The New Robber Barons

Amazon has done more than any other company to contribute to Seattle's affordable housing crisis.  Now the city is coming to collect Amazon's share, and as a result Amazon is now openly threatening to leave its new downtown building unfinished and take 7,000 jobs elsewhere if Seattle makes the company pay a dime.

On Wednesday, Amazon announced the company would halt the construction of a new building in downtown Seattle it was planning to build, jeopardizing some 7,000 jobs.

Why? Because the company opposes a tax being considered by the City Council.

The tax targets 500-600 businesses in the city that gross at least $20 million a year. The companies would be charged a “head tax” at $500 per employee. In 2021, the head tax would be replaced by a 0.7 percent payroll tax. The payroll tax would windup costing Amazon more than the initial head tax, considering Seattle Amazon employees are paid about an average of $110,000 per year, according to data from job-reviews site Glassdoor.

“I can confirm that pending the outcome of the head-tax vote by City Council, Amazon has paused all construction planning on our Block 18 project in downtown Seattle and is evaluating options to sub-lease all space in our recently leased Rainer Square building,” a spokesperson for Amazon told The Seattle Times.

The city council is expected to vote on the tax on May 14.

The city estimates the tax would raise an estimated $75 million annually, with Amazon paying roughly $20 million in 2019 and 2020. One might think for a company that pulled in $1.6 billion last quarter, they could afford to help out the city of Seattle and its most vulnerable residents, especially considering the extent to which Amazon’s presence in the city has exacerbated the housing crisis there.

Since 2010, when Amazon opened its first headquarters in the South Lake Union area of Seattle, housing costs have skyrocketed.

The median cost of a single-family home has more than doubled to $820,000, and rents have increased 64 percent, according to the Seattle Times. The average two-bedroom home in Seattle costs more than $2,000 per month. Only a third of condominiums in Seattle are priced below $500,000.

Amazon is willing to wreck everything over $20 million a year, and why shouldn't it be this obnoxious when dozens of cities are willing to destroy their local economies just to get Amazon's second corporate HQ?

Here's an idea.

Maybe stop shopping at Amazon?  Maybe cancel your Prime subscription?  Maybe let them know they already have more money than Walmart or Target ever had and that that they're too big to be allowed to continue?

Just a thought here in the feudal tech era.

Sunday Long Read: That Kansas Tornado Again

Kansas GOP Gov. Sam Brownback is on his way out as the state's chief executive, but his legacy of economic destruction will continue for a generation as the combination of red state austerity policies, production-at-all-cost agriculture, and rural-to-urban population shift has left the state's farm counties all but completely broken. The New Food Economy's Corie Brown:

My journey began last December, with a journalistic lead—a story I felt sure would confirm my belief in the power of good food.

I’d learned that a group of nonprofits led by the Kansas Health Foundation had spent years studying the depopulation of rural Kansas. Their research had yielded one central finding: local food stores selling fresh produce help to stabilize struggling communities. Last November, the consortium unveiled an initiative implemented by Kansas State University that could deliver up to $10 million through a mix of grants and loans to support such stores (the majority of those dollars will be provided in loans). 

The spark for this initiative came from Marci Penner, a self-starter in Inman, Kansas (population 1,353) who publishes state guidebooks through her Kansas Sampler Foundation. After twice visiting each of the state’s 626 incorporated towns—half of which have fewer than 400 people—she has doggedly tracked the success of their food stores. In her view, a town’s ability to survive hinges on whether residents can buy healthy food there. 

Penner’s goal is to get urban Kansans out to rural areas to support these struggling communities. “No one knows how to wrap their heads around these little towns. We are invisible,” she told me. “It’s time someone said, ‘I’m from Kansas. I’m sticking up for this state.’” 

My bags were packed the minute I got off the phone. A story about Kansans determined to keep America’s breadbasket from becoming a food desert would write itself, I thought. But it was also an excuse to go back home. A fourth-generation Kansan on both sides, I found myself looking for a reason to return, and longing to drive through parts of the state I haven’t visited in decades. I could almost smell the Flint Hills wildflowers and see the wind’s invisible fingers moving through that ocean of bluestem grasses. 

With a list of Penner’s favorite stores in hand and my daughter along to share the journey, I flew home. 

We sensed the missing plot points in Penner’s folktale early on. Too many storeowners knew nothing about the grants. When we asked rural officials about the importance of grocery stores, they shrugged. Affordable housing, jobs, schools and hospitals topped their lists. Everyone wanted to talk about Kansas’s depopulation crisis, but a lack of healthy food, they all agreed, was not why people left. 

Reality snapped into focus the morning we drove into Downs (population 844). I’d been in a close friend’s wedding there in the 1980s, and the tiny, one-street downtown had teemed with life back then. My friend’s father owned, edited, and published the local newspaper. Another friend’s dad ran a successful real estate company. It took those girls forever to walk anywhere; everyone wanted to stop and chat. Downs had 1,324 residents in 1980—36 percent more than it has today. 

Thirty years later, the blank faces of empty storefronts line the main drag. Oddly, one of the last remaining businesses we found was a well-stocked grocery store, though no one was shopping inside the brightly lit aisles. When we asked where we could get a cup of coffee, the cashier directed us to the gas station outside of town on the two-lane state road. A pot of brown water on a quick mart hot plate was the best the town had to offer.
Everywhere, I felt the absence—of people, of commerce, even of sound. The silence was broken only by a vintage pickup truck pulling up to the Downs grain elevator, huge mounds of excess grain piled high on the ground all around it. 

That image—abundance at the center of a depopulated landscape—sums up the reality of rural Kansas. Yes, the harvest continues to be bounteous. But it masks a harder truth: Kansas’s plentiful grain crop has come at the expense of nearly everything else.

Some 90% of Kansas's land is devoted to production of food.  Farms are massive automated systems that produce hundreds of acres of grain.  There's nothing but the local economy, and the local economy is dying.  The closest Mickey D's or Starbucks is 60 miles away from Downs.

This is exactly why red states in particular need more of a safety net on some issues, especially basic infrastructure, than more urban blue states.  But Republican austerity policies have robbed them of even that.

Kansas has so super-specialized with agriculture that it's increasingly tough to get businesses to move there or people to stay.  In a sense it's like a desert.  The state doesn't need to serve Big Ag the way it does, but it does anyway.

It may not be the code cubes of Silicon Valley or the mines of West Virginia, but the farms of Kansas can be just as much a corporate profit sweatshop.

Last Call For Coaled Comfort

West Virginia's GOP Senate primary is Tuesday, and the state's Republicans are about to nominate a screamingly racist convicted miner-killing felon to lose to Democrat Joe Manchin in November.  Needless to say, a replay of Roy Moore in Alabama has the party in 100% panic mode.

There is growing concern among Republicans that Don Blankenship, a bombastic coal baron who has spent time in prison, is surging ahead of Tuesday’s West Virginia Senate primary — and a last-minute campaign is underway to stop him.

As the tight contest hurtles to a close, four Republicans said they’d reviewed polling conducted in recent days showing Blankenship, who spent a year in jail following the 2010 explosion at his Upper Big Branch Mine that killed 29 workers, moving narrowly ahead of his more mainstream GOP rivals, Rep. Evan Jenkins and state Attorney General Patrick Morrisey.

The Republicans cautioned that the surveys, designed to offer a snapshot of the race, were conducted over a brief period of time and may be overstating Blankenship’s support.

Still, Blankenship’s rivals and other Republicans are alarmed. Many are convinced that a Blankenship win, coming just months after the disastrous Alabama Senate race, would destroy the party’s prospects of defeating Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin in November.

Some Republicans involved in the race said they were hoping the White House would intervene ahead of the Tuesday primary, though it remains unclear whether it will do so.

On Thursday, the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., sent out a tweet asking “the people of West Virginia to make a wise decision and reject Blankenship.”

“No more fumbles like Alabama,” he added. “We need to win in November.”

Republicans are sinking millions into the race to stop Blankenship, and it's not working.  It's not working at all, because Blankenship is putting his own fortune into winning, and he's running against the most hated man in the state:  Mitch McConnell.

National Republicans have sought to prevent Blankenship from winning the nomination. An outside group aligned with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Mountain Families PAC, has spent $1.3 million on a TV ad campaign targeting the former prisoner. On Friday afternoon, the group began a digital advertisement telling West Virginians, “Don’t vote Don Blankenship.”

The offensive bears similarities to the ultimately unsuccessful one the party launched against former state Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore in last year’s Alabama Senate race. Moore beat back the national GOP campaign against him and went on to lose the general election to Democrat Doug Jones.

Blankenship has responded in kind, launching a slash-and-burn campaign targeting McConnell.

His scorching attacks have veered into deeply personal, even racially-charged territory.

This week, Blankenship began airing a TV commercial labeling McConnell “Cocaine Mitch,” an apparent reference to a 2014 report that drugs were once found aboard a shipping vessel owned by the family of McConnell’s wife, Taiwanese-born Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao. Then, a few days later, Blankenship began airing another spot declaring that McConnell’s “China family has given him tens of millions of dollars.”

Believe me when I say Republican primary candidates are paying attention to Blankenship's attacks on McConnell as a path to victory.  It's a free-for-all and everyone's a target now.

The Handmaid's Tale Stage Spectacular

Iowa GOP Gov. Kim Reynolds has done what Ohio GOP Gov. John Kasich won't do: signed into law a ridiculously unconstitutional "fetal heartbeat" abortion ban that will eliminate more than 90% of abortion procedures and will immediately be challenged in court.  Maureen Shaw explains:

Dubbed the “heartbeat bill,” the law will prohibit doctors from providing abortion care once a fetal heartbeat is detected. But heartbeats can be detected as early as six weeks after gestation (i.e., six weeks after a pregnant person’s last period began). Given that many women don’t learn they are pregnant until after that benchmark, Iowa's law effectively makes abortion illegal while depriving women of their bodily autonomy.

Indeed, women typically don’t find out they are pregnant until they are, on average, five to seven weeks along (for a number of reasons). The science is clear on this issue but I also know it to be true from personal experience. In my early 20s, I didn’t suspect I was pregnant until I was seven weeks along. I then had to make an appointment with my OB-GYN to confirm the pregnancy and get a referral for abortion care. Just that one appointment delayed my abortion by a week, putting me at 8 weeks gestation. By Iowa’s standards, I would have been ruled ineligible and deprived of a chance to choose the best option for my health and the health of my family.

According to the Iowa Department of Public Health, of the 3,722 abortions performed in the state in 2016, only 347, or 9 percent of them occurred before six weeks of pregnancy. Based on these numbers, the heartbeat bill will potentially force pregnancy upon the vast majority of pregnant women in Iowa who do not want to have a child.

Previous to this bill being signed, Iowa already imposed numerous restrictions on abortion. According to the Guttmacher Institute, abortions after 20 weeks gestation are banned in the state unless the woman’s life is endangered, and public funding is available for abortion only in cases of life endangerment, rape, incest or fetal anomaly. The governor must approve each Medicaid-funded abortion. Women are also forced to undergo an ultrasound prior to obtaining an abortion, and a pregnant minors’ parent or parents must be notified before the procedure can be performed.

In this context, Iowa’s heartbeat bill isn’t entirely unexpected. But it is unlikely to go into effect in light of judicial precedent. Federal courts have already thwarted similar attempts to ban abortions in Ohio, North Dakota and elsewhere.

So what’s the endgame here? As Robyn Marty has previously noted: “Anti-abortion groups no longer fear that the Supreme Court, given its current and future mix of justices, will uphold Roe if another case makes its way there.” In other words, they’re attempting to use this bill as a test case to get the issue in front of the Supreme Court, where they hope a post-Trump court will gut abortion rights nationwide.

Indeed, state Sen. Rick Bertrand (R-Sioux City) publicly declared as much during the bill’s floor debate: "Today we will begin this journey as Iowa becomes ground zero nationally for the life movement and the starting line back to the Supreme Court. I believe this bill will be the vehicle that will ultimately provide change and provide the opportunity to overturn Roe v. Wade."

Bertrand’s “opportunity” is a dystopian nightmare for women. Imposing such a punitive law would decimate women’s self-determination by eliminating the ability to plan their families. And make no mistake: low-income and financially overburdened women have been shown to suffer the brunt of other, similar abortion bans (as those with financial resources are better able to travel out of state to seek abortion care).

We're one new Trump-appointed justice away from losing essentially every court-based civil rights, reproductive rights, and equality-based protection gained in the last 60 years.  The clock is not on our side, and if Trump gets re-elected, the game is essentially over.

I'm not sure what it's going to take in order to get people to realize this, but we're already well on the road to things being far too late.

A Fairbanks-Weather Friend

Now that GOP Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has made it clear that no legislation to protect Special Counsel Robert Mueller will ever get a vote in the Senate, let alone a Trump signature, useless "moderate Republicans" like Alaska's Lisa Murkowski are more than happy to sign on to an effort that requires nothing on their part.

Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski said this week that the Russia investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller III should be allowed to proceed to its natural end and that she would support legislation approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee to protect the inquiry.

Murkowski, in a wide-ranging interview with the Daily News-Miner editorial board Wednesday, also praised the FBI and said the agency has a "a serious and significant role" in the investigation.

"I have said all along that Mueller should be allowed to take this investigation wherever it takes him and his team," she said. "And I said that at the beginning and I repeat that, because I believe very, very firmly in that. And I think any efforts to thwart that are dangerous.

"If the investigation takes them to an additional turn that needs to be followed, I think this is what we're asking for when we ask for an independent investigation," she said. "That means that the president can't meddle. That means that the attorney general can't meddle. That means that the United States Senate can't meddle, and I just firmly believe that they should be able to take it where it goes."

Murkowski added, however, that she doesn't want to see the investigation go on indefinitely — "You know, this is going to be years and years and years" — and that the probe eventually must reach its natural end.

"And I think you have people of goodwill and good faith that are working to do just that," she said.

"I do not subscribe that this is some kind of a witch hunt," she said, referring to President Donald Trump's oft-repeated criticism of the special counsel inquiry into alleged Russian involvement in the 2016 presidential election and that now appears to have spread to other matters involving Trump and his associates.

Murkowski doesn't face Alaska voters until 2022, and by then Trump will either have his second term or will be gone, so either way Murkowski, like the rest of the GOP senators elected in 2016 along with Trump, doesn't have to do anything at all.

It's easy for Murkowski to say whatever she wants about Trump, but expecting her to do anything is ludicrous.  No Republican will lift a finger to stop Trump or to protect Mueller and/or Rod Rosenstein when the time comes, and it pisses me off to see Murkowski try to take credit for something that she'll never actually act upon.

All of the GOP has to go.

Last Call For Trump Cards, Con't

As I've been warning people and especially Democrats, Trump fatigue has settled in and nobody gives a damn anymore about the banana republic we live in.  Trump at 40% approval no matter what happens is the new normal.

For ordinary Americans, observed Republican pollster Whit Ayres, "We've learned nothing new in the last 24 hours." Surveys taken before Rudy Giuliani disclosed that Trump paid the hush money – which he and attorney Michael Cohen previously denied – back up that assessment.

In a Quinnipiac University poll last month, six in 10 Americans said they believed Trump had an affair with Daniels and knew about the hush money. But seven in 10 said it wasn't important.

Quinnipiac has measured views of Trump's honesty since his term began. The proportion of Americans who consider him dishonest has never fallen below 54 percent.

Of two big targets he frequently accuses of lying, ex-FBI Director James Comey and the news media, Quinnipiac found that majorities trust them more than the president. Fully 55 percent overall – 16 percent of Republicans, 53 percent of independents, and 92 percent of Democrats – said Trump lacks "a sense of decency."

Those assessments have damaged the president and fellow Republicans. Fewer Americans approve his job performance than that of any recent predecessor at the same point, even with the economy humming and international affairs comparatively calm.

But views of Trump's character have largely lost their ability to change his current standing. As unflattering information keeps accumulating, the share of Americans approving of him has ticked up from slightly below, to slightly above, 40 percent.

After 16 months, Americans have grown accustomed to Trump in the White House. The longer he serves without economic downturn or war, the more inured they become to his behavior.

"People have concluded that he's a liar," explained Mark Mellman, a leading Democratic pollster. "He lies every day. People know it."

Dubya both got us into a decade-plus war and wrecked the economy in his first term and he still got a second.  Then he got us into another war and cratered the economy completely and we still almost handed the country over to John McCain and Moose Lady, and then tens of millions of white folks decided "OK, they had their black president, time to revert to status quo".

As long as there's gas in the tank to get Taylor to soccer practice and 2 for $20 dinner specials at Applebee's, America is largely content to let Trump be Trump.  "The Face-Eating Leopard Party isn't going to sic the leopards on me or anything, so whatever.  America sucks, what are ya gonna do, vote for the other corporate party?  That's a sucker's bet.  Just keep your head down and go into work on Monday like you always do."

Ten years ago when I started ZVTS, we cared.

That seems like a lifetime ago.

Three People Outside Jefferson City, Missouri, Con't

Missouri Republicans have possessed every opportunity to scrap impeachment proceedings against GOP Gov. Eric Greitens in the wake of his felony charges involving sexual assault and campaign finance violations, but they continue to play it straight given the overwhelming depth of evidence mounting against the embattled state chief executive.

Even with a more than two-thirds supermajority in both the state House and Senate, Missouri Republicans are now calling a special session later this month to impeach and possibly remove Greitens from office.

The Missouri General Assembly has taken the historic step of calling itself back into special session to decide whether to impeach Gov. Eric Greitens.

According to the petition signed by 138 House members and 29 senators — both more than the three-fourths required in each cahmber to call a special session — lawmakers will consider the findings and recommendations of a House committee investigating Greitens, “including, but not limited to disciplinary actions against Gov. Eric R. Greitens.”

The special session would begin at 6:30 p.m. on May 18, immediately after the legislature adjourns its regular session for the year. It will mark the first time in Missouri history that lawmakers have called a special session themselves instead of relying on the governor to do so.

House Speaker Todd Richardson, R-Poplar Bluff, first proposed a special session last month after a special House committee investigating Greitens released a report detailing allegations of abuse, blackmail and sexual coercion made by a woman with whom he had an affair in 2015.

"Today's actions ensure there will be a conclusion to this process," Richardson said, later adding: "This path is not the one I would have chosen for Missourians or for my colleagues. I've hoped from the beginning of this process that the committee would find no wrongdoing. ... Unfortunately, this is where the facts led. We will not avoid doing what is right, just because it's hard."

House Minority Leader Gail McCann Beatty, D-Kansas City, agreed with Richardson.

"This is a necessary step," she said. "We have to make sure we do this right, and the best way to do that is to give the committee time to complete the investigation, and if they see fit, to file articles of impeachment."

She said some of her fellow Democrats refused to sign because they wanted impeachment to start immediately. Others thought impeachment should wait until after Greitens' criminal trial, which starts May 14.

Impeaching the governor would take 82 votes in the House. The Senate would then appoint seven judges to conduct a trial. If five agree he should be removed from office, Lt. Gov. Mike Parson would take over. Parson would serve until his term ends in early 2021.

This isn't like Bill Clinton's impeachment and trial 20 years ago, done by an opposition party to railroad a popular president.  This is Greitens's own party going to the unprecedented lengths of pledging to call a special session of the legislature to consider impeachment of a sitting governor.  They could have easily run out the clock on the investigation, they could have easily scrapped the investigation and waited for the courts to deal with it, they could have done precisely nothing and there wouldn't have been a thing Democrats in the state could have done in response.

That tell me that the evidence presented to the state legislature has been so overwhelmingly against Greitens that there's no question an impeachment vote is coming.  Remember, calling that special session without the governor requires meeting the ludicrously high bar of three-quarters of both chambers, and they are publicly proclaiming that they have that level of support.

Greitens should resign immediately.  In all seriousness, he should hang it up. 

He is done.  Not only will he be near certainly impeached, he will be more than likely removed from office in disgrace.

I don't know if the guy can take a hint, but it's over.

The Blue Wave Rises, Con't

Michigan GOP Gov. Rick Snyder has done tremendous damage to the state in eight years, and Democrats are trying to win the state back, but in the Trump Era, anything goes.  Ahead of an open primary season for both parties with voters going to the polls in August, right-wing Republicans are already attacking Democrats as terrorists in a state with a growing Muslim population.

The Michigan gubernatorial race took an ugly turn last week, when a Republican contender accused a Democratic candidate of being part of a “civilizational jihad” to take over America.

The Republican, state Sen. Patrick Colbeck, stands by his accusation that former Detroit health director Abdul El-Sayed has ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. Just one of Colbeck’s Republican rivals condemned the remarks; Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), a Colbeck backer, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

What El-Sayed is going through happens to nearly every Muslim-American in public life: They face baseless questions about their patriotism and then are left in a no-win situation. If they deny the charges, they risk giving them credence. But if they ignore them, they might get even more traction.

“We have to spend the bulk of our time disproving negatives: ‘Prove that you’re not a radical Islamist. Prove that you’re not a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Prove that you’re not trying to implement Sharia,’” said Wajahat Ali, a Muslim-American writer and co-author of “Fear Inc.,” a 2011 study of networks of anti-Muslim bigotry.

It’s a phenomenon that Dawud Walid, executive director of the Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim-American civil rights group, calls a “type of neo-McCarthyism.”

If elected, El-Sayed, a 33-year-old physician, would be the country’s first Muslim governor. And there is no evidence that he has ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. But thanks to Colbeck and the amplification he received on conservative talk radio, the allegations already show signs of staying power.

El-Sayed graduated with honors from the University of Michigan, where his classmates and teachers picked him to deliver the 2007 commencement speech. The remarks, peppered with inside-campus jokes, showcased an early flair for public speaking.

He was also vice president of the Muslim Students Association, which Colbeck believes shows El-Sayed has sympathy for the Muslim Brotherhood. Of course, just because they both have the word “Muslim” in them doesn’t mean they’re the same.

Unfortunately, that distinction doesn't matter to as many Michiganders as it should.  Rampant Islamophobia in the GOP in the Trump era is no surprise, it's what they want to push, the racism and hatred cards.

Both Colbeck and El-Sayed are long shots, the frontrunners are the state's current GOP Attorney General Bill Schuette, and the former Democratic state Senate minority leader, Gretchen Whitmer.

Both of them have significant competition however, Schuette from Snyder's Lt. Governor, Brian Calley, and Whitmer from pharmaceutical entrepreneur Shri Thanedar.  Where this all goes, we'll see, but with redistricting on the line in 2020, Democrats need as many 2018 gubernatorial victories as they can get.

StupidiNews!

• Hawaii's famous Mt. Kilauea has erupted, hundreds have been evacuated from two nearby housing subdivisions as lava, ash and gas approached residential areas late Thursday.
• Donald Trump has ordered the Pentagon to work up plans for troop reductions in South Korea, Trump has said in the past that the US should withdraw troops from the Korean peninsula.
• Trump Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has concluded a trade delegation to Beijing without any major breakthroughs as trade relations between China and the US continue to worsen.
• Walmart will buy a 75% stake in India's biggest online retailer, Flipkart, for $15 billion as the US retail giant prepares to go head-to-head with Amazon in Asia.
• California public health officials are confirming at least one person has died from E. coli-tainted Romaine lettuce grown in Arizona.

Last Call For It's Mueller Time, Con't

Special Counsel Robert Mueller continues to connect the dots, and the people those dots represent ought to be really scared.

Special counsel Robert Mueller is focusing intensely on alleged interactions between former top Trump campaign official Rick Gates and political operative Roger Stone, one of President Donald Trump's closest confidants, according to sources with direct knowledge of the matter. 

Stone, a longtime advisor to Trump, is apparently one of the top subjects of the Mueller investigation into potential collusion between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign, sources told CNBC on condition of anonymity. 

The questions have been largely about what was discussed at meetings, including dinners, between Stone and Gates, before and during the campaign, said the sources, who have knowledge of the substance of the recent interviews.

In February, Gates pleaded guilty to two counts stemming from the Russia investigation, and he is cooperating with Mueller's probe. 

The new developments indicate that Mueller's team is interested in Stone beyond his interactions with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange during the campaign. 

An attorney for Stone, Robert Buschel, did not deny the relationship between his client and Gates, but sought to downplay its importance. 

"Roger Stone did not have any substantive or meaningful interaction with Rick Gates during or leading up to the 2016 campaign," Buschel told CNBC in a statement. 

An attorney for Gates declined to comment. The special counsel's office declined to comment. 

The link between Gates and Stone goes back to their work at what had been one of the most powerful lobbying firms in Washington, which was founded by Stone along with former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort. The special counsel's probe has yielded two indictments against Manafort, who is accused of several crimes, including bank fraud and conspiracy against the United States.

I've been wondering when Roger Stone would find himself in Mueller's direct crosshairs, and it seems we have our answer.  Don't be surprised if Stone is Mueller's next target, because as with the weeks before the Manafort and Flynn indictments, the grand jury subpoena game is heating up rapidly.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller on Thursday filed a request for 70 blank subpoenas in the Virginia court presiding over one of two criminal proceedings involving former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort. 

The two-page filing doesn’t offer much in the way of details, but each subpoena orders the recipient to appear at the federal courthouse in Alexandria on July 10 at 10 a.m. to testify at Manafort’s trial on charges stemming from Mueller’s investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. 

Although Manafort faces no charges related to the Trump campaign, he is accused in cases filed both in Alexandria, Virginia and Washington, D.C. of hiding the work he did for and the money he made from a Russia-friendly political party in Ukraine and former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych. 

In Virginia, he is also accused of concealing foreign bank accounts, falsifying his income taxes and failing to report foreign bank accounts. 

In Washington, Manafort faces counts of conspiracy to launder more than $30 million, making false statements, failing to follow lobbying disclosure laws and working as an unregistered foreign agent.

May brings the spring flowers and the seeds of justice.

The Great Wall Bean Ball Downfall

Trump's trade war with China has its first major casualty, and it's America's soybean exporters here in Ohio and other farm states.

The world’s biggest oilseed processor just confirmed one of the soybean market’s biggest fears: China has essentially stopped buying U.S. supplies amid the brewing trade war. 

“Whatever they’re buying is non-U.S.,” Bunge Ltd. Chief Executive Officer Soren Schroder said in a telephone interview Wednesday. “They’re buying beans in Canada, in Brazil, mostly Brazil, but very deliberately not buying anything from the U.S.” 

In a move that caught many in U.S. agriculture by surprise, China last month announced planned tariffs on American shipments of soybeans. As the market waited for the measure to take effect, there was some hope among traders and shippers alike that relations between the nations could ease in the meantime and the trade flow would continue. But that doesn’t seem to be the case, at least for now, according to Bunge.

It’s “very clear” that the trade tensions have already stopped China from buying U.S. supplies, Schroder said. “How long that will last, who knows? But so long as there is this big cloud of uncertainty, that’s likely to continue.”

Soybeans are a billion dollar crop in Ohio.  Lot of farmers here depend on those exports and China is by far the largest buyer.  Now they have stopped buying.

Gonna be a fun November around here.

Teaching Some Global Economics

If you want to know why teachers are on strike in Arizona and are considering striking in other states, consider this:  Red state education cuts have gotten so bad that we treat the teaching profession like we currently treat coders in IT or engineers in tech.  States want to fill teaching positions with qualified people, but they want to pay retail cashier salaries so they're looking to hire from outside the US. 

The latest wave of foreign workers sweeping into American jobs brought Donato Soberano from the Philippines to Arizona two years ago. He had to pay thousands of dollars to a job broker and lived for a time in an apartment with five other Filipino workers. The lure is the pay — 10 times more than what he made doing the same work back home.

But Mr. Soberano is not a hospitality worker or a home health aide. He is in another line of work that increasingly pays too little to attract enough Americans: Mr. Soberano is a public school teacher.

As walkouts by teachers protesting low pay and education funding shortfalls spread across the country, the small but growing movement to recruit teachers from overseas is another sign of the difficulty some districts are having providing the basics to public school students.

Among the latest states hit by the protests is Arizona, where teacher pay is more than $10,000 below the national average of $59,000 per year. The Pendergast Elementary School District, where Mr. Soberano works, has recruited more than 50 teachers from the Philippines since 2015. They hold J-1 visas, which allow them to work temporarily in the United States, like au pairs or camp counselors, but offer no path to citizenship. More than 2,800 foreign teachers arrived on American soil last year through the J-1, according to the State Department, up from about 1,200 in 2010.

“In these times, you have to be innovative and creative in recruiting,” said Patricia Davis-Tussey, Pendergast’s head of human resources. “We embrace diversity and really gain a lot from the cultural exchange experience. Our students do as well.”

Public school teachers are the new migrant workers in America.  We don't even give them a path to being citizens here.  Has teaching really become the new face of "jobs Americans won't do" in the Trump era?

Sure looks like it.

StupidiNews!

• An Air National Guard C-130 cargo plane on its way to be decommissioned crashed shortly after takeoff into a highway near Savannah, Georgia, killing all nine on board.
• Arizona teachers remain on strike for a fifth day as state lawmakers consider a deal to get teachers back to work and to restore a decade of steep education budget cuts.
• Donald Trump reportedly will scrap the Iran nuclear deal, but wants an exit that doesn't alienate French President Emmanuel Macron, who urged Trump to keep the deal in a state visit last week.
• Trump legal adviser Rudy Giuliani says that Trump reimbursed lawyer Michael Cohen for $130,000 in money reportedly paid to Stormy Daniels, something Trump has previously denied.
• Oakland is joining a growing number of California cities passing local laws creating community oversight boards as a check on surveillance technology and privacy issues.

Last Call For Buy Buy Buyback

Corporations continue to reap record profits thanks to the Trump tax scam and Apple is no different, announcing a massive $100 billion in stock buybacks thanks to Uncle Sam's deep pockets.

Apple just announced a stock buyback equal to the size of Ecuador’s GDP, thanks to the Republican tax cut bill. 

In a quarterly earnings announcement on Tuesday, the Cupertino, California-based company said it would put in place a new $100 billion share buyback program and increase its quarterly dividend by 16 percent. It’s no coincidence that Apple is a major beneficiary of the GOP tax cuts — its effective tax rate (the amount it actually pays) has dropped by about 10 percent between this year and last, and it’s saving an estimated $47 billion on taxes on profits earned overseas as well. 

Of the multiple major buyback announcements companies have made since the tax bill was passed in December, Apple’s is by far the biggest. But there have been others as well:The tech conglomerate Cisco in February said it would put an additional $25 billion toward a stock buyback. Troubled megabank Wells Fargo in January announced about $22 billionin buybacks. Pepsi announced a $15 billion buyback, Amgen and AbbVie $10 billion, and Google’s parent company Alphabet $8.6 billion. 

Stock buybacks occur when companies repurchase shares of their own stock. That leaves remaining shareholders with a bigger chunk of the company and increases the earnings they reap per share. Buybacks have become increasingly popular in recent years and have boomed in the wake of the tax bill. 

By June, Apple will have delivered $210 billion in buybacks to its shareholders since 2012, and it is now earmarking an additional $100 billion. It’s also upping its dividend to 73 cents per share from 63 cents. 

Apple is returning more cash to shareholders than any company ever, the Financial Times’s Robin Wigglesworth wrote on Tuesday. By the summer, it will have given back more than the market value of all but 20 of the biggest publicly traded companies in the United States — bigger than Verizon, Mastercard, Coca-Cola, and Disney.

Not an owner of a thousand shares of Apple stock?  Oh well.

Just remember that when Republicans tell you that we can't afford roads, bridges, schools, clean water, Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security and health care, just remember they had no problem giving Apple $47 billion a year to buy their own stock.

Trump Gets His Chicken Kiev

Ukraine wants US missiles, so naturally the government is making things as pleasant as possible for the Trump regime by basically losing all the paperwork on any outstanding charges against Paul Manafort.

In the United States, Paul J. Manafort is facing prosecution on charges of money laundering and financial fraud stemming from his decade of work for a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine. 

But in Ukraine, where officials are wary of offending President Trump, four meandering cases that involve Mr. Manafort, Mr. Trump’s former campaign chairman, have been effectively frozen by Ukraine’s chief prosecutor. 

The cases are just too sensitive for a government deeply reliant on United States financial and military aid, and keenly aware of Mr. Trump’s distaste for the investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, into possible collusion between Russia and his campaign, some lawmakers say. 

The decision to halt the investigations by an anticorruption prosecutor was handed down at a delicate moment for Ukraine, as the Trump administration was finalizing plans to sell the country sophisticated anti-tank missiles, called Javelins. 

The State Department issued an export license for the missiles on Dec. 22, and on March 2 the Pentagon announced final approval for the sale of 210 Javelins and 35 launching units. The order to halt investigations into Mr. Manafort came in early April. 

Volodymyr Ariev, a member of Parliament who is an ally of President Petro O. Poroshenko, readily acknowledged that the intention in Kiev was to put investigations into Mr. Manafort’s activities “in the long-term box.” 

“In every possible way, we will avoid irritating the top American officials,” Mr. Ariev said in an interview. “We shouldn’t spoil relations with the administration.”

Manafort? Never heard of the guy.  Who's he?  Robert Mueller?  Cooperate on what? Surely you're mistaken, my friend.

The Ukrainian investigators had been tracing money paid to Mr. Manafort and a New York law firm, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, by figures in the political party of Viktor F. Yanukovych, the Russian-leaning Ukrainian president who was ousted by street protesters and fled the country in 2014. Mr. Manafort was a longtime adviser to Mr. Yanukovych, working with him to revamp his public image and acquire a pro-Western patina that helped him win the presidency in 2010.

And now, they are not tracing the money.  But they are getting anti-tank missiles, so everything is OK.

This is how America's foreign policy works now.  Everything is done to appease Dear Leader, because we shouldn't spoil relations with this administration.  Kiev is all but admitting that somebody from the Trump regime let them know that dropping the Manafort investigation would be viewed as a personal favor. 

When we find out soon that of course the White House set this up, nobody will care, because this is how Trump does business, so this is how America does business too.  We're a third-world banana republic, and we're all adjusting to the new reality.