What a Surprise

It appears that the for profit Medicare Advantage insurance companies are systematically defrauding customers and the government.

This is business as usual when for profit companies are given a role in running basic government services.  It's also why for profit companies should never be given a role in running basic government services.

Kathy Ormsby’s work auditing medical case files uncovered an alleged scheme to defraud the federal government: The California health system that employed her was scouring health histories of thousands of elderly Medicare patients, then pressuring doctors to add false diagnoses it found to their current medical records.

The point of larding the medical records with outdated and irrelevant diagnoses such as cancer and stroke — often without the knowledge of the patients themselves — was not providing better care, according to a lawsuit from the Justice Department, which investigated a whistleblower complaint Ormsby filed. It was to make patients appear sicker than they were.

The maneuver translated into millions of dollars in inflated bills to the federal Medicare Advantage insurance program, the government alleged in its false-claims lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in California.

………

Ormsby’s former employer, the Palo Alto Medical Foundation, which has 1,600 doctors, and its parent affiliate, Sutter Health, which runs 24 hospitals in Northern California, settled the case with the government in August 2021 for $90 million. It admitted no wrongdoing or liability.

A quick wiki reveals that it had over 2 million visits in 2008.  If you figure that the fraud was going on for 5 years, that fine comes down to just a cost of doing business.

The government said its investigation confirmed that Palo Alto Medical and Sutter systematically added false diagnoses to patient records. In a sample of hundreds of cases Ormsby audited, the government’s lawsuit said, she discovered 90 percent of diagnoses for cancer were invalid, as were 96 percent for stroke and 66 percent for fractures.

Those numbers are truly staggering.

………

Medicare Advantage, which is run by outside companies under contract with the government, was added to traditional Medicare in 2003 with the support of Republicans in an effort to improve care and lower costs through privatization. But it is costing taxpayers increasingly more money to run than traditional fee-for-service Medicare, according to MedPAC, a government watchdog panel. The higher cost, what MedPAC labels “excess payments,” reached $12 billion in 2020 out of total program costs of $350 billion and are projected to top $16 billion next year, MedPAC said in March.

The aggressive billing tactics stem from incentives built into Medicare Advantage. Under the program, companies are paid a flat fee per month to provide whatever care is required for a patient based on age, gender, geography and health risk factors. To compensate plans and providers for potential costs of care for individual patients with conditions such as diabetes, heart disease or cancer, Medicare boosts the monthly payment to Medicare Advantage plans under a “risk adjustment” for each additional condition. The system differs from the traditional “fee for service” payment, in which Medicare pays hospitals and doctors directly each time they provide a service.

Of course Republicans adopted this idea.  It increases the opportunity for fraud, and the fraudsters will favor Republicans with campaign donations, and it makes Medicare increasingly untenable from a financial perspective.

………

For-profit insurance companies have typically been the primary target of these probes. More recently, unsealed whistleblower cases such as Ormsby’s against Sutter Health, and a pending case against Kaiser Permanente, reveal how such investigations have spread to prestigious, nonprofit physician and hospital groups.

This is why single payer is simply not enough, we need to go with government owned healthcare, and not just single.  The profit motive has so completely distorted the practice of medicine that it is a petri dish for fraud.  (Pun not intended)

Nothing to See Here, Move Along

In addition to it being a felony,* the fact that Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows has been accused of burning some official documents in his office, which constitutes an admission of guilt, or at least guilty intent, which is the requirement for a conspiracy charge.

I don't expect any charges though there should be:

Then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows burned papers in his office after meeting with a House Republican who was working to challenge the 2020 election, according to testimony the Jan. 6 select committee has heard from one of his former aides.

Cassidy Hutchinson, who worked under Meadows when he was former President Donald Trump’s chief of staff, told the panel investigating the Capitol attack that she saw Meadows incinerate documents after a meeting in his office with Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.). A person familiar with the testimony described it on condition of anonymity.

The Meadows-Perry meeting came in the weeks after Election Day 2020, as Trump and his allies searched for ways to reverse the election results.

It’s unclear whether Hutchinson told the committee which specific papers were burnt, and if federal records laws required the materials’ preservation. Meadows’ destruction of papers is a key focus for the select committee, and the person familiar with the testimony said investigators pressed Hutchinson for details about the issue for more than 90 minutes during a recent deposition.

………

Before the 2020 election, Perry — who represents the Harrisburg, Pa. region — had a relatively low national profile. But testimony and documents obtained by congressional investigators show he was the first person to connect Trump with Jeffrey Clark, a top Justice Department official who sympathized with the then-president’s efforts to overturn his loss to Joe Biden.

Senior Trump DOJ officials have testified that the former president came close to appointing Clark as acting attorney general in order to use the department’s extraordinary powers to sow doubt about the election results and urge state legislatures to consider overriding Biden’s victory.

Perry, now chair of the pro-Trump House Freedom Caucus, spent weeks pressing Meadows to implement the plan.

………

The select committee has also revealed that Meadows and Perry took steps to conceal some of their communications after the election. For example, in a Dec. 2020 text message exchange the committee included in an April court filing, Perry told Meadows he had “just sent you something on Signal,” referring to the encrypted messaging app popular with journalists and government officials.

If there is any justice in Washington, DC,‡ there would be a criminal investigation going on at this moment, but with "Meek Merrick" Garland in charge of the DoJ, I would put the chances at slim to none.

^*44 U.S.C. §2201, 18 USC §641, 18 USC §1361, 18 U.S. Code §2071, 18 U.S.C. §793, 18 U.S. Code § 1512, and 18 U.S.C. §1001, but I am an engineer, not a lawyer, dammit.^† (Link)
† I love it when I get to go all Dr. McCoy!
^‡Spoiler, there is no justice in Washington, DC. Ever Since Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon before he was tried, elite impunity has been the norm.

Linkage

• And Babies? (Angry Bear) The lede says it all, "Uvalde = My Lai. This is not hyperbole. War crimes are an inevitable byproduct of war. Mass shootings are an inevitable byproduct of militarism and a militarized culture. "
  
• In Final Slap to Bush-Era Neoconservatives, Iraq Criminalizes Contacts with Israel (Juan Cole) The final nail in the coffin for that entire benighted endeavor.
  
• The Evidence for Antidepressants Causing Mass Shootings (The Forgotten Side of Medicine) I'm a bit dubious, and correlation is not causation, but it bears study.
  
• Corporate America’s Favorite Legal Trick Is Backfiring (Jacobin) Mass filing as a way to make binding arbitration untenable.
  
• No more Elvis-themed weddings for Las Vegas chapels, a licensing company says (NPR) First, it is clear that extant of IP regulations is excessive.  Second, the chapels should consider Andy Kaufman themed weddings.
• The City of London is a major drain on productive economic activity in Britain (LBC) Greece's former Minister of Finance Yanis Varoufakis makes a strong argument for considering the City of London a parasitic force in the economy.
• 'Fantastic giant tortoise,' believed extinct, confirmed alive in the Galápagos (Phys.org) A bit of good news to start the week.
• Japan Is Dropping a Gargantuan Turbine Into The Ocean to Harness 'Limitless' Energy (Science Alert) It has potential, but I'd wait at least 5 years to see if this is viable.
• U.S. death rates show how politics are affecting public health (STAT) Right-wing areas, which generally have lower vaccination rates, and frequently are not covered by medicaid expansion, die more.  Hoocoodanode?
• She Helped Create the Big Lie. Records Suggest She Turned It Into a Big Grift. (Reveal) The founder of True the Vote is enriching herself.  This is a feature of many right wing "grassroots" organizations.

 

Kawaii!

Being Evil, Again

I already knew how Google Maps was misleading people about restaurants on Google maps, pointing people to (paid a fee to Google) delivery apps rather than the actual restaurants, but I am a bit surprised that Google maps is misdirecting women looking for abortion access to fraudulent "Pregnancy Crisis Centers" run by antiabortion groups.

One wonders how money they are getting for this:

Googling “abortion clinic near me” or “abortion pill” in several U.S. states yields misleading results, according to a new report from the non-profit Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH).

The researchers surveyed the first page of Google search results in a select group of 13 states that have some of the strictest anti-abortion policies in the country. They found that 11% of the 445 recorded search results led to anti-abortion centers, not actual clinics offering abortion care. About a quarter of all sponsored advertisements appearing on search pages were for anti-abortion centers, as were 37% of Google Maps results.

“A surprise in particular was the maps results,” said Callum Hood, head of research at CCDH and one of the report’s contributors. “The way that Google presents these [centers] on the first page of search results is, it actually puts them under a [maps] heading such as ‘abortion clinics.’”

Anti-abortion centers purposefully capitalize on misleading and attracting people who are seeking abortion care, explained Hood. Google seems to be enabling that deception through their maps results.

I'm beginning to think that breaking up Google is not enough.  It needs to be nationalized.

Remember Those Right Wingers Attempting to Stage a Riot in Idaho at a Pride Rally?

I wrote about it yesterday.

Remember the right wingers who got busted attempting to foment a riot at a pride parade in Iowa?

Well, the North Idaho news has reported their names and mug shots. (I would stay from the comments, they are pretty rank)

This Explains a Lot

The Video Version 

An essay called, "How Being a Cop Broke My Brain," provides a terrifying insight into the dysfunction that is police training and police culture which explains why policing is so broken.

It turns out that police are broken as human beings.

This jibes with the assessment of a therapist friend of mine who said that after 5 years, pretty much all the cops out there were suffering from PTSD:

Hey there! Welcome to That Dang Dad, my name is Phil, and tonight I want to return to a topic I haven’t done a video on in awhile: law enforcement. If you’re new to the channel, you should know that I was a police officer for nearly a decade in a pretty rowdy part of California. In the years since then, I have become a police and prison abolitionist, meaning that I believe the entire concept of police forces and prisons is not reformable and must be replaced by a system that is more compassionate, more just, and more committed to dignity and meeting human needs. I’ll put a link in the description if you want to see me do a deeper dive on this topic.

Tonight though, I want to set aside the academic texts and the philosophy and all that nerd sh%$, and I want to get personal about how my time as a cop really fucked my brain up. Tonight we’re going to be talking about state violence and some nasty stuff cops see in the line of duty, so if you’re not in the mood for blood and guts and man’s inhumanity to man, you might wanna skip this one. 

He then relates the story of how he dealt with entering a building in pursuit of an armed suspect, which ends like this:

………

And it’s not because I hated this guy or really wanted to score my first kill on the job. It was because I wasn’t quite sure I could actually do it. I was taking a page out of Dave Grossman’s [Author of "Killology", and a consultant to many police forces on the use of lethal force] training, psyching myself up and convincing myself that yes, I could kill someone else if I had to. After all, he was armed, he was dangerous, he’d already killed… What option did I have?

Among other things, "Killology" training literally tells cops that after they kill someone, they will have the best sex.

It is also a machine for creating PTSD:

………

I tell you this story because it’s emblematic of much of my law enforcement career. When I first started out, I was criticized for being meek, timid, and too slow to show dominance out in the field. I was taught that showing that kind of weakness on calls would make me a target for attack. I was shown hundreds of videos of cops being murdered on routine calls for service, often by assailants who didn’t look like killers. 

………

Over time, I internalized this message: at any given time, someone out there is going to hurt you if you’re not ready to hurt them first. If you let your guard down for even a second, they’ll kill you. In the police business, this is the way we talk about Officer Safety. The most respected veteran officers I worked with were the ones stopping the young guys from running around blind corners, they were the ones asking if we’d searched that dumpster before we turned our back on it. You got the sense these guys had Seen Things and knew how to keep each other safe.

And, you got the sense from listening to their stories that the big thing you can do to protect yourself on the job is to mentally prepare for That Day. And since you never know in what form the attack will take, it’s best to just run scenarios in your head constantly, building those mental pathways so that when it finally does happen, you’ll know exactly what to do. 

………

I was constantly in a state of vigilance. Not concern, just vigilance. My krav instructor used the color code system to talk about emotional states (y’know… white, yellow, orange, black) and he used to say you should never leave the house without being at least at a code yellow, that you should never be in a state of total relaxation in public.  

And I never was! And to this day, I never am!

It’s been a long time since my cop days now, but this hypervigilence has never left me. And what at one time felt like a survival tool I was proud of now just makes me exhausted (and probably exhausting to be around). I hate leaving my house, I don’t like to go out and do things with lots of people. If it’s too loud and crowded somewhere, I feel like I’m not in control, like I’m not safe, sometimes I even dissociate just little bit, as a treat. 

………

That’s why there’s the almost unbridgeable gulf between a normal person who says, like “Why did you punch that guy 37 times for having his hands in his pockets?”, and the cop who replies “Because I didn’t know what was in there, it could have been a knife or a gun or a jar of battery acid he was going to throw in my face and I didn’t want to take the chance.” I guarantee you, that cop was at a seminar one time where some old head told a war story about his partner Bob Sacamano who actually did get battery acid thrown in his face.

There are approximately 900,000 police officers in the United States and I’m willing to bet the vast majority of them were trained like I was and have the same mental pathways I have. That’s a lot of armed, unaccountable people running around fantasizing about being executed in the streets every day.

I don't see a way to fix this except by tearing the whole damn corrupt edifice brick by brick.

For the Love of God, Do Not Google “Goatse”

It appears that a disgruntled game developer has added "Goatse" to a Half Life 2 game mod.

If you know what "Goatse" is, you have my condolences, if you don't, you do not want to know.  That which is unseen cannot be unseen.

I will not be posting the image, (that image is NOT Goatse) and I will be expunging and descriptions from the report below: 

One of the reasons why Half-Life 2 is one of the most endearing games of all time is that it is goddamn Half-Life 2, another one is all the glorious fan content it gave birth to. No game deserves more thanks for bringing Half-Life 2 to the memestream than Garry's Mod,  an awesome open sandbox that allows players to use all models from Valve properties and create their own Source engine games. Trolls seem to have argued that Garry's Mod is too good, in fact, and so they've decided to fill it up with booby traps that are sure to traumatize anyone playing the game. Yeah, remember Goatse? We're sorry for reminding those who do, and we're even more sorry for the readers who don't know of it and are inevitably going to open google to search for something that will change their lives forever (for the worse). Goatse is a relatively ancient meme of great evil from a time when the Internet was an absolute free for all. It's a picture of ………

The horror………

Tweet of the Day

on the W train pic.twitter.com/atj0VH7ijD

— 75-foot Subway Car Hate Account (@julestrainman) June 7, 2022

Seriously. It just needs to be said.

Headline of the Day

Iran Is Backing Out of Nuclear Deal That U.S. Already Reneged On

—The Intercept

Given that the United States has been operating in bad faith on this deal since almost day 1, the fact that Iran is making moves to pull out is not a surprise. 

Even now the is US refusing to relax sanctions as required on the deal, and with the US State Department trying to add restrictions with no promise of sanctions relief.

This was a foreseeable development.

The US foreign policy establishment (aka "The Blob") is immoral, incompetent, and stupid.

Cops Flip to the Other Side

And this is a good thing.

Rather than protecting right-wing wing rioters, police in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho (!) actually arrested them.

Given the behavior of many local police departments, most notably in Portland, Oregon and Minneapolis, Minnesota, it is refreshing to see cops actually enforcing the law.

Not what I would expect out of Idaho:

Authorities have said they arrested 31 members of the white supremacist group Patriot Front near an Idaho Pride event after they were found packed into the back of a U-Haul truck with riot gear.

The men were standing inside the truck wearing khakis, navy blue shirts and beige hats with white balaclavas covering their faces when Coeur d’Alene police stopped the U-Haul and began arresting them on the side of the road on Saturday.

“They came to riot downtown,” Coeur d’Alene police chief Lee White said at a news conference.

All 31 were charged with conspiracy to riot, a misdemeanour, White said. The men were going through the booking process on Saturday afternoon and were scheduled to be arraigned on Monday, he said.

………

Police learned about the U-Haul from a tipster, who reported that “it looked like a little army was loading up into the vehicle” in the parking lot of a hotel, White said. Officials spotted the truck soon after and pulled it over, he said.

Videos of the arrest posted on social media show the men kneeling on the grass with their hands zip-tied behind their backs.

………

Those arrested came from at least 11 states, including Washington, Oregon, Texas, Utah, Colorado, South Dakota, Illinois, Wyoming, Virginia, and Arkansas, White said.

Only one was from Idaho, he said.

Gee, what is the term for people who come from areas OUTSIDE the local are with the goal of being AGITATORS of violence?  It's at the tip of my tongue.

I am stunned that the cops did not side with the protesters.

Of Course They Did

The Washington Post has fired national political reporter Felicia Sonmez, following a sh%$ storm over her calling out a colleague's retweet of a sexist and bigoted joke.

Said colleague, Dave Weigel, has a long history over posting bigoted crap online.

Following a pile on from her cow-orkers, and a series of tweets from the golden boys at the WaPo that could be summarized as, "Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I've ever known in my life."

Before this incident, her editors pulled her from any story that might possibly involve sexual violence after she had revealed that she had been a victim of sexual assault.  (They walked it back after a firestorm)

Given that this paper happily employed the execrable Fred Hiatt as its editorial editor for more than 20 years, it sounds like a lovely place to work.

 

The Fed is Going to Go Crazy

Inflation went up to 8.6% last month.

Needless to say, I would expect at least a 75 basis point (¾%) interest rate increase at the next Federal Reserve meeting.

Housing sales are already falling off a cliff, even at the high end, so I am expecting a full blown recession by year's end:

U.S. consumer inflation reached its highest level in more than four decades in May as surging energy and food costs pushed prices higher, with little indication of when the upward trend could ease.

The Labor Department on Friday said that the consumer-price index increased 8.6% in May from the same month a year ago, marking its fastest pace since December 1981. That was also up from April’s CPI reading, which was slightly below the previous 40-year high reached in March. The CPI measures what consumers pay for goods and services.

May’s increase was driven in part by sharp rises in the prices for energy, which rose 34.6% from a year earlier, and groceries, which jumped 11.9% on the year, the biggest increase since 1979. But inflation pressures were distinctly broad-based in May, said Sarah House, senior economist at Wells Fargo Securities.

The fact that numerous sources are using the term, "Broad Based," will almost certainly ensure that the fed will go full jihad against wages.

Not good.

No. Just No.

I do not know what possessed some Japanese scientists to create a robotic finger in human skin, but I do not like it on bit.

I do not like it with a bat,
I do not like it with a cat,

I do no like it here of there,
I do not like it anywhere.

Roboticists from the University of Tokyo have taken a tiny step toward creating the Terminator. They’ve built an articulated robot finger that’s seamlessly covered in living human skin.

There are many reasons why our current attempts to build humanoid robots with lifelike appearances always seem to end up somewhere in the uncanny valley, where their imperfect resemblance to real human beings invokes a strong negative emotional reaction from us. The way a humanoid robot moves certainly contributes to its not-quite-right appearance, but more often than not it’s the artificial materials used to recreate human skin that make humanoids especially creepy.

Because nothing says, "Not creepy," like a covering of human skin.

………

So we can either continue to work on improving artificial skin to make it more believable, or admit that there will never be a substitute and just use the real thing. That’s the route this team of researchers from the University of Tokyo has chosen, and in a recently published paper in the journal Matter, they detail a new approach for seamlessly wrapping a robotic finger in living skin tissue.

Seriously, this is a very bad idea.

I do not know how this will go wrong, but it will go wrong, and it won't be pretty.

Bummer

Nat was stage managing this show, and they had to cancel because of a Covid case in the cast:

Unfortunatly, Nat's Herculean efforts on the show have turned out to be Sisyphean.

"Charity" Hospital

All organizations, even allegedly charitable ones, need financial reserves to account for problems as they come up.

Under-capitalization, the lack of sufficient resources to weather something going wrong, is one of the main reasons that new business go bust.

That being said, a number of charities (I discussed Harvard's outsize endowment here and here over a decade ago) that have an obsession with building up reserves that is so extreme that it runs counter to their basic mission, case in point the St. Jude Hospital system:

In July 2021, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital announced to fanfare that it had just finished raising $2 billion in donations, a single-fiscal-year record for the nation’s largest health care charity. “Solving pediatric cancer is a global problem — a multi-trillion, multi-year problem,” Rick Shadyac, chief executive of St. Jude’s fundraising arm, told the Associated Press at the time. “The way we look at it is: If not St. Jude, then who?”

Financial disclosures newly released by St. Jude, however, show $886 million of the hospital’s record $2 billion-plus in revenues last fiscal year went unspent. Those surplus dollars instead flowed to the hospital’s reserve fund, which helped it grow to $7.6 billion by the end of June 2021. That’s enough money to run St. Jude’s 77-bed hospital in Memphis at last year’s levels for the next five years without a single additional donation.

I wonder what Danny Thomas would have to say about that.

………

Last year, ProPublica reported that St. Jude had accumulated billions of dollars while many families of young patients treated at the hospital struggled financially. Parents told ProPublica that they’d exhausted savings and retirement accounts and borrowed from family and friends, despite St. Jude’s much-publicized pledge to alleviate many of the costs associated with treatment “because all a family should worry about is helping their child live.” St. Jude said they provided generous benefits to families, but cannot cover all financial obligations that a family experiences during a child’s illness. In response to the story, St. Jude significantly increased its benefits for families, including more support for travel and housing.

Some researchers, oncologists, health care advocates and families of patients complain that St. Jude’s fundraising makes it more difficult for other pediatric hospitals to raise money for their operations. St. Jude competes for fundraising dollars directly against other children’s hospitals, some of which have significant numbers of patients in clinical trials and their own research divisions focused on pediatric cancer care. To visualize just how much St. Jude outstrips its competitors: In 2020, U.S. News and World Report’s ranked the nation’s best children’s cancer centers. St. Jude’s, ranked tenth, pulled in more than the combined total of the nine hospitals ranked above it , according to financial records filed with the Internal Revenue Service.

Call me a cynic, but my guess is that the metrics used to determine the bonuses for executives at St. Jude are slanted toward fundraising, and not patient care.

Econ 101:  If you pay for it, that is what they will give you.

There needs to be more regulation of charities.

Something to Keep in Your Back Pocket

The next time that you are involved in poo flinging with the ammosexual crowd, share this tweet and associated video:

Celebrating over 20 years of GOP thoughts and prayers! pic.twitter.com/tkds9BObE4

— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) June 2, 2022

It may not solve anything, but it will certainly give them major butthurt.

Thursday Jobless Report

It looks like the Federal Reserve may be getting what they want, as initial unemployment claims rose to a 5 month high.

The numbers are still decent, and one week does not make a trend, but when juxtaposed with news that home sales falling sharply, also because of the interest rate increases, it does seem to indicate a potential downturn:

Initial jobless claims, a proxy for layoffs, increased by 27,000 to 229,000 last week from the previous week’s revised level of 202,000, the Labor Department said Thursday. Claims had been at or below the 2019 average of 218,000 since late January.

The four-week average of new claims, which smooths volatility in the weekly figures, also rose slightly to 215,000 last week. That figure hasn’t decreased since early April.

Continuing claims, a proxy for the total number of people receiving payments from state unemployment programs, remained at 1.3 million in the week ended May 28—the lowest point since December 1969. Continuing claims are reported with a one-week lag.

Recent claims increases can be attributed to seasonal factors being thrown off balance because of the Covid-19 pandemic, Ian Shepherdson, chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, wrote in a note. Memorial Day also fell on Monday last week, shortening the number of workdays. Claims figures can be more volatile around holidays.

………

The U.S. labor market remains strong but is showing some initial signs of cooling. U.S. employers added 390,000 jobs in May—a robust gain that also was below the average monthly pace of growth over the past year. The unemployment rate held steady at 3.6%, nearly matching the half-decade low reached right before the pandemic hit the U.S. in the spring of 2020.

I'm not sure where this is going but I've got a bad feeling about this.

Oh, Snap!

The quest by Michigan Republicans to field a candidate to run against incumbent Democrat Gretchen Witmer is turning into a complete sh%$ show.

First, the top candidates were knocked off the ballot because of signature fraud by a contractor that they were using, and now the right wing nutjob who is the proverbial last man standing in the Governors race was just arrested for his alleged participation in the January 6 insurrection.

I don't think that even the crazy stupid Devos/Amway money can save them now:

The FBI raided the Allendale home of Michigan GOP gubernatorial candidate Ryan Kelley on Thursday and arrested him on charges related to the 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol.

Kelley was arrested "on misdemeanor charges stemming from the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol breach," the U.S. Department of Justice said in a statement. He was arraigned in federal court in Grand Rapids later Thursday.

Kelley, 40, is charged with entering or remaining in a restricted building or grounds without lawful authority, disorderly and disruptive conduct, knowingly engaging in an act of physical violence against a person or property, and willfully injuring property, according to a criminal complaint.

Generally, all of those misdemeanors carry penalties of up to one year in prison and fines of up to $100,000 on each charge.

Special Agent Mara Schneider, a spokeswoman for the FBI in Detroit, confirmed that federal agents used a search warrant to enter Kelley's home.

………

He is one of five Republican candidates on the August primary ballot for governor, after five other candidates were disqualified.

In an affidavit related to Thursday's complaint, an agent said Kelley was seen on video "wearing a black hat and a black coat ... in a crowd of people who are assaulting and pushing past law enforcement officers." Kelley also "climbed onto and stood on an architectural feature next to the North West stairs and indicated by waving his hand that the crowd behind him should move towards the stairs" leading into the building, the affidavit said.

The same person is seen in the Capitol courtyard and moving toward the entrance to the building, according to the FBI affidavit, which does not cite video evidence of Kelley inside the building.

………

A Kelley campaign spokeswoman did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment, though the words "political prisoner" appeared Thursday on Kelley's gubernatorial Facebook page.

It sucks to be Ryan Kelley. It also sucks to be whoever is responsible for the Republican Gubernatorial campaign in Michigan.

The Cruelty is the Point

A new study has discovered that social safety net programs reduce crime.

So the war on social services not only hurts people in need, it makes the world less safe for the rest of us:

A new paper in the Quarterly Journal of Economics indicates that removing cash welfare from children when they reach age 18 greatly increases the chances that they will face criminal justice charges in subsequent years.

Supplemental Security Income is a United States program that provides payments to people with disabilities who have low incomes. Children qualify for the program based on their disability status and their parents' low income and assets. Until 1996 children automatically continued to qualify for the adult program when they reached 18 years old unless their incomes increased.

1996, huh?  Bill Clinton's welfare reform continues to hurt the country.

As part of changes made to US social welfare programs in 1996 the US Social Security Administration began to reevaluate children receiving SSI when they turned 18 using different, adult, medical eligibility criteria. The Social Security Administration began removing about 40% of children receiving benefits when they turned 18. This process disproportionately removes children with mental and behavioral conditions such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.

Using data from the Social Security Administration and the Criminal Justice Administrative Records System researchers estimated the effect of losing Supplemental Security Income benefits at age 18 on criminal justice and employment outcomes over the next two decades. By comparing records of children with an 18th birthday after the date of welfare reform enactment on August 22, 1996, and those born earlier (who were allowed onto the adult program without review) the researchers were able to estimate the effect of losing benefits on the lives of the affected youth.

They found that terminating the cash welfare benefits of these young adults increased the number of criminal charges by 20% over the next two decades. The increase was concentrated in what the authors call "income-generating crimes," like theft, burglary, fraud/forgery, and prostitution. As a result of the increase in criminal charges, the annual likelihood of incarceration increased by 60%. The effect of this income removal on criminal justice involvement persisted more than two decades later.

………

The paper is titled "Does Welfare prevent crime? The criminal justice outcomes of youth removed from SSI."

This is emblematic of our dysfunctional society at the core of our broken welfare system.

Our polity is paralyzed by fear of someone possibly getting something that they do not "deserve," and so create a needlessly punitive society.

From the Department of, "About F%$#ing Time"

It looks like the SEC is looking at targeting payment for order flow in stock trades.

The short version is that "market makers" pay retail brokers to funnel their trades through them.

This tactic was developed by Bernie Madoff.  Yes, that Bernie Madoff.

This technique, which is one part front running, the market makers execute their own trades ahead of the orders sent to them, and one part anti-competitive behavior, because these market makers can increase the bid-ask spread without the customer knowing that they are getting the shaft.

A portion of these ill-gotten gains go back to the broker as a kick-back for not acting in their clients' best interest.

What the SEC, more specifically SEC Chairman Gary Gensler, is suggesting is not a ban on the service, but to require that brokerages use a bid process to select the best trading to execute a trade.

This would be a change from the current standard, "reasonable diligence," which basically means that so long as you are not caught on tape crowing over deliberately screwing clients, everything is OK:

The Securities and Exchange Commission is preparing to propose major changes to the stock market’s plumbing as soon as this fall.

Chairman Gary Gensler directed SEC staff last year to explore ways to make the stock market more efficient for small investors and public companies. While aspects of the effort are in varying stages of development, one idea that has gained traction is to require brokerages to send most individual investors’ orders to be routed into auctions where trading firms compete to execute them, people familiar with the matter said.

………

The most consequential change being discussed would affect the way trades are handled after an investor places a so-called market order with a broker to buy or sell a stock. Market orders, which account for the majority of individual investors’ trades, don’t specify a minimum or maximum price the investor is willing to pay.

Mr. Gensler has said he wants to ensure that brokers execute orders at the best possible price for investors—the highest price for when an investor is selling, or the lowest price if they are buying.

Current rules require brokers to perform “reasonable diligence” to determine the likely best market for executing a trade. Many brokers route orders to big electronic trading firms called wholesalers, including Citadel Securities or Virtu Financial Inc. rather than to exchanges such as the Nasdaq Stock Market, arguing that the wholesalers provide the best prices.

Some brokers, including Charles Schwab Corp. and Robinhood Markets Inc.,accept compensation from wholesalers for routing trades to their venues. Mr. Gensler has said this practice, known as payment for order flow, creates a conflict of interest and limits competition for individual orders.

Under the auctions being considered by the SEC, different firms would compete with each other to fill an individual investor’s trade, according to people familiar with the agency’s plans. Such a mechanism would fundamentally alter the business model of wholesalers, which can make more money by trading against small investors than they do on public exchanges, where they might find themselves trading with other sophisticated trading firms or institutional investors.

(Emphasis mine) 

Basically, the wholesalers are making money, and paying kick-backs to brokers, in order to get access to unsophisticated investors so that they can make money by executing on private exchanges (dark pools) to extract money.

………

After a year of internal deliberations, the agency has homed in on a narrowing set of proposals. If the SEC votes to release them for public comment later this year, they would have a path to implementation, as Democrats hold a majority of seats on the commission.

I'm not a fan of Paul Volker, but when the late Federal Reserve Chairman said in 2009 that, "The only thing useful banks have invented in 20 years is the ATM," he was generally accurate, ATMs had actually been invented about 40 years ago, but his comment on financial innovation was spot on.

Financial innovation is primarily a way to extract rents from the productive parts of society.

Maryland, Huh?

Trust me, if you are from Maryland, you get this.

What Do You Call this Type of Humor?

I love this kind of joke.

When I talk about loving Russian/Slavic humor, this is what I mean.

It speaks to my soul:

A German walks into a bar and orders a beer. The bartender tells him:

“That’ll be 100 euros.”

The German is in shock.

“What do you mean, 100 euros? Yesterday it was only 10!”

“Well today it’s 100.”

“But why 100, dammit?!”

“I’ll explain it to you now”, the bartender says. “10 euros is for the beer. 10 more – to help Ukraine. 20 – assistance to the European countries which have imposed sanctions and are not members of the EU. Another 10 – to help the UK for the successful implementation of its sanctions against Russia. Another 10 go to the Balkan countries to help them to buy heating coal. And the remaining 40 euros – they’re for the gas subsidy to the EU and the fund to help maintain sanctions.”

The German silently took out a hundred-euro bill and handed it to the bartender. The bartender took the money, put it into his cash register, and then took out a 10-euro note and gave it back.

The German is confused.

“Wait, you said 100 – I gave you 100. Why are you giving me back 10 euros?”

“There’s no beer.”

I love this joke.

Channeling Jonathan Swift

When D. Allan Kerr writes that the solution to school shootings is to arm the children, he is channeling Jonathan Swift's satirical essay A Modest Proposal For preventing the Children of Poor People From being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and For making them Beneficial to the Publick (generally just called A Modest Proposal).

For those of you who do not get the reference, first be ashamed of your ignorance, and know that Jonathan Swift proposed, among other things, the roasting and eating of Irish children to alleviate the famine. "A young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout."

Much like the Swift, Kerr is mocking the people whose solutions to school shootings are proposals which make everything demonstrably worse:

When did the National Rifle Association become such a bunch of wimps?

During their convention in Texas just days after the horrific massacre at a nearby elementary school, advocates called for arming teachers and increasing police presence in classrooms. But as they say, go big or go home.
D. Allan Kerr

The answer to bring mass shootings in our schools to an end is right there in front of us, but no one wants to say it. So, I will.

It’s time to arm the kids themselves. If the answer to gun violence is more guns, it’s really the most logical solution.

This reminds me of an essay penned by my dad's childhood friend in Willamette Week regarding the proposal to require that cats be licensed in Multnomah County when I was a freshman in high school.  

It also involved recipes, and humorless people were still incensed over this when I graduated from Woodrow Wilson High School.

Well played, Mr. Kerr.

Adventures in Stupid Google AI

Well, for the first time ever, I have had a blog post unpublished by Google for violating community standards.

Unsurprisingly, this was for a completely anodyne post.

I was mocking Susan "The Senate Karen" Collins for calling the cops in response to someone writing a polite note in chalk on the public sidewalk suggesting that she support Roe v. Wade.

For some reason (there was no profanity, and no doxxing) Google flagged it.

There was a picture of the sidewalk, but no street signs or mailboxes.

I have no clue as to why it was flagged.

I'll chalk it up to artificial stupidity. (pun intended)

Primary Results Tonight

First, I want to note that it appears that abusive right wing thug Keith Fagundez jailing women for miscarriages who I wrote about last night, has lost the primary.

The fact that he is under investigation for directing his office's money to his relatives may have had something to do with this.

Unfortunately, in San Francisco, the bad guys won, and reformer attorney Chesa Boudin was recalled.

The bad cops and the right wing money won.

In the Los Angeles mayor's race, the rich developer spent a lot of his own money, but did not manage to avoid a runoff, so he will face establishment Democrat Karen Bass in November, where higher turnout is likely to mitigate his cash advantage.

Additionally, incumbent (and ruthlessly corrupt) LA County Sheriff Alex Villanueva was forced into a runoff as well.

California has a non-partisan "Jungle Primary", where the top two finishers face each other if neither gets an outright majority in the first round.

In South Dakota, a constitutional amendment  put on the ballot to forestall a referendum to expand Medicare in the state resoundingly failed.

In Iowa, Michael Franken (not related to Al) beat the relentlessly non-ideological (i.e. corporate stooge) Abby Finkenauer in the Senate primary, and will face Republican crypt-keeper Charles Grassley in the general election.

It was not particularly close, which is a surprise given the support that Finkenaur got from the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) and Emily's List.

I'm bumming about Boudin, but otherwise, it appears to be a good night.

This is Our Future

The Handmaiden's Tale, without the charm:

In early 2018, a 29-year-old Central Valley woman became the first person in decades to be jailed in California for the death of her stillborn infant.

In late 2019, it happened again. Another pregnant woman who struggled with addiction delivered a stillborn baby who tested positive for methamphetamine at Adventist Health hospital in the Kings County seat of Hanford. She was also flagged by doctors, investigated by local law enforcement and charged with murder by District Attorney Keith Fagundes.

The cases sparked national backlash from civil rights groups, which successfully fought to overturn the convictions. But now, as Gov. Gavin Newsom positions California as a reproductive rights sanctuary ahead of the Supreme Court’s anticipated reversal of Roe v. Wade, the cases are once again dividing residents in a bitter district attorney’s race in this corner of California’s heartland.

………

“Those two cases, they’re a symptom of the disease,” said Sarah Hacker, a Hanford lawyer challenging Fagundes. “And the disease that has infected our criminal justice system here in Kings County is preferential treatment.”

For the incumbent Fagundes, it’s “not an abortion discussion,” but a matter of two drug cases that spiraled into a reproductive rights lightning rod — a sequence of events that he said he did not plan for, but which he has embraced.

“You know,” he said, “somebody’s gotta be a voice for that fetus.”

You have shown yourself to be the worst possible person to do this, because you are scaring pregnant women away from proper medical care.

………

“I haven’t been to San Francisco in years, because the last time I was there it was disgusting,” Fagundes said. “And I don’t want my community to be like San Francisco.”

And a gay bashing son of a bitch as well.

………

Becker’s attorney, Samantha Lee of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, said the isolated California cases are part of a national trend toward criminalizing pregnant people. The advocacy group identified more than 1,330 prosecutions nationwide from 2006 to 2020, more than triple the 413 cases prosecuted from 1973 to 2005.

The goal here is not protection of anyone.  It's about control of women by people who hate women.

………

But at two dueling pickup trucks blanketed in Hacker and Fagundes campaign signs parked outside the busy Superior Dairy ice cream shop in downtown Hanford, it’s not the stillbirth cases that she’s stressing to voters. Instead, a folder taped to the window of the truck offered printed copies of a lawsuit filed last year by former Kings County District Attorney Chief Investigator Robert Waggle.

The lawsuit, which was filed against the county in September, alleged that Fagundes harassed and retaliated against Waggle, including claims that Fagundes touched Waggle “in a sexual manner” and kept “blackmail folders” on employees. The complaint is one of several that Fagundes has attempted to fight off in recent months, including two county-approved settlements with other former employees, one who accused the district attorney of “unprecedented abuse of prosecutorial discretion.”

And this asshole is a self-hating closet case.

It's only a matter of time before he is found suffocated (self-inflicted) in a closet in a wet suit, with a rubber hood, rubber gloves, slippers, tied up like a Thanksgiving turkey with a dildo up his ass.  (Link)

No Accountability

We now have testimoney that Gina Haspel personally supervised torture at CIA black sites.

She was director of the CIA for 3 years after this, and probably still has the highest level security clearance. 

The fact that there are never any consequences for the our elites is corrosive to our society:

During Gina Haspel’s confirmation hearing to become director of the C.I.A. in 2018, Senator Dianne Feinstein asked her if she had overseen the interrogations of a Saudi prisoner, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, which included the use of a waterboard.

Ms. Haspel declined to answer, saying it was part of her classified career.

While there has been reporting about her oversight of a C.I.A. black site in Thailand where Mr. Nashiri was waterboarded, and where Ms. Haspel wrote or authorized memos about his torture, the precise details of her work as the chief of base, the C.I.A. officer who oversaw the prison, have been shrouded in official secrecy.

But testimony at a hearing last month in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, included a revelation about the former C.I.A. director’s long and secretive career. James E. Mitchell, a psychologist who helped develop the agency’s interrogation program, testified that the chief of base at the time, whom he referred to as Z9A in accordance with court rules, watched while he and a teammate subjected Mr. Nashiri to “enhanced interrogation” that included waterboarding at the black site.

Z9A is the code name used in court for Ms. Haspel.

………

Defense teams have been asking military judges to exclude certain evidence from the war crimes trials of accused Qaeda operatives as tainted by not just torture but also cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. In May, that meant revisiting what happened nearly 20 years ago at the secret prison in Thailand.

………

It was previously known that by the time Mr. Nashiri was waterboarded in late 2002, Ms. Haspel had taken over as the chief of base at the secret prison in Thailand. It has also been reported that she drafted cables relating what happened to Mr. Nashiri and what was learned during his interrogations and debriefings.

But Dr. Mitchell’s testimony went further. He testified that the chief of base observed the sessions, though she did not participate in them.

The law firm that employs Ms. Haspel, King & Spalding L.L.P., declined to comment and referred questions to the C.I.A., which also declined to comment.

………

And although Ms. Haspel’s role as chief of base at the black site in Thailand is widely known, it is still considered a state secret.

………

At her confirmation hearing, Ms. Haspel pledged not to set up any similar interrogation programs.

Yeah, I guess that THAT makes everything OK.  (Not)

She should be in jail, not earning some obscene pay from one of the largest law firms in the world.

Sounds Familiar

It appears that the increase in interest rate will be creating a plague of, "Zombie firms," companies that will be slowly circling the drains as they are increasingly unable to service their debts:

They are creations of easy credit, beneficiaries of central bank largesse. And now that the era of unconventional monetary policy is over, they’re facing a challenge like never before.

They are America’s corporate zombies, companies that aren’t earning enough to cover their interest expenses, let alone turn a profit. From meme-stock favorite AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc. to household names such as American Airlines Group Inc. and Carnival Corp., their ranks have swelled in recent years, comprising roughly a fifth of the country’s 3,000 largest publicly-traded companies and accounting for about $900 billion of debt.

Now, some say, their time may be running short.

Firms that could once count on virtually unfettered access to the bond and loan markets to stay afloat are being turned away as investors girding for a recession close the spigot to all but the most creditworthy issuers. The fortunate few that can still find willing lenders face significantly higher borrowing costs as the Federal Reserve raises interest rates to tame inflation of more than 8%. With surging input costs poised to eat away at earnings, it’s left a broad swath of corporate America with little margin for error.

The end result could be a prolonged stretch of bankruptcies unlike any in recent memory.

………

Junk-rated companies, those ranked below BBB- by S&P Global Ratings and Baa3 by Moody’s Investors Service, have borrowed just $56 billion in the bond market this year, a more than 75% decline from a year ago.

………

Zombie firms get their nickname because of how they tend to stumble along, weighed down by their debt burdens yet with sufficient access to capital markets to roll over their obligations. They drag on overall productivity and economic growth because they can’t afford to invest in their businesses, and tie up assets that could be better used by stronger players. 

The scariest jobs chart ever

A plague that shuts down the economy?  We bounce back in about 12 months.

We have a debt overhang created by speculation, lack of regulation, and we have the great recession and jobs to not recover to their prior level for over 6 years. (And that's ignoring normal growth.

This is why the expansion of finance is so dangerous.  They privatize the profits and socialize the losses, and it takes years for society to retire.

When the crash comes, and it's probably coming sooner rather than later, because there was no accountability the last time around.

The expectation of a bailout, reinforced by the bailouts that they got barely more than a decade ago has made the banksters behavior even more reckless, more divorced from the underlying economy, and more criminal.

Too Soon?

I hear tuition costs at Blinn College are shooting up, and it’s not due to inflation https://t.co/C7mzrXVh2k

— Steady Eddy (@SteadyE69) June 6, 2022

The right wing's murder moppet lies about going to Texas A&M, whines about how murdering two people derailed his high school career.  (He also lies about Blinn College being a feeder to Texas A&M, it's a run of the mill community college).

Do you want some cheese with that whine?

Of Course They Did

Remember that woman at the Uvalde elementary school who was handcuffed by cops for demanding that they save the kids?

Well, later, the police called her and threatened her with obstruction of justice charges if she talked to the press.

Nope.  The cops are not covering anything up here:

The Uvalde, Texas mother of two young Robb Elementary School students who was handcuffed by law enforcement at the scene of last month’s school shooting that left 19 children and two adults dead, gave a detailed description on Thursday of her attempts to save her children. Speaking to CBS News, Angeli Gomez said that she has since received a phone call from law enforcement, warning her to stop telling her story of how she scuffled with police who had set up a perimeter around the school but refused to enter the building and attempt to stop the shooter.

………

Gomez also said that since she began telling her story to the press, she received a call from “law enforcement” warning her that because she is on probation for a charge she says is close to a decade old, she could face legal trouble and be charged with “obstruction of justice” if she continues to speak to the media.

This is despicable, which is completely unsurprising.

Who Says Irony is Dead

I would note that this is untentional irony, because when Louie Gohmert says, "If you’re a Republican, you can’t even lie to Congress or lie to an FBI agent or they’re coming after you," he doesn't get it. (Gohmert has routinely been called one of the dumbest members of Congress)

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) railed against the indictment of former Trump White House adviser Peter Navarro while saying in an interview on Friday that “if you’re a Republican, you can’t even lie to Congress or lie to an FBI agent or they’re coming after you.”

Gohmert, speaking to Newsmax in an interview on Friday, was asked to comment on the Friday indictment of Navarro by a federal grand jury after the former Trump official failed to comply with the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.

“It actually puts an exclamation point on the fact that we have a two-tiered justice system. If you’re a Republican, you can’t even lie to Congress or lie to an FBI agent or they’re coming after you. They’re gonna bury you. They’re gonna put you in the D.C. jail and terrorize and torture you and not live up to the Constitution there,” Gohmert responded.

This has to be the worst playing of the victim card that I have ever encountered.

 

Tweet of the Day

Today was the first time that I have ever had an event regarding gun safety in Texas and I wasn’t protested by 40+ Men wielding A.R. 15‘s

There was not a single counter protester for the first time in my life protesting in Texas.
This time is different.

— David Hogg 🌻 (@davidhogg111) June 3, 2022

For those of you who have been living in a cave, David Hogg is a survivor of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shootings in Parkland, FL, and a prominent gun control advocate.

When 40+ men show up carrying AR pattern rifles, this is an attempt to intimidate people with an implicit threat of violence, and is a fairly common Texas "Thing".

The fact that the ammosexual community did not protest David Hogg is very unusual for Texas, and one would hope that this is a harbinger of things to come, but my guess is that in a few days, they will be back to the old (and insane) normal.

America's Finest News Source

The Onion, of course:

Left-Wing Group Too Disorganized For FBI Agents To Infiltrate

Admitting that they had been working for several years without any discernible success, FBI agents confirmed Wednesday that a local left-wing political group was too disorganized to infiltrate. ……… “These people are incredibly disorganized. We try to attend their meetings to get them to unwittingly work on our behalf, but half the time no one shows up but the undercover agents, and the other half of the time the meetings are so confusing it’s impossible to follow what they’re actually trying to do. We also tried to sow division in their ranks to ensure that they couldn’t become powerful, but that didn’t work because these people already all f%$#ing hate each other. They spend all their time arguing about minutiae, and most of the time when we try to talk them into doing something violent to the communal spaces in their community, they don’t even know where to go. They’re just a mess.”

This is funny because it's true.

This is sad because it's true.

The Cruelty is the Point

It turns out that Donald Trump's inspector general for Social Security set up an administrative kangaroo court to harass poor people receiving benefits.

It sounds like she was doing this just because hurting the poors amused her, as did retaliating against employees of her department who noted that her actions were unlawful: 

Four years after her longtime partner died of kidney cancer, federal agents knocked on Gail Deckman’s door outside Chicago and told her she was in trouble: She had kept thousands of dollars in Social Security disability benefits that should have stopped when he died.

Deckman told the agents she thought the $1,400 check deposited each month into an account to which she had access was a payment for land her partner had sold in Michigan. She spent the money on rent and clothes and gifts for her grandchildren, she said.

The inspector general’s office, which investigates disability fraud and tries to recoup money for the government, ultimately charged her $119,392 — nearly three times what she received in error.

………

The inflated fees were set in motion during the Trump administration, when attorneys in charge of a little-known anti-fraud program run by the inspector general’s office levied unprecedented fines against Deckman and more than 100 other beneficiaries without due process, according to interviews, documents and sworn testimony before an administrative law judge. In doing so, they disregarded regulations and deviated from how the program had recovered money since its inception in 1995, failing to take into account someone’s financial state, their age, their intentions and level of remorse, among other factors.

The sums demanded by the government stunned those accused of fraud. The unusual penalties were not the only break with how the Civil Monetary Penalty program had previously been conducted: Unlike in the past, the chief counsel also directed staff attorneys to charge those affected as much as twice the money they had received in error, on top of the fines, interviews and court testimony show.

The escalating penalties created a giant jump — at least on paper — in the amount of money the inspector general could show lawmakers it was bringing in, according to interviews and sworn testimony obtained by The Washington Post. Fines as high as hundreds of thousands of dollars were imposed on poor, disabled and elderly people, many of whom had no hope of ever being able to pay.

A Chicago woman was fined $132,000 after wrongly receiving as much as $10,618 in benefits, according to internal data of penalties and assessments obtained by The Post. A Denver woman was sanctioned $168,000 after cashing as much as $14,960 in wrongly received checks. A New Jersey woman is on the hook for nearly $435,000 after she accepted about $47,000 in benefits but failed to report a $120,000 house she inherited from her father and car loans she co-signed for her children, on what she said was a lawyer’s advice.

………

The remarkable penalties led to tumult inside the Office of Inspector General Gail Ennis, where a whistleblower was targeted for retaliation, according to a ruling this month by the administrative judge at the Merit Systems Protection Board.

Ennis, who was sworn in as a Trump appointee in January 2019, declined an interview request but said in a written statement that her office is “unaware of any basis that supports the statement that unprecedented fines have been imposed.”

………

Inside Ennis’s office, two officials raised concerns about the fees to her and her top staff, according to interviews and court testimony: Deborah Shaw, considered the program’s most knowledgeable, experienced attorney, who testified in September that she was directed by her bosses to issue penalties she found unconscionable; and veteran senior executive Joscelyn Funnié.

Ennis told them that she would not renegotiate any cases because she did not want to draw attention to the program and worried that Social Security would take it away from her office, according to testimony and four people familiar with her comments during a staff meeting.

After they repeatedly pressed to have cases reexamined and the penalties lowered, Shaw and Funnié were escorted out of the agency’s headquarters in Woodlawn, Md., in September 2019 and placed on paid leave. Ennis then fired Funnié, who had also raised separate concerns to her about what she believed were improper hiring actions she took and directed that Shaw, who was also threatened with suspension, be demoted, according to hearing transcripts and people familiar with their cases.

In a May 6 ruling, Judge Craig A. Berg found that Shaw was the victim of a “prima facie case of whistleblower reprisal” by Ennis’s office and ordered the agency to restore back pay and benefits and reinstate her as a supervisor.

Shaw “has shown that she had a reasonable belief she was disclosing an abuse of authority when she raised issues with the drastic increase in penalties the [Civil Monetary Penalty] program was assessing ...” Berg wrote in a 68-page decision. He found “significant evidence” that Ennis and her top staff “had motive to retaliate” against Shaw as she became a “vocal advocate” to reopen 83 cases whose penalties she believed were excessive.

………

………

Ennis, a former WilmerHale attorney, also wrote that the number of audits “does not sufficiently capture the value the OIG provides to taxpayers” and said her office’s productivity has remained consistently above the average for the federal watchdog community.

WilmerHale is a white shoe law firm, with a lot of political folks, Robert Mueller, Charlene Barshefsky, C. Boyden Gray, and Ken Salazar come to mind, going through its revolving doors.

They do a lot of lobbying, and Ennis is a big Trump donor, so mindless cruelty toward the powerless, and retaliation against employees who report wrong doing, is par for the course.

It's Thursday, So

We get another initial unemployment claims report, this time with first time jobless claims falling to 200,000, down 11,000 from the prior week's numbers.

Also, job opening in the US fell slightly, from 11.9 million to 11.4 million, and the quit rate remained near historic highs. 

Damned if I know what it all means.

Putting the Dis in Dystopian:

In Poland, there is a LARP group that roleplays as contemporary Americans. Here they are doing “Ohio.” pic.twitter.com/ckZRIYZHzV

— ✨𝖇𝖊𝖓✨ (@PenBercifield) May 28, 2022

pic.twitter.com/6zN8VUPedQ

— ✨𝖇𝖊𝖓✨ (@PenBercifield) May 28, 2022

pic.twitter.com/D5EvWgK9Kp

— ✨𝖇𝖊𝖓✨ (@PenBercifield) May 28, 2022

Seriously, you don't know Dis? Dante's Divine Comedy folks.

I don't mean to disrespect these cosplayers, nor the Polish people, but there is something profoundly odd about someone, particularly some one who is not an American, LARPing American life.

This version appears to be something very similar to the critically panned movie version of Hillbilly Elegy.

I'm not sure what this means, but it is a total mind-f%$#.

Good Done in a Lame Duck

In the December 2020, the "No Surprises Act" was signed into law.

It was intended to prevent exorbitant surprise bills by out of network medical providers.

It came into effect this January, and since then, it has blocked about a million surprise bills a month:

The No Surprises Act stopped about 2 million unexpected medical bills from hitting private insurance patients during the first two months of 2022, according to a new report.

More than 12 million potential surprise bills could be avoided this year if the trend continues, the study from the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association and America’s Health Insurance Plans found.

“The No Surprises Act ended the practice of surprise medical billing in most circumstances, providing relief for millions of patients who faced surprise medical bills they did not expect at prices they could not afford,” Matt Eyles, president and CEO of America’s Health Insurance Plans, said in a statement.

………

In December 2020, the No Surprises Act was signed into law, and most of the provisions took effect at the beginning of 2022. Under the law, when anyone covered by private health insurance is treated for emergency services or at an in-network facility by an out-of-network provider, the provider or facility can’t charge a patient above the in-network cost-sharing price.

The law also sets up a way to resolve disagreements on what the health plan will pay the out-of-network provider or facility, which can lead to an independent dispute resolution.

“There is no room for surprise medical bills in a health care system that puts people first,” Kim Keck, the president and CEO of the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, said in the statement.

“As recently as last year, an emergency visit to the hospital may have left patients on the hook for steep, surprise medical bills,” she said. “The No Surprises Act has not only put an end to this loophole, but it has provided undeniable financial protection to millions of Americans.”

I'm not sure who gets the credit for this bill, it was a part of a consolidated appropriations bill and hence must-pass legislation, but someone is owed a debt of gratitude.

Nothing to See Here, Move Along

A John Deere dealer refused to service the tractor of a right-to-repair advocate until he filed a complaint with the FTC.

No evidence that John Deere is using it locked down repair ecosystem to punish critics here:

A farmer in Missouri said he had to go to complain to the Federal Trade Commission in order to get his tractor repaired by the only John Deere dealership in his area, showing how without the right to repair farmers are bound by the whims of the corporations who have a monopoly on repair.

Jared Wilson had a problem with the AC in his John Deere tractor. It wasn’t running and he needed to finish planting his corn and soybeans. The tractor would run, but finishing the plant would be a miserable experience in the heat of the Missouri spring. According to an affidavit Wilson filed to the FTC, he called the local John Deere dealership and asked for an appointment. The manager told him he didn’t want his business.

In the FTC complaint, Wilson is asking the commission to open a consumer protection investigation.

Wilson and the manager talked on April 14, according to an affidavit about the incident filed with the FTC on April 16. Wilson told Motherboard he didn’t know the AC had gone out until temperatures started creeping up in April. “When it hits 70 degrees it’s almost unbearable inside the cab because it’s all just glass and you’ve got a super hot motor sitting in front of you,” he said.

Knowing he’d never make it through the rest of his plant without a little cooling in the tractor, he called his local John Deere dealership: Heritage Tractor. He got the manager on the phone. According to Wilson’s affidavit, the manager said that, “I was not a ‘profitable customer,’ due to my repeated repair service complaints and written notices to John Deere’s corporate office about my dissatisfaction with Heritage Tractor’s repair services.”

According to the affidavit, Wilson felt the manager’s words were “a veiled threat that if I continued to complain to ‘outside people’ about my dissatisfaction with Heritage Tractor that I could or would no longer authorize [sic] repair assistance from Heritage Tractor in the future.”

Wilson is a fierce and vocal advocate for a farmer’s right to repair their tractors. He’s testified about it in the Missouri state house, been interviewed by NBC News, and is quoted by name in a complaint to the FTC.

………

When Wilson started farming in 2013, there were three different repair shops within 30 minutes of his farm. Now there’s just one: Heritage Tractor, the store Wilson is constantly at odds with.

………

A lot of this wouldn’t be a problem if Wilson could repair his own machines, but John Deere has taken pains to make that very difficult, if not impossible. “What I think kind of gets lost in this is it’s not just about ‘Can I repair it without all this information?’ It’s, ‘Can I diagnose what the problem actually is?’” he said. “Anything software related that has to do with the controller, we just don’t have any tools for that.”

Biden has promised to do something about this, but hasn't yet, which makes no sense.  It's good policy and good politics.

This is nothing but a power grab and a exercise in rent seeking by the manufacturers. 

Whether it's Deere or Apple, these policies are universally loathed by their users.

Leaning Back

The rats are leaving the sinking ship.  Specifically, Sheryl Sandberg is stepping down as COO of the company formerly known as Facebook:

Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg said she would leave the social media service after 14 years, marking the departure of one of the most high-profile female executives in the U.S. at a time of tumult for the company.

Sandberg, 52, helped build the world’s most profitable social network alongside Mark Zuckerberg, who she met when the CEO was just 23 and still struggling to turn his viral site into an actual business. She is also one of the wealthiest self-made female billionaires in the world, who charted her own course as a champion of women’s empowerment while writing two best-selling books — one on women in the workplace and the other on grieving for her late husband. She is also a large Democratic donor.

Self made billionaire? Seriously?  She's a doctor's kid who made her money as an executive that other people founded.  This is not a Horatio Alger story.

Between Apple blocking their stalker style advertisements, the growth of newer social media sites, an FTC and DoJ that will no longer allow them to acquire up and coming competitors, and the increasing stench of their corrupt business practices, it's probably a good time for her to get out.

My guess is that she is hoping to avoid the handcuffs.

Headline of the Day

Canada Now Talks About Us Like We're the Meth Lab Downstairs

—The indispensable Charlie Pierce in Esquire

This is as true as taxes is. And nothing's truer than them.

He is writing, of course, about Justin Trudeau's gun control proposals.

When announcing his regulations, Trudeau noted, “We need only look south of the border to know that if we do not take action, firmly and rapidly, it gets worse and worse and more difficult to counter.”

Translated from the Canadian dialect, this is, "Those motherf%$#ers to the south of us are crazy, and we need to quarantine them."