Conn Baby Gone

The big story here in Kentucky today is the disappearance of Eric Conn, the trial lawyer who plead guilty earlier this year to more than a half-billion in Social Security fraud and was facing 12 years in federal prison.  Under house arrest, it seems Conn took off his monitoring device and fled the country.

The FBI office in Louisville issued a press release saying Conn had removed his electronic monitoring device in violation of his bond and that authorities didn’t know where he was. 

Conn pleaded guilty to stealing from the Social Security Administration and paying bribes to a judge to rubber-stamp disability claims for thousands of his clients. Conn remained free on bond pending his sentencing next month, but a judge had ordered him to be on home detention with electronic monitoring. 

Conn faced up to 12 years in prison. He had also been ordered to pay more than $80 million — $5.7 million to repay fraudulent earnings; $46.5 million to the Social Security Administration; and $31 million to the government and two whistleblowers who helped expose his wrongdoing and their attorneys. 

After Conn was arrested in April 2016, prosecutors argued he should have to stay in jail pending trial, partly because of the risk that he could flee.

Employees in Conn’s office had heard him say he would flee to Cuba or Ecuador to avoid criminal charges, and Conn had wired substantial sums of money out of the country at times, an FBI agent testified at one hearing. 

“If he were to leave, to cross a border, he could go to wherever he has stashed some money and flee,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Trey Alford said at the time. 

Conn’s attorneys pointed out that he had not fled even though he’d known for years that he was under investigation, and that he had substantial ties to home, including his elderly mother and teen daughter. 

U.S. Magistrate Judge Robert E. Wier allowed Conn out of jail but set a number of conditions, including home detention with GPS monitoring at his large house in Pikeville. Wier also required Conn to pledge his home to secure a $1.25 million bond and to surrender his passport. 

Conn said at the time that he was not a threat to skip town. 

“Your trust is not misplaced,” he told Wier. 

The court issued an arrest warrant for Conn Saturday after he disappeared, according to the release from FBI chief counsel David Habich.

Despite the fact that the guy's name is literally "Conn" and he defrauded the government for nine figures, it amazes me that you get more prison time for carjacking a rusted out Dodge pickup than stealing half of one billion dollars, but that's America for you.  Meanwhile, maybe the Louisville FBI ought to figure out how this guy got away.

It's almost criminal.

Qatar Pin, Linchpin, Grenade Pin, Boom

That "major diplomatic crisis beyond Trump's control" scenario has just happened, and of course it involves America's Gulf State allies in the Middle East.  There are several players in the region, but Monday's meltdown involves natural gas-rich Qatar, and it looks like the Saudis believe they have the green light to squeeze Iran's Shiite allies in the region.

Saudi Arabia and three other Arab countries cut off most diplomatic and economic ties to Qatar, in an unprecedented move designed to punish one of the region’s financial superpowers for its ties with Iran and Islamist groups in the region.

Oil gained and Qatari stocks plunged after Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt said they will suspend air and sea travel to and from the Gulf emirate. Saudi Arabia will also shut land crossings with its neighbor, potentially depriving the emirate of imports through its only land border. Qatar called the accusations “baseless” and said they were part of a plan to “impose guardianship on the state, which in itself is a violation of sovereignty.”

Qatar is one of the world’s richest countries and of strategic importance, being the biggest producer of liquefied natural gas. A country with a population smaller than Houston, its $335 billion sovereign wealth fund holds stakes in companies from Barclays Plc and Credit Suisse Group. It also hosts the forward headquarters of CENTCOM, the U.S. military’s central command in the Middle East.

Emboldened by warmer U.S. ties under President Donald Trump, the Saudi-led alliance is seeking to stamp out any opposition to forming a united front against Shiite-ruled Iran. And while Monday’s escalation is unlikely to hurt energy exports from the Gulf, it threatens to have far-reaching effects on Qatar.

Air, sea, and land travel has been cut off to Qatar and its capital of Doha as well. All this started over -- surprise! -- an email leak between the Ambassador of the United Arab Emirates to the US and several US foreign policy figures from the Obama and Dubya administrations complaining about Qatar's frenemy the UAE being allowed to get away with things that no other Gulf State could.

An unnamed source who late last week leaked emails between a powerful ambassador and top figures in the U.S. foreign policy community shared a fresh batch of private messages with HuffPost on Sunday just hours before a new Middle East crisis erupted.

The new dump appears to contain messages between the United Arab Emirates’ ambassador to the U.S., Yousef Al Otaiba and top members of the Obama administration as well as figures at the Atlantic Council, an influential Washington think tank that receives funding from the Emirates, and Elliott Abrams, a prominent official in former President George W. Bush’s administration who is popular among some Trump administration officials.

Late Sunday, Otaiba’s nation, the UAE, and three other U.S.-friendly countries ― Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Bahrain ― announced that they had severed ties with their neighbor Qatar, a wealthy nation which hosts the largest American military facility in the region. The weekend email dump shows the ambassador and others privately blasting Qatar.

The dramatic change in diplomatic ties came after a leak of messages that showed Otaiba communicating with former Defense Secretary Bob Gates and prominent alumni of the Bush and Obama teams about his disdain for Qatar, his desire to shut down the U.S. military base there and his support for public criticism of the country. The stream of leaks also showed the level of tension among U.S. partners despite President Donald Trump’s recent visit to the Middle East and the scale of a campaign targeting one of the most important diplomats in the U.S.

In a message accompanying the latest dump, the source claimed the emails were meant to expose how moneyed foreigners hijack U.S. foreign policy to their own benefit and Americans’ loss. The source had previously denied any ties to Qatar. HuffPost has confirmed the authenticity of six of the email exchanges.

Qatar has long positioned itself as Shiite mediator between the Sunni Muslim states led by Saudi Arabia and Shiite Iran, because of its position in the region, its wealth, and its diplomacy.  The United Arab Emirates is the other side of that coin, only favoring the Sunni side.  The US happily helps out both countries as a result, and so far it's been nothing personal, just business (and business is good).

All that just disintegrated over these email leaks.

These leaks show a concerted effort by Qatar to slag the Emirati Ambassador to the US, while Qatar is saying that all the Iranian terror support is fake news, and in return the rest of the Gulf States have now considered Qatar a terrorist state (which is hysterically funny and awful once you recall that Saudi Arabia's militant Wahhabi faction of Muslim fundamentalists are pretty much terrorist factories.)

There's way more going on here than on the surface, and the US has multiple military, academic and corporate interests among all the Gulf States.  Having to take sides here when threading a series of needles is necessary is going to be bad enough, but let's remember our State Department is criminally understaffed, led by a oil executive who was hired by an idiot luxury hotelier who can't even keep his own hotels open.

In other words, the odds of this becoming a spectacular and bloody mess is extremely high. It's one thing for Qatar and the UAE to be in the middle of a fight, but it's entirely another for everyone to suddenly call Qatar an ISIS terrorist state and shut the place down.  And the bulk of the military forces in Qatar belong to...the US.  We have a nice little base outside Doha. Qatar says it's the victim here.  What happens to the US military in Qatar? What about the 5th Fleet US Naval HQ in neighboring Bahrain?

Absolutely nothing good can come from this.  This is going to get Middle East-ugly at wildfire-level speed, and Donald Trump is the US leader at the helm right now.

Good luck, and buckle the hell up, kids.  None of this makes sense, and it's moving way too quickly to contain.  Trump better figure it out or we're going to have an open shooting war on the Saudi Peninsula.

Of course, the larger issue goes back to Qatar being the largest producer of natural gas.  Qatar has long wanted a pipeline through Syria to sell its product in Europe.  The war in Syria has made that pipeline impossible for years.  And guess who's currently the biggest natural gas dealer to Europe right now?

Our friend Vlad.  So what if wrecking the Qatari ambition for a pipeline becomes the price Doha has to pay to get back in the Gulf States country club?

Remember, this all started days after Trump's Middle East trip to Riyadh. Qatar being completely cut off, unable to move natural gas at all, would be a huge help to the Russians and OPEC.  Heavy tension in the region would certainly start to push oil prices up.  Everyone would benefit.

Except for, you know, American consumers.

Just looking at the chessboard a few moves ahead, and I'm not liking what I'm seeing.  But off we go.

StupidiNews!

• British police have arrested 11 in connection with this weekend's London Bridge attack, the three attackers who were killed Saturday have been identified by law enforcement officials.
• Both former FBI Director James Comey and NSA Director Mike Rogers will testify this week in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee on Russian interference in the 2016 election.
• A growing diplomatic crisis in the Middle East now has several Gulf States, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt cutting diplomatic ties to Qatar's government over suspected terrorist ties to ISIS.
• Legalized recreational marijuana use in California, the subject of an upcoming 2018 referendum, could mean a billion-dollar yearly tax windfall for the state.
• For the first time Saturday's successful SpaceX Dragon spacecraft supply run launch to the International Space Station included a Chinese science experiment.

The Watch Of The Hours

Forget the "living paycheck-to-paycheck" economy, in 2017 it's all about "How many hours do I get this week" at the job, and unless your household is pulling down six figures, most of us are one bad week or two away from crashing.

“Since the 1970s, steady work that pays a predictable and living wage has become increasingly difficult to find,” said Jonathan Morduch, a director of the U.S. Financial Diaries project, an in-depth study of 235 low- and moderate-income households. “This shift has left many more families vulnerable to income volatility.”

Ever-changing schedules at Victoria’s Secret, for example, make it difficult for Ms. Casares, 27, to find care for her 2-year-old and 6-year-old and to cover the bills. “The lowest hours I’ve gotten is 15 and the highest I’ve gotten is 39,” said Ms. Casares, who started in October, earning $10 an hour. The schedule is usually posted a month in advance, she said, but there are frequently last-minute changes.

Stability is worth a lot to workers. On average, employees are willing to give up a fifth of their weekly wage to avoid a schedule set by an employer on a week’s notice, according to a field experiment where workers were offered a range of alternative hours at different pay levels.

“That is totally the story,” said Mr. Morduch, who watched household incomes in his study rise and fall. “And that instability and insecurity are increasingly a part of middle-class life, too.”

In the course of a year, for example, the monthly income of a California family with one child that Mr. Morduch’s team tracked jumped to $5,279 from as low as $1,175. (Strict ethics protocols prohibit the release of participants’ names.) The husband supplemented his steady $400-a-week salaried construction job with extra remodeling work that could add from $323 to $1,588 a month to his total. His wife picked up from zero to $1,824 a month from babysitting, and from selling jewelry, clothing and flowers.

Monthly expenses can pendulum as much as income, but the two do not necessarily move in tandem. An analysis of 250,000 bank accounts by the JPMorgan Chase Institute, a nonprofit research arm of the bank, found that roughly 80 percent of households had an insufficient cash buffer to manage the mismatch between income and expenses in a given month.

Few people can comfortably ride out the inevitable financial bronco ride. “Only households that earn $105,000 or more a year are secure against the volatility they are exposed to,” said Diana Farrell, the institute’s president and chief executive. “It’s not just about the unemployed or the poor.”

Middle-income households, for example, saw their monthly expenses deviate by nearly $1,300, the equivalent of a month’s rent or mortgage payment. And one uh-oh expense — usually in the form of a medical, tax or car repair bill — can wreck a family’s balance sheet for a year or more.

Even a single month’s volatility can have a cascading effect. One month, a family copes by using the money earmarked for, say, the utility bill to cover the cost of replacing a busted water heater. The next month, it’s the telephone company that goes unpaid as the family struggles to make up the missed utility bill plus late fees and interest — and so on. Emergencies are not the only source of expense spikes. So are bridal showers, Christmas gifts and outgrown winter coats.

People have jobs.  But they're being scheduled and micromanaged within an inch of their lives as businesses cut labor costs whenever and wherever they can.  Some states have laws on the books to help workers get paid for a half shift even if they are called in and sent home early. But for most of us, depending on how much OT you get or how much work at all you get this week means that side gig or two you're working on, and we've all done it.

It also means that varying schedule means it's hard to work in that second job regularly.  That hasn't changed much over the years.  But more of us are doing it.  That busted carburetor or balloon payment still happens, much less being able to save for college or retirement.

We're all living on the knife's edge it seems, and that knife is not really stable these days.

Another Tough Night For Europe

Another terrorist attack, this time in London itself as a van plowed through pedestrians on London Bridge before the people in the vehicle exited to take knives to bystanders and patrons.

The death toll rose to seven Sunday, following the latest terrorist attack to strike Britain, with Prime Minister Theresa May blaming the “evil ideology of Islamist extremism” and vowing to conduct a review of the nation’s counterterrorism laws.

London Metropolitan Police Commissioner Cressida Dick confirmed that seven people were killed in Saturday night’s incident that saw a van mow down pedestrians on London Bridge before the vehicle’s occupants got out and started stabbing patrons of nearby bars and restaurants. That toll does not include the three attackers, who were fatally shot by officers within eight minutes of the first emergency call, Dick said.

London Ambulance Service earlier said it had taken “at least 48 patients to five hospitals across London.”

As doctors and nurses tended to the wounded, police carried out raids in the east London neighborhood of Barking in a signal that authorities are probing at least the possibility that others may have been involved in the attack’s planning. A dozen people were arrested, police said.

The low-tech but high-profile attack will raise questions about how British security services failed to stop yet another mass-casualty strike after years of thwarting such attempts. May, who is running for another term in this week’s general election, said the nation needs to step up its fight against radical ideologies in response, asserting that there is “far too much tolerance for extremism in our country.”

“Things need to change,” May said Sunday, speaking outside of the prime minister’s residence at 10 Downing Street

The recent spate of terrorist attacks — Saturday’s was Britain’s third in as many months — were not connected, May said. But she described it as “a new trend” in which terrorists are “copying one another and often using the crudest means of attack.”

May had returned from the campaign trail to 10 Downing Street late Saturday for emergency meetings with security officials. On Sunday morning, all the major parties, including May’s Conservatives, suspended campaigning ahead of an election due on Thursday.

The outcome of Thursday's UK general elections is at this point anyone's guess.  Polls are showing that the voters are not happy with the Tories, who promised safety and security along with Brexit, a disengagement from the EU that would protect Britain from the chaos in Europe.

Needless to say that has not happened.  Whether or not Jeremy Corbyn and Labour are ready, well who knows.  The Tory lead has dropped from 18 points in mid-April when May called for the elections to less than six now, and closing fast.

Things could get very dicey from this point on in the UK.  If May loses, what happens to Brexit negotiations?   We'll see shortly.

Sunday Long Read: Wild, Addicted West Virginia

Margaret Talbot's profile of West Virginia's communities on the front-lines of the opioid crisis is our Sunday Long Read for the week, Talbot travels with a paramedic in Berkeley County, in the far eastern tip of the state's panhandle along I-81, a hour northwest of Washington DC.  It's not a poor mountain county by any means, being next to Maryland and Hagerstown, with more than 110,000 people in the county proper.

But it does have the worst overdose rate in the worst state for heroin overdoses in the nation.

Martinsburg, which has a population of seventeen thousand, is a hilly town filled with brick and clapboard row houses. It was founded in 1778, by Adam Stephen, a Revolutionary War general. The town became a depot for the B. & O. Railroad and grew into an industrial center dominated by woollen mills. Interwoven, established in the eighteen-nineties, was the first electric-powered textile plant in the U.S. The company became the largest men’s-sock manufacturer in the world, and at its height, in the nineteen-fifties, it employed three thousand people in Martinsburg. The Interwoven factory whistle could be heard all over town, summoning workers every morning at a quarter to seven. In 1971, when the mill closed, an editorial in the Martinsburg Journal mourned the passing of “what was once this community’s greatest pride.” In 2004, the last woollen mill in town, Royce Hosiery, ceased operations.

It’s simplistic to trace the town’s opioid epidemic directly to the loss of industrial jobs. Nevertheless, many residents I met brought up this history, as part of a larger story of lost purpose that has made the town vulnerable to the opioid onslaught. In 2012, Macy’s opened a distribution center in the Martinsburg area, but, Knowles said, the company has found it difficult to hire longtime residents, because so many fail the required drug test. (The void has been filled, only partially, by people from neighboring states.) Knowles wonders if Procter & Gamble, which is opening a manufacturing plant in the area this fall, will have a similar problem.

The Eastern Panhandle is one of the wealthier parts of a poor state. (The most destitute counties depend on coal mining.) Berkeley County is close enough to D.C. and Baltimore that many residents commute for work. Nevertheless, Martinsburg feels isolated. Several people I met there expressed surprise, or sympathy, when I told them that I live in D.C., or politely said that they’d like to visit the capital one of these days. Like every other county in West Virginia, Berkeley County voted for Donald Trump.

Michael Chalmers is the publisher of an Eastern Panhandle newspaper, the Observer. It is based in Shepherdstown, a picturesque college town near the Maryland border which has not succumbed to heroin. Chalmers, who is forty-two, grew up in Martinsburg, and in 2014 he lost his younger brother, Jason, to an overdose. I asked him why he thought that Martinsburg was struggling so much with drugs. “In my opinion, the desperation in the Panhandle, and places like it, is a social vacancy,” he said. “People don’t feel they have a purpose.” There was a “shame element in small-town culture.” Many drug addicts, he explained, are “trying to escape the reality that this place doesn’t give them anything.” He added, “That’s really hard to live with—when you look around and you see that seven out of ten of your friends from high school are still here, and nobody makes more than thirty-six thousand a year, and everybody’s just bitching about bills and watching these crazy shows on reality TV and not doing anything.”

The Interwoven mill, derelict and grand, still dominates the center of Martinsburg. One corner of it has been turned into a restaurant, but the rest sits empty. Lately, there’s been talk of an ambitious renovation. A police officer named Andrew Garcia has a plan, called Martinsburg Renew, which would turn most of the mill into a rehab facility. Todd Funkhouser, who runs the Berkeley County Historical Society, showed me around one day. “Martinsburg is an industrial town,” he said. “That’s its identity. But what’s the industry now? Maybe it will be drug rehab.”

I know, you're saying "Another story of Trump-voting white junkies who ruined the country for the rest of us?"

I'm starting to think that people voted for Trump in the Rust Belt for the same reason these states have succumbed to smack: they've tried everything else and they're still miserable.  Then along comes heroin in the same way Donald Trump came along with the cheap high of outrage and racism.  But like heroin, you need more and more outrage and hatred to be effective, and pretty soon you're addicted to it.

When these states -- and Kentucky is one of them, believe me -- crash from the high, it's going to get ugly, violent, and deadly.

Trump's Road To Ruin

So you remember Trump's "Trillion-Dollar Infrastructure Plan" that was going to make America yadda yadda?  Turns out that was a massive lie too, and you're the one who will pay for it.

President Trump will lay out a vision this coming week for sharply curtailing the federal government’s funding of the nation’s infrastructure and calling upon states, cities and corporations to shoulder most of the cost of rebuilding roads, bridges, railways and waterways.

He will also endorse a plan to privatize and modernize the nation’s air-traffic control system. That plan, which is to be introduced on Monday at the White House and the subject of a major speech in the Midwest two days later, will be Mr. Trump’s first concrete explanation of how he intends to fulfill a campaign promise to lead $1 trillion in United States infrastructure projects. The goal is to create millions of jobs while doing much-needed reconstruction and updating. But the actual details of the initiative are unsettled, and a more intricate blueprint is still weeks or even months from completion.

What the president will offer instead over the coming days, his advisers said, are the contours of a plan. The federal government would make only a fractional down payment on rebuilding the nation’s aging infrastructure. Mr. Trump would rely on a combination of private industry, state and city tax money, and borrowed cash to finance the rest. It would be a stark departure from ambitious infrastructure programs of the past, in which the government played a major role and devoted substantial resources to paying the cost of large-scale projects.

“We like the template of not using taxpayer dollars to give taxpayers wins,” said Gary Cohn, director of the National Economic Council and an architect of the infrastructure plan, in an interview Friday in his West Wing office.

His language evoked the corridors of Wall Street, where he previously worked. “We want to be in the partnership business,” Mr. Cohn said. “We want to be in the facilitation business, and we’re willing to provide capital wherever necessary to help certain infrastructure along.”

As a model for the approach, Mr. Trump plans on Monday to send a proposal to Congress for overhauling the nation’s air-traffic control system. He would spin it off into a private, nonprofit corporation that would use digital satellite-based tracking systems, rather than land-based radar, to guide flights in the United States. There would be no cost to the government, Mr. Cohn said, because a newly formed corporation would finance the entire enterprise, using loans to handle the initial costs of equipment and other needs.

On Wednesday, Mr. Cohn said, the president will travel to the banks of the Ohio River to deliver a speech about overhauling the nation’s infrastructure, including the inland waterways that are in dire need of attention.

The philosophy undergirding the speech, administration officials said, is that melding public and private forces to rebuild the nation’s physical backbone will vastly expand the resources available to pay for doing it. The concept — a discussion of which helped cement Mr. Cohn’s hiring by Mr. Trump late last year — has driven infrastructure policy in the United States for many years. But Mr. Trump is proposing a far smaller federal investment than many Republicans and Democrats have long thought is necessary.

So yeah, you'll get your roads.  And they won't cost "taxpayer dollars".  But if you plan to actually use those roads (or airlines) you'll be paying tolls, fees, and surcharges every time you drive or fly, and you'll have no choice in the matter if you want to get to where you're going.  These roads and flights have to make profits, after all.

Profits off of you and your family.

Enjoy paying by the mile, America.

Make America Technoligarchic Again

Daily Beast writer Joel Kotkin reminds us that while Trump is too busy looting the country and taking the US off the global stage in order to hide his kleptocracy, the rest of the world is moving forward with the next phase of corporate oligarchy, and that means the rise of Big Tech as the controlling interest in the US.

America’s vast midsection, a region that has been hammered by globalists of both parties, has been abandoned by the great corporations that grew fat on its labor and resources.

To many from the Appalachians to the Rockies, Donald Trump projected a beacon of hope. Despite the conventional wisdom among the well-heeled of the great coastal cities, these resource and manufacturing hubs elected the new president.

Yet barely six months after his election, Trump is emerging as the latest politician to betray middle America.

Some of this is his awful management and communications style, which may well leave the country frozen until it is returned to the care of the coastal hegemons, tech oligarchs, high-level bureaucrats, academics, and media elitists whose views of the Heartland range from indifferent to hostile. The rise of China may have been a convenient source of cheap labor and more recently investment capital and lots of full load tuitions for universities, but according to the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, our deficit cost the country 3.4 million jobs, most in manufacturing.

Trump’s trade rhetoric, like that of Bernie Sanders, excited the people and communities affected by these policies, but it remains questionable whether his own voters will benefit from his regime. Certainly the president’s tax proposals have been tailored to appeal to his billionaire friends more than the middle class. His health care reforms failed to prioritize those who feel threatened by loss of coverage, however much they gripe about the inanities of Obamacare.

Meanwhile promises that could help middle-America, like a massive infrastructure program, appear to be roadkill squashed beneath Trump’s staggering ineptitude and his Republican Party’s dysfunction.

There is no chance he will succeed in convincing voters he’s making America great again, let alone in actually doing so, if he cannot address the reasons why companies desert our towns and cities for all but elite functions, leaving so much of America in tatters.

And he's too busy looting the treasury on the way out to care.  So what comes next?

The notion of “Making America Great Again” had its flaws, but appealed to people who hoped to see middle-class jobs return to the country. It energized the suburbs and small cities who now find themselves led by an incompetent leader who appears to have used them, like patrons of a casino. Lured by an image of glamour they will find their wallets lightened rather than their spirits lifted.

The big winners long-term as Trump fails to deliver will be the country’s emergent tech oligarchy. Allied with the clerisy, and with an expanding, soon to be dominant, role in the media, they will create the conditions and define the future culture. Hollywood and Wall Street will be partners, but the nerds of the Valley will rule the economy.

To be sure automation and digitization brings many benefits, but Silicon Valley firms have secured advantage for reasons beyond being technically adept. Firms like Apple pay little in the way of taxes (thanks as much to Republicans as Democrats), and companies like Google manage to avoid anti-trust action. The rules are different for the oligarchs; they can afford to raise money without making a profit, as was the case of Amazon, Uber, and others. The shop on Main Street, or the store owner in the strip mall, enjoy no such advantage.

It is almost impossible to overestimate the power of these corporations. Apple alone for example has more cash on hand than the total reserves of both the United Kingdom and Canada. Four of the world’s richest people come from either the Seattle or Silicon Valley tech community. More important for the future, techno-nerds account for the most of 23 American billionaires under 40; 12 live in San Francisco, the de facto blue capital, alone.

The triumph of the oligarchs may spell the end of America as we have known it. Increasingly the core functions—and the big rewards—are concentrated in fewer hands and in fewer places. The distress being felt in rural areas and second-tier cities has its roots in globalization which, as Chicago sociologist Richard Longworth suggested two decades ago, undermines the industrial and routine business functions while boosting the already fantastic wealth of top echelon of executives, and those who serve them.

To keep the voters and the people they vote for at bay, the oligarchs will make common cause with the social justice warriors (as we saw during the election) and the greens to confine and control the terms of our national conversation as they work to expand and enforce a neo-feudal order.

The hoi polloi? They will get a stipend from the wealth generated by the oligarchs like Mark Zuckerberg. Likely not enough to start a business or own a home, but good enough to stave off homelessness or starvation. Silicon Valley and its media tools will forge a generation plugged into its phone but that owns little, and spends its limited capital on media, gadgets, and other idle pursuits. Americans will become more like a nature of serfs, their daily bread dependent on the kindness of their betters, their iPhone serving as both the new confessional and ephemeral town square.

This is precisely the America that Trump’s supporters sought to prevent, but may soon be stuck with. Not because the middle and working class has failed, but because Trump, due to his dysfunctional ways and inborn class biases, has betrayed the very people who put him in office.

And this is the future the folks that said "Once we get rid of Trump we'll have a real progressive state" wanted all along. A discredited Democratic party and a destroyed Republican party, well that leaves the corporatist leftovers in each.

Enjoy.

The Golden (State) Road To Single-Payer

California's state Senate has moved forward with a single-payer health care framework plan, the first step in what would be the largest change to the American health care market since Obamacare was signed in 2010...but there are still a lot of potholes on this road and the biggest roadblock may be Trump.

As a legislative deadline loomed, California senators Thursday — in some cases, reluctantly — voted to pass a $400 billion plan to create a government-run health care system without a way to pay for it. 

Senate Bill 562, by Sens. Ricardo Lara, D-Bell Gardens, and Toni Atkins, D-San Diego, passed 23-14 and will now advance to the Assembly, where it will likely be amended to include taxes. And that would mean the measure would require two-thirds votes in both chambers. 

“What we did today was really approve the concept of a single-payer system in California,” Lara said in an interview after the vote.

The California Nurses Association, the bill’s lead sponsor, has pushed the proposal hard, organizing demonstrations at the California Democratic Convention last month and promising to “primary” incumbent Democrats who don’t jump on board. On Wednesday, a study commissioned by the nurses concluded that Californians could save tens of billions of dollars annually under such a system through lowering of drug prices and elimination of administrative overhead. 

Most California families and businesses, the University of Massachusetts study said, would pay less for health care than they do now, even with the new taxes, because they would no longer pay premiums, deductibles or co-pays.

That's the good news.  The bad news...

A Senate committee analysis released last week, however, estimated that the state would have to raise $200 billion in revenue each year, which it said could be done through a 15 percent payroll tax. 

Republicans argued forcefully against the bill, questioning its cost and the very idea of a government-run program. 

“How do we possibly pay for this thing?” asked Sen. Tom Berryhill, R-Oakdale.
Sen. John Moorlach, R-Costa Mesa, said he felt like he was in the car with “Thelma and Louise.” 

“Colleagues, cliff dead ahead,” he said.

Lara acknowledged the bill was “a work in progress.” One of the many big questions left unanswered in the thin, 38-page proposal is whether the federal government would permit California to use existing Medicare funding for such a plan. The state also doesn’t know whether Congress will slash health care funding by repealing the Affordable Care Act.

It’s also possible that voters might need to approve such a change because of a rule called the “Gann Limit,” a 1979 statewide measure approved by voters that limits the growth in spending of the state and local governments. 

The vote put Democrats in an awkward position, and a number of lawmakers made that clear on the floor. 

Sen. Ben Hueso, D-Chula Vista, said he could not support the proposal because it lacked so much detail that if it passed, the Senate would be “kicking the can down the road” to the Assembly, where, he predicted, it would die. 

“The people of our state deserve a more substantive discussion,” he said. “I don’t know what I’m voting on.”

I'm glad California is starting on making the process of single-payer work for 40 million Americans, but the reality is California Republicans most likely have the votes to kill this right now.  That may not be the case in 2018, but that brings us to whatever Trump and the GOP does with healthcare, almost assuredly massive cuts to California's federal Medicaid allotment or even legislation or an executive order that outright prevents Medicaid money from being used for California's program at all. And then there's the real issue of having to hold a referendum for this, something that I think that Republicans can terrify voters, especially older ones, into killing for them.

There are still a lot of massive obstacles to get California to single-payer, but if any state can do it, it's this one.

I'll keep an eye on this for sure.

Weather Or Not, It Matters

Speaking of the subject of climate change this week, yesterday marked the beginning of the Atlantic hurricane season and should a storm smash into the East Coast or Gulf Coast right now, the Trump regime still hasn't bothered to nominate anyone for NOAA head to monitor storms and just now named a FEMA Director to deal with the cleanup.

Forecasters say the 2017 Atlantic hurricane season, which begins Thursday, could bring "above-normal" storm activity. Residents along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts are making sure they have supplies and plans in place if a storm hits. 

But this year there are concerns that the federal agencies in charge of dealing with disasters — from providing emergency relief to rebuilding homes — may be less prepared than usual and could be hampered by proposed budget cuts. 

Last year provided a reminder of why many say federal assistance is vital. In October, Matthew slammed into Haiti as a powerful Category 4 hurricane, killing more than 500. After that, it swept up the U.S. Atlantic coast, pounding communities like St. Augustine, Fla., where beaches were washed away and much of the downtown was underwater. 

Eight months after the storm, St. Augustine and surrounding communities are still recovering, spending millions to rebuild the coastline. The emergency manager of St. John's County, Linda Stoughton, says federal support for that effort is vital. "We understand disasters are local," Stoughton says. "We responded. But we are going to need federal funding to make St. John's County back to where it was." 

This year, key federal agencies that state and local governments and the public depend on still don't have leaders. Nearly five months after Donald Trump was sworn in as president, NOAA, the agency that oversees the government's weather forecasting, is still without an administrator, as is the agency that responds to disasters, FEMA. 

At least in the case of FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, a nomination is pending. The Trump administration has named the former head of Alabama's emergency management agency, Brock Long, to the position.

The real problem remains that Trump wants to cut billions from FEMA disaster aid response and preparedness programs and eliminate the government's flood insurance and mapping program entirely.  NOAA too would see its entire climate monitoring budget zeroed out along with cuts to weather station budgets and the National Hurricane Center.

It'll be bad right now if the US gets nailed by a big storm this year, or by a string of tornadoes.  It will only get worse in the future with more intense and dangerous storms fueled by climate change and less of a budget to deal with them.

But this is what America voted for.  Enjoy, coastal red states!

StupidiNews!

• "Marocain" was the winning word in this year's Scripps National Spelling Bee as 12-year-old Ananya Vinay was victorious over a field of nearly 300. 
• Vladimir Putin is promising military action and warns that the NATO "threat" to Russia will be "eliminated" should Sweden be allowed to join the treaty nations.
• The Trump regime wants the Supreme Court to immediately reinstate its revised travel ban on six majority Muslim nations while the courts consider the legality of his executive order.
• A new international Gallup poll of 66 countries finds Paraguay has the least tolerant views on race, religion, and culture, Sweden the most tolerant.
• The GOP majority on the FCC is ready to redefine broadband internet as something other than "telecommunications" in order to assure that the commission can't regulate it as a utility.

Last Call For We'll Never Have Paris

As expected, Kang the Conqueror continues America's path down the road of the international pariah as the US will now start the process to drop out of the Paris Climate Agreement.

President Trump announced Thursday that he will withdraw the United States from participation in the Paris climate accord, weakening global efforts to combat climate change and siding with conservatives who argued that the landmark 2015 agreement was harming the economy. 

But he will stick to the withdrawal process laid out in the Paris agreement, which President Barack Obama joined and most of the world has already ratified. That could take nearly four years to complete, meaning a final decision would be up to the American voters in the next presidential election. 

Still, Mr. Trump’s decision is a remarkable rebuke to fellow heads-of-state, climate activists, corporate executives and members of the president’s own staff, all of whom failed this week to change Mr. Trump’s mind with an intense, last-minute lobbying blitz. 

It makes good on a campaign promise to “cancel” an agreement he repeatedly mocked and derided at rallies, saying it would kill American jobs. As president, he has moved rapidly to reverse Obama-era policies designed to allow the United States to meet its pollution-reduction targets as set under the agreement.

“In order to fulfill my solemn duty to protect America and its citizens, the United States will withdraw from the Paris climate accord but begin negotiations to re-enter either the Paris accord or an entirely new transaction on terms that are fair to the United States,” the president said. “We are getting out. But we will start to negotiate, and we will see if we can make a deal that’s fair. And if we can, that’s great.”

The rest of the world has immediately vowed that the Paris Agreement will not be renegotiated,  Of course as I've said before, this is about exterminating Barack Obama and his legacy from the history books, and reversing as many of his accomplishments as possible.

Much like gun control, an overwhelming majority (in this case 71% of  Americans) want us to remain in the Paris Agreement, but the Trump regime and his cultists have said no, and so voters will ignore it and continue to vote for Republicans who believe climate change is a massive hoax and who will do everything they can to wreck the planet.

It's possible that the process for the US exit from the framework won't be 100% official until after the next presidential election, meaning that the Democratic candidate in 2020 may be able to keep us in, but I would assume at this point that no international partner will trust the US after this point, so there's really no point in us engaging.

We are a isolated rogue state.

The world will rightfully treat us as such.  I doubt the damage from Trump will be fixed in my lifetime, if ever.

Black Museums Matter

My only reaction to this story of a noose being found on the grounds of the National Museum of African American History and Culture at the Smithsonian is that "Wow it took this long for white supremacists to try to bring their particular brand of hatred in."

A noose was found Wednesday in a public gallery at the National Museum of African American History and Culture museum, the second such incident on Smithsonian grounds in less than a week, officials said. 

David J. Skorton, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, said in an email announcement that he had to share “deeply disturbing news” that the rope was found in an public exhibition space Wednesday afternoon. It was in the Segregation Gallery on the second floor of the history galleries. 

“The Smithsonian family stands together in condemning this act of hatred and intolerance, especially repugnant in a museum that affirms and celebrates the American values of inclusion and diversity,” Skorton wrote. 

Skorton added that the incident is being investigated by U.S. Park Police. Spokeswoman Sgt. Anna Rose said that police are investigating but she provided no further details. 

Police officials said a noose was found hanging from a tree Saturday on the grounds of the Hirshhorn Museum.

Two in a week.

And of course the argument is "Why do they need a museum?  Why can't they just be happy with American history?  They're Americans, right?  Isn't this, you know,  racist?"

Unspoken message is "You go after our Confederate monuments, we go after your African-American museums."

So two nooses appear.

Making America Great Again™!

Russian To Judgment, Con't

A lot to cover in developments in the ongoing Trump/Russia collusion investigation in the last day or so, so let's get to it: First up, remember the two Russian diplomatic compounds in the US that then President Obama kicked the Russians out of in December? Those compounds are now going right back to Vlad and his buddies to continue operating. 

The Trump administration is moving toward handing back to Russia two diplomatic compounds, near New York City and on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, that its officials were ejected from in late December as punishment for Moscow’s interference in the 2016 presidential election.

President Barack Obama said Dec. 29 that the compounds were being “used by Russian personnel for intelligence-related purposes” and gave Russia 24 hours to vacate them. Separately, Obama expelled from the United States what he said were 35 Russian “intelligence operatives.”

Early last month, the Trump administration told the Russians that it would consider turning the properties back over to them if Moscow would lift its freeze, imposed in 2014 in retaliation for U.S. sanctions related to Ukraine, on construction of a new U.S. consulate on a certain parcel of land in St. Petersburg.

Two days later, the U.S. position changed. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak at a meeting in Washington that the United States had dropped any linkage between the compounds and the consulate, according to several people with knowledge of the exchanges.

Last week the Russian Embassy's Twitter account retweeted a Sputnik article calling for the US to return those two compounds or face consequences.  Looks like manly man Trump caved in order to give his real boss a nice present.

And speaking of Russian bosses, Attorney General Jeff Session has once again been caught perjuring himself with evidence of yet another clandestine meeting between him and Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak that Sessions failed to disclose to Congress.

Congressional investigators are examining whether Attorney General Jeff Sessions had an additional private meeting with Russia's ambassador during the presidential campaign, according to Republican and Democratic Hill sources and intelligence officials briefed on the investigation. 

Investigators on the Hill are requesting additional information, including schedules from Sessions, a source with knowledge tells CNN. They are focusing on whether such a meeting took place April 27, 2016, at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, DC, where then-candidate Donald Trump was delivering his first major foreign policy address. Prior to the speech, then-Sen. Sessions and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak attended a small VIP reception with organizers, diplomats and others. 

In addition to congressional investigators, the FBI is seeking to determine the extent of interactions the Trump campaign team may have had with Russia's ambassador during the event as part of its broader counterintelligence investigation of Russian interference in the election.

Once again Sessions lied to Congress under oath, but he's still allowed to be Attorney General. Fun times. 

On the congressional side of the investigation, the House is finally issuing subpoenas to those involved in the Russia investigation...but also to former Obama administration officials over "unmasking" these names as Republicans still blame the previous administration for all this.

A political feud erupted on Wednesday over the U.S. House Intelligence Committee's probe of suspected Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election, with charges that the panel's Republican chairman subpoenaed the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency without telling Democratic members.

Committee aides complained that the chairman, Representative Devin Nunes, who publicly recused himself from leading the Russia probe in April following a secret visit he paid to White House officials, failed to consult Democrats on the subpoenas.

The subpoenas asked the agencies to provide details of any requests made by two top Obama administration aides and the former CIA director to "unmask" names of Trump campaign advisers inadvertently picked up in top-secret foreign communications intercepts, congressional sources said.

The former officials named in the subpoenas were Obama national security adviser Susan Rice, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power and former CIA Director John Brennan.

"Subpoenas related to the 'unmasking' issue would have been sent by Chairman Nunes acting separately from the committee's Russia investigation. This action would have been taken without the minority's (Democrats') agreement," said a senior committee aide, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Another congressional source, who also requested anonymity, said Democrats were "informed and consulted" before the subpoenas were issued.

Former Trump National Security Adviser Mike Flynn and Trump's personal lawyer, Michael Cohen were issued subpoenas, but so have former Obama National Security Adviser Susan Rice, Obama's CIA Director John Brennan, and Obama's UN Ambassador Samantha Power.

In other words, the House GOP wants to dump as much of this on "Obama leakers" as they can to distract from Trump's possible crimes.

But in the Senate, the hammer may drop as early as this time next week as fired FBI Director James Comey is expected to testify publicly.

Fired FBI director James Comey plans to testify publicly in the Senate as early as next week to confirm bombshell accusations that President Donald Trump pressured him to end his investigation into a top Trump aide's ties to Russia, a source close to the issue said Wednesday. 

Final details are still being worked out and no official date for his testimony has been set. Comey is expected to appear before the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is investigating possible connections between the Trump campaign and Russia during last year's presidential election. 

Comey has spoken privately with Special Counsel Robert Mueller III to work out the parameters for his testimony to ensure there are no legal entanglements as a result of his public account, a source said. Comey will likely sit down with Mueller, a longtime colleague at the Justice Department, for a formal interview only after his public testimony. 

When he testifies, Comey is unlikely to be willing to discuss in any detail the FBI's investigation into the charges of possible collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign -- the centerpiece of the probe, this source said. But he appears eager to discuss his tense interactions with Trump before his firing, which have now spurred allegations that the president may have tried to obstruct the investigation.

This of course explains the House move to put Rice, Brennan and Power under oath.  I would expect it to happen the same day or the day after Comey testifies.

Stay tuned.

StupidiNews!

• In a "friendly fire" incident, 11 Philippines solders were killed and 7 wounded when a Duterte regime airstrike against terrorists on Mindanao Island missed its target.
• Ohio GOP Attorney General Mike DeWine is suing five drugmakers over the state's opioid crisis, Ohio has led the nation in opioid overdose deaths for the past several years.
• Donald Trump is expected to announce that the US will abandon the Paris Climate Accords this afternoon, joining Syria and Nicaragua as the only countries refusing the global compact.
• China has surpassed the US in the size of the country's gaming market as global revenue from PC, console, and mobile games topped $100 billion last year.
• A German court has ruled that the parents of a deceased 15-year-old girl have no rights to her Facebook account, saying that allowing access would set a dangerous privacy precedent.