Observations on current events

Cadenced team-wide activities can be highly effective in-person. For day-to-day activities, many of us have experienced how essential a remote-aware collaborative approach is for multi-site operations, in Software Development & DevOps in particular. Getting executive leadership to admit their previous policies, including accompanying long-term real estate investments, were an appropriate idea at one time but no longer, can be an exercise in futility. Emitting carbon to attend an office where one's main task is to collaborate virtually with others in remote offices creates a larger than necessary carbon footprint that every business should be accountable for. "I pay you enough to drive here" was what I heard once.

AP NEWS: Trump has long blasted China’s trade practices. His ‘God Bless the USA’ Bibles were printed there
"By RICHARD LARDNER and DAKE KANG Updated 8:25 AM MDT, October 9, 2024 WASHINGTON (AP) — Thousands of copies of Donald Trump’s “God Bless the USA” Bible were printed in a country that the former president has repeatedly accused of stealing American jobs and engaging in unfair trade practices — China. Global trade records reviewed by The Associated Press show a printing company in China’s eastern city of Hangzhou shipped close to 120,000 of the Bibles to the United States between early February and late March. The estimated value of the three separate shipments was $342,000, or less than $3 per Bible, according to databases that use customs data to track exports and imports. The minimum price for the Trump-backed Bible is $59.99, putting the potential sales revenue at about $7 million. The Trump Bible’s connection to China, which has not been previously reported, reveals a deep divide between the former president’s harsh anti-China rhetoric and his rush to cash in while campaigning. The Trump campaign did not respond to emails and calls seeking comment..."




Where Is Our Freedom From Religion

When a former Evangelical insider feels the duty to warn, we should listen. This agenda ought to be discussed at every American kitchen table and understood for what it really is.

(Video) Frank Schaeffer: Duty to Warn: May I Tell You Who Mike Johnson Really Is?

Wayne O'Leary: The Real Inflation

"As 2022 draws to a close, the year’s primary political concern (policywise) seems to be easing. Inflation in the US, which was 5.4% in September 2021, peaked at 9.1% this past June and has since drifted down to 7.1% as of early December.
What economists like to call “core inflation”; that is, the inflation level absent food and energy costs, has lessened, yet only to a degree. Gasoline prices, which fueled last summer’s dramatic upsurge, have moderated, but food prices have not. This means average Americans can now drive to the grocery store, but may not be able to afford much when they get there. And 7.1% inflation, no matter how you slice it, is still burdensome in the extreme for those without hefty incomes.
The Federal Reserve Board, chaired by Trump appointee Jerome H. Powell, who was inexplicably reappointed (2021) by Joe Biden, has the answer. In homage to his celebrated predecessor and hero from the 1980s, Powell plans to go the full Volcker if necessary, wrestling inflation to the ground with high interest rates, no matter the collateral damage. On Paul Volcker’s watch (1979-87) that meant a 20% prime rate and 10% unemployment — to the delight of the big Wall Street banks, which prospered as never before through foreign investment.
At year’s end, Powell, bolstered by a 4 to 3 Republican majority at the Fed (three, including himself, installed by Donald Trump), had raised federal interest rates seven times in 2022, from 0% to 4.5% — not quite Volcker territory, but the most abrupt upward adjustment in 40 years and the highest level in a generation. He’s expected to raise that to 5.1% in early 2023 and not consider a downward revision until late 2023 or 2024 at the earliest.
Powell’s recent public pronouncements reveal his inflexible mindset. “It is premature to think about pausing,” he commented on his current rate offensive in early November. “We will keep at it until we are confident the job is done.” Restoring price stability would require “holding policy at a restrictive level for some time,” the Fed chairman admitted shortly afterward.
Chairman Powell also knows where the specific inflation problem lies. As a Republican in good standing, he shares his party’s bias in favor of limiting wage growth. At the Fed’s December meeting, the chairman pointed accusingly at the upward trend in labor income that was frustrating the Fed’s goal of 2% annual inflation by presumably stimulating consumer spending. In this, he was joined by other conservative Fed officials.
Letting slip a seldom acknowledged capitalist secret, Powell then elaborated that employers, if pressured to pay higher wages and benefits, would pass those labor costs on in the form of higher (read: inflationary) prices. Inconveniently for the chairman, this observation flew in the face of an International Monetary Fund (IMF) finding (as reported in The Economist, 10/22/22) that wage growth, now and historically, has not kept up with inflation, negating perennial fears of wage-price spirals. Instead, the IMF calculated, roughly half of annual inflation for 2021 was due to disruptions in production and higher commodity prices, with government stimulus spending a distant second.
At one fell swoop, the IMF thereby decimated the two most hoary right-wing beliefs about what causes inflation: (1) the Fed’s rising-wages bugaboo (shared by Wall Street) and (2) the Republican Party’s specter of runaway federal spending. In the process, it also undermined the GOP’s proposed anti-inflation program outlined in the 2022 midterm campaign: cutting taxes and shrinking government...

What, then, is the source of persistent inflation? Basically, it’s capitalism operating as it usually does, given the opportunity. Business is continuing to raise prices because, in an era of lax regulation, it can. Cal-Berkeley historian Christopher W. Shaw, whose April 2020 article in Harper’s revealed the Fed’s feet of clay regarding monetary policy, enumerated existing alternatives to using recessionary interest-rate hikes to control inflation: taxes, price controls, wage guidelines, voluntary reductions in consumption — to which could be added antitrust actions. All, regrettably, are out of favor in modern America.
So, for example, we’re presented with such developments as US food prices rising 13% over the 12 months ending November 2022, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Such price boosts naturally translate into profits, which rose for America’s corporate sector as a whole by a record 35% in 2021, with profit margins at their widest since 1950. One iconic US firm, Coca-Cola, reported profits up 14% last October compared to October 2021, a surge it unashamedly credited to its price increases.
The rationale for these extravagant returns is invariably explained as the complex structural nature of the companies’ far-flung trading markets. Oil and grain prices, in particular, are said to be ungovernable, quite beyond the understanding of outsiders. Domestic shortages and price volatility are an unavoidable result of the workings of sensitive arcane market mechanisms; they must be tolerated. In actuality, US corporations could easily satisfy the needs of their domestic markets without “supply-chain disruptions” and profiteering; they prefer instead to market their wares wherever and however they can get top dollar...."


Thom Hartmann: What the Final Stage of Reaganism Looks Like

"Back in 1981, when Ronald Reagan was sworn in and implicitly promised to destroy our government because it was “the problem,” many of us who strongly opposed him wondered what the final stage of Reaganism would look like.
Now we know. We’re there.

Violence toward women and minorities has exploded. Armed militias tried to assassinate the Vice President and Speaker of the House in an attempted coup directed by the Republican President of the United States. They tried to kidnap and murder the Democratic governor of Michigan. They’re blowing up power substations from Oregon to the Carolinas. They’ve embedded themselves in DHS, police departments, and our military. They’re coordinating with fascists overseas.
Leading up to this moment was a 41-year political war that splattered the American Dream like gut-shot blood across a dystopian Republican hellscape mural.
Reaganism brought us:
— the collapse of the middle class;
— student and medical debt that’s impossible to climb out of;
— an explosion of predation from health insurance companies and for-profit hospitals;
— political manipulation by corporations and billionaires;
— an explosion of homelessness and untreated mental illness;
— and turned our elementary schools into killing fields.
The question today is whether we as a nation and a people will recover from it, or if it will, as Reagan promised on January 20, 1981, end the American experiment of pluralistic liberal democracy.
The seeds of Reaganism were planted in 1972 when President Nixon put tobacco lawyer Lewis Powell on the US Supreme Court.
Powell had written his infamous “Memo” a year earlier, arguing that corporate America and the morbidly rich needed to join forces to wrest back control of America after forty years of FDR’s New Deal had empowered middle class union workers, consumers, and environmentalists..."

ProPublica: How a Secretive Billionaire Handed His Fortune to the Architect of the Right-Wing Takeover of the Courts

"In the largest known political advocacy donation in U.S. history, industrialist Barre Seid funded a new group run by Federalist Society co-chair Leonard Leo, who guided Trump’s Supreme Court picks and helped end federal abortion rights..."

Judith Enck and Jan Dell: Plastic Recycling Doesn’t Work and Will Never Work
"If the plastics industry is following the tobacco industry’s playbook, it may never admit to the failure of plastics recycling... ...Americans support recycling. We do too. But although some materials can be effectively recycled and safely made from recycled content, plastics cannot. Plastic recycling does not work and will never work. The United States in 2021 had a dismal recycling rate of about 5 percent for post-consumer plastic waste, down from a high of 9.5 percent in 2014, when the U.S. exported millions of tons of plastic waste to China and counted it as recycled—even though much of it wasn’t.
Recycling in general can be an effective way to reclaim natural material resources. The U.S.’s high recycling rate of paper, 68 percent, proves this point. The problem with recycling plastic lies not with the concept or process but with the material itself.
The first problem is that there are thousands of different plastics, each with its own composition and characteristics. They all include different chemical additives and colorants that cannot be recycled together, making it impossible to sort the trillions of pieces of plastics into separate types for processing..."

France24: China and QAnon embrace Russian disinformation justifying war in Ukraine

"As Russia's attack on Ukraine enters a third week, Russia's deputy ambassador to the UN, Dmitri Polianski, convened the Security Council on Friday to raise the issue of the "biological activities” of the US military in Ukraine.
Polianski accused Washington of developing biological weapons in research laboratories throughout the country. Earlier this week, Russia's defense ministry said there was a network of US-funded biolaboratories in Ukraine working on establishing a mechanism "for the covert transmission of deadly pathogens" and conducting experiments with bat coronavirus samples. Russia claimed this was being done under the auspices of the US Department of Defense and was part of a US biological weapons programme.
On unregulated social media platforms – including Telegram and 8chan – this conspiracy theory has become incredibly popular, racking up hundreds of thousands of hits each day.
This is not the first time since the beginning of the war in Ukraine that Moscow has put this far-fetched theory on the table. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in early March that he had proof that "the Pentagon has developed pathogens in two military laboratories in Ukraine"..."

Robert Kuttner: Inflation and Price-Gouging - The case for an excess profits tax

"The Prospect’s special issue on the supply chain debacle should demolish the fable that the current inflation reflects too much stimulus. As we report, most supply and price pressure is the delayed result of deregulation and concentration of the global logistics system combined with far too much offshoring. It took only a crisis like COVID to expose the system’s fragility.
Want more evidence? Have a look at Europe. Inflation in the EU, which has nothing like the stimulus program of the U.S., clocked in at 5 percent for 2021, the highest in decades.
This statistic understates Europe’s true consumer inflation because Germany, the EU’s largest economy, cut value-added taxes for six months in July 2021, lowering net prices to consumers. Without that cut, the increase in consumer prices would have been even higher.
In 2020, the U.S. deficit was 15.2 percent of GDP. Europe’s was less than half that, at 7.2 percent. In 2021, as the recovery kicked in, the U.S. deficit fell to 12.4 percent. Europe’s budget deficit slightly increased, because its recovery was weaker.
In short, despite very different stimulus policies, Europe and the U.S. are experiencing similar price pressures due to supply shocks. And one result that adds to the inflation is opportunistic price hikes and excess profits.
The big investment banks booked record profits in 2021. Likewise the platform monopolies. Amazon just reported profits of $14.3 billion on the fourth quarter alone, double its fourth-quarter profits of 2020.
On an earnings call with Wall Street analysts this morning, the meat giant Tyson reported earnings per share up by 50 percent over last year, driven by price increases of 32 percent in beef, 20 percent in chicken, and 13 percent in pork. These price hikes to consumers go neither to farmers nor to supermarkets but to giant monopoly middlemen like Tyson.
Ocean shippers have quintupled their rates, and booked astronomical returns of $150 billion in 2021, up from $25 billion in 2020. This price-gouging reflects the extreme economic concentration that has resulted from deregulation coupled with a four-decade failure to enforce the antitrust laws. All of this comes at the expense of consumers and of workers whose nominal pay is up but in most cases lags behind price hikes.
So COVID has been a grotesque bonanza for America’s most concentrated industries. The long-term cure for the supply crunch is drastic re-regulation of the global logistics system, as well as rebuilding domestic manufacturing and supply. The Biden administration’s antitrust crackdown will also help reduce pricing power.
In the meantime, we need an excess profits tax, to tax away the opportunistic price hikes, just as we did in World War II. Profits that exceeded a normal rate of return, based on several pre-pandemic years, would be subject to a much higher rate of tax.
This idea will both spotlight the real source of the inflation and help pay for the domestic industrial policy that we need to prevent future supply shocks. Even if it’s not enacted, Biden should propose it."

Robert Reich: The true meaning of 6 January: we must answer Trump’s neofascism with hope

"6 January will be the first anniversary one of the most shameful days in American history. On that date in 2021, the United States Capitol was attacked by thousands of armed loyalists to Donald Trump, some intent on killing members of Congress. About 140 officers were injured. Five people died. Trump speaking to supporters near the White House on 6 January. Capitol panel to investigate Trump call to Willard hotel in hours before attack Read more Even now, almost a year later, Americans remain confused and divided about the significance of what occurred. Let me offer four basic truths:

1. Trump incited the attack on the Capitol For weeks before the attack, Trump urged supporters to come to Washington for a “Save America March” on 6 January, when Congress was to ceremonially count the electoral votes of Joe Biden’s win. “Big protest in DC on 6 January. Be there, will be wild!” he tweeted on 19 December. Then on 26 December: “See you in Washington DC on 6 January. Don’t miss it. Information to follow.” On 30 December: “JANUARY SIXTH, SEE YOU IN DC!” On 1 January: “The BIG Protest Rally in Washington DC will take place at 11am on 6 January. Locational details to follow. StopTheSteal!” At a rally just before the violence, Trump repeated his falsehoods about how the election was stolen...


...2. The events of 6 January capped two months during which Trump sought to reverse the outcome of the election Shortly after the election, Trump summoned to the White House Republican lawmakers from Pennsylvania and Michigan, to inquire about how they might alter election results. He even called two local canvassing board officials in Wayne county, Michigan’s most populous county and one that overwhelmingly favored Biden. He asked Georgia’s Republican secretary of state to “find 11,780 votes”, according to a recording of that conversation, adding: “The people of Georgia are angry, the people of the country are angry. And there’s nothing wrong with saying that, you know, um, that you’ve recalculated.” He suggested that the secretary of state would be criminally prosecuted if he did not do as Trump told him: “You know what they did and you’re not reporting it. You know, that’s a criminal – that’s a criminal offense. And you know, you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you and to Ryan, your lawyer. That’s a big risk.” He pressed the acting US attorney general and deputy attorney general to declare the election fraudulent. When the deputy said the department had found no evidence of widespread fraud and warned that it had no power to change the outcome of the election, Trump replied: “Just say that the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me” and his congressional allies.


...3. Trump’s attempted coup continues Trump still refuses to concede the election and continues to say it was stolen. He presides over a network of loyalists and allies who have sought to overturn the election (and erode public confidence in it) by mounting partisan state “audits” and escalating attacks on state election officials. When asked recently about the fraudulent claims and increasingly incendiary rhetoric, a Trump spokesperson said the former president “supports any patriotic American who dedicates their time and effort to exposing the rigged 2020 presidential election”. Last week, Trump announced he will be hosting a news conference at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida on 6 January. “Remember,” he said, “the insurrection took place on 3 November. It was the completely unarmed protest of the rigged election that took place on 6 January.” (Reminder: they were armed.)


...4. All of this exposes a deeper problem with which America must deal Trump and his co-conspirators must be held accountable, of course. Hopefully, the select committee’s report will be used by the justice department in criminal prosecutions of Trump and his accomplices. But this in itself will not solve the underlying problem: a belligerent and narcissistic authoritarian has gained a powerful hold over a large portion of America. As many as 60% of Republican voters continue to believe his lies. Many remain intensely loyal. The Republican party is close to becoming a cult whose central animating idea is that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.


...The anger Trump has channeled is more closely connected to a profound loss of identity, dignity and purpose, especially among Americans who have been left behind – without college degrees, without good jobs, in places that have been hollowed out, economically abandoned, and disdained by much of the rest of the country. Trump filled a void in a part of America that continues to yearn for a strongman who will deliver it from despair. A similar void haunts other nations where democracy is imperiled. The challenge ahead for the US as elsewhere is to fill that void with hope rather than neofascism. This is the real meaning of 6 January."

Jaron Lanier delivers the Willy Brandt Lecture 2018 on December 10 in Berlin,
followed by a Q&A with Ulrich Kelber, German Federal Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information (Jan 2019).

Dorothy Thompson: Who Goes Nazi?

"It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi. By now, I think I know. I have gone through the experience many times—in Germany, in Austria, and in France. I have come to know the types: the born Nazis, the Nazis whom democracy itself has created, the certain-to-be fellow-travelers. And I also know those who never, under any conceivable circumstances, would become Nazis..."

NPR: Two Fox News commentators resign over Tucker Carlson series on the Jan. 6 siege

"Two longtime conservative Fox News commentators have resigned in protest of what they call a pattern of incendiary and fabricated claims by the network's opinion hosts in support of former President Donald Trump.
In separate interviews with NPR, Stephen Hayes and Jonah Goldberg pointed to a breaking point earlier this month: network star Tucker Carlson's three-part series on the Jan. 6 siege of the U.S. Capitol that relied on fabrications and conspiracy theories to exonerate the Trump supporters who participated in the attack.
"It's basically saying that the Biden regime is coming after half the country and this is the War on Terror 2.0," Goldberg tells NPR. "It traffics in all manner of innuendo and conspiracy theories that I think legitimately could lead to violence. That for me, and for Steve, was the last straw."
Hayes has been a close friend of Fox News political anchor Bret Baier since their college days at DePauw University; both he and Goldberg were mainstays of Baier's Special Report since joining the network in 2009. Together, Hayes and Goldberg co-founded the conservative news site The Dispatch.
According to five people with direct knowledge, the resignations reflect larger tumult within Fox News over Carlson's series "Patriot Purge" and his increasingly strident stances, and over the network's willingness to let its opinion stars make false, paranoid claims against President Biden, his administration and his supporters..."

Greg Palast: Smoking Gun for Impeachment: Proof Trump’s Call to March on Capitol was a Crime

"Here is the smoking gun.
Trump’s GOP defenders say that Trump merely called for a march to the Capitol, a legal act of protest.
Except for this: it wasn’t legal. And Trump and his team knew it.

During Wednesday’s trial, House impeachment manager Rep. Stacey Plaskett (D-VI) laid out the evidence the Palast investigative team first broke in Consortium News and on the Thom Hartmann Program: The sponsors of the January 6 rally at the Ellipse repeatedly promised, in writing, there would be no march on the Capitol...

...On January 5, the night before the riot, two participants foolishly posted (in posts since removed, but recorded) that they were meeting at Trump’s personal residence at his DC hotel with top Trump strategists about the next day’s events. The group included notably, Eric and Donald Trump Jr. Both would speak at the rally the next day.
Crucially, during the meeting Don Jr.’s girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle called Ali Alexander—who’d been calling for a “Stop the Steal” march from the rally despite admonitions from the rally organizers that it would be illegal and dangerous. We’ve previously reported on Alexander’s threats of violence to overturn the election [“We’ll light the whole sh*t on fire!”]. Guilfoyle gave Alexander the go-ahead. And indeed, Alexander was escorted by White House emissaries to a place just outside the rally to lead the march—which he did. It is not minor that neither Trump, nor the White House, nor Trump fils told the organizers that Trump would issue a call to march. The permit holders, Women for America First, told this reporter that both the White House and Alexander had been warned repeatedly against attempting the uncontrolled march. The point is simple: when you promote an illegal action—exhorting an angry, armed mob to head to the Capitol, you are legally liable for its foreseeable outcome even if you did not plan nor endorse the outcome. When a law is broken and someone ends up dead, that’s murder. Trump knows that. In December, Trump proudly authorized the execution of Brandon Bernard. Bernard was 18 years old when his friends killed two people in a robbery in which he took part. The kid had no idea the couple would be killed, but joining in an illegal act which led to death, put him in the electric chair..."

Bob Burnett: Whatever Happened to Personal Responsibility?

"It may be hard to imagine but, a couple of decades ago, Republicans described themselves as “the Party of personal responsibility.” The Grand Old Party imagined itself as the party of rugged individualists, folks who clawed their way to the top with an unstoppable combination of ambition, perseverance, and moral rectitude. Republicans claimed the moral high ground. No more.
In the last year, we’ve seen Donald Trump, and his Republican cohorts, dodge responsibility for the coronavirus pandemic and for the Jan. 6 insurrection. Each of these actions was shameful and should be sufficient to tarnish the GOP for decades..."


Dick Polman: John Boehner reminds us Republicans lived in 'Crazytown' long before Trump

" It’s not exactly news that Boehner feels this way – he quit in 2015 because he was sick of all the “morons” (again, his word) – but an excerpt from his book, posted the other day, vividly refutes the lazy and widely mistaken belief that it was Trump who drove the party into a ditch. Truth is, the party was already there – stewing in racism, anger, and grievance – when Trump trudged onto the scene and turned the brush fires into a bonfire.
This scorching passage, from Boehner’s book, says it all:

“In the 2010 midterm election, voters from all over the place gave President Obama what he himself called ‘a shellacking.’ And oh boy, was it ever. You could be a total moron and get elected just by having an R next to your name – and that year, by the way, we did pick up a fair number in that category … I felt I owed them a little tutorial on governing. I had to explain how to actually get things done. A lot of that went straight through the ears of most of them, especially the ones who didn’t have brains that got in the way … You could tell they weren’t paying attention because they were just thinking of how to fundraise off of outrage or how they could get on Hannity that night.”

That was 11 years ago – long before the advent of Marjorie Taylor Greene and the other Trump demon spawn. Greene doesn’t care that she was recently kicked off a House committee, because she thinks that legislating is boring anyway, and she just wants to focus on her performative propaganda. That’s not new behavior. As Boehner writes about the tea party class of 2010, “They didn’t really want legislative victories. They wanted wedge issues and conspiracies and crusades.”

Indeed, Boehner writes, their “Crazytown” was built on a solid foundation of hatred: “This new crowd hated – and I mean hated – Barack Obama.”

(Gee, I wonder why. And no wonder a failed casino operator got so much mileage from his birther lies.)

It’s nice indeed that Boehner is calling out the “crap” he had to deal with, but we should also remember that he too occasionally indulged in it. One of the racist dog whistles about Obama was that he was a secret Muslim. When Boehner appeared on Meet the Press in February 2011, he was specifically asked about that pejorative lie: “As the speaker of the House, do you not think it’s your responsibility to stand up to that kind of ignorance?”

Boehner’s answer: “It’s not my job to tell the American people what to think …The American people have the right to think what they want to think. I can’t – it’s not my job to tell them.” Not exactly a profile in courage. Especially when we remember ( I do, anyway) that Boehner at that time was trying very hard to tell the American people what to think about Obamacare – that it was a job-killing train wreck catastrophe. But apparently he didn’t think it was his duty to enlighten the “morons” about the president’s Christian faith.

So Boehner’s hands are not totally clean when he writes that “by 2011, the right-wing propaganda nuts had managed to turn Obama into a toxic brand for conservatives…spreading dangerous nonsense like they did every day about Obama.”"

Juan Cole: We Could Have Greened Half the US Electrical Grid With $2.26 Wasted on Afghan War

Much of the money spent in Afghanistan was wasted and disappeared into a fog of corruption.

Thom Hartmann - It's Time To Roll Back Reagan's Middle-Class Tax Increases!

"It’s time for some middle-class tax breaks. Reagan did such a great job selling tax cuts as a good thing that now Democrats should pick up some of that slack.
The money you receive when you retire or become disabled and begin to draw Social Security is money that you already paid in, in large part, through your working life. Therefore, when Franklin Roosevelt passed the Social Security act in 1935, the money people got from Social Security was not taxable and not even tracked by the IRS.
When Congress passed legislation enacting unemployment benefits, they also established a trust fund that employees, through money their employers could have paid them in other benefits, pay into throughout their working years.
Most workers never use this fund, but those who do are simply receiving what they already, indirectly, have paid into the system to create a safety net that will catch people so they don’t fall too hard or too far when they lose their jobs. Because this money was usually deducted from people’s income before wages were calculated, unemployment benefits were also not taxable and not reported to the IRS.
People who work in jobs where they receive tips rarely have their own back office accounting system to daily keep track of those tips and report them to the IRS, and, besides that, those tips are actually gratuities rather than income and are wildly variable. As a result, for most of the history of the United States tips (although technically taxable) were not reported to the IRS.
Back in 1981, Reagan passed the biggest tax cut for billionaires and giant corporations in the history of the world, lowering the top rate from around 74% to around 28% and shoveling, in today’s money, trillions to the top 1%.
The result was an explosion in the budget deficit the following year, so Reagan decided something had to be done, requiring the largest tax increases since World War II. But, being a Republican, he put it almost entirely on the shoulders of working people, unemployed people and those receiving Social Security.
Reagan and his Republicans decided that people on Social Security should pay income taxes on Social Security benefits as if they were still working and not retired or disabled.
Tips, he and his GOP buddies figured, were actually part of “wages” even though employers didn’t have to bother paying them, and therefore forced employers to begin counting and reporting tips, and made sure the minimum wage stayed around two bucks an hour and the IRS could now come after tipped employees.
And people on unemployment, Reagan decided, would have to give back to the IRS some of the money they received out of the unemployment trust funds that they, themselves, had paid into throughout their working lives through their employer’s payments.
He also raised taxes substantially on working-class people who still had regular jobs..."

April Short: COVID-10 Has Exposed the Fragility of Our Food System — Here's How We Can Legalize It

"The US was once a haven for small-scale, family farmers. Today, food giants have gobbled up most of those family farms, creating the monstrous and unsustainable food industry known as Big Ag. The extent to which this massive, industrialized, global food system falls short became especially unmistakable in 2020. The current food system is “fraying.” It relies on the horrendous treatment of laborers, a wasteful allocation of resources, worldwide environmental devastation — and in a pinch, can quickly devolve into near-collapse of the entire system, as evidenced by the delays, shortages and pressure during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the deepening hunger crisis in America. Among the many necessary systemic changes 2020 has illuminated is the need to majorly restructure the way we cultivate and access food in our communities. Faced with the shortcomings of the current food systems, food producers across the Pacific Northwest have been innovating ways to reestablish locally sourced, regional food systems. In the process of localizing the food supply chain, they aim to establish food security for their communities, create local jobs and support the surrounding ecosystems. During a free, online event called Festival of What Works, which took place in November 2020, entrepreneurs from an array of backgrounds shared their success stories to demonstrate how it is possible to build and scale local food production across geography as well as institutions and create more food-secure communities. The festival was a project of a newly launched eco-trust network called Salmon Nation. It gathered a collection of voices from various cultures and focuses, to showcase solution-oriented projects from Northern California through Alaska (a region called “Salmon Nation” by many of the area’s Indigenous people) that offer place-based responses to the current political, economic and climate realities. Here are three examples of localized food projects successfully challenging the current system—all of which lend themselves to replication in other areas.

1. Localizing Flour Mills Across a Region When food giants wiped out family farmers, mills were no exception. Just about 120 years ago there were 24,000 mills in the United States. Today there are only 180..."

...
2. A Regenerative Way to Farm Chickens
An innovative chicken farming model in British Columbia could help pave the way for a new standard of poultry farming that is regenerative and solar-powered. The system is referred to as poultry-centered regenerative agriculture (PCRA), and Skeena Energy Solutions (SES), a project started by the Skeena Watershed Conservation Coalition (SWCC), is putting it into action. It has 1,500 chickens living in sustainably built, solar-powered coops, with free range to wander during the day under a low canopy of brush, which encourages increased egg production and healthier birds while also fertilizing and replenishing the soil where the birds graze.
“Canopy is really important as we discovered because chickens are jungle fowl, [not pasture animals],” says Kesia Nagata, energy coordinator for SWCC. She notes that even if poultry farms are free-range, but the range does not have a covering canopy to allow chickens to hide from potential predators, chickens’ wandering range will stay limited.
The regenerative poultry model gives the birds free access to rotating, fenced grazing areas. Rotating the area where the birds graze allows chickens to fertilize and nourish the soil while avoiding damage to the land by overuse, Nagata explains. The chickens are given locally grown feed from small-scale producers, and the project has hired local workers, the majority of them Indigenous people, who are paid living wages...
...
3. Sustainable Livestock Ranching
The American meat industry is unsustainable, and beef alone carries a significant carbon footprint. During the Food Democracy at Scalepanel discussion at the Festival of What Works, Cory Carman, a fourth-generation cattle rancher, shared how and why she operates Carman Ranch, which is spread across 5,000 acres, as a sustainable, grass-fed, locally oriented meat business..."

Middle East & Nukes:

Juan Cole: Israeli Official: “World should thank Israel” for murdering Iranian Scientist; CIA’s Brennan: “Act of state-sponsored terrorism”

"An unnamed Israeli official told the New York Times on Sunday, “the world should thank Israel” for killing Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh. I don’t guess I’m thanking Israel for committing a flagrant act of terrorism. If Israel can murder a scientist in Iran, what is to stop it from murdering people it doesn’t like in other countries, including in the United States?...
...By destroying the [JCPOA] treaty, Trump has left Iran free to enrich to higher levels, with more and better centrifuges than the treaty had allowed.
Israeli officials at least say that they do not accept this firm international consensus, and want to destroy the JCPOA because they hold it provides cover for a secret Iranian weapons program. This is no doubt a guilt complex speaking, since Israel has dozens of atomic bombs that it made clandestinely while promising Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon that they would never do such a thing. The difference is that the UN inspection regime in the JCPOA is rigorous, and no country under its inspections has ever developed a nuclear bomb. Israel on the other hand never accepted inspections, and so was free to make its deadly arsenal.
By going nuclear, Israel started an arms race in the Middle East that has cost the United States trillions of dollars. Iraq’s 1980s nuclear enrichment program was in response to the Israeli Bomb, and that Iraq so much as did those (failed) experiments helped lead to the disastrous 2003 Bush invasion and occupation of Iraq. Now we are going around about Iran and could well end up at war with it, a war Israel is goading Washington on to..."


2020 Election Aftermath:

Thom Hartmann: Why America's Survival Depends on Bankrupting the Republican Party

"It’s time to defund the GOP, and there’s precedent and strategy for the effort. nnThe need to cut the party’s access to both private and government money is seen in the reaction by some extremist Republicans to news like a New York State lawmaker’s proposal to make vaccination against COVID-19 mandatory. Predictably, the far right is freaking out. “Freedom!” they scream as they run around maskless, assaulting their fellow citizens with potentially virus-laden breath.
Large parts of the Republican base now join conspiracists in the misguided belief that vaccine manufacturers are participating in mind-control experiments and that public health measures like masks are “un-American,” while we’re being sickened and dying from the highest rates of COVID-19 infection and death in the developed world.
Republicans on the Supreme Court even say the founders of our republic and the framers of the Constitution would never go along with preventing churches and synagogues from holding superspreader events during a pandemic, but, like so many things GOP, it’s a lie...
...Since the election of Ronald Reagan, Republicans have damaged America more in 40 years than our worst enemies could have dreamed of by other means. These Republicans are not patriots; they’re traitors to reason, science, education, human rights, democracy and now, unbelievably, public health. They’re traitors to humanity itself. The only way to deal with a death-dealing cult is to end it; thus, we must embark on a campaign to defund the Republican Party. Back in 1981, the Republican Party decided to defund the Democratic Party, and actually pulled it off. While the Republican Party had principally been funded by rich people and big business since the 1920s, the Democrats were largely reliant on the labor unions. So Ronald Reagan, as part of his “Reagan Revolution,” figured the best way to destroy the Democratic Party was to destroy America’s unions. His first shot was to destroy PATCO, the air traffic controllers’ union, and he did it in less than a week in August of 1981. He, along with Republicans in Congress and conservatives on the Supreme Court, then embarked on a campaign to eliminate unions from the American landscape, thus gutting the Democratic Party’s ability to win elections. It worked, and by 1992, American union membership, and union’s ability to fund elections, had collapsed so severely that Bill Clinton and the Democratic Party turned to giant corporations and billionaires to win that election year. Reagan’s plan not only kneecapped the Democratic Party for the next 40 years but also changed the party at its core, turning it from President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society party into Bill Clinton’s corporate-friendly Democratic Leadership Council/New Democrats, now in bed with big banks, insurance companies, etc. Defunding the Republican Party may even force it to start focusing on the needs of regular people, rather than just billionaires and corporations, which only adds to the urgency of the job. There are just a few steps through the process, which include:

• End “Red State Welfare.” Kentucky gets $2.41 for every dollar they send to Washington, D.C. Most other red states are similarly “taker” states, so let’s fight for a law limiting states to no more than, say, $1.50 for every buck they sent to D.C. in tax revenues. Call it welfare reform!

• End corporate welfare that gets recycled to GOP politicians. This includes $700 billion a year to fossil fuel companies, and nearly $1 trillion a year we give to Big Pharma, as well as support for insurance companies (like subsidies for the “Medicare Advantage” scam) and “Big Ag.”

• End corporate monopolies. Break up giant corporations and make America safe again for small businesses, while rejuvenating local economies. From airlines to tech to banking and retail, giant monopolies rip off working-class Americans and use some of that money to fund the GOP.

• Bring back Eisenhower’s 91% top tax rate, or at least something north of 50 percent. America’s strongest economy was during the 30 years from 1950 to 1980, with a top tax rate of 91% to 74%. Progressive taxation on the super-wealthy was openly supported by Republican presidents like Eisenhower, Nixon, and Ford. With that tax revenue, we built highways, schools and hospitals, and put men on the moon, while the best way CEOs could avoid the tax was to use the money to pay their workers better wages. Reagan cut that top rate to less than 30%, and the billionaires it produced now pour money into the GOP to keep it that way. Follow Europe’s example and impose a wealth tax on great fortunes. Average Americans pay a wealth tax every year—the property tax on their largest store of wealth, their homes. Billionaires should pay a similar annual tax on their money bins.

End campaign contributions from corporations, end super PACs, and limit billionaires’ ability to skew our politics with their money. We did this in the 1970s after the Nixon bribery scandals, but the Supreme Court blew it up. There are multiple ways around that, and the Democratic Party should make this job one.

These simple “Progressive Contract with America” steps, along with restoring the ability of American workers to unionize, will not only revive the Democratic Party, but also restore America to economic greatness and give us a far more honest political system."

Jim Rutenberg, Jo Becker, Eric Lipton, Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Martin, Matthew Rosenberg and Michael S. Schmidt: 77 Days: Trump’s Campaign to Subvert the Election

"Hours after the United States voted, the president declared the election a fraud — a lie that unleashed a movement that would shatter democratic norms and upend the peaceful transfer of power...
...By Thursday the 12th of November, President Donald J. Trump’s election lawyers were concluding that the reality he faced was the inverse of the narrative he was promoting in his comments and on Twitter. There was no substantial evidence of election fraud, and there were nowhere near enough “irregularities” to reverse the outcome in the courts.
Mr. Trump did not, could not, win the election, not by “a lot” or even a little. His presidency would soon be over. Allegations of Democratic malfeasance had disintegrated in embarrassing fashion. A supposed suitcase of illegal ballots in Detroit proved to be a box of camera equipment. “Dead voters” were turning up alive in television and newspaper interviews.
The week was coming to a particularly demoralizing close: In Arizona, the Trump lawyers were preparing to withdraw their main lawsuit as the state tally showed Joseph R. Biden Jr. leading by more than 10,000 votes, against the 191 ballots they had identified for challenge.
As he met with colleagues to discuss strategy, the president’s deputy campaign manager, Justin Clark, was urgently summoned to the Oval Office. Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, was on speaker phone, pressing the president to file a federal suit in Georgia and sharing a conspiracy theory gaining traction in conservative media — that Dominion Systems voting machines had transformed thousands of Trump votes into Biden votes...
Mr. Clark warned that the suit Mr. Giuliani had in mind would be dismissed on procedural grounds. And a state audit was barreling toward a conclusion that the Dominion machines had operated without interference or foul play.
Mr. Giuliani called Mr. Clark a liar, according to people with direct knowledge of the exchange. Mr. Clark called Mr. Giuliani something much worse. And with that, the election-law experts were sidelined in favor of the former New York City mayor, the man who once again was telling the president what he wanted to hear.
Thursday the 12th was the day Mr. Trump’s flimsy, long-shot legal effort to reverse his loss turned into something else entirely — an extralegal campaign to subvert the election, rooted in a lie so convincing to some of his most devoted followers that it made the deadly Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol almost inevitable.
Weeks later, Mr. Trump is the former President Trump. In coming days, a presidential transition like no other will be dissected when he stands trial in the Senate on an impeachment charge of “incitement of insurrection.” Yet his lie of an election stolen by corrupt and evil forces lives on in a divided America.
A New York Times examination of the 77 democracy-bending days between election and inauguration shows how, with conspiratorial belief rife in a country ravaged by pandemic, a lie that Mr. Trump had been grooming for years finally overwhelmed the Republican Party and, as brake after brake fell away, was propelled forward by new and more radical lawyers, political organizers, financiers and the surround-sound right-wing media..."

Matt Tiaibbi: Neoliberal Champion Larry Summers Opens Mouth, Inserts Both Feet

"The former Harvard President and Treasury Secretary offers important thoughts on the negative consequences of aid to the less fortunate..."

Ralph Nader: Needed: Indicators for Measuring Injustice and Societal Decay

"Economic indicators – data points, trends, and micro-categories – are the widgets of the big information industry. By contrast, indicators for our society’s democratic health are not similarly compiled, aggregated, and reported. Its up and down trends are presented piecemeal and lack quantitative precision.

We can get the process started and lay the basis for qualitative and quantitative refinement. Years ago, when we started “re-defining progress” and questioning the very superficial GDP and its empirical limitations, professional economists took notice. Unfortunately, with few exceptions, economists cling to the yardsticks that benefit and suit the plutocrats and CEOs of large corporations.

Here are my offerings in the expectation that readers will add their own measures:

1. A society is decaying when liars receive mass media attention while truth-tellers are largely ignored. Those who are chronically wrong with outrageous and baseless predictions are featured on news broadcasts, op-ed pages, and as convention and conference speakers. On the other hand, those who forewarn and are proven to be accurate are not regaled, but instead, they are excluded from the media spotlight and significant gatherings. Consider the treatment of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz post-Iraq invasion, compared to people like Congressman Dennis Kucinich, Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn who factually warned Washington not to attack illegally a country that didn’t threaten us.

2. A society is decaying when rampant corruption is tolerated, and its perpetrators are rewarded with money, votes, and praise. When President Eisenhower’s chief of staff, former New Hampshire Governor Sherman Adams, accepted a vicuña coat from a textile manufacturer, he was forced to resign. The daily corruption of Trump and the Trumpsters towers beyond measure over Adams’ indiscretion. Yet calls for Trump and his cronies to resign are rare and anemic. Tragically, the law and the norms of decency have done little to curb the corrupt, criminogenic, and criminal excesses of Trump & company. Even government prosecutors and inspectors generals have been fired, chilled, and sidelined by Trump and his toady, Attorney General Barr.

3. A society is decaying when a growing number of people believe in fantasies instead of realities. Social media makes this an ever more serious estrangement from what is actually happening in the country and in the world. Believing in myths and falsehoods leads to political servitude, economic disruption, and social dysfunction. The corrupt concentration of power ensues.

4.An expanding economy focusing increasingly on ‘wants and whims’ while ignoring the meeting of basic ‘needs and necessities’ shatters societal cohesiveness and deepens miseries of many people. Adequate housing, healthcare, food, public services, education, mass transit, health & safety standards, and environmental protections are the prerequisites for a humane democracy. The economy is in shambles for tens of millions of Americans, including hungry children. Minimal economic security is beyond the reach of tens of millions of people in our country.

5. With few exceptions, the richer the wealthy become, the more selfish they behave, from severely diminished contributions to charities to the failure to exert leadership to reverse the breakdown of society. Take all the failures of the election machinery from obstructing voters to simply counting the votes honestly with paper records. The U.S. Senate won’t vote to give the states the $4 billion needed for administering the coming elections despite the Covid-19-driven need for expanded voting by mail. The Silicon Valley, undertaxed, mega-billionaires could make a $4 billion patriotic donation to safeguard the voting process in November and not even feel it.

6. Rampant commercialism knowing no boundaries or restraints even to protect young children is running roughshod over civic values. Every major religion has warned about giving too much power to the merchant class going back over 2000 years. In our country, justice arrived after commercial greed was subordinated to humane priorities such as abolishing child labor and requiring crashworthy cars, cleaner air, water, and safer workplaces. Mercantile values produce predictable results, from excluding civic groups from congressional hearings and the mass media to letting corporations control what the people own such as the vast public lands and public airwaves.

7. Then there is the American Empire astride the globe, enabled by an AWOL Congress and propelled by the avaricious military-industrial complex. In his 1961 farewell address, President Dwight Eisenhower presciently forewarned that “[W]e must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” All Empires devour themselves until they collapse on the countries of their origins. Over 55% of the federal government’s operating spending goes to the Pentagon and its associated budgets. The military-industrial complex increasingly leads to quagmires and creates adversaries abroad, as it starves the social safety net budgets in our country. Our country’s military spending with all its waste is surging and unaudited. The U.S. spent more than $732 billion on direct defense spending in 2019; this is more than the next ten countries with the largest military expenditures.

8. A society that requires its people to incur crushing debt to survive, while relying on casinos and other forms of gambling to produce jobs, is going backward into the future.

9. Public officials who repeatedly obstruct voters from having their votes received and counted accurately and in a timely fashion continue with impunity to try to steal elections. Then Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp (now governor of Georgia) “stole” the election in 2018 from gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams. Abrams said Kemp was an “architect of voter suppression.” And that because Kemp was the Georgia Secretary of State during the race, he was “the referee, the contestant and the scorekeeper” for the 2018 gubernatorial election. He escaped accountability. Democracy decays.

10. Access to justice is diminishing. Tort law – the law of wrongful injuries – has been weakened in many states with arbitrary caps on damages for the most serious injuries. It also is harder than ever for citizens to get through to real people in government agencies..."

Jennifer Finney Boylan: The Long Shadow of the Reagan Years
"...For the life of me I have never been able to understand how so many Republicans talk about their patriotism and their love of the flag and at the same time despise the very government the Constitution created. Is that what patriotism means now — hating governance, but getting all teary-eyed and sentimental about Exxon Mobil?
It’s this enduring frame of mind that still eats away at us. It explains, just to pick one example, Republicans’ hatred of the Affordable Care Act — and why they’ve been trying to repeal it for all these years, even while swearing that they’ll protect so many of its provisions.
Because since Mr. Reagan, it’s been apostasy to suggest that good governance could ever do anything to improve people’s lives. Even the resistance to mask-wearing can arguably be traced back to November 1980: Just look at all the people who find that a mandate to wear a mask to keep other people from actually dying is somehow suppression of their freedom..."

Jochen Bittner: 1918 Germany Has a Warning for America
"...According to the Pew Research Center, 89 percent of Trump supporters believe that a Joe Biden presidency would do “lasting harm to the U.S.,” while 90 percent of Biden supporters think the reverse. And while the question of which news media to trust has long split America, now even the largely unmoderated Twitter is regarded as partisan. Since the election, millions of Trump supporters have installed the alternative social media app Parler. Filter bubbles are turning into filter networks.
In such a landscape of social fragmentation, Mr. Trump’s baseless accusations about electoral fraud could do serious harm. A staggering 88 percent of Trump voters believe that the election result is illegitimate, according to a YouGov poll. A myth of betrayal and injustice is well underway.
It took another war and decades of reappraisal for the Dolchstosslegende to be exposed as a disastrous, fatal fallacy. If it has any worth today, it is in the lessons it can teach other nations. First among them: Beware the beginnings...."

Jamelle Bouie: It Started With ‘Birtherism’
"...Trump did not force the Republican Party in Michigan and Wisconsin to create districts so slanted as to make a mockery of representative government in their states; he did not tell the North Carolina Republican Party to devise and pass a voter identification bill targeting the state’s Black voters for disenfranchisement with “surgical precision”; he didn’t push Republican election officials in Georgia to indiscriminately purge their voter rolls or pressure Florida Republicans into practically nullifying a state constitutional amendment — passed by ballot measure — to give voting rights to former felons.
The Republican Party’s contempt for democracy and embrace of minoritarian rules and institutions predate Trump and will continue after he leaves the scene. It does not seem to matter that Republicans can clearly compete and win in high turnout elections since hostility to democratic participation has become as much a part of the party’s identity as its commitment to low taxes and so-called small government.
What does this mean for the future of our politics? In the near-term, the president’s haphazard attempt to nullify the election is probably the start of a new normal, in which it is standard procedure for Republican politicians to allege fraud and challenge the results, tying the outcome up in federal court until it’s either untenable — or somehow successful. And even if it doesn’t work, the attempt still stands as a ritual affirming the belief that some Americans count more than others, and that our democracy is legitimate only insofar as it empowers the people, narrowly defined, over the mere majority..."

New Yorker: Noam Chomsky Believes Trump Is “the Worst Criminal in Human History”
"...The other major threat to human survival in any recognizable form is environmental catastrophe, and, there, Trump is alone in the world. Most countries are doing at least something about it—not as much as they should be, but some of them rather significant, some less so. The United States has pulled out of the Paris Agreement; is refusing to do any of the actions that might help poorer countries deal with the problem; is racing toward maximizing the use of fossil fuels; and, at the same time, just opened the last major nature reserve in the United States for drilling. He has to make sure that we maximize the use of fossil fuels, race to the precipice as quickly as possible, and eliminate the regulations, which not only limit the dangerous effects but also protect Americans. Step by step, eliminate everything that might protect Americans or that will preserve the possibility of overcoming the very serious threat of environmental catastrophe. There is nothing like this in history. It’s not breaking with the American tradition. Can you think of anyone in human history who has dedicated his efforts to undermining the prospects for survival of organized human life on earth? In fact, some of the productions of the Trump Administration are just mind-boggling..."

"...It’s kind of striking when you see the great and powerful get together. Take a look at the last Davos conference, in January. There were three keynote speakers. The first, of course, was Trump. They don’t like him. They don’t like him at all because they like to put forward an image of humanism, civilized behavior, decency, “put your trust in us,” that sort of thing. But when he spoke, they gave him rousing applause. They couldn’t stand anything he was saying. There’s this braggart up there ranting about how wonderful he is. They were probably cringing in their seats, but they gave him rousing applause because there’s one line that he said that they understand, which is meaningful: I’m going to put plenty of money in your pockets, so therefore you better tolerate me. That’s the way he’s regarded by the powerful élites here. Yeah, we can’t stand him, he’s a disgusting creature, but he knows which side the bread is buttered: ours..."

"...Stalin’s intentions were to maintain power and control. He didn’t purposely want to kill people. He had to kill people as a means toward this end. Take, say, Henry Kissinger. When he sends a directive to the American Air Force saying, about a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia, “anything that flies on anything that moves,” does he have the intention of committing genocide? Do I care? No. I just care that that’s what he said..."


"...I think [American] democracy, first of all, was never much to write home about. Do you really want to talk about it? The Founding Fathers, let’s go back to them. They were committed to reducing democracy. The major scholarly work on the Constitutional Convention, the gold standard for today, is Michael Klarman’s book, and it’s called “The Framers’ Coup”—their coup against democracy. The general population wanted more democracy. The Framers wanted to restrict that; they didn’t like the idea of democracy. Their picture was more or less that of John Jay: the people who own the country ought to rule it. James Madison explained that one of the prime goals of government is to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority, and the Constitution was designed to try to prevent what is called the tyranny of the majority, meaning democracy. You’ve got to protect the minority; the opulent have to be protected.
There are all sorts of ways in which this was done. There’s been a battle about that over the centuries. But since roughly 1980, since the neoliberal regression began, there has been a significant decline in the partially functioning democracy that existed before. That’s an immediate reflection of the policies that were chosen. You recall Reagan’s [first] Inaugural Address: government is the problem. What does that mean? Decisions are being made somewhere. If they’re not made in government, which is under at least partial influence of the population, they are being made in the private sector by unaccountable private institutions.
You take a look more closely, and 0.1 per cent of the population now hold twenty per cent of the wealth of the country. It’s had a major effect on the political system for perfectly obvious reasons. You have somebody elected to Congress. The first thing they have to do is get on the telephone, call the donors to make sure they’re going to be funded in the next electoral campaign. That’s the kind of democracy we had before Trump. He’s hit it with a wrecking ball and made it much worse..."

NY Times: 18 Revelations From a Trove of Trump Tax Records

"Times reporters have obtained decades of tax information the president has hidden from public view. Here are some of the key findings.
The New York Times has obtained tax-return data for President Trump and his companies that covers more than two decades. Mr. Trump has long refused to release this information, making him the first president in decades to hide basic details about his finances. His refusal has made his tax returns among the most sought-after documents in recent memory.
Among the key findings of The Times’s investigation:

Mr. Trump paid no federal income taxes in 11 of 18 years that The Times examined. In 2017, after he became president, his tax bill was only $750.

He has reduced his tax bill with questionable measures, including a $72.9 million tax refund that is the subject of an audit by the Internal Revenue Service.

Many of his signature businesses, including his golf courses, report losing large amounts of money — losses that have helped him to lower his taxes.

The financial pressure on him is increasing as hundreds of millions of dollars in loans he personally guaranteed are soon coming due.

Even while declaring losses, he has managed to enjoy a lavish lifestyle by taking tax deductions on what most people would consider personal expenses, including residences, aircraft and $70,000 in hairstyling for television.

Ivanka Trump, while working as an employee of the Trump Organization, appears to have received “consulting fees” that also helped reduce the family’s tax bill.

As president, he has received more money from foreign sources and U.S. interest groups than previously known. The records do not reveal any previously unreported connections to Russia.

It is important to remember that the returns are not an unvarnished look at Mr. Trump’s business activity. They are instead his own portrayal of his companies, compiled for the I.R.S. But they do offer the most detailed picture yet available..."



Election 2020

Barton Gellman: The Election That Could Break America

"If the vote is close, Donald Trump could easily throw the election into chaos and subvert the result. Who will stop him?"

Media Coverage:


Columbia Journalism Review: Photos reveal media’s softer tone on opioid crisis

"The racial bias is inescapable: A drug crisis that is largely affecting suburban and rural whites is being treated with a drastically different attitude and approach in words and imagery than those used to characterize heroin use in the 1970s, crack cocaine in the late 1980s, and the drug problem plaguing America’s people of color and urban poor today.
Elected officials, the criminal justice system, and the American media have adopted a “kinder and gentler” tone around the opioid crisis. The attitude and phrasing of a recent New York Times article—titled: “In Heroin Crisis, White Families Seek Gentler War on Drugs”—is both an example and an illustration. As is Time’s just-published photo story “A caring lens on the opioid crisis.” The visual language is just as illuminating. The opioid crisis has been framed as a threat from outside, with drug users facing an “illness or a “disease” rather than a personal moral shortcoming.
You can see in this photo how demonstrators cast addicts who have died from drugs as victims, and in the inset photo, literally as an angel. In another photograph, you can see how the same group, FedUp!, has co-opted the quilt as a protest symbol reminiscent of the AIDS crisis. The largely white drug “epidemic” we’re facing now bears little resemblance to the scenes of squalor, sociopathy, and criminality depicted in this 33-photo Getty package shot in the Bronx and published in June. And photos from the urban “war on drugs” don’t look much different today than they did 30 years ago..."


Civil Society:


Jamelle Bouie: The Police Are Rioting. We Need to Talk About It.

"It is an attack on civil society and democratic accountability.
If we’re going to speak of rioting protesters, then we need to speak of rioting police as well. No, they aren’t destroying property. But it is clear from news coverage, as well as countless videos taken by protesters and bystanders, that many officers are using often indiscriminate violence against people — against anyone, including the peaceful majority of demonstrators, who happens to be in the streets.
Rioting police have driven vehicles into crowds, reproducing the assault that killed Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017. They have surrounded a car, smashed the windows, tazed the occupants and dragged them out onto the ground. Clad in paramilitary gear, they have attacked elderly bystanders, pepper-sprayed cooperative protesters and shot “nonlethal” rounds directly at reporters, causing serious injuries. In Austin, Texas, a 20-year-old man is in critical condition after being shot in the head with a “less-lethal” round. Across the country, rioting police are using tear gas in quantities that threaten the health and safety of demonstrators, especially in the midst of a respiratory disease pandemic.
None of this quells disorder. Everything from the militaristic posture to the attacks themselves does more to inflame and agitate protesters than it does to calm the situation and bring order to the streets. In effect, rioting police have done as much to stoke unrest and destabilize the situation as those responsible for damaged buildings and burning cars. But where rioting protesters can be held to account for destruction and violence, rioting police have the imprimatur of the state.
What we’ve seen from rioting police, in other words, is an assertion of power and impunity. In the face of mass anger over police brutality, they’ve effectively said So what? In the face of demands for change and reform — in short, in the face of accountability to the public they’re supposed to serve — they’ve bucked their more conciliatory colleagues with a firm No. In which case, if we want to understand the behavior of the past two weeks, we can’t just treat it as an explosion of wanton violence; we have to treat it as an attack on civil society and democratic accountability, one rooted in a dispute over who has the right to hold the police to account..."

COVID-19 Response


Roger Cohen: Germany’s Lessons for China and America
"“The nation-state alone does not have a future,” Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, said this week. It was a direct challenge to President Trump’s “America First,” the slogan whose poison keeps on giving. His United States has become the most unserious of nations...

For an American, suffering the daily drivel of the Blather-Mouth in Chief, Steinmeier’s statement is powerful — in its honesty, its humility, its seriousness, its decency, its morality, its courage. The Trump administration consigned all those words to the American past.
I don’t think it’s easy, even for a German, to speak of brokenhearted love of country, nor to pronounce, as Merkel did, the demise of the “nation-state alone.” Nationalism is the most facile and effective of political tools, as well as the most dangerous. It was important, in the midst of a pandemic that has revealed a world incapable of a coordinated response and devoid of American leadership, that Europe’s most powerful nation step forward with honor.
The European Union, that entity with a stubborn heartbeat, has emerged better from the pandemic than China or the United States. The fear-driven Chinese cover-up of the coronavirus and the chaotic denialism of the Trump administration have been the two main contributors to the disaster. President Xi Jinping’s tightening despotism and the dilapidation of American democracy were evident...
The German chancellor — who will not seek re-election next year, and who will be missed — signaled that innovation is needed. The world cannot return to where it was before the virus. The status quo ante is untenable. The nationalism of Trump’s America, Xi’s China and Vladimir Putin’s Russia is not the answer.

Stephen Heintz, the president of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, has written of a crisis “that stems from the growing obsolescence of three core operating systems that have shaped civilization for the past 350 years: capitalism, fueled by carbon since the dawn of the Industrial Age and increasingly driven by global financialization; the nation-state system, formalized by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648; and representative democracy, a system of self-rule based on Enlightenment ideals of freedom, fairness, justice and equality.” The problem is that “our practice of capitalism is both putting the planetary ecosystem at risk and generating vast economic inequality.” The nation-state is “inadequate for managing transnational challenges like global warming.” And “representative democracy is neither truly representative nor very democratic as citizens feel that self-rule has given way to rule by corporations, special interests and the wealthy.”

The virus and accompanying economic collapse have only redoubled the urgency of these reflections. This is the Age of Undoing — of world order, of international law, of truth, of America’s word. It is a dangerous time, as Germany knows better than any nation. Autocracy feeds on fear, misery, resentment and lies. It did in the 1930s; it does now. Better to love your country with a broken heart than to love it blind."

COVID-19 Exposes Social Divisions


NY Times Editorial: The Cities We Need

"...Well before the coronavirus pandemic posed its own threats to the life of American cities, they were struggling. Over the last half century, their infrastructure of opportunity has badly decayed. Their public schools no longer prepare students to succeed. Their subways are reliably unreliable. Their water runs with lead.
Our urban areas are laced by invisible but increasingly impermeable boundaries separating enclaves of wealth and privilege from the gaptoothed blocks of aging buildings and vacant lots where jobs are scarce and where life is hard and, all too often, short. Cities continue to create vast amounts of wealth, but the distribution of those gains resembles the New York skyline: A handful of super-tall buildings, and everyone else in the shade.
The pandemic has prompted some affluent Americans to wonder whether cities are broken for them, too. It has suspended the charms of urban life while accentuating the risks, reviving an hoary American tradition of regarding cities with fear and loathing — as cesspools of disease, an image that all too easily aligns with prejudices about poverty and race and crime...

...In 1970, 65 percent of the residents of large metropolitan areas lived in neighborhoods with median incomes close to the median for the entire area, according to an analysis by the sociologists Kendra Bischoff and Sean F. Reardon. Most neighborhoods, in other words, approximated the economic diversity of the broader community. But by 2009, only 42 percent lived in such neighborhoods. Meanwhile, the share residing in either very affluent or very poor neighborhoods more than doubled from 15 percent to 33 percent.
This trend has reshaped central cities, filling downtowns with new buildings invariably described as “luxury” condominiums and apartments. In Chicago, for example, a recent analysis found the share of census tracts with concentrations of either wealth or poverty increased from 28 percent in 1980 to 47 percent in 2010.

But most wealthy families continue to reside in the suburbs that provide the bulk of housing in every metropolitan area except New York. These suburbs, created to maintain economic exclusivity, have become increasingly exclusive. Residents live in what are effectively private clubs and send their children to what are effectively private schools. Cars have obviated the need for servants to live close by, or to be tolerated as participants in the same polity. The people who serve the affluent must find housing elsewhere.
Life in America resembles an airline passenger cabin: separate entrances, separate seating areas, separate bathrooms. The Village of Indian Hill, a wealthy suburb of Cincinnati, touts its rural atmosphere, its “firm administration of zoning ordinances” and its “proximity to the cultural life of a large city.” It is, in short, a parasite, taking what it values from Cincinnati while contributing as little to it as possible. In this, it is hardly unique. Hundreds of similar suburbs encrust cities across the United States.

Even in cities where the rich and poor continue to live under the same local government, economic segregation saps political support for common, egalitarian infrastructure. Rich New Yorkers donate generously to beautify Central Park while resisting the taxation necessary to maintain parks in neighborhoods they never visit. In Washington, D.C., parents in wealthier neighborhoods contribute lavishly to parent-teacher organizations that provide extra money to public schools in their neighborhoods, but they do not vote for a similar level of funding for all city schools. Two schools in northwest Washington each raised more than half a million dollars in 2017, while several schools in southeast Washington don’t even have parent-teacher organizations. Last year, for the third time since 1970, the residents of Gwinnett County, Ga., which sits on the edge of Atlanta, refused to fund an expansion of the regional transit system into their suburban county..."


Frank Bruni: Nobody Is Protected From President Trump

"The simple accessory of a mask tells the story of a presidency and a pandemic..."

COVID-19 & Trade:


Thom Hartmann: The Coronavirus Crash Could Be Worse than the Republican Great Depression of 1930

"The coronavirus crisis has turned the fact that we don’t make anything in America anymore from a topic for philosophical and political debate into a crisis in our hospitals causing people to die and endangering our frontline health care workers. Even worse, there’s nothing to catch us as and after we fall, because we don’t have a manufacturing base to fall back on like we did the last time a crisis like this happened — in the 1930s. Most of our medical supplies and prescription drugs now come from China, for example, and that’s producing a crisis in our hospitals because China isn’t exporting N95 masks, ventilators and respirators like they were just six months ago. Back in the day, the British knew that manufacturing was the core strength of a nation, which is why they forbade the colonists in 1770 from manufacturing most items that could be imported from Britain, and famously forbade the good people of India from even turning their own cotton into cloth and clothing (thus Gandhi’s spinning wheel as a logo for protest). The colonists of America overthrew the economic tyranny of the British, and in short order (1791) Alexander Hamilton presented to Congress a detailed and specific plan to turn America from an agricultural backwater to a manufacturing giant. It included recommendations that: • We must discourage the import of foreign-made products and promote the manufacture of American-made goods by taxing imported finished goods (a tax called an “import tariff”). • We must encourage the import of foreign raw materials, and the export of finished goods, with low tariffs on these items. • We must invest government money—extensively — in infrastructure that would build our monetary and industrial base. We should be protectionist and hardworking, and refuse to cede to anybody our right to make whatever we damn well wanted. Hamilton was so successful that 100% of the income of the federal government from our founding to the Civil War came from tariffs — and we learned to manufacture just about everything we needed in this country as a result...

...The last time things unraveled like this was during the Republican Great Depression of 1929-1938. That, too, followed a series of Republican administrations that had radically deregulated banking and securities rules, leading to wild speculation and asset bubbles, starting with a real estate explosion in Florida in the early 1920s. That Florida real estate bubble burst in 1927, and by 1929 it had spread to Wall Street. What we are witnessing today is the death of neoliberalism (e.g., Reaganomics), although few in the corporate media will call it out. And the 40-year embrace of that neoliberalism — by both Republican and Democratic administrations — is every bit as responsible for our coronavirus mortality rates as is the incompetence of the Trump administration. “Roosevelt is dead,” Rush Limbaugh famously intoned at the appointment of G.W. Bush as president, “but his programs remain, and we’re in the process of doing something about that, as well.” Indeed. Let’s start calling this what it is — the total discrediting of the economic theories of Friedrich von Hayek, Milton Friedman, and borrow-and-spend Reaganomics. It’s the obvious failure of the “globalization,” deregulation and privatization promoted by the GOP through the 1980s and adopted by the Clinton Democrats in the 1990s. Today’s coronavirus market crash is a clear and clarion call for a return to the commonsense policies Franklin Delano Roosevelt put into place that saved capitalism from itself and its predators (and led to four decades of sustained growth of both the economy and the middle class) three generations earlier. The coronavirus crisis will pass within a year or three; after a great toll, enough of us will have immunity, or a vaccine will be widely available, or both. And when it does, the pent-up demand for goods will pop. We should reorganize our trade systems now (or in the next administration) to make sure most of those goods will again be made in America. Now that we are again “rediscovering” the lessons of the Herbert Hoover’s market crash of 1929, if we don’t begin to move manufacturing capacity back into this country we will be, within a few years, far worse off than Americans were in 1932. If we succeed in rebooting American manufacturing through the measures used by Hamilton (and emulated by China over the past 30 years), our recovery from this crisis could mark a new dawn for the American middle class."


AP News: German minister backs creating legal right to work from home

"Germany’s labor minister wants to enshrine into law the right to work from home if it is feasible to do so, even after the coronavirus pandemic subsides. Labor Minister Hubertus Heil told Sunday’s edition of the Bild am Sonntag newspaper that he aims to put forward such legislation this fall. He said initial estimates suggest the proportion of the work force working from home has risen from 12% to 25% during the virus crisis, to around 8 million people. “Everyone who wants to and whose job allows it should be able to work in a home office, even when the corona pandemic is over,” Heil was quoted as saying. “We are learning in the pandemic how much work can be done from home these days.” Heil stressed that “we want to enable more home working, but not force it.” He said people could choose to switch entirely to working from home, or do so for only one or two days per week. Heil’s center-left Social Democrats, the junior partner in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s governing coalition, had already called in December — long before the virus epidemic brought public life in Germany and elsewhere to a near-standstill — for the establishment of a right to work from home. Germany’s main employer group rejected the idea. The chief executive of the Confederation of German Employers’ Associations, Steffen Kampeter, said mobile work is in everyone’s interest when it is possible and makes sense, but “operational issues and customers’ wishes must play a central role.” “We need a moratorium on burdens instead of further requirements that limit growth and flexibility,” he said."

Pandemic Response:

NY Times: He Could Have Seen What Was Coming: Behind Trump’s Failure on the Virus

"An examination reveals the president was warned about the potential for a pandemic but that internal divisions, lack of planning and his faith in his own instincts led to a halting response...

...Throughout January, as Mr. Trump repeatedly played down the seriousness of the virus and focused on other issues, an array of figures inside his government — from top White House advisers to experts deep in the cabinet departments and intelligence agencies — identified the threat, sounded alarms and made clear the need for aggressive action.
The president, though, was slow to absorb the scale of the risk and to act accordingly, focusing instead on controlling the message, protecting gains in the economy and batting away warnings from senior officials. It was a problem, he said, that had come out of nowhere and could not have been foreseen... Even after Mr. Trump took his first concrete action at the end of January — limiting travel from China — public health often had to compete with economic and political considerations in internal debates, slowing the path toward belated decisions to seek more money from Congress, obtain necessary supplies, address shortfalls in testing and ultimately move to keep much of the nation at home.
Unfolding as it did in the wake of his impeachment by the House and in the midst of his Senate trial, Mr. Trump’s response was colored by his suspicion of and disdain for what he viewed as the “Deep State” — the very people in his government whose expertise and long experience might have guided him more quickly toward steps that would slow the virus, and likely save lives.
Decision-making was also complicated by a long-running dispute inside the administration over how to deal with China. The virus at first took a back seat to a desire not to upset Beijing during trade talks, but later the impulse to score points against Beijing left the world’s two leading powers further divided as they confronted one of the first truly global threats of the 21st century.
The shortcomings of Mr. Trump’s performance have played out with remarkable transparency as part of his daily effort to dominate television screens and the national conversation.
But dozens of interviews with current and former officials and a review of emails and other records revealed many previously unreported details and a fuller picture of the roots and extent of his halting response as the deadly virus spread:

* The National Security Council office responsible for tracking pandemics received intelligence reports in early January predicting the spread of the virus to the United States, and within weeks was raising options like keeping Americans home from work and shutting down cities the size of Chicago. Mr. Trump would avoid such steps until March.

* Despite Mr. Trump’s denial weeks later, he was told at the time about a Jan. 29 memo produced by his trade adviser, Peter Navarro, laying out in striking detail the potential risks of a coronavirus pandemic: as many as half a million deaths and trillions of dollars in economic losses.

* The health and human services secretary, Alex M. Azar II, directly warned Mr. Trump of the possibility of a pandemic during a call on Jan. 30, the second warning he delivered to the president about the virus in two weeks. The president, who was on Air Force One while traveling for appearances in the Midwest, responded that Mr. Azar was being alarmist.

* Mr. Azar publicly announced in February that the government was establishing a “surveillance” system in five American cities to measure the spread of the virus and enable experts to project the next hot spots. It was delayed for weeks. The slow start of that plan, on top of the well-documented failures to develop the nation’s testing capacity, left administration officials with almost no insight into how rapidly the virus was spreading. “We were flying the plane with no instruments,” one official said.

* By the third week in February, the administration’s top public health experts concluded they should recommend to Mr. Trump a new approach that would include warning the American people of the risks and urging steps like social distancing and staying home from work. But the White House focused instead on messaging and crucial additional weeks went by before their views were reluctantly accepted by the president — time when the virus spread largely unimpeded..."

Contrast Trump and the American response to that of Germany. 4 key factors that made a difference:
testing, tracking, a robust public healthcare system, trust in government.
The GOP has actively been working to tear down trust in public institutions since the Reagan Administration.


NY Times: A German Exception? Why the Country’s Coronavirus Death Rate Is Low
"The pandemic has hit Germany hard, with more than 100,000 people infected. But the percentage of fatal cases has been remarkably low compared to those in many neighboring countries...

...Testing
In mid-January, long before most Germans had given the virus much thought, Charité hospital in Berlin had already developed a test and posted the formula online. By the time Germany recorded its first case of Covid-19 in February, laboratories across the country had built up a stock of test kits. “The reason why we in Germany have so few deaths at the moment compared to the number of infected can be largely explained by the fact that we are doing an extremely large number of lab diagnoses,” said Dr. Christian Drosten, chief virologist at Charité, whose team developed the first test. By now, Germany is conducting around 350,000 coronavirus tests a week, far more than any other European country. Early and widespread testing has allowed the authorities to slow the spread of the pandemic by isolating known cases while they are infectious. It has also enabled lifesaving treatment to be administered in a more timely way."...

...Tracking
On a Friday in late February, Professor Streeck received news that for the first time, a patient at his hospital in Bonn had tested positive for the coronavirus: A 22-year-old man who had no symptoms but whose employer — a school — had asked him to take a test after learning that he had taken part in a carnival event where someone else had tested positive. In most countries, including the United States, testing is largely limited to the sickest patients, so the man probably would have been refused a test. Not in Germany. As soon as the test results were in, the school was shut, and all children and staff were ordered to stay at home with their families for two weeks. Some 235 people were tested. “Testing and tracking is the strategy that was successful in South Korea and we have tried to learn from that,” Professor Streeck said. Germany also learned from getting it wrong early on: The strategy of contact tracing should have been used even more aggressively, he said...

...A Robust Public Health Care System
Before the coronavirus pandemic swept across Germany, University Hospital in Giessen had 173 intensive care beds equipped with ventilators. In recent weeks, the hospital scrambled to create an additional 40 beds and increased the staff that was on standby to work in intensive care by as much as 50 percent. “We have so much capacity now we are accepting patients from Italy, Spain and France,” said Susanne Herold, a specialist in lung infections at the hospital who has overseen the restructuring. “We are very strong in the intensive care area.” All across Germany, hospitals have expanded their intensive care capacities. And they started from a high level. In January, Germany had some 28,000 intensive care beds equipped with ventilators, or 34 per 100,000 people. By comparison, that rate is 12 in Italy and 7 in the Netherlands. By now, there are 40,000 intensive care beds available in Germany...

...Trust in Government
Beyond mass testing and the preparedness of the health care system, many also see Chancellor Angela Merkel’s leadership as one reason the fatality rate has been kept low. Ms. Merkel, a trained scientist, has communicated clearly, calmly and regularly throughout the crisis, as she imposed ever-stricter social distancing measures on the country. The restrictions, which have been crucial to slowing the spread of the pandemic, met with little political opposition and are broadly followed. The chancellor’s approval ratings have soared. “Maybe our biggest strength in Germany,” said Professor Kräusslich, “is the rational decision-making at the highest level of government combined with the trust the government enjoys in the population.”

COVID-19

Dr. Cornelia Griggs: A New York Doctor’s Coronavirus Warning: The Sky Is Falling

"...Making my rounds at the children’s hospital earlier this week, I saw that the boxes of gloves and other personal protective equipment were dwindling. This is a crisis for our vulnerable patients and health care workers alike. Protective equipment is only one of the places where supplies are falling short. At our large, 4,000-bed New York City hospital, we have 500 ventilators and 250 on backup reserve. If we are on track to match the scale of Covid-19 infections in Italy, then we are likely to run out of ventilators in New York. The anti-viral “treatments” we have for Covid-19 are experimental and many of them are hard to even get approved. Let me repeat. The sky is falling. I say this not to panic anyone but to mobilize you. We need more equipment and we need it now. Specifically gloves, masks, eye protection and more ventilators. We need our technology friends to be making and testing prototypes to rig the ventilators that we do have to support more than one patient at a time. We need our labs channeling all of their efforts into combating this bug — that means vaccine research and antiviral treatment research, quickly. We need hospitals to figure out how to nimbly and flexibly modify our existing practices to adapt to this virus and do it fast. Doctors across the globe are sharing information, protocols and strategies through social media, because our common publishing channels are too slow. Physician and surgeon mothers are coming together on Facebook groups to publish advice to parents and the public, to amplify our outrage, and to underscore the fear we feel for our most vulnerable patient populations, as well as ourselves and our families. Please flatten the curve and stay at home, but please do not go into couch mode. Like everyone, I have moments where imagining the worst possible Covid-19 scenario steals my breath. But cowering in the dark places of our minds doesn’t help. Rather than private panic, we need public-spirited action. Those of us walking into the rooms of Covid-19-positive patients every day need you and your minds, your networks, your creative solutions, and your voices to be fighting for us. We might be the exhausted masked face trying to resuscitate you when you show up on the doorstep of our hospital. And when you do, I promise not to panic. I’ll use every ounce of my expertise to keep you alive. Please, do the same for us."

And to reinforce what the World Health Org said: Test, test, test, we see the data coming from Italy:

The Independent (UK) Coronavirus: Italian village reports no new infections for days after blanket testing

"A Italian village that was a coronavirus hotspot has seen no new cases for days following blanket testing on all residents, according to local media. When around 3,300 people were checked for the virus in Vo Euganeo in northern Italy, 3 per cent (around 90) were infected with Covid-19, researchers said. Most of these reportedly had no symptoms of the flu-like disease at all. “If he hadn’t have done this,” the head of the Veneto region said, “Vo Euganeo would have seen an explosion of infections.” Luca Zaia told Italian TV that the community was now “as healthy as can be”. No new positive cases have been reported in the small Italian village since last week after authorities even tested asymptomatic people, according to newspaper Il Gazzettino. ​ The mass-testing - a trial led by the University of Padua - saw all residents checked for Covid-19 in February and then checked again shortly after. It was hailed a success by researchers, who told local media that on the second round of testing, the number of positive results dropped significantly to 0.3 per cent. “We were able to show that isolating all the positive cases allowed us to reduce the rate of infection,” Professor Andrea Crisanti said."