Françoise Augustine's "Transparence" is from the Very Peri collection, which I am a sucker for and thought several were very pretty or pretty cool.
So, Breyer, one of the Democratic appointees on the Supreme Court, has finally decided maybe he should retire since he's a million years old and pretty much every Democrat is telling him he needs to retire in the short window of time when a Democrat would appoint his replacement. I'd just like to say that I won't really miss any one of these neoliberals. I've read some appalling decisions in the last decade that passed not by a 5-4 vote with the "liberals" on the losing side, but unanimously. Sure, they haven't been quite as awful as often as their Republican-appointed colleagues, but there have been Republican appointees even in my lifetime who weren't as corporatist as these "liberals" have been. And yes, I include Ginsberg in that. Anyway, Stoller's reaction to the announcement is, "Stephen Breyer's Legacy of Destruction: 'On the basis of his antitrust record, he is an unjust man. Breyer is the candidate of big business and monopoly in America.' [...] Breyer had, in Mueller's view, lied to disguise his record during his nomination hearing. Howard Metzenbaum, perhaps the last Senator in the 1980s to take antitrust seriously, had asked Breyer about the track record of big businesses in his court, since it was well-known that Breyer believed strongly in theories that size were a marker not of bad behavior but efficiency. Breyer replied, 'Sometimes plaintiffs did win in antitrust cases I've had and, as you point out, defendants have often won. The plaintiff sometimes is a big business and sometimes isn't. The defendant sometimes is and sometimes isn't.' In response, Mueller sent a list of antitrust cases heard by Breyer, showing that 'no plaintiff, so far as I can determine, has ever won an antitrust case in his court.' Mueller came as close as he could to calling Breyer a liar, saying the judge consistently had 'trouble with the facts,' and arguing that 'Breyer is the candidate of big business and monopoly in America.' Here's Mueller's list."
"Biden stiff arms progressives on the Postal Service: President Biden
has sent a clear message to progressives regarding the U.S. Postal Service (USPS): major change is out, and Trump fundraiser Louis DeJoy can stay as postmaster general for the next few years. He will lead 21 percent of the federal civilian workforce. The president did this by nominating two highly impressive, accomplished public servants — Dan Tangherlini and Derek Kan — to serve on USPS's Board of Governors, i.e., its board of directors. The Board of Governors, not President Biden, has the authority to fire and hire the postmaster general. So, while Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.), and dozens of members of Congress have demanded DeJoy be fired, he is staying in place. With the likely confirmation of Tangherlini and Kan, Biden will have five nominees on the full board versus four from President Trump. But Kan is a Republican who worked in the Trump administration and for Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), making him unlikely to remove DeJoy. And at least two of Biden's other confirmed nominees have shown no inclination to remove DeJoy."
"Court revokes largest-ever U.S. offshore oil lease, cites NEPA: A federal court yesterday blocked the Biden administration's massive oil and gas lease sale in the Gulf of Mexico, handing a major win to conservation groups. Judge Rudolph Contreras for the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia tossed out the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management's approval for Lease 257 after finding that the agency's failure to calculate potential emissions from foreign oil consumption had violated the National Environmental Policy Act. The sale, held last November, covered 80.8 million acres on the outer continental shelf and was the largest offshore lease sale in the nation's history."
"Congressional Democrats Join Republicans To Undermine Biden Administration's Surprise Medical Billing Rule: Worried an aggressive new rule could cut into providers' earnings, key members of Congress including Rep. Richie Neal are helping private industry weaken the administration's position in federal court. CONGRESSIONAL DEMOCRATS ARE joining Republicans in a last-ditch effort to undermine the newly implemented No Surprises Act, which bans surprise medical bills. A key provision in the law could become a first step toward allowing the federal government to standardize rates for medical procedures covered under private insurance plans, an objective the private health care industry has fought for decades. Late last year, in the months leading up to the bill's enactment, opponents filed a flurry of lawsuits claiming that by enforcing the rule in a manner widely viewed as consistent with the text of the legislation, the Biden administration had overstepped Congress's intentions. The leading opponents of the provision, which mandates that insurers and health care providers settle billing disputes based primarily on the median in-network rate for a procedure, are organizations representing the private health care industry, like the American Hospital Association and the American Medical Association. Along with a number of health care providers, the groups have filed lawsuits that federal courts are expected to decide in the coming months, before the first round of disputes under the new law reaches the arbitration stage. The legal arguments rely on murky case law about congressional intent, but nonpartisan experts familiar with the No Surprises Act told The Intercept that the rule is consistent with the law's text. Instead, they point to the law's possible consequences to explain why providers are fighting so hard to undermine its implementation. The move has the potential to drive down the high prices U.S. providers charge compared to other countries, stoking fears in the health care industry that it would lead to standardized rates. The drop in prices would at least partially be returned to Americans in the form of lower health insurance premiums." We already knew the right-wing Dems, and particularly Neal, were up to this, but here it is again.
"The Democratic Pivot: There's a path to gaining some needed successes on policy and legislation while waiting for a deal to emerge on Build Back Better. DDay is not on board with the idea that somehow Build Back Better can pass in any meaningful way or that Manchin and Sinema will each have a come-to-Jesus moment, but he thinks there are still ways to get things done. There are already some promising bills that seem headed for the president's desk.
"'A No-Brainer': Lawmakers Urge Pelosi to Hold Vote on Stock Trading Ban: 'Perhaps this means some of our colleagues will miss out on lucrative investment opportunities,' said House members in a bipartisan letter. 'We don't care.' A bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers on Monday urged the top Democrat and Republican in the House of Representatives to 'swiftly bring legislation to prohibit members of Congress from owning or trading stock' to the floor. The call came in a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.)—who has faced criticism for defending her husband's trades and existing rules—and Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), who is reportedly considering enacting a ban on lawmakers trading if the GOP wins control of the chamber in this year's midterms. Pointing to proposals such as the Ban Conflicted Trading Act or the TRUST in Congress Act, the letter states that 'this common-sense, bipartisan legislation is unfortunately necessary in light of recent misconduct, and is supported by Americans across the political spectrum.'"
"Big Tech Freaks Out About Bipartisan Crackdown: CEOs are calling individual senators and lobbyists are engaged in a full-court press to stop legislation in its tracks. If the Senate Judiciary Committee advances a bill it is marking up today, you're going to die. At least, that's the assessment of Kent Walker, chief legal officer of Google, who claims that the proposed legislation would 'threaten America's national security,' slow down urgent searches for information like 'stroke symptoms,' and hamper access to COVID vaccines. If it sounds overheated, well, it is. But it's part of a coordinated, borderline-hysterical campaign from the most powerful companies in the business world, aimed at preventing any restrictions on their practices. The Judiciary Committee has planned to mark up two bills. The first would prohibit Big Tech platforms from preferencing their own products over rivals, like Amazon cloning third-party seller products and promoting them on their marketplace, or Google hosting restaurant reviews scraped from competitors on its search page. The second would regulate the two dominant app stores (Apple's and Google's) to stop monopoly price-gouging and offer choice in managing apps. Both mostly serve to protect smaller businesses put at a disadvantage by the power and aggression of Big Tech companies; they would not put these prodigious platforms out of business, or change their massive valuations. It would merely level the playing field, slightly. Yet the very idea of regulating the tech industry for the first time in the platform era has triggered an unprecedented firestorm."
"Big Tech Is About to Make Our Terrible Health Care System Even Worse: 'It's like Uber, but for nurses.' Does that scare you? It should. Private hospitals are increasingly teaming up with Silicon Valley to make American health care even more exploitative. [...] The idea has been gathering steam during the COVID-19 pandemic, which has pushed America's capitalist health care system to its limits, dramatically exposing and exacerbating preexisting issues. The imperative for health care to turn a profit has left hospitals woefully understaffed, under-resourced, and unable to properly deal with the influx of COVID-19 patients. Thus, the question of the health care labor market has been driven to the fore, with everyone agreeing that something needs to change. But instead of acknowledging that decades of pinching pennies and cutting corners led to this chaotic juncture and course-correcting by sacrificing future profits to permanently increase capacity, major health care companies have opted for a more predictable response. They've united with venture capital and Silicon Valley in a depressingly on-brand pivot to the gig economy."
Jack Crosbie, "The Bold Electoral Strategy That Could Save Biden's Legacy: Give People Free Stuff: The White House took too long to offer free Covid-19 tests and masks. It shouldn't stop there, [...] The key is that they can't stop there. Yesterday's early rollout of the U.S. Postal Service's free test-delivery program was just functional enough, despite its bugs, that it gave us a look at what a functional government can do for its citizens. The fact that the Biden administration had to literally be shamed into taking this step isn't a good sign, nor is Jen Psaki's sneering dismissal of constructive criticism and legitimate questioning. As the gridlock in Congress makes the Democrats' electoral hopes dimmer and dimmer for the 2022 midterms, it's clear that the party as a whole desperately needs any concrete signs of progress to market to voters. [...] Critics will reduce this strategy, as they did with Trump, to crude bribery. And so what? Maybe a little 'bribery' is good, if it's coming from a body that has a constitutional and moral duty to provide for the people it governs. In the third year of a deadly pandemic, it's absurd that the American people haven't gotten more out of the organization designed to provide for them. We should have had universal free masks and tests years ago. Anything we get now might be too little and too late. But the other option is promising a little and delivering nothing, which until now has been the administration's default line. Biden's sinking approval rating shows how well that's worked so far. It's clearly time to try something new."
"Police Say Homicide Detective Sean Suiter Committed Suicide, So Why Doesn't Anyone Believe Them?The circumstances surrounding the 2017 death of Baltimore detective Sean Suiter were already suspicious—then it was revealed that Suiter died one day before he was supposed to testify in a police corruption investigation. A recent HBO documentary entitled The Slow Hustle has brought renewed attention to the mysterious death of Baltimore homicide detective Sean Suiter in 2017. Police initially claimed Suiter was the victim of a lone assailant after his body was found in a West Baltimore alley with a gunshot wound to the head. But as details began to emerge regarding Suiter's involvement with some of Baltimore's most corrupt cops, the case took a turn that raised serious questions about what actually happened and if his death was part of a broader cover-up." (Transcript and audio.)
"Mayor Lori Lightfoot and police leaders lean on flawed information to argue releasing criminal defendants on electronic monitoring worsens violence problem: At the end of a year that saw at least 800 homicides in Chicago, Mayor Lori Lightfoot last month wrote to the Cook County chief judge with a request: Judges should immediately stop ordering certain defendants to await trial at home with an electronic-monitoring ankle bracelet. It would be a sweeping policy change intended to keep violent offenders securely behind bars, albeit with implications for thousands of people who would likely be kept in custody as their cases took months if not years to proceed. But many of the claims and statistics related in her letter and repeated at a press conference earlier this month are misleading — and some are simply inaccurate, the Tribune has found after examining the cases highlighted by the mayor." Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this article is that it appeared in The Chicago Tribune, because usually when these people lie about the need for harsher treatment, the papers just report it credulously.
"FBI and San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department accused of illegally seizing marijuana cash: The driver of an armored car carrying $712,000 in cash from licensed marijuana dispensaries was heading into Barstow on a Mojave Desert freeway in November when San Bernardino County sheriff's deputies pulled him over. They interrogated him, seized the money and turned it over to the FBI. A few weeks later, deputies stopped the same driver in Rancho Cucamonga, took an additional $350,000 belonging to legal pot stores and gave that cash to the FBI too. Now, the FBI is trying to confiscate the nearly $1.1-million bounty, which it might share with the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department. The FBI says the money is tied to federal drug or money-laundering crimes, but has specified no unlawful conduct and charged no one with a crime. The cash seizures — and another from the same trucking company in Kansas — raise questions about whether the Justice Department under President Biden is moving to disrupt the operations of licensed marijuana businesses in California and other states where pot is legal. The case has also rekindled allegations that federal law enforcement agencies in Southern California have been abusing forfeiture laws by seizing cash and valuables from people when the government has no evidence that they committed crimes. The FBI and the U.S. attorney's office in Los Angeles have been forced to return tens of millions of dollars in cash and valuables seized by federal agents last March from hundreds of safe deposit boxes in Beverly Hills after the government failed to produce evidence to back up its allegations that the money and goods were criminal proceeds. Some of that money belonged to owners of state-licensed marijuana businesses."
"How America Made Itself a Poor Country — But Still Doesn't Understand Why [...] America's labour share of income — that's how much the average working schlub takes home — is about just 50% of GDP. Tanner Tucker Cooper Fletcher is about to shout at me that that's fair. He's wrong. In Europe, the labour share of income average between 70 to 80%. That is, Europeans, for the work they do, enjoy a share of the economy that's 50% greater than Americans do (aka the difference between 50% and 75%.) Let me say that again. Europeans take home a share of the national income that's 50% greater than Americans do. Fifty percent. What would you do with a fifty percent higher income? That's what Americans should be asking, instead of desperately searching for side hustles or day trades or what have you — and why they don't earn it"
People are pretty aggravated at watching Boris Johnson flout the rules he makes for everyone else, so the video made by Led by Donkeys where the cop-watchers of AC-12 from Line of Duty grill Johnson went viral pretty quick. They all left us wondering whether the actors from the show aided and abetted Led by Donkeys to create it.
"Another U.S.-Trained Soldier Stages a Coup in West Africa: The leader of a coup in Burkina Faso is the latest in a line of U.S.-trained soldiers who overturned civilian leaders. Earlier this week, the military seized power in Burkina Faso, ousting the country's democratically elected president, Roch Marc Christian Kaboré. The coup was announced on state television Monday by a young officer who said the military had suspended the constitution and dissolved the government. Beside him sat a camouflage-clad man whom he introduced as Burkina Faso's new leader: Lt. Col. Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba, the commander of one of the country's three military regions. Damiba is a highly trained soldier, thanks in no small part to the U.S. military, which has a long record of training soldiers in Africa who go on to stage coups. Damiba, it turns out, participated in at least a half-dozen U.S. training exercises, according to U.S. Africa Command, or AFRICOM."
"The Smearing of Emma Watson: Anyone who has ever been critical of Israeli actions toward the Palestinian people knows what to expect next—an avalanche of pit-bull attacks and smears that their criticisms of Israel are motivated by racism and anti-Semitism. The latest example is the response to actress Emma Watson's pro-Palestinian Instagram post, which led (predictably) to Israeli officials and supporters accusing her of anti-Semitism. Among many others, former Israeli UN Representative Danny Danon—in a tone-deaf post—wrote, '10 points from Gryffindor for being an antisemite.' The purpose of such false accusations is of course to deflect attention away from what is happening on the ground—the real (war) crimes that Israel is perpetrating against the Palestinian people—to the supposed motivations of the critics. Unable to defend its criminal actions, all that Israel's increasingly desperate defenders have left is smear and innuendo, as the attacks on Emma Watson make clear. But the accusations may also have some other unintended consequences—they make real anti-Semitism (the right-wing fascist variety that really does hate Jews as Jews) more respectable and legitimate—and thus even more deadly. In that sense, the Zionist defenders of Israel are among the most dangerous purveyors of contemporary anti-Semitism—the hatred of Jews as a collective."
RIP: "Meat Loaf: Bat Out of Hell singer dead at 74: The US singer and actor Meat Loaf has died aged 74, his agent has confirmed. Born Marvin Lee Aday and later legally known as Michael, the musician died on Thursday with his wife, Deborah Gillespie, by his side. No cause of death was shared but unconfirmed reports suggested he had died of Covid-19." (The Guardian's official obituary is longer but, strangely, gives short shrift to the importance of The Rocky Horror Picture Show in elevating his career.)
RIP: "Ronnie Spector, Ronettes Singer and Ultimate Girl-Group Icon, Dead at 78: Ronnie Spector, the leader of the girl group the Ronettes and the voice behind immortal classics like 'Be My Baby' and 'Walking in the Rain,' died Wednesday after a brief battle with cancer. She was 78. [...] The huge success of 'Be My Baby' in the summer of 1963 turned the Ronettes into superstars, and caused massive ripples across the pop landscape. 'I was driving [the first time I heard it], and I had to pull over to the side of the road — it blew my mind,' Brian Wilson said in 2013. 'I felt like I wanted to try to do something as good as that song, and I never did. I've stopped trying. It's the greatest record ever produced. No one will ever top that one.'"
"The fantasy of a Trump-slaying Republican [...] As I said, I don't know whether Trump is going to run. But I do know this: If he does run, none of the serious GOP contenders in whom so many conservative intellectuals and Republican apparatchiks are placing their hopes will challenge him. Yes, a spoiler candidate with no chance of prevailing and little chance of winning a single delegate — think Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger, or Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan — may jump into the ring for a few rounds. But Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis? Former Vice President Mike Pence? Texas Sen. Ted Cruz? Former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley? Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton? It's not going to happen. Why will none of them dare to take him on? Because they aren't political fools. They can read the polls showing Trump beating them by more than 30 points and understand that they can only change this dynamic by successfully taking him down — something no Republican has come close to doing."
"Guantánamo Notebook: I Spent 20 Years Covering America's Secretive Detention Regime. Torture Was Always the Subtext. 'U.S. Takes Hooded, Shackled Detainees to Cuba,' declared the Washington Post headline on January 11, 2002. The reporters who wrote it were on the ground at Guantánamo Bay and in Kandahar, Afghanistan. I was in Washington, at my desk in the Post newsroom, where I worked as a researcher. As I read the story, one ominous revelation stuck with me: 'The 20 prisoners, whose identities have not been made public ...' I would spend the next two decades learning those prisoners' names and covering the story of America's not-so-secret terrorism detention complex. It started as a research challenge: to uncover the secrets of what some have called the 'American Gulag.' Later, as hundreds more nameless 'enemy combatants' were brought to the remote U.S. naval base on the south coast of Cuba, I followed the story through the brief wax and long wane of the Guantánamo news cycle. I wanted to know who was detained and why — and when the 'war on terror' would end."
From 2013, MugWumpBlues on Milton Friedman was wrong every which way about the Postal Service: "The US Postal Service is a frequent target of those seeking to privatize public assets. In 1960, Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom argued for what Friedman defined as a smaller government. Claiming private industry does things better, he specifically advocated eliminating the United States Postal Service's mail monopoly. For his proof private mail service works better? Friedman claimed the USPS killed the Pony Express. [...] Friedman is not correct. The USPS monopoly was established in 1792, 70 years before the Pony Express existed. In its first 100 years, the USPS almost always made money. On the other hand, the Pony Express, in business only 2 years, always lost money and went bankrupt. If Friedman were correct, and the USPS killed the supposedly "more efficient" Pony Express, one wonders why the USPS allowed the profitable American Express and Wells Fargo companies to survive. Friedman sort of has one fact right: the Pony Express closed the day after the first trans-continental telegraph was sent. That ended the Pony Express business: electric current moves faster than horses. Who paid for that innovation? The United States Postal Service. " And that's just one little thing he was wrong about.
Looks like someone has discovered him again, so I'm always happy to have an excuse to post about him. "The wild story of Marine legend Smedley Butler that you won't hear at boot camp: While Butler is known to most Marines for this rare achievement, he is better known outside of the military community for his late-in-life epiphany that during his 33 years of Marine Corps service, he and his men fought, killed, bled, and died more to shore up the profits of Wall Street than to defend the United States from foreign invaders."
"Justified: Sony and FX Revive Timothy Olyphant Series: Sony and FX confirm Timothy Olyphant's return as Marshal Raylan Givens in a new Justified limited series, Justified: City Primeval." Can it possibly be as good?
But in my mind I know they will still live on and on
"This Iceberg Photo Is Perfectly Divided into Four Satisfying Quadrants: Although it was captured back in 2007 this photo from Canadian photographer David Burdeny still remains one of the coolest iceberg photos in existence thanks to perfect composition and symmetry that separates the photo into four different sections of colour and texture. Rising perfectly out of the Weddel Sea the iceberg photo is titled 'Mercators Projection,' and is taken from the series 'North/South' photographed during a trip to Antartica and Greenland."
"Bernie Sanders says Democrats are failing: 'The party has turned its back on the working class': Senator Bernie Sanders has called on Democrats to make 'a major course correction' that focuses on fighting for America's working class and standing up to 'powerful corporate interests' because the Democrats' legislative agenda is stalled and their party faces tough prospects in this November's elections."
Here's Lea Litman live-tweeting Supreme Court arguments in the case that's really about whether the executive branch or Congress can delegate the CDC to mandate health measures — or for any other agency to do its job. Scott Lemieux reports on the opinion. :"Republican Majority of the Supreme Court arbitrarily re-writes statute to conform to anti-vaxx Republican orthodoxy." As Scott points out, in the tradition of Bush v. Gore, the majority opinion was so shameful that no one was willing to put their name on it, but the joint dissent by Breyer, Sontomayor, and Kagan spells out just how egregious the decision is.
I guess once Michelle hugged W, it was all going to go this way. Can't wait to see them hugging Trump. Juan Cole says, "Dick Cheney says he doesn't Recognize current GOP, but he Helped pave way for Insurrection." After all, Cheney was at least as corrupt as Trump, but so much better at it. This guy was actually a serving Vice President of the United States and still on the payroll of Haliburton while he shuffled a whole load of no-bid, no-responsibility contracts to them. But now Democrats are toasting Cheneys like they toasted W with no recognition of what enemies of democracy these people always have been.
"Dick Cheney Should Be in Jail, Not Praised as a Hero by Democrats [...] I find it difficult to put into words how shameful venerating Cheney like this is by anyone, much less the country's supposed left-wing party — and it's particularly jarring given that Cheney has dedicated his career to attacking democracy, the very thing the ceremony was supposedly in opposition to. It's necessary to remember a bit of history here. Cheney was the most powerful vice president in US history. He is most remembered for his role in promoting the Iraq War, an illegal war of aggression predicated on lies, as well as pushing the nation to the 'dark side' after 9/11, which included torture, detention without trial (including of US citizens), warrantless surveillance, and other egregious departures from liberal norms of democracy."
"New Legal Filing in Mumia's Case: With continued pressure from below, 2022 will be the year that forces the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office and the Philly Police Department to answer questions about why they framed imprisoned radio journalist and veteran Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal. Abu-Jamal's attorneys have filed a PCRA petition focused entirely on the six boxes of case files that were found in a storage room of the DA's office in late December 2018, after the case being heard before Judge Leon Tucker in the Court of Common Pleas concluded. (tinyurl.com/zkyva464 ) The new evidence contained in the boxes is damning, and we need to expose it. It reveals a pattern of misconduct and abuse of authority by the prosecution, including bribery of the state's two key witnesses, as well as racist exclusion in jury selection — a violation of the landmark Supreme Court decision Batson v. Kentucky. The remedy for each or any of the claims in the petition is a new trial. The court may order a hearing on factual issues raised in the claims. If so, we won't know for at least a month. "
"The Bronx Fire Was Not Only a Tragedy, but Also a Housing Injustice: The fire, New York's deadliest in decades, shows why pandemic-era housing policy Band-Aids aren't enough. WITHIN 12 HOURS of New York City's deadliest fire in decades, which killed 17 people in the Bronx on Sunday night, officials were willing and able to apportion blame. 'A space heater is blamed for the deadly fire in a Bronx apartment building,' noted a New York Times headline Monday; New York Mayor Eric Adams had announced as much in a statement. The explanation was not so much false as it was wildly insufficient. The blaze was indeed reportedly sparked by a malfunctioning space heater. This alone was not enough to kill 17 tenants, including eight children, and leave dozens more hospitalized in critical condition. According to reports, the fire itself was contained to one apartment. Dense black smoke, meanwhile, spread through the entire 19-story building, through an apartment door that, were it in line with New York City codes since 2018, should have been self-closing." It was cold, the landlords still hadn't done anything to fix the heat. They'd ignored a lot of housing violations, in fact. And they were on the new mayor's transition team so it's unlikely he's going to go hard on them. And that's not all. But New Yorkers are already starting to suspect they elected what one local called "black Giuliani".
"Why US Prisons Don't Want Prisoners To Read: As one of the many calculated cruelties that define the US prison-industrial complex, the long assault on prisoners' ability to read books while incarcerated is sinister, inhumane, and must be stopped." Video and Transcript (16:38).
"US War Lobby Fuels Conflict in Russia, Ukraine, and Syria: Ex-Pentagon Advisor: A former senior advisor at the Pentagon confirms what was obvious to those who pay attention. The Military Industrial Congressional Complex is more powerful than anyone who occupies the office of the presidency. Col. Doug Macgregor, an ex-Pentagon advisor, on how the US war lobby fuels conflict from Ukraine to Syria. Washington, DC, he says, is 'occupied territory. It's occupied by corporations, by lobbies.' Douglas Macgregor, a retired US Army Colonel and former Pentagon senior advisor, analyzes the US-Russia standoff in Ukraine; the aftermath of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan; Trump's failure to act on 2016 campaign anti-interventionist rhetoric, only to surround himself with neocons; and the ongoing, overlooked US military occupation of Syria after the decade-long CIA dirty war. [...] We didn't pay any attention. We attacked him viciously. We essentially ignored any of his expression of concern or interest in Ukraine from the standpoint of Moscow's national security. And we have always refused to acknowledge the Russian concern that NATO is threatening to Russia. We've insisted, 'Absolutely not.' But we don't have far to look over the last 20 years at the various regime change operations that Washington has staged to appreciate Putin's concerns. But instead of addressing those concerns in a substantive way, taking into account what Russia's interests are, we've essentially said that they're illegitimate, and the only interests that are legitimate are our own and those of our quote-unquote NATO allies."
"There's a News Blackout on the Fed's Naming of the Banks that Got Its Emergency Repo Loans; Some Journalists Appear to Be Under Gag Orders: Four days ago, the Federal Reserve released the names of the banks that had received $4.5 trillion in cumulative loans in the last quarter of 2019 under its emergency repo loan operations for a liquidity crisis that has yet to be credibly explained. Among the largest borrowers were JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, three of the Wall Street banks that were at the center of the subprime and derivatives crisis in 2008 that brought down the U.S. economy. That's blockbuster news. But as of 7 a.m. this morning, not one major business media outlet has reported the details of the Fed's big reveal. [...] Those Fed revelations, that had been withheld from the American people for two years, should have made front page headlines in newspapers and on the digital front pages of every major business news outlet. Instead, there was a universal news blackout of the story at the largest business news outlets, including: Bloomberg News, the Wall Street Journal, the business section of the New York Times, the Financial Times, Dow Jones' MarketWatch, and Reuters."
A couple years ago, Luke Savage wrote this book review: "The Real Working Class Is Invisible to the Media: The media doesn't talk much about working-class America. But when it does, it mainly has one thing to say about it: that it's entirely white, male, and very right-wing. All those things are lies. [...] Central to this story is the decline of labor reporting, once a mainstay of major dailies. Today, by contrast, as Martin puts it: 'A conference gathering of labor/workforce beat reporters from the country's leading newspapers could fit into a single booth at an Applebee's.' Of the country's top twenty-five newspapers, he notes, a majority no longer covers the workplace/labor beat on a full-time basis, and the landscape for such reporting appears to be even bleaker on television (one 2013 survey cited by Martin, for example, reveals that only 0.3 percent of network TV news in the years 2008, 2009, and 2011 covered labor issues)." This led to his recent look back at the subject of labor coverage, "How the New York Times Covered Two Transit Strikes, 42 Years Apart: The vastly disparate NY Times coverage of two NYC transit strikes illustrates the dramatic transformation of mainstream coverage of working-class life in recent years. As media companies chase an upper-crust audience, workers have been erased."
RJ Eskow originally wrote in 2010 about the documents that established MERS was an illegal scam. It still amazes me that no one thought it worthwhile to put a stop to something that was designed to evade transfer fees and avoid proper registration of properties. And it's still going on. And these people still belong in prisons. "Pictures of MERS, Part 1: Corporate Documents Illustrate the Mortgage Shell Game."
Ryan Grim in 2009 on "Priceless: How The Federal Reserve Bought The Economics Profession: The Federal Reserve, through its extensive network of consultants, visiting scholars, alumni and staff economists, so thoroughly dominates the field of economics that real criticism of the central bank has become a career liability for members of the profession, an investigation by the Huffington Post has found. This dominance helps explain how, even after the Fed failed to foresee the greatest economic collapse since the Great Depression, the central bank has largely escaped criticism from academic economists. In the Fed's thrall, the economists missed it, too."
It's worth remembering Obama's betrayal of letting homeowners drown while he saved the banks and let them keep right on running scams like MERS, because right now Democrats are pretending they can "save democracy" with some prosecutions of the January 6th rioters. But that already seems to be falling apart and it does nothing to alleviate the real causes of the right, which is a continuing betrayal of the democracy and the public. It was, as Sirota says, "a predictable riot," and it's not over yet. "Democrats have coupled this pro-democracy theater with high-profile betrayals of the working class — from dropping a $15 minimum wage to ending the expanded child tax credit, to refusing to eliminate student debt, to killing paid family and sick leave proposals in the middle of a pandemic. Most recently, Biden's spokesperson scoffed at the idea of delivering free COVID tests to people's homes, Biden's consultants aided Big Pharma's efforts to kill promised drug-pricing legislation, and Biden's White House is promising no more stimulus legislation, no matter how much worse the pandemic gets. [...] As a recent Gallup poll shows trust in government further cratering under Biden, Democrats' theory seems to be the opposite of Roosevelt's truism — they seem to believe that a working class facing unending precarity would never dare 'sacrifice liberty in the hope of getting something to eat,' and that simply screaming about the end of what's left of democracy is a winning formula. Democratic Rep. Abby Spanberger perfectly summarized these beliefs when she recently declared that "Nobody elected (Biden) to be FDR, they elected him to be normal and stop the chaos' — as if 'stopping the chaos' has absolutely nothing to do with delivering FDR-like help to millions of angry people struggling to survive."
RIP: "Sidney Poitier, Black acting pioneer, dies aged 94: Poitier, who was born in Miami and raised in the Bahamas, was the first Black winner of the best actor Oscar for Lilies of the Field and, along with Harry Belafonte, was a pioneering Black presence in mainstream Hollywood cinema." I think I saw that movie once on my black and white TV set one afternoon, but I first saw him at the local movie house in A Patch of Blue and was impressed at how he loomed so large. We all loved him in To Sir, With Love, of course, and then he was in one of my private favorites, Sneakers, so yeah, he was a really big deal. Some people say he made all the others possible.
RIP: "Dwayne Hickman, TV's Dobie Gillis, has died at 87 [...] Hickman's TV and movie career ebbed and flowed through the 1970s, and he went on to work as a talent director a the Howard Hughes-owned Las Vegas Landmark Hotel casino, then a program director at CBS, overseeing M.A.S.H., Dukes of Hazzard, Designing Women, and Maude, The Associated Press reports. He started studying painting in the late 1980s. But for many people he was always Gillis, the lovesick teenager who never quite got the girl." Well, sure, he was always Dobie Gillis, but I still liked him in Cat Ballou. Zelda herself had some nice things to say on Twitter.
RIP: "Michael Lang, an organizer and producer of Woodstock, dies at 77 [...] Lang's death was confirmed by a representative, Maureen O'Connor, who said he died of complications due to lymphoma in New York City. Lang helped organize not only the original 1969 festival but also the 1994 Woodstock, as well as the disastrous 1999 Woodstock. Although he is arguably best known for helping to organize the historic festival, his career included managing music icons like Billy Joel and Joe Cocker, as well as producing numerous rock concerts."
RIP: Director, actor, writer, and critic Peter Bogdanovich, at 82. From Orson Welles to The Last Picture Show to Cybill Shepherd to some essential books on film (and even a good rock and roll movie), He was everywhere and got a lot of mileage, even if he was a bit... unreliable.
"The Second Coming of Octavia E. Butler: Sixteen years after the visionary novelist's death, Hollywood is bringing a slew of her intense sci-fi novels to the screen. The ground Octavia E. Butler covered in her 15 novels and two story collections is traceable—but you need time. In the '70s, '80s, and '90s, when Butler published the bulk of her work, she, Samuel Delany, and Ursula K. Le Guin were the only significant science fiction authors attempting such ideologically ambitious stories within the genre, placing left-of-center national politics and local histories right at the core of their plots. But genre fiction was historically not considered the breeding ground for the great American novel, especially if you were Black, gay, and/or a woman (all three authors were at least one of the above). In recent years, we've seen the tremendous literary contributions of these politically insightful sci-fi writers fêted rather than ghettoized. For Butler—unlike Le Guin, who died in 2018, and Delany, who is 79—the peak of her recognition has arrived posthumously."
"More American Girl Dolls with glasses: American Girl, a famous brand that makes 18-inch dolls, has many issues. Their dolls' skin colors, hair and other looks aren't very diverse, their accessories are the same kind of items, they're overpriced, and more. But the issue we're addressing in this petition is the lack of dolls that come with eye glasses. American Girl has made 50 character dolls as of January 2022. If we're being realistic, 19 more of the 50 character dolls should have glasses." This comes with a petition.
I'm just putting this one here for my own reference: "Beware the Moderate Democrat: Why the centrist extremists are an incredibly dangerous political animal" — They claim to be moderate and brand themselves as "the center", but they represent only 3.8% of the population.
"The private monorail tunnel under North London: Under North London, there exists a private underground monorail service, some 20km long, running from Elstree to St John's Wood in the centre of town. You can't ride on the monorail, and it's not an escape route for Royals or rich oligarchs, it's actually owned by the electricity grid — and it's their inspection railway."
"The Secret History of Holywell Street: Home to Victorian London's Dirty Book Trade: Victorian sexuality is often considered synonymous with prudishness, conjuring images of covered-up piano legs and dark ankle-length skirts. Historian Matthew Green uncovers a quite different scene in the sordid story of Holywell St, 19th-century London's epicentre of erotica and smut." (Thanks, Moshe!)
Kuttner, "Democrats Gain Control of a Key Regulatory Agency: Trump's chair of the FDIC, outvoted on a key issue, decides to bail. Democrats will regain firm control of a key regulatory agency, the FDIC, thanks to the abrupt resignation of its Trump-appointed chair, Jelena McWilliams, on New Year's Eve. Her departure takes effect in early February. Martin Gruenberg, a longtime progressive Democrat on the FDIC board and former FDIC chair, will become acting chair once again. The stakes are huge because several major bank regulatory issues will be decided this spring. Here's the backstory. In early December, the three Democrats on the five-member FDIC board formally requested public comments on the need for tighter regulation of bank mergers. McWilliams strenuously objected and tried to block the proposal. She wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal blasting the board majority's move as a 'hostile takeover.' The politics of the situation were briefly complicated when one of the three Democrats, Michael Hsu, a former mid-level Fed official who serves on the FDIC board via his current job as acting comptroller of the currency, momentarily lost his nerve and decided he did not want to cross the FDIC chair. But McWilliams soon learned that the law is not on her side. The FDIC's statute makes clear that the board is the legal authority, and the chair has only such power as the board delegates. At that point, she decided to call it a day, rather than serving as a lame-duck chair with no power, even though her term doesn't expire until mid-2023. This is a windfall for Democrats—and a reward to Gruenberg and the FDIC board's other progressive Democrat, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau director Rohit Chopra, for playing hardball. With McWilliams gone, Hsu is now expected to vote with the FDIC's other Democrats. All of this matters because in addition to tightening standards for bank mergers, the nation's regulatory agencies will soon act to restore capital and liquidity requirements for big banks, strengthen consideration of climate change in evaluating bank balance sheets, and undertake the first toughening of regulation under the Community Reinvestment Act in a quarter-century."
Jon Schwarz, "Everything Democrats Didn't Do in 2021: From protecting the vote to raising the minimum wage to action on global warming, in the past year, the Democrats did none of it. [...] THAT BRINGS US to 2022, which begins tomorrow. It is, of course, theoretically possible that the Democrats will take significant action on some of these issues in the coming year. But with rare exceptions, that's not how U.S. politics work. The biggest things happen in a president's first year in office, or they don't happen at all."
Branko Marcetic, "Biden's Agenda Is Dying Because the Interests of the Rich and Poor Are Irreconcilable: Joe Biden's rationale for his own presidency was that he could bring oligarchs and working people together and hammer out a compromise that worked for both. The apparent death of his legislative agenda proves what a laughable fantasy that was."
"'Innocence Isn't Enough': Arizona Urges The Supreme Court To Send Barry Jones Back To Death Row: The case has far-reaching implications: Should new evidence be ignored by the federal courts even when it exposes a wrongful conviction? [...] Now in their 30s, the siblings were just kids when their dad was sentenced to die. He'd been accused of an unfathomable crime: the rape and murder of his girlfriend's 4-year-old daughter, Rachel. Jones swore he was innocent — and the case against him was flimsy from the start. In 2017, an evidentiary hearing finally dismantled the evidence that sent Jones to death row. The next year, a federal judge overturned his conviction, ordering the state to retry Jones or release him. But that never happened. Instead, Arizona appealed the decision all the way to Washington, D.C."
"A Judge Has Ordered Him Released From Prison—Twice. The Government Still Won't Set Him Free. Bobby Sneed's story highlights how far some government agents will go to keep people locked up, flouting the same legal standards they are charged with upholding. [...] This year was going to be different. The Louisiana Board of Pardons and Committee on Parole voted unanimously to release him months ago. Yet Sneed has remained in prison long past his March 29, 2021, release date and despite a November 18 court decision ordering his release. Another ruling came down early last week: Sneed must be freed, a judge said. And as he was waiting by the gate for pickup, prison officials again refused to release him, instead rearresting him and transferring him to West Feliciana Parish Detention Center in St. Francisville, Louisiana."
"Cryptocurrencies: A Necessary Scam? "Yes, Web3 is a bunch of bullshit. The problem is, compared to what? For a few years, I've been thinking about why social movements like crypto and bitcoin have so much momentum. I often get emails from proponents of crypto as an anti-monopoly tool, and a lot of smart people that I respect believe that it is based on a groundbreaking technology that will sweep the world. I don't see it that way. I think it's a social movement based on a dangerous get-rich-quick scam. But there's a tremendous amount of goodwill involved, and as with GameStop, the underlying driver of the energy in this movement is mass and legitimate disillusionment with liberal institutions who have failed to deliver."
"Trump's Supreme Court allows Trump's other crank judges to run free: The reactionary hacks Republicans have nominated to lower federal courts have been overrunning Biden administration policy with no serious legal basis. One obvious reason they're doing this is that they know the Court that is theoretically in charge of enforcing its own precedents isn't going to do anything about it: [...] As Milhiser goes on to point out, the Biden administration is showing little resistance, even in cases (like the order to restore the Remain in Mexico policy) where the courts have no real ability to enforce their orders. The Cult of the Court remains powerful no matter how lawless the federal courts get."
"Democrats' Betrayals Are Jeopardizing American Democracy: History is screaming at Democrats to both rescue the economy and save democracy from a meltdown. They're doing the opposite. American democracy is in the midst of a meltdown — the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol and Republicans' intensifying crusade to limit voting rights and deny election results make that abundantly clear. Conflict-averse Democrats in Washington, D.C., are on the verge of letting this turn into a full-fledged nightmare. Torn between their corporate donors and the electorate, they are studiously avoiding the two key questions: What is really fueling this crisis? And how can it be stopped?"
A couple of graphs show that, "The Real Burglars Aren't Wearing Masks: Across the country and across industries, employers steal billions from workers each year. Minimum wage violation — the act of paying workers below the legal limit — is just one form of wage theft, but it results in at least $15 billion in lost wages annually. In 2015, minimum wage violations cost workers more than all robberies, burglaries, larcenies, and motor vehicle thefts combined."
RIP: "Sarah Weddington, attorney who won Roe v Wade abortion case, dies aged 76 [...] Susan Hays, a Democratic candidate for Texas agriculture commissioner, announced the news on Twitter on Sunday and the Dallas Morning News confirmed it. 'Sarah Weddington died this morning after a series of health issues,' Hays wrote. 'With Linda Coffee, she filed the first case of her legal career, Roe v Wade, fresh out of law school. She was my professor — the best writing instructor I ever had, and a great mentor. 'At 27 she argued Roe to [the supreme court] (a fact that always made me feel like a gross underachiever). Ironically, she worked on the case because law firms would not hire women in the early 70s, leaving her with lots of time for good trouble.'"
RIP: "Beloved TV Icon Betty White Dead on the Cusp of 100th Birthday: A few weeks shy of her 100th birthday, Betty White, the beloved actress and comedian whose career in Hollywood spanned nearly eight decades and included stints on hit shows like The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Golden Girls, has died.'Even though Betty was about to be 100, I thought she would live forever. I will miss her terribly and so will the animal world that she loved so much. I don't think Betty ever feared passing because she always wanted to be with her most beloved husband Allen Ludden. She believed she would be with him again.'" I think a lot of us thought she'd live forever, or at least wanted her to. I was glad to see that she hadn't spent her last days in pain, though. "In an interview with People, published on Dec. 28, White said, 'I'm so lucky to be in such good health and feel so good at this age.'" She was everyone's favorite little old lady. And here's that time Joan Rivers interviewed Betty.
RIP: "Joan Didion, Literary Titan, Dies at 87: Joan Didion, a resounding voice in American literature who insightfully captured the '60s and California through observant and beautiful language, died on Thursday at home in Manhattan. She was 87 years old. The famed writer's cause of death was Parkinson's disease, according to an email sent by her publisher, Paul Bogaards, an executive at Knopf, to The New York Times."
"Joan Didion, in her own words: 23 of the best quotes"
RIP: "Anti-apartheid hero Archbishop Desmond Tutu dies aged 90: Desmond Tutu, the South African cleric and social activist who was a giant of the struggle against apartheid, has died aged 90, prompting tributes from religious leaders, politicians and activists from around the world. Tutu, described by observers at home and abroad as the moral conscience of the nation, died in Cape Town on Boxing Day, weeks after the death of FW de Klerk, the country's last white president."
"Entertainment Monopolies Are Zombifying Mass Culture: Mass culture is becoming a museum dedicated to itself, its artifacts curated by an ever-narrowing family of conglomerates. Nowhere is that clearer than in the decline of The Simpsons, whose groundbreaking satire was killed by monopoly capitalism."
"Adolph Reed Jr.: The Perils of Race Reductionism: The political scientist Adolph Reed Jr. on the Black Lives Matter movement, the 'rich peoples' wealth gap,' and his Marxism. [...] What looks like an overall racial income gap that's not closing, that's persistent, turns out to be more an effect of rich people getting richer than the rest of us. What Bruenig finds is that 70% of so-called White wealth—or rather, close to 75% of so-called White wealth and close to 75% of so-called Black wealth—are held by the top 10% of each group, and that 97% of the racial wealth gap exists above the median."
"Government Action, Not Consumer Action, Will Stop Climate Change: Pointing the finger at individual consumers has been the default strategy of powerful corporations since the 1950s. Deflect blame for smog or litter or polluted waterways or carcinogens or gun violence away from manufacturers and onto John Q. Public. Make the issue about personal responsibility. 'People start pollution, people can stop it,' said the famous crying Indian ad from the early 1970s, the brainchild of a can and bottle manufacturers trade group. The strategy has worked like a dream because Americans prize personal responsibility. Ronald Reagan was speaking for many of us when he said: 'It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions.'"
"Best of 2021: David Dayen: Our executive editor hand-picks his favorite stories of the year." I was particularly interested in "Amazon's Attack on Women's Health," which isn't just about women's health products, but the way Amazon treats its sellers and customers.
Your occasional reminder that Teen Vogue is smarter than a lot of "grown-up" rags. "Billionaires Should Not Exist — Here's Why: This op-ed argues that every billionaire really is a policy failure. [...] We have arrived at an obscene inequality crisis, in which wealth is concentrated in the hands of a powerful few, at the cost of crippling hardship, precarity, and compromised well-being for the many. When a single billionaire can accumulate more money in 10 seconds than their employees make in one year, while workers struggle to meet the basic cost of rent and medicine, then yes, every billionaire really is a policy failure. Here's why."
"Here Comes the Juice: The Expanse Changed How We Think About Sci-Fi Storytelling: We expect space opera to be big—sprawling tales with enormous casts traversing untold star systems and encountering alien beasties beyond human ken. But Amazon Prime's "The Expanse" took a much more intimate, grounded tack: what if we reached the stars, and brought all of our problems—xenophobia, class inequities, our innate knack for self-destruction—along with us?"
Alex McLevy tweeted an image, "I'd like to thank the makers of the 2022 BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER calendar for obviously being devoted, passionate fans of the show who can readily identify all the most iconic characters." (Don't miss Andy Lambert's comment here to bring it all into focus.)
I have known who Pamela Coleman-Smith was for my entire adult life and have used her most famous work extensively at times, but in all these years, I never knew what she looked like.
