Tag: Legislation

Damn!

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California has a good bill in the legislature which will provide employee protections for the people misclassified as independent contractors by the “Gig-Economy” companyes.

Uber, Lyft and DoorDash are spending almost $100 million to prevent this through the initiative petition process:

Gig-economy giants Uber, Lyft and Doordash have put $30m apiece into a new fund to push a new California ballot measure that would prevent their workers get ordinary benefits like a minimum wage, overtime, workers’ compensation and so on.

The corporations are worried about a new piece of legislation working its way through the legislature in Sacramento that would effectively make their workers employees. The bill, AB5, passed the Assembly in May, has gone through one Senate committee and was cleared by another on Friday, meaning it will now go to the full Senate.

Numerous groups have won exemptions to the provisions in AB5 – doctors, engineers, architects, hair stylists and others – by arguing that that they set their own prices and work directly with their customers. But gig-economy giants have not, meaning that they will be on the hook for employee benefits, which in real terms will increase their cost of labor by 20-30 per cent.

Uber, Lyft and others, including truckers and exotic dancers – have been lobbying fiercely against the new law but seemingly to little avail. With the bill looking increasingly likely to become law, they have struck on a new idea: push a ballot measure that Californian residents will vote on that would undercut the law. 

I would hope that the people of the state of California would vote down what is clearly an attempt to  f%$# their own workers, but there is going to be a lot of money, from some very profoundly unprofitable (not a typo) firms, telling lies in order to keep the VC capital flowing so that their senior management can cash in before their inevitable collapse.

Truly Elegant Troll

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Because they have way too much free time, and because they want to force their views on others, the Kentucky legislature pass a law requiring schools to prominently display the national motto, “In God we trust.”

In response, Fayette County Public Schools is hanging framed dollar bills.

Well played:

When Brittany Pike saw the back of a dollar bill framed at Lexington’s Athens Chilesburg Elementary School last week, she couldn’t have been more pleased.

Pike took a photo and posted it on Facebook Wednesday along with this message about Fayette County Public Schools’ response to Kentucky’s new law that requires the national “In God We Trust” motto to be displayed prominently at schools:

“This school year Kentucky began requiring schools to place “In God We Trust” in the building. I absolutely love living in a school district that wants to follow the law while also ensuring EVERY student feels welcomed back regardless of religious beliefs. Thank you so very much Fayette County Public Schools for simply posting a dollar with ‘In God We Trust.’ My kids don’t feel awkward or excluded for not believing in any God.”

Fayette Superintendent Manny Caulk said Wednesday afternoon that in complying with the new law, “all schools in our district have been provided a framed version of an enlarged copy of a $1 dollar bill to display in a prominent location.”

This is beautiful.

Live in Obedient Fear. Citizen!

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It appears that people are taking to dumping water on police officers in New York as a way of showing their disrespect for the local constabulary, much in the same way that dumping a milk shake on a Tory politician is in the UK indicates a lack of approval.

Obviously, this is a crime, assault, and if you do the crime, you should do the crime.

However, some wannabee fascists in the New York State Assembly decided that a simple assault charge isn’t enough, and so have drafted a bill making “disrespecting the police” a felony.

That sound you hear is Eric Arthur Blair spinning in his grave at relativistic velocities:

New video surfaced Tuesday evening of more NYPD officers being doused with water.

The most recent incident in Queens has compelled lawmakers to announce a new bill that cracks down on anyone who disrespects the badge, CBS2’s Natalie Duddridge reported.

………

“We will not wait until these attacks spread like wildfire,” said Assemblyman Mike LiPetri, R-Long Island. “This time, it’s water. What’s next? Gasoline? Acid?”

At a rally on the steps of City Hall on Wednesday morning, LiPetri and Assemblyman Michael Reilly, R-Staten Island, proposed a new law to stop what some call a disgusting trend.

“What we are witnessing in New York City is disgraceful. A culture of blatant disrespect for law enforcement has been fostered and encouraged simply for political gain which has resulted in such despicable acts of hate becoming acceptable in our communities,” LiPetri said. “New York State must send a message that this will not be tolerated and I am confident that this bill provides law enforcement the tools they need to properly react.”

According to LiPetri and Reilly, the new bill would make it a Class E felony to throw or spray water, or any other substance, against an on-duty police or peace officer. The charge would be punishable by up to 1 to 4 years in prison. 

Because clearly disrespect of cop is worse than, I don’t know, stock fraud.

Here’s an idea, do something about the culture of impunity that has people so fed up with cops that they are dumping water on them.

Also, fire Pantaleo.

This is What Pay-Go is Supposed to Do

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Remember when Dems put PAYGO in the rules package and people like me (who raised hell) were told not to worry because it would be waived off as necessary to pass important legislation? https://t.co/Pd97gv8sqq

— Stephanie Kelton (@StephanieKelton) July 18, 2019

I’m always that Pelosi’s insistence on Pay-Go rules was profoundly self destructive.

I used to believe that this was a short-sighted policy driven by a need to appeal to the inside the Beltway pundits for whom deficits are important whenever Democrats take power.

I increasingly believe the affection of Pelosi, and the rest of the Democratic Party establishment for Pay-Go is more about having an excuse for not doing the right thing, because they don’t want to do the right thing.

Case in point, Democrats using Pay-Go to gut funding on community health centers:

Several Democratic lawmakers are accusing members of their own party of advancing a plan that would have the effect of cutting health care services for millions of Americans in poor and rural parts of the country — a charge fiercely denied by the package’s supporters.

Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. (D-N.J.), chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, is pushing a bipartisan plan that would provide flat levels of federal funding for hundreds of community health centers nationwide, at about $4 billion for the next four years. A similar plan is advancing in the Senate with the support of Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), the top Democrat on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee.

Lawmakers face a September deadline for the community health centers, after which their funding would begin to expire, likely leading to steep cuts.

Pallone said the plan would provide the security of the longest guaranteed funding commitment ever secured by the clinics, averting the September cliff. But flat funding would not keep pace with medical inflation, likely forcing the community health centers to serve about 4 million fewer people annually by 2023 than they do now, said Leighton Ku, professor of health policy at George Washington University’s Milken Institute School of Public Health.

There is always money for a free for the next bloated defense program, but when you want to provide poor people with basic healthcare, we must be fiscally responsible.

The neoliberal consensus of the Democratic Party leadership is bad politics and bad policy.

Never Failing to Disappoint

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Well, in a feat of profound stupid cowardice, House Democrats are planning to water down their minimum wage bill, because, I guess, actually helping the working man is scary:

Top House Democrats are eyeing a major tweak to the caucus’ signature minimum wage proposal, part of a last-minute bid to bolster support among moderates just days before a floor vote.

Democratic leaders are floating a more gradual path to a federal minimum wage of $15 per hour, which would mark a concession to some centrists who had been hesitant to back the bill for fear of aggravating small businesses, according to multiple sources familiar with the ongoing discussions.

Under the proposal, employers would have six years to phase in the wage hike rather than five.

The House plans to vote on the bill next week. And while top Democrats like Majority Leader Steny Hoyer have said they’re confident it will have enough votes to pass, they have worked behind the scenes to shore up more support and avert any drama on the floor.

………

Democrats have long worried that a GOP procedural maneuver on the floor — in which Republicans use a “motion to recommit” to put forward their own changes — could ultimately tank the entire effort.

If Republicans win support from about two dozen Democrats, they could force changes to the bill all within a few minutes. That could result in others in the caucus, including progressives, choosing to revolt and vote it down.

They are worried about faux Dems knifing them in the back, so they are pre-capitulating, because they have no guts.

You know, maybe Nancy Pelosi should spend less time clapping ironically or slagging real Democrats in her caucus, and instead whip the phony Democrats to vote for raising the minimum wage, which, after all, is overwhelmingly supported across the partisan divide.

This sort of crap is why people don’t believe it when Democrats say that they will help ordinary people, because when push comes to shove, they cave so badly they should be wearing spelunking helmets.

Kafkaesque and Orwellian are Inadequate Words to Describe This

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The CIA is arguing for an extension and broadening of The Intelligence Identities Protection Act because they need to conceal their role in torture and other crimes against humanity.

I’m serious about this. The state security apparatus is actually using their role in torture to call for greater legal jeopardy for reporting the misdeeds of the state security apparatus:

The C.I.A. is quietly pushing Congress to significantly expand the scope of a law that makes it a crime to disclose the identities of undercover intelligence agents, raising alarms among advocates of press freedoms.

The agency has proposed extending a 1982 law, the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which makes it a crime to identify covert officers who have served abroad in the past five years. Under the C.I.A.’s plan, the law would instead apply perpetually to people whose relationships with the intelligence community are classified — even if they live and operate exclusively on domestic soil.

………

The C.I.A.’s proposal “seriously expands the felony criminal penalties that could be used against journalists, against whistle-blowers and against public-interest organizations,” said Emily Manna, a policy analyst for Open the Government, a group promoting accountability. “It opens the door to a ton of abuses and secrecy to a much greater extent,” she said.

The proposal would also outlaw the identification of American citizens who serve as classified agents or informants for intelligence agencies, or otherwise help them. Currently, the identities law covers only classified informants who reside and act abroad.

The push was aimed at protecting clandestine officers, said Timothy Barrett, the C.I.A. press secretary. In the past five years, he said, “hundreds of covert officers have had their identity and covert affiliation disclosed without authorization,” and under current law, the identities of officers who are based on domestic soil but travel frequently overseas are not protected.

………

The C.I.A. also argued that lawmakers’ original rationale for only protecting agents abroad — that they faced special physical danger — was “no longer valid” because “organizations such as WikiLeaks” are willing to go to great lengths to publish government secrets, and because of the fallout from revelations about the C.I.A.’s defunct torture program, according to a copy of the agency’s written justification for the proposal obtained by The New York Times.

Still, critics said that the agency’s proposed language is too broad, covering people who have not been in harm’s way abroad for years.

The proposal also comes at a time when defense lawyers at the military commissions system at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, are trying to identify eyewitnesses from the C.I.A. black sites whom they could potentially call to testify about their clients’ treatment, including in the case against Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four other detainees accused of aiding the Sept. 11 attacks.

Last month, when the Senate Intelligence Committee unveiled its annual intelligence bill, Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, flagged his concern that the C.I.A. provision would allow the protections for undercover identities to apply indefinitely.

“I am not yet convinced this expansion is necessary and am concerned that it will be employed to avoid accountability,” he wrote.

The C.I.A.’s push comes against the backdrop of a sharp increase in the prosecution of current and former officials accused of providing government secrets to the news media in recent years. It also comes against the unprecedented Justice Department decision in May to expand the criminal case against the founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, to include Espionage Act charges for soliciting, obtaining and publishing classified information — including files that identified people in dangerous countries who had helped Americans.

Congress enacted the identities law after Richard S. Welch, the C.I.A.’s station chief in Athens, was murdered in 1975 and Philip Agee, a former C.I.A. officer who had grown to oppose American foreign policy, revealed numerous covert officers’ identities.

The identities law supplemented the Espionage Act, which more broadly makes it a crime to disclose potentially harmful defense-related information to someone not authorized to receive it. The identities act is narrower but easier to use in some respects: Prosecutors need only prove that the disclosed identity met the definition for “covert.”

Prosecutors have only rarely used the law, but they won a conviction under it in a 1985 case involving a C.I.A. clerk in Ghana and in the 2012 case of John Kiriakou, a former C.I.A. officer who pleaded guilty to telling a reporter the name of a covert officer involved in the agency’s interrogations.

Another part of the identities law, which prosecutors have not used, might apply to journalists under some circumstances. It covers outsiders who do not have authorized access to classified information but learn about and disclose covert identities anyway, “in the course of a pattern of activities intended to identify and expose covert agents.”

………

In a House committee report accompanying the 1982 bill, lawmakers stressed that they intended to limit its coverage to clandestine agents abroad, or agents who may be “temporarily in the United States for rest, training, or reassignment” before returning abroad, because they face special dangers.

The 1982 report also said that the public should be able to discuss intelligence informants living in the United States, saying they “may be employees of colleges, churches, the media, or political organizations. The degree of involvement of these groups with intelligence agencies is a legitimate subject of national debate.”

(emphasis mine)

Live in Obedient Fear, Citizen.

It’s a Start

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Maryland just passed a law requiring that the state pension fund publicly report all fees charged to it by Wall Street.

While this is not my preferred solution, I would prefer the Banksters be kicked out of public pensions completely, but I think that this is a step to that path:

A new Maryland law requires greater transparency in disclosing millions of dollars in fees paid by the state’s pension system to Wall Street investment firms.

 The Maryland State Retirement and Pension System has reported paying about $370 million annually in fees to the firms that invest its $51 billion in assets.

 But the real amount of fees paid is anywhere from $460 million to $570 million. That’s because so-called “carried interest fees” — a cut of the Maryland fund’s profits that goes to the outside investment managers — have not been not disclosed publicly.

 That’s about to change.

 ………
 At one point, the legislation sought to cap the amount of fees the firms could charge the pension system, but it was amended to become a bill requiring greater disclosure. Both chambers of the General Assembly passed the revised bipartisan legislation unanimously and Republican Gov. Larry Hogan signed it into law.

 The pension system now must publicly disclose the amount it pays in carried interest fees by the end of each calendar year. The first report, due Dec. 31, will include the fees from fiscal years 2015 through 2019.

It’s a start.

Unions Behaving Badly

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Uber and Lyft have already lost the suit and are now required to treat their employees as, well, employees, and there a bill was passed further extending this, but the SEIU is allying itself with the Gypsy cab companies to roll back these protections.

I guess that they think that getting some dues trumps the rights of workers that they are pretending to represent.

California’s labor movement recently seemed on the verge of a new era for worker rights. A state court ruled that workers in the gig economy should have many of the protections of employment, like a minimum wage and overtime pay. And the State Assembly passed a bill codifying that ruling and adding more protections.

But any celebration was premature. Behind the scenes, a few large unions had been meeting with the giants of the ride-hailing industry, Uber and Lyft, to discuss a way to exempt drivers from full employment protections, according to union and industry officials. The talks have created deep rancor within the labor ranks and set unions against one another.

Exempting Uber and Lyft from classifying drivers as employees would provide huge savings in labor costs and allow the companies to avert what could be an existential threat to their business.

In return, Uber and Lyft — which currently classify drivers as contractors — have publicly proposed to recognize a labor organization that would represent drivers’ interests on certain issues. The companies have also discussed providing drivers with benefits like retirement saving and paid time off and setting certain pay standards.

At a meeting of union officials within the last two weeks, the executive director of the California council of the Service Employees International Union, one of the unions in discussions with Uber and Lyft, put forth a proposal along these lines, according to two people who attended the meeting.

But on a conference call on Friday with the executive director, Alma Hernández, and several S.E.I.U. officials in California, one of the union’s national leaders, Heather Conroy, appeared to reject the idea, according to a person on the call. Ms. Conroy said the union supported full employee status, including the California bill that would enshrine it.

The change in the S.E.I.U.’s apparent openness to exploring less than full employment status comes amid considerable opposition to the idea both inside and outside the union. One local in California, the United Healthcare Workers West, has threatened to oppose such a proposal publicly, according to the union’s president, Dave Regan.

In mid-June, Héctor Figueroa, the head of a large S.E.I.U. local in New York, wrote of a similar proposal, “Collective bargaining without a minimum wage, which is what this would be, means that we are forced to bargain for what should already be rightfully ours.” Mr. Figueroa also criticized the companies’ attempt at negotiating a “back-room deal” in California.

David Huerta, the president of the United Service Workers West, an S.E.I.U. local in California, said in a statement, “Neither Alma nor S.E.I.U. have ever pushed forward anything that would take away employee status for gig workers or advocate for independent contractor status for any gig worker.” Mr. Huerta said he has attended internal and external meetings about gig workers with Ms. Hernández.

………

“We won a court case that gave workers rights,” said Cesar Diaz, the political and legislative director for the State Building and Construction Trades Council. “To cut some kind of deal that takes away rights, that is not what labor unions are about.” Mr. Diaz said that any move to include exemptions in the legislation could open the door to denying full employment protections to workers in other sectors.

In its 2018 decision, the state Supreme Court ruled that workers should be considered employees if they perform a task that’s part of the “usual course” of a company’s business. Most legal experts concluded that driving was central to Uber’s business and that drivers must be considered employees under the ruling, said Veena Dubal, a professor at the University of California Hastings College of the Law.

This May, the state’s Assembly passed a bill that would extend the ruling in certain respects and limit it in others. The court ruling applied mainly to minimum wage and overtime laws, while the legislation, Assembly Bill 5, would apply to all aspects of employment, including unemployment insurance, workers’ compensation and paid sick days. At the same time, the bill exempted certain high-paying professions from the Supreme Court ruling, such as doctors and real estate agents.

………

In July, the State Senate will hold hearings on the measure. Legislators working with Uber and Lyft could attach an exemption for drivers or write separate legislation to do so.

Despite the S.E.I.U.’s insistence that it supports the bill and full employment status for drivers, the union appears willing to continue negotiating with Uber and Lyft. It has created what it calls a “national bargaining committee to provide national leadership on the negotiations” with the companies, according to an email dated June 21 from Ms. Conroy, an executive vice president of the union, that was reviewed by The New York Times.

………

To fight their legislative battle in California, Uber and Lyft have resorted to a longstanding tactic: trying to mobilize drivers. Uber sent one message to drivers through its app saying that “unless the California Legislature takes action to modernize the law, you could lose your ability to work with multiple apps and control when and where you choose to drive with Uber,” then urged drivers to sign a petition. Uber said tens of thousands of drivers signed.

But it’s not clear how effective the tactic will be in an era of rising driver frustration over pay and arbitrary treatment, as well as regular driver protests.

………

Nicole Moore, a member of the organizing committee for Rideshare Drivers United, a driver group, said many drivers were upset by the efforts of Uber and Lyft to enlist them in fighting against employment status.

“I have never seen so many angry messages about ‘How dare they say I should advocate against my own rights?’” Ms. Moore said.

Nicole Moore is right.

This behavior is so abusive, self-destructive, short-sighted, and corrupt that you would think that the union executives are members of management, or a part of a venture capital firm..

This Should Have Happened 4 Years Ago

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The Senate voted to block the sale of billions of dollars of munitions to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates on Thursday, in a sharp and bipartisan rebuke of the Trump administration’s attempt to circumvent Congress to allow the exports by declaring an emergency over Iran.

In three back-to-back votes, Republicans joined Democrats to register their growing anger with the administration’s use of emergency power to cut lawmakers out of national security decisions, as well as the White House’s unflagging support for the Saudis despite congressional pressure to punish Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman after the killing in October of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

A United Nations report released Wednesday made the most authoritative case to date that responsibility for the killing and its cover-up lies at the highest levels of the Saudi royal court.

No other foreign policy issue has created as large a rift between President Trump and Congress, and the vote to block the arms sales deepens the divide. It is the second time in just a few months that members of Mr. Trump’s party have publicly opposed his foreign policy, with both the House and Senate approving bipartisan legislation this spring to cut off military assistance to Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen using the 1973 War Powers Act, only to see it vetoed.

………

The vote came the same day that Britain announced it would temporarily suspend approval of any new licenses to sell arms to Saudi Arabia, after an unexpected court ruling that ministers had acted unlawfully in allowing the sale of weapons when there was a clear possibility they might be used in violation of international humanitarian law in Yemen.

This war, and the criminal brutality, has been going on for far too long.

New York Realtors Has a Sad

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Now that Republicans have, despite the best efforts of “Democrat” Andrew Cuomo, lost control of the New York State Senate, and with that, much of their political power.

They had used that power to restrict municipalities on things like rent control and eviction protections, and now some meaningful regulation looks set to pass, and they are upset.

F%$# them:

Less than a day after newly emboldened Democratic lawmakers announced bills that would significantly tighten tenant protections, prominent real estate developers got Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo on the phone to make a last-ditch plea to persuade him to block the measures.

………

They and their counterparts in the real estate industry have donated millions of dollars in campaign contributions to Mr. Cuomo and other state politicians in recent decades.

But on Wednesday, Mr. Cuomo rebuffed the developers, telling them that “they should call their legislators if they want to do something about it,” said a person briefed on the call, which lasted about 15 minutes.

The phone call capped a humiliating moment for an industry that had long reigned in the state capital.

………

The bills announced on Tuesday night by the Democratic leaders of the State Senate and the Assembly would abolish rules that let building owners deregulate apartments and close loopholes that permit them to raise rents.

The legislation would directly impact almost one million rent-regulated apartments in New York City, which account for more than 40 percent of the city’s rental stock, and allow other municipalities statewide beyond New York City and its suburbs to adopt their own regulations.

Real estate industry groups said the bills would do serious damage to housing in the city by reducing incentives for landlords to renovate existing apartments and to build affordable new ones.

Existing rent laws expire on Saturday. The rent regulation package, which is expected to be approved before the end of the week, is perhaps the most resonant symbol of the change in power in Albany since Democrats took complete control in November.

Republicans had dominated the State Senate for most of the last century and formed a close alliance with the New York City real estate industry, which donated heavily to Republican senators.

The elections in November not only brought Democrats to power in the State Senate, but also saw the rise of progressive lawmakers who fiercely opposed real estate interests.

These guys have been profiting through their political connections pretty much since the Donald Trump was in diapers.

It’s time for a change.

Nope, No Racism Here: Republicans in Maine Are pro Confederacy

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The great state of Maine has adopted a new state ballad, which I guess is in addition to the state song.*

It honors the 20th Maine volunteer infantry regiment, which is best known for saving the Union at Little Round Top during the Battle of Gettysburg.

It appears that some Republicans in the state are objecting, because they feel that the song is insufficiently considerate of the sensitive feelings of the traitors on the other side:

With Governor Janet Mills’ signature today, the “The Ballad of the 20th Maine” became Maine’s official state ballad.

The stirring anthem recorded and performed by the band The Ghost of Paul Revere tells the story of the 20th Maine Volunteer Infantry Regiment, which fought for the Union Army under General Joshua Chamberlain in the American Civil War. The regiment is best known for its brave defense of Little Round Top at the Battle of Gettysburg on July 2, 1863.

………

The bill to enshrine the ballad was sponsored by Rep. Scott Cuddy (D-Winterport) and passed without objection in both chambers. It did see some initial opposition in the legislature’s State and Local Government Committee, however, where two Republicans raised objections that the song’s unabashedly pro-Union message may be unfair to the South.

“I find it a little bit, we are united states, we are not Union, we are united states. And I find it just a little bit – I won’t say offensive but that’s what I mean – to say that we’re any better than the South was,” said Rep. Frances Head (R-Bethel) during a May 1st public hearing on the bill.

“I am a lover of history and especially a lover of the civil war period and regardless of what side people fought on, they were fighting for something they truly believed in,” said Rep. Roger Reed (R-Carmel), who specifically praised Confederate General Robert E. Lee. “Many of them were great Christian men on both sides. They fought hard and they were fighting for states’ rights as they saw them.”

Let me translate:  “Great Christain men,” means let’s keep those n*****s from getting uppity.

………

Reed eventually voted in favor of the ballad legislation. Head voted against it.

They may represent a minority position, but the statements of these Republicans show just how far the Myth of the Lost Cause, a systematic effort to rehabilitate the racist legacy of the Confederacy, has spread. These objections were raised in Maine, which contributed a largest number of Union soldiers in proportion to its population of any state.

The American Civil War was fought on the issue of slavery. That’s the “state right” that Confederates were seeking to defend. To ignore or elide that history doesn’t just denigrate the sacrifices of our ancestors, but bolsters the resurgent white supremacist movement we’re seeing across our union today.

This is a feature, and not a bug of the modern Republican party and the myth of the lost cause serves their political agenda, even in Maine, where the 20th saved the Republic.

F%$# their bigoted small minds.

*Which is called, interestingly enough, State of Main Song.

If it Becomes a Wypipo Problem, ALEC Loses

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Arkansas is repealing its ban on municipally owned broadband. because they are sick and tired of getting screwed by the cable and telephone companies:

Pat Ulrich can’t make water-cooler talk about The Handmaid’s Tale or Shrill. “I can’t get Hulu or anything like that,” she says. If it’s on a streaming service, she probably hasn’t seen it.

Her home, in Arkansas, has no broadband internet connection. A cable company once quoted her $44,000 to install one, so she and her husband get mediocre Wi-Fi through a satellite provider. “It’s 20 gigabytes” per month, she says, “no different from using your phone.”

Connectivity isn’t just a problem for the state’s sizable rural population. Ulrich lives in a suburb of Little Rock and commutes into the city each day to work as a web developer for the Arkansas Arts Center. Needless to say, she never works from home.

Arkansas is the least connected of the 50 states, according to BroadbandNow, a group that tracks consumer options. Since 2011, the state has banned cities and towns from building their own networks, outlawing a local solution that has been hailed as an effective way for communities to connect themselves when they don’t have internet providers.

This year, however, Arkansas appears to be having a change of heart. Under the weight of constituent complaints about lousy internet—and after years of waiting for subsidies to goad telecom giants into expanding the infrastructure—the state legislature in February passed a bill to repeal its ban. Republican Governor Asa Hutchinson said he will sign it.

That this is happening at all is significant. That it’s happening in a deep-red state is perhaps monumental.

Arkansas outlawed municipal broadband in 2011 as a wave of other states passed similar laws. It was, in part, a factor of the Tea Party movement, which ushered small-government Republicans into state capitols. By 2018, 21 states had some law banning or restricting municipal broadband; many were cut-and-paste “model legislation” from the American Legislative and Exchange Council, backed by telecom giants. They sought to kill municipal broadband under the belief that “such services should not be offered by government in competition with private-sector providers.”

Yes, the cable companies are so awful that they are getting municipal broadband in Arkansas.

These companies got $250 million from the FCC to build out broadband, and didn’t do squat.

They are the most hated businesses in America for a reason, and the ALEC sponsored ban on municipal broadband has become toxic.

Meanwhile, in Nevada

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Felon reanfranchisement is now the law in the Silver State:

Nevada’s governor has signed criminal justice reform bills that restore voting rights to convicted felons and streamlines the process for sealing low-level marijuana convictions.

Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak signed both the measures Wednesday as the legislative session continues on in its final days.

The voting rights legislation gives felony offenders the right to vote after being released from prison, instead of granting certain felons the right to vote two years after being released.

Sisolak says some 77,000 state residents will have their voting rights restored due to the legislation.

Felon disenfranchisement has always been an explicitly racist enterprise, and it needs to end.

I Knew That the Name “Sununu” Was Involved

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New Hampshire just abolished the death penalty.
In order to do so, they had to override the veto from the Governor.

I did not know who the Governor was, but I knew his last name had to be Sununu, because whenever some Republican in New Hampshire does something Reagan type psychotic, you know that a Sununu had to be involved:

Lawmakers in New Hampshire voted Thursday to abolish the death penalty, overriding a veto from the state’s Republican governor and making it the 21st state to abandon capital punishment.

The vote by the New Hampshire Senate capped months of uncertainty about what would happen to capital punishment in the state, the last in New England to still have the death penalty.

………

Lawmakers in New Hampshire had tried to abolish the death penalty before but narrowly failed, running headlong into gubernatorial vetoes and, in 2014, falling short by a single vote.

After Gov. Chris Sununu (R) vetoed a bill last year abolishing the death penalty, lawmakers passed another measure this year with enough support to withstand a veto.

This bill “changes the penalty for capital murder to life imprisonment without the possibility for parole,” stripping away the possibility of a death sentence for such crimes.

Political dynasties are truly toxic.

Someone Is Looking to Steal from Us

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Specifically, the healthcare executives who are calling for a rollback on anti-kickback laws.

They claim that this will allow for, “Innovation.”

What they really want is a way to goose their profits and their salaries, because this about self-dealing, not improving the quality or efficiency of healthcare.

Whenever I hear someone talk about how deregulation will allow for innovation, I am reminded of Paul Volker’s quote on financial innovation, that, “The only thing useful banks have invented in 20 years is the ATM.”

Let us be completely clear, this is about legalizing larceny, nothing else:

Beth Hughes’ job involves closely partnering with physicians to sync Sioux City, Iowa-based MercyOne’s operations and move the health system forward. But one regulation continues to stand in her way—the Stark law, the president of MercyOne’s Western Iowa region said.

The Stark law is meant to curb Medicare and Medicaid spending by prohibiting a physician for making referrals that financially benefit the doctor. That combined with the federal anti-kickback statue have impeded new payment models by limiting incentives used to reward progress, providers said, noting that they can incur significant financial penalties even if they didn’t intend to violate the regulations.

………

“Being creative with value-based care flies in the face of fraud and abuse laws,” Hughes said as organizations like MercyOne aim to reduce hospital readmissions and length of stay. “You can try to get an exception, but most people are discouraged because it is a long and arduous process. Those laws may be inhibiting our ability to creatively align ourselves with providers.”

More than 36% of 162 healthcare executives surveyed by Advis said that fraud and abuse laws don’t support new models of care—the most common answer to what regulations stand in the way of changing healthcare for the better. Fraud and abuse laws were followed by Medicare conditions of participation and state licensure laws as well as limits on telehealth reimbursement.

If this doesn’t sound like a license to cheat and steal, you have the political and financial acumen of Little Orphan Annie.

Mission F%$#ing Accomplished

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I wholehearted the proposal by Bernie Sanders and Barbara Lee to  levy a tax on financial transactions. 

The idea is that by increasing the cost of high frequency trading and other forms of speculation, these parasitic activities would be reduced:

This week Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Barbara Lee are introducing bills in the Senate and House for a financial transaction tax (FTT). Their proposed tax is similar to, albeit somewhat higher than, the FTT proposed by Senator Brian Schatz earlier this year. The Sanders-Lee proposal would impose a 0.5 percent tax on stock transactions, with lower rates on transfers of other financial assets. Senator Schatz’s bill would impose a 0.1 percent tax on trades of all financial assets.

At this point, it is not worth highlighting the differences between the bills. Both would raise far more than half a trillion dollars over the next decade, almost entirely at the expense of the financial industry and hedge fund-types. In the case of the Schatz tax, the Congressional Budget Office estimated revenue of almost $80 billion a year, a bit less than 2.0 percent of the budget. The Sanders-Lee tax would likely raise in the neighborhood of $120–$150 billion a year, in the neighborhood of 3.0 percent of the federal budget.

While the financial industry will make great efforts to convince people that this money is coming out of the middle-class’ 401(k)s and workers’ pensions, that’s not likely to be true. This can be seen with some simple arithmetic.

Take a person with $100,000 with a 401(k). Suppose 20 percent of it turns over each year, meaning that the manager of the account sells $20,000 worth of stock and replaces it with $20,000 worth of different stocks. In this case, if we assume the entire 0.5 percent specified in the Sanders-Lee bill is passed on to investors, then this person will pay $100 a year in tax on their 401(k).

While no one wants to pay more in taxes, this hardly seems like a horrible burden. After all, the financial industry typically charges fees on 401(k)s in excess of 1.0 percent annually ($1,000 a year, in this case), and often as much as 1.5 percent or even 2.0 percent.

One of the arguments against the tax is that the forecast revenues are overstated, since there will be less speculative activity as a result of the higher costs.

This a feature, and a highly attractive feature at that, and not a bug, or, as Randall Munroe noted in his xkcd web comic, Mission F%$#ing Accomplished.

Pass the Popcorn

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The New York legislature just passed a bill authorizing Congressional access to Donald Trump’s state tax returns, and Governor Andrew “Rat Faced Andy” Cuomo is expected to sign it:

New York State lawmakers on Wednesday gave their final approval to a bill that would clear a path for Congress to obtain President Trump’s state tax returns, injecting another element into a tortuous battle over the president’s refusal to release his taxes.

The bill, which is expected to be signed by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, a third-term Democrat and regular critic of Mr. Trump’s policies and behavior, will authorize state tax officials to release the president’s state returns to any one of three congressional committees.

The returns — filed in New York, the president’s home state and business headquarters — would likely contain much of the same information as the contested federal returns, though it remained unclear whether those congressional committees would use such new power in their investigations.

The Legislature’s actions put the state in a bit of uncharted legal territory; Mr. Trump has said that he is ready to take the fight over his federal tax returns to the Supreme Court, and it seems likely that he would seek to contest New York’s maneuver.

Republicans have called the effort in Albany a “bill of attainder” — an unconstitutional piece of legislation aimed at a single person or group — while also decrying the potential invasion of privacy, suggesting that federal officials would conduct improper “fishing expeditions.”

………

Once signed into law by Mr. Cuomo, the legislation would require the commissioner of the New York Department of Taxation and Finance to release returns to the chairmen of the House Ways and Means Committee, the Senate Finance Committee and the Joint Committee on Taxation for any “specified and legitimate legislative purpose.” Such a request would be have to be made it writing, and only after a request for federal returns has been made to the Treasury Department.

While the bill clearly targets Donald Trump’s particular circumstances, it does not appear to my non lawyer eyes to rise to the level of a bill of attainder.

The real question is whether any of the members of the Ways and Means Committee have the stones to actually make the request, as the other two committees would have such a request blocked by Republicans.

My guess is that Ways and Means Chairman Richard Neal (D-MA) won’t have the requisite intestinal fortitude to actually make a formal request, because Democrats.

A Much Needed Regulation

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This is important, because excluding the disabled, and other students who need extra help, is the “Secret Sauce” of charter schools.

It allows them to create the appearance of exceptional performance on the cheap:

State law already requires that a charter school admit any student who applies. In his May budget revision, Gov. Gavin Newsom is proposing to tighten the language banning discrimination in charter school enrollment, particularly to protect students with disabilities and students with poor grades who want to attend charter schools.

………

In return for receiving public funding, charter schools must have open admissions and hold a lottery when there are more applicants than spaces. School districts have complained that some of the state’s 1,300-plus charter schools have discouraged families with academically struggling students and special education students with high-cost needs from signing up. Others counsel students who are struggling academically to leave school mid-year to boost schoolwide test scores, districts say.

………

Charges that charter schools deliberately select top student applicants have been largely anecdotal, which is why Newsom is proposing a uniform complaint policy that allows parents to file a grievance if they believe they were discriminated against. He also wants to explore using state Smarter Balanced testing and other data to identify enrollment disparities “that may warrant inquiry and intervention,” his budget stated.

Three years ago, the ACLU Foundation of Southern California and the public interest law firm Public Advocates released a report that found that about a fifth of charter schools had admissions policies that improperly excluded students based on grades, pre-enrollment interviews, a parental participation requirement, or that required citizenship documentation and a minimum level of English language proficiency. The report was based on a review of charter schools’ websites and most charter schools responded by removing pages they said were outdated and didn’t reflect their current policies.

Newsom’s proposed statute would specify that charter schools cannot request or require parents to submit student records before enrolling. And it would require that charter schools post parental rights on their websites and make parents aware of them during enrollment and when students are expelled or leave during the year.
………

The proposed statute implies there should be no allowances “for any reason” that might discourage any pupil from enrolling in a charter school.

It’s a good start.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

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Alabama’s new anti-abortion law is too extreme for Pat Robertson.

What the f%$#?

Longtime televangelist Pat Robertson decried Alabama’s new abortion ban as “extreme,” saying on his show on Wednesday that the state legislature has “gone too far.”

Alabama’s law, which has been passed by the legislature and signed by the governor, includes a penalty of up to 99 years in prison for doctors who perform abortions and has no exceptions for rape or incest, Robertson noted on his show.

“They want to challenge Roe vs. Wade, but my humble view is I don’t think that’s the case I’d want to bring to the Supreme Court because I think this one will lose,” Robertson told viewers of CBN’s “The 700 Club” on Wednesday.

Let me repeat this:  What ……… the ……… f%$#?

I Wonder How Much He Got from the House of Saud

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Rep. Ed Royce, a senior Republican who, at the time, chaired the Foreign Affairs Committee, gave a speech on the House floor in November 2017 imploring his fellow lawmakers to maintain support for the Saudi Arabian-led war in Yemen. Royce warned that foreign adversaries — namely, Iran — could gain a foothold in Yemen through the Houthi rebels.

“Part of the problem here is the leaders of the Houthi militia were indoctrinated in Qom, in Iran, as part of an Iranian attempt to construct a Hezbollah-like proxy in Yemen,” warned Royce, suggesting that the rebels in Yemen were merely Iranian cutouts, something experts dispute.

The inflammatory line had been scripted by a lobbyist for Saudi Arabia — like much of Royce’s impassioned speech. “During the 1990s, the leaders of the Houthi militia were indoctrinated in the Iranian city of Qom as part of an Iranian attempt to construct a Hezbollah-like proxy in Yemen,” says a set of lobbyist talking points obtained by The Intercept.

Royce had received talking points earlier that day from a lobbyist retained by the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, according to federal disclosure forms, in order to undermine congressional opposition to the Yemen war.

………

The talking points provided to Royce are among the many hidden ways in which Saudi money has quietly influenced the debate.

“The fact that Rep. Royce is repeating word for word talking points from wealthy law firm Hogan Lovells, not his own unique thought and hearing what his constituents have to say, speaks to the very stifling our democracy suffers from,” said Heather Purcell, a spokesperson for Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., who introduced the bill Royce was speaking against.

Our “Friends” in Riyadh, huh?

The sooner that the House of Saud falls from power the better.