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Ajit Pai and Regulatory Capture
American Evangelicals and the Anitchrist
Bailout
Blankfein Says He's Just Doing 'God's Work'

The chief executive of Goldman Sachs, which has attracted widespread media attention over the size of its staff bonuses, says he believes banks serve a social purpose and are "doing God's work."

But he is, he told The Times, just a banker "doing God's work."

Brunhilde Pomsel

Brunhilde Pomsel worked at the heart of the Nazis’ propaganda machine. As a film about her life is released, she discusses her lack of remorse and the private side of her monstrous boss

Want to fight climate change? Have fewer children
Climate Refuge
Collective Nouns
Congressional Job Approval
Critical Race Theory
Debts that can't be paid, won't be paid
Demonym

Some nifty demonyms include Cochabambino, for someone from the city of Cochabamba; Minneapolitan for a person from Minneapolis; Monegasque for a person from Moncaco; Ivorian for a person from Côte d'Ivoire; Kalamazooian, for a person from Kalamazoo; Hoosier, for a person from Indiana; Phoenician, for a person from Phoenix; Mancunian, for a person from Manchester; Liverpudlian, for a person from Liverpool.

Distance Learning

The 1950s TV Show That Set the Stage for Today’s Distance Learning

(PDF) DNC SERVICES CORP, d/b/a, DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL COMMITTEE, ET AL. - Transcript of Motion Hearing had before the Honorable William J. Zloch, United States District Judge.

"And then in terms of concrete injury, which was really the first prong, that, again, is problematic, because - and this goes back to your Honor's question - there is no right to - just by virtue of making a donation, to enforce the parties' internal rules. And there's no right to not have your candidate disadvantaged or have another candidate advantaged. There's no contractual obligation here."

And then in terms of concrete injury, which was really the first prong, that, again, is problematic, because - and this goes back to your Honor's question - there is no right to - just by virtue of making a donation, to enforce the parties' internal rules. And there's no right to not have your candidate disadvantaged or have another candidate advantaged. There's no contractual obligation here. But here, where you have a party that's saying, We're gonna, you know, choose our standard bearer, and we're gonna follow these general rules of the road, which we are voluntarily deciding, we could have - and we could have voluntarily decided that, Look, we're gonna go into back rooms like they used to and smoke cigars and pick the candidate that way. That's not the way it was done. But they could have.

Equifax Data Breach

Congress votes to disallow consumers from suing Equifax and other companies with arbitration agreements: The Senate voted late Tuesday night to strike a federal rule that would have allowed consumers affected by the Equifax hack to sue the company. Without it, the millions affected by the historic security breach may be disallowed from related joining class action lawsuits. This specific rule, and only this rule, would be nullified if the joint resolution is signed by the President. The vote was 50/50, with the tie-breaking yea cast by Vice President Pence.

Edward Snowden

"Edward Snowden, a former contractor for the CIA, left the US in late May after leaking to the media details of extensive internet and phone surveillance by American intelligence."

Incomplete list of Wikipedia's Snowden Revelations

"The NSA's top-secret black budget, obtained from Snowden by The Washington Post, exposed the successes and failures of the 16 spy agencies comprising the U.S. intelligence community, and revealed that the NSA was paying U.S. private tech companies for clandestine access to their communications networks."

"It was revealed that the NSA was harvesting millions of email and instant messaging contact lists, searching email content, tracking and mapping the location of cell phones, undermining attempts at encryption via Bullrun, and that the agency was using cookies to piggyback on the same tools used by Internet advertisers 'to pinpoint targets for government hacking and to bolster surveillance.' The NSA was shown to be secretly accessing Yahoo and Google data centers to collect information from hundreds of millions of account holders worldwide by tapping undersea cables using the MUSCULAR surveillance program."

"The NSA and the GCHQ were also shown to be surveilling charities including UNICEF and Medecins du Monde, as well as allies such as European Commissioner Joaquin Almunia and the Israeli Prime Minister."

"Snowden's disclosures...revealed that the U.S. had spied on Brazil, France, Mexico, Britain, China, Germany, and Spain, as well as 35 world leaders, most notably German Chancellor Angela Merkel...Leaked documents published by Der Spiegel in 2014 appeared to show that the NSA had targeted 122 high-ranking leaders."

"An NSA mission statement titled 'SIGINT Strategy 2012-2016' affirmed that the NSA had plans for continued expansion of surveillance activities. Their stated goal was to 'dramatically increase mastery of the global network' and to acquire adversaries' data from 'anyone, anytime, anywhere.' Leaked slides revealed in Greenwald's book No Place to Hide, released in May 2014, showed that the NSA's stated objective was to 'Collect it All,' 'Process it All,' 'Exploit it All,' 'Partner it All,' 'Sniff it All' and 'Know it All.'"

Snowden says NSA engages in industrial espionage: TV

First Follower
Greenspan - I was wrong about the economy. Sort of

"I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organisations, specifically banks and others, were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms," said Greenspan.

The congressional committee's Democratic chairman, Henry Waxman, pressed him: "You found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right, it was not working?" Greenspan agreed: "That's precisely the reason I was shocked because I'd been going for 40 years or so with considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well."

Hermann Göring on Manipulating People

We got around to the subject of war again and I said that, contrary to his attitude, I did not think that the common people are very thankful for leaders who bring them war and destruction.

Why, of course, the people don't want war, Goering shrugged. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.

There is one difference, I pointed out. In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare war.

Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

- Hermann Göring on Manipulating People: Gilbert, G.M. (1947). Nuremberg diary. Farrar, Straus and Company.

Housing is a human right: How Finland is eradicating homelessness
Houston Homelessness
Income Inequality

Wage inequality captures the gap between wage-earning individuals. Let's shift our attention to a more common measure (for the study of inequality) of income. Income includes non-wage forms of income like return on investment or capital gains, and it groups individuals (depending on the way in which the data is collected) into families, households, or tax units

For the first 30 years after World War II, income for all groups closely tracked the expansion of the postwar economy. We were growing together. For the last 30 years, the gains have been starkly unequal: As productivity and incomes for higher earners continued to rise, the incomes of this in the middle and lower percentiles flattened off.

The magnitude of that redistribution is driven home by recent research from the Congressional Budget Office [see FIG below]. From 1979 to 2007, the after-tax incomes of the poorest 20 percent grew very little, gaining almost nothing in real (inflation-adjusted) value from 1979 to the mid-1990s and inching up during the late 1990s - for a net gain of about 15 percent. Incomes for the middle 60 percent of workers echoed this trend - while the next richest 19 percent did a little better. But the lion's share has gone to the top 1 percent--whose incomes over that span have almost tripled.

League of Women Voters: Debates

In 1987 the parties announced the creation of the Commission on Presidential Debates. The Commission chose LWVEF to sponsor the last presidential debate of 1988, but placed so many rules and restrictions on the possible format of the debate that the LWVEF was finally unable to agree to participate. In a press release at the time, Nancy Neuman, then LWVUS President, stated that the League had 'no intention of becoming an accessory to the hoodwinking of the American public.'

Luddites

the Luddites – who took their name from the mythological General Ned Ludd, whose legend included the smashing of weaving-frames – were engaged in the most science-fictional exercise imaginable – asking not what a technology does, but who it does it to and who it does it for.

All that was threatened by the advent of textile machines, which produced more fabric in less time, and required less skill. The owners of textile factories bought these machines with profits derived from the weavers' labor, and then used those machines to grind down the weavers. Their hours got longer, their pay got shorter, and many of them were maimed or killed by the new machines.

Here's where the science fiction part comes in. If you were a Martian looking through a telescope at Earth, it would not be obvious to you that these new weaving machines should benefit factory owners, rather than workers. There's nothing inevitable about that arrangement. The machines could just as easily have shortened weavers' working hours, increased their hourly pay, and made more fabric available at lower prices to the public.

Mass-resignation
Monarch Butterfly Migration

The annual migration of North America’s monarch butterfly is a unique and amazing phenomenon. The monarch is the only butterfly known to make a two-way migration as birds do. Unlike other butterflies that can overwinter as larvae, pupae, or even as adults in some species, monarchs cannot survive the cold winters of northern climates. Using environmental cues, the monarchs know when it is time to travel south for the winter. Monarchs use a combination of air currents and thermals to travel long distances. Some fly as far as 3,000 miles to reach their winter home!

National Hummingbird Day

A hummingbird eats about half of its body weight in sugar daily , Their hearts can beat as fast as 1,260 beats per minute , Hummingbirds are the only birds that can fly backward. , The roufus hummingbird has the longest known avian migration (when measured in body lengths).

Panama Papers

Panama Papers: The Secrets of Dirty Money. Panama Papers Q&A: What is the scandal about?

"A huge leak of documents has lifted the lid on how the rich and powerful use tax havens to hide their wealth. The files were leaked from one of the world's most secretive companies, a Panamanian law firm called Mossack Fonseca."

Pandora Papers
Paradise Papers

Paradise Papers: The Shadowy World of Big Money. Paradise Papers: Everything you need to know about the leak

"The offshore financial affairs of hundreds of politicians, multinationals, celebrities and high-net-worth individuals, some of them household names, have been revealed. The papers also throw light on the legal firms, financial institutions and accountants working in the sector and on the jurisdictions that adopt offshore tax rules to attract money."

Pharma chief: drug price rise a 'moral requirement'

"Last month, Nostrum Laboratories, a small Missouri-based drugmaker, more than quadrupled the price of a bottle of nitrofurantoin from $474.75 to $2,392, according to Elsevier's Gold Standard drug database. Nitrofurantoin is an antibiotic used to treat bladder infections that was first marketed in 1953, which appears on the World Health Organization's list of essential medicines."

"In an interview, Nirmal Mulye, Nostrum chief executive, said he had priced the product according to market dynamics, adding: 'I think it is a moral requirement to make money when you can.'"

"He also defended the actions of Martin Shkreli, who became infamous in 2015 for his decision to raise the price of an Aids and cancer drug from $13.50 to $750 per tablet...'I agree with Martin Shkreli that when he raised the price of his drug he was within his rights because he had to reward his shareholders,' said Mr Mulye."

Private prisons

Private prisons are certainly direct beneficiaries of more prisoners and longer sentences. But are they good for our society?

There is no evidence that they actually save taxpayers any money. In fact, the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics reported in 2016 that the cost-savings promised by private prisons have simply not materialized. Some research even indicates that private prisons often refuse to accept inmates that cost a lot to house (i.e. the violent offenders), making the statistics they report highly misleading.

A 2016 report by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) said that privately operated federal facilities are less secure, less safe, and drastically more punitive than publicly operated federal prisons. Inmate on inmate assaults were almost 30 percent higher in private prisons, and new inmates were often automatically placed in solitary confinement due to overcrowding.

Queen: Fried Chicken
Racial Inequality

The racial gap in earnings, incomes and wealth reflects the long shadow of slavery, and the persistence of racial discrimination in employment, politics, education, housing, credit, and criminal justice.

African-Americans also have a much more tenuous foothold in the labor market, their unemployment rate, across the last business cycle, running more than double that of whites. It is true of incomes, where the median for black families has grown alongside that of white families since the 1960s - but without closing the gap between them (black median income reached 60 percent of white median income at the end of the 1960s; that ratio has not budged since [see FIG below]).

And it is dramatically true of wealth, where the legacy of deep discrimination in housing continues to shape the accumulated assets, or net worth, of African-American families. [see FIG below] The median wealth of white households is about twenty times that of black households, a ratio that is actually higher now than it was a generation ago. Fully one quarter of African-American families have no net assets. And the housing crash hit African-American families hard, pushing homeownership rates back below 45 percent.

The close ties between race and inequality have been tightened in recent decades by the dramatic and devastating rise in incarceration rates (click here for a nice graphical summary). The U.S. incarceration rate more than tripled from 1980 to 2008 - and in a startlingly uneven fashion: African Americans are incarcerated at 7 times the rate of white Americans. In 2008, over a third of black men between the ages of 20 and 34 were incarcerated. More than two-thirds of African-American men without a high school education born between 1975 and 1979 had a prison record by 2008.

The impact of incarceration on inequality is hidden (those in prison are left uncounted by conventional measures of unemployment or poverty) but profound. Higher rates of imprisonment reflect not higher rates of crime, but an increasingly intensive policing or urban neighborhoods and institutions (including schools) and increasingly draconian sentencing laws. This, in turn, has served to exaggerate disadvantages based on race, place, and education. Jail suspends employment and income prospects for the period of incarceration, and undermines over the long haul for those who are released. Family members and dependents left behind fall into deeper poverty - and are themselves more likely as a result to end up behind bars. Mass incarceration, now accompanied by a vast prison-industrial complex, undercuts the bargaining power of "free" labor. And the systematic disenfranchisement of felons further skews the political reflection of racial and economic inequality.

Remember Oak Creek
Single Payer Healthcare: CBO

Exhibit 1-1, Page 12 - Summary of CBO’s Projections Under Current Law and the (5) Illustrative Single-Payer Options, 2030: Current Law saves $0, Option 1 saves $142 Billion, Option 2 saves $144 Billion, Option 3 saves $306 Billion, Option 4 saves $327 Billion, Option 5 saves $466 Billion.

Single Payer Healthcare: The Lancet

Taking into account both the costs of coverage expansion and the savings that would be achieved through the Medicare for All Act, we calculate that a single-payer, universal health-care system is likely to lead to a 13% savings in national health-care expenditure, equivalent to more than US$450 billion annually. The entire system could be funded with less financial outlay than is incurred by employers and households paying for health-care premiums combined with existing government allocations.

Single Payer Healthcare: PNHP

Of course, the status quo is unsustainable. National health spending continues to grow at a rapid clip, year after year after year, with the latest figures from 2019 showing a 4.7% increase from 2018, to $3.8 trillion. That’s more than enough to finance all medically necessary care for every U.S. resident while totally eliminating out-of-pocket spending. Bottom line: a single-payer national health program is not only affordable, it’s the only affordable option.

Snowflake Photography

Photographer and scientist Nathan Myhrvold has developed a camera that captures snowflakes at a microscopic level never seen before

Some of The Money In Politics

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez isn't even in office yet and she's already pulling back the curtain on the inner workings of Congress: "Our 'bipartisan' Congressional orientation is cohosted by a corporate lobbyist group. Other members have quietly expressed to me their concern that this wasn't told to us in advance," she tweeted. "Lobbyists are here. Goldman Sachs is here. Where's labor? Activists? Frontline community leaders?"

Are members of Congress becoming telemarketers?: Rep. David Jolly: And your job, new member of Congress, is to raise $18,000 a day. Your first responsibility is to make sure you hit $18,000 a day. The House schedule is actually arranged, in some ways, around fundraising. It is a cult-like boiler room on Capitol Hill where sitting members of Congress, frankly I believe, are compromising the dignity of the office they hold by sitting in these sweatshop phone booths calling people asking them for money. And their only goal is to get $500 or $1,000 or $2,000 out of the person on the other end of the line. It's shameful. It's beneath the dignity of the office that our voters in our communities entrust us to serve.

Call Time For Congress Shows How Fundraising Dominates Bleak Work Life: A PowerPoint presentation to incoming freshmen by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, obtained by The Huffington Post, lays out the dreary existence awaiting these new back-benchers. The daily schedule prescribed by the Democratic leadership contemplates a nine or 10-hour day while in Washington. Of that, four hours are to be spent in "call time" and another hour is blocked off for "strategic outreach," which includes fundraisers and press work. An hour is walled off to "recharge," and three to four hours are designated for the actual work of being a member of Congress -- hearings, votes, and meetings with constituents.

Systemic Racism in Mecklenburg County Government: Written by Charlotte Mecklenburg Library and the Robinson-Spangler Carolina Room

Systemic Racism in Mecklenburg County Government: Paper

Tax Gap

The tax gap can be a major source of inequity. Today’s tax code contains two sets of rules: one for regular wage and salary workers who report virtually all the income they earn; and another for wealthy taxpayers, who are often able to avoid a large share of the taxes they owe. As Table 1 demonstrates, estimates from academic researchers suggest that more than $160 billion lost annually is from taxes that top 1 percent choose not to pay.

'Thank God' for bailouts

Tired of all the mealy-mouthing over the bailouts? Charlie Munger's your man. Munger, the billionaire value investor who is Warren Buffett's sounding board and vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, told students at the University of Michigan this month that the Troubled Asset Relief Program and other handouts to bankers were 'absolutely required to save your civilization.' Munger, 86 years old, also rejected the idea of bailing out people whose economic decision making was as bad as the banks', saying individuals must 'suck it in and cope' - or society will collapse.

Wage Stagnation

"In fact, despite some ups and downs over the past several decades, today's real average wage (that is, the wage after accounting for inflation) has about the same purchasing power it did 40 years ago. And what wage gains there have been have mostly flowed to the highest-paid tier of workers."

Wage Theft

Workers in the 10 most populous states, home to about half of the country’s total workforce, are being cheated out of $8 billion annually. If these findings hold true for the other half of the U.S. workforce, it would mean that bad employers across the country are stealing around $15 billion annually from their employees just from minimum wage violations alone.

It is worth noting that this number, $15 billion, exceeds the value of property crimes committed in the United States each year: according to the FBI, the total value of all robberies, burglaries, larceny, and motor vehicle theft in the United States in 2015 was $12.7 billion (FBI 2016; Meixell & Eisenbrey 2014). Property crime is a better understood, more tangible form of crime than wage theft, and federal, state, and local governments spend tremendous resources to combat it. In contrast, lawmakers in much of the country allocate little, if any, resources to fighting wage theft, yet the cost of wage theft is at least comparable to—and likely much higher than—the cost of property crime. (It is important to note that our estimate doesn’t include all forms of wage theft: if minimum wage violations total $15 billion on their own, it is likely the full cost of all forms of wage theft—including failure to pay overtime, misclassification, off-the-clock violations, illegal deductions, and others—dwarfs the cost of property crime.)

War On Drugs

In 1994, John Ehrlichman, the Watergate co-conspirator, unlocked for me one of the great mysteries of modern American history: How did the United States entangle itself in a policy of drug prohibition that has yielded so much misery and so few good results?

I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. "You want to know what this was really all about?" he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. "The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

Wealth Inequality

While income captures the money coming into a family or household an annual basis, wealth measures accumulated assets or "net worth." This includes savings, home equity, and investments (and subtracts debts).

The top 1 percent claim about a third of the nation's wealth [see FIG below]. The top 5 percent claim over 60 percent. The top 10 percent claim over 70 percent. The top 20 percent claim over 80 percent. The next two percentiles - those falling between the richest 20 percent and poorest 40 percent - together claim a little more than 10 percent. Leaving the poorest 40 percent with a share of national wealth that is nearly imperceptible on the chart.

This inequality has been attenuated in recent years, since housing is (or was) the main source of wealth for middle-income American families. Between 2007 and 2010 alone [see FIG below], those in the broad middle class (between the 20th and 60th income percentiles) saw their family wealth slip almost 40 percent. The recession hit the wealthy hard, but they rebounded quickly: by 2011, the richest 5 percent were back were they were in 2003, while net worth for the median household had fallen by half over the same span.

Consider the latest data on patterns in global wealth, from Credit Suisse's 2012 Global Wealth Report. Of the 166 countries included in the report, the United States is - unsurprisingly - one of the wealthiest, with a mean (average) wealth-per-adult of about $260,000 - making it the 7th richest nation on that list...A more telling benchmark is median wealth - the point at which half adult American are worth more and half are worth less. On this metric, the United States (at only about $39,000) drops to 27th. Indeed the yawning gap between the mean and the median is pretty good measure of wealth inequality. If average wealth is $260,000, but half of all adults have a net worth of less than $39,000, a lot of wealth is being hoarded at the very top.