…slow going [DOT 7/4/21]

…wednesday…it’s practically a metaphor in its own right…in fact you might say the last twelve months have been a real wednesday of a year

Call it a late-pandemic crisis of productivity, of will, of enthusiasm, of purpose. Call it a bout of existential work-related ennui provoked partly by the realization that sitting in the same chair in the same room staring at the same computer for 12 straight months (and counting!) has left many of us feeling like burned-out husks, dimwitted approximations of our once-productive selves.

We Have All Hit a Wall [NYT]

…& you might be forgiven for thinking that a year or more of the world being in the grip of a global pandemic scenario involving a novel virus might move the needle in terms of a stance on healthcare

“There is a solution to this health crisis – a popular one that guarantees health care to every person as a human right and finally puts people over profits and care over corporations,” […] “That solution is Medicare for All.”

The bill has the support of more than half the Democrats, but it is unlikely to pass the House. In the Senate, several Democrats instead are pushing for the public option, a government-run health insurance to exist alongside private health insurance.

Both reforms seek to make health insurance more affordable, easier to access and less costly and are being weighed by several state governments.

The hurdles, however, are immense.

Partnership for America’s Health Care Future, a lobby which represents hospitals, pharmaceutical companies and health insurers, is already spending millions to campaign against reform. In Colorado, the group bought $1m in TV ads to run this spring before a bill was even introduced.
[…]
Americans for Prosperity, a group with financial backing from the conservative Koch brothers network, is also stepping in. The group spent millions to fight the ACA, and told CNBC in March that that campaign failed in part because they didn’t present an alternative. This time, the group is showcasing a “personal option” plan which would slash regulations and is pitched toward the private sector.

‘There is a solution’: a Covid survivor’s life-or-death battle for Medicare for All [Guardian]

…but you probably wouldn’t be well advised to hold your breath

Amazon illegally fired two workers who advocated for Covid safety measures, US agency finds [Guardian]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/04/05/amazon-nlrb-worker-firings

When I write about health policy or speak with medical colleagues about barriers to care, there is one word — and one word only — that evokes a wide range of responses. Some respond with silence; others with avoidance. Some respond with anger and defensiveness.

The word appeared at the top of a paper I submitted to the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2015 with David R. Williams, a professor of public health and African American studies at Harvard University. The title: “Racism in Health and Healthcare: Challenges and Opportunities.”
[…]
The covid-19 pandemic has laid bare the racial inequities of the U.S. health-care system. Too many health-care executives still perpetuate the ahistoric perspective that our country’s model provides safe and equal care for all. Yet the disproportionate number of deaths to covid-19 among racial and ethnic minority groups exposes the systemic and lethal barriers to care.
[…]
I have worked all over the United States and internationally as a champion of addressing health inequity. I can say without hesitation — both as a doctor and a citizen — that racism in the United States is a public health crisis.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/04/05/health-care-racism-medicine/

…even if fresh air might not be what it used to be

For the first time in recorded history, the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide, or CO2, was measured at more than 420 parts per million at the Mauna Loa Observatory on the Big Island of Hawaii. It’s a disconcerting milestone in the human-induced warming of the planet, around the halfway point on our path toward doubling preindustrial CO2 levels.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/04/05/atmospheric-co2-concentration-record/

…still…some things might seem clear enough…like…a mob invading the capitol in hopes of derailing the process of certifying the duly elected president might be…what’s the word?

in the three months since 6 January, however, there has been little public discussion of “treason” as the framework for understanding what happened, [UC Davis law professor Carlton] Larson said. “Everything was ‘Treason, treason, treason,’ when it wasn’t, and now you have an event that is closer to the original 18th century definition of treason than anything that’s happened, and it’s almost silent. Nobody is using the term at all,” he said.

Federal prosecutors have brought cases against more than 300 people allegedly involved in the Capitol insurrection. So far, many of the rioters have been charged with lower-level offenses, like “disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building”. A few members of extremist groups, including the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, are facing more serious conspiracy charges.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/apr/05/the-capitol-attack-treason

…speaking of which

The identity of Q, the supposed top-secret government operative and prophet of the extremist ideology QAnon, has for years been a fiercely debated mystery. But a possible slip-up in a new documentary suggests the answer was always the most obvious one: Ron Watkins, the longtime administrator of the message board 8kun, the conspiratorial movement’s online home.
[…]
The evidence is circumstantial, and no proof affirms Watkins’s role. Watkins, for his part, messaged his 150,000 subscribers on the chat service Telegram late Sunday, “Friendly reminder: I am not Q. Have a good weekend.”

But the revelation has reinvigorated debate about the clues of Watkins’s role in one of the biggest conspiracy-theory movements of the Internet age. QAnon has incited violence and criminal acts, and the FBI has designated it a domestic terrorism threat.
[…]
As QAnon’s following grew, Q never seemed to show any interest in sharing his exclusive intelligence “drops” anywhere but 8kun, a rickety online watering hole — even when the site, formerly known as 8chan, went offline for nearly three months after a series of mass shootings in 2019.

It was also unclear why such an elite strategic mastermind — with a prized view into the engine of Trump’s secretive war — would trust only a father-son duo, living in the Philippines, whose main claim to fame was a crude website of hate speech, pornography and extremist memes.
[…]
Q, who once posted several times a day, hasn’t said a thing since Dec. 8. But the movement in many ways has outgrown Q, by having elevated a widespread corps of QAnon promoters, merchandisers and social media influencers who offer their audiences a flurry of absurd baseless claims and far-right talking points.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/04/05/ron-watkins-qanon-hbo/

…even if you ignore the treason angle…it’s more than a little curious whose example those folks seem so keen for the US to follow

The Russian president signed the legislation on Monday, ending a year-long process to“reset” his presidential terms by rewriting the constitution through a referendum-like process that his critics have called a crude power grab.
[…]
If he remains in power until 2036, his tenure will surpass even that of Joseph Stalin, who ruled the Soviet Union for 29 years, making Putin the longest-serving Moscow leader since the Russian empire.

Officially, the new law limits Russian citizens to two presidential terms in their lifetime, outlawing the kind of shuffling between the presidency and the role of prime minister that Putin employed earlier in his career.

But the law specifically does not count terms served up until it entered into force, meaning that Putin’s past four terms (including the current term) do not count and he can still serve two more. Russians say that he has “zeroed out” his terms.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/05/vladimir-putin-passes-law-that-may-keep-him-in-office-until-2036

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/putin-signs-law-allowing-him-2-more-terms

…not to mention the fact that when it comes to evidence of the events of January 6th there would seem to be an embarrassing wealth of the stuff…although arguably that’s a whole different problem

“Modern surveillance” might evoke images of drones overhead, smartphones constantly pinging cell towers, and facial recognition deployed at political protests. All of these are indeed unchecked forms of 21st-century monitoring, often in uniquely concerning ways. Facial recognition, for instance, can be run continuously, from a distance, with minimal human involvement in the search and surveillance process. But the reporting on Ice’s use of utility records is a powerful reminder that it’s not just flashy gadgets that increasingly watch our every move; there’s also a large and ever-growing economy of data brokerage, in which companies and government agencies, law enforcement included, can buy up data on millions of Americans that we might not even think of as sensitive.

Privacy protections in the United States are generally quite weak; when it comes to police purchases of private data, they are completely absent. This is one of the oddities of trying to update 18th-century rights to address 21st-century threats. At the time of the country’s founding, the framers wrote about protecting things like our homes, our papers, and other physical objects. Flash forward to today, and these categories fail to capture most of our intimate data, including the ins and outs of your daily routine captured by a nosy electronic roommate – or a data broker.
[…]
Whether it’s our financial records, our phone records, or the countless other records held about us by third parties, this data is generally open to police even without a warrant. This so-called “third-party doctrine” has come under more scrutiny in recent years, and there is some hope the courts will catch up with the changes in technology. Until they do, however, nearly all the data held about us by private companies remains completely exposed. Hence why utility records might end up in the hands of law enforcement via a private company, or how smart-home devices like thermostats and fridges could very well be sending off your data to be sold away.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/apr/05/tech-police-surveillance-smart-home-devices

…mind you…with a supreme court like this

The Supreme Court Monday tossed out a lawsuit over former President Donald Trump’s Twitter account, after the Justice Department said the end of Trump’s presidency made the case a dead letter.
[…]
The Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit said the president’s account amounted to a kind of public forum and often concerned official matters with contributions from White House staff members.
[…]
Katie Fallow of the Knight Institute, a group that advocates on behalf of First Amendment issues and represented the Twitter users who Trump blocked, urged the justices to leave the lower court rulings intact. “There is now widespread recognition that the principles we established in this case are important to protecting the vitality of public forums that are increasingly important to our democracy,” shaping the way public officials use social media.
[…]
In January, Twitter permanently suspended Trump’s account, citing “the risk of further incitement of violence” after a mob of his supporters attacked the Capitol in an attempt to stop Congress from formally recognizing Biden’s election victory. Five people died.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/supreme-court/supreme-court-dismisses-lawsuit-over-trump-s-twitter-account

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/apr/05/trump-twitter-block-case-supreme-court-decision

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/supreme-court-trump-twitter-clarence-thomas/2021/04/05/story.html

…they might say justice is blind…but it does look more like these justices are more about finding excuses to turn a blind eye given half a chance

In a 6-2 decision, the justices overturned a lower court’s ruling that found Google’s inclusion of Oracle’s software code in Android did not constitute a fair use under U.S. copyright law.
[…]
Oracle’s lawsuit accused Google of plagiarizing its Java software by copying 11,330 lines of computer code as well as the way it is organized, to create Android and reap billions of dollars in revenue. Android, for which developers have created millions of applications, now powers more than 70 percent of the world’s mobile devices.

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/us-supreme-court-sides-with-google-in-major-copyright-dispute-with-oracle

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/supreme-court-google-oracle/2021/04/05/story.html

…& it’s clear that to some people the idea that if you throw enough money around you should get to have things your own way is something of an article of faith

A man who was arrested after refusing a temperature screening at Disney Springs in Florida told authorities that he couldn’t be told to leave because he had spent $15,000 on his vacation.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/i-spent-15-000-man-arrested-at-disney-resort-in-florida-after-refusing-temperature-check

…although as another saying goes…even a stopped clock is right twice a day

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear an appeal by Infowars host and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who was fighting a Connecticut court sanction in a defamation lawsuit brought by relatives of some of the victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/supreme-court-nixes-alex-jones-appeal-in-newtown-shooting-case

https://www.theguardian.com/law/2021/apr/05/alex-jones-sandy-hook-school-shooting-case-supreme-court-appeal

…of course that saying doesn’t account for the world having largely moved on to a digital standard

A national online network of thousands of rightwing, self-described “Oath Enforcers” is threatening to unleash harassment tactics on elected officials and government workers around the country
[…]
The chats also indicate that white supremacists and others connected with the militia movement are aiming to leverage the group’s success in recruiting disillusioned supporters of Donald Trump and the “QAnon” conspiracy movement, who are being exposed to a wide range of conspiracy theories, white nationalist material and rightwing legal theories inside the groups.
[…]
The Oregon Oath Enforcers group, for example, was joined on 5 February by Chester Doles of Dahlonega, Georgia. Doles, a long-time former member of the Ku Klux Klan and the neo-Nazi National Alliance, who was imprisoned in 1993 for beating a black man, and later marched in the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017.
[…]
A former member of far-right group Patriot Prayer, Tusitala “Tiny” Toese, joined the Oregon Oath Enforcers chat on 9 February. Toese, a Proud Boy, was a prominent and frequently violent participant in a long string of brawling, contentious street protests in Portland throughout the Trump era. He was jailed in Clark county, Washington, last October after violating the condition of his probation after earlier being convicted for assault over an unprovoked daylight attack on a man in Portland.
[…]
Elsewhere in the Oath Enforcers’ instructional Telegram channel, Edwards and others have shared documents from a range of organizations around the country which promote false legal and constitutional doctrines associated with the so-called sovereign citizen movement.
[…]
The sovereign citizen movement does not hold a universally consistent set of beliefs, but most adherents believe in a false alternative history of the US, and that the present, and especially the law, reflects a conspiracy ordered by esoteric rules. Many treat all legal and governmental authority as illegitimate.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/06/far-right-group-oath-enforcers

MAGA political philosophy is not systematic, but it is comprehensive. Right-wing populism offers a distorted lens to view nearly all of life.

Through this warped lens, progress toward equal rights is actually the oppression of White people. Free and fair elections, when lost, are actually conspiratorial plots by the ruthless left. But perhaps the most remarkable distortion concerns the MAGA view of covid-19.

We have all seen the basic outlines of pandemic reality. Experts in epidemiology warned that the disease would spread through contact or droplets at short distances, which is how it spread. The experts recommended early lockdowns to keep health systems from being overwhelmed, and the lockdowns generally worked. The experts said Americans could influence the spread of the disease by taking basic measures such as mask-wearing and social distancing. The disease was controlled when people did these things. The disease ran rampant when they did not, killing a lot of old and vulnerable people in the process.
[…]
Metaphorically (but only barely metaphorically), there is a body on the floor with multiple stab wounds. The Trump administration stands beside it with a bloody knife in its hand. It not only claims to be innocent. It claims there is no blood. There is no body. There is no floor.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-tearing-down-fauci-is-essential-to-the-maga-myth/2021/04/05/story.html

In the weeks after the 2016 election, we were all trying to explain how Donald Trump had, somehow, narrowly won the presidency. And one phrase that had cropped up just before the election was suddenly on the lips of many analysts: “fake news.” Deliberate election disinformation from dubious websites had infected such social media platforms as Facebook, leading many people to believe utterly false things like that the pope had endorsed Trump or that Hillary Clinton had sold weapons to the Islamic State militant group. Some studies even suggested it might have swung the election.
[…]
Today, a similar effort is afoot to re-purpose another phrase that has become a liability for Trump’s party: the “big lie.”
[…]
It has been rightly noted that such laws and their more extreme variants are predicated, in many ways, on Trump’s “big lie” of a supposedly stolen election. GOP legislators have justified such efforts by saying that they are needed to address even the perception of problems, regardless of nonexistent evidence of the widespread voter fraud that Trump claimed.

Conservatives, though, are appropriating that phrase not to describe the predicate for laws like Georgia’s, but rather the pushback against it.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/04/05/conservatives-try-to-commandeer-the-big-lie/

…but let’s face it

Their real motives aren’t a mystery. They want Biden to fail, just as they wanted President Barack Obama to fail, and will once again offer scorched-earth opposition to anything a Democratic president proposes. And they’re especially opposed to public programs that might prove popular, and thereby help legitimize activist government in voters’ minds.
[…]
Being who they are, they can’t help going to ludicrous extremes, and their claims that only a few percent of the proposal is “real” infrastructure are easily debunked. The only way to get anywhere close to their numbers is to declare, bizarrely, that only pouring concrete for transportation counts, which means excluding spending on such essentials for a modern economy as clean water, reliable electricity, access to broadband and more.
[…]
The idea that investment isn’t real if it doesn’t involve steel and concrete would come as news to the private sector. True, back in the 1950s around 90 percent of business investment spending was on equipment and structures. But these days more than a third of business investment is spending on “intellectual property,” mainly R&D and purchases of software.

Businesses, then, believe that they can achieve real results by investing in technology — a view ratified by the stock market, which now puts a high value on companies with relatively few tangible assets. Can the government do the same thing? Yes, it can. In fact, the Obama administration did.
[…]
What about spending on people, which accounts for hundreds of billions and will reportedly be the main focus of an additional proposal? There’s overwhelming evidence that this is a good idea.
[…]
The results are clear. Children who received early aid did better than those who didn’t by every measure: education, health, earnings. The social return on aid to families, especially children, turns out to be huge.

Republicans Are Mired in Concrete [NYT]

…much of this is hardly new

The laws that disenfranchised Black Americans in the South and established Jim Crow did not actually say they were disenfranchising Black Americans and creating a one-party racist state.

I raise this because of a debate among politicians and partisans on whether Georgia’s new election law — rushed through last month by the state’s Republican legislature and signed by Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican — is a throwback to the Jim Crow restrictions of the 20th century.

Democrats say yes. “This is Jim Crow in the 21st century. It must end,” President Biden said in a statement. Republicans and conservative media personalities say no. “You know what voter suppression is?” Ben Shapiro said on his very popular podcast. “Voter suppression is when you don’t get to vote.”

The problem with the “no” argument here is that it mistakes both the nature and the operation of Jim Crow voting laws. There was no statute that said, “Black people cannot vote.” Instead, Southern lawmakers spun a web of restrictions and regulations meant to catch most Blacks (as well as many whites) and keep them out of the electorate. It is true that the “yes” argument of President Biden and other Democrats overstates similarities and greatly understates key differences — chief among them the violence that undergirded the Jim Crow racial order. But the “no” argument of conservatives and Republicans asks us to ignore context and extend good faith to lawmakers who overhauled their state’s election laws because their party lost an election.

If It’s Not Jim Crow, What Is It? [NYT]

…in fact…particularly in some cases…no degree of hypocrisy is too staggering

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Monday accused corporations of siding with Democrats’ portrayal of the law as the new Jim Crow, which he called an attempt to “mislead and bully the American people.” He argued that it would expand, not restrict, voter access to the polls, and his statement included a threat of unspecified “serious consequences” if companies continued to stand opposite Republicans on a variety of issues.
[…]
The acrimony between Republicans and large companies over Georgia underscores the party’s increasingly fraying relationship with corporate America over social and cultural issues as GOP leaders grapple with the direction of the party after the 2020 election. The future of that relationship is complicated by the fact that Republicans continue to support economic policies advocated by the private sector on taxes and regulations, making it unclear what form of retribution leaders could pursue.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/georgia-voting-mlb-trump-mcconnell/2021/04/05/story.html

“I found it completely discouraging to find a bunch of corporate CEOs getting in the middle of politics,” McConnell told a press conference in his home state of Kentucky on Monday. “My advice to the corporate CEOs of America is to stay out of politics. Don’t pick sides in these big fights.”
[…]
McConnell also issued a written statement that claimed Georgia’s new law has been portrayed unfairly and bemoaned “a coordinated campaign by powerful and wealthy people to mislead and bully the American people”.
[…]
Former president Donald Trump spent months falsely claiming that his 2020 election defeat was the result of widespread voter fraud. He failed in dozens of court challenges and his own attorney general, William Barr, reported no significant irregularities.

Even so, legislators in 47 states this year have introduced 361 bills imposing new restrictions on voting, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. Georgia, which Joe Biden won narrowly, will strengthen identification requirements for absentee ballots and make it a crime to offer food or water to voters in a queue.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/apr/05/mitch-mcconnell-voting-restrictions-corporate-america

…citizens united, anyone?

McConnell: “I found it completely discouraging to find a bunch of corporate CEOs getting in the middle of politics. My advice to the corporate CEOs of America is to stay out of politics. Don’t pick sides in these big fights.” https://t.co/Bm0Qn4Cw7q

— Eugene Scott (@Eugene_Scott) April 6, 2021

…mind you

The Biden administration and top Democrats in Congress began detailing plans for significant changes to how the United States and other countries tax multinational corporations as they look for ways to raise revenues and finance President Biden’s $2 trillion infrastructure proposal.

Biden and Democrats Detail Plans to Raise Taxes on Multinational Firms [NYT]

…it’s not as though the other side of the aisle is exactly free of those corporate puppet strings

Speaking on a West Virginia radio station, Manchin said he would vote against President Biden’s proposal to raise the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 28 percent, instead saying the rate should be set at 25 percent. Even if all other Democrats support the plan, Manchin’s opposition would likely be enough to kill it because the Senate is split 50-50 between Democrats and Republicans.
[…]
“The bill, basically, is not going to end up that way,” Manchin said on Monday. “If I don’t vote to get on it, it’s not going anywhere. So we’re going to have some leverage here. And it’s more than just me. … There’s six or seven other Democrats that feel very strongly about this.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2021/04/05/joe-manchin-white-house-tax/

…on the other hand…I’d guess more than a handful of folks might have some fairly strong feelings about this

Fifty-five of the nation’s largest corporations paid no federal income tax on more than $40 billion in profits last year, according to an analysis by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a progressive think tank.

In fact, they received a combined federal rebate of more than $3 billion, for an effective tax rate of about negative 9 percent.
[…]
The findings also underscore the favorable tax environment for big businesses in the wake of the 2017 Trump tax cuts. Twenty-six corporations have paid no federal income taxes since 2017, according to the report, including such household names as Nike, FedEx and Dish Network. Combined, the 26 companies have booked more than $77 billion in profits since 2018, while receiving nearly $5 billion in rebates, for an effective three-year tax rate of negative 6 percent.
[…]
“By all appearances, the companies described in this report appear to be using entirely legal means to reduce their tax bills,” Gardner, the study’s lead author, said via email. But that doesn’t mean the companies are “blameless,” he added. “Many of the tax provisions these companies are using exist because they themselves have lobbied heavily for their creation.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/04/05/corporations-federal-taxes/

…so…there would seem to be a lot of reconciliation to be done

A top Senate official ruled on Monday that Democrats could use the fast-track budget reconciliation process for a second time this fiscal year, potentially handing them broader power to push through President Biden’s agenda, including his infrastructure plan, over Republican opposition.

The decision by the parliamentarian means that Democrats can essentially reopen the budget plan they passed in February and add directives to enact the infrastructure package or other initiatives, shielding them from a filibuster that requires 60 votes to overcome.
[…]
But the decision has potential significance beyond those plans, and even the current Congress. The guidance could substantially weaken the filibuster by allowing the majority party to use budget reconciliation — a powerful tool that allows measures related to taxes and spending to pass on a majority vote — multiple times in a single fiscal year. That would dilute the power of the minority to stall or block such legislation in the Senate, the latest bid by the party in power to chip away at the arcane filibuster rules.
[…]
Democrats already had two more opportunities to use the reconciliation process during the 117th Congress, under budget blueprints for fiscal years 2022 and 2023. But the ruling from Ms. MacDonough allows them to use the maneuver at least two more times during this calendar year alone, and could further increase the opportunities for them to do so before the end of 2022.

The option does not guarantee a smooth path for Mr. Biden’s agenda; with narrow majorities in both chambers, party leaders will have to keep Democrats almost entirely united to be able to use the maneuver successfully. And reconciliation is subject to strict budgetary rules that limit what can be included.

Democrats Win Crucial Tool to Enact Biden’s Plans, Including Infrastructure [NYT]

…& here & there it might be worth dusting off a few principles the GOP would prefer to imagine don’t apply to their efforts

Patton joins a small group of Trump political appointees punished for Hatch Act violations. She is just one of several Trump officials accused of violations during the conventions. https://t.co/qOlktOibZv

— Andrew Solender (@AndrewSolender) April 6, 2021

If you're curious about learning more, here's an explainer I did in August about why top Trump officials rarely face Hatch Act penalties.

You can also follow me if you like relentless ethics nerds. https://t.co/e2iQXLtiXk

— Andrew Solender (@AndrewSolender) April 6, 2021