If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed. -- Benjamin Franklin
The science division of the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) was unstaffed as of Friday as the three remaining employees departed this week, sources tell CBS News.
All three employees were holdovers from the Obama administration. The departures from the division -- one of four subdivisions within the OSTP -- highlight the different commitment to scientific research under Presidents Obama and Trump.
Under Mr. Obama, the science division was staffed with nine employees who led the charge on policy issues such as STEM education, biotechnology and crisis response. It's possible that the White House will handle these issues through staff in other divisions within the OSTP.
On Friday afternoon, Eleanor Celeste, the assistant director for biomedical and forensic sciences at the OSTP, tweeted, "Science division out. Mic drop" before leaving the office for the last time.
Oh well. Guess it's hard to tell America that climate change is a hoax if the place is full of scientists who believe in climate change and have the figures to back it up.
No science is best science if you're the Trump regime.
It appears the joke's on Mike Pence and Kris Kobach. The former Indiana Governor and Trump's running mate and Kansas Secretary of State, respectively, can';t even get their respective states to go along with their voter suppression plan. Why? Well, who wants to be responsible for handing over millions of voter records, including Social Security information, to the Russians?
At least 24 states are pushing back or outright refusing to comply with the Trump administration’s request for voter registration data.
The Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, formed by President Trump to investigate his widely debunked claim that millions of illegal votes cost him the popular vote in the 2016 presidential election, sent letters this week to the 50 secretaries of state across the country requesting information about voters.
The letter, signed by commission vice chairman and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (R), asked for names, addresses, birth dates and party affiliations of registered voters in each state. It also sought felony convictions, military statuses, the last four digits of Social Security numbers and voting records dating back to 2006, according to a copy of the letter obtained by The Hill.
Many states immediately raised concerns and voiced their opposition to providing the information.
Kobach said Friday that Kansas, at least for now, also won’t be sharing Social Security information with the commission, on which he serves as vice chairman. The state will share other information about the state’s registered voters, including names and addresses, which are subject to the state’s open records laws.
Kobach said Thursday that Kansas would provide all the information requested in the letter, but in a follow-up interview Friday, he said the state would not be sharing the Social Security information at this time.
“In Kansas, the Social Security number is not publicly available. … Every state receives the same letter, but we’re not asking for it if it’s not publicly available,” Kobach said.
He did not rule out the possibility of providing that information to the commission in the future.
“If the commission decides that they would like to receive Social Security numbers to a secure site in order to remove false positives, then we would have to double check and make sure Kansas law permits,” Kobach said.
“I know for a fact that this information would be secured and maintained confidentially,” he added in response to security concerns.
But of course he won't do it now, despite assurances that "the information would be secure". It's because he knows it won't be secure at all, especially given that this is precisely the information the Russian hackers who hit our election and voter registration systems wanted, and that the Trump regime must be considered still compromised by Moscow. It would be an utter disaster, and Kobach knows it.
They won't even go along with thier own voter suppression scam, because of the chance Putin will use it in other ways. I'd laugh, but this is how much of a dark comedy America is right now.
Even Texas turned Kobach down. Hell, Mississippi told him to go to hell. Crooks we can understand in America. Traitors on the other hand, well not even the GOP will put up with them, it seems.
Reading the New York Times last night and this morning, I felt like I had been plagiarized. It seems that what was once a lonely voice is rapidly becoming common wisdom. It’s been a recurring theme of my analysis for months that the Trump administration had blundered badly by marrying his unorthodox and in many cases heretical campaign for the Republican nomination and presidency with a strategy that is wholly reliant on conventional conservative Republicans for implementation and passage.
In particular, the decision to sign off on the never-before-attempted plan to pass two budget reconciliation bills in a single fiscal year is beginning to look like a narrow-alley dead end in a very bad neighborhood. The idea was that the Republicans could take advantage of the fact that since they never did their budget work last year they still had the opportunity to finish that up with a health care bill that only requires fifty votes to pass (with the vice-president breaking any tie). They could then use the same legislative trick to pass tax reform in this year’s budget plan at a fifty vote threshold. Without getting into all the parliamentary rigamarole that’s involved, the most significant consequence of adopting this plan was that the administration believed and acted as if they would never need a single Democratic vote for anything, ever.
And of course that's what the Trumpistas believe, that well beyond Newt Gingrich's declaration of Bill Clinton's irrelevance in 1997 is the unshakable fanaticism that just because Trump defied the odds and the pollsters (with or without Russian help, mind you) and won in November, that the Democrats and their voters no longer matter, no longer have any political power, any voice, any franchise, or any rights as citizens. We're not even Americans to them at this point, the country has moved on into a Brave New World of Trump.
Only, reality has come a-knockin', and Mitch and Paul Ryan just aren't up to fixing this mess.
If that looks familiar it’s because I’ve written essentially the same thing over and over again. It’s not just health care and tax reform that are in peril. If Trump attempts to raise the debt ceiling using nothing but Republican votes, he will fail, too. If he tries to pass appropriations bills without any Democratic support, the government will either shut down or be funded on continuing resolutions that keep Obama’s priorities in place. He will not get an infrastructure bill without significant Democratic input and support.
Not only can he not govern successfully using this strategy, he cannot govern at all. This is why I foresaw that his administration would crack up on the shoals sometime this summer, and certainly no later than September when the fiscal year ends and the debt ceiling becomes critical.
Most concerning was the prospect and likelihood that he had painted himself into a corner and would discover that he had no way of recovering from the mess he’d made. As McConnell’s plan for Obamacare repeal faltered, he began warning his caucus of exactly what I am explaining now. But it was too late and the plan was never going to work anyway. The only thing that McConnell had to use in support of a bill that the people hate was the direness of the consequences of failure. But either he doesn’t understand the severity of the problem or he was unable to communicate it effectively enough. Perhaps it’s just not salvageable on any level, since the only way to delay their fate is to pass a bill that would strip 22 million people of their access to health care.
The consequences will begin to pile up now. Trump will lash out in ever more confusing and bizarre ways. And then the indictments and plea deals will start to flow in from Special Counsel Bob Mueller’s shop. By Thanksgiving, if not before, the nation will be confronted with the urgent need to remove Trump from power and I suspect there will be more consensus about it by then than most people can imagine right now.
Not only do I believe Martin is right, I think the reality of the just how bad this can get is going to hit long before Thanksgiving, especially if Trump botches the debt ceiling or stomps his way into a shooting conflict somewhere. Trump still has most of Obama's economy right now. Should the economic consequences of Trumpism arrive sooner rather than later and the Dow goes from 21,000 to 16,000 again, you are going to see Republicans head for the exits at near relativistic velocities.
The larger point is that Martin predicted Trump's inability to govern would be what sinks the guy, and that's looking more likely than ever after just five months on the job. The State Department is at this point in shambles, the FBI, CIA, and NSA are having a good old time plying connect-the-dots with Trump's Russian buddies, it's all the Pentagon can do to keep Trump from burning down the Middle East, and morale is so bad at the rest of the executive branch agencies due to purges and proposed massive budget cuts that it's all starting to come unglued.
And it's only end of June, some 22 weeks in. We can't even see the bottom yet, but we're on the way down so fast that the fog is beginning to clear just from the speed of our descent.
Pierre Omidyar's Democracy Fund (yes, the same guy behind bankrolling Team Double G and The Intercept) has an interesting new study out on Trump voters and what motivated them to support Trump. Not all Trump voters are the same, but the study claims that a particular subset of Trump voters were the ones that Democrats have lost over the last six years, and they are largely responsible for the GOP being in charge of the country. Meet the "American Preservationists" who voted to wreck the America they love so much.
These Trump voters lean economically progressive, believe the economic and political systems are rigged, have nativist immigration views, and a nativist and ethnocultural conception of American identity.
Although American Preservationists are less loyal Republicans than other Trump voter groups, and nearly half had positive views of Clinton in 2012, American Preservationists comprise the core Trump constituency that propelled him to victory in the early Republican primaries.
American Preservationists have low levels of formal education and the lowest incomes of the Trump groups—and non-Trump voters as well. Despite being the most likely group to say that religion is “very important” to them, they are the least likely to attend church regularly. They are the most likely group to be on Medicaid, to report a permanent disability that prevents them from working, and to regularly smoke cigarettes. Despite watching the most TV, they are the least politically informed of the Trump groups.
American Preservationists appear more likely to desire being around people like themselves, who have similar backgrounds and cultural experiences. They are far more likely to have a strong sense of their own racial identity and to say their Christian identity is very important to them. They take the most restrictionist approach to immigration— staunchly opposing not just illegal but legal immigration as well, and intensely supporting a temporary Muslim travel ban. They feel the greatest amount of angst over race relations: they believe that anti-white discrimination is as pervasive as other forms of discrimination, and they have cooler feelings (as measured on a feeling thermometer scale) toward minorities.(2) They agree in overwhelming numbers that real Americans need to have been born in America or have lived here most of their lives and be Christian.
American Preservationists are trade skeptics and look more like Democrats on domestic economic issues, particularly on the nation’s wealth distribution, concern over old-age entitlement programs, and animus toward Wall Street. They feel powerless against moneyed interested and the politically connected and tend to distrust other people. They also share liberals’ views on the environment, believing that global warming is a serious threat and human activity is primarily to blame.
The theory is until Trump came along, these are the folks that would just have easily voted for the Democrats over Medicaid, Wall Street and climate change then they would vote for Republicans over immigration, race, and religion. When Trump came in and appealed directly to these voters and their fears, they dumped Clinton like a hot sack of garbage to go be publicly racist assholes.
If you've ever been to Kentucky, the state is full of these voters. They were tailor-made to flip to the GOP when Trump ran. Obamacare pissed them off until they figured out that it meant more stuff for them.
The question is do the Democrats bother to try to get these voters back?
OK folks, as if I haven't stressed this enough over the last almost nine years, now is way past the time to be worrying about Trump's point man on national voter suppression efforts, our old friend Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach.
Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach has asked the state of Connecticut to provide President Donald Trump’s new voter commission with the names, birthdates and Social Security information for that state’s voters going back to 2006.
Kobach, a former chairman of the Kansas Republican Party and a candidate for Kansas governor in 2018, serves as vice chairman of Trump’s Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity.
In a June 28 letter, Kobach asked the Connecticut secretary of state’s office to provide it with all publicly available voter roll data, including the full names of all registered voters along with their addresses, dates of birth, the last four digits of their Social Security numbers, voting history and other personal information.
Kobach’s office did not immediately answer a question about how many states received similar letters. Kobach previously promised that the commission would undertake the most comprehensive study of voter fraud to date.
Connecticut Secretary of State Denise Merrill, a Democrat, said in a statement that her office plans to share “publicly-available information with the Kobach Commission while ensuring that the privacy of voters is honored by withholding protected data.”
“In the same spirit of transparency, we will request that the Commission share any memos, meeting minutes or additional information as state officials have not been told precisely what the Commission is looking for,” she said. “This lack of openness is all the more concerning, considering that the Vice Chair of the Commission, Kris Kobach, has a lengthy record of illegally disenfranchising eligible voters in Kansas.”
Kobach has championed some of the strictest voting laws in the country during his tenure as secretary of state. Those laws have spurred multiple lawsuits.
Last week, a federal judge fined him $1,000 for making “patently misleading representations” about documents he took to a November meeting with Trump that relate to federal voting law as part of an ongoing voting rights case.
“The courts have repudiated his methods on multiple occasions but often after the damage has been done to voters,” Merrill said. “Given Secretary Kobach’s history we find it very difficult to have confidence in the work of this Commission.”
Vanita Gupta, the former head of the U.S. Department of Justice’s office of Civil Rights, said on Twitter that the letter proves that Kobach and Vice President Mike Pence, who serves as the commission’s chairman, “are laying the groundwork for voter suppression, plain & simple.”
Kobach’s office denied a request by The Kansas City Star for documents related to the commission last week on the grounds that his office has no documents pertaining to the commission.
Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) said in a statement that he has “no intention” of fulfilling the request, defending the fairness of his state's elections. He also blasted the commission in his statement, saying it was based on the "false notion" of widespread voter fraud in the November presidential election.
“At best this commission was set up as a pretext to validate Donald Trump’s alternative election facts, and at worst is a tool to commit large-scale voter suppression,” McAuliffe stated.
California Secretary of State Alex Padilla (D) also responded to the request, saying “I will not provide sensitive voter information to a commission that has already inaccurately passed judgment that millions of Californians voted illegally” in the last election.
“California’s participation would only serve to legitimize the false and already debunked claims of massive voter fraud made by the President, Vice President, and [Kansas Secretary of State Kris] Kobach,” Padilla stated.
Kobach is the vice chairman of the voter fraud panel who asked each state for its voter rolls.
Later in the evening, Kentucky Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes (D) said she too wouldn't offer up the information requested by the panel.
"The president created his election commission based on the false notion that "voter fraud" is a widespread issue – it is not," Grimes said in a statement Thursday.
"Indeed, despite bipartisan objections and a lack of authority, the President has repeatedly spread the lie that three to five million illegal votes were cast in the last election," her statement continued. "Kentucky will not aid a commission that is at best a waste of taxpayer money and at worst an attempt to legitimize voter suppression efforts across the country."
And the only reason you would force states to do this is if your "solution" to the issue of "voter fraud" was a "national voter integrity database" ahead of national voter ID legislation that would standardize voting and registration procedures across the country for federal elections.
Keep in mind too that Trump would then have a database of every voter in the country and how they voted for the last ten years. You can imagine the awesome levels of malfeasance that could occur in the annals of targeting voter disenfranchisement with that type of information.
You can also imagine that there would be no independent oversight of the commission and the conclusions they would draw, which of course would be that America desperately needs "voter registration and identification reform legislation" ahead of 2020...or maybe ahead of 2018.
This is where we lose our two-party system, guys, right here. Republicans vote, Democrats are mysteriously purged from the rolls, just enough to give Republicans key wins in key locations time and time again. You don't have to touch a single voting machine in the country to control the outcome if you already know who can and cannot vote in each precinct in America.
Even if you don't believe that Trump got help from this from the Russians the first time around, you'd better believe Kobach is going to push for this to happen by 2020. Keep a really close eye on this one guys, because your democracy is going to go poof before you know it.
Today's Russia bombshell story (and we're well into the uncharted territory where we have enough regular bombshell stories for me to use the term today's Russia bombshell story) is from the WSJ's Shane Harris, who tells us the story of a GOP political operative named Peter Smith. Smith, it turns out, is the cutout man linking Hillary Clinton's stolen emails, taken by Russian hackers, and Mike Flynn and the Trump campaign.
Before the 2016 presidential election, a longtime Republican opposition researcher mounted an independent campaign to obtain emails he believed were stolen from Hillary Clinton’s private server, likely by Russian hackers.
In conversations with members of his circle and with others he tried to recruit to help him, the GOP operative, Peter W. Smith, implied he was working with retired Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, at the time a senior adviser to then-candidate Donald Trump.
“He said, ‘I’m talking to Michael Flynn about this—if you find anything, can you let me know?’” said Eric York, a computer-security expert from Atlanta who searched hacker forums on Mr. Smith’s behalf for people who might have access to the emails.
Emails written by Mr. Smith and one of his associates show that his small group considered Mr. Flynn and his consulting company, Flynn Intel Group, to be allies in their quest.
What role, if any, Mr. Flynn may have played in Mr. Smith’s project is unclear. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Smith said he knew Mr. Flynn, but he never stated that Mr. Flynn was involved.
Mr. Flynn didn’t respond to requests for comment.
A Trump campaign official said that Mr. Smith didn’t work for the campaign, and that if Mr. Flynn coordinated with him in any way, it would have been in his capacity as a private individual. The White House declined to comment.
So if you wanted to know what the big shoe waiting to drop on Trump was, judging by his screaming Twitter rants all week, this appears to be it. By the way, Peter Smith is now dead. Did I mention that?
Mr. Smith died at age 81 on May 14, which was about 10 days after the Journal interviewed him. His account of the email search is believed to be his only public comment on it.
The operation Mr. Smith described is consistent with information that has been examined by U.S. investigators probing Russian interference in the elections.
Those investigators have examined reports from intelligence agencies that describe Russian hackers discussing how to obtain emails from Mrs. Clinton’s server and then transmit them to Mr. Flynn via an intermediary, according to U.S. officials with knowledge of the intelligence.
It isn’t clear who that intermediary might have been or whether Mr. Smith’s operation was the one allegedly under discussion by the Russian hackers. The reports were compiled during the same period when Mr. Smith’s group was operating, according to the officials.
Mr. Smith said he worked independently and wasn’t part of the Trump campaign.
His project began over Labor Day weekend 2016 when Mr. Smith, a private-equity executive from Chicago active in Republican politics, said he assembled a group of technology experts, lawyers and a Russian-speaking investigator based in Europe to acquire emails the group theorized might have been stolen from the private server Mrs. Clinton used as secretary of state. Mr. Smith’s focus was some 33,000 emails Mrs. Clinton said were deleted because they were deemed personal. Mr. Smith said he believed that the emails might have been obtained by hackers and that they actually concerned official matters Mrs. Clinton wanted to conceal—two notions for which he offered no evidence. Mrs. Clinton gave the State Department tens of thousands of emails related to official business.
Ahh, but it gets better.
In the interview with the Journal, Mr. Smith said he and his colleagues found five groups of hackers who claimed to possess Mrs. Clinton’s deleted emails, including two groups he determined were Russians.
“We knew the people who had these were probably around the Russian government,” Mr. Smith said.
And better.
Mr. Smith said after vetting batches of emails offered to him by hacker groups last fall, he couldn’t be sure enough of their authenticity to leak them himself. “We told all the groups to give them to WikiLeaks,” he said. WikiLeaks has never published those emails or claimed to have them.
No, that would have given the game away. But Flynn had them. The Russians had them. Smith talked to the WSJ. And now he's dead.
The NRA is apparently sick and tired of liberals wanting to not have schools full of kids being shot up and have decided that the real enemy of the United States is people who don't like firearms. If you think I'm exaggerating the "liberals are the enemy" angle of the NRA, this is their newest video.
I’m not sure this video is even unusual for the NRA, which, these days, is more a purveyor of wholesale culture war zealotry than it is just a gun rights group. But it’s still a pretty spectacular appeal to the seemingly bottomless resentment of liberal sophisticates that eternally haunts conservatives despite controlling virtually the entire political apparatus of the United States. If there were a secret version of this video that ended with a call to march on Hollywood and raze it to the ground, I wouldn’t be surprised.
This raises a question for “both sides” apostles: Can you think of a recent video anywhere near as vicious as this one from a left-wing group? I don’t mean some dude on Twitter. I mean some significant organization associated with mainstream liberalism. It’s an honest question. I don’t watch a lot of propaganda videos, so I could easily have missed something. Any takers?
That's Dana Loesch in the video, by the way. If the name sounds familiar, she's one of Glenn Beck's friends at The Blaze and is married to equally awful conservative media jackass Chris Loesch.
Her response to criticism of this video?
“The language of the left is violence and it has been because they think it’s an acceptable form of protest,” she said. “I thought these people were supposed to be open-minded and creative and funny, and I’ve never seen people who are the dullest crayons in the box in my life, and these people who try to overreact — hyper-reaction — and feign outrage about condemnation of violence that they themselves don’t have the balls to condemn.”
When somebody tell you straight out that "the only way to stop their violence of lies is with the clenched fists of truth" as an endorsed, public statement of an advocacy group for the promotion and use of firearms, it is not "rhetoric"or "metaphor" or "hyperbole", it is a statement that the NRA believes and is openly advocating that firearms should be purchased to be used by scared and angry people as a tool of resolution of political disagreement, to be used on Americans, by Americans.
It is a declaration of a belief that the time is coming when firearms must be used not in defense of liberty but as offense to put down enemies of the state.
It is a call for civil war, a clarion call to take up arms and to use those arms.
It's the most irresponsible and hideous thing I think I've seen in a long time, and the racial undertones of it are both indelible and unmistakable. This goes far beyond the sick lunacy of a single man's attempt to kill a Republican Congressman earlier this month. It is a call to open fire, during an open season of blood.
No Republican will dare disavow this. But if I were making a recruitment video for a anti-government militia group, a white supremacist sovereign citizen movement, or I just wanted to inspire someone to start shooting up the next Black Lives Matter demonstration, in sixty seconds I could not have done a better job.
This is terrifying. And there will be bloody consequences from this, I guarantee it.
It's no wonder that here in a state with the twin national embarrassments of the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter theme park, in a state where religious organizations now have the same "equal access" to discriminate against LGBTQ organizations on public university campuses and use tax dollars to do so, that GOP Gov. Matt Bevin is now putting Bible study courses in Kentucky high schools.
Public schools in Kentucky can soon teach reading, writing and the book of Revelation.
At the Capitol on Tuesday, Gov. Matt Bevin gave his public “Amen” to a bill allowing Bible courses in public schools.
Normally, a bill signing does not open with prayer, but in this case, it may have been appropriate. At a ceremony in the Capitol Rotunda, Bevin signed House Bill 128, which allows public schools to teach courses on the Bible.
The bill's sponsor says students need to understand the role the Bible played in American history.
“It really did set the foundation that our founding fathers used to develop documents like the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights," said Rep. D.J. Johnson (R-Owensboro). "All of those came from principles from the Bible."
The bill, which easily passed the House and Senate, gives local school boards the option of developing a Bible literacy class as part of their social studies curriculum. The course would be elective, not required.
“The idea that we would not want this to be an option for people in school, that would be crazy. I don't know why every state would not embrace this, why we as a nation would not embrace this,” Bevin told the crowd.
The ACLU of Kentucky said it’s concerned about how the law might be used in schools.
“A Bible literacy bill that, on its face, may not appear to be unconstitutional, could in fact become unconstitutional in its implementation,” said Advocacy Director Kate Miller.
Miller told WDRB News the ACLU will monitor the law closely.
Comparative religion courses are one thing, I took such a class in college and hey, I learned about the Bible, the Qu'ran, the Torah and Talmud, the Mahabharata, the Tripitaka and more. But teaching the Bible in high school, even as a social studies elective, is tricky and in this state probably going to get ugly fast next year.
I'd argue that we need more Constitutional literacy, or literacy in general here in Kentucky, but that's why I'm not on any school boards around here. Go figure.
Bonus question: When do we get the high school elective courses on literacy of the Qu'ran or any non-Christian religious text?
Meanwhile here in Kentucky, Sen. Rand Paul is pissed off that the Senate GOP bill to wreck Medicaid and health insurance doesn't go far enough to rid America of a few million undesirable sick poors and that his Senate GOP buds need to be ready to purge the sick from the country in the name of that Tree of Liberty and all.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) says some of his "weak-kneed" Republican colleagues need to remember what they stand for regarding the repeal of ObamaCare.
During a Wednesday interview on Fox News, Paul — an opponent of the Senate GOP's healthcare bill in its current form — said all Democrats hate the legislation, and so do half of Republicans.
"The half of Republicans that hate it are conservatives like myself who went to rally after rally after rally saying 'We're going to repeal ObamaCare,' and now we're not repealing it, we're keeping it," Paul said.
"These weak-kneed Republicans up here who are saying, 'Oh, we got to spend more money and we got to keep Medicaid forever, the expansion,' they need to get over themselves."
Paul said Republicans need to remember what they were for: "Repealing ObamaCare."
He added he'd like to support a healthcare bill, but will only vote for one that truly nixes the Affordable Care Act, not just modifies it or scales it back.
Got that, Kentucky voters? If you got help from the Affordable Care Act over the last few years, well, you just need to "get over yourselves" and be sick and poor again. Rand doesn't give a good goddamn if you live or die.
Keep in mind that if the Senate bill passes, the biggest loser in federal Medicaid spending cuts by percentage will be...you guessed it, Kentucky. The Bluegrass State will lose 58.5% of its federal funding for healthcare by 2022 if this bill becomes law, putting us in a worse position than before Obamacare even came along in the first place.
And Rand Paul believes those federal spending cuts to Kentucky aren't steep enough.
We've seen plenty of charts on America's income being lopsided as Republicans are more than happy to give the richest Americans a trillion-dollar tax cut or three while ravaging social programs, but it turns out America's wealth distribution is even worse.
Critics of that body of work say its use of pre-tax data masks some of the equalizing effects of the tax code, and thus overstates inequality. If that were indeed the case, a look at the distribution of wealth as opposed to just income, while harder to measure, could be a better barometer as to the true state of America’s social divide.
This chart courtesy of Deutsch Bank economist Torsten Slok shows the picture with regards to wealth is even bleaker.The richest 10% of families are worth a combined $51 trillion, equal to 75% of total household wealth. To put that figure in perspective, US GDP totaled $18.5 trillion in 2016.
Please note America's total wealth doubled during Bill Clinton's two terms, from $30T to $60T, and wealth went up among America's bottom 50%, tripling to $3T or so. It really was a boom time, and them Dubya came along and screwed us.
Still, the problem remains that just 10 percent of the country owns three-quarters of the wealth in America, and most of us have nothing or next to nothing. Now we're ruled by a cabal that seems to think that the wealthiest ten percent need more trillions at our expense.
Paul Manafort, who was forced out as President Trump’s campaign chairman last summer after five months of infighting and criticism about his business dealings with pro-Russian interests, disclosed Tuesday that his consulting firm had received more than $17 million over two years from a Ukrainian political party with links to the Kremlin. The filing serves as a retroactive admission that Mr. Manafort performed work in the United States on behalf of a foreign power — Ukraine’s Party of Regions — without disclosing it at the time, as required by law. The Party of Regions is the political base of former President Viktor F. Yanukovych, who fled to Russia during a popular uprising in 2014.
The disclosure hints at the vast fortunes available to top American political consultants plying their trade in other countries.
It was not immediately clear if Mr. Manafort would be required to pay any fines for the late filing. He has maintained that a majority of his work for Mr. Yanukovych was political consulting in Ukraine, where his firm, Davis Manafort International, operated an office at the time.
The Party of Regions employed Mr. Manafort to help rebrand Mr. Yanukovych and his party, which was long known as tilting toward Russia, as modernizers favoring closer ties to the European Union. All the work disclosed by Mr. Manafort on Tuesday predated Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign.
Mr. Manafort’s filing indicates that he was retained by the Party of Regions to help elect national and regional candidates in Ukraine and to liaise with American diplomats in Kiev, the capital, who were monitoring elections there.
“Paul’s primary focus was always directed at domestic Ukrainian political campaign work, and that is reflected in today’s filing,” said Jason Maloni, a spokesman for Mr. Manafort.
The problem of course is that Manafort's millions in blood money meant he was in the business of helping a government friendly to Russia get elected, something he refused to actually disclose as he should have done under law here. Then again, he was performing the same job here, wasn't he? That mean both Mike Flynn and Paul Manafort have both lied about representing foreign powers in campaign capacity, and then both went to work for Trump.
I'm betting Robert Mueller is having a less-than-fun time sifting through this maze of sand, but when he hits pay dirt it's going to be a hell of a thing.
UK officials have charged six police and safety officers in connection with 1989's deadly Hillsborough stadium stampede that killed 96 in a crowded enclosure.
In January 2016, Seattle’s minimum wage jumped from $11 an hour to $13 for large employers, the second big increase in less than a year. New research released Monday by a team of economists at the University of Washington suggests the wage hike may have come at a significant cost: The increase led to steep declines in employment for low-wage workers, and a drop in hours for those who kept their jobs. Crucially, the negative impact of lost jobs and hours more than offset the benefits of higher wages — on average, low-wage workers earned $125 per month less because of the higher wage, a small but significant decline.
“The goal of this policy was to deliver higher incomes to people who were struggling to make ends meet in the city,” said Jacob Vigdor, a University of Washington economist who was one of the study’s authors. “You’ve got to watch out because at some point you run the risk of harming the people you set out to help.”
The paper’s findings are preliminary and have not yet been subjected to peer review. And the authors stressed that even if their results hold up, their research leaves important questions unanswered, particularly about how the minimum wage has affected individual workers and businesses. The paper does not, for example, address whether displaced workers might have found jobs in other cities or with companies such as Uber that are not included in their data.
Still, despite such caveats, the new research is likely to have big political implications at a time when the minimum wage has returned to the center of the economic policy debate. In recent years, cities and states across the country have passed laws and ordinances that will push their minimum wages as high as $15 over the next several years. During last year’s presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton called for the federal minimum wage to be raised to $12, and she faced pressure from activists to propose $15 instead. (The federal minimum wage is now $7.25 an hour.) Recently, however, the minimum-wage movement has faced backlash from conservatives, with legislatures in some states moving to block cities from increasing their local minimums.
The reality is while an $11 minimum wage had little to no deleterious effects, going to $13 is beginning to cause issues in at least one study.
Monday’s report looks at the impact of the second wage increase under the law: the January 2016 hike to $13 an hour for large employers. This time, the findings look very different: Compared to a counterfactual in which Seattle didn’t raise its minimum wage, the number of hours worked by low-wage workers (those earning less than $19 an hour) fell by 9.4 percent over the first nine months of 2016, and the number of low-wage jobs fell by 6.8 percent. Cumulatively, those add up to the losses of 5,000 jobs and 3.5 million hours of work. The average low-wage employee, they found, saw his or her monthly paycheck shrink by $125, or 6.6 percent.
The study is far from the last word on the impact of Seattle’s law, let alone the $15 minimum wage movement more generally. Indeed, just last week another study used similar methods to reach seemingly the opposite conclusion: A report from the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment at the University of California, Berkeley, found that Seattle’s minimum wage, “raises pay without costing jobs,” as a press release on the study announced.
The Berkeley study, however, looked exclusively at the restaurant industry. That has been a common practice in minimum-wage research, because the industry is one of the largest employers of low-wage workers. But the University of Washington study suggests a possible flaw in that approach: That research, too, found essentially no job losses in the restaurant sector as a result of the city’s minimum wage hike. That suggests that studies that focused on the restaurant industry might have missed larger effects in other sectors. (Michael Reich, one of the authors of the Berkeley study, said he was confident in his findings. Bernstein said focusing on restaurants, especially fast food, was a widely accepted approach that was well grounded in economic theory.)
The Washington study has one big advantage over most past research: The authors had access to detailed data on the hours and earnings of nearly all employees in Washington state, allowing them to measure the effects of the minimum wage much more directly than is possible with less complete datasets.3 But the study has its own weaknesses. Because the researchers had data only for Washington state, they had only a limited pool of places they could compare Seattle to — a key step for figuring out the effects of the minimum wage policy. (The Berkeley paper, by contrast, compared Seattle to similar communities across the country.4)
The Washington researchers also had to exclude many multilocation businesses, which means their sample could leave out major low-wage employers such as fast-food chains. Reich, in a letter to Seattle’s mayor responding to the study, called the findings “not credible” in part because they differed so much from those of past research. But Jeffrey Clemens, an economist at the University of California, San Diego who has studied the minimum wage, said it isn’t surprising that Seattle’s minimum wage would have an unusually big impact because it is so much higher than most other minimums.
Even if the Washington study stands up to scrutiny — and it will get lots more scrutiny — it carries important caveats. Vigdor cautioned that the study makes no claims about individual workers: It is possible, for example, that workers who lost their jobs after the wage hike quickly found other jobs outside of Seattle, or that they made up for lost hours by driving for Uber. Neither shift would show up in the researchers’ data.
It's a cautionary tale, but again the categories of jobs and employers in the studies are not complete. What this really means is that we don't know what Seattle's minimum wage hikes will mean truly without more data and more expansive research. Meanwhile, several other cities are set to join Seattle soon at that $15 point, and we'll have more data in more locations pretty rapidly over the next several years.
I know that's all pretty clinical when we're talking about a living wage for Americans out there working every day to put food on the table, but the issue has to be dealt with in a country where the federal minimum wage isn't a livable wage in any single county in the US. That has to increase. The question is "by how much". We have one set of data points, but right now we're still largely in the "here be macroeconomic dragons" section of the chart.
However, keep in mind that the answer as long as the GOP is in charge is "it will never increase because we think that's already too high."
Even with the Biden Administration adults in charge and Democrats in control on Congress (barely), there remains an increasingly crumbling global economy imperiling the world, rising nationalism and deadly racism across Europe and Asia, a seemingly endless war against terror, a federal government nobody trusts or believes in, global climate change putting us on the brink of destruction and a Village media that barely does its job on even the best day.
Needless to say there's a lot of Stupid out there when we need solutions. Dangerous levels of Stupid.
Into the fray, dear Reader. Tray tables, crash helmets, arms inside blog at all times.
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