With Tax Bill's Passage Seemingly Assured, Is Time To Shut The Government Down?

With John McCain and Susan Collins now apparently on board, swayed by lies and empty promises, the remaining question is whether Paul Ryan will allow the Senate bill to go to conference or whether he will simply take the Senate bill and shove it down the House GOP. I'm assuming the latter because the longer this process plays out, the stronger the opposition will be.

Susan Collins says that she has a promise from Mitch McConnell that the Medicare cuts prompted by the tax bill's blowing through the PAYGO provisions will not kick in. McConnell has promised that the PAYGO provision will be waived in the upcoming budget agreement. Of course, McConnell has no means to make that promise because whatever budget agreement that gets hashed out will require Democratic votes in the Senate in order to overcome the 60 vote threshold.

John McCain just put out a statement expressing "concern" about the impact on the deficit but saying the "net effect on our economy will be positive". He forgot to add "for my donors, the top 0.1%". He will now vote for the bill. I guess the idea of passing the bill without any detailed analysis or real hearings counts as regular order to McCain now.

With Murkowski bought off by drilling in the Alaskan Wildlife Refuge and Corker satisfied by some unknown and undefined trigger that will never be allowed to kick in when the deficit explodes, there appears to be nothing capable of stopping this horrendous bill.

So, assuming the bill does become law, the next question is what do the Democrats do with the only point of leverage they still have left and that is the budget and keeping the government functioning. Maybe I'm speaking out of the anger of the moment, but I really wonder if we wouldn't be better off just shutting the whole thing down at this point. Most of the government agencies, such as the EPA, Interior, and DHS, are actually inflicting damage on the country, rather than protecting it.

Moreover, Collins promise from McConnell on Medicare is essentially an attempt to blackmail Democrats into protecting her vote for this "immoral" tax bill, as Bernie Sanders so rightfully calls it. In addition, agreeing to a budget at this point will just clear the way for the Medicare and Social Security cuts that the administration and Senators like Rubio are already proposing. Collins may object to them but she will get rolled on that by her own Republican colleagues.

At this point, why should Democrats be willing to negotiate on anything with the Republicans when they have done nothing of the sort with any of the legislation they've both tried and failed to pass in the last year. And why should they clear a path for Republicans to further gut the social safety net. It is time to let the Republicans live with what they have actually done and not bail them out once again "for the good of the country".

Is it a risky strategy politically. Most assuredly. Will it cause pain and hardship for the American people. Definitely. But at some point your party has to stand for its principles and say enough is enough. In Europe, the center-left lost its support because it constantly supported austerity policies in coalition governments with the center right in the belief that political stability was key in order to maintain financial stability. Labour's resurgence under Corbyn in Britain was based on return to the core principles of the party. It was a desire for a similar return that the SPD decided not to join the grand coalition again in Germany and once again become a true opposition party, a decision they are now unfortunately rethinking, again, in an attempt for "stability". In fact, it could be argued that the lack of a real opposition from the left opened up the opportunities for the far right.

It's time for Democrats to say enough. Shut the government down until late in the spring of 2018 and make the midterm elections a referendum on the destruction of health care and the social safety net created by the GOP.

Structural Differences Between The Political And Corporate World And Sexual Harassment

Ana Navarro had a tweet today that went viral saying, "Matt Lauer lost his job. Charlie Rose lost his job. Mark Halperin lost his job. Glenn Thrush lost his job. Billy Bush lost his job. Harvey Weinstein lost his job. Kevin Spacey lost his job. But in politics... Conyers still in Congress. Moore still running. Trump still President." Of course, this is designed to show just how corrupt our entire political establishment is. But a commentator on MSNBC made a really great point that bears repeating.

In the corporate world, there is a hierarchical structure that allows the manager to fire individual employees. In addition, there are morality clauses in employment contracts that allow people to be fired for actions that reflect negatively on the employer. Last night, Andy Lack made the decision to fire Matt Lauer and he was able to do so simply because Lack has the power to do it.

In the political world, that hierarchical structure does not exist. There is no CEO or manager that can fire a member of Congress or, for that matter, the President. Which means that we are never going to get the instant response for sexual harassment that we (occasionally) see in the corporate world. It is just not going to happen.

That doesn't mean the process for dealing with these morality issues needs to be improved. The secrecy and opaqueness of the Ethics Committee is just not acceptable. The process of reporting and dealing with sexual harassment claims is horribly slanted against the accuser. Taxpayer money should not be used as part of the settlements of claims. All of these processes need to be totally revamped and improved.

That also does not mean that Democrats should not be calling for both Conyers and Franken to step down. Politically, that would probably be the right thing to do at this point. Democrats could also remove them from positions of leadership and strip them of committee assignments. That would also be a strong message. But even if Democrats were united in belief that Conyers and/or Franken should step down, there is very little that they could do to actually force those resignations if the members themselves refuse to do so. The only way to do that is through an investigation by something like an Ethics Committee and then act on a subsequent recommendation for censure or removal. That is the only process that can or will exist, other than waiting for the next election and letting the voters decide.

So, yes, I get the point of Navarro's tweet. But there are clear and definitive structural differences between the corporate and political worlds. There is no structure in our legislative system for the swift terminations that we see in the corporate world. So we should not expect it. That doesn't mean that the political system has no need to act, only that the process will be extended and drawn out.

More importantly, not clearly recognizing these important structural differences allows a false equivalence to take place on multiple levels. On the broader level, you can see that in Navarro's tweet. It's expressing a belief that the political system is somehow immune to the standards we expect in other parts of our society. That is not necessarily true.

Worse, however, the belief that the political system is corrupt allows a further false equivalence between the actions of Roy Moore and Donald Trump and Al Franken and John Conyers. All of them are guilty of some form of sexual harassment. But only Roy Moore and Donald Trump have been accused of harassing and, in Moore's case, molesting minors and underage children. That is a crucial difference that has real significance. The punishment should fit the crime and the degree of the crime. But that difference in degree is getting lost in the fact that the political system seems unresponsive to these charges as compared to the corporate world.

Finally, Josh Marshall makes the point that the only jury is really your constituency. In the corporate world, the constituency of consumers is a driving factor in their decisions. In the political world, the same thing applies. Personally, I think that Conyers must resign. But I also fear we may end up in a place where Franken and Conyers are no long in Congress and Roy Moore is in the Senate and Trump is in the White House. For Trump and Moore, their constituency just doesn't care.

The Horrors Of This Tax Bill Extend Well Beyond Taxes

So Mitch McConnell has begun the process to bring this horrific tax bill to the floor of the Senate for a vote. Senators will actually start voting today, trying to beat the report from the Joint Center on Taxation that is expected to come out tonight and show that the claims about accelerated growth are entirely fiction. Besides the fact that this bill will actually raise taxes on the middle class and low income workers while giving a massive tax cut the rich, it will also decimate other elements of our economy and our society.

The repeal of the individual mandate will result in 13 million people losing their health insurance and will further drive up health insurance rates. As Paul Krugman points out, over one third of the savings from the huge corporate tax cut will actually go to foreigners, not Americans. It will immediately cut Medicaid by $18 billion in 2018 alone and will also result in cuts to Medicare. The repeal of the medical expense deduction which allows the deduction of expenses greater than 10% of income, which admittedly is only in the House version of the bill, will, combined with the repeal of the individual mandate, probably force thousands of American into medical bankruptcy. The repeal of the state and local tax deduction will not only shift the federal tax burden further onto richer, more dynamic blue states but also cost those states billions of dollars in revenue. The House bill will treat tuition breaks for graduate students as income, making advanced degrees unaffordable for many, just as we fall further behind the rest of the world in STEM leaders. In addition, the House version also repeals the deduction for student loan interest, raising the cost of college education for everyone. The Senate bill will open up the Alaska Wildlife Refuge to drilling. The repeal of the Johnson Amendment will allow dark money to use non-profits and religious organizations for political activity. The $1.4 trillion in additional debt, at minimum, will raise interest rates and increase credit card and other borrowing costs for everyone. The changes and phase-outs in the coming years will make it harder for people to plan for their financial future and probably require more work from tax accountants for some.

The above would be bad enough on its own. But it is combined with a massive handout to the already wealthy and powerful at the eventual expense of the poor and middle class. And when the deficit explodes, as everyone knows it will, these very same Republicans will be back to saying the only way forward is to cut spending even more, once again hurting poor and middle class taxpayers.

Lastly, let's just note how many sectors of the American economy this bill (negatively) effects. There have been no hearings. There has been no testimony from experts on any of the myriad of impacts it will have on the various parts of the American economy and society. Even today, Senators do not understand what's in the bill and promises have been made to certain Senators which will only be revealed right before the vote is taken. It is certainly no way to run a country.

Wells Fargo Is At It Again, Fleecing Its Customers In The Foreign Exchange Market

As we see the battle engaged over who will at least temporarily run the CFPB, an agency designed to protect consumers from the predatory behavior of Wall Street, it is now reported that Wells Fargo is at it again, this time fleecing institutional accounts in the foreign exchange market.

Wells Fargo's latest scam was charging fees on foreign exchange transactions that were far higher than what the bank and the customer had initially agreed upon. In some cases, the higher fees actually ended up creating a loss for the unsuspecting customers. Among the companies burned were Ecolab, Veritas Technologies, Restaurant Brands International, CenturyLinkInc., Federal-Mogul Holdings Corp., and even nonprofit groups such as the National Bone Marrow Donor Program.

Many of these transactions were large currency trades or swaps so even a slightly higher fee than agreed to could generate tens or even hundred of thousands of extra dollars for the bank. As an example, just one Restaurant Brands trade ended up costing the company an extra $900,000 dollars which the bank refunded to the company after it complained.

Of course, the traders and sales people in the foreign exchange group were paid cash bonuses based on their revenue generation, encouraging them to gouge their own customers. And it was common knowledge within the bank that this theft was going on. Whistleblowers knew they would be ignored and fired. None of this is new for Wells Fargo.

It probably should also be mentioned that this thievery was going on while a major class action suit against the big foreign exchange dealers for inflating fees was ongoing. This class action involves years of overcharging customers in the foreign exchange markets going back as far as 2003. You would think that, knowing there was already an intense focus on foreign transaction fees, the bank would make sure that it was not overcharging its customers. But no, not at Wells Fargo.

I don't have the time or the energy anymore to rehash the litany of thievery that the bank has engaged in for the last decade and a half. Suffice it to say, it is a long and varied history that often looks more like a criminal enterprise than a bank. At least this time, it was only a few hundred customers that were robbed as opposed to the millions that Wells has ripped off in the past. And to think that Wells was considered the most well run bank at the time of the financial crisis. You can only imagine what the others might be like. And now they won't even have to worry about the CFPB anymore.

Are We Seeing The End Of Our Past?

There is a fascinating post by the economist Mark Koyama over on Medium that explores the question of whether economies can actually be self-sustaining or whether they are eventually doomed to stagnate and contract or even die. The immediate question that Koyama grapples with is why ancient Rome did not develop a sustainable economy in the same way the that the world has seen out modern economy develop since the dawn of the industrial revolution 300 years ago.

Koyama cites a book by Aldo Schiavone called the End of the Past. In it Schiavone points out just how dominant and far-reaching the Roman economy was. First century AD Rome was bigger than any European city in 1700 and economist Peter Temin believes the economy of the entire Roman empire of that period probably matched Europe's in the early 1700s. But there were clearly differences between the two. Koyama paraphrases Schiavone, saying, "Observe that Roman history leaves no traces of great mercantile companies like the Bardi, the Peruzzi or the Medici. There are no records of commercial manuals of the sort that are abundant from Renaissance Italy; no evidence of 'class-struggle' as we have from late medieval Europe; and no political economy or 'economics', that is, no attempts to systematize one’s thoughts and insights concerning the commercial world. The ancient world, in this view, only superficially resembled that of early modern Europe. Seen from this perspective, the latter contained the potential for sustained growth; the former did not."

Schiavone attributes this to two important elements of the Roman economy, slavery and the dominance of a aristocratic, rentier class. Again Koyama summarizing Schiavone, "ultimately the economic stagnation of the ancient world was due to a peculiar equilibrium that centered around slavery...the ancient reliance on slaves as human automatons — machines with souls — removed or at least weakened, the incentive to develop machines for productive purposes...The relevance of slavery colored ancient attitudes towards almost all forms of manual work or craftsmanship. The dominant cultural meme was as follows: since such work was usually done by the unfree, it must be lowly, dirty and demeaning...Thus this attitude also manifest itself in the distain the ancients had for practical mechanics: Similar condescension was shown to small businessmen and to most trade (only truly large-scale trade was free from this taint). The ancient world does not seem to have produced self-reproducing mercantile elites. Plausible this was in part because of the cultural dominance of the landowning aristocracy." Koyama calls this the "easy assumptions of aristocratic superiority".

In other words, slavery created an environment where the technical capabilities, which the Romans clearly had based on the incredible public works that we still see, were never put into use in improving agriculture or small craft businesses. The merchant class was respected but it was seen as a means to an end, to becoming part of the landed gentry, a rentier class, that was supported by slave labor.

Now, there is clearly an open question of whether slave labor was instrumental in helping to launch and create the Industrial Revolution. But there is no question that the democratizing influence of the late Renaissance and the Reformation led to the acceptance of what we now consider the basis of modern market economics and helped drive lay the groundwork for the Industrial Revolution and create our modern economy.  Dierdre McCloskey calls this the acceptance of the norms and tenets of the bourgeois mentality. The acceptance of those principles never happened in Rome and may account for its inability to sustain itself.

But there is another point of view expressed by Bas van Bavel that looks at economies throughout history and concludes that they always end in decline. The initial "liberalization" creates mobility and easier exchange of land, capital, and labor and improves the lives of the average person. But there eventually emerges an essentially plutocratic class that accumulates the majority of the capital, wealth, and power, largely on the backs of wage labor. That power translates to political power which begins the process of stagnation as the elites essentially attempt to "lock in" their advantages. Polarization increases and the welfare of the average citizen declines. The stagnation and sclerosis reduces innovation and eventually leads to economic decline.

Which brings us to where we are today. Global inequality is at levels not seen in a century or more. There is a distinct global plutocratic class that uses offshore entities to hide its enormous and often ill-gotten wealth and to conduct business largely hidden from public view.  Most of the 20th century's dictatorships have not become democratized but have morphed into illiberal democracies that serve an entrenched oligarchy.  The opening up of China and India created a vast pool of wage labor that could be exploited to further enhance the wealth and power of this global plutocratic class.

And now, the tax bill that looks Republicans are trying to ram through Congress will just further entrench the American plutocrats. The repeal of the Alternative Minimum Tax and the estate tax will create a huge windfall for the already well off and create our own version of a landed gentry of dynastic power. The reduction of the corporate tax along will further empower the shareholder, rentier class. Meanwhile, that very class will ensure that the exploding deficit will require cuts to services for the wage labor class. There is virtually nothing in this tax bill that does anything to grow the economy or support small business, the supposed engine of growth. It is simply designed to make the already wealthy and powerful even more wealthy and powerful.

Just as in Rome and as van Bavel predicts, the elimination of the wage labor class via automation will further entrench the wealthy elites. And with virtually no labor costs to eliminate, the need for innovation will decline and economic stagnation will set in. In the US, wages have been stagnant for over 40 years. Productivity has been below normal for well over a decade. New company formation is also at historic lows. The barriers to entry in certain markets now are almost insuperable. In some industries, the elites have already locked in their advantage. Polarization is at an all-time high. It certainly seems that stagnation and sclerosis is already setting in.

Maybe I'm just getting old and see the world collapsing just as my parents and their parents before them did. But I do get a sense that this time is different. There is certainly less optimism for the future. And I would also note that the Roman economy really blossomed between about 100 BC and 250 AD, a run of around 350 years. The modern economy that we know now started in the 1700s and has only been running for around 300 years. The efficiency of modern transportation gives our world economy a slightly larger reach than the Roman empire. But there is nothing that says it won't end the same way.

Obviously, the whole issue regarding the Roman economy and how market economies in general sustain themselves is an enormous subject in its own right and certainly nothing that can be encapsulated in a single post. And I've obviously summarized some important works in just a few sentences.  But Koyama's post certainly prompted some reflection on our current state. It's something worth thinking about.

CFPB Fight Is Yet Another Battle Over Trump Circumventing The Political Process

The current fight over who will be the acting head of the CFPB is yet another example of how Trump is corrupting our political processes with the implicit support of Republicans. The CFPB is probably the last agency within the government that is actively fulfilling its mandate, which clearly puts it at odds with the Trump administration. In addition, the agency has been a target of the Republicans in Congress and their financial backers on Wall Street ever since it was created. So, the struggle over who will run this agency, even temporarily, would always be a battle.

I am not a lawyer but it does seem that the statutory language in the bill that created the CFPB that allows the deputy director to become the acting director supersedes the President's power under the Federal Vacancies Reform Act. And that is what the current court case will eventually decide.

In the end, of course, Trump will be able to put whomever he wants in charge of the bureau because the person he nominates will be surely confirmed by the Republican Senate. Knowing that, in any other sane administration, the deputy director would become the acting director and the President would quickly nominate someone to become the permanent director. But this is the Trump administration. The real reason that Trump wants to install Mulvaney at CFPB is precisely because he has no interest in appointing a separate permanent director. Doing so allows him to once again have someone running an agency whose approach is totally antithetical to an agency's mission, but without having to endure the Senate confirmation process and force yet another tough vote from Senate Republicans.

So, the issue here is not whether Trump has the right to appoint someone to lead the CFPB. Everyone agrees he has that right. The issue here really is whether Trump can get away with appointing an acting director without Senate confirmation. To do so, would just be another violation of our governing norms and yet a further erosion of the separation of powers and the GOP in Congress will be willing accomplices in this effort.

A Shocking Proposal For Trump, GOP To Control The Judicial System

Along with a free press, the rule of law is essential to a well-functioning democracy. Part of the reason that Vladimir Putin had such an easy time destroying a nascent Russian democracy and restoring dictatorial rule was because so little time was spent in the immediate post-Soviet era building a strong judicial system while the majority of the effort was focus on a (too) rapid conversion to a market economy. And the most important element to the effective rule of law is an independent judiciary.

Budding autocrats are especially interested in finding a way to control the judiciary. In Hungary, Viktor Orban and his Fidesz party is in constant conflict with what remains of an independent judiciary.  One his earliest attempts to control the judicial process was to create a "judicial czar" who would fill court openings and who also had the ability to assign individual cases to specific judges which would obviously allow the government to control the outcome of certain litigation. In addition, Orban appointed his own additional hand-picked judges to the Constitutional Court in an effort to force early retirement on existing judges, thereby allowing his "czar" to appoint their successors. Remarkably, that effort was struck down by the Court as the people took to the streets to protest Orban's effort.

In Poland, the Law and Justice party refused to swear in three properly appointed justices to its own Constitutional Court and followed Orban's lead by appointing five new members of its own choosing. In addition, the Law and Justice controlled parliament passed a law that required the Constitutional Court to reach a two-thirds majority in order to have its decisions be binding. A law passed earlier this year dismissed the Supreme Court justices and, like Hungary, allowed the justice minister to dismiss and appoint the heads of the lower common courts and again created an enormous backlash and protest from the citizenry.

Orban and Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the current head of Poland's Law and Justice party and the most powerful man in the country, are both accused of trying to create illiberal democracies, in other words a state that has the features of a democracy but is in essence an autocracy.

We have seen a similar situation in another country. There, the ruling party refused to seat a qualified and properly nominated judge to the Supreme Court and instead changed the rules to appoint someone else who was deemed appropriate by a group the provides a list of judges that would be "acceptable" to the ruling party. In addition, the ruling party, which had created an unprecedented number of vacancies by refusing to seat appointees from the prior government, has appointed judges whom independent groups have determined are distinctly unqualified but whose politics made them agreeable to the ruling party. The ruling party has eliminated the ability of the minority party to object to and block judges, an ability the ruling party took full advantage of when it was in the minority in order to create that record number of vacancies.

Now, an early leader of that group that essentially picks judges for the ruling party, essentially another version of a judicial czar, has a proposal to further consolidate the judicial branch under the control of the ruling party. The proposal is to create an extraordinary number of new judicial positions, increasing the size of the judiciary by anywhere from one-third to one-half. All of those new judges would be signed off on by this new judicial czar. In addition, this czar wants to replace all the judges in the administrative law courts, which are currently non-partisan fact finders, with lifetime appointments made by the ruling party and signed off on by the judicial czar.

The country I'm describing is not some third world country or a country with a short history of democracy or a long history of dictatorships. No, it is, of course, the United States. The ruling party is the Republicans. The Supreme Court nominee that the ruling party refused to seat was Merrick Garland and the 60 vote rule for Supreme Court positions was eliminated by Republicans in order to seat Neil Gorsuch. The group that selects acceptable judges for the ruling party, the new judicial czar, is the Federalist Society. The independent group that has determined that some of the judges are uniquely unqualified is the American Bar Association, the traditional and independent arbiter of a judges qualifications. The ability of the minority party to block judges is the blue slip, a rule that Republican used to block an unprecedented number of Obama nominations and which they now dispose of whenever they want. And Steven Calabresi, a co-founder of the Federalist Society, is the source of this breathtaking proposal to transform the American judicial system.

Calabresi's proposal would essentially pack the American courts with nearly 450 new judicial positions, all of whom would be nominate by Trump, signed off on by the Federalist Society, and approved by the Republican majority. That is on top of the over 100 judicial vacancies that Trump can fill due to Republican obstruction during the Obama years. By next year, nearly 1/8 of all federal judges will have been appointed by Trump, again with approval from the Federalist Society. Calabresi also wants to replace all 158 administrative law judges, all of whom are currently non-partisan career public servants, with judges appointed by Trump who will serve for life.

Now, you may think that the comparison between what the Republicans and Trump are doing with budding autocracies in Hungary and Poland is a bit of a stretch. And you could also say that Calabresi is merely an independent conservative firebrand who holds no official government office and is not reflective of the position of Trump and Congressional Republicans. And that might be true. But the Republicans have shown themselves willing to approve clearly unqualified judges simply because of their youth and adherence to Federalist Society principles (if you can call them that). And Trump certainly seems to have a belief that the judiciary is essentially there to do his bidding. So, despite what we may think, it shows the sad state of our country, and how we are "normalizing" the budding trappings of autocracy, that the comparison is only a "bit of a stretch".

In his short Presidency, Donald Trump has managed to attack both pillars of an effective democracy, a free press and an independent judiciary. From "fake news" to trashing CNN and trying to force ATT to divest itself of the news outlet, Trump has shown his contempt for the press. And his comments denigrating Judge Curiel during the campaign to those who struck down his Muslim ban are similar attacks on judicial independence. The unprecedented GOP obstruction of Obama appointees and the stolen Supreme Court seat of Merrick Garland were further attacks on our judicial system. The next step for any autocracy is to pack the judiciary with loyal appointees, just as Calabresi proposes. You may not believe it could happen here. But that's what happens in every country that moves from democracy to autocracy, and no one can believe it.

Natural Weekends - More Dark Clouds

Pai, FCC, Refuse Lawful Requests From NY AG In Order To Repeal Net Neutrality

We knew it would be bad. Very bad. We knew it when we saw Jeff Sessions nominated as Attorney General, when Scott Pruitt went to the EPA, when Tom Price went to HHS, and when Ryan Zinke went to Interior. Others, who we expected to be a somewhat ameliorating force despite still being horrible in their own right, such as Steve Mnuchin, John Kelly, and Rex Tillerson, have proven to be totally incompetent (Mnuchin), actual true Trump believers (Kelly), or far worse than could be imagined (Tillerson). And others who were complete idiots, such as Ben Carson and Betsy DeVos, have proven to be just exactly that and have been largely impotent because of it. But I don't believe anyone thought that Ajit Pai would be able to rival all of them when he ascended to the head of the FCC after Tom Wheeler's departure.

Yes, it was always clear that Pai would lead an assault on net neutrality. After all, he originally led the fight against it.  But I don't think most people expected he would bend the rules as egregiously as he did in order to let Sinclair Broadcast Group purchase Tribune Media and force Boris Epshteyn propaganda down the throats of 75% of the American public. In order to allow that, Pai had to allow UHF channels to be included in the total number of stations in order to keep Sinclair under the statutory limits of ownership. At the same time, Pai also was able to change the cross-ownership rules that limited one owner's control of a newspaper and a radio and TV station in one town. While that might have been expected of Pai and the new FCC, the decision also now allows one owner to control two of the top four TV stations in a single market, a further gift to Sinclair.

When you look at Trump's assaults on a free press, especially the decision to try to force ATT to divest itself of CNN, Pai has become a far more nefarious persona than might have been imagined. But I don't think anyone expected Pai to simply flout the rule of law in the manner of the Trump administration in general. But it is apparently what he is doing when it comes to the suspicious comments collected by the FCC regarding net neutrality.

Apparently, hundreds of thousands comments that supported the rollback of net neutrality were bogus and actually used stolen identities to pose as pro-repeal individuals. One estimate is that the number of fake comments number in the millions and almost 100% of them supported repeal.

Some of those people whose identities were used to generate these fake comments lived in New York and so NY Attorney General Eric Schneiderman launched an investigation. But Schneiderman's efforts have largely been stymied by the FCC itself. The AG has made nine requests for records from the FCC asking for logs and other data about the comments and the comment process itself, which is required by law. The FCC has rebuffed all those requests.

Schneiderman finally went public with his frustration, writing the comment process "has been corrupted by the fraudulent use of Americans’ identities. Such conduct likely violates state law — yet the FCC has refused multiple requests for crucial evidence in its sole possession that is vital to permit that law enforcement investigation to proceed. In doing so, the perpetrator or perpetrators attacked what is supposed to be an open public process by attempting to drown out and negate the views of the real people, businesses, and others who honestly commented on this important issue."

But not even that public rebuke managed to humble the FCC whose spokesman retorted "This so-called investigation is nothing more than a transparent attempt by a partisan supporter of the Obama Administration’s heavy-handed Internet regulations to gain publicity for himself." This is the Trump administration's answer to a lawful request from a sitting state Attorney General. It is simply an astounding statement that the law does not apply to them and is indicative of the attitude of the entire Trump administration.

Of course the reason Pai and the FCC are desperately ignoring Schneiderman is that the Commission is intent on ramming through a vote to repeal net neutrality in the next few weeks. Schneiderman's investigation into the corruption of the comment process has a small chance to not so much derail the vote as to delay it. And, as with everything that the Trump administration does, the more time and sunlight on what they are doing, the stronger the opposition grows.

Yes, we knew it would be bad. But I don't think that we ever thought that Trump's lawlessness and total disrespect for the rule of law would filter down to the FCC. But, under Ajit Pai, it apparently has.

Natural Weekends - Dark Clouds

Black Friday

It's not often I read something that encapsulates almost everything I would want to say about a certain subject and then re-post here. I think I've only done it once before on this blog. But today I will just put up in its entirety a post on Lawyers, Guns, and Money written by one of that's sites commenters. It really says it all about today. (PS - if you are going to send this on to other people, please use the link above to the original post so that they get the deserved traffic...thx.)

So. Black Friday. It’s upon us. The highest holy day of our national consumer religion, and the ratchet that turns one notch tighter on the workers who make it possible every year.

Of course, it isn’t really about the Friday in question anymore and hasn’t been for some time. It’s about the Thursday before Black Friday, which has been colonized by the day following it in the same way a fungus colonizes and enslaves ants.

Let’s check out this years murderers row of “opening on Thanksgiving” hours among major retailers. It’s basically the same as the year prior, but with some real fun changes:

Walmart: 6.00 PM
Target: 6.00 PM
Sears: 6.00 PM
Best Buy: 5.00 PM
Toys R’ Us: 5.00 PM
Macy’s: 5.00 PM
JC Penney: 2.00 PM

Now, last year our winner in this particular ghoulish sweepstakes was Penneys, with that then-jaw dropping two in the afternoon opening time.

This year, K-Mart looked at that and said “hold my beer.”

K-Mart will be opening at six in the morning on Thanksgiving day. Yes, not P.M, but A.M. They’ll be open all day and into the night, and then open again at six in the morning on Black Friday proper.
They say the saddest place in the world to be is the buffet at Caesar’s Palace at one a.m Christmas morning. I would submit that the layaway counter in a K-Mart at six a.m on Thanksgiving Day is competitive.

The silver medal winner has got to be Dollar General; they’ll be opening at seven a.m and staying open all day. That’s some synergistic planning right there; people who can’t afford to take a day off will show up to run their Dollar Generals in order to sell things to people who have been so beaten down they can’t afford to shop anywhere else but a Dollar General.

So what does this mean for workers?

Many of these stores will require their workers to stay late on Wednesday in order to get their plan-o-grams set up for the oncoming weekend, which will have special displays. Many stores will also use this as an opportunity to get their final Christmas season layouts in place. Re-doing a store has to be done on the regular and is drudgery enough when you’re not doing it last thing Wednesday evening prior to coming in and working on Thanksgiving.

Those selfsame workers will need to arrive an hour early or so to set up on Thursday, of course. So add about an hour to all of the times listed above; people will be rolling up to K-Mart at five in the morning to get it all ready to go.

Now, there is one bright spot; many of these stores used to stay open all night Thursday and then all day Friday. However, the majority have shifted to closing for at least a few hours Thursday night before re-opening. Wal-Mart is going the distance, of course, but Macy’s and Best Buy and Target et. al. have backed off from that.

(Although that allows them to do things like schedule someone from five to one on Thanksgiving day, and then call them back in at six on Friday for another eight-hour shift.)

This is a direct outgrowth of the decimation of unions across the country, and of our unraveling social contract as a whole. Industries that remain strongly unionized have workers that will be staying home with their families, where they belong, on Thanksgiving. They’ll often have Black Friday off as well. (In an ironic twist of fate, their union wages likely give them the disposable income to go out and shop both days.) White-collar workers have one or both days off as well. But it once would have been unthinkable to make even non-unionized workers show up on Thanksgiving. People would have been appalled. Not so much anymore.

Many grocery stores are open extended hours on Thanksgiving. And again; grocery stores used to be hugely unionized. Now the actual on-the-ground labor is an army of part-time teenagers and the elderly, and who the fuck cares about them, am I right? So Meijers or Wegmans or your regional equivalent can be open on Thanksgiving day, so their middle-class patrons can pop right in and pick up something they forgot for the dinners the person checking them out won’t be able to enjoy themselves. How convenient!  [Editor's note: my local Stop&Shop was open from 8am-6pm on Thanksgiving Day - was that really necessary. Surely even closing at noon, bad as that might be, would be sufficient.]

The worst part of all this, tho, the very worst, is the way it turns our own giving nature against us.
Times are tough for a lot of people, but they still want to have some nice things, or more importantly buy nice things for their loved ones. The people who are lining up at these stores and thereby validating the decision to be open on Thanksgiving are not, in most cases, bad people. They’re people who want to buy their children and siblings and parents, who they care about deeply, the gifts they feel those folks deserve. But their pocketbooks require insane doorbuster savings to make that possible. Some of the people you’ll see trampling each other in the inevitable “riot at a Wal-Mart” videos are just asshole skinflints, of course, but most are not.

They’re just driven to do things like pervert their entire day around these sales, even if they themselves have the day off, and that’s just terrible.

This Thanksgiving bullshit is vile, and it’s anti-worker. No, more than that; it’s anti-people. And folks need to know that, and fight against the notion that this is all okay and normal.

Merkel's Weakness Compounds May's Problems

Although she is still trying, it appears that Angela Merkel will be unable to form a majority coalition government. The collapse of talks with the Green party and the FDP leaves Merkel with three distinctly unpalatable options. She could try to rule as a minority government with implicit support from the SPD, or try to convince the SPD to re-join the grand coalition, or wait until new elections are forced sometime next spring. Obviously, in the present environment, any new elections will be risky, potentially further eroding the power of not only Merkel's conservatives but also the SPD as well and giving the right-wing, xenophobic AfD another opportunity to expand its own electoral base despite its own internal divisions. But that seems to be Merkel's preferred option. (UPDATE: Merkel and the SPD seem to be rethinking their positions as the SPD has just agreed to talks about reviving their coalition.)

Meanwhile, Merkel's weakness will provide even more Brexit headaches for Theresa May and her Conservative colleagues. Already riven by internal chaos regarding the path of negotiations, May and the Conservatives seem to stumbling toward no agreement at all. EU negotiators recognize they have the superior negotiating position and are maintaining their hard line. At the same time, they seem to be getting fed up with the chaos on the British side. And with a weakened Merkel who may be facing yet another election, the chances of her being able or even willing to force tough compromises on the European side will be further diminished.

As usual, the Conservatives are once again misreading their European counterparts and engaging in wishful thinking. According to Jacob Rees-Mogg, Merkels' inability to form a coalition and the resulting "political weakness of the strongest E.U. state makes our negotiating position stronger." I seriously think not. In fact, as the director of the Center for European Reform says, "I don’t think it makes much difference to Brexit in the short term, because the positions of various parties in Berlin are all pretty hard-line on the issues. But it might matter in the long term, because if the negotiations get stuck, Merkel and Macron could intervene to get a deal. That might not happen if Merkel disappears, because the E.U. got used to her knocking heads together."

As slowly as any progress is being made in the separation negotiations, the situation on the domestic front is almost as rapidly deteriorating. The UK's respected Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) cut its forecast for productivity, earnings, and growth well into the next decade. Per person GDP in 2021 is now expected to be a whopping 3.5% below the forecasts of early 2016 and would possibly still be lower than in 2008, adjusted for inflation. The economy is not expected to grow by more than 2% per year in the foreseeable future and deficits will accordingly be higher than previously expected. According to the head of the IFS, "We are in danger of losing not just one but getting on for two decades of earnings growth. We will all have to get used to the idea that steadily rising living standards may be a thing of the increasingly distant past." He added that things will only get worse, saying, "This is not the end of austerity. It is not even nearly the end of austerity. There are still nearly £12bn of welfare cuts to work through the system, while day-to-day public services spending is still due to be 3.6% lower in 2022-23 than it is today."

At the same time, both business and people are fleeing the country and this includes some highly skilled labor. Over 120,000 Europeans have already left their jobs in the UK and departed for parts elsewhere in just the last year and a half. In the City, jobs are already moving to the continent at an increasingly rapid pace and in London construction workers and even coffee baristas are becoming harder to find. Talented and rich foreign students, who are critical to some schools' funding, are also no longer coming to the country's universities.

But nowhere has the immediate impact of Brexit been felt more than in the already beleaguered NHS. In the year following the vote, over 10,000 NHS professionals left the service. There are now over 40,000 nursing vacancies even as the number of registered nurses who are certified to treat in both the UK and the EU has dropped by 90%. As the Times notes, "Brexit seems certain to make it harder and costlier to recruit from the Continent, assuming that people will still want to come from there. Even the legal status of European Union citizens already living in Britain remains unclear, entangled in the stalled Brexit talks between Brussels and London. Many fear they could lose rights, job security, pensions and access to free health care."

There is a sad irony to this state of affairs and that is because the Leave campaign touted the millions of pounds that would be available to the NHS after Brexit. The slogan was 350 million pounds per week that was currently going to the EU would now be available to shore up the NHS. It was all a lie. And now the already severely stretched NHS is bleeding foreign talent because of the vote.

Meanwhile, the already difficult situation in Northern Ireland is also deteriorating and the Good Friday Agreement is in danger of collapsing. The government there has already been dysfunctional since the beginning of the year, when the ruling coalition collapsed when Sinn Fein left it in attempt to get DUP leader Arlene Foster to step down. Instead, Foster and the DUP became the key to allowing Theresa May to form a coalition government after her disastrous snap election. Since then, the Northern Ireland government has been at a standstill. In addition, Gerry Adams further added to the chaos when he decided to step down as leader of Sinn Fein in the hopes of thereby allowing the party to become a coalition partner in Ireland's government.

That move, however, leaves a power vacuum in Northern Ireland both on the nationalist and unionist sides and probably further reinforces Sinn Fein demands for reunification of Ireland, especially in light of Brexit and the fact that the UK government is now specifically aligned with the DUP due its status as a coalition partner. The border negotiations seem to be going nowhere and the Irish foreign minister recently trashed the UK negotiators saying they essentially have not made any serious proposals or promises regarding the future of the border post-Brexit.

All this has driven the ruling coalition further apart. Sinn Fein is now demanding that Irish language be given the same legal status as English and that same-sex marriage be recognized by the state. It has also given rise to the idea that a ruling government must not necessarily be a power sharing arrangement between the unionists and the nationalists, effectively voiding the premise of the Good Friday Agreement. The head of Sinn Fein's main rival nationalist party says, "I don’t mean to be dramatic or anything, but I do think the Good Friday Agreement is effectively dead." She ominously added, "I don’t think there’s any real support for violence, but you can see how quickly things can unravel. It’s very bleak, and it is something to worry about."

There is now a belief that a referendum on leaving the UK and becoming part of Ireland will come sooner rather than later, especially with the restrictions imposed by the eventual Brexit agreement, if there even is one, and if the border issue is not addressed satisfactorily. As one centrist, neither nationalist or unionist, leader said, "This is a more profound crisis than we’ve had at other times in the last 20 years." More dispiritingly, May and the Conservatives seem unable, or worse, uninterested in doing anything to help resolve the current impasse. And the longer the impasse continues, the more government services will deteriorate, prompting call for drastic action on both sides of the sectarian divide.

May must surely hope that the SPD does, in fact, join in another German grand coalition. The economy she is overseeing is deteriorating quickly, the prized achievement of the post-war UK government, the NHS, is increasingly under duress, and the rumblings for independence still exist in Scotland and now perhaps even more imminently in Northern Ireland. Without a strong German government to help forge consensus and compromise in the EU, it will be difficult to reach an agreement on Brexit. And waiting until a new German election next spring will bring the 2019 deadline for the break with the EU even closer and further enhance the probability of no deal at all. And even if the CDU-SPD coalition is revived, it is unlikely that the Germans will waste political capital on Brexit when they are so many other problems facing the EU itself.

Astronomy Adventure - Three Lunar Mountain Ranges

The photo below show three lunar mountain ranges.  Starting way down on the lower left is the crater Eratosthenes and the mountain range that curves up and to the left is the Montes Apenninus. Continuing across the gap that connects the Mare Seranitatis above and the Mare Imbrium below is the Montes Caucasus. The two large craters as you continue to the left are Eudoxus and Aristoteles. Below them are the Montes Alpes with the large crater Plato at the lower end of that range in the bottom left. The three large craters in the Mare Imbrium between the Apenninus and the Alpes are, from smallest to largest, Autolycus, Aristillus, and Archimedes. The peak in the midst of Mare Imbrium between Aristillus and that Alpes is Mons Piton which rises nearly 1.4 miles high.

Technical details:

Scope: Starblast 4.5; tracking on
Magnification: ~150x
Camera: iPhone6 using NightCap Pro; Low ISO
Photos: 1x1/16 second image

Recognizing The Culture Behind Roy Moore's Abuse

Obviously, we are and will be consumed by sexual harassment and assault accusations for the foreseeable future, and rightly so. And, again quite obviously, the media is focusing on the sexual assault on a 14 year old by Roy Moore, especially in light of the other revelations about sexual predators in Hollywood, the media, and politics. But the issues with Roy Moore's preoccupation with underage girls is also reflective of a problem in certain theocratic, fundamentalist communities like the one Moore inhabits.

One of the people who stood alongside Roy Moore at a rally earlier this week is a prominent preacher, Flip Benham, who had this to say about Moore's situation, "Judge Roy Moore graduated from West Point and then went on into the service, served in Vietnam and then came back and was in law school. All of the ladies, or many of the ladies that he possibly could have married were not available then, they were already married, maybe, somewhere. So he looked in a different direction and always with the [permission of the] parents of younger ladies. By the way, the lady he’s married to now, Ms. Kayla, was a younger woman. He did that because there is something about a purity of a young woman, there is something that is good, that’s true, that’s straight and he looked for that."

Benham's statement is a perfect encapsulation of a widely held belief in many conservative evangelical communities. Essentially, it is OK for an older man to date or even marry underage women because they are "pure" and those girls can then be molded into the wife that will serve that man's needs as perfectly as possible. One of the 17 year old girls that Moore wanted to "date" in fact asked her mother what she thought about that possibility to which her mother responded, "I’d say you were the luckiest girl in the world."

According to one woman who grew up in a fundamentalist environment, "there is a segment of evangelicalism and home-school culture where the only thing Roy Moore did wrong was initiating sexual contact outside of marriage. 14 year old girls courting adult men isn’t entirely uncommon." Another woman with a similar background said, "A woman’s role is to be a wife, a homemaker and someone who births children. The man’s role is generally to be established and someone who provides the full income. It may take longer for a man to reach stability. While a woman of 15 or 16, if she’s been trained for a long time looking after her younger siblings, in their eyes she might be ready for marriage." Duck Dynasty's Phil Robertson put it more bluntly when he said, "You got to marry these girls when they are about 15 or 16." In fact, Moore himself admits he first noticed his wife at a dance recital when she was 15 years old and eventually married her eight years later.

It is this culture that allows many of Moore's supporters to discount all the allegations about dating teenage girls and even hanging around the mall. And that just really leaves the two accusations of inappropriate behavior which are also shrugged off by simply not believing the accusers. As an evangelical minister says, "It’s been so many, so many years. People’s recollections are different. You don’t know if somebody’s embellishing. I like to give people the benefit of the doubt and say let’s see what the truth is."

Virtually all sexual harassment and assault is more about control and power than actual sex. And these highly patriarchal communities where the roles for girls and women is to be subservient and support a man in the way that please him most are especially susceptible to these kinds of inappropriate and illegal behavior. In fact, the women themselves are often blamed for the sins of the men. As one woman said, "When you’re taught that if you don’t dress modestly enough, that a man could lust after you and fall into sexual sin, then if a man has an abusive sexual relationship toward you, you could believe that it was what you were wearing or what you said or how you walked that caused him." It is the ultimate "she was asking for it" mindset. And it's compounded by the search for "purity" that men are looking for in a wife in these communities.

Obviously, this is a legacy of the agrarian economy where young girls were merely considered an extra mouth to feed and needed to be unloaded as soon as possible. That legacy was then entrenched in a religious and cultural tradition, in a similar way to polygamy in the Mormon community. But, just as the idea of Southern heritage can be used a s cover for hatred and racism, this religious tradition can and is used and perverted for sexual assault and abuse.

While the rest of us our confounded by the support for Moore, especially in the evangelical community, portions of that community look at the condemnation of Moore as part and parcel of the elites condescendingly criticizing their "culture", the very same feelings that Trump taps into every day. This is what is distinctly different about the sexual abuse charges against Roy Moore as opposed to the charges against, say, Franken and Conyers. Yes, their is a certain cultural aspect to all abuse, but only in Moore's case does the culture allow for what is essentially child predation. It is important to recognize that distinction.

Uber Once Again Blatantly Violates The Law; When Will It End?

I see that my favorite (sarcasm intended) company is back in the news today with yet another horror story. Last fall, Uber was hacked and the personal details of over 57 million customers and drivers were stolen. The company responded in its usual fashion, by conspiring with the hackers to conceal the truth.

While the personal customer information that was stolen only (sarcasm intended) included names, addresses, emails, and phone numbers, the stolen drivers' information included driver's license numbers. 7 million drivers around the world were affected, including 600,000 in the US.

Rather than reporting than theft and notifying the individuals affected by the hack as required by law, Uber kept the hacking secret. In addition, the company began negotiations with the hackers, who had demanded ransom. That led to an "agreement" where Uber paid them $100,000 and the hackers agreed to destroy the stolen information and keep the breach quiet.

There was a very good reason for Uber making this "agreement". At the time of the hack, they were already negotiating a settlement with the FTC for lax security measures relating to an earlier hack in 2014. In addition, they had only just reached a settlement with the NY State Attorney General over that same issue. Obviously, having a similar breach become public potentially jeopardized both those settlements. So Uber did what it always does - break the law and hope no one notices.

While Uber may actually be trying to clean up its act now that they it has sidelined Travis Kalanick, the fact remains that the company was built by ignoring laws and regulations around the world in an attempt to build a monopoly in what was known as the tax and car service business. As Bloomberg notes, "Uber has earned a reputation for flouting regulations in areas where it has operated since its founding in 2009. The U.S. has opened at least five criminal probes into possible bribes, illicit software, questionable pricing schemes and theft of a competitor’s intellectual property, people familiar with the matters have said. The San Francisco-based company also faces dozens of civil suits." And those are just the suits the company has faced in the US.

As I keep asking in all my writings about Uber, how and why is this company, which looks exactly like an international criminal enterprise, still in business?

Trump Is Right To Block ATT/Time Warner Merger, But For The Worst Reason

I guess we shouldn't be shocked that Trump's Justice Department has blocked the ATT/TimeWarner merger. As a supporter of stronger antitrust enforcement, and especially in the wake of the FCC's decision to decimate net neutrality, I actually think that blocking the merger is the right thing to do. But let's be clear, the Trump administration is doing this not out of principle but in order to punish CNN and once again attack and attempt to control the media that covers it.

The ATT/TimeWarner merger is what's known as a vertical merger in that the two primary areas of business for each company do not dramatically overlap and cover different levels of the same industry. ATT is the second biggest wireless company and the third biggest broadband internet provider. In addition, it is the largest provider of pay TV due to its purchase of DirectTV. Essentially, ATT is a provider of communication pipelines. TimeWarner is primarily a content company with its ownership of CNN, HBO, Warner Brothers, TNT, TBS, Cartoon Network and Turner Classic Movies.  Put those two together and you have a company that controls the entire flow of information and entertainment from content development to delivery.

This arrangement, of course, provides a real incentive for ATT to price and/or package its offerings in a way that favors its own products. As one consumer advocate puts it, "There’s not even a question about whether AT&T’s TV packages are going to carry Time Warner programming, because of course they are. But that may be at the expense of viewers or competing programmers that might have something better, but aren’t even going to be considered."

With the news that the FCC is planning on eliminating net neutrality, ATT could also actually legally degrade the delivery of competing products over its network or simply freeze competitors out entirely. This is what has already happened in the cable business. As an Optimum customer, it is impossible for me to get the Tennis Channel and Comcast only offers it as part of high-priced package in order to protect its own Golf and NBC Sports channels.

Of course, none of this is behind the DOJ's decision to fight the merger. Kevin Drum has kindly put together James Hohmann's seven reasons why Trump is probably ordering this decision to punish CNN:

• In every other area, the Trump administration is bending over backward to boost big business.
• The head of the antitrust division has changed his view on the issue to match the president’s.
• The administration’s denials are full of lawyerly language that leaves wiggle room.
• Trump has repeatedly demonstrated that he does not respect the independence of the Justice Department. Why would he prize the autonomy of the antitrust division any more than he did the FBI?
• There are no precedents for this kind of lawsuit succeeding.
• The president has made no secret of his deep personal disdain for CNN.
• White House officials have previously hinted that Trump might wade into the antitrust process.

In the end, this looks like just another attack on the free press and part of Trump's effort to create a "managed media" that is virtually a coordinated propaganda outlet for the government. The fact that Trump actually supports a sane and proper policy in order to do that is hardly any solace.

The GOP's Multi-Pronged Attack On Our Democracy

Under the Trump administration, the assault on our democracy that Republicans have been waging for the last two decades is actually escalating. The latest prongs of this attack comes from multiple directions.

Today, Politico is reporting that Trump's rumored choice to run the operational role of the Census Bureau is an "inexperienced professor who wrote that 'Competitive Elections are Bad for America.'" As with everything with Trump and the GOP these days, the choice would break a long tradition of appointing a non-political government employee with experience in statistics. Trump's choice, Thomas Brunell, has none of those qualifications.

Brunell's minimal qualifications are that he worked on a House subcommittee that oversaw the census and that he has written about redistricting and voting rights in his capacity as a professor at the University of Texas at Dallas. Of course, part of that writing argued that "partisan districts packed with like-minded voters actually lead to better representation than ones more evenly split between Democrats and Republicans, because fewer voters in partisan districts cast a vote for a losing candidate. He has also argued that ideologically packed districts should be called 'fair districts' and admits that his stance on competitive elections makes him something of an outlier among political scientists, who largely support competitive elections."

Brunell is a registered Republican and has testified on behalf of Republican redistricting efforts in North Carolina, Alabama, South Dakota, South Carolina and New Mexico. In Ohio, Brunell testified against the extension of early voting saying it "takes away from Election Day as a civic event." He has also criticized the statistical adjustments that the Census Bureau makes in order to more accurately count groups, usually minorities, that are known to under-respond to the census.

The position Brunell is rumored to get is the deputy director of the Census Bureau and he would be responsible for the actual operational effort to run the 2020 census. That census will determine the redistricting that will remain in place for the next decade. As operational director, Brunell could make decisions that would seriously impact the effectiveness of the census. That includes cutting back on advertising, as the Trump administration has already done with Obamacare, or adding a question about citizenship on the long form which would result in fewer minority responses, or even tweaking or eliminating the statistical adjustments. The Trump administration and Republicans have already been accused of underfunding and undermining the 2020 census. Of course, all these efforts are solely directed at limiting the counting of minorities, traditional Democratic voters.

Worse, Brunell was floated as Trump's choice as Census Director earlier this year but his nomination never occurred because of pushback from Congress. The position of Census Director requires Congressional approval, while the deputy director position is a straight Presidential appointment that does not. So Trump, having been rebuffed by Congress, may decide to simply appoint an originally unacceptable candidate to a position which arguably has even more control of the 2020 census. As one census watchdog says about the potential Brunell appointment, "If true, it signals an effort by the administration to politicize the census." What a surprise.

Meanwhile, lost in the current Republican effort to enact what they call "tax reform" but what really would be the greatest transfer of wealth to the top 1% in American history is another goodie that will open up even greater opportunities for the governing group of plutocrats like the Mercers and the Kochs to even further dominate our elections.

The House tax bill has an explicit provision that rolls back the so-called Johnson amendment which restricts 501(c)3 tax-exempt organizations such as churches and charities from endorsing and politicking for specific candidates. The new House provision would allow these organizations to retain their tax-exempt status as long as their politicking occurred "in the ordinary course of the organization’s regular and customary activities in carrying out its exempt purpose", a meaningless and virtually unenforceable restriction. The rollback is something that evangelical Christian groups have been seeking for decades.

As the Post reports, this ruling provides an even greater opportunity for rich donors to now funnel their millions into political contributions with the added benefit of being able to hide the source and even amounts of those donations while receiving a tax break for doing so. "Today, so-called super PACs are a massive force in politics, spending more than $1 billion in the 2016 election cycle. Such super PAC donations must be disclosed to the Federal Election Commission and are not tax-deductible. What if these donors are tempted to give their money to a 501(c)3 organization that beckons with a tax deduction and no disclosure? The givers won’t hold back. Churches and church-affiliated groups generally don’t even have to file IRS returns, so there will be no information about who these contributors are. Other 501(c)3 groups do file, but the donors are not disclosed to the public. The politicized churches, charities and foundations could become the latest vessels for dark-money politics."

If you want to see the perniciousness of the dark money and non-profits, take a look at what happened to Merrick Garland. One anonymous donor gave over $28 million to the Wellspring Committee, a Virginia-based nonprofit, which in turn donated $23 million to the Judicial Crisis Network, which in turn spent over $7 million to block Merrick Garland from getting his rightful place on the Supreme Court and another $10 million dollars pushing the awful Neil Gorsuch in his place.

Voting rights advocates did, however, get some good news out of the state of Michigan. In that state, an all-volunteer effort has managed to get over 400,000 signatures, 85,000 more than the minimum required, in order to get an initiative on the ballot that would change the state constitution to have the redistricting process controlled by an independent commission, as opposed to being handled by the governor and the legislature as is done today. Under the proposal, the redistricting commission would consist of four Republicans, four Democrats, and five independent members drawn at random. In addition, "The panel would be prohibited from providing a 'disproportionate advantage' to a political party, using 'accepted measures of partisan fairness.'" Of course, getting on the ballot is just the first step. Getting it passed is an entirely separate matter.

Michigan is one of the most gerrymandered states. In the 2016 elections, Democrats won 50% of the vote but only ended up with 43% of the seats in the state House, one of the highest efficiency gaps in the nation. As one supporter noted, the ballot initiative "The idea that voters should choose their politicians instead of the other way around is pretty straightforward." That may seem straightforward but not to a certain party that relies on extreme gerrymandering to remain in power.

While the Michigan story is certainly heartening, the real short-term answer to extreme gerrymandering must come from the Supreme Court, which is hearing a case out of Wisconsin where gerrymandering creates results that largely replicate the results in Michigan. The longer-term solution is a radical restructuring of our whole electoral system, beyond just restoration of voting rights and elimination of gerrymandering but also attacking the structural problems with the composition of the Senate and the Electoral College. That process will probably take a generation, (or a revolution), but it can only begin when we all realize that our democracy is larger than partisan politics. Based on the current environment, it's hard to be optimistic about that happening.

The Majority Of The US Lives Under The Tyranny Of Two Minorities

Thomas Edsall did a deeper dive into the exit polling of the 2016 election and discovered, unsurprisingly, that the areas that Trump did best were what Edsall calls "ultra-white" districts. And Trump did even better in districts that were ultra-white but had received a small influx of minorities since the 2012 election.

The graph below shows just how much better Trump did in the ultra-white districts in the swing states of the Midwest, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

Basically, in municipalities that were over 90% white, Trump overwhelmed Romney's 2012 total. As Alan Berube says, "Trump got a particular boost from small, overwhelmingly white communities threatened not only by real forces of technological change and trade, but also by the specter of immigrants and other nonwhites making gains at their expense in America’s economy and society." Ironically, these districts were "communities arguably most insulated from urban crime, immigration and gangs" but were also strongly swayed by Trump's message of America being flooded by hordes of illegal immigrants and terrorists and being lost to gangs of African-American thugs and Sharia law.

You can stretch to make a case that these results reflect "economic anxiety" as these districts are getting poorer and losing population but, even accepting that, it is clear the real anxiety is more that immigrants and minorities are getting ahead and these whites are being left behind. That anxiety is perfectly encapsulated in the myth of the "Obama phone". In other words, there is a substantial racial component to these results.

These ultra-white districts reflect the base of Trump's supporters. As I wrote last year, however, they are a minority that truly believes they are a majority. And they believe that the voice that Trump gave to their racism and xenophobia and allowed them to vocalize those same feelings themselves is what a majority of the country also believes. As Michael Grunwald wrote last year, "Again and again, Trump supporters told me they appreciated the way he was fighting the forces of political correctness, standing up for their right to primal-scream what they believe about immigrants and terrorists and Black Lives Matter thugs."

We keep on forgetting that Trump only won 46% of the total vote and only became President due to the anachronism of the Electoral College and the unprecedented interference of James Comey. Reporters keep on focusing on Trump's base and reporting from places that supposedly reflect that base like Johnstown, Pennsylvania (that actually went for Hillary Clinton by a small margin). But these ultra-white districts are a distinct minority and, as Edsall notes, a minority that is shrinking. When Edsall writes that these districts represent the "the last gasp of white hegemony" and "the last gasp of a small fraction of the electorate set the nation on such a dangerous and destructive course", he is echoing what I wrote last year, namely, "The Trump campaign is a primal scream, the last gasp from a segment of the country that is seeing its place of privilege disappear once and for all".

The fact that this may be the last gasp of white hegemony may encourage Democrats in the longer term. But, for now, as we see with Roy Moore in Alabama, Democrats will never win these votes because the party is viewed as the defender of minorities and their rights. More importantly, it is a disaster in the short term. Trump is only interested in satisfying his base. Almost every policy is designed to shore up his base or, worse, targets Democratic voters. The rolling back of regulations on coal, the virtual ethnic cleansing being performed by ICE, the backing out of TPP, the neglect of Puerto Rico, today's outrageous emergency funding request that completely ignores California, and his attacks on the media and black sports figures, and so much more are solely designed to keep Trump's base motivated.

Meanwhile, the plutocrats that actually fund and direct the Republican Congressional majority, which itself is in place due to voter suppression, extreme gerrymandering, and the small-state bias of the Senate, are only too happy to let Trump keep the base happy while they go about the greatest transfer of wealth to the top 1% in the history of our nation and cement an oligarchic kleptocracy in place. And if that entails punishing Democratic voters with this tax bill by removing state and local deductions and other measures, then that's even better.

This is the tyranny of the two minorities we live under. One is the minority of white Republicans that refuse to lose their place of privilege and managed to squeak Trump into office. The other minority is the plutocratic class that sees the looming demographic and political shift that Edsall describes and is determined to cement their oligarchic kleptocracy in place by destroying the safety net, health care, education, and the middle class in order to create an almost feudal state where capital owners live a luxurious life of privilege reaping the rewards of workers who just scrape by for a living. All the while, the majority of Americans will suffer.