By Lambert Strether of Corrente.
2016
The S.S. Clinton
Gamechanger: Evan Bayh endorses Clinton [The Times].
Krugman on Schweitzer book: [In the 1990s, there were “the Clinton rules, under which innuendo and guilt by association were considered perfectly OK, in which the initial suggestion of lawbreaking received front-page headlines and the subsequent discovery that there was nothing there was buried in the back pages if it was reported at all” [New York Times]. So, yeah, when I read about the Scaife-funded Hoover Institute emitting a Clinton scandal book, it seems like the same play from the same playbook; and I am “old enough to remember the 1990s.” Krugman also writes: “Some of the same phenomenon resurfaced during the 2008 primary.” I’m old enough to remember 2008, and it was Obots that did the resurfacing, too, which Krugman — note the lack of agency — gracefully avoids mentioning. My point being that bullshit seems to have an incredibly long half life, and moreover is an asset to be seized by any player.
“‘I very much believe that that’s the right policy, that we’ll be even more transparent,’ said Chelsea Clinton, the foundation’s vice chairwoman” [The Hill]. So the cookie jar is transparent, and it shows your hand. And?
Schweitzer uranium scandal in 140 characters: “Hillary Clinton’s State Department approved a sale of a mine while a person involved donated to her family foundation” [Wall Street Journal]. And you can say that makes the Clinton Foundation look like a money laundry, which it does. On the other hand, “looks like” isn’t the same as proof, is it? And I suppose, if my corruption and impropriety tape measure were handy — it has a negative scale — “transparently” running a money laundry would rate a -8, but just outright taking checks in unknown amounts from unknown squillionaires via a SuperPAC would rate, oh, -24. Couldn’t we cover this story using my tape measure? And is there a candidate at, say, -2, we can vote for?
Schweitzer’s next book to be on Jebbie [Bloomberg].
Jebbie on Schweitzer book: “I haven’t seen any of the contents of the book so I really can’t comment” [MSNBC]. Jebbie has people for that.
Quinippiac: “30. Would you say that – Hillary Clinton is honest and trustworthy or not?” Independents: No, 61%; Yes, 30% [Quinippiac].
Clinton campaign to have paid staffers in all 50 states [HuffPo].
“Bill Clinton relied much more heavily on rural white counties in 1996 than Barack Obama in 2012 who consolidated Democratic advantages around diverse urban areas.” With handy map [Wall Street Journal].
Republican Establishment
Jebbie’s plan to outsource his campaign to SuperPACs could well be illegal under “a little-noted provision of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002” [Fred Wertheimer, Reuters].
Bush has one big problem: His last name [McClatchy].
The Koch dynasty [USA Today].
The Kennedy, Bush, and Clinton dynasties [WaPo]. Sensing a theme….
Stats Watch
Durable Goods orders, March 2015: “Manufacturing is on a dual track-transportation up and non-transportation soft” [Bloomberg]. “Within the core, orders were almost all down. The only major industry that gained was computers & electronics.”
Pantry Clear-out
Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams of Ohio has recalled all of its products after health officials found listeria in a sample [FOX]. Second one after Blue Bell.
Black Injustice Tipping Point
Freddie Gray: Baltimore Police Union press release: “The images seen on television look and sound much like a lynch mob in that they are calling for the immediate imprisonment of these officers without them ever receiving the due process that is the Constitutional right of every citizen, including law enforcement officers” [Baltimore Sun]. Not to mention setting them on fire and stringing them up from a tree. Oh, wait….
Freddie Gray: Baltimore cops twisted him like “origami,” says the man who filmed the fatally wounded 25-year-old’s arrest [Daily News].
Natasha McKenna: “A mentally ill woman who died after a stun gun was used on her at the Fairfax County jail in February was restrained with handcuffs behind her back, leg shackles and a mask when a sheriff’s deputy shocked her four times” [WaPo].
Description of Parma, where the police department resigned after the election of a black mayor [New York Times].
Parma’s main strip looks like a bombed-out Wild West town, with abandoned brick buildings — an awning collapsing from one of them — broken windows and piles of rubble inside. There are two convenience stores and a couple of farming-related businesses, but generally little commercial life. Things here faded over the past several decades, as did the surrounding area, as small-time farming was overtaken by industrial operations, hurting the economy, residents said.
Whenever you see photographs of the protests, be sure to check the built environment in the background: Buildings, roads, signage. You’ll see a generation’s-worth of neoliberal disinvestment and infrastructure destruction wherever you look.
New Kinloch Mayor “Betty McCray was not only prevented from entering city hall, she was also told she’d been impeached before she got a chance to start” [FOX]. “After the election results were certified earlier this week by the St. Louis County Board of Elections, Kinloch’s outgoing administration refused to allow the city clerk to give McCray the oath of office, claiming voter fraud…. Kinloch city attorney James Robinson informed McCray she had been impeached. However, the city refused to tell the new mayor the articles of impeachment.” I grant I’ve got priors on St Louis municipalities, but this looks a little sketchy.
Police State
Armed U.S. marshall trash Beatriz Paez’s phone, as bystander records it all [Photography is Not a Crime]. Pro tip: Hold your phone horizontally to get as much of the street as possible in the frame.
Big Brother Is Watching You Watch
Defense of Tor routers, from a company that makes them, but still not so bad [Ars Technica].
The DEA and the U.S. Army buy rootkits from Hacking Team, an Italian company that sells malware [Motherboard]. No backdoors in it, I’m sure.
“[T]he Pentagon will sink millions into creating a Silicon Valley-based Defense Innovation Unit X” to partner with startups [San Francisco Chronicle]. Taking a play from the NSA playbook.
Imperial Collapse Watch
“Bitter Cucumbers,” a graphic novel on the rise of the Khmer Rouge [Cambodia Daily].
Pay conservative group ForAmerica $50,000, and you can hang out and shoot machine guns with Robert O’Neill, the former Navy SEAL said to have whacked Osama bin Laden [WaPo]. Classy!
“Pentagon can’t account for $1 billion in Afghan reconstruction aid,” “60 percent of all such spending under an emergency program” [McClatchy]. “The missing money was part of the relatively small amount of Afghanistan spending that was routed directly to military officers.” Gee, I wonder who took it? To be fair, the officers must see everybody above them looting like crazy, so they’d be crazy not to do it themselves.
Class Warfare
“Corporations are immortal, transhuman artificial life-forms and humans are their gut flora. Gut flora and host organisms are often aligned in their interests. Ultimately, your gut flora’s strategies are not yours” [Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing].
Headline: “The global economy’s weird problem is that we have too much stuff” [WaPo]. The article’s topic is over-production, but whaddaya mean, “we”? WaPo uses the Beltway “we” far too much.
News of the Wired
- Germany’s solar power plants produced a record 22 gigawatts of energy on Friday, equivalent to the output of 20 nuclear plants [Reuters]. Bring on the bomb trains, America!
- “Watch the Opening Credits of an Imaginary 70s Cop Show Starring Samuel Beckett” [Open Culture].
- “What Happens When You Give a Robot $100 in Bitcoin? It Buys Drugs” [IGN].
- “Chile volcano Calbuco causes flight problems” [BBC].
- Gawker interviews Buzzfeed’s Ben Smith [Gawker]. Not sure whether to laugh or cry at this one.
- Atlanta teachers in cheating scandal charged and convicted under RICO (!) [The Nation]. You’d think that would be the perfect tool to convict some banksters for accounting control fraud. Maybe somebody could ask Loretta Lynch about that.
- “How the city’s animals get where they’re going” [New York Times]. “The city” being Manhattan.
- Annals of Government Propaganda: “Attorney General Eric Holder: The People’s Lawyer” (video) [Department of Justice]. Did you know that when Holder bowled for the first time, he scored a perfect 300?
Readers, feel free to contact me with (a) links, and even better (b) sources I should curate regularly, and (c) to find out how to send me images of plants. Vegetables are fine! Fungi are deemed to be honorary plants! See the previous Water Cooler (with plant) here. And here’s today’s plant, the fifth of “I Wish It Were Spring!” week six (Kurt Sperry):
A wild Red Flowering Currant with Lake Whatcom as a backdrop.
Send me plantings and garden projects!
If you enjoy Water Cooler, please consider tipping and click the hat. It’s the heating season!
Talk amongst yourselves!
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As detailed in Heller’s Catch 22…
What’s a billion dollars lost for the DoD, it’s not like it’s a food stamp program or anything. Then we’d really have a problem.
The MIC is full of welfare queens…well, kings mostly…although, with the kind of money they’re ripping off we should probably refer to them as welfare emperors or something…
I’m sure plenty was embezzled, and more was wasted by local contractors hoping to buy houses in Dubai. However, I know a decent number of army officers who used this program in Afghanistan, and there’s a good possibility that most of it simply wasn’t accounted properly.
It was money for doing stuff like building wells and medical clinics when the same jobs weren’t being done after requests through proper channels. You can visit afghanistan and see a lot of new schools, wells, clinics.
Don’t take that as an endorsement of military presence or unaccountable spending there, just repeating what friends have told me.
I didn’t see this expose of Macau’s dirty gambling money elsewhere on NC. The very rapid growth in Macau’s gaming revenues, the involvement of Triads, the involvement of very wealthy Chinese, money laundering, and kingmakers in U.S. Republican politics are all touched on in the piece.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/23/how-chinas-macau-crackdown-threatens-big-us-casino-moguls-sheldon-adelson
it’s the appendix of china. maybe it’s time for an ultrasound.
Life itself is a big casino, it’s true.
But humans are the only ones who actively crave for gambling.
And if you suspect that it is a sickness, then you also start to wonder if the same force that gave rise to gambling and what we call ‘civilization’ (though that is an idea not echoed by any other species in Nature) – via some genetic mutation that gave the world a new species – is a sickness, instead of being what we so un-objectively perceive as Peak Evolution (not objectively because we are making a claim about ourselves, without hearing from others).
We spend our lives creating environments to reduce risk and, surprise! find it’s integral to our nature.
““transparently” running a money laundry would rate a -8, but just outright taking checks in unknown amounts from unknown squillionaires via a SuperPAC would rate, oh, -24. Couldn’t we cover this story using my tape measure? And is there a candidate at, say, -2, we can vote for?”
Didn’t Bebe Rebozo deliver actual paper bags full of $$ to Nixon? Times have changed…
Props for Bebe Rebozo reference! Ah the memories of Tricky & Bebe in Key Biscayne (wasn’t it?). Those were simpler times of smaller bags o loot, methinks. Today Bebe could just do wire transfers or something.
Didn’t Bebe claim to have kept Nixon’s paltry $100,000 in a safe? Which was why nobody believed the story, because nobody keeps cash sitting in a safe, inflation would destroy its value in a couple of years. Oh, forgot, inflation was a lot higher in those days.
“Bebe, How are ya?”…….Bebe & Dick, could’ve been a good road movie.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRNPxjJky0E
Here’s Jon Stewart on the Atlanta Cheating / Wall St. Bankster scandals:
http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/2015/04/23/video-jon-stewart-on-the-atlanta-cheating-scandal/
Speaking of Recalls:
http://www.foodsafetynews.com/2015/04/arkansas-meat-processor-recalls-pork-products-for-possible-staph-contamination/#.VTqShpMreSo
I’m not a big meat eater but I do know some local producers here in the land of Tyson. This particular (small) recall found no evidence of contamination–tell that to John Q. Public. And the processor was following their USDA inspector’s guideline of 125deg in the smoker. FSIS comes along & busts them for not doing 130 deg. The meat was not tested, apparently…I’m fairly certain the big boys have all gone to ‘voluntary’ testing.
While Jon’s comparison of the prison sentences handed down to Atlanta’s cheating teachers to the wrist slap fines given to Wall Street for its far larger crimes is funny, it fails to answer the question – why? The reason(s) is simple: Wall Street virtually funds major elections – and no bureaucrat ever dreams of taking the revolving door into an elementary school classroom. We should pay attention to Eric Holder. My guess is he will join a white shoe law firm within 6 months of leaving office.
he will join a white shoe law firm within 6 months of leaving office.
I have you know that it will be 30 days or less and the so-called free liberal press will not say a word of it. That’s is what they do best.
Jon Stewart (born Jonathan Stuart Leibowitz; November 28, 1962) … his brother Lawrence, who was previously the Chief Operating Officer of NYSE Euronext (parent company of the New York Stock Exchange…
I’d love to be a fly on the wall of some of those clan gatherings.
who cares what Evan Bayh thinks? I’m a native Hoosier, vote democrat mostly. He is the true definition of an empty suit with good hair. His wife was on the board of healthcare Wellpoint. We call them Ken and Barbie. Healthcare here is crappy as are many other indicators of well being. Don’t think he did a thing for us. Got in because of legacy from his dad. Might as well be a Republican. Went to exclusive private schools in DC (contemporary of W-Barbara drove the carpool often according to a classmate I knew), has no idea what it is to struggle as so many here do.
Yes, but he endorsed the woman who is channeling her inner Eugene Debs!
Doesn’t that prove what a populist he is?
“…who cares what Evan Bayh thinks? ……. Might as well be a Republican ”
This is precisely the kind of thing we should care about. Bayh’s endorsement is a clue as to what you can expect from Hillary as POTUS. A leading indicator , so to speak , and an ominous one.
Who’d you expect him to endorse??
The sad, hypocritical retirement of Evan Bayh
But Bayh did not return to Indiana to teach. He did not, as he said he was thinking of doing, join a foundation. Rather, he went to the massive law firm McGuire Woods. And who does McGuire Woods work for? “Principal clients served from our Washington office include national energy companies, foreign countries, international manufacturing companies, trade associations and local and national businesses,” reads the company’s Web site. He followed that up by signing on as a senior adviser to Apollo Management Group, a giant public-equity firm.
The “corrosive system of campaign financing” that Bayh considered such a threat? He’s being paid by both McGuire Woods and Apollo Global Management to act as a corroding agent on their behalf.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/post/the-sad-hypocritical-retirement-of-evan-bayh/2011/03/10/AB4MZzY_blog.html
“Gamechanger” was irony….
I can’t wait to see what “even more transparent” means. President Opaque pretty much rode that horse to death- and yet still managed to have secret health care talks behind the backs of the citizens and secret trade conversations behind the backs of the citizens – because “national security.”
Let’s see so far the Madame Secretary hid emails and the Foundation her husband runs is a hedge fund favorite……she’s already ALMOST as transparent as Obama.
Nice photo, Kurt! Scenes like that are why I love living in the West.
Here’s a long article that I skimmed; it has some interesting information and ideas. There’s a chart showing 10 professions that are more dangerous than being a police officer is.
http://www.peakprosperity.com/blog/92427/rising-police-aggression-telling-indicator-our-societal-decline
The author’s solution to the problem of rising police aggression:
Perhaps only a portion of the penalty should come from the pension fund. But even with that modification, I doubt that any cities will implement this solution.
That’s good. Align incentives. If there is anything of value that I learned from my neo-classical econ education, it’s that people will generally follow their incentives, and financial incentives tend to be pretty effective. I wonder if Ferguson has a citizen initiative process?
It does sound like a good idea. Would it be illegal on its face to try and legislate this at the appropriate level?
If not, perhaps it could be tried in some test-bed jurisdictions.
Also, to take a super simplified view of “White America’s” muted reaction to all these sport-killings against “Black America” by members of “Police America” . . . I suggest this hypothesis: White America is afraid that if it complains to Police America about all these Police America killings in Black America, that Police America will turn around and say: “You shut your mouth. Or you’ll be next.”
Just a hypothesis. . . .
“I guarantee you that with the incentive to train and behave properly and lawfully now resting with the police itself, rapid behavior and training modification would result.”
Also guaranteed would be the police insistence on the incentivizing politicians so involved being subject to enhanced apprehension of formerly over-looked politician’s activities.
BTW, the Baltimore policeman’s knee to Mr. Gray’s back only caused 80% of a lynching since a noose around the neck and 2- foot free drop would have caused 100% C-2 spinal injury and immediate death.
Um…I’m sorry, but isn’t “immediate imprisonment” what happens to pretty much everyone the police pick up for, like, anything, much less killing somebody? As far as I’ve been able to determine, based on many first-hand accounts, plenty of people get locked-up immediately and then get to wait their for days to weeks waiting for their trial. So why should murderous cops get a pass? And isn’t a gang of tuffs fatally beating an unarmed man, ostensibly for choosing a bad time to take a jog–and being black–more akin to a lynch mob than people “calling” for anything? Somebody whack the BPU with a clue stick…
And I’ll add that lynch mobs, if anything, tend to drag people out of jails, not demand that they be put in one. Hasn’t this guy ever seen a western?
http://www.cnn.com/2015/04/24/us/baltimore-freddie-gray-death/
“The admission comes two days after a police union attorney spoke of the possibility that the injuries occurred during a “rough ride,” a frequently claimed practice in which police vehicles are deliberately driven in such a way to cause injury to suspects.
At least two suspects have won court cases against the city after being left paralyzed in such rides over the last decade or so, The Baltimore Sun reported Thursday.”
==================================================================
Incredible. I thought the whole excuse that this happened because Mr. Gray wasn’t buckled in somewhat amazing – how fast do paddy wagons go? How wildly are they driven back to the police station? Most people drive with their best behavior with a police vehicle in sight, so why would a police van ever have to slam on the brakes????
But again, it just shows how naive and uneducated I am about what the authorities do when it comes to abusing people…
And of course, even with the court rulings, nothing actually changes (charge the taxpayers, but don’t fire anybody!)
Very shocking and appalling what has happened to governance, rule of law, and basic decency over the last couple of decades. Purposeful ignorance.
Maryland is a fairly democratic state, and Baltimore is a totally democratic city, which shows the rhetoric is more caring, but the actions are just as bad.
That’s Democratic with a big D, not democratic in the “rule by the people” sense….which is the problem.
“transparently” running a money laundry would rate a -8, but just outright taking checks in unknown amounts from unknown squillionaires via a SuperPAC would rate, oh, -24.
Where does granting multibillion dollar Federal contracts to a company you used to head and from which you still receive deferred compensation that exceeds your government salary fall? Or has everyone forgotten Darth Cheney?
The first rule of Elitism is there are no rules…
Rules are for the little folk or the 99%. The 1%ers are the rule makers and therefore not subject to them.
What was that Tom Delay once said, “I AM the government.”
I understand the reasons why he did, but looking back 20 yrs. later it’s hard to believe that Bill Clinton carried Louisiana twice–now a hard-core republican state.