It Fits Trump's Game

The Republicans have enjoyed their unearned advantage for so long, they've become very comfortable playing championship golf from the red tees while the Dems are expected to play from well behind the black markers.

I was going to call them "Ladies' tees" - cuz that's how I learned it - but I looked it up and found out it's a slam on women.

Caught myself.

I ain't dumb, but sometimes I learn a little slow.

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.

The Wealth Gap Just Gets Worse

Both Bernie and Hillary tried with this, but the message was never enough to cut thru the frenzied clutter of the Trump Chaff Machine, plus the Voter Suppression that the GOP has been working on for 20 years, plus the Kremlin, plus the FBI, plus the Rat-Fucking and the Fake News and and and.

From The Institute For Policy Studies:


Key findings

Just 100 CEOs have company retirement funds worth $4.7 billion — a sum equal to the entire retirement savings of the 41 percent of U.S. families with the smallest nest eggs.

This $4.7 billion total is also equal to the entire retirement savings of the bottom:

• 59 percent of African-American families 
• 75 percent of Latino families 
• 55 percent of female-headed households 
• 44 percent of white working class households

On average, the top 100 CEO nest eggs are large enough to generate for each of these
executives a $253,088 monthly retirement check for the rest of their lives.

Among ordinary workers, those lucky enough to have 401(k) plans had a median balance at the end of 2013 of $18,433, enough for a monthly retirement check of just $101.

Of workers 56-61 years old, 39 percent have no employer-sponsored retirement plan whatsoever and will likely depend entirely on Social Security, which pays an average benefit of $1,239 per month.

With nearly $3 billion in special tax-deferred accounts, Fortune 500 CEOs stand to gain enormously from Trump’s proposed tax cuts on top earners.

If President-elect Donald Trump succeeds in cutting the top marginal tax rate from 39.6 percent to 33 percent, Fortune 500 CEOs would save $196 million on the income taxes they would owe if they withdrew their tax-deferred funds.

Unlike ordinary 401(k) holders, most top CEOs have no limits on annual contributions
to their tax-deferred accounts. In 2015 alone, Fortune 500 CEOs saved $92 million on their taxes by putting $238 million more in these accounts than they could have if they were subject to the same rules as other workers.

Michael Neidorff, the CEO of Centene, a provider of health plans to Medicaid recipients and other low-income Americans, has nearly $140 million in his deferred compensation account, up 658 percent since the 2010 launch of Obamacare.

The retirement asset gap between CEOs mirrors the racial and gender divides among ordinary Americans.

The 10 white male CEOs with the largest retirement funds hold a combined $1.4 billion, more than eight times more than the 10 CEOs of color with the largest retirement assets and nearly five times as much as the top 10 female CEOs.

Fair's Fair

Ludlow Day

Today's the 100th anniversary of the Ludlow Massacre (April 20, 1914).

The Ludlow Massacre was an attack by the Colorado National Guard and Colorado Fuel & Iron Company camp guards on a tent colony of 1,200 striking coal miners and their families at Ludlow, Colorado, on April 20, 1914. Some two dozen people, including women and children, were killed. The chief owner of the mine, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., was widely criticized for the incident.
The massacre, the culmination of a bloody widespread strike against Colorado coal mines, resulted in the violent deaths of between 19 and 26 people; reported death tolls vary but include two women and eleven children, asphyxiated and burned to death under a single tent.[1] The deaths occurred after a daylong fight between militia and camp guards against striking workers. Ludlow was the deadliest single incident in the southern Colorado Coal Strike, lasting from September 1913 through December 1914. The strike was organized by the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) against coal mining companies in Colorado. The three largest companies involved were the Rockefeller family-owned Colorado Fuel & Iron Company (CF&I), the Rocky Mountain Fuel Company (RMF), and the Victor-American Fuel Company (VAF).
In retaliation for Ludlow, the miners armed themselves and attacked dozens of mines over the next ten days, destroying property and engaging in several skirmishes with the Colorado National Guard along a 40-mile front from Trinidad to Walsenburg.[2] The entire strike would cost between 69 and 199 lives. Thomas G. Andrews described it as the "deadliest strike in the history of the United States".[3]
The Ludlow Massacre was a watershed moment in American labor relations. Historian Howard Zinn described the Ludlow Massacre as "the culminating act of perhaps the most violent struggle between corporate power and laboring men in American history".[4]Congress responded to public outcry by directing the House Committee on Mines and Mining to investigate the incident.[5] Its report, published in 1915, was influential in promoting child labor laws and an eight-hour work day.
The Ludlow site, 12 miles (19 km) northwest of Trinidad, Colorado, is now a ghost town. The massacre site is owned by the UMWA, which erected a granite monument in memory of the miners and their families who died that day.[6] The Ludlow Tent Colony Site was designated a National Historic Landmark on January 16, 2009, and dedicated on June 28, 2009.[6] Modern archeological investigation largely supports the strikers' reports of the event.[7]

The Krugman Speaks

..for a good long time, and says a lot of great stuff.



I guess a coupla main points for me are these:

• We have to stop allowing ourselves to be made to believe that Democracy and Capitalism are interchangeable terms.
• We have to understand just how close we're coming to letting the Bain-type Vultures pull off a corporate takeover of our government. (Don't think so?  Think about the assets owned by the USA, and then try not to think about that fat and juicy Pension Fund we've got, just layin' there ready for some smart buzzards to swoop in and pick it clean.  What's happening now - what's been happening for 25 years - is classic Bain Capital / Henry Kravitz leveraged buyout bullshit.)

Punish The Do-Gooders

A high school girls' basketball team wore pink unies as part of a fund-raiser for Make-A-Wish and the opposing team's AD and coaches used the "violation" to try to gain a competitive edge.

From NE (Nebraska) Prep Zone:

Before the third quarter began, Columbus coach Dave Licari discussed the uniforms with the officials. State rules require the home team's uniforms to be predominantly white.

The officials then called a technical foul on Burke, and a Columbus player sank both free throws. The Discoverers went on to win 62-47.

Some people have no soul and no honor.  Order solely for the sake of order is exactly the kind of bureaucratic tyranny that everybody rightly hates.

Fun Fact

This represents exactly one dollar more than what ExxonMobil paid in taxes last year.