…or don’t [DOT 22/5/22]

…they say doing the same thing over & over & expecting a different result is a sign of insanity

Investors are reassessing the premise that justified Tesla’s astronomical stock price and made its founder, Elon Musk, the richest person in the world.

…but it’s supposedly not nuts to keep getting out of bed…even on sundays…so here I am

Tesla’s shares have declined more than 40 percent since April 4 — a much steeper fall than the broad market, vaporizing more than $400 billion in stock market value. And the tumble has called attention to the risks that the company faces. These include increasing competition, a dearth of new products, lawsuits accusing the company of racial discrimination and significant production problems at Tesla’s factory in Shanghai, which it uses to supply Asia and Europe.
[…]
Tesla shares are reacting in part to the same forces that are roiling stock markets around the world: war in Ukraine, rising interest rates, the threat of recession, supply chain chaos and surging inflation. But Tesla shares have fallen much more than other Silicon Valley giants like Apple or Alphabet, the company that owns Google.
[…]
In another blow, the S&P 500 ESG Index, a listing of companies that meet certain environmental, social and governance standards, ejected Tesla last month. S&P said it was disturbed by claims of racial discrimination and poor working conditions at the company’s Fremont factory.

Mr. Musk responded to S&P’s decision by writing on Twitter that the movement to apply environmental, social and governance standards to corporations a “scam” that “has been weaponized by phony social justice warriors.”

Mr. Musk followed that Twitter post by declaring that he was switching his allegiance from the Democratic Party, which he said had “become the party of division & hate,” and would now vote for Republicans. Politically charged statements like those are certain to alienate some car buyers.
Tesla’s Aura Dims as Its Plunging Stock Highlights the Risks It Faces [NYT]

…&…were it not for all the other elon-related stuff in the headlines lately that you have to wade through to see something like that I’d almost be inclined to greet it as good news…although I likely wouldn’t have waded through quite so much of it if I’d not been trying to find a particular bit of context

Shares of the electric car company, from which much of Musk’s wealth comes, sank more than 10 percent during trading Friday, falling at one point to about $636 per share. That’s about a 35 percent drop from its price on the day Musk’s deal to buy Twitter was announced.

…ever since I read that thing about a 40% drop in tesla’s share price being a line beyond which the twitter deal could force a sale of a potentially market-shifting quantity of that same falling stock I’ve been genuinely pretty curious to know what that actually translates to…& it sounds from that like the price on the day would have been somewhere in the region of $980(…unless it’s still too early & I can’t math right)…so…I’d only get to find out if that would all go as badly as I think it might should the stock dip down below $600…but…that isn’t feeling implausible to me…admittedly in no small part because I tend to think that the value ascribed to tesla is unjustified in the first place…but it’s nice to know this particular display of “when you’re rich, they let you” might actually be getting real for his bottom line

Musk has taken out extensive personal loans that are heavily tied to the value of Tesla’s stock. At times, he has put down as much as 50 percent of his Tesla shares as collateral to back them. As the company’s share price approaches $600, Musk enters dangerous territory with lenders — where they could seek some of his equity to ease their confidence in his ability to pay, according to analysts.
[…]
“The Street will start to speculate, given the stock’s performance, that it’s getting dangerously close to that area code and that’s putting more pressure on the stock,” said Dan Ives, analyst with Wedbush Securities. “Because it’s a cascade effect. The stock coming down 35 percent since the Twitter deal, that was never on the map.”
[…]
Tesla’s annual report warned of the potential consequences of Musk’s personal loans on its stock.

“We are not a party to these loans. … If the price of our common stock were to decline substantially, Mr. Musk may be forced by one or more of the banking institutions to sell shares of Tesla common stock to satisfy his loan obligations,” according to the document. “Any such sales could cause the price of our common stock to decline further.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/05/20/tesla-stock-price-plummeting/

…& given how things have been for most people over the last couple of years…a further decline in this particular trajectory would seem like the least karma could do

…so…there are still several ways that could all go…but…some I might be fine with?

“Idea: we’re going to get a bunch of hardcore dudebrah attorneys, we’re gonna put ‘em in a room, we’re gonna tell them to GO KICK ASS, and we’re going to put a mercurial engineer in charge of them.”

— WokeMindVirusHat (@Popehat) May 20, 2022

I apologize; I’ve been informed Elon Musk is not an engineer. I drew conclusions based on his grasp of law. I regret the error.

— WokeMindVirusHat (@Popehat) May 20, 2022

…& not to put too fine a point on it…I could use a little cheering up

The U.N.’s climate science panel said in February that more than 430 million people globally were exposed to extreme heat in 2020.

Depending on how quickly the global economy reins in carbon emissions, it warned that between half and two-thirds of humanity would be “exposed to periods of life-threatening climatic conditions arising from coupled impacts of extreme heat and humidity” this century.

It said the burden will be disproportionately felt by the urban poor in regions of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
[…]
A study published this week by Britain’s national meteorological service said that climate change had made record-breaking heat waves in northwest India and Pakistan more than 100 times more likely, meaning that instead of occurring once every three centuries under natural conditions, they are now likely to take place every three years. The study also found that based on current climate change projections, by the end of the century the region could be experiencing extreme heat waves every year.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/heat-wave-india-pakistan-climate-change-food-crisis-ukraine-war

…because…I don’t know…what with one thing

Dozens of states across the US began the weekend grappling with historically high spring temperatures, as a blistering heatwave that has scorched the country’s south and west moves east.
[…]
Heat is a silent killer, often responsible for more deaths than higher-profile disasters like floods, hurricanes or tornadoes. And the rising toll heat has been taking is expected to worsen as the world warms because of the climate crisis.
[…]
Frequent, intensifying heatwaves result from the climate crisis, with models indicating that there could be between 25 and 30 extreme events a year by mid-century – up from an average of between four and six a year historically. They are also expected to cover wider swaths of land than before.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/may/21/us-heatwave-temperatures-hot-weather-us-states

…or another

The supercell formed as thunderstorms swept across Michigan. Surface low pressure strengthened west of Lake Michigan, and that drew warm, moist air north across the state and created the instability to support the storms, the weather service said.

After producing the tornado that hit Gaylord, the supercell would go on to drop hail the size of baseballs on Posen, a village 50 miles to the east, the agency said.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/northern-michigan-tornado-damages-homes-businesses

A late spring Colorado snowstorm dumped several inches in the Denver metro area Saturday and knocked out electricity for about 210,000 customers, officials said.
[…]
The small Colorado community of Cripple Creek near the base of Pike’s Peak got 20 inches of snow, KUSA reported.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/weather/colorado-snowstorm-knocks-power-210000

…it’s uncomfortable feeling like globally we’re about as well prepared for a lot of this weather stuff as…well…texas

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) made the appeal in a statement […] saying that soaring temperatures increased demand and caused six power generation facilities to trip offline. That resulted in the loss of about 2,900 megawatts of electricity.
[…]
ERCOT came under scrutiny last year after record cold temperatures in February caused the state’s highest electricity demand and more than 200 people died during the power crisis, with the most common cause of death being hypothermia.
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/05/14/us/texas-heat-wave-ercot-conserve/index.html

…so…I could do without…well…all the other shit?

An avalanche of lawsuits fueled by roofing scams has plunged Florida into a property insurance crisis that has forced dozens of companies to shut their doors, drop customers, raise rates or flee the state. It’s a slow-motion collapse that lawmakers have known about for years but have failed to fix.

…seriously…how many things do we need on the list of slow-motion collapse(s) that have been known about for years but that we’ve failed to fix…& do quite so many of them have to beggar or kill folks…most of whom are just looking to keep a roof over their heads?

The crisis is largely the result of a plague of roofing scams, fed by loopholes in state law and a string of court decisions that allowed them to proliferate, insurers and government officials say.

The scam works like this: Contractors knock on doors offering to inspect homeowners’ roofs for storm damage. They say they can help get a roof replacement covered by insurance, and they persuade the homeowners to sign away their rights to file the claims themselves. The contractors then file fraudulent damage claims, and when the insurance companies balk, the contractors sue. The insurance companies usually settle the disputed claims for many times more than the original claim. Most of that money goes to the contractors’ lawyers in the form of a “contingency fee multiplier.” Some lawyers file hundreds of such lawsuits a year.
[…]
In the state Legislature, attempts to reform litigation practices pit the insurance industry against trial lawyers, another politically powerful group. The Florida Justice Association, which represents trial lawyers, says the insurance companies’ claims about fraud and frivolous lawsuits are overblown, and that the companies are to blame for poor financial management. The group accuses the companies of using the issue to erode consumers’ rights to pursue legitimate claims, and regulators of poor oversight of insurers.

Lawmakers passed measures in 2019 and 2021 that were supposed to curb the schemes. But the insurance industry’s net losses have risen in each of the past five years, surpassing $1 billion in 2021, according to state officials.

Eight insurance companies operating in Florida have gone out of business since 2021, including three in the past three months. Those that remain have sought rate increases ranging from 15 percent to 96 percent and have become more selective about who they will cover; some are asking homeowners to replace their roof in order to get a new policy. Others are dropping customers; one company recently announced that it was canceling 56,000 policies.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/roofing-scams-florida-property-insurance-hurricane

…& yet you kinda know there’s still people doing this stuff who feel like they’re all kinds of smart because they found a way to take advantage of the system…& though they may not be helping…I guess it’s not hard to see why they might be motivated…given how the system seems to fuck over enough people that it’s hard to argue it doesn’t have it coming

After Lisa French’s doctors warned that she could be paralyzed if she tripped or fell on her back, the hospital told the Colorado resident that she’d have to pay an estimated $1,337 out of pocket for two procedures. Money was tight, which is why French and her husband used all the money in their emergency fund — $1,000 — to help cover most of the cost expected after insurance for the back surgeries, according to her attorney.

So when she got the bill from St. Anthony North Health Campus in 2014, French thought it was a mistake: The hospital had billed her for $303,709 — and she owed more than $229,000 out of pocket. As part of the forms she filled out at the nonprofit hospital in Westminster, Colo., operated by Centura Health, French unknowingly had signed up to pay all charges related to the hospital’s then-secretive “chargemaster” price rates — a master list of prices that determined the sticker prices for everything the hospital did.

Years after French argued she was never informed of the chargemaster and engaged in a years-long legal battle with the hospital, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled in her favor this week, saying she is not liable to pay the rest of the massive bill because she did not agree to the hospital’s secret pricing schema. State Supreme Court Justice Richard Gabriel wrote in a Monday opinion that Centura Health’s argument that French was required to pay “all charges of the hospital” was rejected because the “long-settled principles of contract law” showed that the 60-year-old woman never agreed to pay the chargemaster rate.

“She assuredly could not assent to terms about which she had no knowledge and which were never disclosed to her,” Gabriel wrote in the opinion.

State and federal laws have since been passed forcing hospitals to make their chargemaster prices public. None of the laws were in place when French had her surgeries in 2014, according to the Denver Post, the first to report the news. Gabriel blasted the health-care industry’s predatory billing practices in the opinion, noting that “hospital chargemasters have become increasingly arbitrary and, over time, have lost any direct connection to hospitals’ actual costs, reflecting, instead, inflated rates set to produce a targeted amount of profit for the hospitals after factoring in discounts negotiated with private and governmental insurers.”
[…]
Most U.S. hospitals are still not complying with federal regulations requiring medical centers to post their prices online for patients to review, according to a 2021 report by patient advocates. The report, which surveyed the websites of 500 of the roughly 6,000 hospitals subject to the rule, found that 471 of the hospitals did not fully post the prices they charge patients and the rates they have negotiated with insurers. The federal price transparency rules took effect Jan. 1, 2021.
[…]
As an office clerk at a trucking company, French’s insurance plan was connected to ELAP Services, a firm based in Wayne, Pa., that audits hospital bills to assess the value of the medical services provided, Lavender said. After her surgeries were completed, ELAP advised French’s employer-based insurer to not pay her hospital bill of roughly $229,000, alleging she had been grossly overbilled. ELAP and the insurer agreed to pay about $74,000. Centura Health disagreed with ELAP and sued French for the rest of the bill in 2017.
[…]
“I always felt that the hospital was using me as a guinea pig to fight this company that was helping people from getting ripped off,” she said.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/05/19/colorado-hospital-surgery-cost-french/

…& sure…taking a swipe at US healthcare is maybe low-hanging fruit…but…some of this shit just didn’t ever need to be as fucked up as some people got it

The inflated fees were set in motion during the Trump administration, when attorneys in charge of a little-known anti-fraud program run by the inspector general’s office levied unprecedented fines against Deckman and more than 100 other beneficiaries without due process, according to interviews, documents and sworn testimony before an administrative law judge. In doing so, they disregarded regulations and deviated from how the program had recovered money since its inception in 1995, failing to take into account someone’s financial state, their age, their intentions and level of remorse, among other factors.

The sums demanded by the government stunned those accused of fraud. The unusual penalties were not the only break with how the Civil Monetary Penalty program had previously been conducted: Unlike in the past, the chief counsel also directed staff attorneys to charge those affected as much as twice the money they had received in error, on top of the fines, interviews and court testimony show.

The escalating penalties created a giant jump — at least on paper — in the amount of money the inspector general could show lawmakers it was bringing in, according to interviews and sworn testimony obtained by The Washington Post. Fines as high as hundreds of thousands of dollars were imposed on poor, disabled and elderly people, many of whom had no hope of ever being able to pay.
[…]
Over a seven-month period ending in mid-2019, 83 people were charged a total of $11.5 million, the documents obtained by The Post show — a jump from less than $700,000 for all of 2017. It is not clear whether that is a full accounting of those affected by the practice of imposing stepped-up fines, which was halted by the inspector general’s office last year amid ongoing whistleblower complaints.
[…]
The remarkable penalties led to tumult inside the Office of Inspector General Gail Ennis, where a whistleblower was targeted for retaliation, according to a ruling this month by the administrative judge at the Merit Systems Protection Board.

Ennis, who was sworn in as a Trump appointee in January 2019, declined an interview request but said in a written statement that her office is “unaware of any basis that supports the statement that unprecedented fines have been imposed.”

…which I guess could be true…if she’s suffering from cartoon amnesia after massive head trauma…or similarly unaware of any basis that supports a definition of the term “unprecedented”…either way in terms of studied ignorance at least one judge seems reasonably convinced she was hard at work

In a May 6 ruling, Judge Craig A. Berg found that Shaw was the victim of a “prima facie case of whistleblower reprisal” by Ennis’s office and ordered the agency to restore back pay and benefits and reinstate her as a supervisor.

[Deborah] Shaw [considered the program’s most knowledgeable, experienced attorney, who testified in September that she was directed by her bosses to issue penalties she found unconscionable] “has shown that she had a reasonable belief she was disclosing an abuse of authority when she raised issues with the drastic increase in penalties the [Civil Monetary Penalty] program was assessing …” Berg wrote in a 68-page decision. He found “significant evidence” that Ennis and her top staff “had motive to retaliate” against Shaw as she became a “vocal advocate” to reopen 83 cases whose penalties she believed were excessive.
[…]
Shaw testified that she was shocked when she was directed in early 2019 to issue a penalty of $176,000 to a woman who had already written a check for $26,000 to repay the government the entire amount she had wrongly received in disability benefits. Before she was placed on leave, Shaw was able to dismiss or settle about 23 cases with high proposed fines that were already in the appeals process. But that left at least 83 cases that she thought merited review, interviews and testimony show.

The week after her hearing before the merit board, Shaw learned that a file she was ostensibly put on leave for losing was never misplaced at all, but had reappeared in the mailbox of the inspector general’s Office of Investigations, according to two people familiar with the incident.
[…]
Advocates for those fined said they could not fathom how the government expected to recoup such large sums of money from people who generally live below the poverty line.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/05/20/social-security-fraud-penalties/

…the thing that’s still somehow hard for me to grasp, though…is that the ones trying to take advantage so often seem to be the ones the system seems to have already provided with more than enough advantage for most people

Larry Ellison, the billionaire co-founder and chairman of the software company Oracle and the biggest backer of Elon Musk’s attempted Twitter takeover, participated in a call shortly after the 2020 election that focused on strategies for contesting the legitimacy of the vote, according to court documents and a participant.
[…]
Ellison’s participation illustrates a previously unknown dimension in the multifaceted campaign to challenge Trump’s loss, an effort still coming into focus more than 18 months later. It is the first known example of a technology industry titan joining powerful figures in conservative politics, media and law to strategize about Trump’s post-loss options and confer with an activist group that had already filed four lawsuits seeking to uncover evidence of illegal voting.
[…]
Ellison is the 11th-richest person in the world, with a net worth of about $85 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. He became a major political power broker during the Trump administration, hosting the president in 2020 for a fundraiser at his estate in California’s Coachella Valley and contributing millions to Republican candidates and committees, including to Graham, according to filings with the Federal Election Commission.

During the Trump administration, in 2020, Oracle partnered with the Department of Health and Human Services to collect data from doctors treating coronavirus infections with hydroxychloroquine, the anti-malaria drug touted by the president, among other drugs. That fall, it won praise from Trump as a “great company” as it became the preferred U.S. buyer of TikTok, in a potential deal with Chinese company ByteDance that did not come to fruition.

Details of the November 2020 call and questions about Ellison’s role in it were revealed in new filings made in litigation brought against True the Vote and its representatives by Fair Fight, a political action committee associated with the voting rights organization founded by Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams.
[…]
Ellison does not appear to have made public comments about the results of the 2020 vote.

But Oracle has contributed sizable sums to conservative causes, including as much as $499,000 in 2019 to the Federalist Society and as much as $499,000 in 2021 to the Internet Accountability Project, a nonprofit that accuses major technology companies of anti-conservative bias, according to corporate disclosures.

Ellison personally has invested significantly in Republican candidates and causes. He hosted Trump for a fundraiser for his 2020 reelection campaign on the same day the administration took Oracle’s side in a high-stakes copyright dispute with Google unfolding at the Supreme Court. Ellison backed Graham’s reelection in 2018 to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars. And this year, he donated $15 million to a super PAC aligned with Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), among the largest individual contributions this cycle.

This month, Ellison pledged $1 billion to support Musk’s $44 billion Twitter takeover, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. That makes him the largest single backer of the bid, which has been cheered by Trump allies because of comments Musk and his associates have made about loosening rules on content moderation and possibly letting the former president back on the platform.

Ellison stepped down as Oracle’s chief executive in 2014 but remains chairman of its board and chief technology officer. He is also its largest individual shareholder. Ellison joined the board of Tesla, Musk’s electric-car company, in 2018, disclosing that he had purchased 3 million shares earlier that year, which earned him 12 million additional shares in a stock split in 2020. He owns nearly all of the Hawaiian island of Lanai.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/05/20/larry-ellison-oracle-trump-election-challenges/

…because when it comes to the same thing happening over & over again while I wait like a crazy person for a different result…I have to wonder with this crowd

While little is known about what was said on the chat, the membership list of Friends of Stone, provided to The New York Times by one of its participants, offers a kind of road map to Mr. Stone’s associations, showing their scope and nature in the critical period after the 2020 election. During that time, Mr. Stone was involved with a strikingly wide array of people who participated in efforts to challenge the vote count and keep Mr. Trump in the White House.

Some of the 47 people on the list are identified only by nicknames or initials, and Mr. Stone had pre-existing political ties with many of them. Still, as prosecutors deepen their inquiry into the storming of Capitol, the list suggests that Mr. Stone had the means to be in private contact with key players in the events of Jan. 6 — political organizers, far-right extremists and influential media figures who subsequently played down the attack.
[…]
While the origins of the group chat remain somewhat obscure, Friends of Stone has existed since at least 2019, when Mr. Stone was indicted in connection with the Russia investigation by the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, said one of its participants, Pete Santilli, a veteran right-wing radio host. According to Mr. Santilli, the group chat — hosted on the encrypted app Signal — was a kind of safe space where pro-Stone figures in politics and media, many of whom were banned from social media, could get together and trade links and stories about their mutual friend.
[…]
But after Mr. Trump’s defeat, Friends of Stone seemed to assume another purpose as Mr. Stone found himself in the middle of the accelerating Stop the Steal movement devised to challenge the results of the election. The Washington Post, citing footage from a Danish documentary film crew that was following Mr. Stone, said that in early November 2020, he asked his aides to direct those involved in the effort to monitor the chat for developments.

In recent weeks, the Justice Department has expanded its investigation of the riot from those who physically attacked the Capitol to those who were not at the building but may have helped to shape or guide the violence. Investigators appear to be interested in finding any links between organizers who planned pro-Trump rallies at the Capitol that day and right-wing militants who took part in the assault.
[…]
While the government has gathered thousands of pages of private messages in its vast investigation of the Capitol attack, it remains unclear if prosecutors have gotten access to the Friends of Stone group chat. Along with the membership list, The Times was given images of a few snippets of conversations to verify the chat’s authenticity.

In one of them, Ms. Skaggs told the group that she had just spoken with the pro-Trump lawyer L. Lin Wood, who took part in the effort to overturn the election. Ms. Skaggs’s message, which does not bear a date, said Mr. Wood was claiming that the Insurrection Act — a form of martial law — had been invoked the night before.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/20/us/politics/roger-stone-jan-6.html

In the filing on Thursday, Mr. Eastman argued that some of his emails with the White House and Trump campaign were covered by attorney-client privilege because, he said, the people he communicated with were functioning as “conduits” for or “agents” of Mr. Trump. He said he mostly communicated with Mr. Trump using six intermediaries, three of whom worked for the Trump campaign and three of whom worked directly for Mr. Trump while he was in office.
[…]
The documents Mr. Eastman is seeking to block from release include the two handwritten notes from Mr. Trump; communications with what he called “potential clients,” including seven state legislators, who were seeking advice about how to challenge their states’ election results; a document discussing “various scenarios for Jan. 6”; and another discussing the “need to pursue election integrity litigation even in the event of Trump loss for the good of the country.”

In March, the federal judge in the case ruled that Mr. Eastman and Mr. Trump had most likely committed felonies as they pushed to overturn the election, including obstructing the work of Congress and conspiring to defraud the United States. The actions taken by Mr. Trump and Mr. Eastman, the judge found, amounted to “a coup in search of a legal theory.”
[…]
In deciding in March that Mr. Trump and Mr. Eastman had “more likely than not” broken the law, Judge Carter noted that Mr. Trump had facilitated two meetings involving Mr. Eastman in the days before Jan. 6 that were “explicitly tied to persuading Vice President Pence to disrupt the joint session of Congress.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/20/us/politics/john-eastman-trump-jan-6.html

…how many smoking (checkov’s) guns do we need to rack up before someone actually takes a bullet?

…I would go on…after all, I think we’re well past the point of it not being clear that’s kind of a failing of mine…but for reasons that largely defy my understanding…I actually have to get on my way unreasonably early on this particular day of rest…so…I probably can’t rather than won’t…but…still…in the context of this kind of stuff

For over a decade, Democrats have argued that Internet service providers (ISPs), like AT&T and Verizon, shouldn’t be allowed to favor or throttle certain content on their networks, a push that ushered in the 2015 net neutrality rules later repealed by the GOP.
[…]
On one estimate, just four corporations control 90% of the global grain trade. The same corporations have been buying into seed, chemicals, processing, packing, distribution and retail. In the course of 18 years, the number of trade connections between the exporters and importers of wheat and rice doubled. Nations are now polarising into super-importers and super-exporters. Much of this trade passes through vulnerable chokepoints, such as the Turkish Straits (now obstructed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine), the Suez and Panama canals and the Straits of Hormuz, Bab-el-Mandeb and Malacca.
[…]
The food industry is becoming tightly coupled to the financial sector, increasing what scientists call the “network density” of the system, making it more susceptible to cascading failure.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/may/19/banks-collapsed-in-2008-food-system-same-producers-regulators

…I try to listen to people who I’m pretty sure are smarter than me

I try never to be surprised by evil and never paralysed by despair. Instead, my immediate reaction was “here we go again”, with the horror, the suffering and then the now familiar routine of rhetorical gestures and superficial posturing.

…even if a lot of what those folks have to say doesn’t necessarily make me feel better

Trump is not out there with a gun, but he is leading a campaign continuing what Malcolm X called a war against black and coloured people. He is doing it within the electoral political system. He is not killing folks. But he bears responsibility in terms of the context. Have no doubt, he is still the dominant figure.

The campaigning and reflection after the death of George Floyd should have made things better in the US. And, for a beautiful moment, it did. But that moment passed. The press is fickle, the pandemic started to kick in, and other issues such as Ukraine and inflation captured attention. Look at the polls and see how issues of race have fallen down the list of people’s priorities.

The impact of the George Floyd marches was blunted. Congress was unable to enact any meaningful legislation, including the George Floyd bill itself, which would have given us some mechanism with which to address police misconduct and brutality. The Democratic party was not even able to act decisively to uphold voting rights for black people. That is a colossal failure of the Biden administration, but then Biden bears a lot of responsibility when it comes to the position and arrogance of these white supremacists.
[…]
The president can’t stop a rightwing gangster killing black people, but he can send a message. He can say: I am being consistent because one of my major priorities is to ensure black people have their rights. If, after all the demonstrations and the campaigns, racists pick up the message that politicians don’t really care about black people, we end up exactly where we are today.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/may/21/trump-black-white-supremacy-buffalo-joe-biden

…& I “try not to let the bastards get you down”

Boris Johnson is expected to scapegoat the head of the civil service Simon Case this week in a desperate effort to save his own job, as both men face stinging criticism in a report into lockdown-breaking parties in Downing Street.
[…]
“From my expectation of what I know it will be the real deal. There will be detail. There will be evidence. She is going to say this is under your watch, this is your house, all that kind of stuff,” the source said.

Senior officials are braced for Case to be so heavily criticised that he will have to offer his resignation, or be sacked by Johnson, in order for Johnson to be able to say he has acted decisively and learned lessons.

“That is probably why he [Case] is still there [and not moved from his post already],” said one source. “Because Johnson needs a body.” If Case were to be lose his job, however, it would mean that a civil servant who has not been fined would have lost his job, while the prime minister, who has been fined, keeps his.
[…]
Another source with knowledge of Gray’s thinking said: “Sue is in a very good place to give judgments. She has worked at the heart of government for a very long time. I think there is a genuine question.
[…]
He added: “What has been said to me is no one is going to come out of this looking good. So there will be damage for Johnson. In many ways it could be more damaging for him than the fine because the fine was for a relatively minor thing [his birthday party] that people were surprised he got fined for. So he was able to excuse himself.

…which I know begs the question of quite why there weren’t some more of those fines levied on the man…but…it’s not about the money, I guess

The prime minister was under pressure on Saturday to explain a recent meeting he held with Gray. It has led to claims that No 10 had tried to interfere and water down her findings.

It is understood Gray and Johnson met earlier this month, although a Whitehall source said the report’s contents were not discussed at any point. Downing Street said that the meeting had taken place at Gray’s request, although accounts differed yesterday.
[…]
“This is a prime minister incapable of taking responsibility for the rotten culture he has created in Downing Street or of doing the decent thing. The Sue Gray report must be published in full and with all accompanying evidence.” [said][Angela Rayner, Labour’s deputy leader]

Liberal Democrat MP Christine Jardine also called on the PM to throw light on the meeting. “Any whiff of a stitch-up would make an absolute mockery of the report,” she said.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/may/21/boris-johnson-to-sacrifice-top-official-over-partygate-to-save-himself

…but if you feel like a long read…it really is amazing quite how fucked up things can get when there are banks involved

Debt had smothered the country for more than half a century. Despite ousting its colonial rulers in a war of independence, Haiti had been forced to pay the equivalent of hundreds of millions of dollars to its former French slave masters, a ransom for the freedom it had already won in battle.

But on the night of Sept. 25, 1880, paying off the last of that money finally seemed within reach. No longer would Haiti lurch from one financial crisis to the next, always with a weather eye on the horizon for the return of French warships. The new president, Lysius Salomon, had managed a feat that had eluded the nation since birth.

“The country will soon have a bank,” he told his guests, proposing a toast.

…spoiler alert…things…did not go great

The National Bank of Haiti, on which so many hopes were pinned that night, was national in name only. Far from an instrument of Haiti’s salvation, the central bank was, from its very inception, an instrument of French financiers and a way to keep a suffocating grip on a former colony into the next century.
[…]
Haiti was the first modern nation to win its independence after a slave uprising, only to be financially shackled for generations by the reparations demanded by the French government for most of the 19th century.

And just when that money was nearly paid, Crédit Industriel and its national bank — the very instruments that seemed to hold the promise of financial independence — locked Haiti into a new vortex of debt for decades more to come.
[…]
The national bank that Crédit Industriel created charged fees on nearly every transaction the Haitian government made. French shareholders earned so much money that in some years, their profits exceeded the Haitian government’s entire public works budget for a country of 1.5 million people.
[…]
The Times sifted through 19th-century texts, diplomatic records and bank documents that have seldom, if ever, been studied by historians. Together, the documents make clear that Crédit Industriel, working with corrupt members of the Haitian elite, left the country with barely anything to operate, let alone build a nation.
[…]
The documents help explain why Haiti remained on the sidelines during a period so rich with modernization and optimism that Americans dubbed it the Gilded Age and the French called it the Belle Époque. This extraordinary growth benefited both faraway powers and developing neighbors, yet Haiti had vanishingly little to invest in basics like running water, electricity or education.
[…]
The contract establishing Haiti’s national bank reads like a series of giveaways. Durrieu and his colleagues took over the country’s treasury operations — things like printing money, receiving taxes and paying government salaries. Every time the Haitian government so much as deposited money or paid a bill, the national bank took a commission.

Lest there be any doubt where that money was headed, the contract said the National Bank of Haiti would be chartered in France and exempted from Haitian taxes and laws. All power was put in the hands of the board of directors in Paris. Haiti had no say in the operation of its own national bank.
How a French Bank Captured Haiti [NYT]

…anyway…I’ll try to squeeze some tunes in down here…& some more coffee down my throat…& then I really must get out the door…so I hope your plans for the day are more pleasant to contemplate than mine are currently looking