Last Call For Mitch Better Have My Money, Con't

Delusional Republican voters lie to themselves as much as their GOP politicians lie to them, so it all makes sense in the end that reality is meaningless as long as their side "wins".

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi slammed Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell for touting the benefits of the stimulus law for his home state of Kentucky. The $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief law cleared Congress in March without any Republican support.

"Vote no and take the dough," Pelosi wrote on Twitter.

At a press conference on Tuesday, McConnell swung between noting his opposition to the federal rescue package and crediting it with providing substantial financial relief for Kentucky.

"Not a single member of my party voted for it. So you're going to get a lot more money," McConnell said. "I didn't vote for it, but you're going to get a lot more money. Cities and counties in Kentucky will get close to $700-$800 million."

The Kentucky Republican said the state was projected to get $4 billion as a result of the stimulus law. "So my advice to members of the legislature and other local officials: Spend it wisely because hopefully this windfall doesn't come along again," McConnell said.

Republicans were staunchly opposed to Biden's stimulus law, which contained $1,400 direct payments, a renewal of federal unemployment benefits, and aid to state and local governments. They argued it was too large and costly after lawmakers had approved a $900 billion federal rescue package late in 2020. Not a single Republican in Congress voted for it.

However, at least a dozen congressional Republicans have since touted parts of the law, such as small business aid, even though they didn't support the law's passage. Biden rebuked the GOP earlier this year for "bragging" about the law, saying, "some people have no shame."

Also on Tuesday, McConnell pledged a bruising political brawl over Democratic efforts to bypass Republicans to implement their infrastructure spending plans. "This is not going to be done on a bipartisan basis," he said. "This is going to be a hell of a fight over what this country ought to look like in the future and it's going to unfold here in the next few weeks."

 

So Mitch to Kentucky:

1. We didn't vote to give you anything.
2. You're getting money because of Biden and the Democrats.
   
3. We're taking credit for it anyway. 
4. Vote Republican!

 Yes, it's delusional. Yes, Republican voters believe every word of it.

Dennis Beckett wasn't even sure he wanted to cash his stimulus check, especially after he received a letter from President Biden announcing its arrival. Beckett, a retired pipe fitter, owns 25 firearms and staunchly opposes the president's call for restrictions on high-capacity magazines.

After thinking about it for a few days, Beckett finally decided to use the money to fix up his century-old home, recently purchased for $30,000.

But even as the stimulus makes his renovation possible, Beckett also blames it for the rising cost of the construction materials he needs. “Ever since January 20th, everything has shot up,” Beckett said, referring to the day Biden was inaugurated. “Just look at gas — it’s $3 a gallon, when it had been $1.79.”

Beckett’s ambivalence is echoed across Monroe County, made up of small towns and family farms tucked in the Appalachian region of southeastern Ohio.

In this impoverished pocket of the United States, the most recent round of stimulus payments — $1,400 for Americans who earn up to $75,000 — was the difference between getting a medical treatment and not, enrolling a child in college and not. But political divisions are deep here, and Trump voters, who make up the great majority of residents, are blaming the payments for a range of ills.

Some here say the Biden stimulus checks are keeping people from work, fueling a sense that the undeserving are exploiting the system. As the price of basic goods climbs, others worry that the stimulus will lead to runaway inflation on wood, cars, even milk.

“My God-honest opinion was at first that it was nice that the government was helping people,” said Brad Jeffries, 50, a truck driver who was laid off for most of last year and used the stimulus to pay off bills. “But since we got that, everything has went up, so how is that helping people out?”

This former Democratic stronghold has shifted right recently, and many residents now refer to the area as “Trump country.” In 2020, President Donald Trump received an average of 72 percent of the vote in the 420 counties covered by the Appalachian Regional Commission, a joint federal-state agency that steers resources to the 13-state region.

Biden has promised to win some of those voters back with economic incentives like the stimulus and the expanded child tax credit program, which will begin monthly payments to parents in mid-July of $350 per-child under the age 6, and $250 per child for children between 6 and 17.

A Washington Post analysis estimates that more than 90 percent of Trump voters in Monroe County received stimulus checks, one of the highest rates in the region.

“The president understands when we raise the quality of life and achievement of rural America, we improve the quality of life for all Americans,” said Gayle Manchin, whom Biden appointed co-chair of the Appalachian Regional Commission this spring.

But many of Monroe County’s Trump supporters don’t see it that way. Danny Long, a 41-year-old truck driver, was unemployed for much of last year and was behind on rent and utility bills.

The stimulus helped him catch up. But he credits Republicans for the checks, noting that Americans also received two stimulus payments during the last year of Trump’s presidency. “Biden didn’t do this,” Long said. “Trump did.”

 

So either the Biden stimulus "caused inflation", rather than the basic economics of demand reasserting itself after a depression-strength crash, or it's the Trump stimulus and he gets the credit for it. Also, apparently only Trump voters matter. You'd never, ever, ever see a single story where the people who voted for Biden are happy that they got the money they needed.

You can't win over a self-delusional cultist.

Dems need to stop trying to save people who would literally rather die than be helped and save who want to be helped. You will never appease them, and they will never stop trying to destroy Democrats and their voters.

They will never, ever stop.

Hack The Planet, Con't

So it turns out that the July 4th weekend cyberattack on global companies was really cover for Russian-linked hacker group Cozy Bear to try to hit the Republican National Committee.

Russian government hackers breached the computer systems of the Republican National Committee last week, around the time a Russia-linked criminal group unleashed a massive ransomware attack, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The government hackers were part of a group known as APT 29 or Cozy Bear, according to the people. That group has been tied to Russia’s foreign intelligence service and has previously been accused of breaching the Democratic National Committee in 2016 and of carrying out a supply-chain cyberattack involving SolarWinds Corp., which infiltrated nine U.S. government agencies and was disclosed in December.

It’s not known what data the hackers viewed or stole, if anything. The RNC has repeatedly denied that it was hacked. “There is no indication the RNC was hacked or any RNC information was stolen,” spokesman Mike Reed said.

In a statement following the publication of this story, Chief of Staff Richard Walters said the RNC learned over the weekend that a third-party provider, Synnex Corp., had been breached.

“We immediately blocked all access from Synnex accounts to our cloud environment,” he said. “Our team worked with Microsoft to conduct a review of our systems and after a thorough investigation, no RNC data was accessed. We will continue to work with Microsoft, as well as federal law enforcement officials, on this matter.”

In a statement, Microsoft declined to provide additional details. “We can’t talk about the specifics of any particular case without customer permission,” a company spokesperson said. “We continue to track malicious activity from nation-state threat actors -- as we do routinely -- and notify impacted customers.”

A spokesperson for the Russian Embassy in Washington didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The attack on the RNC, coupled with the recent ransomware attack, is a major provocation to President Joe Biden, who warned Russian President Vladimir Putin about cyberattacks at a June 16 summit. It’s not clear if the attack on the RNC is connected in any way to the ransomware attacks, which exploited multiple previously unknown vulnerabilities in software from Miami-based Kaseya Ltd.

The hackers are suspected to have attacked the RNC through Fremont, California-based Synnex, the people said, asking not to be identified as they weren’t authorized to discuss confidential matters. In a press release, Synnex said “it is aware of a few instances where outside actors have attempted to gain access, through Synnex, to customer applications within the Microsoft cloud environment.”

“As our review continues, we are unable to provide any specific details,” said Michael Urban, president of worldwide technology solutions distribution at Synnex in a statement to Bloomberg News. “As with any security issue, a full review of all companies, systems, third-party applications and related IT solutions must be completed before final determinations can be made.”

 

Now, I find it extremely interesting that the RNC is flatly denying that it lost any data at all, when politically it would benefit them to say that the effort "proved" that Biden was weak, or that Trump was strong, or that it was all a part of a grand Russian "collusion" conspiracy with the Democrats to hurt Republicans. Those accusations I'm sure are coming, but for now, the initial, immediate reaction was that the attack failed to accomplish the stated goal.

It's possible that the RNC is actually telling the truth, but, well, that's unlikely now, isn't it?

Anyway, there's two possibilities, that 1) the attack worked because the Russians absolutely want to keep the GOP under their thumb with possible blackmail material, or 2) it failed and eventually this all changes to "the Dems were in on it" which is ludicrous, but this is the era of flat earth, anti-vax, and the Big Lie.

There is a third possibility, that there was never an attack on the RNC's third-party provider at all and it's all a massive false flag, but who knows with cyberattacks? They have built in plausible deniability.

Anyway, don't take anything the RNC says at face value. But you already knew that...

Haiti President Jovenel Moïse Assassinated

Word this morning that Haiti's leader, President Jovenel Moïse, was assassinated by armed gunmen in his own home overnight, and that reports are that his wife Martine also succumbed to her injuries.

President Jovenel Moïse of Haiti was assassinated in an attack in the early hours of Wednesday at his home on the outskirts of the capital, Port-au-Prince, the prime minister said.

Mr. Moïse’s wife, Martine Moïse, was also shot in the attack, Prime Minister Claude Joseph said in a statement. Her condition was not immediately clear.

“A group of unidentified individuals, some of them speaking Spanish, attacked the private residence of the president of the republic and thus fatally wounded the head of state,” the prime minister said.

Mr. Joseph said in a telephone interview that he was the one running the country at the moment.

The news rocked the impoverished Caribbean island nation 675 miles southeast of Miami. Haiti has a long history of dictatorships and coups.

The country fought to emerge from one of the world’s most brutal slave colonies, one that brought France great wealth and that the colonial rulers fought to keep.

What started as a slave uprising at the turn of the 18th century eventually led to the stunning defeat of Napoleon’s forces in 1803. More recently, the country suffered under more than two decades of dictatorship by François Duvalier, known as Papa Doc, and then his son, Jean-Claude, known as Baby Doc.

A priest from a poor area, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, became the first democratically elected president in 1990. But in less than a year, he was deposed in a coup.

In recent months, the streets of Haiti have become clogged with angry protests demanding the removal of Mr. Moïse. He had clung to power, ruling by decree for more than a year, with many — including constitutional scholars and legal experts — contending that his term had expired.

Since a devastating earthquake 11 years ago, the country has not rebuilt, and many say it is worse off, despite billions of dollars of reconstruction aid. Armed gangs control the streets and have taken to kidnapping even schoolchildren and church pastors in the middle of their services. Poverty and hunger are on the rise, and the government has been accused of enriching itself while not providing even the most basic services.

Mr. Joseph said that the president had been “cowardly assassinated,” but that the murderers “cannot assassinate his ideas.” He called on the country to “stay calm” and said he would address the nation on Wednesday. He said the country’s security situation was under the control of the police and the army.

But international observers warned that the situation could quickly spiral out of control.

Didier Le Bret, a former French ambassador to Haiti, said he hoped Mr. Joseph would be able to run the country, despite his lack of political legitimacy.

“There is no more Parliament, the Senate is missing for a long time, there’s no president of the Court of Cassation,” Mr. Le Bret said, adding of Mr. Joseph: “Everything will rest on him.”

 

We'll see where this ends up, but it's going to be very tragic all the way around. The international community could finally get off its ass and help Haiti, it's been more than a decade. The earthquake there was a story I covered on ZVTS way back at our start.

Now another earthquake, the political kind, has devastated the place.

We talk about disasters a lot here, but this is definitely one of them.

StupidiNews!

• The death toll in the condo collapse in Surfside, Florida has risen to 36 as 109 remain unaccounted for as Tropical Storm Elsa is expected to reach Category 1 Hurricane strength before hitting Florida.
• Last week's heat wave in British Columbia, Canada may have killed more than one billion tidal animals like starfish and mussels off the coast of Vancouver.
  
• Eric Adams will win the NYC Democratic Mayoral Primary, with a narrow lead that is only expected to grow in the ranked-choice counting.
• The Biden Administration is advising the Saudi and UAE governments as OPEC's next round of oil price talks get underway this month.
• NASA's Ingenuity helicopter on Mars, accompanying the Perseverance rover, has now completed its ninth flight in less than three months, going further and faster each time.
  

Last Call For Black Lives Still Matter, Con't

When it's clear you're not wanted somewhere, go somewhere else where you are.

Journalists Nikole Hannah-Jones and Ta-Nehisi Coates are joining Howard University’s faculty, school officials announced Tuesday in a major recruiting victory for the private institution in the nation’s capital.

The surprising development came less than a week after trustees for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill voted to award tenure to Hannah-Jones. Initially, the public university hired her as a professor without the job-protection status. But its board of trustees approved tenure for her on Wednesday, after faculty and students at Chapel Hill protested that she had been mistreated.

In an interview Tuesday on CBS This Morning, Hannah-Jones said she would not join the UNC faculty.

Now Hannah-Jones will have tenure at Howard in the new position of Knight Chair in Race and Journalism, starting this summer at the historically Black university in Washington.

“I am so incredibly honored to be joining one of the most important and storied educational institutions in our country … ” Hannah-Jones said in a statement. “One of my few regrets is that I did not attend Howard as an undergraduate, and so coming here to teach fulfills a dream I have long carried.”

Hannah-Jones will also found a Center for Journalism and Democracy at Howard. She said it will aim to train journalism students from historically Black schools to “accurately and urgently [cover] the challenges of our democracy with a clarity, skepticism, rigor and historical dexterity that is too often missing from today’s journalism.”

Coates, an award-winning author known for his work on topics including race and white supremacy, will be a writer-in-residence in the university’s College of Arts and Sciences, and hold the Sterling Brown Chair in the English department. He said in an interview he plans to teach a class in creative writing next year.

“That really is the community that made me,” Coates said. “I would not be who I am without the faculty at Howard.”

Coates also has plans to finish his bachelor’s degree, which he started at Howard in 1993. He hasn’t picked a major but said he’d like to learn more about math, science and economics.

 

A very wise move for Hannah-Jones, Coates, Howard U., and for Black Lives Mattering.

 

In another life I would have graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill's journalism school myself, I understand why Hannah-Jones pursued the offer. But to create a journalism program, well...that's something that will long outlive you. That's a legacy.

Oh, and Howard U. got $20 million from their own rich donors to do it.

 

Black Lives Still Matter.

Report on that.

Ghosts In The Machines, Con't

The same Russian-based cyberattack gang that hit America's largest meatpacker five weeks ago has now hit multiple corporations across the globe over the July 4th holiday weekend, and the villains are demanding $70 million to free all their victims.

Cybersecurity teams worked feverishly Sunday to stem the impact of the single biggest global ransomware attack on record, with some details emerging about how the Russia-linked gang responsible breached the company whose software was the conduit.

An affiliate of the notorious REvil gang, best known for extorting $11 million from the meat-processor JBS after a Memorial Day attack, infected thousands of victims in at least 17 countries on Friday, largely through firms that remotely manage IT infrastructure for multiple customers, cybersecurity researchers said.

REvil was demanding ransoms of up to $5 million, the researchers said. But late Sunday it offered in a posting on its dark web site a universal decryptor software key that would unscramble all affected machines in exchange for $70 million in cryptocurrency.

Earlier, the FBI said in a statement that while it was investigating the attack its scale “may make it so that we are unable to respond to each victim individually.” Deputy National Security Advisor Anne Neuberger later issued a statement saying President Joe Biden had “directed the full resources of the government to investigate this incident” and urged all who believed they were compromised to alert the FBI.

Biden suggested Saturday the U.S. would respond if it was determined that the Kremlin is at all involved.

Less than a month ago, Biden pressed Russian President Vladimir Putin to stop giving safe haven to REvil and other ransomware gangs whose unrelenting extortionary attacks the U.S. deems a national security threat.

A broad array of businesses and public agencies were hit by the latest attack, apparently on all continents, including in financial services, travel and leisure and the public sector — though few large companies, the cybersecurity firm Sophos reported. Ransomware criminals infiltrate networks and sow malware that cripples them by scrambling all their data. Victims get a decoder key when they pay up.

The Swedish grocery chain Coop said most of its 800 stores would be closed for a second day Sunday because their cash register software supplier was crippled. A Swedish pharmacy chain, gas station chain, the state railway and public broadcaster SVT were also hit.

In Germany, an unnamed IT services company told authorities several thousand of its customers were compromised, the news agency dpa reported. Also among reported victims were two big Dutch IT services companies — VelzArt and Hoppenbrouwer Techniek. Most ransomware victims don’t publicly report attacks or disclose if they’ve paid ransoms.

CEO Fred Voccola of the breached software company, Kaseya, estimated the victim number in the low thousands, mostly small businesses like “dental practices, architecture firms, plastic surgery centers, libraries, things like that.”

Voccola said in an interview that only between 50-60 of the company’s 37,000 customers were compromised. But 70% were managed service providers who use the company’s hacked VSA software to manage multiple customers. It automates the installation of software and security updates and manages backups and other vital tasks.

Experts say it was no coincidence that REvil launched the attack at the start of the Fourth of July holiday weekend, knowing U.S. offices would be lightly staffed. Many victims may not learn of it until they are back at work on Monday. Most end users of managed service providers “have no idea” whose software keep their networks humming, said Voccola,

Kaseya said it sent a detection tool to nearly 900 customers on Saturday night.

The REvil offer to offer blanket decryption for all victims of the Kaseya attack in exchange for $70 million suggested its inability to cope with the sheer quantity of infected networks, said Allan Liska, an analyst with the cybersecurity firm Recorded Future. Although analysts reported seeing demands of $5 million and $500,000 for bigger targets, it was apparently demanding $45,000 for most.

“This attack is a lot bigger than they expected and it is getting a lot of attention. It is in REvil’s interest to end it quickly,” said Liska. “This is a nightmare to manage.”

 

In other words, the bad guys caught so many victims in their nets that they're demanding a blanket ransom for everyone.  If anything, they're victims of their own success. Too bad for them though that they've just caught international attention.

We'll see what happens.

The Big Lie, Con't

Republicans heading into the 2022 midterm elections are openly running on the Big Lie, not only using it to justify removing President Biden from the Oval Office and "restoring" Trump as president, but using it for justification to advocate removing Democrats from power by any means necessary.

A candidate to be Arizona’s top elections official said recently he hopes a review of 2020 ballots underway in his state will lead to the reversal of former president Donald Trump’s defeat there.

In Georgia, a member of Congress who used to focus primarily on culturally conservative causes such as opposing same-sex marriage has made Trump’s false claim that the election was stolen a central element of his bid to try to unseat the current secretary of state.

And in Virginia last month, a political novice who joined Trump’s legal team to try to overturn his 2020 loss in court mounted a fierce primary challenge — and won — after attacking a Republican state House member who said he had seen no evidence of widespread fraud in the election.

“He wasn’t doing anything — squat, diddly,” Wren Williams said in an interview about his primary opponent. “He wasn’t taking election integrity seriously. I’m sitting here fighting for election integrity in the courts, and he’s my elected representative who can legislate and he’s not.”

Across the country, as campaigns gear up for a handful of key races this year and the pivotal 2022 midterms, Republican candidates for state and federal offices are increasingly focused on the last election — running on the falsehood spread by Trump and his allies that the 2020 race was stolen from him.

While most of these campaigns are in their early stages, the embrace of Trump’s claims is already widespread on the trail and in candidates’ messages to voters. The trend provides fresh evidence of Trump’s continued grip on the GOP, reflecting how a movement inspired by his claims and centered on overturning a democratic election has gained currency in the party since the Jan. 6 Capitol attack.

Dozens of candidates promoting the baseless notion that the election was rigged are seeking powerful statewide offices — such as governor, attorney general and secretary of state, which would give them authority over the administration of elections — in several of the decisive states where Trump and his allies sought to overturn the outcome and engineer his return to the White House.

Many are newcomers to politics. They boast campaign websites proclaiming “America First,” call themselves patriots or tout their military service.

Some, including Chuck Gray of Wyoming, declare “election integrity” their top priority. Gray is one of at least six pro-Trump Republicans challenging Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), who has denounced Trump and voted to impeach him on a charge that he incited the Capitol attack.

And many are current Republican officeholders, lining up to seek reelection, who have backed Trump’s efforts over the past eight months by questioning the validity of the 2020 result, taking legislative votes or signing on to official efforts to overturn it.

Of the nearly 700 Republicans who have filed initial paperwork with the Federal Election Commission to run next year for either the U.S. Senate or the House of Representatives, at least a third have embraced Trump’s false claims about his defeat.

Many of them — 136 — are sitting members of Congress who voted against Joe Biden’s electoral college victory on Jan. 6.

Similarly, of the nearly 600 state lawmakers who publicly embraced Trump’s false claims, about 500 face reelection this year or next. Most of them signed legal briefs or resolutions challenging Biden’s victory. At least 16 of them attended the Jan. 6 protest in Washington.

“What’s really frightening right now is the extent of the effort to steal power over future elections,” said Jena Griswold, the Democratic secretary of state in Colorado. “That’s what we’re seeing across the nation. Literally in almost every swing state, we have someone running for secretary of state who has been fearmongering about the 2020 election or was at the insurrection. Democracy will be on the ballot in 2022.”

 

Republicans figure they can nullify enough Democratic wins in 2022 to take control of the House and Senate, bury Biden in impeachment for two years, and take over more states in 2024. The result will be an electoral college impossible for the Democrats to win, because Republicans in enough states will simply declare that Trump, or whoever is running on the GOP ticket in 2024, is automatically the winner.

The "election fraud" will be the justification for action against Democrats at all levels. It'll get ugly, fast. I still believe people are badly underestimating the probability of widespread, organized violence in the months ahead.

StupidiNews!

• Tropical Storm Elsa is crossing over Cuba and headed for Florida on Wednesday as the state prepares for heavy winds and rain.
• Legal experts say Ivanka Trump may be the next target in the ongoing investigation of the Trump Organization's criminal finance probe.
• Rescue crews in Japan are resuming their search for 24 missing in landslides over the weekend as heavy rains have cleared for now.
• Luxembourg Prime Minister Xavier Bettel remains hospitalized for a second day after being diagnosed with COVID-19 last week, the 48-year-old Bettel is stable condition for now.
• Analysts say the pandemic finished off Columbus, Ohio's status as America's "Smart City" as a $50 million, five-year grant from the Department of Transportation was largely wasted.
  

Last Call For America Is Still Going Viral, Con't

Republican governors are realizing that their states are full of unvaccinated folks increasingly vulnerable to the delta variant of COVID-19 (not to mention possibly even worse future variants) and that they're now 100% responsible for convincing the GOP holdouts to get the jab, or there may not be anyone left to vote for them in 2022 or 2024. The most vocal is GOP Gov. Jim Justice of West Virginia, who may be facing the toughest road.

West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice (R) said people hesitant about receiving a COVID-19 vaccine are “not thinking right” and warned they are playing a “death lottery.”

“They really are in a lottery with themselves,” Justice told Martha Raddatz on Sunday’s broadcast of ABC News’ “This Week.”

“You know, we have a lottery that basically says, if you’re vaccinated we’re going to give you stuff,” he said, referencing prizes that can be won in exchange for getting a shot in the state. “Well, you’ve got another lottery going on, and it’s the death lottery.”

Vaccination rates in West Virginia have significantly slowed in recent weeks, even though public health officials and scientists deem vaccines a safe way to fight the pandemic.

“Red states probably have a lot of people that, you know, are very, very conservative in their thinking and they think, ‘Well, I don’t have to do that,’ but they’re not thinking right,” Justice said.

Raddatz asked Justice what he thought would encourage those who haven’t received the vaccine to do so.

“I hate to say this, but what would put them over the edge is an awful lot of people dying,” he replied. “The only way that’s going to happen is a catastrophe that none of us want. And so we just got to keep trying.”

 

No, it's going to take millions of Delta variant cases and hundreds of thousands of deaths, all among vaccine holdout Republicans, before the needle on needles moves. This is why I'm not worried about Kristi Noem, or Ron DeSantis, or Greg Abbott in 2024, because they're going to have catastrophes on their hands well before they ever get to consider a run for the White House, one that will destroy their careers, and unfortunately, kill hundreds of thousands of Americans in the years ahead.

Automatic For The People, Con't

In the grand tradition of American labor history, workers with the advantage as demand rebounds from the Trump COVID depression are finding that businesses and corporations are no longer considering raising wages to attract workers, they're instead turning to automation and computers to get rid of minimum wage jobs completely.

 

When Kroger customers in Cincinnati shop online these days, their groceries may be picked out not by a worker in their local supermarket but by a robot in a nearby warehouse.

Gamers at Dave & Buster’s in Dallas who want pretzel dogs can order and pay from their phones — no need to flag down a waiter.

And in the drive-through lane at Checkers near Atlanta, requests for Big Buford burgers and Mother Cruncher chicken sandwiches may be fielded not by a cashier in a headset, but by a voice-recognition algorithm.

An increase in automation, especially in service industries, may prove to be an economic legacy of the pandemic. Businesses from factories to fast-food outlets to hotels turned to technology last year to keep operations running amid social distancing requirements and contagion fears. Now the outbreak is ebbing in the United States, but the difficulty in hiring workers — at least at the wages that employers are used to paying — is providing new momentum for automation.

Technological investments that were made in response to the crisis may contribute to a post-pandemic productivity boom, allowing for higher wages and faster growth. But some economists say the latest wave of automation could eliminate jobs and erode bargaining power, particularly for the lowest-paid workers, in a lasting way.

“Once a job is automated, it’s pretty hard to turn back,” said Casey Warman, an economist at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia who has studied automation in the pandemic.

The trend toward automation predates the pandemic, but it has accelerated at what is proving to be a critical moment. The rapid reopening of the economy has led to a surge in demand for waiters, hotel maids, retail sales clerks and other workers in service industries that had cut their staffs. At the same time, government benefits have allowed many people to be selective in the jobs they take. Together, those forces have given low-wage workers a rare moment of leverage, leading to higher pay, more generous benefits and other perks.

Automation threatens to tip the advantage back toward employers, potentially eroding those gains. A working paper published by the International Monetary Fund this year predicted that pandemic-induced automation would increase inequality in coming years, not just in the United States but around the world.

“Six months ago, all these workers were essential,” said Marc Perrone, president of the United Food and Commercial Workers, a union representing grocery workers. “Everyone was calling them heroes. Now, they’re trying to figure out how to get rid of them.”  

Checkers, like many fast-food restaurants, experienced a jump in sales when the pandemic shut down most in-person dining. But finding workers to meet that demand proved difficult — so much so that Shana Gonzales, a Checkers franchisee in the Atlanta area, found herself back behind the cash register three decades after she started working part time at Taco Bell while in high school.

“We really felt like there has to be another solution,” she said. 

So Ms. Gonzales contacted Valyant AI, a Colorado-based start-up that makes voice recognition systems for restaurants. In December, after weeks of setup and testing, Valyant’s technology began taking orders at one of Ms. Gonzales’s drive-through lanes. Now customers are greeted by an automated voice designed to understand their orders — including modifications and special requests — suggest add-ons like fries or a shake, and feed the information directly to the kitchen and the cashier.

The rollout has been successful enough that Ms. Gonzales is getting ready to expand the system to her three other restaurants.

“We’ll look back and say why didn’t we do this sooner,” she said.

 

No, a year from now I figure we'll all be back at the office for good, only you'll see a lot fewer help wanted signs. Restaurants may come back, but fast-food is going to automation even more quickly than anticipated. 

Wait until Amazon starts replacing warehouse workers with robots in a couple of years. Grocery stores, fast food, banks, retail logistics, all of it is going to automation this decade. We're going to have to find a way to deal with that, and increasingly the answer is going to be "an unemployable underclass".

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

White supremacist domestic terrorist Trump cultists continue their open demonstrations of power, marching over the holiday weekend in front of Philadelphia City Hall.

A group of white supremacists marched in front of Philadelphia City Hall Saturday night, drawing jeers from onlookers, as well as small scuffles.

Approximately 200 members of the group Patriot Front wore white face coverings, khakis, blue shirts and tan hats and waved flags with their group insignias.

They were seen approaching from Market Street before walking in front of City Hall around 10:45 p.m. Some could be seen holding shields as watchers-on shouted at them, demanding they leave Philadelphia.

Philadelphia police said the Patriot Front members chanted "Reclaim America," and "The election was stolen," as they marched.

A few people could be seen engaging in minor pushing and shoving with members of the group and police said several physical confrontations took place. An NBC10 photographer had his cellphone taken from him by members of the group, before recovering it.

Police also said members of Patriot Front used what they believed to be smoke bombs to cover their retreat as they fled.

Patriot Front, which is based out of Texas, is described by the Anti-Defamation League as “a white supremacist group whose members maintain that their ancestors conquered America and bequeathed it solely to them.”

They are known to participate in localized flash mobs, the likes of which happened in Philadelphia Saturday night, according to the ADL. The Independent reported that members of the group also marched in Washington, D.C., Saturday.

It was unclear whether Philadelphia police made any arrests in relation to the local march. Police also said there were no reports of any damage or injuries.

 

Luckily, there aren't any reports of major injuries.

 

This time. 

With the case against the Trump Organization moving into the indictment phase, who knows how long that peace will hold? Because make no mistake, what these assholes pulled off on Saturday in Philly was straight-up terrorism. When people tell you "But racism just doesn't happen in 2021" you tell them it sure as hell does.

Next time, it could involve firearms and worse. We're having open white supremacist group marching in America's major cities now. It won't be long before others join them.

It's going to be a long summer.

StupidiNews!

• Recovery teams in Surfside, Florida worked overnight to demolish the rest of the partially collapsed condo building ahead of the approach of Tropical Storm Elsa.
• FOX networks refused to run President Biden's Independence Day address on Sunday, choosing to run regularly scheduled programming.
• An airliner crash in the Philippines has killed 47 and injured at least 49 more as President Duterte is calling for an investigation into the crash and holding those responsible to account.
• California election officials have set September 14 as the date for the effort to recall Gov. Newsom, Newsom would face voters again in 2022 if he survives.
• Billionaire Sir Richard Branson plans to be among the first passengers on his commercial spaceflight journey next week.

Last Call For Orange Meltdown, Con't

The Former Guy™ really cannot stop himself from saying the quiet part out loud, only now there's no White House staff to hold him back or to parse his criminal admissions as bravado as his disastrous tour continues across the country, this time in Florida.

Former president Donald Trump lashed out at Manhattan prosecutors Saturday night for indicting his organization and its chief financial officer for tax fraud, calling it “prosecutorial misconduct” in his most extensive comments on the charges since they were unsealed Thursday.

As Trump criticized the investigation, he appeared to acknowledge the tax schemes while questioning whether the alleged violations were in fact crimes.

“They go after good, hard-working people for not paying taxes on a company car,” he said at a rally in Sarasota, Fla. “You didn't pay tax on the car or a company apartment. You used an apartment because you need an apartment because you have to travel too far where your house is. You didn't pay tax. Or education for your grandchildren. I don't even know. Do you have to? Does anybody know the answer to that stuff?”

The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office charged the Trump Organization and CFO Allen Weisselberg with orchestrating a 15-year scheme to avoid taxes by providing benefits hidden from the federal government. Weisselberg, they said, evaded taxes on $1.7 million in fringe benefits, which included the Trump Organization paying his rent, leasing him cars and other gifts. The Trump Organization and Weisselberg both pleaded not guilty this week, and Trump was not charged in the case.

But Trump excoriated the prosecutors for what he argued was a politically motivated investigation and one that came at the expense of focusing on violent crimes.

“For murder and for selling massive amounts of the worst drugs in the world that kill people left and right, that's okay,” he said. “Think of it, think of how unfair it is. Never before has New York City and their prosecutors or perhaps any prosecutors criminally charged a company or a person for fringe benefits. Fringe benefits. Murders, okay. Human trafficking, no problem — but fringe benefits, you can’t do that.”

Tax experts have said prosecutions centered on fringe benefits are rare, but some have compared the charges to the case against Leona Helmsley, a New York real estate developer who was convicted of evading $1.2 million in taxes in the 1980s.

Yet Trump maintained that he was the victim of “the radical left” who failed to “get him” in Washington with the Mueller investigation and said prosecutors only want to target him and other Republicans.

“Every abuse and attack they throw my way, it's only because I have been fighting for you against the corrupt establishment,” he said. “That's all it is.”

But prosecutors for the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office argued Thursday that the business practices were not “standard practice,” attempting to counter Trump’s argument that the investigation is politically motivated.

“There is no clearer example of a company that should be held to criminal account,” said Carey Dunne, a prosecutor working for Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. (D).

Trump has no external filter people anymore. He's talking himself into investigation after investigation here. Most importantly, he's not saying he's innocent. He's saying he's being persecuted for actually doing these things. He fully expects to get away with it all this time too because he's gotten away with it in the past so many times. He's not saying "I didn't do this!" He's saying "Of course I did it, why is it a crime? It's not a real crime like murder or human trafficking!"

You have to wonder why he's bringing those crimes up.

And of course, he's saying he's only being hounded because he's "fighting the corrupt establishment" for his cult followers. Fighting how? He's fundraising off these, fleecing his faithful. Folks, he is the corrupt establishment.

Oh, and you know who was nowhere near this hate rally? GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis. Don't think Trump will forget...or forgive.

Bull In The Pulpit

Pastors, preachers, ministers, reverends, and priests in Trump Country aren't about to tell their congregations to get vaccinated against COVID-19, even if their respective flocks are putting themselves and clergy at health risk. No, they fear the hand of man and an enraged audience on Sundays more than the specter of the Delta variant.

Biden administration and state officials hoped that pastors would play an outsized role in promoting Covid-19 vaccines, but many are wary of alienating their congregants and are declining requests to be more outspoken.

POLITICO spoke with nearly a dozen pastors, many of whom observed that vaccination is too divisive to broach, especially following a year of contentious conversations over race, pandemic limits on in-person worship and mask requirements. Public health officials have hoped that more religious leaders can nudge their congregants to get Covid shots, particularly white evangelicals who are among the most resistant to vaccination.

The White House, which acknowledged it will fall shy of its goal of vaccinating 70 percent of adults by July 4, has stressed its robust campaign to inoculate the country will continue for months to come, though the strategy has largely shifted from mass vaccination sites to more targeted local efforts. With the rapid spread of the highly transmissible Delta variant, particularly in areas of the country where vaccination rates are lagging, the Biden team is making a renewed effort to enlist help from trusted community leaders like pastors while other initiatives like million-dollar lotteries and giveaways have failed to meaningfully blunt the steep drop-off in vaccinations.

State health officials are conducting informal focus groups and outreach to try to ease pastors’ concerns about discussing vaccination, but progress is often elusive, they said. Many pastors said they have already lost congregants to fights over coronavirus restrictions and fear risking further desertions by promoting vaccinations. Others said their congregations are so ideologically opposed to the vaccine that discussing it would not be worth the trouble.

“If I put forth effort to push it, I’d be wasting my breath,” said Nathan White, a pastor at Liberty Baptist Church in Skipwith, Va., a small town near the North Carolina border.

The pastors POLITICO spoke with are located across Virginia and Tennessee, mostly in predominantly white communities. Some in rural areas lead overwhelmingly conservative congregations while some in more suburban areas said their churches were more politically mixed. Each pastor had been vaccinated but not all were eager to discuss it with their congregations.

Polls have consistently shown that white evangelicals are among the groups most hardened against vaccination. The most recent, a June survey from the Kaiser Family Foundation, found that 22 percent of white evangelicals said they would “definitely not” get the vaccine, a figure that’s barely budged since April. About 11 percent said they wanted to “wait and see” how the vaccines perform.

 

In other words, these faith leaders are all cowards. They care more about the size of their congregations and their collection plates on Sunday than saving lives. I've become disillusioned with religion in my life after being raised a Catholic, and it's awful behavior like this that makes me never want to return. The word of God keeps being delivered by the most sinful of people, and I tuned them out a log time ago.

Sunday Long Read: Critical Of A Racist's Theories

The screeching throng on the right would have you believe that colleges and universities haven't changed since the days of the movie "PCU" more than 25 years ago, and that higher education for anyone my age and younger was an uphill battle against the "horrors of political correctness". The current yowling by the right about critical race theory is a new name for a battle that's been going on for all my adult life.

That's not to say that some instructors and professors aren't terrible people, as this week's Sunday Long Read details in the San Francisco Chronicle, the story of avowed racist teaching his students that Black and Hispanic students should be in college, and that they're all taking the place of more qualified Asian and white kids.

With one painful exception that she still thinks about today, Marisol Schowengerdt enjoyed her classes at Cal State East Bay. 

She enrolled in 2014 at age 41, older than most students, but no one gave her a hard time. The university’s Hayward campus was an inviting, diverse place, as East Bay’s marketing stresses: 86% of undergraduates are non-white, and many are the first in their families to attend college. Even at the business school, where a stock ticker flashed market prices as students arrived to class, officials emphasized social justice. 

“The ‘American Dream’ is the ideal that everyone living in the U.S. should have an equal opportunity to achieve success and prosperity,” reads a recent mission statement by East Bay’s College of Business and Economics. “We make the Dream possible for an exceptionally diverse student population.” 

Schowengerdt is the daughter of an immigrant cherry farmer, a man born in Mexico who came to the U.S. in the mid-’60s and raised seven children. She had spent her 20s and 30s building a successful career in California real estate and finance. But she lacked a college degree and aimed to change that. 

After two years at a junior college, she transferred to East Bay — part of Cal State, the largest four-year public university system in the country — and majored in economics. She liked almost all of her professors, she said, and they seemed to believe the stuff about the dream. 

Then there was Gregory Christainsen. 

A white man with salt-and-pepper hair, Christainsen was 60 at the time and had taught economics at East Bay since the 1980s. Schowengerdt enrolled in his public sector economics course, a requirement for her to graduate. The syllabus promised lessons in government finance and health insurance markets. 

But to Schowengerdt’s surprise, she said, Christainsen spent hours of class time talking about which racial groups were smarter than others. 

In one of the first lectures, Christainsen said Black and Hispanic people get involved in politics at lower rates than whites, Schowengerdt recalled. Then he showed a photo of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign staff in Chicago. Most staffers were white or Asian American. The photo, she said Christainsen told the class, demonstrated that even a Black man needs white people to get elected. 

As the semester continued, she said, the professor lectured repeatedly about race and intelligence, insisting they are linked. He taught students that white people and those of Chinese heritage are smarter on average than Black and Hispanic groups; he said this was proved by gaps in average IQ scores between races. 

Although scientists overwhelmingly attribute these gaps to societal factors like racism, poverty and cultural biases in the tests, Christainsen said the IQ disparities are inherent, rooted in genetics. He spoke with pride about his own family’s heritage: Telling students that his wife was Chinese, he called himself a “white tiger.” 

For Schowengerdt, these lessons felt like bigotry, not teaching, and it was all the more upsetting, she said, whenever she swiveled her head in class: Most of the 25 or so students were non-white, and many were Black. She vented sometimes with a classmate in her study group, Alex Bly, one of the few white students in the course. 

Originally from Texas, Bly, now 35, said she found the experience “surreal.” One day, she said, Christainsen gave students an article about how Jews run Hollywood. It struck her as a classic anti-Semitic trope, which “blew my mind,” she recalled. But it also seemed irrelevant: What did Jews in Hollywood have to do with public sector economics? 

About halfway through the semester, around March 2014, Bly drafted a complaint about the class. She addressed it to Jed DeVaro, chair of the economics department. To protect herself from possible retaliation, Bly created an anonymous email account. 

She hit send, then waited for the university to do something.

 

What followed of course was the controversy last year over Christainsen and his courses, and the somehow still-ongoing "debate" that Black and brown folk are genetically inferior to Asian and white folk.  If anything, Cal State East Bay did nothing about this racist asshole for years, because dealing with him would have made the school a target of billionaire-funded right-wing garbage fires like Campus Reform, Turning Point USA, and the Young America's Foundation.

The funny thing about "political correctness" is that college campuses today are absolutely terrified of being correct about anything, especially in red states where higher education funding has been brutalized over the last 15 years. This story shows that even in blue states, I wouldn't count on college administrators to give a damn until they are forced to do so.