Ellen: ‘I Never Intended To Make Staff Feel Unsafe By Wearing A Bloodied Ram Skull And Stalking Them With A Hatchet’This is a level of screwing the pooch that approaches some sort of twisted dog bordello.
Most troubling of all, perhaps, was a sentiment the expert said a member of Kushner’s team expressed: that because the virus had hit blue states hardest, a national plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically. “The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy,” said the expert.Unsurprisingly, Jared Kushner was leaving this effort.
Ever wondered about the extraordinary performance figures that listed private equity firms trumpet in their official stock market filings?This is conscious fraud, no different in intent, and larger in scale than anything that Bernie Madoff ever imagined.
Take, for instance, the latest Form 10-K issued by Apollo, one of the world’s largest buyout groups. This claims that its private equity funds have “consistently produced attractive long-term investment returns . . . generating a 39 per cent gross internal rate of return (IRR) on a compound basis from inception through December 31, 2019”.
Or how about the one from KKR, which says it has “generated a cumulative gross IRR of 25.6 per cent” since the firm’s inception back in 1976?
It’s not just the eye-popping scale of these returns that captures the attention. It’s their amazing “since inception” consistency. Not only do the firms generate stratospheric numbers — far higher than anything produced by the boring old stock market — but they can apparently do it year in, year out, with no decay in returns.
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Take Apollo, for example. Its long-term IRR has barely moved from the 39 per cent level over the past several decades. True, it did hit 40 per cent in 2008, before dropping back by a full percentage point the following year. But since then it has been like a stuck record. Financial crises? Great recessions? Market fluctuations? It seems that nothing can knock it off that 39 per cent.
It’s a similar story with KKR. The firm's IRR since inception has fallen by just 0.7 of a percentage point in the years since 2007 and, at 25.6 per cent, remains barely below the 26.1 per cent return generated by its early “legacy” funds between 1976 and 1996.
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But what’s concerning is the ease with which this mathematical circularity has been allowed to create a distorted impression. The main audience for private equity to date has been large, so-called “sophisticated investors”. The fact that these absurd numbers still get headline exposure makes one wonder whether these investors understand them. That is disturbing.
Even more worrying is the way that policymakers appear to have set these financial pig-iron statistics in stone. The industry standard for reporting — the Global Investment Performance Standards — actually makes it mandatory for private equity to report a since-inception IRR or “money-weighted return”.
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Realistic numbers matter. The US authorities are thinking of letting the American public loose on private equity with their 401(k) pension plans. Retail investors need to know what they are getting into. It’s time the way private equity reports performance was rethought.
When the pandemic prompted companies to furlough or lay off thousands of employees, some chief executives decided to show solidarity by forgoing some of their pay.
But it turns out that their sacrifice was minimal.
A survey of some 3,000 public companies shows that the cuts — which, so far, have come in the form of salary reductions — were tiny compared with their total pay last year. Total pay includes things like bonuses and stock awards that typically make up the bulk of what corporate bosses take home.
Only a small percentage of the companies cut salaries for their senior executives at all, which is surprising given that the pandemic has crushed profits and sales for many companies, forcing large layoffs. But even among businesses that did cut the boss’s pay, two-thirds of the chief executives took reductions that were equivalent to only 10 percent or less of their 2019 compensation, according to an analysis by CGLytics, a compensation analysis firm.
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“These salary cuts were more window dressing than anything else,” said Liz Shuler, secretary-treasurer of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. The labor federation on Wednesday released a report showing that companies in the S&P 500 stock index last year paid chief executives on average 264 times as much as median employees, down from 287 times in 2018.
One other unexpected detail: In an interview with Womenetics, a B2B services firm that specializes in helping women professionals, Ms. Abrams named three favorite books: The Institutionist, Ender’s Game and… Atlas Shrugged, not exactly a book at the top of most Democrat reading lists. Womenetics called her a “serial entrepreneur” and clearly she has a passion for business. As to how does that translate to the tough business of navigating the politics of Georgia as a Democrat legislator, she seems to have found quick success.
When Abrams was little, visiting her grandmother, with her some 16 first cousins running around, she was the one in the corner, holed up with a book. She loved Helen Keller’s The Story of My Life, The Count of Monte Cristo, Silas Marner, Little Women, Jane Eyre, Ender’s Game, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Atlas Shrugged (“But not for the Paul Ryan reasons. . . . There was something about how [Ayn Rand] highlighted the capacity of a person to be more than.”) She loved mythology. “Greek, Norse, Roman, Cherokee. If I could reach it, I would read it,” Abrams says.Being a fan of Atlas Shrugged is on a par with taking Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal as a serious policy proposal.
Herman Cain, who rose from poverty in the segregated South to become chief executive of a successful pizza chain and then thrust himself into the national spotlight by seeking the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, has died. He was 74.I am not a fan of Mr. Cain, and the opportunity for meming this tempting, but I'm not going to go there.
His death was announced on Thursday on his website and on social media accounts. It did not say precisely when or where he died. Dan Calabrese, the website’s editor, attributed the death to the coronavirus, which President Trump, in a White House briefing, later referred to as the “China virus” and a “horrible plague” in affirming it as the cause.
Mr. Cain had been hospitalized in the Atlanta area this month after testing positive for the virus on June 29.
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Mr. Cain had attended President Trump’s indoor rally in Tulsa, Okla., on June 20 and had done “a lot of traveling” recently, Mr. Calabrese said.
“I don’t think there’s any way to trace this to the one specific contact that caused him to be infected,” he said at the time. “We’ll never know.”
A federal appeals court in Washington will take a second look at a judge’s effort to scrutinize the Justice Department’s decision to drop its case against President Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn.The DoJ decision was corrupt as hell, and it was clearly pushed because William Barr sees himself as Donald Trump's consigliere, and not the Attorney General for the United States of America.
The full U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit agreed Thursday to revisit U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan’s plan to examine the politically charged matter, reviving the unusual case testing the limits of the judiciary’s power to check the executive branch.
The court’s brief order set oral arguments for Aug. 11. The decision to rehear the case before a full complement of judges wipes out the June ruling from a three-judge panel that ordered Sullivan to immediately dismiss the case and said Sullivan was wrong to appoint a retired federal judge to argue against the government’s move to undo Flynn’s guilty plea.
In May, Sullivan refused to go along with the government’s request to end the criminal case against Flynn, who twice pleaded guilty to lying to federal agents about his contacts with Russia’s ambassador in Washington before Trump took office in 2017.
Instead, Sullivan asked retired federal judge John Gleeson to argue against the Justice Department’s request. That prompted Flynn’s attorneys to take the rare step of asking the appeals court to intervene midstream, and they accused Sullivan of bias.
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The order from the court Thursday suggests that the judges are seeking a narrowly focused argument on the question of whether Flynn should have waited to appeal until after Sullivan rendered a decision. The court told lawyers on both sides to be prepared at oral argument to address whether Flynn had “no other adequate means to attain the relief” he sought from the appeals court.
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The initial ruling against Sullivan from the three-judge panel cut short his plans to hold a hearing to examine the government’s decision.
Not only did initial jobless claims go up for the 2nd week in a row, but the 2nd quarter GDP numbers show an annual 32.9% decline.The economy contracted at a record rate last quarter and July setbacks for the jobs market added to signs of a slowing recovery as the country faces a summer surge in coronavirus infections.This is unbelievably grim.
The Commerce Department said U.S. gross domestic product—the value of all goods and services produced across the economy—fell at a seasonally and inflation adjusted 32.9% annual rate in the second quarter, or a 9.5% drop compared with the prior quarter. The figures were the steepest declines in more than 70 years of record-keeping.
Meanwhile, the Labor Department’s latest figures on unemployment benefits suggested the jobs market was faltering. The number of workers applying for initial unemployment benefits rose for the second straight week—by a seasonally adjusted 12,000 to 1.43 million in the week ended July 25—after nearly four months of decreases following a late-March peak. The number of people receiving unemployment benefits increased by 867,000 to 17 million in the week ended July 18, ending a downward trend that started in mid-May.
If This Strikes You as Crazed Hyperbole, You Are Either Painfully Ignorant or Chris Cillizza. but I Repeat Myself.Mr. Rosario asks the question, "Why Do Liberals Unfriend People Over Politics?," and answers himself, "Because Conservatives Are Soulless Monsters."
—Justin Rosario at The Daily Banter
Only Goldman Sachs. Last week, after months of public sparring and days of tough in-person negotiations, the Wall Street bank finally reached a deal with Malaysia over allegations that it had helped a former prime minister loot billions of dollars from the state investment fund, 1MDB.Mr. Schorr means that he hopes that GS will continue business as usual.
Goldman will fork out $2.5bn, instead of the $7.5bn the finance minster had originally demanded, and the Malaysian government agreed to drop criminal charges against the bank and cease legal proceedings against 17 current and former Goldman directors.
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Evercore’s Glenn Schorr argues that “the only thing that matters is, will this prevent Goldman from doing business in the way they need to do business? I believe it won’t.” If history — and the Malaysian result — is any guide, Mr Schorr is on to something.
A federal judge has ordered the state of New York to quickly pay unemployment benefits to four Uber and Lyft drivers who have been waiting for the payments since March or April. The New York Taxi Workers Alliance, which filed a lawsuit over the issue back in May, says that the ruling could ultimately help thousands of drivers in similar situations.Assuming that Andrew "Rat Faced Andy" Cuomo is not in the gig companies' pockets, (a big if) collecting wage data, along with pursuing payment of premiums, should occur as a matter of basic bureaucratic imperative.
Uber and Lyft have long argued that its drivers are independent contractors, not employees. That stance has come under increasing pressure. Since 2016, the New York Department of Labor has held that ride-hail drivers were employees for purposes of unemployment insurance. But Uber and Lyft have dragged their feet, failing to provide wage data that would enable the agency to calculate unemployment payments for each worker.
As a result, when Uber and Lyft drivers forced out of work by the pandemic applied for unemployment benefits, some were told that they weren't eligible because state data showed them with zero earnings. Workers continued to be denied benefits even after they submitted 1099 tax forms showing their earnings.
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In her Tuesday ruling, Judge LaShann DeArcy Hall sided squarely with the drivers. She acknowledged that Uber and Lyft bore some of the blame for failing to supply the state with necessary data. But she said the state still had an obligation to pay benefits promptly—using data supplied by workers themselves if necessary.
PLAYBOOK PM: After we reported that @replouiegohmert was positive, we got an email from a Gohmert aide. pic.twitter.com/x31CSOdkLf— Jake Sherman (@JakeSherman) July 29, 2020
Donald Trump has made warnings about the threat of antifa and “far-left fascism” a central part of his re-election campaign. But in reality leftwing attacks have left far fewer people dead than violence by rightwing extremists, new research indicates, and antifa activists have not been linked to a single murder in decades.If the right wing were treated as the threat that they actually are, we'd have hundreds of co-conspirators in prison serving sentences or awaiting trial right now.
A new database of nearly 900 politically motivated attacks and plots in the United States since 1994 includes just one attack staged by an anti-fascist that led to fatalities. In that case, the single person killed was the perpetrator.
Over the same time period, American white supremacists and other rightwing extremists have carried out attacks that left at least 329 victims dead, according to the database.
More broadly, the database lists 21 victims killed in leftwing attacks since 2010 , and 117 victims of rightwing attacks in that same period – nearly six times as much. Attacks inspired by the Islamic State and similar jihadist groups, in contrast, killed 95 people since 2010, slightly fewer than rightwing extremists, according to the data set. More than half of these victims died in a a single attack on a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, in 2016.
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While researchers sometimes disagree on how to categorize the ideology of specific attacks, multiple databases that track extremist violence, including data maintained by the Anti-Defamation League, and from journalists at the Center for Investigative Reporting, have found the same trend: It’s violent rightwing attacks, not “far-left” violence, that presents the greater deadly threat to Americans today.
In yet another example of the weirdness that is 2020, or with an assist from anthropogenic climate change, Maine has seen its first ever shark attack death:A woman swimming off Bailey Island in Harpswell on Monday afternoon was attacked and killed by a shark in what one expert says is the first such fatality recorded in Maine waters.I will be so glad when this year is over.
The woman has not been identified pending notification of her family.
She was swimming offshore near homes on White Sails Lane when a witness saw her being attacked by what appeared to be a shark, the Maine Marine Patrol said.
Two kayakers brought the victim and another woman to shore, where a crew of Harpswell emergency responders met them. The woman died at the scene.
The second woman, who was swimming with the victim, was not injured, said Jeff Nichols, a marine patrol spokesman.
“This is the first documented fatality ever in Maine,” James Sulikowski, a former University of New England professor and researcher who conducts shark research in Maine and locations worldwide, said in an interview Monday evening. “Shark interactions with humans are very rare in Maine.
“My guess is that the person was mistaken as a food item. In this area of Maine and depending on how close to shore the event occurred, my guess is it was a white shark.”
Senate Republicans copied key parts of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s controversial corporate immunity law and pasted it word-for-word into their new coronavirus relief proposal released on Monday. The provision could shield health care industry CEOs, executives and corporate board members from COVID-related lawsuits in the event that their business decisions end up injuring or killing health care workers and patients."Rat Faced Andy" Cuomo is a cancer on the Democratic party.
Among all federal lawmakers running for reelection in 2020, Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is the top recipient of campaign cash from the hospital and nursing home industries. One of the biggest career donors to Texas GOP Sen. John Cornyn — the author of the bill — is a private equity firm that owns one of the nation’s largest hospital staffing companies. Additionally, a super PAC defending Senate Republican incumbents also just received $10 million from a private equity billionaire whose firm owns another major medical staffing conglomerate.
Executives from those industries stand to benefit from the corporate immunity provision that Senate Republicans spliced into their legislation.
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TMI previously reported that in April, Cuomo worked with a major health care industry lobby group to slip language into his state’s budget designed to block lawsuits against hospitals and nursing homes during the pandemic, as the casualty count exploded in New York. The provisions did not just cover frontline health care workers -- it included language extending that protection to any ”health care facility administrator, executive, supervisor, board member, trustee,” or other corporate manager.
Cuomo pushed the provision after his political machine received more than $1 million from the Greater New York Hospital Association.
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“Governor Cuomo brushes aside criticism for his mishandling of nursing homes as Republican partisan politics but as it turns out he has inspired Republicans to follow his policies,” said New York Democratic Assemblyman Ron Kim, who has fought to repeal the immunity provision in New York. “Giving nursing home executives and health care corporations early blanket legal and criminal immunity was just wrong, plain and simple.”
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Amid growing outrage over the corporate immunity law, Democratic lawmakers in Albany passed Kim’s bill to narrow their state’s liability shield.
But if Senate Republicans pass their legislation in Washington, the New York statute will effectively become the law of the land in every state in the country.
A masked man who was seen in a viral video smashing the windows of a south Minneapolis auto parts store during the George Floyd protests, earning him the moniker "Umbrella Man," is suspected of ties with a white supremacist group and sought to incite racial tension, police said.One would hope that whoever ends up investigating this is not connected with the Minneapolis PD or DA, because only through a truly independent investigation give us a credible narrative.
A Minneapolis police arson investigator said the act of vandalism at the AutoZone on E. Lake Street helped spark a chain reaction that led to days of looting and rioting. The store was among dozens of buildings across the city that burned to the ground in the days that followed.
"This was the first fire that set off a string of fires and looting throughout the precinct and the rest of the city," Sgt. Erika Christensen wrote in a search warrant affidavit filed in court this week. "Until the actions of the person your affiant has been calling 'Umbrella Man,' the protests had been relatively peaceful. The actions of this person created an atmosphere of hostility and tension. Your affiant believes that this individual's sole aim was to incite violence."
Police identified "Umbrella Man" thanks to a tip that came via e-mail last week, Christensen said.
The Star Tribune could not independently verify the police account, which has so far only surfaced in the search warrant, and isn't naming the man because so far he has not been charged with a crime. The man, who has a criminal history that includes convictions of domestic violence and assault, did not respond to messages seeking comment. Spokespersons for the Minneapolis Police Department and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which is also involved in the investigation, declined to comment.
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Christensen wrote in the affidavit that she watched "innumerable hours" of videos on social media platforms to try to identify "Umbrella Man," to no avail. Investigators finally caught a break when a tipster e-mailed the MPD identifying him as a member of the Hells Angels biker gang who "wanted to sow discord and racial unrest by breaking out the windows and writing what he did on the double red doors," she wrote.
Police have also connected the 32-year-old man to a widely publicized incident in Stillwater late last month, in which a Muslim woman was confronted by men wearing white supremacist garb.
A subsequent investigation revealed the man was also an associate of the Aryan Cowboy Brotherhood, a small white supremacist prison and street gang based primarily in Minnesota and Kentucky. Several of its members were also present at the Stillwater incident.
American tech giants have enjoyed a reversal of their EU legal fortunes over the past fortnight as Euro nation courts issued rulings in their favor – and now Facebook has even sued the European Union itself, alleging the political bloc’s agencies broke their own data protection rules.
Facebook filed a lawsuit against EU competition regulators on Monday alleging that enforcers were improperly seeking access to sensitive employee personal data.
Theantisocial media network said in a statement to financial newswire Reuters that EU regulators had made “exceptionally broad” demands for documents during an antitrust investigation into Facebook’s online marketplace.
Facebook assistant general counsel Tim Lamb was quoted as saying, apparently with a straight face: “The exceptionally broad nature of the Commission’s requests means we would be required to turn over predominantly irrelevant documents that have nothing to do with the Commission’s investigations, including highly sensitive personal information such as employees’ medical information, personal financial documents, and private information about family members of employees.”
Notwithstanding Facebook's business model of encouraging the world's citizens to upload such details about themselves to Facebook's services for the company to monetise, the suit has been filed in the EU General Court in Luxembourg. It includes demands for the court to halt further EU regulatory data demands against Facebook until further notice. An EU Commission spokesman said it would defend the lawsuit.
Facebook also told the newswire that EU agents had demanded copies of any internal Facebook document containing phrases such as “not good for us”, “big question” and “shut down”, among 2,500 others.
A revolt is brewing among Bernie Sanders delegates three weeks from the Democratic National Convention.Good. It's rational to make this a fight on principle.
More than 360 delegates, most of whom back Sanders, have signed on to a pledge to vote against the Democratic Party’s platform if it does not include support for "Medicare for All," the petition’s organizers told POLITICO. They argue that single-payer health care is an urgent priority amid a worldwide pandemic and the biggest unemployment crisis since the Great Depression.
“This pandemic has shown us that our private health insurance system does not work for the American people. Millions of people have lost their jobs and their health care at the same time,” said Judith Whitmer, a Sanders delegate and chair of the convention’s Nevada delegation who helped spearhead the pledge. “There’s people leaving the hospital now with millions of dollars in medical bills. What are we going to do about that?”
What, you thought you were safe? You’d get through the big “Cancel Culture” war without me popping off?If I could distill this article into one sentence, and you should read the whole thing, it is, "Words can hurt, but silence kills."
No such luck.
Public morality should be pretty simple. When an oppressed group gets enough power to make its oppressors behave, they will do so — and they should.
The real problem, the kind of thing that would make De Niro in Casino groan, “Amateur night!”, starts when people imagine that they can stop immoral behavior by policing immoral characters, phrases, or scenes in literature.
They’re looking for the wrong thing. They’re sniffing for depictions of immorality, when they should be scanning the silences, the evasions.
There’s a very naïve theory of language at work here, roughly: “if people speak nicely, they’ll act nicely” — with the fatuous corollary, “If people mention bad things, they must like bad things.”
The simplest refutation of that is two words: Victorian Britain.
Victorian Britain carried out several of the biggest genocides in human history. It was also a high point of virtuous literature.
Because they were smart about language. They didn’t rant about the evil of their victims or gloat about massacring them, at least not in their public writings. They wrote virtuous novels, virtuous poems. And left a body count which may well end up the biggest in world history.
Open genocidal ranting is small-time stuff compared to the rhetorical nuke perfected by Victoria’s genocidaires: silence. The Victorian Empire was the high point of this technology, which is why it still gets a pass most of the time. Even when someone takes it on and scores a direct hit, as Mike Davis did in his book Late Victorian Holocausts, the cone of Anglosphere silence contains and muffles the explosion. Which is why Late Victorian Holocausts is Davis’s only book that didn’t become a best-seller.
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But that didn’t happen. There was no wave of conscience among historians of the British Empire in the 1920s (or 30s or 40s or, to end the suspense, ever.)
Davis puts it bluntly: “[T]he famine children of 1876 and 1899 have disappeared.”
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They’re very grim lessons, as it happens. While grad students comb texts for improper remarks, they miss the real point: the vast silence, and the paint-job of virtue that helps distract us.
Ideology doesn’t seem to do any good at clearing away the bigotry of Imperial history. Charles Kingsley, prominent novelist of mid-nineteenth-century Britain, was honored as promoter of socialist causes — while he wrote in letters to his wife about his loathing for the “white chimpanzees” whose corpses were littering the roadside when he visited Sligo [Ireland] during the Famine in the 1840s.
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Visiting County Sligo, Ireland, he wrote a letter to his wife from Markree Castle in 1860: “I am haunted by the human chimpanzees I saw along that hundred miles of horrible country [Ireland] … to see white chimpanzees is dreadful; if they were black one would not see it so much, but their skins, except where tanned by exposure, are as white as ours.”
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There are no excuses for this. There are reasons, but as the song says, “It doesn’t make it all right.” Still, once the rage passes and you stop clenching your jaw ’til it aches, there are reasons. Most of all, there’s a deep Imperial skill in the trope of silence. The stupid Nazis ranted and raved and lasted 13 years, then got completely destroyed. The Empire kept its rants for private letters, passed on to a guild of coopted historians, pundits, and publishers—and has never been called to account.
Maybe it never will be. That poor optimist radical Davis mentions thought the exposé would be big news by 1925. Well, it’s 2020, and the Empire is still remembered fondly. Victoria herself is a beloved figure all over again.
Silence is the only really effective PR for a genocide, and the nature of artificial famines, as opposed to mass executions, makes silence particularly effective. Famines, most people still believe, are acts of God, or matters of chance, or perhaps (under their breath) the result of the sheer fecklessness of the victims, for being Papists as in Ireland, or Hindus as in India, or Muslims as in contemporary Somalia. After all, the Empire wasn’t standing people up against a wall and shooting them (except sometimes, as in Kenya, and the Empire handled that by putting the records on ships and dropping them into the Indian Ocean.)
Silence, not Nazi-style boasting. That’s the key. We should be looking for omissions, not gaffes. Gaffes are for hicks like Hitler. Silence is the grown-up way to hide vast genocides.
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That, folks, is how you cover up a genocide. It’s leaked a little in the 170 years since it was successfully carried out. But it lasted longer than any other cursed tomb in history. Nowhere — not in Dublin, not in London — was there any commemoration of the Famine on its 50th anniversary in 1897, or its hundredth in 1947. In 1998 Blair gave a very carefully-worded quasi-apology, and I still remember Jeremy Clarkson’s response: “I see Blair has apologized to the Irish for poisoning their potatoes.”
In short, this method works. We are its products; we live in the delusion it created, and like it or not, Hobsbawm and a host of other Igors have that blood on their hands along with the outright vampires. Sometimes you end up angrier at the Igors than the Nosferatus.
………“The Central Government [of British India] under the leadership of Queen Victoria’s leading poet, Lord Lytton, vehemently opposed efforts…to stockpile grain or otherwise interfere with market forces. All through the Autumn of 1876, while the kharif crop was withering in the fields… Lytton had been absorbed in organizing the immense Imperial Assemblage in Delhi to proclaim Victoria Empress of India (Kaiser-e-Hind). As The Times [of London]’s special correspondent described it, ‘The Viceroy seemed to have made the tales of Arabian fiction come true…nothing was too rich, nothing too costly.’ [This feast] ‘achieved the two criteria [set for Lytton], of being ‘gaudy enough to impress the orientals’ and…a pageant which hid the nakedness of the sword on which we really rely.’ An English journalist later estimated that 100,000 of the Queen-Empress’s subjects starved to death…in the course of Lytton’s spectacular durbar.”………
You won’t find gloating, you won’t see death’s heads on every officer’s cap. That stuff was for the Nazis, who were hicks themselves. The pro’s, like Lord Lytton, wrote virtuous, vapory blather like this. Reams of it. Best smoke-screen a genocidaire could want.
Today California child care providers announced they have voted to be represented by the statewide child care provider union, Child Care Providers United. This result, which comes after providers succeeded in their 17-year battle to win authorizing legislation from the state, gives care providers the ability to bargain together for higher pay, better training, and the kind of improvements that mean their families will no longer have to struggle just to pay for necessities. With an overwhelming vote for CCPU, the 45,000 family child care providers will gain official recognition and bargaining rights with the state of California.It took 15 years for the legislature to grant basic labor rights to child healthcare workers.
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The 97% CCPU yes vote also comes as child care providers are increasingly recognized for their essential role in California’s recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic and its widespread economic fallout.
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Child care providers, many over the age of 55, have continued to work daily, providing essential early learning for the children of grocery store clerks, nurses, and other frontline workers. At the same time, they’ve faced added financial pressure from reduced enrollment. Providers said winning this union election means they will have a strong platform from which to work with the state to keep their home-based child care businesses open to parents who are counting on them now more than ever. The pandemic has also revealed the need for providers to have a voice to bargain for the kind of training and protective equipment needed to keep their families and those they care for safe.
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For a workforce that is mostly women and 74% people of color, succeeding in winning union representation is also a significant step forward in their fight for racial justice for their own families and the young people they educate. Last Monday, providers in Los Angeles, Sacramento, and San Francisco led children in their care in art projects and discussions on the theme of racial justice as part of the Strike for Black lives, calling on the government to value each child equally, whether brown, Black, white, API or Native American. Doing so, they said, requires rebalancing the economy and creating opportunity for children of color by ensuring corporations and the wealthy pay their fair share so our communities can invest in early care and education.
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Today’s vote culminates providers’ decades-long fight for union rights. Last fall, after many years of being denied the rights that other workers have — the right to form a union and bargain for higher pay, family-sustaining benefits, and other improvements — the legislature passed and Governor Newsom signed into law AB 378 (Limón) which enables child care providers to bargain for important, lasting improvements to the child care system.
The vote was a mail-in secret ballot election conducted by the American Arbitration Association under the direction of the California Public Employment Board. Family child care providers have been working to win their rights since 2003 by organizing in their communities, forming their union, and working with elected officials.
Press freedom groups and journalist organisations are among 40 groups to today call for the British Government to release Wikileaks founder Julian Assange on his 49th birthday.Meanwhile, the journalists who actually worked with him to break the story are studiously silent.
The International Federation of Journalists, Reporters Without Borders, Pen International and the National Union of Journalists are among those to sign the letter.
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The co-signers write: “This [indictment] is an unprecedented escalation of an already disturbing assault on journalism in the US, where President Donald Trump has referred to the news media as the ‘enemy of the people’.
“Whereas previous presidents have prosecuted whistleblowers and other journalistic sources under the Espionage Act for leaking classified information, the Trump Administration has taken the further step of going after the publisher. ”
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Full list of the groups calling for Julian Assange’s release
Nathan Fuller, Executive Director, Courage Foundation
Rebecca Vincent, Director of International Campaigns, Reporters Without Borders (RSF)
Adil Soz, International Foundation for Protection of Freedom of Speech
Anthony Bellanger, General Secretary – International Federation of Journalists (IFJ)
Archie Law, Chair Sydney Peace Foundation
Carles Torner, Executive Director, PEN International
Christine McKenzie, President, PEN Melbourne
Daniel Gorman, Director, English PEN
Kjersti Løken Stavrum, President, PEN Norway
Lasantha De Silva, Freed Media Movement
Marcus Strom, President, MEAA Media, Australia
Mark Isaacs, President of PEN International Sydney
Michelle Stanistreet, general secretary, National Union of Journalists (NUJ)
Mousa Rimawi, Director, MADA – the Palestinian Center for Development and Media Freedoms
Naomi Colvin, UK/Ireland Programme Director, Blueprint for Free Speech
Nora Wehofsits, Advocacy Officer, European Centre for Press and Media Freedom (ECPMF)
Peter Tatchell, Peter Tatchell Foundation
Ralf Nestmeyer, Vice President, German PEN
Rev Tim Costello AO, Director of Ethical Voice
Robert Wood, Chair, PEN Perth
Ruth Smeeth, Chief Executive Officer, Index on Censorship
Sarah Clarke, Head of Europe and Central Asia, ARTICLE 19
Silkie Carlo, Director, Big Brother Watch
William Horsley, Media Freedom Representative, Association of European Journalists
Foundation for Press Freedom (Fundación para la Libertad de Prensa)
Americans for Democracy & Human Rights in Bahrain (ADHRB)
Bytes for All (B4A)
Center for Media Freedom & Responsibility (CMFR)
The Center for Media Studies and Peacebuilding (CEMESP-Liberia)
The Centre for Investigative Journalism (CIJ)
Free Media Movement Sri Lanka
Freedom Forum Nepal
IFoX / Initiative for Freedom of Expression – Turkey
International Association of Democratic Lawyers
International Press Centre (IPC)
The International Press Institute (IPI)
Media Foundation for West Africa
Mediacentar Sarajevo
National Lawyers Guild International Committee
Pakistan Press Foundation (PPF)
South East Europe Media Organisation (SEEMO)
World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters (AMARC)
Gov. Mike DeWine reversed himself and called for the repeal of the House Bill 6 on Thursday, saying Speaker Larry Householder’s alleged bribery scheme “forever tainted” the $1.3 billion nuclear bailout law.It's not that he has had a meaningful change of heart, he still supports bailouts for the rich and lectures for the poor, it's just that his position in this has become politically toxic.
DeWine, who signed HB6 a year ago Thursday, reiterated that he supports the policy laid out in the bailout, saying it’s needed to preserve jobs at the Davis-Besse and Perry nuclear plants and keep carbon-free sources of energy.
“While the policy in my opinion is good, the process by which it was created stinks. It’s terrible, it’s not acceptable,” DeWine said during his televised coronavirus briefing.
The governor’s announcement marks a reversal from just the day before, when he stood by HB6 despite the federal charges against Householder and four allies regarding their acceptance of more than $60 million from FirstEnergy Corp. to get HB6 passed and thwart an anti-HB6 referendum effort.
Bolivia has postponed its presidential election for a second time due to coronavirus, which will leave its unelected president Jeanine Añez in power through to the end of the year.Bolivia's right, and its center-right, believe that it is illegitimate (literally an affront to God) for the indigenous majority in the country to hold political power, so I would expect further lawfare, and further violence, against the MAS and the poor.
The vote was due to take place on September 6. But with Covid-19 cases still rising in what is one of the poorest countries in Latin America, the top electoral court set a new date of October 18, with a second round, if needed, on November 29. The new government would take office in December.
The court said that “there is a consensus that the [coronavirus] peak [in Bolivia] will come sometime between the end of July and the first days of September”.
The decision is good news for Ms Añez, who had argued that Bolivians should not go to the polls until the worst had passed, and a blow to her main rival, Luis Arce, leader of the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) party that held power under longtime president Evo Morales until last year. He has accused Ms Añez of using the pandemic to cling to power.
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It seemed she would be in the job for a matter of weeks — just long enough to organise fresh elections and oversee a transition. But after repeatedly saying she had no intention of running for the presidency, she did a U-turn in January and threw her hat into the ring.
The election was first scheduled for May but then pushed back due to the pandemic.
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The last key poll before the pandemic suggested Ms Añez was third in voter intentions, behind Mr Arce and Carlos Mesa, a former president and the more centrist of the three candidates. Some polls since then have suggested Ms Añez had regained ground, but they have all been conducted online because of the lockdown.
Earlier this month, the Bolivian right moved to block Mr Arce’s participation in the election, saying he had breached electoral rules by publishing an opinion poll during the campaign period. The case is before a court.
In a Collapsed State, the Market Rules to the Exclusion of Any Other ConcernsSpecifically, the author maintains that the free market fundamentalism of the United States will lead to an societal collapse:
—The Baffler
………I tend to refer to Neoliberal policies as, "Eating our own seed corn," but this seems to be a bit more intellectually rigorous.
To illustrate his point, [journalist Robert Kaplan, author of "The Coming Anarchy"] Kaplan traveled to the West African nation of Sierra Leone. In the thick of a decade-long civil war, Sierra Leone was the poster child for failed states. The term had come into general use after 1992, when it appeared in a Foreign Policy article written by two U.S. State Department officials, Gerald Helman and Steven Ratner (not to be confused with Steve Rattner, a controversial figure involved in the 2008 economic bailout).
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Against this backdrop, Kaplan described Sierra Leone, a country once known as the Athens of West Africa, as a bellwether for the “withering away of central governments, the rise of tribal and regional domains, the unchecked spread of disease, and the growing pervasiveness of war.” While critics charged Kaplan with trading in racist tropes, he made it clear that this Hobbesian future was not confined to any single continent or country. “West Africa’s future, eventually, will also be that of most of the rest of the world,” he predicted.
What Kaplan missed was the organization behind Sierra Leone’s apparent chaos. For ordinary citizens, wartime Sierra Leone was chaotic, but the economic system was organized, if brutal. Sierra Leoneans called it the Sell Game: rival armies looting the countryside while vying for control of the country’s illicit diamond trade.
Sierra Leone’s Sell Game exemplifies state failure’s central characteristic, as the term has evolved. In the words of Robert I. Rotberg, former director of the Program on Intrastate Conflict, Conflict Prevention, and Conflict Resolution at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, in a collapsed state, “the market rules to the exclusion of any other concerns.”
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Yet the prescience of Kaplan’s Big Idea is truly remarkable. As Kaplan predicted in 1994, West Africa in the 1990s was a dire warning of global trends now hitting our shores. Not the amputations—although who knows how far things will go—but the withering of the nation-state, the rise of tribalism, big man politics, and above all, the Sell Game.
Welcome to the Failed State of America.
Donors and civil society groups spend tens of millions of dollars every year trying to combat corruption. They do it because corruption has been shown to increase poverty and inequality while undermining trust in the government. Reducing corruption is essential to improve public services and strengthen the social contract between citizens and the state.The NGOs, and more importantly the donors, will likely be impervious to data showing that what they do does not work.
But what if anti-corruption efforts actually make the situation worse?
Our research in Lagos, Nigeria, found that anti-corruption messages often have an unintended effect. Instead of building public resolve to reject corrupt acts, the messages we tested either had no effect or actually made people more likely to offer a bribe.
The reason may be that the messages reinforce popular perceptions that corruption is pervasive and insurmountable. In doing so, they encourage apathy and acceptance rather than inspire activism.
Filings for weekly unemployment benefits rose for the first time in nearly four months as some states rolled back reopenings because of the coronavirus pandemic, a sign the jobs recovery could be faltering.This is going to get ugly.
Initial unemployment claims rose by a seasonally adjusted 109,000 to 1.4 million for the week ended July 18, the Labor Department said Thursday, halting what had been a steady descent from a peak of 6.9 million in late March, when the pandemic and business closures shut down parts of the U.S. economy.
The increase followed a period where claims had settled around 1.3 million a week, well above the pre-pandemic record of 695,000 in 1982.
As Caribbean beaches and resorts begin welcoming back international tourists, there’s one group that’s increasingly being left out: Americans.So much winning.
Tropical vacation spots across the region are giving U.S. citizens the cold shoulder amid fears they might spread the coronavirus, cutting Americans off from one of the few regions that was still accessible to them.
This week, the Bahamas will begin barring commercial flights and passenger ships from the U.S., even as it invites Canadian and European tourists to visit. The Dutch countries of St. Maarten and Curacao have also reopened to almost everyone but U.S. travelers.
The influential Washington-based U.S.-Ukraine Foundation (USUF) hosted a webinar on July 15 about a documentary about Vasyl Slipak, a famed Ukrainian opera singer who died in 2016 fighting alongside the ultranationalist Right Sector’s “Volunteer Ukrainian Corps” (DUK) in eastern Ukraine.I get that foreign policy ain't beanbag, but experience shows that appeasing Nazi movements is not a good long term strategy.
The webinar featured an appearance by Diana Vynohradova (Kamlyuk), a sieg-heiling neo-Nazi decorated with white supremacist tattoos. Vynohradova was convicted of participating in a notorious racist murder and has incited hatred against Jews, denigrating them as “kikes.”
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Zaborona reported that Vynohradova was convicted in the early 2000s for her participation in the racist murder of a Nigerian citizen. “I don’t like Negroes,” her friend replied when asked why he stabbed the Nigerian to death.
While in prison, Vynohradova wrote poems for the notorious neo-Nazi band Sokyra Peruna. During the 2013-14 “Revolution of Dignity,” she advised protesters from the main stage on Kyiv’s Independence Square “not to give in to supplications from the kikes.”
In the past, Vynohradova wore a neo-Nazi “1488” tattoo on her right arm, but she has since covered it up. She has not bothered to hide the white supremacist Celtic Cross above it, however, and continues to sport a kolovrat necklace — a Slavic pagan symbol that resembles a swastika.
A powerful earthquake located off Alaska’s southern coast jolted some coastal communities late Tuesday, and some residents briefly scrambled for higher ground over fears of a tsunami.I really hope that the fault line is not going to open up like a zipper.
There were no immediate reports of damage in the sparsely populated area of the state, and tsunami warning was canceled after the magnitude 7.8 quake off the Alaska Peninsula produced a wave of a less than a foot.
According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the earthquake struck Tuesday at 10:12 p.m. local time, centered in waters 65 miles south-southeast of Perryville, Alaska at a depth of 17 miles.
Because of its location, nearby communities along the Alaska Peninsula did not experience shaking that would normally be associated with that magnitude of a quake, said Michael West, Alaska State Seismologist.
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More than a dozen aftershocks of magnitude 4.0 or higher were reported immediately after the earthquake, he said by telephone from the Alaska Earthquake Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
“We got people here who are going be working all night,” West said early Wednesday morning. “These aftershocks will go and go and go and go.”
The Alaska-Aleutian Trench was also where a magnitude 9.2 quake in 1964 was centered. That remains the second most powerful earthquake ever recorded. The temblor and ensuing tsunami caused widespread damage and killed 131 people, some as far away as Oregon and California. Alaska is the most actively seismic state. Nearly 25,000 earthquakes have been recorded in Alaska since Jan. 1, according to the center.
The New York legislature today passed a moratorium on the use of facial recognition and other forms of biometric identification in schools until 2022. The bill, which has yet to be signed by Governor Andrew Cuomo, comes in response to the launch of facial recognition by the Lockport City School District and appears to be the first in the nation to explicitly regulate or ban use of the technology in schools.Letting private companies profit from spying on our children is wrong.
In January, Lockport became one of the only U.S. school districts to adopt facial recognition in all of its K-12 buildings, which serve about 5,000 students. Proponents argued the $1.4 million system made by Canada-based SN Technologies’ Aegis kept students safe by enforcing watchlists and sending alerts when it detected someone dangerous (or otherwise unwanted). It could also detect 10 types of guns and alert select district personnel and law enforcement. But critics said it could be used to surveil students and build a database of sensitive information the school district might struggle to keep secure.
While the Lockport schools’ privacy policy stated that the watchlist wouldn’t include students and the database would only cover non-students deemed a threat, including sex offenders or those banned by court order, district superintendent Michelle Bradley ultimately oversaw which individuals were added to the system. It was reported earlier this month that school board president John Linderman couldn’t guarantee student photos would never be included for disciplinary reasons.
Government assistance. https://t.co/AXYTGw72NZ
— Jessica Cisneros (@JCisnerosTX) July 22, 2020
In a stunning reversal, President Donald Trump announced Thursday evening that he was canceling the Republican National Convention in Jacksonville next month, abruptly calling off an event he’d pushed only weeks earlier to relocate from North Carolina to his home state.This is a complete cluster-f%$#, which I find intensely amusing.
Trump announced the decision during a White House news conference, saying “the timing of the event is not right” amid the surging coronavirus outbreak in Florida, where earlier in the day officials announced a state record of 173 COVID-19 deaths.
“I told my team it’s time to cancel the Jacksonville, Florida, component of the GOP convention,” Trump said, adding that his campaign would still hold “tele-rallies” and online events. “I’ll still do a convention speech in a different form, but we won’t do a big crowded convention per se. It’s just not the right time for that.”
Trump’s announcement — which caught some of his closest allies off guard after he pushed the event out of Charlotte, N.C., in the hope that he could give his nomination acceptance speech in a packed arena in Florida — signals a shift in position on the novel coronavirus pandemic, which he’d attempted to write off for months as a minimal threat.
The decision also avoids a potentially embarrassing clash with Jacksonville city and law enforcement officials, who warned early this week that attempts to gather thousands of law enforcement officers to police the event had fallen short. A workshop with the city council was scheduled Friday to go over make-or-break legislation that some council members had said they might not support.
“We appreciate President Donald Trump considering our public health and safety concerns in making this incredibly difficult decision,” Jacksonville Sheriff Mike Williams and Mayor Lenny Curry said in a joint statement.
This month, Stephen Miller, the extremist anti-immigrant Trump adviser who has promoted white nationalist ideas, lost a relative to the coronavirus pandemic, and his uncle tells Mother Jones that the Trump administration is partly to blame for this death.I get that he doesn't care about black and brown people, but this is his GRANDMOTHER that they are lying about.
On July 4, David Glosser, the brother of Miller’s mother, posted a Facebook note announcing the death of his mother, Ruth Glosser, who was Miller’s maternal grandmother:
This morning my mother, Ruth Glosser, died of the late effects of COVID-19 like so many thousands of other people; both young and old. She survived the acute infection but was left with lung and neurological damage that destroyed her will to eat and her ability to breathe well enough to sustain arousal and consciousness. Over an 8-week period she gradually slipped away and died peacefully this morning.………
In response to a request seeking comment from Miller, a White House spokesperson sent Mother Jones this statement:
This is categorically false, and a disgusting use of so-called journalism when the family deserves privacy to mourn the loss of a loved one. His grandmother did not pass away from COVID. She was diagnosed with COVID in March and passed away in July so that timeline does not add up at all. His grandmother died peacefully in her sleep from old age. I would hope that you would choose not to go down this road.………
Moreover, Ruth Glosser’s death certificate—which her son shared with Mother Jones—lists her cause of death as “respiratory arrest” resulting from “COVID-19.”
Informed that Ruth Glosser’s death certificate cited COVID-19, the White House spokesperson replied, “Again, this is categorically false. She had a mile [sic] case of COVID-19 in March. She was never hospitalized and made a full and quick recovery.”
In mid-June, on a sunny late afternoon, dozens of protesters led by Indigenous and youth organizers gathered in front of the Albuquerque Museum at the feet of La Jornada, a statue of Spanish conquistador Don Juan de Oñate. They called for the statue’s removal, saying it was a monument to a genocidal colonial history. On the outer banks of the crowd, at least six militiamen from the New Mexico Civil Guard, a civilian militia, flanked the protest in a tight semicircle, some of them shouldering assault rifles.The culture of policing in the United States is rotten to the core.
When some of the protesters began taking a pickax and chain to the statue, a man in a blue shirt — later identified as Steven Baca Jr. — sprayed a cloud of Mace at them. Then he threw a woman to the ground. Her head hit the pavement with an audible smack, and Baca fled, with protesters trailing him, shouting at him to leave. Baca turned to face a man in jeans and a black hoodie, who tackled him. A bystander’s video caught the scuffle that followed: Baca drew a handgun from his waistband and fired four shots. “There’s a man down,” someone shouted. “There’s a man down!”
Throughout the hours-long demonstration, Albuquerque police had waited behind the museum with an armored car, some watching from museum security cameras. Meanwhile, members of the so-called Civil Guard, dressed in Army uniforms and helmets, tried to keep protesters from the statue. They were there, they claimed, to keep peace and enforce the law. After Baca shot the protester three times, the militia surrounded him, protecting him as he sat in the street. The nearby police took four minutes to arrive. The protester, Scott Williams, was eventually taken to the hospital in critical condition.
The shooting at La Jornada, Spanish for “the expedition,” occurred several weeks after the beginning of #BlackLivesMatter protests in Albuquerque. At those demonstrations, too, a disquieting camaraderie between official police and another militia, the New Mexico Patriots, emerged. “We’re all here for the same cause, man,” an Albuquerque police officer said to a group of body-armored gym-goers and militiamen before a #BLM protest, according to a video taken by a militia member and shared online. “We’re here to help.”
The incidents are in line with the deeper history of the Albuquerque police’s behavior during the civil rights movement in the 1960s and early 1970s. High Country News unearthed archival documents from the Center for Southwest Research illuminating a history of police cooperation and cross-pollination with radical right-wing and vigilante groups in New Mexico. According to police and FBI reports, newspaper clippings and the testimony of activists, that cooperation included surveillance, harassment and misinformation campaigns against social justice movements by informants and radical provocateurs.
The fired Minneapolis police officer charged with killing George Floyd was charged along with his wife Wednesday with felony tax crimes dating back to 2014 that allege failure to claim more than $460,000 in income — at least $96,000 of that in his off-duty security work.I would note that the entire "Cops being paid cash for security by a club" thing is probably pretty common in Minneapolis.
Derek Chauvin and Kellie Chauvin, of Oakdale, were each charged by summons in Washington County District Court with nine felony counts of aiding and abetting false or fraudulent tax returns or failing to file returns.
From 2014 to 2019, the Chauvins underreported $464,433 in joint income and owed a total of $21,853 in taxes, according to the charges. With interest and late filing and fraud penalties, they owe $37,868, the complaints said.
Derek Chauvin, 46, remains jailed on second-degree murder and manslaughter charges in connection with the death of Floyd while in police custody on May 25. Three other ex-officers, Thomas Lane, J. Alexander Kueng and Tou Thao are charged with aiding and abetting Chauvin.
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The filing includes a litany of allegations. Among them, prosecutors say the Chauvins bought a new BMW X5 in January 2018 for $100,230 from a Minnetonka dealership and registered the SUV in Florida — they own a condo in Windermere, outside Orlando — and paid $4,664 in taxes in that state.
However, the vehicle was serviced 11 times in Minnetonka and never in Florida, investigators say they found. Kellie Chauvin told investigators they opted for Florida because it was less expensive. The taxes due on the SUV had it been registered in Minnesota were $5,053.
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The charges document various sources of income for the couple. The complaints said that between 2014 and 2019, Derek Chauvin made between $52,000 and $72,000 annually as a police officer. He also worked off-duty security nearly every weekend in that time at El Nuevo Rodeo dance club, Cub Foods, Midtown Global Market and EME Antro Bar on E. Lake Street.
During that span, Chauvin failed to pay taxes on nearly $96,000 he earned from El Nuevo Rodeo alone, investigators estimated.
Beginning in June 2019, he routinely worked off-duty at EME Antro Bar on weekends from 11 p.m. to 2:30 a.m. after his MPD shift and was paid $250 in cash each night, said investigators, who located no corresponding tax papers.
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A member of the Democratic wing of the Democratic party, and a fan of Bernie who thinks Neoliberal (DLC/New Dem) trickle down conomics sucks.Mechanical Engineer with a background in defense, electronics packaging, medical & food equipment, transportation, and manufacturing.
In my spare time (Hah!), I am the developer of the Firefox addon, bbCode for Web Extensions (bbCodeWebEx).
I have two cats, a black cat, and a gray and white long hair cat, who keep me on my toes. (Because he keeps attacking my feet)
I am a Jew and a Zionist, who is married to a woman with exquisitely bad taste in men, and I have two remarkable children with her.
