Wonder Where All That Money Went?

Too bad -- the Trump regime ain't telling:

White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow told CNN's "State of the Union" Sunday that the Trump administration never promised to release the names of businesses that received forgivable Paycheck Protection Program loans as a part of the CARES Act.

Have you noticed a certain resistance to accountability in the Trump regime? I wonder why that is. And Kudlow's comment is so much horsepucky:

The PPP loan application also warns borrowers that their company names, loan amounts, and other information are public records “that will be automatically released," according to TIME. And in April, the SBA told news organizations that it intended to post "individual loan data" after the loan process had been completed.

Could it bee that they don't want us to know how much of that money -- our money, let me remind you -- went to a)Trump's businesses and b) major Republican donors?

I suggest you check out the full article. It basically describes the Trump-generated swamp that used to be our government.

And get this video of Kudlow wallowing all over the place trying to justify Mnuchin not releasing any information on who got how much:

Via Joe.My.God.

Welcome to the Nineteenth Century

Courtesy of the FDA:

After recovering from the novel coronavirus, Andy Cohen signed up for a program to donate his antibody-rich blood plasma to help those still fighting COVID-19. But Cohen says he was ultimately turned away, due to the FDA’s “antiquated and discriminatory” restrctions on gay and bisexual men donating blood.

Although the FDA recently relaxed the policy, gay and bi men are still barred from donating blood — and plasma — unless they abstain from sex for three months. But Cohen notes that no such restriction applies to heterosexual people.

Here's his full commentary:

It would be nice to have a Food and Drug Administration that believed in science.

Today in Petty Vindictiveness: Two Firings

Trump likes to fire people. We knew that when he first made his mark (such as it was) as a reality TV star. This one was a long time coming:

U.S. President Donald Trump notified Congress on Friday that he is firing the inspector general of the U.S. intelligence community who was involved in triggering an impeachment probe of the president last year.

In a letter to key lawmakers, Trump said he planned to remove the official, Michael Atkinson, in 30 days, saying, “it is vital that I have the fullest confidence in the appointees serving as inspectors general.”

“This is no longer the case with regard to this inspector general,” he said.

"Fullest confidence", of course, means a reliable sycophant. Atkinson's big sin, of course, was that he did his job and reported the Ukraine whistleblower's complaint to Congress. Besides, Trump doesn't like the intelligence community anyway.

For the second firing, he used a surrogate:

[Capt. Brett] was removed from duty after a letter he wrote pleading for help for those onboard his ship who are infected with the coronavirus leaked to the media.

The Navy announced his removal on Thursday. According to acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly, whether Crozier intentionally leaked the letter or not, he "did not take care" to ensure it was not leaked.

As of Thursday, 114 sailors on board the Roosevelt had tested positive for COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.

Crozier's letter to Navy officials, which leaked on Tuesday, warned that the tight quarters onboard the ship did not allow for the safety of the crew. He asked leadership to offload most of the sailors on the ship in order to allow for social distancing and sanitizing the ship.

So, try to take care of the service members under your care and you get fired.

And the surrogate is madly trying to cover his ass:

Acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly said Friday that his firing of the captain who raised the alarm about a coronavirus outbreak onboard a U.S. aircraft carrier was the "hardest thing that I've ever had to do."

But he did it anyway, because:

"I know that he loves this crew. I know that the crew loves and respects him. But that's not an excuse for exercising the judgment that he did," Modly said.

If anyone displayed poor judgment in this, it's the" Acting" Secretary of the Navy.

All via Joe.My.God.

Another PR Stunt

After Trump made a big to-do about sending Navy hospital ships to New York to help with the overcrowding in hospitals there -- well, who could have known?

Such were the expectations for the Navy hospital ship U.S.N.S. Comfort that when it chugged into New York Harbor this week, throngs of people, momentarily forgetting the strictures of social distancing, crammed together along Manhattan’s west side to catch a glimpse.

On Thursday, though, the huge white vessel, which officials had promised would bring succor to a city on the brink, sat mostly empty, infuriating executives at local hospitals. The ship’s 1,000 beds are largely unused, its 1,200-member crew mostly idle.

Only 20 patients had been transferred to the ship, officials said, even as New York hospitals struggled to find space for the thousands infected with the coronavirus. Another Navy hospital ship, the U.S.N.S. Mercy, docked in Los Angeles, has had a total of 15 patients, officials said.

And it's deliberate:

But the reality has been different. A tangle of military protocols and bureaucratic hurdles has prevented the Comfort from accepting many patients at all.

On top of its strict rules preventing people infected with the virus from coming on board, the Navy is also refusing to treat a host of other conditions. Guidelines disseminated to hospitals included a list of 49 medical conditions that would exclude a patient from admittance to the ship.

And the Trump regime continues its stellar response to the pandemic.

Maybe he should put Jared in charge.

Via Joe.My.God.

The Administration's Response to the Possibility of a Pandemic

Trump appointed Mike Pence to head up the administrations coronavirus response team. Yes, the same Mike Pence to did nothing to halt the worst outbreak of HIV in Indiana when he was governor.

Here's the team hard at work:

And do notice how representative it is of America -- well, the Republican part of America, at least.

Why do I think we're really in for it?

Read It and Weep

While you still can -- this is almost beyond belief -- or it would be with any other administration. From an interview with historian Matthew Connelley:

So, you write, “The Department of the Interior and the National Archives have decided to delete files on endangered species, offshore drilling inspections and the safety of drinking water.” You also talk about, specifically, when we’re talking about ICE, that last month they announced that ICE could go ahead and start destroying records from Trump’s first year, including the detainees’ complaints about civil rights violations and shoddy medical care. Is this different from previous administrations?

It gets worse. It gets much worse.

This is straight out of something -- maybe a Monty Python sketch:

MATTHEW CONNELLY: It is. I would say that under this administration things have gone much further, much faster. I think perhaps the best example of that is how Donald Trump tears up his own papers in tiny little pieces. Now, in this case, the National Archives tried to do the right thing. They sent staff to the White House to Scotch tape those papers back together again. I’m not even kidding. So, what happened to them —

AMY GOODMAN: Say that again.

MATTHEW CONNELLY: They went to the White House to Scotch tape those pieces of paper back together again. These are our federal employees having to fish out of the trash pieces of paper that Donald Trump had left there rather than leaving a record for the rest of us. And so, they Scotch taped those records back together. So, what happened to those people? They were fired. They were terminated.

This is your government, ladies and gentlemen -- covering its tracks.

Thanks to commenter coram nobis at Joe.My.God.

Today's Must-Read: What Taxes Pay For

In civilized countries, at least, and once upon a time, here in America as well. You're not going to hear about this from Republicans:

Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (AOC, for short), Democrat of New York, is the occasion for the discussion, you may have heard. In an interview with Anderson Cooper of 60 Minutes, AOC proposes a "Green New Deal" for moving the U.S. economy to renewable energy in 12 years, funded with a top marginal tax rate of "60 or 70 percent."

Thus, in her first week in office, AOC set conservatives' hair ablaze by saying the U.S. tax structure should resemble something more like the radical days of Dwight Eisenhower. The retired World War II general initiated construction of the now-crumbling interstate highway system in 1956. That national investment paid for in part by a more progressive tax policy has produced untold economic benefits for the country ever since, and explosive growth that would have been impossible without the 41,000 miles of tax-funded roads.

Note the reference to the "now-crumbling" interstate highways system. That's what you get after decades of Republicans holding the purse strings.

Compare to someplace like Sweden:

I was very grateful to live in Sweden when the triplets were born.The operating room was swarming with highly skilled professionals; one team of doctor and nurses for every triplet, one team to handle the Cesarean.I thought "I'm spending every krona I ever paid in tax right now." pic.twitter.com/q1RlbAMsiz

— @sweden (@sweden) June 25, 2018

Also note that Canada's national health service, which pays about 70% of Canadians' health-care costs, is fully funded by the provincial and territorial governments -- and Canadians pay less income tax, on the average, than Americans.
'
Food for thought, in the light of the GOP's recent "tax reform" bill.

We Are Beset By Idiots

Apparently, everyone in the Trump regime thinks the way he does -- which is to say, not much, if at all. It seems that no one thought about the consequences of an extended government shutdown:

Food stamps for 38 million low-income Americans would face severe reductions and more than $140 billion in tax refunds are at risk of being frozen or delayed if the government shutdown stretches into February, widespread disruptions that threaten to hurt the economy.

The Trump administration, which had not anticipated a long-term shutdown, recognized only this week the breadth of the potential impact, several senior administration officials said. The officials said they were focused now on understanding the scope of the consequences and determining whether there is anything they can do to intervene.

They really had no clue.

And please note that the single largest group, 39% of those who receive government assistance -- i.e., "welfare", including food stamps -- are rural whites: Trump's base, if we are the believe the pundits. (Granted, a chancy proposition.)

And it's going to affect the economy:

Joseph Brusuelas, chief economist at RMS U.S., an accounting and consulting firm, said a prolonged shutdown would shave an entire percentage point off the U.S.’s economic growth, in part because of an “uncertainty tax” that would freeze spending by households and businesses.

“If one doesn’t know what’s going to happen with respect to their own income . . . there will be a pull back on the purchase of big-ticket items,” he said. “Large firms will pull back on outlays on software, equipment and capital.”

I've been a manager, and most of the people in responsible positions in government are managers. It becomes almost a reflex: if you propose a course of action, you think about the consequences. Those in charge of what we laughingly refer to as "this administration" obviously never think about consequences, just like their boss. The problem is only compounded when Glorious Leader gets a hair up his butt and catches everyone by surprise so that they can't even advise him -- which he doesn't listen to anyway.

Via the New Civil Rights Movement.

Remember "Big Brother"? Guess What

If you're flying anywhere for any reason, he's watching you:

A reporter from the Boston Globe has helped lay bare an otherwise hidden program of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA): one that targets all US citizens.

The program, called "Quiet Skies," goes beyond previous TSA efforts, including specific watch lists, air marshals, and other actions designed to secure US airways in a post-9/11 world. In the previously undisclosed program, US citizens are tracked and treated as potential terrorists even though they are not otherwise under investigation.

"Quiet Skies represents a major departure for TSA. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the agency has traditionally placed armed air marshals on routes it considered potentially higher risk, or on flights with a passenger on a terrorist watch list," says the Boston Globe.

They continue, "Deploying air marshals to gather intelligence on civilians not on a terrorist watch list is a new assignment, one that some air marshals say goes beyond the mandate of the US Federal Air Marshal Service. Some also worry that such domestic surveillance might be illegal. Between 2,000 and 3,000 men and women, so-called flying FAMs, work the skies."

I have nothing but contempt for TSA -- as far as I can see, it's done nothing to increase security on flights, and it seems to recruit small people and give them some power, always a bad combination.

Somebody sue them, before Trump stacks the courts even worse.

Blatant

They don't even bother to pretend any more:

Mick Mulvaney, the interim director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, told banking industry executives on Tuesday that they should press lawmakers hard to pursue their agenda, and revealed that, as a congressman, he would meet only with lobbyists if they had contributed to his campaign.

“We had a hierarchy in my office in Congress,” Mr. Mulvaney, a former Republican lawmaker from South Carolina, told 1,300 bankers and lending industry officials at an American Bankers Association conference in Washington. “If you’re a lobbyist who never gave us money, I didn’t talk to you. If you’re a lobbyist who gave us money, I might talk to you.”

At the top of the hierarchy, he added, were his constituents. “If you came from back home and sat in my lobby, I talked to you without exception, regardless of the financial contributions,” said Mr. Mulvaney, who received nearly $63,000 from payday lenders for his congressional campaigns.

So now it's right out in the open: our government's for sale.

Via Joe.My.God.

Today's Must-Read: Behind Closed Doors

Have you noticed how the Republicans running our country want to do everything in secret? While we're all focused on Junior's e-mails (E-mails? Where have I heard that before?), this is going on:

President Trump entered office pledging to cut red tape, and within weeks, he ordered his administration to assemble teams to aggressively scale back government regulations.

But the effort — a signature theme in Trump’s populist campaign for the White House — is being conducted in large part out of public view and often by political appointees with deep industry ties and potential conflicts.

Most government agencies have declined to disclose information about their deregulation teams. But ProPublica and The New York Times identified 71 appointees, including 28 with potential conflicts, through interviews, public records and documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

Some appointees are reviewing rules their previous employers sought to weaken or kill, and at least two may be positioned to profit if certain regulations are undone.

That's just the tip of the iceberg.

I might point out that, contra the right-wing myth of "liberals" in government crushing our brave entrepreneurs with regulations, these rules were not formulated just to be nasty to the "job creators": they happened in response to abuses and problems that required government intervention. (For example, there's quite a bit in the article on pesticide manufacturers wanting to get rid of rules that require them to get approval from the EPA and the Interior Department before offering their products for sale, because of the requirements of the Endangered Species Act. Who needs that kind of headache? After all, what could go wrong?)

It's kind of lengthy, and in places perhaps offers more than you wanted to know, but it's worth reading, just to give you an idea of what's going on while no one's looking -- and how the government is stonewalling those who are trying to find out what's going on.

Today in Disgusting People: School Choice Edition (Update)

Betsy DeVos, who is, in a gallery of egregious cabinet picks, is one of the worst, mostly because she's intent on torpedoing our kids' futures.

Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos says she has no problem with states that allow schools to discriminate against LGBT students while receiving federal funds, and believes that the federal government should not intervene.

The whole exchange is appalling. There's video at the link (that I'm not able to embed) that's worth viewing, just to see DeVos squirm as she's trying to avoid the issue.

Addendum: There's more of DeVos and her agenda here. It sort of echoes the Republican philosophy on the economy: if it doesn't work, keep trying.

Update: I found the video clip on YouTube:

Little People In Uniforms

I'm borrowing Digby's title with a little modification: her post deals with ICE agents, who are predominantly men, but it describes a pattern I've seen in TSA agents, who are often women (or for that matter "security" personnel in general). She starts off with a quote from this article at NYT, but I think the article's opening is illustrative:

In Virginia, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents waited outside a church shelter where undocumented immigrants had gone to stay warm. In Texas and in Colorado, agents went into courthouses, looking for foreigners who had arrived for hearings on other matters.

At Kennedy International Airport in New York, passengers arriving after a five-hour flight from San Francisco were asked to show their documents before they were allowed to get off the plane.

The Trump administration’s far-reaching plan to arrest and deport vast numbers of undocumented immigrants has been introduced in dramatic fashion over the past month. And much of that task has fallen to thousands of ICE officers who are newly emboldened, newly empowered and already getting to work.

Gone are the Obama-era rules that required them to focus only on serious criminals. In Southern California, in one of the first major roundups during the Trump administration, officers detained 161 people with a wide range of felony and misdemeanor convictions, and 10 who had no criminal history at all.

The gloves are off, and it ain't pretty. The episode of the San Francisco-New York Delta flight has gotten a lot of play, and it should. ICE's excuse was that they were looking for someone who was to be deported, who turned out not to be on the plane. As one commentator noted, they could have looked at the passenger manifest.

These are customs agents forcibly checking the ID of every passenger deplaning from Delta flight 1583 tonight at JFK. A domestic flight. pic.twitter.com/fHMgyzCjo5

— Britton Taylor (@brittontaylor) February 23, 2017

I'd love it if one of the churches whose shelter had been raided filed a suit claiming a violation of religious freedom -- show some of these "Christians" what it's about.

Digby focuses on the attitude shift among ICE and Border Patrol agents after Trump's executive orders on immigrants were issued:

Interviews with 17 agents and officials across the country, including in Florida, Alabama, Texas, Arizona, Washington and California, demonstrated how quickly a new atmosphere in the agency had taken hold. Since they are forbidden to talk to the press, they requested anonymity out of concern for losing their jobs.

The White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, said on Tuesday that the president wanted to “take the shackles off” of agents, an expression the officers themselves used time and again in interviews to describe their newfound freedom.

“Morale amongst our agents and officers has increased exponentially since the signing of the orders,” the unions representing ICE and Border Patrol agents said in a joint statement after President Trump issued the executive orders on immigration late last month.

Two memos released this past week by the Department of Homeland Security, the parent agency of ICE and the Border Patrol, provided more details about how it would carry out its plan, which includes Mr. Trump’s signature campaign pledge — a wall along the entire southern border — as well as speedier deportations and greater reliance on local police officers.

But for those with ICE badges, perhaps the biggest change was the erasing of the Obama administration’s hierarchy of priorities, which forced agents to concentrate on deporting gang members and other violent and serious criminals, and mostly leave everyone else alone.

Quite honestly, I favor the Obama administration's priorities on this. (And a side note for those who are worried about jobs: undocumented immigrants are not taking jobs away from Americans; jobs are being shipped overseas by the "job creators," who are creating thousands of jobs in China, Vietnam, Mexico, the Philippines -- and Ethiopia, which is where Ivana Trump's line of shoes in now manufactured, because labor costs are cheaper. . . .)

And if we could count on ICE and Border Patrol agents to use some judgment in the field, I wouldn't be so concerned: they are hedged in by rules and regs because they do things like this:

The son of legendary boxer Muhammad Ali was detained for hours by immigration officials earlier this month at a Florida airport, according to a family friend.

Muhammad Ali Jr., 44, and his mother, Khalilah Camacho-Ali, the second wife of Muhammad Ali, were arriving at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport on Feb. 7 after returning from speaking at a Black History Month event in Montego Bay, Jamaica. They were pulled aside while going through customs because of their Arabic-sounding names, according to family friend and lawyer Chris Mancini.

Immigration officials let Camacho-Ali go after she showed them a photo of herself with her ex-husband, but her son did not have such a photo and wasn't as lucky.

Mancini said officials held and questioned Ali Jr. for nearly two hours, repeatedly asking him, "Where did you get your name from?" and "Are you Muslim?"

As Digby points out:

I don't know how stupid you have to be to not know that or realize that if you just let his mother, the former wife of the most famous American Muslim in the world go through, that means he is the son of the most famous American Muslim in the world, but apparently it's not so stupid that you can't be given a uniform and told to guard our borders.

Fasten your seat belts: it's going to be a bumpy ride.

Coda: You don't have to be a person of color or even have a "foreign-sounding" name.

A 70-year-old children’s book author claims she was held for over two hours and insulted as she attempted to visit the U.S. from Australia earlier this month.

According to The Guardian, author Mem Fox says she has visited the U.S. over 100 times before but has never received the treatment she was subjected to when she flew into Los Angeles International Airport en route to a conference in Milwaukee.

“I have never in my life been spoken to with such insolence, treated with such disdain, with so many insults and with so much gratuitous impoliteness,” Fox explained, saying she was held in a room and questioned before a group of people at the airport

.

Making America great again.

Like This Will Really Go Somewhere

I'm guessing this is an exercise in futility:

The Democratic Coalition has filed an FBI complaint against Trump Campaign Chairman Steven Bannon, which alleging that he violated a federal campaign finance law coordinating Super PAC activities with the Trump campaign, and receiving payments from it after becoming officially part of the Republican campaign. . . .

The Democratic Coalition wrote:

On Tuesday morning, the Democratic Coalition Against Trump reported Trump Senior Advisor and Former Trump campaign CEO Steve Bannon to the FBI for breaking campaign finance law. Over the course of the Trump campaign, Bannon was paid $950,090 by pro-Trump Super PAC, Make America Number 1, through his company Glittering Steel LLC, both before and after Bannon assumed his role as campaign CEO.

Glittering Steel produced the propaganda/smear film Clinton Cash, which was used by a group of FBI agents in New York as the basis for an "investigation" (another investigation) into the Clinton Foundation. Yes, that's the same FBI headed by James Comey, who popped up eleven days before the election with another announcement about E-Mails!!1! from devices that had nothing to do with Hillary Clinton. The same FBI that, sadly, is charged with enforcing the Federal Election Campaign Act, under which this complaint was filed.

I'm sure the FBI will get right on it.

This Sounds Familiar

It's called "ruling," not "governing":

Speaker Ryan on Wednesday behind closed doors told Republican House members he will restrict the amendment process, effectively thwarting one of the few avenues Democrats have to advance their legislation, given the vast majority of the House is Republican, and bipartisanship is rare in today's toxic environment.

Ryan "is cracking down on Democrats' ability to win floor votes on hotly contested issues such as LGBT rights," the Associated Press reports late Wednesday morning. "The move means Ryan is reneging on a promise to protect the rights of lawmakers to take on a wide range of issue when the House debates annual spending bills."

"Hotly contested issues" -- read, "Issues on which the GOP is completely out of step with the rest of the country."

This, of course, is directly opposed to the promise he made when assuming the gavel to protect members' right to submit and advance bills. I guess he didn't think any Democrats would exercise that right.

This, I think, says it all:

Politico adds that an unnamed House aide "said Ryan is hearing that members 'want the Rules Committee to make sure we can govern as a majority and not allow Democrats to use the amendment process to take down the bills and derail the House’s work. . . ."

"Govern as a majority" -- don't they call that "one-party rule"? And isn't that the way it used to work in places like the U.S.S.R.?

More on this from TPM -- it looks like no one is happy:

Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK) told the Hill newspaper that Ryan's hand was forced.

“I think it was something he probably preferred not to do, but he felt like he had to do,” Cole said. “That’s his responsibility as Speaker. You have to make some tough decisions.

Not everyone was convinced.

“Our leadership is using this as an excuse to close down the process,” Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) told the Hill.

Democrats took their own shot at Ryan for the decision.

“It has long been clear that regular order is not as important to Republicans as protecting their special interest agenda. Republicans are clearly afraid of the will of the House when it comes to protecting LGBT Americans or standing up for hard-working families," House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi said in a statement.

Well, back to gridlock.

Today's Must-Read: Whistleblowers

This is what happens to whistle-blowers who go through channels:

But if you want to know why Snowden did it, and the way he did it, you have to know the stories of two other men.

The first is Thomas Drake, who blew the whistle on the very same NSA activities 10 years before Snowden did. Drake was a much higher-ranking NSA official than Snowden, and he obeyed US whistleblower laws, raising his concerns through official channels. And he got crushed.

Drake was fired, arrested at dawn by gun-wielding FBI agents, stripped of his security clearance, charged with crimes that could have sent him to prison for the rest of his life, and all but ruined financially and professionally. The only job he could find afterwards was working in an Apple store in suburban Washington, where he remains today. Adding insult to injury, his warnings about the dangers of the NSA’s surveillance programme were largely ignored.

Edward Snowden learned from Drake's experience, revealed in the story of another man, a senior official at DoD:

But there is another man whose story has never been told before, who is speaking out publicly for the first time here. His name is John Crane, and he was a senior official in the Department of Defense who fought to provide fair treatment for whistleblowers such as Thomas Drake – until Crane himself was forced out of his job and became a whistleblower as well.

His testimony reveals a crucial new chapter in the Snowden story – and Crane’s failed battle to protect earlier whistleblowers should now make it very clear that Snowden had good reasons to go public with his revelations.

During dozens of hours of interviews, Crane told me how senior Defense Department officials repeatedly broke the law to persecute Drake. First, he alleged, they revealed Drake’s identity to the Justice Department; then they withheld (and perhaps destroyed) evidence after Drake was indicted; finally, they lied about all this to a federal judge.

This is horrible enough in itself, but think of what we're in for if, by some bizarre circumstance, someone like Donald Trump actually becomes president -- which is to say, someone with no concern for the rule of law.

Read the whole article.

Via Tom Sullivan at Hullabaloo.

Today's Must-Read

Now that the pain is over (for most of us), a very interesting article from Gaius Publius at Hullabaloo:

The following is another instance of the difference between neo-liberal governance and FDR-liberal governance. At present, tax filing — filling out and sending in a prepared multi-page tax return — is complicated and in most cases requires third-party software to complete. The government could do this for you, by filling in your forms with the information they have already, making those forms available online at a secure government web site and letting you add the rest of the data yourself.

But under our current neo-liberal government, the IRS doesn't do that. Instead, the IRS has agreements with vendors in the software industry, including the TurboTax giant Intuit, not to cut into their profit by "competing" with them in "providing free, on-line tax return preparation and filing services to taxpayers." Even though, as you'll see below, the IRS is compelled by law to do just that.

(Of course I was talking about taxes -- I mean, what's the worst thing that happens in this country in mid-April? Give or take a late-season blizzard.)

It's lengthy, but read the whole post. I found the differentiation between "FDR-liberal" and "neo-liberal" very interesting. Needless to say, as an amateur anthropologist, I'm in the FDR-liberal camp.*

And on that score, see also this from Mahablog:

Bill and Hillary Clinton are the quintessential American centrist neoliberals. American centrist neoliberaism isn’t as far Right as the European neoliberalism George Monbiot complains about. Call it soft neoliberalism. But it’s still neoliberalism, and it still feeds into income inequality.

There are a lot of different definitions of neoliberalism, but ultimately it’s about sacrificing the standard of living of working-class men and women for the sake of global corporate profits.

The article is mostly about Hillary Clinton and her history, but it's all really about her neo-liberalism.

* I should probably explain that: Government is simply the institutionalization of our less formal (but no less real) social organizations, something that we've inherited from millions of years' worth of our simian and anthropoid ancestors. Government, then, functions as "the group," or in some cases, the alpha male, keeping things orderly and functioning smoothly. The basic purpose, and the whole reason sociality has an adaptive value, is that it serves to ensure the welfare of the group. When one component becomes too powerful and/or forgets the basic purpose of society -- today, it's multi-national corporations, in the 18th Century is was the aristocracy -- you have a disaster in the making. Sadly, the correction, if things get too far out of hand, is usually violent and destructive.

Anyway, that's why I'm an FDR-liberal.

Today in Stupid

I know, there's almost too much to choose from, but this story stuck out a little bit:

The lawsuit says many are either placed on what's called a Selectee List, which subjects them to extra scrutiny, or the more stringent No-Fly List, which prevents the traveler from flying.

One of the plaintiffs is a 4-year-old baby from California, listed in the lawsuit as "Baby Doe."

"He was 7 months old when his boarding pass was first stamped with the 'SSSS' designation, indicating that he had been designated as a 'known or suspected terrorist,'" said the lawsuit. "While passing through airport security, he was subjected to extensive searches, pat-downs and chemical testing."

"Every item in his mother's baby bag was searched, including every one of his diapers."

Remember that your basic TSA agent is not known for actually thinking -- remember the five-year-old handicapped boy who was forced to crawl through the security station without his crutches?

As for the list itself, it's become nothing more than a sick joke, as might have been expected, seeing as how it was first instituted by John Ashcroft when he was Dubyah's AG. According to the article, there are now over 1.5 million people on the list. I doubt there are 1.5 million terrorists in the whole world, but rationality is no longer part of our security establishment's repertoire.

OK -- the stories behind the lawsuit are bad enough, but the rationale -- well, I don't know whether to laugh or scream and throw things:

The FBI says on its website that "the TSC (Terrorist Screening Center) regularly conducts comprehensive and case-specific quality assurance reviews of its data to ensure the U.S. government’s substantive criteria for watch-listing are met and to ensure the records maintained in the Terrorist Screening Database are current, accurate, and thorough. The TSC also participates in redress procedures established by agencies that perform terrorist screening."

Can you say "bullshit"? I wonder how many of that 1.5 million are on the list because someone doing data entry can't spell?

Via RawStory.

And a foonote: more on our culture of paranoia.

Today's Must Read: The Perils of Privatization

I started thinking about privatization of public facilities after reading this article at Crooks and Liars:

A controversial bill signed into law this afternoon by Gov. Chris Christie would allow for fast-tracking the privatization of many public water systems in New Jersey.

The Water Infrastructure Protection Act removes the public vote requirement to sell water systems throughout the state under emergency conditions that many systems currently meet.

Hmm -- "removes the public vote requirement." How very democratic of them -- will of the people, and all that.

Then I ran across this one at Baloon Juice, which focuses on my home town:

Looting the public treasury for private benefit — it’s bipartisan! At In These Times, Rick Perlstein (The Invisible Bridge, Nixonland, Before the Storm) introduces us to “Rahm Emanuel’s Chicago, the privatized metropolis of the future“:

… For over a decade now, Chicago has been the epicenter of the fashionable trend of “privatization”—the transfer of the ownership or operation of resources that belong to all of us, like schools, roads and government services, to companies that use them to turn a profit. Chicago’s privatization mania began during Mayor Richard M. Daley’s administration, which ran from 1989 to 2011. Under his successor, Rahm Emanuel, the trend has continued apace. For Rahm’s investment banker buddies, the trend has been a boon. For citizens? Not so much.

He goes on about the supposed benefits:

That is the promise of privatization in a nutshell: that the profit motive can serve not just those making the profits, but society as a whole, by bypassing inefficient government bureaucracies that thrive whether they deliver services effectively or not, and empower grubby, corrupt politicians and their pals to dip their hands in the pie of guaranteed government money…

What no one seems to want to talk about -- at least, no one who is touting privatization as the remedy for our tottering infrastructure, not to mention the perennial manufactured "crises" in Social Security and Medicare -- is that you're inserted another layer of potential abuse into the system: suddenly, someone has to make a profit off of something that has been functioning without having to make a profit.

However, the rush to outsource responsibility for housing the poor became a textbook example of one peril of privatization: Companies frequently get paid whether they deliver the goods or not (one of the reasons investors like privatization deals). For example, in 2004, city inspectors found more than 1,800 code violations at Lawndale Restoration, the largest privately owned, publicly subsidized apartment project in Chicago. Guaranteed a steady revenue stream whether they did right by the tenants or not—from 1997 to 2003, the project generated $4.4 million in management fees and $14.6 million in salaries and wages—the developers were apparently satisfied to just let the place rot…

The head-scratcher here is that the taxpayer is going to have to pay for this, ultimately, by reimbursing the new owners for the purchase price (often inflated) and by paying for any maintenance the owners care to do. Higher rates for everyone, coupled with a decrease in service. Something else that no one wants to talk about.

I'm not going to point fingers at Republicans or Democrats on this one -- it's a bipartisan effort.

And from the standpoint of value for the dollar, it's really, really stupid.

Some things really should not be subject to the profit motive. Like just about anything that we, as taxpayers, are footing the bill for.

What's Wrong With This Story?

From MilitaryTimes.com:

A computer glitch that blocked commissaries from processing food stamps, electronic WIC transactions or debit card cash back has been repaired at most commissaries stateside, Defense Commissary Agency officials said Wednesday. . . .

Commissary shoppers used $130.6 million in food stamps, officially known as the Supplement Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), in fiscal 2013, the most recent year for which data is available, according to the Defense Department. About $29 million in Woman and Infant Children (WIC) benefits were redeemed that same year.

Does anyone else see the elephant in the room? If not, I'll spell it out for you: Why in the hell are our servicemembers and their families having to rely on public assistance to make ends meet?

Via driftglass.