Last Call For Punishing The Poor

The Richest Man In Congress(tm) wants you to know that there's no real poverty in America, because our poors are just lazy, not actually, you know, poor or anything.

Darrell Issa, the richest man in Congress, said America has made "our poor somewhat the envy of the world." 

Asked by CNNMoney whether he feels personally responsible to address income inequality in the United States, the Republican Congressman from California said "absolutely." But he noted that America is the richest country on earth and implied that those in poverty here are better off than the poor in other nations. 

"If you go to India or you go to any number of other Third World countries, you have two problems: You have greater inequality of income and wealth. You also have less opportunity for people to rise from the have not to the have," said Issa. In the U.S., he noted there is better availability and access to quality public education.

So shut up you awful poor people.  If you really were moral, you'd have $450 million like Darrell Issa. Since you don't, he's obviously correct about us.

We should probably cut taxes on the 1%, just to be sure.

Watching The Watchmen

A three-judge federal appeals court panel has found that the USA PATRIOT Act does not in fact authorize widespread metadata surveillance programs and that these programs are illegal, but the panel stopped short of issuing an injunction stopping the surveillance.

In a 97-page ruling, a three-judge panel for the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit held that a provision of the USA Patriot Act known as Section 215 cannot be legitimately interpreted to allow the bulk collection of domestic calling records. 

The ruling was certain to increase the tension that has been building in Congress as the provision of the act that has been cited to justify the bulk data collection program nears expiration. It will expire in June unless lawmakers pass a bill to extend it. 

Thursday’s ruling did not come with any injunction ordering the program to cease, and it is not clear that anything else will happen in the judicial system before Congress has to make a decision about the expiring law. 

It is the first time a higher-level court in the regular judicial system has reviewed the program.

The conventional wisdom is that this puts significant pressure on Congress to reform or stop altogether these metadata surveillance programs.

I'm here to tell you that nothing could be further from the truth.

Congress will do nothing.

The case will probably be appealed to the Supreme Court, and it will find in favor of the US government.

The programs will continue.

President Obama will be blamed, of course, but it's the legislative and judicial branches that will refuse to stop bulk collection of metadata.  Please keep that in mind.

Nailed In A New York Minute

This amazing piece from Sarah Maslin Nir in the NY Times covers the nail salon industry in the Big Apple, where a massive concentration of places to get your nails done has driven prices to half the national average. The true cost however is how workers there, often women of color, are treated as chattel.

Once an indulgence reserved for special occasions, manicures have become a grooming staple for women across the economic spectrum. There are now more than 17,000 nail salons in the United States, according to census data. The number of salons in New York City alone has more than tripled over a decade and a half to nearly 2,000 in 2012. 

But largely overlooked is the rampant exploitation of those who toil in the industry. The New York Times interviewed more than 150 nail salon workers and owners, in four languages, and found that a vast majority of workers are paid below minimum wage; sometimes they are not even paid. Workers endure all manner of humiliation, including having their tips docked as punishment for minor transgressions, constant video monitoring by owners, even physical abuse. Employers are rarely punished for labor and other violations. 

Asian-language newspapers are rife with classified ads listing manicurist jobs paying so little the daily wage can at first glance appear to be a typo. Ads in Chinese in both Sing Tao Daily and World Journal for NYC Nail Spa, a second-story salon on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, advertised a starting wage of $10 a day. The rate was confirmed by several workers. 

Lawsuits filed in New York courts allege a long list of abuses: the salon in East Northport, N.Y., where workers said they were paid just $1.50 an hour during a 66-hour workweek; the Harlem salon that manicurists said charged them for drinking the water, yet on slow days paid them nothing at all; the minichain of Long Island salons whose workers said they were not only underpaid but also kicked as they sat on pedicure stools, and verbally abused. 

Last year, the New York State Labor Department, in conjunction with several other agencies, conducted its first nail salon sweep ever — about a month after The Times sent officials there an inquiry regarding their enforcement record with the industry. Investigators inspected 29 salons and found 116 wage violations. 

Among the more than 100 workers interviewed by The Times, only about a quarter said they were paid an amount that was the equivalent of New York State’s minimum hourly wage. All but three workers, however, had wages withheld in other ways that would be considered illegal, such as never getting overtime.

Outright wage theft, company store schemes, physical and verbal abuse, and that's just for starters. The rampant racism and living conditions verging on human trafficking can be much worse. It's a brutal situation, happening in hundreds of salons just in New York City.

Worker protection laws are there, but when those basic laws of human decency can't be enforced because of a lack of government resources, lives get destroyed, period.

And again I can't help thinking that the near complete invisibility of this problem stems in part from the victims being women of color.

StupidiNews!

• A massive rout of the left in Scotland by the Scottish National Party and Tory gains in Wales appear to give UK PM David Cameron and the Tories a majority in yesterday's UK elections.
• US Attorney General Loretta Lynch is expected to announce as early as today that the Justice Department will be making a full patterns and practices investigation into the Baltimore PD.
• President Obama will visit Nike's headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon today to push the Trans-Pacific Partnership as the shoemaker pledges to create 10,000 new US jobs.
• Mobile phone giant Ericsson is suing Apple in Europe over patent royalties as Apple's current arrangement for paying Ericsson expired in January.
• Swiss watchmaker Swatch says they will be releasing "revolutionary" battery technology in 2016 for smartwatches and automobiles.

Last Call For Literal Gay Bashing

Gosh, when are white urban community leaders going to do something about white on white violence in New York City?

The New York City Police Department (NYPD) is investigating allegations that men at a Dallas BBQ restaurant in Manhattan were called anti-gay slurs and then beaten. 

Jonathan Snipes, 32, told DNA Info that he was having dinner at the Chelsea neighborhood restaurant with his 25-year-old boyfriend, Ethan York-Adams, on Tuesday night when the attack occurred. 

“A table near us audibly started making pretty gross comments about the two of us like, ‘White f—-ts, spilling drinks,'” Snipes recalled. 

“I don’t let anyone talk to me like that,” he explained. “I went over there and asked, ‘What did you say about us?'” 

Snipes said that he weighed 140 pounds, and did not expect the two large men to turn the verbal disagreement into a physical confrontation. 

“I may be a mouthy broad, but I wasn’t going to take it to that level,” he noted, adding that one of the men “turned it into a physical altercation very quickly.” 

According to DNA Info, the man knocked Snipes off of his feet, and then began kicking him while he was on the ground. During the beating, one of Snipe’s teeth was left loose, cartilage in his ear was snapped and his head was bruised. 

“Take that, f—-t,” the attacker allegedly told Snipes. 

“At some point, the guy stops kicking me in the face. He’s won,” Snipes said. “But as [my boyfriend] tried to get me away, that’s when the other dude hits him with the chair.”

Maudlin humor aside, it's at the very least assault here and may even fit federal hate crime legislation if this ends up a civil rights case.  Even in a large, fairly liberal place like Manhattan there are still bigots and assholes and America still has a long, long way to go.

Dinesh D'Felon D'Nied

No Convicted Felon Dinesh D'Souza, you can't just take summer break from your community service, you're a convicted federal criminal.

Federal Judge Richard Berman shot down conservative filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza’s request that he be allowed a “summer break” from his community service because the Catholic high school at which he had been serving is on its summer recess, the New York Post’s Josh Saul reports.

D’Souza pleaded guilty to violating campaign finance laws by using other people’s identities to donate $20,000 to Republican Wendy Long’s failed New York senatorial bid. He was sentenced to eight months in a halfway house and community service, which he had been serving at the Mater Dei School in San Diego. 

But when the school let out for the summer, instead of finding an alternative means of performing community service, D’Souza had his parole officer petition the court for a “summer break.” Berman wouldn’t hear of it, writing that “with respect to [the] request that Mr. D’Souza’s community service hours be ‘waived’ from June 1, 2015 until July 13, 2015, the request is respectfully denied.”

“The short explanation is,” Berman continued, “as all criminal defendants are aware, that we don’t provide ‘summer breaks’ in these circumstances.” He noted that there are other “appropriate venue[s] for community service in San Diego” and strongly encouraged D’Souza to locate one of them and fulfill the terms of his parole immediately.

If Convicted Felon D'Souza didn't exist, he would have to be written into Arrested Development as a Bluth.  He's that much of a clueless, privileged bag of fermented stupid.

Frankly, the judge should have had a five minute laughing session, and then immediately thrown Convicted Felon D'Souza in prison.  But hey, this is why I'm not a federal judge.

That's probably a good thing.

An Air Apparent Situation

It's no longer a question of will man-made global warming cause damage, but how awful, widespread, deadly, and costly that damage will be.  We've hit a new milestone in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, one that foretells brutal results in the near future.

Record carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations in the atmosphere were recorded worldwide in March, in what scientists said marked a significant milestone for global warming. 

Figures released by the US science agency Noaa on Wednesday show that for the first time since records began, the parts per million (ppm) of CO2 in the atmosphere were over 400 globally for a month. 

The measure is the key indicator of the amount of planet-warming gases man is putting into the atmosphere at record rates, and the current concentrations are unprecedented in millions of years. 

The new global record follows the breaking of the 400ppm CO2 threshold in some local areas in 2012 and 2013, and comes nearly three decades after what is considered the ‘safe’ level of 350ppm was passed. 

“Reaching 400ppm as a global average is a significant milestone,” said Pieter Tans, lead scientist on Noaa’s greenhouse gas network. 

“This marks the fact that humans burning fossil fuels have caused global carbon dioxide concentrations to rise more than 120ppm since pre-industrial times,” added Tans. “Half of that rise has occurred since 1980."

World leaders are due to meet in Paris for a UN climate summit later this year in a bid to agree a deal to cut countries’ carbon emissions and avoid dangerous global warming.

Dr Ed Hawkins, a climate scientist at the University of Reading told the Guardian: “This event is a milestone on a road to unprecedented climate change for the human race. The last time the Earth had this much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was more than a million years ago, when modern humans hadn’t even evolved yet."

Oh, well we should probably do nothing then.  I'm sure it'll pass soon.

Our kids and grandkids, well, they won't be so lucky.  I'm sure they'll forgive us someday.

Maybe.

StupidiNews!

• A series of powerful tornadoes rocked Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska last night with Oklahoma City being hardest hit by several storms and nearly 8 inches of rain in 24 hours.
• LAPD officials are reviewing the evidence in the deadly police shooting of an unarmed homeless man Tuesday night in Venice Beach.
• British voters go to the polls today to decide a new government with polls showing the closest contest between the ruling Conservative Party and rival Labour Party in decades.
• A new global study of countries with minimum wage laws find that in 21 countries including the US, a 40 hour minimum wage work week will not get workers out of poverty.
• Tesla Motors say it will unveil the Model X electric SUV this summer and the cheaper Model 3 sedan next March, with mass production of the model in 2017.

Last Call For Doctor Feelbad

Dr. Ben Carson should really stick with the doctor part (the man is a neurosurgeon after all) and leave the politics to the slightly less bonkers people.

Republican presidential candidate and tea party favorite Ben Carson said in an interview with Newsmax that the President of the United States doesn't have to follow the Supreme Court if the high court were to rule in favor of same-sex marriage.

"First of all, we have to understand how the Constitution works. The president is required to carry out the laws of the land, the laws of the land come from the legislative branch," Carson said on Tuesday. "So if the legislative branch creates a law or changes a law, the executive branch has a responsibly to carry it out. It doesn’t say they have the responsibility to carry out a judicial law. And that's something we need to talk about." 

Carson's comments follow the Supreme Court in April beginning to hear arguments in Obergefell v. Hodges, which concerns bans on same-sex marriage in Kentucky, Ohio, Michigan, and Tennessee. The nine justices seemed to split along party lines in the early arguments. If the high court were to rule with the plaintiffs, gay marriage bans across the country could be wiped out in one single wave.

Carson, as Right Wing Watch which flagged the Newsmax interview noted, has signaled support for impeaching judges who favor same-sex marriage.

Which is weird, because when President Obama actually exercised his actual Constitutional executive order plans, the right went nuts and said it was illegal.  Now Carson is saying that as President, he will set up a Constitutional crisis in order to preserve wherever it is in the Constitution where straight people get to hate LGBTQ people.

Sure, this guy seems sane and all.  Let's elect him President.

White Out On The Blue Line

The Center for Public Integrity has a new study out this month that finds in 49 of the 50 largest cities in the US, police departments have a smaller percentage of African-American as police officers on the force than the share of African-Americans in the cities those officers serve.  The lone exception? Atlanta.

In Baltimore, white people make up 28 percent of the population but 50 percent of the city's police officers. In Philadelphia, where police and protesters clashed last Thursday during a #FreddieGray rally, whites are 37 percent of the population but 58 percent of the police force. In Sacramento, whites comprise just 36 percent of residents but 72 percent of police. 

Those are just a few of the departments whose ethnic makeup is dramatically out of sync with the demographics of the cities they serve. Using census data, Chris Zubak-Skees of the Center for Public Integrity crunched the numbers for the nation's 50 most populous cities. In 49 of them—Atlanta being the lone exception—the cops are whiter than the community. 

Zubak-Skees notes that police departments in many cities have worked hard to make themselves more diverse. Acting on recommendations by the 1968 Kerner Commission—which was appointed to investigate the causes of riots in Los Angeles, Chicago, Newark, and Detroit—many departments began reviewing fair promotion policies and recruiting African Americans. The numbers have improved somewhat over the years, but most big-city forces are still far from representative. The Kerner report warned that an "abrasive relationship between police and the minority communities has been a major—and explosive—source of grievance, tension, and disorder." 

"For many, those words still ring depressingly true today," CPI notes.

Is there any wonder still why there's a trust issue (not to mention the "us vs them" occupation mentality) when nearly all major police departments look nothing like the cities they are supposed to protect?

Besides Atlanta, the only other cities that are within even 5% of having the correct number of white officers on the force are Albuquerque and Seattle.

The city with the largest disparity?  Milwaukee.  The city is only 38% white, but white cops make up a whopping 70% of the Milwaukee PD. No surprise here that the worst thing to happen when a white cop shot and killed an unarmed black man in that city was that the cop was fired.

Lyin' Ryan Strikes Again

As Vox's Dylan Matthews reminds us, Rep. Paul Ryan's major problem with social programs and poverty begins with the realization that Ryan (and the GOP and much of the Village) gets the basic fact wrong on poverty.

It doesn't help that the first policy statement he makes is an out-and-out lie:

After a 50-year war on poverty and trillions of dollars spent, we still have the same poverty rates. 

This sentence suggests that either Paul Ryan has absolutely no clue how poverty rates work, or he does know and is actively deceiving viewers. First of all, the specific claim in question isn't even technically accurate. The poverty rate was 19 percent in 1964, when the War on Poverty was announced. In 2013, it was 14.5 percent. We do not have the same poverty rates we did then. Ryan is just wrong. 

But even that dramatically understates the progress that has been made. The official poverty rate is a travesty of a statistic, and using it at all in this context is irresponsible. It's literally based on food prices in 1955. But more relevantly for these purposes, it excludes the very anti-poverty programs Ryan is talking about. It excludes in-kind transfers like Medicaid, food stamps, and housing vouchers, as well as tax-based programs like the EITC. Blasting those programs because they don't show up in the poverty rate is like arguing that Netflix shows have zero viewers by pointing to cable ratings. 

And Republicans have been throwing this accusation around for a couple of years now: that the War on Poverty has been a $12 trillion (or $18 trillion or $22 trillion, depending on who is telling the lie) waste of money that hasn't helped anyone in America.

That's just an out and out lie.

A much better metric, which takes anti-poverty programs fully into account and is based on more recent data, is known as the Supplemental Poverty Measure. The SPM factors in government programs, and is based on current data about spending on food and other necessities. It's the poverty rate people like Ryan should be referencing. While the federal government has only been using the SPM for a short while, a group of researchers centered at Columbia — Christopher Wimer, Liana Fox, Irv Garfinkel, Neeraj Kaushal, and Jane Waldfogel — went back and calculated SPM numbers for every year since 1967. To distinguish from the government-issued SPM metric, they call this "anchored SPM." 

The researchers found that anchored SPM (the blue line below) has fallen dramatically in recent decades. But if you take out government programs, you get the green line below, which doesn't fall at all. Poverty — measured accurately, in a way that includes the government programs Ryan is trying to evaluate — fell, and it fell entirely because of government programs: 

Wimer et al 

"After accounting for taxes and transfers, poverty falls by approximately 40 percent, from 26 percent to 16 percent," write Wimer et al. Absent those programs, poverty actually would have increased slightly.

So yes, we've reduced poverty in this country by a lot.  We still have a long way to go however. And Paul Ryan and the GOP will completely reverse that progress and will add millions more into poverty once they get control of everything.

There is a difference between electing Republicans and Democrats, and fighting poverty versus massive austerity is just one major difference.

StupidiNews!

• German police officials say four German nationals have been arrested for planning attacks on German Muslims and mosques.
• A Nebraska woman has filed a lawsuit in federal district court in Omaha naming herself as "an ambassador of God" against the plaintiffs, the entirety of every LGBTQ person in America.
• Hillary Clinton's latest policy speech on immigration calls for a path to citizenship for all undocumented immigrants and attacked her Republican rivals' plan for "second-class status".
• As Greek PM Alexis Tsipras reaches 100 days in power, the ECB is considering tighter liquidity rules for Greek banks in exchange for continued emergency funding.
• The 11th Cirtcuit Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday that the government does not need a warrant to obtain your cell phone's location history records from your wireless carrier.

Last Call For Maximum Gohmert

You knew GOP Rep. Louie Gohmert wasn't going to be able to resist the awesomeness that is the US military's Jade Helm 15 exercises in Texas and the Southwest.

Tea party darling Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) on Tuesday demanded that the U.S. military alter a planned training exercise that some conspiracy theorists believe is cover for a possible takeover of the Lone Star state.

Gohmert said in a statement that he understands Texans' concerns that the exercise, dubbed "Jade Helm 15," may be a precursor for martial law. He directed his criticism specifically at what has been reported to be a map of the training exercise, which labels Texas, among other states, as "hostile" territory.




"Once I observed the map depicting ‘hostile,’ ‘permissive,’ and ‘uncertain’ states and locations, I was rather appalled that the hostile areas amazingly have a Republican majority, ‘cling to their guns and religion,’ and believe in the sanctity of the United States Constitution," Gohmert said in the statement.

"Such labeling by a government that is normally not allowed to use military force against its own citizens is an affront to the residents of that particular state considered as 'hostile,' as if the government is trying to provoke a fight with them," he later added.

The congressman urged the military to alter the tone of the training exercise and draw up a new map so as to dispel any notion that the federal government is "intentionally practicing war" against particular states.

States attacking other states?  Boy, he must have really hated the Confederacy actually doing that 150 years ago.

Seriously, Gohmert's going to be howling about this for months, might as well let him exhaust himself with a tantrum or sixteen now.

It's not a precursor for martial law, but it's not like Gohmert is, you know, sane.  PS, if this was under Bush's watch, noooobody would have cared.

Not Just Democrats Who Are Corrupt In New York

With all that Wall Street cash buying friends, it's no wonder that long-time NY State Assembly Speaker, Democrat Sheldon Silver, was charged with federal corruption counts back in January. Now in May, the other shoe falls as the GOP State Senate Majority leader, Dean Skelos, is facing federal corruption charges along with his son Adam.

Skelos, a 67-year-old Republican, and his 32-year-old son, Adam, were named in a six-count criminal complaint filed in Manhattan federal court that included charges of conspiracy and extortion. 

Prosecutors said Skelos pressured a real estate developer and an environmental technology company to pay his son more than $200,000 in exchange for his support on infrastructure and legislation. 

The men surrendered to the FBI on Monday morning and were expected to appear in court later in the day. Their lawyers did not respond to requests for comment.

The case marked another blow to Albany, a capital that in the last decade has seen 22 legislators charged for corruption, according to New York University Law School's Brennan Center for Justice.

Congrats, New York, you've set a new milestone in the jackass Olympics: you've managed to make New Jersey and Illinois look good.

Then-New York State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, a Democrat, was himself was charged with corruption offenses in January, making this the first time leaders of both of New York's legislative chambers were simultaneously facing charges. 

Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said Skelos's case showed that "public corruption is a deep-seated problem" in New York. 

Monday's complaint built upon evidence secured by authorities through cooperating witnesses, wire taps and search warrants.

We'll see where both of these cases go, but I'm betting running as a State Assembly or State Senate incumbent is going to be bad news in the Empire State come 2016.

Location, Location, Location

A major new study adds to the evidence that where you grow up plays a major role in how far you get in life, and of course it's the worst for kids growing up in poverty-stricken urban counties.

The feelings heard across Baltimore’s recent protests — of being trapped in poverty — seem to be backed up by the new data. Among the nation’s 100 largest counties, the one where children face the worst odds of escaping poverty is the city of Baltimore, the study found. 

The city is especially harsh for boys: Low-income boys who grew up there in recent decades make roughly 25 percent less as adults than similar low-income boys who were born in the city and moved as small children to an average place. 

Beyond Baltimore, economists say the study offers perhaps the most detailed portrait yet of upward mobility — and the lack of it. The findings suggest that geography does not merely separate rich from poor but also plays a large role in determining which poor children achieve the so-called American dream. 

How neighborhoods affect children “has been a quandary with which social science has been grappling for decades,” said David B. Grusky, director of the Center on Poverty and Inequality at Stanford University, who was not involved in the research. “This delivers the most compelling evidence yet that neighborhoods matter in a really big way.”

So yes, after decades of white flight, gated communities, exurbs, urban gentrification, and taking schools, infrastructure, and jobs with them, are we surprised that kids who grow up with multiple structural advantages do better than those who grow up with nothing?

Why, it's almost like the people who keep pointing out that there are structural barriers to the American dream for an entire class of people, and those barriers are not a product of nebulous "morality" as some would have it but a distinct feature of our broken system (if not the desired outcome of that system that's not broken at all, but working as intended.)

In America we stack the deck so high that it blots out the sun and people still wonder why the grass doesn't grow very well. The redistribution screamers are perfectly fine with the wealth remaining in the giant Scrooge McDuck money bins that exist now. The rest of us are just there to get crushed under all that loot, I guess.

P.S. The worst counties to grow up poor in according to the study? Reservation counties, particularly in South Dakota, counties along the lower Mississippi, and Forsyth County NC, home of Winston-Salem, about a hour from where I grew up.