s consistent with a growing literature on the cognitive impact of air pollution, which finds that everyone from chess players to baseball umpires to workers in a pear-packing factory suffer deteriorations in performance when the air is more polluted.

If Gilraine’s result holds up to further scrutiny, he will have identified what’s probably the single most cost-effective education policy intervention — one that should have particularly large benefits for low-income children.

Another way that our society craps on the poor.

Even the air they breath hurts them.

Preach It

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Over at the Stanford Social Innovation Review, they make a cogent argument for limiting excessive salaries in the non-profit sector:

An average family participating in the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program costs taxpayers $400 a month. We pay $126 a month to the typical beneficiary of food stamps—the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

By contrast, Susan Desmond-Hellmann, the CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, costs us $44,200 a month. [This is the amount subsided by the tax deduction, not her salary, which is 2½ times that] This figure may catch some readers by surprise, because they probably don’t think of themselves as paying the salaries of people who work at nonprofit organizations. But we do pay her that amount, and it is a problem.

The salary of the Gates Foundation’s CEO costs taxpayers money because we gave Bill Gates a large tax break that subsidizes his contribution to his eponymous foundation or any other philanthropy. If Gates was in the 40 percent tax bracket (a safe bet before the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act pushed by President Donald Trump), then the government effectively picked up the tab for 40 cents of every dollar that Gates decided to contribute to his foundation.

 There is a tendency to treat tax deductions, for charitable contributions or other purposes, as being qualitatively different from direct government spending. This may be a convenient way of thinking for the people who most benefit from these deductions, who tend to be richer on average. But it is nonsense.

 ………

 We should have this fact in mind when we consider the purpose of the charitable-contribution tax deduction. In effect, we are saying that certain categories of activities are serving a general public purpose. If individuals choose to support these activities, through religious organizations, educational institutions, or philanthropic organizations such as the Gates Foundation, we will subsidize their contributions by allowing them to pay less in taxes.

This is a reasonable policy for the federal government. It provides subsidies for organizations that address a wide variety of social ends in diverse ways. These subsidies can help promote new and innovative practices that may ultimately be adopted more broadly.

 However, the government does put conditions on the sorts of organizations that are eligible for tax-exempt status. For example, they must not be for-profit organizations. The government does not, at least explicitly, allow deductions for money paid to profit-making corporations. Nonprofits also must serve the general public purpose. I cannot have a charity to pay the person who mows my lawn. Nonprofits cannot advance a partisan political agenda.

 This is important background for thinking about the money that taxpayers effectively pay to support the salary of the Gates Foundation’s CEO. Most people view the rise in income inequality as one of the major problems in the US economy. Desmond-Hellmann’s $1.33 million annual salary is way above the cutoff for the top 1 percent of US wage earners. In fact, it is far above the cutoff for the top 0.1 percent of wage earners.

 While many factors have led to the rise in inequality, part of the story is the excessive pay of CEOs and other top executives. This is more an issue in the corporate sector, where the average pay of CEOs now approaches $20 million a year. Nonetheless, when pay for top executives in the nonprofit sector crosses the million-dollar mark, even at philanthropies such as the Rockefeller Foundation that worry about inequality, this is also part of the problem.

………

In this case, we should keep our eye on the ball. The federal government is providing enormous subsidies to the bloated pay of top executives at nonprofits. This is simply not a good use of federal dollars, and it is hardly in keeping with the idea that nonprofits should be serving a public purpose. We can try to develop government policies to reverse market outcomes that generate inequality, but we should first end government policies that promote inequality.

I would note that some of the most highly remunerated employees at non-profits are coaches for NCAA Division I teams, which frequently are in the 8 figure range.

These high levels of compensation make a joke out of charities. 

First, they make a mockery of the whole concept of charity, and second, as behavioral economist Dan Ariely showed in his studies, very high levels of remuneration actually decrease performance.

Missing the Point

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Over at The Nation, they are wringing their hands over how the recent collapse of coffee prices are devastating small farmers all over the world.

The problem is not the vicissitudes of coffee prices.

The problem is that, as a result of trade policies from the United States and the EU, farmers are forced to move away from growing staples to growing cash crops, which makes those farmers lives even more precarious, because they are subject to the whims of the market, and they cannot eat what they grow.

So they starve, or they are forced to sell their farms.

The problem is heavily subsidized US and EU agricultural products flood their markets, and force them to abandon the production of food crops.

Not Enough Bullets………

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The con man who managed to extract billions of dollars from supposedly sophisticated venture capitalists, WeWork’s Adam Neumann, after managing to loot hundreds of millions of dollars in his scam, will now be payed $1,700,000,000.00 to go away.

This guy should be in jail, not walking away with billions:

WeWork’s co-founder Adam Neumann is in line for a $1.7bn (£1.3bn) payout as investors seize control of the troubled office rentals empire he co-founded and thousands of employees wait to hear if they will lose their jobs.

Neumann, 40, used to describe WeWork as “largest physical social network in the world” and a company so important it would one day solve the problem of orphaned children.

Now his business – once the US’s most valuable private company – is in crisis. And the only winner appears to be Neumann, who is reportedly stepping back from the corporate crisis he created with a lucrative deal that will hand him $1bn from the sale of his shares plus a $185m “consultancy fee” and a $500m line of credit.

Under the terms of a rescue deal first reported by The Wall Street Journal, SoftBank, the Japanese investment firm that is WeWork’s largest shareholder, will now take control of the company.

………

The payout to Neumann comes as WeWork weighs up sacking about 2,000 people. The redundancies are on hold while WeWork refinances but are expected soon and have triggered widespread bitterness among WeWork’s 15,000 employees. Many had expected to become millionaires when the company floated but now face losing their jobs. WeWork did not immediately return calls for comment.

As near as I can figure out, VC’s see never going to be profitable unicorns going profit as a way to extract money from idiots further down the line, and they have run out of idiots.

Once bitten, twice shy, I guess.

What a Concept

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We now have a term for the mediocrities who go from failure to failure with lavish funding because they are children of extremely rich parents, the “Glass Floor.”

This is pretty much where Rome was when it began to collapse:

In 2014, Zach Dell launched a dating app called Thread. It was nearly identical to Tinder: Users created a profile, uploaded photos and swiped through potential matches.

The only twist on the formula was that Thread was restricted to university students and explicitly designed to produce relationships rather than hookups. The app’s tagline was “Stay Classy.”

Zach Dell is the son of billionaire tech magnate Michael Dell. Though he told reporters that he wasn’t relying on family money, Thread’s early investors included a number of his father’s friends, including Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff.

The app failed almost instantly. Perhaps the number of monogamy-seeking students just wasn’t large enough, or capping users at 10 matches per day limited the app’s addictiveness. It could also have been the mismatch between Thread’s chaste motto and its user experience. Users got just 70 characters to describe themselves on their profiles. Most of them resorted to catchphrases like “Hook ’em” and “Netflix is life.”

After Thread went bust, Dell moved into philanthropy with a startup called Sqwatt, which promised to deliver “low-cost sanitation solutions for the developing world.” Aside from an empty website and a promotional video with fewer than 100 views, the effort seems to have disappeared.

And yet, despite helming two failed ventures and having little work experience beyond an internship at a financial services company created to manage his father’s fortune, things seem to be working out for Zach Dell. According to his LinkedIn profile, he is now an analyst for the private equity firm Blackstone. He is 22.

America has a social mobility problem. Children born in 1940 had a 90% chance of earning more than their parents. For children born in 1984, the odds were 50-50.

Most accounts of this trend focus on the breakdown of upward mobility: It’s getting harder for the poor to become rich. But equally important is the decline of downward mobility: The rich, regardless of their intelligence, are becoming more likely to stay that way.

You know, this explains a lot:  Donald Trump, Dan Lipinski, Liz Cheney, George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, Mitt Romney, Jared Kushner, and Hunter Biden.  (also, those folks from Hyannis Port)

Get lucky with the right parents, and any sad sack can become a mover and a shaker.

How Convenient

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I have nothing in the way of direct knowledge of the events, but Jeffrey Epstein’s suicide does appear to solve what was a troubling situation for his rich and powerful friends.

Whether this was the final act of a psychopathic narcissist, or the desperate act of those billionaires who he had damning evidence on, it doesn’t matter.

What does matter is that these people, and there were dozens, if not hundreds, of people who were willing partners in this horror show, and now there will be no accounting:

It was Friday night in a protective housing unit of the federal jail in Lower Manhattan, and Jeffrey Epstein, the financier accused of trafficking girls for sex, was alone in a cell, only 11 days after he had been taken off a suicide watch.

Just that morning, thousands of documents from a civil suit had been released, providing lurid accounts accusing Mr. Epstein of sexually abusing scores of girls.

Mr. Epstein was supposed to have been checked by the two guards in the protective housing unit every 30 minutes, but that procedure was not followed that night, a law-enforcement official with knowledge of his detention said.

Again, how convenient.

In addition, because Mr. Epstein may have tried to commit suicide three weeks earlier, he was supposed to have had another inmate in his cell, three officials said. But the jail had recently transferred his cellmate and allowed Mr. Epstein to be housed alone, a decision that also violated the jail’s procedures, the two officials said.

At 6:30 a.m. on Saturday, guards doing morning rounds found him dead in his cell. Mr. Epstein, 66, had apparently hanged himself.

I’ll be spending the next few days considering the tin-foil hat possibilities.

Useful Metric

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A list of Democratic Presidential candidates with the most donations from billionaires.

This list is important, because it shows who the billionaires perceive as being most friendly to their agenda, which is basically the preservation of their wealth and power.

What is interesting is just how many has beens (Gillibrand, O’Rourke, Klobuchar) and never was (Bennet, Hickenlooper) candidates are beating the number 2 & 3 candidates, Warren and Sanders, in this metric.

Obviously, getting donations from billionaires does not, in and of itself, make a candidate unsuitable, but it is a very big red flag.

In order (# of billionaires):

  1. Pete Buttigieg (23)
  2. Cory Booker (18)
  3. Kamala Harris (17)
  4. Michael Bennet (15)
  5. Joe Biden (13)
  6. John Hickenlooper (11)
  7. Beto O’Rourke (9)
  8. Amy Klobuchar (8)
  9. Jay Inslee (5)
  10. Kirsten Gillibrand (4)
    1. Elizabeth Warren (2)
    2. Steve Bullock (2)
    1. Tulsi Gabbard (1)
    2. Andrew Yang (1)
    3. Marianne Williamson (1)
    1. Bernie Sanders (0)
    2. Julian Castro (0)
    3. Bill De Blasio (0)
    4. Tim Ryan (0)

And yes, I spent almost as much time tweaking the HTML code for the numbering as I did the article.

Our Broken Higher Education System

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In addition to bribing school officials for admission, parents are now setting up phony guardianships of their children to avoid having their assets considered by colleges:

Dozens of suburban Chicago families, perhaps many more, have been exploiting a legal loophole to win their children need-based college financial aid and scholarships they would not otherwise receive, court records and interviews show.

Coming months after the national “Varsity Blues” college admissions scandal, this tactic also appears to involve families attempting to gain an advantage in an increasingly competitive and expensive college admissions system.

Parents are giving up legal guardianship of their children during their junior or senior year in high school to someone else — a friend, aunt, cousin or grandparent. The guardianship status then allows the students to declare themselves financially independent of their families so they can qualify for federal, state and university aid, a ProPublica Illinois investigation found.

“It’s a scam,” said Andy Borst, director of undergraduate admissions at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “Wealthy families are manipulating the financial aid process to be eligible for financial aid they would not be otherwise eligible for. They are taking away opportunities from families that really need it.”

 While ProPublica Illinois uncovered this practice in north suburban Lake County, where almost four dozen such guardianships were filed in the past 18 months, similar petitions have been filed in at least five other counties and the practice may be happening throughout the country. ProPublica Illinois is still investigating.

Borst said he first became suspicious when a high school counselor from an affluent Chicago suburb called him about a year ago to ask why a particular student had been invited to an orientation program for low-income students. Borst checked the student’s financial aid application and saw she had obtained a legal guardian, making her eligible to qualify for financial aid independently.

The University of Illinois has since identified 14 applicants who did the same: three who just completed their freshman year and 11 who plan to enroll this fall, Borst said.

You will notice that it is the well off, not poor people who are pulling this scam.

The rich are different from you and me, they are significantly less ethical than the rest of us.

That’s probably how they get rich in first place.

To not quote Honoré de Balzac, it appears that he never actually wrote this, “At the base of every great fortune there is a great crime.”

Walking Dead Man

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Someone has come up with a list of Jeffrey Epstein associates among the Davos set, and upon perusing the list, I can only conclude that he is never going to survive trial, because they do not want their secrets to come out:

Perhaps, at long last, a serial rapist and pedophile may be brought to justice, more than a dozen years after he was first charged with crimes that have brutalized countless girls and women. But what won’t change is this: the cesspool of elites, many of them in New York, who allowed Jeffrey Epstein to flourish with impunity. For decades, important, influential, “serious” people attended Epstein’s dinner parties, rode his private jet, and furthered the fiction that he was some kind of genius hedge-fund billionaire. How do we explain why they looked the other way, or flattered Epstein, even as they must have noticed he was often in the company of a young harem? Easy: They got something in exchange from him, whether it was a free ride on that airborne “Lolita Express,” some other form of monetary largesse, entrée into the extravagant celebrity soirées he hosted at his townhouse, or, possibly and harrowingly, a pound or two of female flesh.

If you watch Fox News, you will believe Bill Clinton was Epstein’s No. 1 pal and enabler. If you watch MSNBC, this scandal is usually all about Donald Trump. In fact, both presidents are guilty (at the very least) of giving Epstein cover and credibility. There are so many unanswered questions about Epstein, but one that looms over all of them is whether the bipartisan crowd who cleared a path for him will cover its tracks before we can get answers — not just Clinton and Trump and all those who drank at Epstein’s trough but also (among others) institutions like Harvard, Dalton, and the Council on Foreign Relations, or lawyers like the New York prosecutor Cy Vance Jr., whose office tried to downgrade Epstein’s sex-offender status; Kenneth Starr, who tried to pressure Republican Justice Department officials to keep the Epstein case from ever being prosecuted; and Alan Dershowitz, who tried to pressure the Pulitzer Prizes to shut out the Miami Herald for its epic investigative reporting that cracked open the case anew.

………

This project is meant to catalogue how Epstein’s secure footing in elite spheres helped hide his crimes. It includes influential names listed in his black book, people he flew, funded, and schmoozed, along with others whose connections to him have drawn renewed attention. Certainly, not everyone cited here knew of everything he was up to; Malcolm Gladwell told New York, “I don’t remember much except being baffled as to who this Epstein guy was and why we were all on his plane.” Some said they never met Epstein at all, or knew of him only through his ex-girlfriend and alleged accomplice, the socialite Ghislaine Maxwell. Others backed away from him after the scandal. But all of the influential people listed here were attached in some way to Epstein’s world. The sum of their names constitutes a more concrete accounting of Epstein’s power than could any accounting of his disputed wealth. Consider this a pointillist portrait of enablement that all too chillingly overlaps with a significant slice of the Establishment.

The list of names, with descriptions, is jaw dropping, and almost endless.

It goes from Trump, to the Clintons, to Andrew Cuomo, to Woody Allen, to the Sultan of Brunei, to Malcolm Gladwell, to Stephen Hawking, to Stephen Banning ………

There is no way that someone among this very long list is arranging an unfortunate accident or suicide for Mr. Epstein as I type this.

H/t Eschaton. 

I Wonder if He Will Flip Now

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Accused pedophile, and pimp to the Davos set, Jeffrey Epstein has been denied bail.

This is not surprising.

When they raided his house, prosecutors found thousands of dollars in cash, diamonds, and a fake passport with his picture on it, which fairly screams, “Flight Risk”:


A federal judge on Thursday denied bail for Jeffrey Epstein, the financier facing sex-trafficking charges in Manhattan, rejecting his request to await trial under home detention at his Upper East Side mansion.

The judge, Richard M. Berman of Federal District Court, said Mr. Epstein’s “past sexual conduct is not likely to have abated,” and he was concerned that if Mr. Epstein were released, he would continue to abuse teenage girls.

“Mr. Epstein’s alleged excessive attraction to sexual conduct with or in the presence of minor girls — which is said to include his soliciting and receiving massages from young girls and young women perhaps as many as four times a day — appears likely to be uncontrollable,” Judge Berman wrote in a bail decision.

The judge said he had taken into account the statements of two of Mr. Epstein’s accusers — Annie Farmer and Courtney Wild — who he said had “movingly testified” in a hearing earlier in the week that they feared for their safety and the safety of others if Mr. Epstein were to be released.

A federal indictment has charged that between 2002 and 2005, Mr. Epstein and his employees paid dozens of underage girls to engage in sex acts with him at his homes in Manhattan and Palm Beach, Fla.

The indictment also accused Mr. Epstein of using some of his victims to recruit additional girls, paying his “victim-recruiters” hundreds of dollars for each girl they brought to him.

Ever since his July 6 arrest at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey after a flight from Paris, Mr. Epstein, 66, has been detained at the highly secure Metropolitan Correctional Center. His lawyers had proposed allowing him to post a substantial bond and remain in his mansion guarded by 24-hour security guards, at his expense.

I’m hoping that he breaks in the New York MCC, and flips on his clients, but I’m not holding my breath.

Eat the Rich

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Billionaire Jeffrey Epstein was just arrested for trafficking in minors, as in raping underage teens.

He’s already done times for this, where his high-power lawyers got him off with a slap on the wrist.

As a result of a series of Miami Herald exposes about how prosecutors cut him a sweetheart deal, he was rearrested as he stepped off of his private jet, named (I sh%$ you not) the Lolita Express, at Teterboro, NJ.

The FBI executed a search warrant, and they found sexually explicit videos of underage girls on disks found in a safe in his home:

A trove of lewd photographs of girls, discovered in a safe inside the financier Jeffrey Epstein’s Manhattan mansion the same day he was arrested, is deepening questions about why federal prosecutors in Miami had cut a deal that shielded him from federal prosecution in 2008.

Federal prosecutors in Manhattan charged Mr. Epstein on Monday with sex trafficking, dealing an implicit rebuke to that plea agreement, which was overseen by Alexander Acosta, then the United States attorney in Miami and now President Trump’s labor secretary.

The indictment in Manhattan could prompt a moment of reckoning for the Justice Department, which for years has wrestled with accusations that it mishandled the earlier case and has faced a barrage of litigation from Mr. Epstein’s accusers. In February, the Justice Department opened its own internal review into the matter.

………

Mr. Epstein, a hedge fund manager, avoided the possibility of a lengthy prison sentence, largely because of a secret agreement his lawyers struck with federal prosecutors in 2008. His social circle is filled with the rich and famous, including former President Bill Clinton and Prince Andrew of Britain.

Yeah, also this guy hung out with Epstein:

Epstein is the guy with the gray hair 3rd from the left.

The guy on the left is (of course) Donald John Trump.

Mr. Clinton’s office said in a statement on Monday that he knows nothing about “the terrible crimes” connected to Mr. Epstein.

In 2002, Mr. Trump described Mr. Epstein as “a terrific guy,” telling New York Magazine, “It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”

Clinton knew, and Trump Knew, and so did everyone else in his circle, and they looked the other way, because he was one of them.

Our so-called elites are rotten to the core.

Several of Mr. Epstein’s accusers said they were relieved that authorities seemed to be taking their complaints seriously after many years.

Yeah, it only took 10 years, and a dogged reporter, Julie Brown, for his victims to have their day in court.

I really hope that the prosecutors, including Trump’s current Secretary of Labor, get keel hauled over this.

Not Enough Bullets

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A 16 year raped a drunk 16 year old girl, filmed it, and shared the film.

The judge at his trial said that he deserved leniency because he came from a good family.

This sort of crap is getting really old:

The 16-year-old girl was visibly intoxicated, her speech slurred, when a drunk 16-year-old boy sexually assaulted her in a dark basement during an alcohol-fueled pajama party in New Jersey, prosecutors said.

The boy filmed himself penetrating her from behind, her torso exposed, her head hanging down, prosecutors said. He later shared the cellphone video among friends, investigators said, and sent a text that said, “When your first time having sex was rape.”

But a family court judge said it wasn’t rape. Instead, he wondered aloud if it was sexual assault, defining rape as something reserved for an attack at gunpoint by strangers.

He also said the young man came from a good family, attended an excellent school, had terrific grades and was an Eagle scout. Prosecutors, the judge said, should have explained to the girl and her family that pressing charges would destroy the boy’s life.

So he denied prosecutors’ motion to try the 16-year-old as an adult. “He is clearly a candidate for not just college but probably for a good college,” Judge James Troiano of Superior Court said last year in a two-hour decision while sitting in Monmouth County.

Now the judge has been sharply rebuked by an appeals court in a scathing 14-page ruling that warned the judge against showing bias toward privileged teenagers.

………

In recent years, judges across the country have come under fire for the way they have handled sexual abuse cases. One of the most notorious was in 2016, when a judge in California sentenced a Stanford University student to six months in jail after he was found guilty of sexually assaulting an unconscious woman. After an intense public backlash, California voters recalled the judge.

………
The judge in Monmouth County, Mr. Troiano, was scolded by the appellate court, according to the panel’s decision. “That the juvenile came from a good family and had good test scores we assume would not condemn the juveniles who do not come from good families and do not have good test scores from withstanding waiver application,” the panel wrote in its decision.

………

Family court cases are typically closed to the public, but the judges’ comments surfaced in June when the appeals court decisions were made public, joining a series of contentious sexual assault cases that have ignited outrage over a legal system that advocates for victims say is warped by bias and privilege.

………

In September 2017, the Monmouth County prosecutor’s office recommended that the case be tried in adult criminal court in part because the boy’s actions were “sophisticated and predatory.”

………

The appellate decision criticized the judge, writing that rather than focusing on whether prosecutors met the necessary standards for a waiver, “the judge decided the case for himself.”

………
In 2004, Judge Troiano imposed a gag order to prohibit people in a courtroom from discussing the high-profile case of two Montclair High School football players accused of sexually assaulting a schoolmate. The charges were eventually dropped.

Think about all the times that this does not get press, and some self-entitled rich kid gets off while some black kid gets tried as an adult for having a joint in his pocket.

Sometimes our society makes me sick.

Not Enough Bullets

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The highest pay packages go to CEOs at healthcare companies. For the third time in four years, chief executives in the healthcare field led the S&P 500 in terms of total compensation. The typical CEO in the industry made $16.1 million last year, which means half earned more than that, and half made less.

A look at the top and bottom-paid CEOs last year, by industry, as calculated by The Associated Press and Equilar, an executive data firm:

1. Healthcare, median compensation of $16.1 million, up from $14.7 million a year earlier.

I so want the guillotine concession when the sh%$ hits the fan on the dysfunctional healthcare system in the United States.