Last Call For A Power Play In Puerto Rico

As millions in Puerto Rico remain without power, the Trump regime is turning to private industry to restore the power grid on the island.  The Senate is expected to finish up a $36.5 billion disaster relief package for Florida, Texas, California and Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands this week, and the biggest recipient of Puerto Rico's power grid contract, some $300 million to start with, is going to...a two-person company in Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke's hometown.

For the sprawling effort to restore Puerto Rico’s crippled electrical grid, the territory’s state-owned utility has turned to a two-year-old company from Montana that had just two full-time employees on the day Hurricane Maria made landfall.

The company, Whitefish Energy, said last week that it had signed a $300 million contract with the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority to repair and reconstruct large portions of the island’s electrical infrastructure. The contract is the biggest yet issued in the troubled relief effort.

Whitefish said Monday that it has 280 workers in the territory, using linemen from across the country, most of them as subcontractors, and that the number grows on average from 10 to 20 people a day. It said it was close to completing infrastructure work that will energize some of the key industrial facilities that are critical to restarting the local economy.

The power authority, also known as PREPA, opted to hire Whitefish rather than activate the “mutual aid” arrangements it has with other utilities. For many years, such agreements have helped U.S. utilities — including those in Florida and Texas recently — to recover quickly after natural disasters.

The unusual decision to instead hire a tiny for-profit company is drawing scrutiny from Congress and comes amid concerns about bankrupt Puerto Rico’s spending as it seeks to provide relief to its 3.4 million residents, the great majority of whom remain without power a month after the storm.

“The fact that there are so many utilities with experience in this and a huge track record of helping each other out, it is at least odd why [the utility] would go to Whitefish,” said Susan F. Tierney, a former senior official at the Energy Department and state regulatory agencies. “I’m scratching my head wondering how it all adds up.”

It adds up because Zinke wanted to bring home the bacon for his home state.  Guy still thinks he's a Congressman and of course this is a crapload of money awarded in a no-bid process because "emergency".

Whitefish Energy is based in Whitefish, Mont., the home town of Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke. Its chief executive, Andy Techmanski, and Zinke acknowledge knowing one another — but only, Zinke’s office said in an email, because Whitefish is a small town where “everybody knows everybody.” One of Zinke’s sons “joined a friend who worked a summer job” at one of Techmanski’s construction sites, the email said. Whitefish said he worked as a “flagger.”

Zinke’s office said he had no role in Whitefish securing the contract for work in Puerto Rico. Techmanski also said Zinke was not involved.

Techmanski said in an interview that the contract emerged from discussions between his company and the utility rather than from a formal bidding process. He said he had been in contact with the utility two weeks before Maria “discussing the ‘what if’ scenarios” of hurricane recovery. In the days after the hurricane, he said, “it started to make sense that there was a need here for our services and others.”

Just a total coincidence, I'm sure.

The scale of the disaster in Puerto Rico is far larger than anything Whitefish has handled. The company has won two contracts from the Energy Department, including $172,000 to replace a metal pole structure and splice in three miles of new conductor and overhead ground wire in Arizona.

Shortly before Maria ravaged Puerto Rico, Whitefish landed its largest federal contract, a $1.3 million deal to replace and upgrade parts of a 4.8-mile transmission line in Arizona. The company — which was listed in procurement documents as having annual revenue of $1 million — was given 11 months to complete the work, records show.

Yeah, these guys are the best experts in restoring power in the entire country, two guys whose biggest ever project took 11 months to fix five miles of power lines in Arizona when Puerto Rico has tens of thousands of downed transmission and distribution lines.

But sure.  These guys will help Puerto Rico get the lights on, as the island heads into its second miserable month without power, water, sewage, and hope.  Did I mention Zinke's son worked for these guys?

Totally not relevant, I'm sure.

They're not even pretending anymore that it isn't all about the graft and the grift.

It's About Suppression, Con't

The evidence continues to mount that Republican voter suppression tactics were what sealed the deal for Donald Trump last year, especially in Wisconsin.  GOP voter suppression laws were extremely effective in the Badger State, as MoJo's Ari Berman investigates, and there's no reason to believe it won't continue to work in 2018 and 2020.

Republicans said the ID law was necessary to stop voter fraud, blaming alleged improprieties at the polls in Milwaukee for narrow losses in the 2000 and 2004presidential elections. But when the measure was challenged in court, the state couldn’t present a single case of voter impersonation that the law would have stopped. 

“It is absolutely clear that [the law] will prevent more legitimate votes from being cast than fraudulent votes,” Judge Lynn Adelman wrote in a 2014 decisionstriking down the law. Adelman’s ruling was overturned by a conservative appeals court panel, which called Wisconsin’s law “materially identical” to a voter ID law in Indiana upheld by the Supreme Court in 2008, even though Wisconsin’s law was much stricter. The panel said the state had “revised the procedures” to make it easier for voters to obtain a voter ID, which reduced “the likelihood of irreparable injury.” Many more rounds of legal challenges ensued, but the law was allowed to stand for the 2016 election. 

After the election, registered voters in Milwaukee County and Madison’s Dane County were surveyed about why they didn’t cast a ballot. Eleven percent cited the voter ID law and said they didn’t have an acceptable ID; of those, more than half said the law was the “main reason” they didn’t vote. According to the study’s author, University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist Kenneth Mayer, that finding implies that between 12,000 and 23,000 registered voters in Madison and Milwaukee—and as many as 45,000 statewide—were deterred from voting by the ID law. “We have hard evidence there were tens of thousands of people who were unable to vote because of the voter ID law,” he says. 

Its impact was particularly acute in Milwaukee, where nearly two-thirds of the state’s African Americans live, 37 percent of them below the poverty line. Milwaukee is the most segregated city in the nation, divided between low-income black areas and middle-class white ones. It was known as the “Selma of the North” in the 1960s because of fierce clashes over desegregation. George Wallace once said that if he had to leave Alabama, “I’d want to live on the south side of Milwaukee.” 

Neil Albrecht, Milwaukee’s election director, believes that the voter ID law and other changes passed by the Republican Legislature contributed significantly to lower turnout. Albrecht is 55 but seems younger, with bookish tortoise-frame glasses and salt-and-pepper stubble. (“I looked 12 until I became an election administrator,” he joked.) At his office in City Hall with views of the Milwaukee River, Albrecht showed me a color-coded map of the city’s districts, pointing out the ones where turnout had declined the most, including Anthony’s. Next to his desk was a poster that listed “Acceptable Forms of Photo ID.” 

“I would estimate that 25 to 35 percent of the 41,000 decrease in voters, or somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000 voters, likely did not vote due to the photo ID requirement,” he said later. “It is very probable that between the photo ID law and the changes to voter registration, enough people were prevented from voting to have changed the outcome of the presidential election in Wisconsin.” 

A post-election study by Priorities USA, a Democratic super-PAC that supported Clinton, found that in 2016, turnout decreased by 1.7 percent in the three states that adopted stricter voter ID laws but increased by 1.3 percent in states where ID laws did not change. Wisconsin’s turnout dropped 3.3 percent. If Wisconsin had seen the same turnout increase as states whose laws stayed the same, “we estimate that over 200,000 more voters would have voted in Wisconsin in 2016,” the study said. These “lost voters”—those who voted in 2012 and 2014 but not 2016—”skewed more African American and more Democrat” than the overall voting population. Some academics criticized the study’s methodology, but its conclusions were consistent with a report from the Government Accountability Office, which found that strict voter ID laws in Kansas and Tennessee had decreased turnout by roughly 2 to 3 percent, with the largest drops among black, young, and new voters. 

According to a comprehensive study by MIT political scientist Charles Stewart, an estimated 16 million people—12 percent of all voters—encountered at least one problem voting in 2016. There were more than 1 million lost votes, Stewart estimates, because people ran into things like ID laws, long lines at the polls, and difficulty registering. Trump won the election by a total of 78,000 votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

There's little doubt anymore that Trump's electoral college victory happened because Republicans stacked the deck at the state level to make it more difficult for black voters.  2016 was the first election where these laws were in effect in a number of states like Wisconsin, and they achieved their goal: to disenfranchise more than a million voters, primarily Democratic voters.

It worked.  It will work again in 2018 and 2020 unless Democrats get people out to the polls and fight these laws now.

So far, they are doing nothing.

Mayor May Not Be An Exciting Race

Cincinnati is one of several metropolitan cities electing mayors in November 2017, but unlike New York City, Chicago, Boston, or Los Angeles, the Cincinnati races for Mayor and for City Council are kind of boring at least if you take the word of Jason Williams at the Enquirer.

No one seems to have the exact answer why city voters are snoozing so far. Based on conversations, here are five potential reasons why voters are feeling blah: 

1. No defining issue 

This is certainly the case for the City Council race. The Children's Hospital expansionis arguably the defining issue in the mayor's race between Democrats John Cranley and Yvette Simpson. Nonetheless, 2017 is nothing like four years ago, when the future of the streetcar was on the line in the election. In fairness, the streetcar could be one of the most divisive issues in city history, and it's hard to top the energy and emotional investment poured into it. But even then, voter turnout was just 29 percent.

2. Trump fatigue

Are voters taking a breather after last year's intense presidential election? The energy around the Donald Trump resistance has subsided since all the marches and protests locally and nationally early this year. Two council candidates told PX they're sensing voters are tired of hearing about politics and are in need of a breather before the 2018 midterms heat up. 

3. Meh about top of ticket 

Neither mayoral candidate has really given voters a really strong reason to vote for them. Mayor Cranley gets things done, but his abrasive personality has rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. Cranley's campaign has focused on touting his record, but he's not offered any new big plans for the future. Simpson has gotten little done in nearly six years on city council, and her puzzling decision on the Children's Hospital expansion in August has raised serious questions about her ability to lead. She also hasn't presented any solid, new plans. 

4. City's going in right direction 

Conversely, almost everyone PX talked to said they believe voters generally feel like the city is in a good place and heading in the right direction. There are polls out there showing that, but PX is skeptical of all polling. Despite all the childish infighting at City Hall, Cranley and this council have overseen the arrival of GE at The Banks; made a commitment to public safety; improved basic services such as street paving and garbage collection; and fixed the pension system. In addition, someone pointed out we just drew 1 million people to Downtown for the Blink light show – and that's said to be record attendance for a weekend-long event here. 

5. Under-the-radar council candidates 

Insiders had expectations of an exciting race, considering it's the first since council terms moved from two to four years. But it hasn't come to pass. It's not a real deep field of serious nonincumbents. There have been few intriguing story lines. First-time candidate Seth Maney has stood out. The first openly gay Republican to run for council has gone after openly gay Democratic incumbent Chris Seelbach for making too big a deal of identity politics. Democratic candidate Michelle Dillingham has talked openly about overcoming a heroin addiction. But other than that, most nonincumbents seem content to fly under the radar.

Mostly, all sides want to put the Sam DuBose shooting behind the city.  Cranley certainly isn't going to bring it up and risk pissing off the CPD, and Yvette Simpson isn't going to bring it up for the same reason.  Frankly, nobody wants to engage on the injustice of this.  As far as both mayoral candidates are concerned, they've tried their best.

But remember too that Cincinnati is a town where the mayor can't really do much of anything without the City Council and the City Manager.  When County Prosecutor Joe Deters gave up on a third trial in July, this issue simply went away for both candidates other than a couple of gripes.

If I had to pick, it would be Yvette Simpson.  Cranley had his shot and he didn't exactly cover himself in accolades, while Simpson actually has gotten things done on the City Council.  Ironically, it's the fact that Cranley was much more effective on City Council 12 years ago than he is as Mayor now that remains the main argument against him getting a second term.

Go figure.

StupidiNews!

• Donald Trump heads to Capitol Hill today for lunch with GOP senators to discuss support for his tax cut plan, the plan would cut $1.5 trillion from Medicare and Medicaid over 10 years.
• Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford says the American people are owed answers about the deaths of four servicemen in an apparent ambush in Niger.
• Iowa has become the latest state to pull out of a planned waiver of some Obamacare rules for 2018, state Republicans are blaming President Obama's signature law as too inflexible.
• Saudi Arabia is planning a $500 billion joint city project on the Red Sea coast with Jordan and Egypt, the city, called NEOM, will act as an autonomous trade region for all three countries.
• Canadian regulators have blocked sales of food supplement Soylent, the product doesn't meet government requirements for being a meal replacement.

Last Call For Still Not On The Team But Wants To Run It

Sen. Bernie Sanders will remain "the independent senator from Vermont" rather than running as an actual Democrat in 2018, which should come as zero surprise to anyone.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has confirmed that he will run for re-election in the Senate as an independent in 2018, despite recent pressure from some Democrats to join the party. 

Sanders told Fox News of his decision to hold onto his independent status during an interview Sunday night.

“I am an independent and I have always run in Vermont as an independent, while I caucus with the Democrats in the United States Senate. That’s what I’ve been doing for a long time and that’s what I’ll continue to do,” Sanders told Fox News.

Sanders had been facing pressure from some Democrats to officially run as a member of the Democratic party. Sanders caucuses with Democrats in the Senate. 

One Democratic National Committee (DNC) member, Bob Mulholland, had introduced a resolution at the party’s fall meeting that would have demanded Sanders and Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) run as Democrats in the future. 

However, the resolution failed, falling short of the simple majority it needed to pass.

Hell, we can't even get Democrats to agree that you need to be a Democrat anymore in order to run as a Democrat, and people keep wondering how third-party bids always end up so damaging to the Democratic party.

Yes, Maine's Angus King is also an independent but he also never ran as the presidential candidate for the party he didn't belong to either. So tired of this. Bernie grudgingly ran as a Democrat in 2016, but now refuses to.  He wants it both ways, and we fall all over ourselves in order to give it to him.

Oh, and let's remember Sanders promised to run as a Democrat in the future two years ago.

Sen. Bernie Sanders on Thursday filed his paperwork without issue in New Hampshire to appear on the state’s first-in-the-nation presidential primary ballot. 

The longtime Vermont independent senator faced no challenges at Secretary of State Bill Gardner’s office, despite earlier concerns about whether he legally qualified as a Democrat. Sanders declared himself a Democrat Thursday, and said he will run as a Democrat in future elections, and that was good enough for Gardner. 

“I'm a Democrat and should be on the ballot, I don't think I need to say too much more,” Sanders said.

Turns out he lied about that too.

Again, the transcript of that 2015 press conference:



It's obnoxious in every way possible.  I'm done with him lying.  If he wins in 2018 and runs again in 2020, great.  It won't be through any effort of mine though.

Full Court Press, Con't

Republicans in the Trump era keep gleefully declaring that they would hurt reporters, so when do we start taking their fascist impulses seriously as a threat to our country?

A Montana GOP official said she “would have shot” a reporter that was assaulted by Rep. Greg Gianforte (R-Mont.) if the reporter had approached her the way he had Gianforte.

Karen Marshall, the vice president of programs for Gallatin County Republican Women, told the Voices of Montana radio program Thursday that she would have shot Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs if she had been in Gianforte’s place, according to The Guardian.“If that kid had done to me what he did to Greg, I would have shot him,” Marshall said.
Gianforte pled guilty to misdemeanor assault after the incident and apologized.

Gianforte body-slammed Jacobs to the ground, broke his glasses and punched him after Jacobs attempted to ask the candidate a question at his campaign headquarters the night before the Montana special election in May.

“That kid came on private property, came into a private building and went into a very private room that I would not even have gone into,” Marshall said. “It was a set-up. A complete set-up. He just pushed a little too hard.”

Eventually reporters aren't going to get roughed up by Republicans, they're going to get killed.  Even that won't be enough, especially if the reporter isn't white.

These guys want the ability to open fire on whomever they disagree with, liberals, the media, the LGBTQ community, people of color, you name it.  Comments about shooting people and getting away with said comments is a problem.

Because tens of millions agree with those comments. 

It's getting dangerous out here.

Our Little Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

There was a terrorist bombing in America last week if you didn't know, an explosion went off in a downtown parking lot near Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia last Thursday. No breathless news coverage of the manhunt for the suspect who was caught 24 hours later, no mention on the Sunday news shows about "soft targets" or "ending all immigration" or "blowback", no arngry tweets from Donald Trump on the subject.  Why didn't you hear about it?  Well, here's the mug shot of the suspect:

Can you guess why you didn't hear about it now?

A Gloucester man was arrested and charged late Friday with setting off an improvised explosive device in a parking lot Thursday evening near Colonial Williamsburg.

Stephen Powers, 30, was arrested at his home in Gloucester and was charged with possessing and using an explosive device and committing an act of terrorism, according to Williamsburg Police.

Police got a call about a vehicle fire around 5 p.m. Thursday near the corner of South Boundary and Francis streets, near the campus of the College of William and Mary, police said Friday.

Investigators – including from the FBI; Newport News Police Department; Colonial Williamsburg; Virginia State Police; and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives – determined an IED had exploded in the parking lot there.

Williamsburg Police Major Greg Riley said the device went off in a highly trafficked area during peak time but no one was injured. Nearby streets were blocked while officers searched the area. They finally deemed the area safe and reopened the streets at 6 p.m. Friday.

Police said they believe that this was an isolated incident, but the investigation is continuing.

If the suspect had been Muslim, or South Asian, or black in appearance, would police still believe it was an "isolated incident" even though there's plenty of evidence that these incidents aren't isolated because we have a serious white nationalist domestic terrorism problem in America?

The lengths this country goes to in order to deny that the bulk of terrorist attacks in the US are conducted by angry white men is impressive, but that's whiteness at work in Trump's America.

StupidiNews!

• US-backed rebel forces have captured Syria's largest oil field in Deir Ezzor, held by ISIS forces since 2014, rebel forces retook the Syrian city of Raqqa last week from Islamic State.
• The FBI reportedly foiled a plot to get a Russian sleeper agent inside Hillary Clinton's inner circle in 2010, part of the same busted Russian spy ring that included model Anna Chapman.
• Snap elections Sunday in Japan's lower house of parliament have given Prime Minister Shinzo Abe a super-majority in his efforts to revise Japan's post-war constitution. 
• Democratic Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer says a bipartisan bill to shore up insurance markets can pass, but GOP Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell is blocking a vote.
• Automaker Tesla has reached a deal to open its first electric car factory in Shanghai, China already accounts for 40% of the global electric vehicle market.

Last Call For The Age Of Austerity

As Stan Collender at Forbes does some back-of-the-napkin math on the Trump regime's budget, he comes up with the figure of one trillion dollars: the minimum yearly deficit that we'll run under the GOP's tax cut scam.  We're already looking at $940 billion gap just this year.

1. Congress appears to be ready to increase the amount it will appropriate for military and domestic programs by at least $50 billion a year above what Trump requested.

2. According to the Congressional Budget Office, Trump's executive order ending federal subsidies for the Affordable Care Act will increase the budget deficit by an average of about $19 billion a year.

3. Federal disaster assistance for Harvey, Irma and Maria will be at least $36 billion, with more expected both for additional relief for hurricane victims and for the victims of the fires in northern California. While most of this aid will be spent in fiscal 2018, disasters (hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires, floods, earthquakes, etc.) requiring a higher-than-budgeted federal response will occur every year and their costs should be included in the permanent projected deficit.

4. If the economy doesn't grow as fast as Trump is promising, additional Pentagon spending is needed for military reasons and interest rates rise more than anticipated because of the increased federal borrowing, consecutive deficits between $1.2 trillion and $1.5 trillion are not out of the question.

In other words, a $1 trillion annual deficit should be considered the minimum of what will occur each year during the Trump presidency.

And that leads us to the optics of adding a trillion dollars a year to the national debt.  No doubt Republicans in Congress won't tolerate it, and that means a trillion or more in yearly cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, and the safety net to balance the budget.

Of course, those cuts will be "necessary to save America" as a result.

Even if the Dems can win back Congress in 2018, it's going to be a rough road to recovery, and that's before the very real possibility of another housing crash and economic mega-recession or even full-blown depression.

The forecast doesn't look good, folks.  Not at all.

The Drums Of War, Con't

This Friday news dump story should be a massive alarm bell in the night as to what Trump is planning in the next several months as far as military action.

President Trump signed an executive order Friday allowing the Air Force to recall as many as 1,000 retired pilots to active duty to address a shortage in combat fliers, the White House and Pentagon announced.

By law, only 25 retired officers can be brought back to serve in any one branch. Trump's order removes those caps by expanding a state of national emergency declared by President George W. Bush after 9/11, signaling what could be a significant escalation in the 16-year-old global war on terror.

"We anticipate that the Secretary of Defense will delegate the authority to the Secretary of the Air Force to recall up to 1,000 retired pilots for up to three years," Navy Cdr. Gary Ross, a Pentagon spokesman, said in a statement.

But the executive order itself is not specific to the Air Force, and could conceivably be used in the future to call up more officers and in other branches.

All of a sudden there's a "pilot shortage" in the war against Islamic State?  I don't buy that for a second.  A thousand more combat pilots won't make much of a difference when the goal is to secure land gains against an entrenched enemy.  We already have air superiority against ISIS, it's not like guys who use IEDs have a modern air force.

But I'll tell you who does have an air force, as well as plenty of targets for precision bombing that would require an immediate need to call up a thousand skilled fighter pilots or more.

Iran and North Korea.

This is the back-door draft in action, guys.  The notion that this is going to be only used or even primarily used to take on Islamic State in Africa is ridiculous.

But it makes perfect sense if you're ramping up military action against Tehran or Pyongyang.

Stay tuned.

Sunday Long Read: The Richest Drug Cartel In America

It's impressive what people start paying attention to when you have a drug crisis that starts killing a bunch of Midwestern white folks in small-town America.  The opioid crisis continues to burn through cities across flyover country, and it got its start with OxyContin, that you know.  What you didn't know is that the empire behind the most addictive drug in history is actually one multi-billionaire family, effectively the richest legal drug cartel family on earth.

The newly installed Sackler Courtyard at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum is one of the most glittering places in the developed world. Eleven thousand white porcelain tiles, inlaid like a shattered backgammon board, cover a surface the size of six tennis courts. According to the V&A’s director, the regal setting is intended to serve as a “living room for London,” by which he presumably means a living room for Kensington, the museum’s neighborhood, which is among the world's wealthiest. In late June, Kate Middleton, the Duchess of Cambridge, was summoned to consecrate the courtyard, said to be the earth's first outdoor space made of porcelain; stepping onto the ceramic expanse, she silently mouthed, “Wow.”

The Sackler Courtyard is the latest addition to an impressive portfolio. There’s the Sackler Wing at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, which houses the majestic Temple of Dendur, a sandstone shrine from ancient Egypt; additional Sackler wings at the Louvre and the Royal Academy; stand-alone Sackler museums at Harvard and Peking Universities; and named Sackler galleries at the Smithsonian, the Serpentine, and Oxford’s Ashmolean. The Guggenheim in New York has a Sackler Center, and the American Museum of Natural History has a Sackler Educational Lab. Members of the family, legendary in museum circles for their pursuit of naming rights, have also underwritten projects of a more modest caliber—a Sackler Staircase at Berlin’s Jewish Museum; a Sackler Escalator at the Tate Modern; a Sackler Crossing in Kew Gardens. A popular species of pink rose is named after a Sackler. So is an asteroid.

The Sackler name is no less prominent among the emerald quads of higher education, where it’s possible to receive degrees from Sackler schools, participate in Sackler colloquiums, take courses from professors with endowed Sackler chairs, and attend annual Sackler lectures on topics such as theoretical astrophysics and human rights. The Sackler Institute for Nutrition Science supports research on obesity and micronutrient deficiencies. Meanwhile, the Sackler institutes at Cornell, Columbia, McGill, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Sussex, and King’s College London tackle psychobiology, with an emphasis on early childhood development.

The Sacklers’ philanthropy differs from that of civic populists like Andrew Carnegie, who built hundreds of libraries in small towns, and Bill Gates, whose foundation ministers to global masses. Instead, the family has donated its fortune to blue-chip brands, braiding the family name into the patronage network of the world’s most prestigious, well-endowed institutions. The Sackler name is everywhere, evoking automatic reverence; the Sacklers themselves, however, are rarely seen.

The descendants of Mortimer and Raymond Sackler, a pair of psychiatrist brothers from Brooklyn, are members of a billionaire clan with homes scattered across Connecticut, London, Utah, Gstaad, the Hamptons, and, especially, New York City. It was not until 2015 that they were noticed by Forbes, which added them to the list of America’s richest families. The magazine pegged their wealth, shared among twenty heirs, at a conservative $14 billion. (Descendants of Arthur Sackler, Mortimer and Raymond’s older brother, split off decades ago and are mere multi-millionaires.) To a remarkable degree, those who share in the billions appear to have abided by an oath of omertà: Never comment publicly on the source of the family’s wealth.

That may be because the greatest part of that $14 billion fortune tallied by Forbes came from OxyContin, the narcotic painkiller regarded by many public-health experts as among the most dangerous products ever sold on a mass scale. Since 1996, when the drug was brought to market by Purdue Pharma, the American branch of the Sacklers’ pharmaceutical empire, more than two hundred thousand people in the United States have died from overdoses of OxyContin and other prescription painkillers. Thousands more have died after starting on a prescription opioid and then switching to a drug with a cheaper street price, such as heroin. Not all of these deaths are related to OxyContin—dozens of other painkillers, including generics, have flooded the market in the past thirty years. Nevertheless, Purdue Pharma was the first to achieve a dominant share of the market for long-acting opioids, accounting for more than half of prescriptions by 2001.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, fifty-three thousand Americans died from opioid overdoses in 2016, more than the thirty-six thousand who died in car crashes in 2015 or the thirty-five thousand who died from gun violence that year. This past July, Donald Trump’s Commission on Combating Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis, led by New Jersey governor Chris Christie, declared that opioids were killing roughly 142 Americans each day, a tally vividly described as “September 11th every three weeks.” The epidemic has also exacted a crushing financial toll: According to a study published by the American Public Health Association, using data from 2013—before the epidemic entered its current, more virulent phase—the total economic burden from opioid use stood at about $80 billion, adding together health costs, criminal-justice costs, and GDP loss from drug-dependent Americans leaving the workforce. Tobacco remains, by a significant multiple, the country’s most lethal product, responsible for some 480,000 deaths per year. But although billions have been made from tobacco, cars, and firearms, it’s not clear that any of those enterprises has generated a family fortune from a single product that approaches the Sacklers’ haul from OxyContin.

Even so, hardly anyone associates the Sackler name with their company’s lone blockbuster drug. “The Fords, Hewletts, Packards, Johnsons—all those families put their name on their product because they were proud,” said Keith Humphreys, a professor of psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine who has written extensively about the opioid crisis. “The Sacklers have hidden their connection to their product. They don’t call it ‘Sackler Pharma.’ They don’t call their pills ‘Sackler pills.’ And when they’re questioned, they say, ‘Well, it’s a privately held firm, we’re a family, we like to keep our privacy, you understand.’ ”

To the extent that the Sacklers have cultivated a reputation, it’s for being earnest healers, judicious stewards of scientific progress, and connoisseurs of old and beautiful things. Few are aware that during the crucial period of OxyContin’s development and promotion, Sackler family members actively led Purdue’s day-to-day affairs, filling the majority of its board slots and supplying top executives. By any assessment, the family’s leaders have pulled off three of the great marketing triumphs of the modern era: The first is selling OxyContin; the second is promoting the Sackler name; and the third is ensuring that, as far as the public is aware, the first and the second have nothing to do with one another.

There's no racket quite like the legalized drug industry, is there?

Russian To Judgment, Con't

Attorney General Jeff Sessions testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week, and his statements on what the Trump regime plans to do in order to prevent Russian interference in the 2018 and 2020 elections is heart-stopping.

The answer, as the Lawfare team points out, is "nothing whatsoever."

The headlines from Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday focused on his refusal to answer questions about his conversations with President Donald Trump and his declaration — dragged out of him with all the elegance of a tooth extraction — that he had not yet been interviewed by special counsel Robert Mueller. Lost in the back-and-forth and amid focus on his testy exchange with Sen. Al Franken about Russian contacts, however, was a truly damning moment about Sessions’s tenure at the Justice Department thus far.

That moment came not in the context of hostile questioning from a committee Democrat but in a perfectly cordial exchange with Republican Sen. Ben Sasse.

With Midwestern gentility, the Nebraska senator told Sessions that he wasn’t going to grill him about Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Rather, he said, “I would like to continue talking about the Russians but in the context of the long-term objectives that Vladimir Putin has to undermine American institutions and the public trust.… We face a sophisticated long-term effort by a foreign adversary to undermine our foreign policy and our ability to lead in the world by trying to undermining confidence in American institutions.”

Russia will be back in the 2018 and 2020 election cycles, Sasse argued. “We live at a time where info ops and propaganda and misinformation are a far more cost-effective way for people to try to weaken the United States of America than by thinking they can outspend us at a military level.… So as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer and as a supervisor of multiple components of our intelligence community … do you think we’re doing enough to prepare for future interference by Russia and other foreign adversaries in the information space?”

You’d think this question would be a golden opportunity for Sessions. After all, if you’re a man who has had some — ahem — inconvenient interactions with former Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, you might relish the chance to answer a question about what you are doing to prevent Russian interference in the future, as a chance to go on offense and show how serious you are about tackling a problem that has undermined your reputation.

But Sessions’s answer did not inspire confidence: “Probably not. We’re not. And the matter is so complex that for most of us, we are not able to fully grasp the technical dangers that are out there.”

Sessions acknowledged “disruption and interference, it appears, by Russian officials” and noted that it “requires a real review.” But he said nothing about what the department is doing to ready itself.

Sasse followed up, giving him an explicit chance to spell it out. “So what steps has the department taken,” or should it take, “to learn the lessons of 2016 … in fighting foreign interference?” he asked.

Crickets from Sessions.

The department, he said, is specifically reviewing commercial, rather than political, interference from foreigners and the theft of trade secrets and data — an enforcement priority that in fact long predates the Trump administration. “We’ve got indictments that deal with some of those issues,” he said, perhaps not even realizing that he was not talking about the same subject Sasse was asking about. He noted that the department’s national security division has some “really talented people” — which is true but hardly constitutes a step he is taking to combat the Russia threat. And he touted the FBI’s experts, too. Then he acknowledged that, despite all this, the department’s capabilities are still not at the appropriate level yet.

As to a specific answer to Sasse’s question — that is, what has the department done or is planning to do to confront information operations threats from Russia in the future? Not a word.

Nor will there be.  The fix has been in on Russian collusion for months now, and Sessions has been in on the game since the start.  He's guilty as hell and nobody is more aware of that then Sessions himself.  There will be no defense from Russian interference in our elections going forward as long as the GOP remains in power.

None.

Last Call For Trump's America

When the man in the Oval Office demands retribution against those who question authority, his cultists respond with brutal efficiency, even in blue strongholds like Massachusetts.

Last week, Kato Mele’s 23-year-old daughter said some things on Facebook that many people found appalling. She wrote that the White Rose Coffeehouse in Lynn, which her mother owns and where she worked, would never host a “coffee with a cop” event, klatches designed to build goodwill between police and the community.

“I will not be part of the false rhetoric that cops are just misunderstood good guys,” Mele’s daughter wrote, among other things. “They uphold an unjust system and murder without consequence.” 

For this opinion, the family business was targeted and destroyed.

The chief of police in Lynn responded beautifully.

“This is a non-story,” Michael Mageary told Lynn’s Daily Item on Sunday. “This young lady has the right to say whatever she wants and we respect that. We will continue to do our job every day. My sense is that most officers will avoid the establishment, but that is their choice.”

But by then, it was already too late. A mob had descended within hours of the Facebook post, whipped up by a website that specializes in (and makes money from) marshaling drooling goons for mass attacks, mostly on victims who express left-of-center views.

They got into the cafe’s Facebook page, leaving hundreds of bad reviews to drive its five-star rating down. Mele’s daughter received rape threats. On Monday, the cafe was slammed with abusive callers, saying horrific things: They hoped Mele and her daughter are ruined, that they never work again, that her daughter drowns. An especially charming bunch of them, parroting a line from the hateful website that played on “coffee with a cop,” said they wanted to have coffee with a c-word.

“These are people targeting us for the stupid opinion of a 23-year-old,” Mele said. “If I had social media when I was 23, I don’t know what I would have done. We’re all dumb at 23.”

Mele was sitting in her empty cafe Thursday morning. In the year since it opened, the White Rose had become a community hub — a place for locals to come get coffee or a beer, to see art or listen to music. She’d hosted events to raise money for victims displaced by a big fire in town; for RAW, a youth art program; to give school supplies to kids whose parents couldn’t afford them.

“We have done whatever we can,” she said. “We have no televisions here. We wanted it to be a place where people could just sit and talk to anybody.”

Now Mele is shutting it all down, and with it her dream. After she survived cancer, she sold her house and liquidated her retirement fund to start the White Rose, and despite its place in the community, this first year had been a financial struggle. The cafe was running week-to-week before this happened. On Monday, the cafe was mostly deserted. Many of the people who came in were friends, offering condolences and dropping $10 or $20 into the tip jar. She couldn’t survive more than a few days like that — especially without her daughter’s help. Worse, she no longer wants to.

“What I have here is a family business that has no family,” she said. “Maybe I could weather this. But this used to be a place of joy for me, and I don’t see a way that I will ever feel that way again.”

The opinion that police shouldn't murder people is so unacceptable in America in 2017 that this is the result: internet Brownshirts burn a business to the ground and harass a family out of their livelihood in the space of a week.

Whenever you hear somebody complaining about "Social Justice Warriors" and "liberal intolerance", remember the story of the Mele family.  I've been personally targeted before for my opinions on this blog, and I've paid a price for those opinions in the past, but never like this.  The threat to do to me what was done to the Mele family has been made on several occasions, and so far I'm still here.

And yet these are the same assholes who will tell you every day, at length, on multiple media platforms, that they are being silenced every day of their lives.

A Gold Star Performance In Lying

Above all, Donald Trump lies whenever he feels it can benefit him, and because nobody on the right will hold him accountable, it always benefits him to lie about whatever he feels like lying about. Case in point: the entire Trump White House, from Trump to Chief of Staff John Kelly to spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders to various staffers are now fully invested in the lies Trump told this week about Gold Star families, and now they have to continue those lies in order to cover for Trump.

In the hours after President Donald Trump said on an Oct. 17 radio broadcast that he had contacted nearly every family that had lost a military servicemember this year, the White House was hustling to learn from the Pentagon the identities and contact information for those families, according to an internal Defense Department email.

The email exchange, which has not been previously reported, shows that senior White House aides were aware on the day the president made the statement that it was not accurate — but that they should try to make it accurate as soon as possible, given the gathering controversy.

Not only had the president not contacted virtually all the families of military personnel killed this year, the White House did not even have an up-to-date list of those who had been killed.
The exchange between the White House and the Defense secretary’s office occurred about 5 p.m. on Oct. 17. The White House asked the Pentagon for information about surviving family members of all servicemembers killed after Trump’s inauguration so that the president could be sure to contact all of them.

Capt. Hallock Mohler, the executive secretary to Defense Secretary James Mattis, provided the White House with information in the 5 p.m. email about how each servicemember had died and the identity of his or her survivors, including phone numbers.

The email’s subject line was, “Condolence Letters Since 20 January 2017.”

Mohler indicated in the email that he was responding to a request from the president’s staff for information through Ylber Bajraktari, an aide on the National Security Council. The objective was to figure out who among so-called Gold Star families of the fallen Trump had yet to call. Mohler’s email said that the president’s aides “reached out to Ylber looking for the following ASAP from DOD.”

Trump had said in a Fox News Radio interview earlier that day that he had contacted the families of “virtually everybody” in the military who had been killed since he was inaugurated.

“I have called, I believe, everybody — but certainly I’ll use the word virtually everybody,” Trump said.

Since then, the Associated Press contacted 20 families and found that half had not heard from Trump. It is not clear how many of the families that have heard from the president received the calls this week, since the controversy over his contacts with military families erupted. It is not clear when the White House first asked for data on Gold Star families, but it is clear that the answers had not been provided before Tuesday.

The Pentagon email indicates that 21 military personnel had been killed in action during Trump’s tenure, and an additional 44 had been killed by means other than enemy fire, such as ship collisions that took 17 sailors’ lives in the Pacific this summer.

Trump has clearly been active in reaching out to military families who have suffered the ultimate loss, as the AP reports show.

But the White House-Pentagon email scramble Tuesday undermines the veracity of Trump’s statement about his record of contacting all Gold Star families. The internal document also sheds light on how the White House staff, on this and other occasions, has had to go into damage-control mode when the president makes inaccurate statements.

Trump's default is to lie.  Our Village Media is finally learning this, so when they fact check they're no longer surprised to find out that he's not telling the truth.  They still haven't learned to call it lying however.  It's "made inaccurate statements" or "factual errors" still, but that is an improvement over the previous era of calling Trump's outright lies "controversial" or "disputed". 

That's progress at any rate.

Take A Knee To Take A Stand

Trump's clinical narcissism continues to damage the country on a daily basis. By making the NFL anthem protests all about himself (because he makes everything about himself, he can't help it) he's now taking aim at the tenet of freedom of expression, something that Trump can no longer tolerate as he views these protests as personal attacks.  When given the powers of the presidency, Trump will always use them to enforce loyalty and accolade by fiat.

President Trump is urging supporters to sign a petition declaring that they believe in standing for the national anthem — his latest effort to put pressure on the NFL over players who kneel in protest during the anthem.

"The President has asked for a list of supporters who stand for the National Anthem. Add your name below to show your patriotism and support," says the petition by the Trump Make America Great Again Committee, a fundraising group.

The petition was also promoted by the Republican National Committee on Twitter and its website. It does not say how many signatures it has garnered so far.

The petition came days after NFL team owners, executives and players met in New York, where they decided that the league would not implement a rule forcing players to stand for "The Star-Spangled Banner."

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said after the meeting that, while players are encouraged to stand for the anthem, there would be no formal rule making it mandatory for them to do so.

Goodell said he understood the concerns of the players — who are seeking to draw attention to racial injustice and police brutality — but he hopes the league can bring the total number of protesters down to zero.

The decision came amid a prolonged feud between Trump and the NFL that began last month when he called on football teams to fire players who took a knee. The demonstrations began last year with former San Francisco quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who has been unable to find a new team after leaving the 49ers.

To recap, Donald Trump's reaction to an NFL quarterback who lost his job because he exercised his right to free speech and silently demonstrated against brutal police violence against black bodies in the United States was to:

• declare the protests offensive to the country and flag,
• declare the protests disrespectful to veterans,
• question the patriotism of protesters,
• take the protests personally as an attack on himself,
• encourage NFL fans to punish the league until the protests stop,
• attack the demonstrators personally using social media,
• demand himself that the demonstrations stop,
• demand that the employers of the protesters make the protests stop or suffer financial consequences and now in the last 24 hours,
• have his party create a loyalty pledge for his position on the protests, and
• fundraise off the controversy he has created.

He has been doing this for several weeks now, and again his pathology over the years is to take protests by people of color as personal insults, to declare these insults as attacks on those who support him, and then encourage his followers to institute collective punishment as revenge.

He especially hates black and Latina women, but also famous black men, like Obama and Kaepernick. I'm a black man and I've accepted that the asshole in the White House hates me because I am black.  But it is exponentially worse for women of color.

Remember that.