Layin' It Out

So, why did Obama's Evil Minion, Susan Rice, "unmask" those subjects of interest in that one intel report?  Cuz she knows how to do her fucking job.

Hat tip = MockPaperScissors

Corporatocracy

Lobbyists, Coin-Operated Politicians and self-subjugating citizens.

Newsweek, DAVID SIROTA, ALEX KOTCH, JAY CASSANO AND JOSH KEEFE:

The French company that says its Houston-area chemical plant is spewing "noxious" smoke—and may explode—successfully pressed federal regulators to delay new regulations designed to improve safety procedures at chemical plants, according to federal records reviewed by International Business Times.The rules, which were set to go into effect this year, were halted by the Trump administration after a furious lobbying campaign by plant owner Arkema and its affiliated trade association, the American Chemistry Council, which represents a chemical industry that has poured tens of millions of dollars into federal elections.

The effort to stop the chemical plant safety rules was backed by top Texas Republican lawmakers, who have received big campaign donations from chemical industry donors.

Representatives from Arkema Americas and the American Chemistry Council did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

There's A Difference

Vox:

If you kill someone, whether the criminal justice system throws you in prison may come down to your race.

That’s the takeaway from a recent report by Daniel Lathrop and Anna Flagg at the Marshall Project. They looked at federal data to analyze the circumstances in which a homicide was deemed “justifiable” by police. Their findings were astounding:

In almost 17 percent of cases when a black man was killed by a non-Hispanic white civilian over the last three decades, the killing was categorized as justifiable, which is the term used when a police officer or a civilian kills someone committing a crime or in self-defense. Overall, the police classify fewer than 2 percent of homicides committed by civilians as justifiable. …

In comparison, when Hispanics killed black men, about 5.5 percent of cases were called justifiable. When whites killed Hispanics, it was 3.1 percent. When blacks killed whites, the figure was just 0.8 percent. When black males were killed by other blacks, the figure was about 2 percent, the same as the overall rate.

The racial disparity held up after controlling for different circumstances. When they adjusted for how well the killer and victim knew each other and how the victim was killed, white-on-black-men homicides were two to 10 times as likely to be called “justifiable.” And when controlling for age in addition to those other factors, white-on-black-men homicides remained 4.7 times as likely to be called “justifiable” as other cases. The disparity also seemed to hold up across the country, according to the report.

This might be a good time to remind ourselves that research like this is not being supported properly by a government that insists on hiding the truth - or worse, denying the truth.

Gun violence studies have all but disappeared at CDC, almost exclusively because "conservatives" have written prohibitions against it into the legislation funding that agency.

We've seen the same kind of thing at FDA and NIH, and now federal funding to study and report the health effects of coal mining is being eliminated.

Good luck trying to make good decisions without good evidence.

Duck Before You Drown

Charlie Pierce at Esquire:

The folks at Camp Runamuck, and their auxiliary down at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, have yet another present for those economically insecure folks who didn't want the lady to replace the black guy because Mexicans and ISIS and telling-it-like-it-is. And economic insecurity. You can die on the job now and not burden your boss with unnecessary paperwork. From The Washington Post:

In a narrow result that divided along party lines, the Senate voted 49 to 48 to eliminate the regulation, dubbed the Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces rule. Finalized in August and blocked by a court order in October, the rule would limit the ability of companies with recent safety problems to complete for government contracts unless they agreed to remedies. The measure to abolish it had already cleared the House. The next step after the Senate vote will be the White House, where Trump is expected to sign it. A half-dozen other worker safety regulations are in Republican crosshairs, with one headed to the Senate floor as soon as this week. Many are directed at companies with federal contracts. Such companies employ 1 in 5 American workers — meaning the effort could have wide-ranging effects.

Chipping away at the protections - the institutions that are there to help us push back.

Back To The Gilded Age

A little reminder of the damage a bad president can do.

Vox:

Since the election of Donald Trump, there’s been a lot of discussion in medical circles about bringing a Silicon Valley ethos to drug innovation in America.

This idea is embodied in Peter Thiel, the billionaire founder of PayPal, who has reportedly been helping the president vet a pool of candidates to lead the Food and Drug Administration.

Thiel, a libertarian iconoclast, has repeatedly made the case that the FDA gets in the way of drug innovation by making it too difficult for new medicines to get to the market. Some of the FDA candidates he’s identified — including Silicon Valley’s Jim O’Neill and Balaji Srinivasan — have similarly argued that the agency should dump its requirement that drugs be proven effective before reaching the market, and that we’d be better off if the FDA operated more like a “Yelp for drugs.” In other words, bringing the same speedy and disruptive approach to medical regulation that Silicon Valley brought to the taxi and hotel industries, for example, will unlock cures — fast.

But Thiel and his pals miss a very important point about developing new drugs: Manipulating biology isn’t the same as manipulating computer code. It’s much, much harder. Speeding up medical innovation will take a lot more than just stripping down the FDA — it’ll take huge leaps forward in our understanding of biochemistry and the body. Health care is also different from taxis and hotels in another key way: Consumers can’t really judge the safety and quality of medical products by themselves.

Trump to remove USDA animal welfare protections from cruelty for dogs. A reminder from 9/16: he's never HAD a dog pic.twitter.com/NykVqnG6Nj

— Keith Olbermann (@KeithOlbermann) February 4, 2017

So, like, one of the things Da Gubmint is there trying to do for you is to keep some asshole from killing your dog.  If you can't quite work yourself up to giving a fuck about people, maybe you could think about finding a little compassion for their fucking house pets.

More from the Vox piece:

One of the key notions that undergirds the Peter Thiel view of the FDA is that if the agency just got rid of some of the pesky restrictions for drug approval, we’d usher in another golden age in drug development. (Thiel declined our interview request.)

To test this idea, I asked a longtime pharmaceutical scientist (and conservative), Derek Lowe, for his views. In his 28 years in the lab, Lowe has seen hundreds of thousands of compounds tested on a huge variety of drug targets, and never, not once, has he brought a drug to market.

The reason? “We don’t know how to find drugs that work,” he said.

For every 5,000 compounds discovered at this "preclinical" phase of drug development, only about five are promising enough to be tried in humans. That’s a success rate of 0.1 percent.

Drug innovation comes from painstaking tinkering and a dash of luck. “It’s very tempting for someone who has come out of IT to say, ‘DNA is code, and cells are the hardware; go in and debug it’,” Lowe said. “But this is wrong.”

Let's just try to remember one or two itty-bitty things, OK?

You were supposed to have read that shit way back in high school, y'know.

Learn a little more about FDA

Yeehaw And Away We Go

Somebody who's better at this than I am would prob'ly find it fairly easy to run it down and make sure, but I'm thinking this is prob'ly a nice little payoff for somebody in Trump's Krony Klatch.

HuffPo:

With what may have been his first presidential order, Donald Trump made it more expensive for working- and middle-class Americans to buy their first homes. The move will increase costs for 750,000 to 850,000 Americans in the next year alone, according to the National Association of Realtors.

The Obama administration had said last week that the Federal Housing Administration would drop the cost of mortgage insurance it sells by almost a third to 0.60 percent. But after Trump took office, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which oversees the FHA, told lenders the fee cut was off. The reversal of the reduction will mean that homebuyers who borrow $200,000 under the program will see their mortgage insurance fees go up by $500 a year relative to what the Obama administration had ordered, according to figures released by the FHA when the cut was announced.

The reduction was intended to help partially offset the cost of rising mortgage rates and was scheduled to go into effect on Jan. 27. The government sells the insurance in case borrowers default.

- and -

Julian Castro, Obama’s HUD secretary, said when the fee cut was announced that the FHA’s reserve fund had grown by $44 billion in the last four years and that it was time to share these gains with borrowers. Ben Carson, Trump’s nominee to run HUD, said in his confirmation hearing that he supported undoing the fee cut, and lending trade publications reported that a reversal was likely.

Profits for me and costs for thee.

Today's Typical Trump

From NPR:

In late October, just weeks ahead of the election, President-elect Donald Trump made a quick detour to Washington for the official opening of his new five-star hotel, just a few blocks from the White House.

During a ribbon-cutting ceremony, Trump told the crowd that the two-year, roughly $200 million renovation project at the historic Old Post Office Building was done ahead of schedule and under budget, thanks to what he called an incredible team of people — "including hundreds of construction workers, electricians, maintenance workers and so many others who helped make this project a reality. They're really the important ones."

Now some of those companies would like final payment for their work. Documents obtained by NPR show three Washington-area companies have filed liens against Trump International Hotel totaling more than $5 million.

--and--

Sterling, Va-based A&D Construction filed a lien in November saying it was owed $79,700. The firm's lawyer, Richard Sissman, says A&D is a small, Hispanic-owned company that was subcontracting on the Trump hotel project.

"The nature of the work was ... trim and casework and architectural millwork, wall base, crown molding; this is all fine carpentry," he says.

Sissman says A&D's lien is relatively small compared to the other two, but it's a lot of money to his client.

"On these big jobs these should be paid. It's ridiculous that a small-time operator has to beg for its money," he says. "It's put him in a very bad situation right now."

This has been Trump's whole history - Over-Promise and Under-Deliver.

Trump is the embodiment of the same old Autocratic Hyper-Predatory Capitalism that the founders risked everything fighting to get rid of (it's just been updated to fit our "modern" version of a very old paradigm), ie: "I don't owe you according to our contract - I only owe you what my lawyers can't prevent your lawyers from forcing me to pay you."

Guess what happens as of January 20th, when Trump thinks he owns it all, and that he can do whatever he wants to do because he's convinced there's nobody left who can force him to do what's right, and nobody to force him not to do what's wrong.

In the end, the only thing that really stands against the impulse to do shitty things to people is a man's sense of honor - and there is no honor in that man.

Today's Clusterfuck

I really don't know that much about it, but hey, this is a new era - The Golden Age of The Dunderhead - so knowing nothing qualifies me to make all the decisions, right?

It looks to me like Trump intends to throw in with Putin and Assad, and just bomb the whole thing flat.  Of course, that's the kind of thing Trump loved to say during the Scampaign® with all that crap about what a lousy leader Obama is on this one - something Grampy McDumfuck and Huckleberry Butchmeup are flogging again - which leads me to believe he has absolutely no intention of following thru on it (Mr Unpredictable, remember?).

Here's the thing: You take a Rent-Seeker like Trump and put him in charge of the US military, and you get the ultimate REMF.  Add Trump's thin skin, short temper, a propensity for revenge while hiding behind bogus "Information Sources", and you get a guy who makes lotsa bad decisions, which makes for lotsa dead people.

It's nothing but a transaction to Trump - Cost/Benefit - he gets paid while you do the work. He collects the tribute while we pay for the funerals.

Because it bears repeating: This isn't politics. This is a fucking robbery.

In Putin's Image

From Bloomberg:

Donald Trump is building a cabinet in his own image. The first billionaire U.S. president has appointed two billionaires and at least nine millionaires, with a combined net worth of about $5.6 billion, to run government departments. Two appointees to cabinet or cabinet-level positions are former generals. And fewer than half have any prior government experience. Many of Trump's nominees have close ties to Wall Street and corporate America. Altogether, his cabinet is shaping up to look a lot different from his predecessors.

The expansive corporate connections, collective wealth and varied policy goals of Trump's cabinet-level picks say a lot about the priorities set to shape his administration. Here are Trump's cabinet nominees so far, in order of their succession to the presidency.

It's interesting - Trump's picks for the various Business Units of the Federal Government are all high-roller CEO types, and his picks for Law Enforcement and National Security are all hardass authoritarian enforcer types. 

So I guess we're seeing the implementation of what the Leftie Loonies have been saying all along - The US is a Private Enterprise Operation with a Militarized Police Force and Nuclear Weapons.

USAmerica Incorporated.

Shades Of Things To Come

Let's just fast forward to 01-21-17, and look in on Trump's first day in office:

"Breaking"

Wow. Hey look - breaking news.  Corporatized Lobbyists don't just write the legislation; and they don't just bribe our Coin-Operated Politicians to vote for or against it - they also tell us what our opinions are.

The Intercept:

OPINION COLUMNS PUBLISHED in California newspapers over the last year in support of the Trans-Pacific Partnership use language nearly identical to drafts written and distributed by public relations professionals who were retained by the Japanese government to build U.S. support for the controversial trade agreement.

Take this column by former San Diego mayor Jerry Sanders, who now serves as the president and CEO of the San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce, in the San Diego Union-Tribune, titled: “Trans-Pacific trade pact benefits San Diego.”

Much of the language in Sanders’ op-ed also appears in a “San Diego Draft op-ed” distributed by Southwest Strategies, a consulting firm paid by the Japanese government to promote the TPP:

Jerry Sanders: “Notably, the TPP includes Japan, which is significant”

Southwest Strategies: “Notably, the TPP includes Japan, which is critical”

And somehow, this is news.  Full circle. The loop is closed.  Has been for a while, actually.  Nothing to see here.  Get back to work; or go back to sleep; or watch some more of the Daily Freak Circus on TV.

They pretend to tell us what's going on, and we pretend that none of it really matters.

Isn't it great to live in a free society like USAmerica Inc?

Another Nail In The Coffin

Former Virginia Governor Robert (Vaginal Bob) McDonnell will stay out of federal prison for a bit longer.

HuffPo:

The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday agreed to take up the case of former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell (R), who in October urged the justices to review his multiple convictions on federal corruption charges.

The justices' decision to hear the case effectively allows McDonnell to remain out of prison at least until the court issues a decision -- which could arrive as late as June.

McDonnell's lawyers are trying to convince the court that the kind of "official action" federal law treats as corruption -- and that a jury agreed McDonnell committed while governor -- was no more than "routine political courtesies," including activities such as "arranging meetings, asking questions, and attending events."

"This is the first time in our history that a public official has been convicted of corruption despite never agreeing to put a thumb on the scales of any government decision," McDonnell's lawyers wrote in their appeal to the Supreme Court. "Officials routinely arrange meetings for donors, take their calls, and politely listen to their ideas."

I think we need to be ready for the Roberts Court to use this case to strengthen the link between Money and Speech.  It seems like these guys need to establish precedents that reinforce the system of Legalized Bribery that's been evolving from what continues to look more and more like our failed experiment in self-government.

Dots

Once is an anomaly:

I think every LEO needs a complete BG check by FBI, just as a person working in top secrete field, eliminate threats https://t.co/EY9h6HCex7

— Mickey Cox (@TheRightImageLV) January 2, 2016

Twice is a coincidence:

Entiire Florida police department busted for laundering millions for international drug cartels https://t.co/I1zGsr1r9d

— margaret stuart md (@marstu67) January 2, 2016

Just waiting for that third occurrence to confirm the trend.

We became allergic to the basics of paying for the things a healthy civilization needs - Education, Infrastructure, Healthcare, Science, Justice.  We decided making rich people richer was more important than looking out for everybody as best we can.  So it forced public servants to look for ways of stretching their budgets.  Some of that is a good thing, but most of it turns out to be a very bad thing when the people looking for creative ways to augment their budgets are the ones who carry badges and guns and who have our tacit blessing to treat people extremely badly as long as it's "those other people" catching the shit and not us.

So - when somebody says "Police Department", think "Sheriff".  And when they say [insert your town's name here], think "Nottingham".

And BTW - not to blow up the analogy or anything, but fuck Robin Hood; where's Frank Serpico when ya need him?

Yale Not Jail

As much as I hate to agree with Jesse Jackson, he was right about one thing.  We spend way more money on keeping people in jail than we spend on the schooling that everybody knows makes it a lot less likely that any given kid will end up in prison. 

And here's a tiny peek at just how stoopid we are in that particular regard:

20.2 Million = College Students in USAmerica Inc
$21 Billion = What we spend on College every year (Avg Cost, Public 2- or 4-year schools)

2.2 Million = Prison Inmates 
$74 Billion = What we spend on Prisons in USAmerica Inc every year 

Arithmetic please: We have almost 10 times as many students as we have inmates, but we spend more than 3 times as much on the inmates as we spend on the students.

Why does that make sense to anybody?

Read up at smartasset.com

The American prison system is massive. So massive that its estimated turnover of $74 billion eclipses the GDP of 133 nations. What is perhaps most unsettling about this fun fact is that it is the American taxpayer who foots the bill, and is increasingly padding the pockets of publicly traded corporations like Corrections Corporation of America and GEO Group. Combined both companies generated over $2.53 billion in revenue in 2012, and represent more than half of the private prison business. So what exactly makes the business of incarcerating Americans so lucrative?

 

Cross Pollination

Generally, but not necessarily a good thing. There's more of this, of course, and it doesn't get any better.

Shut Down The Fuck Barrel

When I see "police", I think "Sheriff".
And when I see [insert city name here],
I think "Nottingham".

Today's John Oliver

Keynote: Preventing Cable Company Fuckery

And it worked - kinda:

This Thursday, FCC Chair Tom Wheeler will announce that under Title II, broadband companies will be regulated as utilities. Real progress, and we should be grateful to Wheeler and President Obama for listening to the public as we made our wishes known.

It's not the same as putting rules in place that make it illegal to create tiered pricing structures, but at least it gives average jokers like me and you a way to verbally assault the Suits and the Nickle Humpers as they proceed to ease their bullshit ownership paradigm into place.

Stay after 'em.

hat tip = Crooks & Liars

Un-Togetherness

Yanking the enforcement teeth out of Dodd-Frank: "...Prohibition Against Federal Government Bailouts of Swap Entities..."  That's part of what the Crime-nibus bill is about.

Senator Warren:



Another part?  It allows rich people (and don't forget corporations are people, my friend) to buy even bigger pieces of Coin-Operated Politicians. 

And all of that shit happening in the Wall-Street-n-Washington-Circle-Jerk is very much part and parcel with this:

...That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government ... Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

Riots, uprisings, revolts and full-blown revolutions happen when it becomes clear that in spite of hearing the voice of the populace, a government chooses to ignore it.

It seems just too weird (even for me) to think about it, but we may actually be a lot closer than we think we are to the point where The Dirty Fucking Hippies and the Knuckle-Dragging TeaBaggers have to stop just flapping their gums about bi-partisanship and start figuring out how to make common cause.

I wonder what happens next, cuz I get one of my truly lousy feelings that there are some very powerful forces working very hard to keep us separated from one another, and I'm not convinced that a Gandhi or a Mandela is even possible now.

It Got Me Thinkin'

Which is always a little dangerous, but anyway - here's a little bit of a thing:



'Conservatives' are always yammerin' about how they want Gubmint to run more like a Bidness.

My contention is that's pretty much exactly what we've been seeing for 20 or more years, and here's why I think it:  Congress Critters are privy to lots and lots of information that's either not known to the rest of us, or that they get to know about way before we get to know  about it; AND, they get to make rules and regulations that can easily tilt the money chute a little (or a lot) in the general direction of their own bank accounts and portfolios.  So while we have managed to put certain safeguards in place to make it harder for them to give themselves raises in their salaries, we've done practically nothing to keep them from creating a very slick and lucrative money-laundering apparatus that funnels shitloads of cash into their pockets, even if it does happen behind a thick veil of toxic fog.

Meanwhile, Corporate Bosses get to do this in a slightly more open way - but it's still pretty fucked up.  CEOs and Directors and Senior Execs get paid a lot, but the way they make the real money is by putting policy decisions in place that benefit them greatly at the expense (often) of everybody else.

Ask a simple question: why are so many companies spending so much (~$2.4 TRILLION) buying their own stock?

Then ask: what's the Comp Plan look like for those Bosses?  

I'm betting dollars to dingleberries that those guys are gonna make more than a few bucks over and above their salaries if the company stock performs well, and what better way to boost the value of a share of your stock than to make it look like it's a hot property because "somebody's snapping it up like crazy"?

And when you're in bed with the politicians who conveniently vote against close enforcement of the rules you've already gotten them to weaken, then collusion and cronyism and outright bribery become the orders of the day, and simply the usual and customary way of doing business.

It gets really complex and convoluted, and I'm not pretending to know what all is wrong or what all needs to be done.  But I think it points back to the need for Separation-Of-Powers solutions; we have to rebuild the firewalls - the ones that keep Businesses and Governments and individuals from becoming too big and too powerful.

Cuz always remember - a business is not a democracy.

Drug It Up

By now we all know it, but it's good to keep it in mind - It's not really a war on drugs.  It's more of a war on the drugs that aren't controlled by Bayer and Glaxo and Pfizer - or any of the other big houses.

It's also good to remember that Coin-Operated Politicians have been put in place by the Big Bux Donors to ensure the flow of money out of our pockets, into theirs.