Category: Dirty Rotten Scoundrels

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

And I see the Chinese have learned that putting dangerous, unregulated toxins in the midst of populated areas is a lot cheaper… for a while.

It boggles the mind: You can see the devastation everywhere: in the hollowed-out shells of buildings, in the anguished faces of relatives, in the parade of scorched cars. But what set off the terrifying explosions that ripped through warehouses containing hazardous chemical materials, shooting fireballs across the sky and shaking buildings more than 2 miles away?… Continue reading “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” →

How Nixon bought off the left wing

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

George Romney introduces Richard Nixon at the Economic Club of Detroit

Turns out we weren’t quite paranoid enough. This Pando story by Mark Ames (read it quick, it goes behind the paywall in a few hours) describes what just might be the real story behind Watergate and the CREEP slush fund (Committee To Reelect The President):

Nixon’s CREEP campaign operatives, including young Roger Stone, specialized in manipulating anti-establishment politics in order to help Nixon (and later, Reagan, Bush, and who knows who else). As I wrote about in my Roger Stone-Donald Trump article, the Nixon people in 1971 laid out a campaign strategy centered on exploiting and manipulating anti-establishment politics in order to destroy their real competition in the Democratic Party.

At the national level, that meant Nixon’s people cut a secret deal with Alabama’s segregationist governor, George Wallace, to run in the Democratic primaries as a far-right populist; and it meant pushing and funding candidates on the far left of the party, particularly black candidates like Shirley Chisholm and antiwar hero Gene McCarthy, to “exacerbate rifts” in the Democratic Party, and allow Nixon to sail to victory.

It worked with depressing efficiency. Nixon’s 1972 victory was one of the biggest landslides in American history.

According to a New York Times scoop, Nixon’s CREEP (Campaign to Re-Elect the President) operatives also brought their strategy to the state and local level. In 1971, the CREEP crew funneled $10,000 into California to try to keep George Wallace’s third party, the American Independence Party, off the California ballot for the 1972 presidential election (Wallace’s independent run in 1968 nearly lost Nixon the election). The effort to keep Wallace’s party off the California ballot failed—but, as I wrote, it didn’t really matter anyway, because Nixon’s people had worked out a sleazy deal with Wallace to run in the 1972 Democratic primaries and divide and depress the party… an effort that was cut short when Wallace was gunned down during a campaign rally, and paralyzed for life.

Other GOP operatives paid and infiltrated the left-wing antiwar party, the Peace and Freedom Party, specifically to undercut California’s Democratic Party candidates by running to the left of the Dems, splitting liberal and antiwar voters, thus helping Republicans to win races they’d otherwise lose.
Continue reading “How Nixon bought off the left wing” →

Teflon and DuPont

~ susie

I’ve always heard awful, awful things about DuPont, a company that pretty much owns the feudal state of Delaware and considers employees to be serfs. This Intercept story is illustrative:

Concerns about the safety of Teflon, C8, and other long-chain perfluorinated chemicals first came to wide public attention more than a decade ago, but the story of DuPont’s long involvement with C8 has never been fully told. Over the past 15 years, as lawyers have been waging an epic legal battle — culminating as the first of approximately 3,500 personal injury claims comes to trial in September — a long trail of documents has emerged that casts new light on C8, DuPont, and the fitful attempts of the Environmental Protection Agency to deal with a threat to public health.

This story is based on many of those documents, which until they were entered into evidence for these trials had been hidden away in DuPont’s files. Among them are write-ups of experiments on rats, dogs, and rabbits showing that C8 was associated with a wide range of health problems that sometimes killed the lab animals. Many thousands of pages of expert testimony and depositions have been prepared by attorneys for the plaintiffs. And through the process of legal discovery they have uncovered hundreds of internal communications revealing that DuPont employees for many years suspected that C8 was harmful and yet continued to use it, putting the company’s workers and the people who lived near its plants at risk.

The best evidence of how C8 affects humans has also come out through the legal battle over the chemical, though in a more public form. As part of a 2005 settlement over contamination around the West Virginia plant where Wamsley worked, lawyers for both DuPont and the plaintiffs approved a team of three scientists, who were charged with determining if and how the chemical affects people.

In 2011 and 2012, after seven years of research, the science panel found that C8 was “more likely than not” linked to ulcerative colitis — Wamsley’s condition — as well as to high cholesterol; pregnancy-induced hypertension; thyroid disease; testicular cancer; and kidney cancer. The scientists’ findings, published in more than three dozen peer-reviewed articles, were striking, because the chemical’s effects were so widespread throughout the body and because even very low exposure levels were associated with health effects.

Scott Walker, probable felon

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Tonette and I kicked off the WI State Fair this morning! - SW #Walker16 by scottwalker

Fortunately, he had the foresight to stack the state judiciary with his buddies, so that all worked out:

Prosecutors believed Gov. Scott Walker committed a felony when he served as Milwaukee County Executive for his role in negotiating a lease extension for county office space and a cleaning service contract, a Wednesday court filing shows.

Walker was never charged with a crime, and has long said he was never a target of the 2011 John Doe investigation into his county office.

On Wednesday prosecutors filed into the court record a 2011 request for a search warrant that was part of the investigation. The Wednesday filing in federal court came in response to a lawsuit brought against the prosecutors, including Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm assistant district attorneys Bruce Landgraf and David Robles, by Walker aide Cindy Archer, who also was under investigation.

They wrote in the search warrant request that there was probable cause to believe Walker, Friends of Scott Walker campaign treasurer John Hiller and real estate broker Andrew Jensen together violated state public office misconduct laws in 2010.

Why the TPP is still in trouble

~ susie

Big pharma payoffs

Because a giveaway to Big Pharma is really unpopular — but without it, Republicans don’t want to support the bill:

The Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade deal the United States is negotiating with 11 other Pacific Rim nations, is a big, complicated document. But if you want to boil the fight over the deal down to its essence, it would be hard to do better than this sentence from Jonathan Weisman at the New York Times, discussing why last week’s negotiations in Hawaii didn’t produce a deal:

Virtually all of the parties hated American protections of pharmaceutical firms, but a compromise on that issue could cost the support of Republicans in Congress.

This is referring to “data exclusivity,” an obscure but important provision of US pharmaceutical regulations. If the US gets other countries to adopt its approach, it could lead to less competition and higher prices for medicine in other TPP nations.

Before a company can introduce a new drug, it must convince the Food and Drug Administration that it’s safe and effective. To prove that, companies conduct expensive clinical trials. Sometimes a second company will develop a drug that’s chemically similar to an earlier drug and will want to use data from the first company’s clinical trials in its own application. But for an important class of drugs called biologics, US law bars companies from doing this for 12 years, forcing these generic drugmakers to either do their own, redundant clinical trials or to wait until that period is over.

The US is trying to use the TPP to export this system to other Pacific Rim nations, most of which have data exclusivity periods for biologics of five or eight years. That would mean higher drug prices around the world, which is why public health groups like Doctors without Borders hate it.

Koch rules for journalists

~ susie

Their lap dog, Scotty Walker

What kind of reporter would go to an event like this and agree to these rules?

This weekend, Charles and David Koch’s Freedom Partners hosted five Republican presidential hopefuls and hundreds of top conservative donors at the St. Regis Monarch Beach luxury resort in California. The tax-exempt organization, which has been dubbed the Koch Brothers’ “secret bank,” allowed nine news organizations to cover parts of the conference.

The New York Times highlighted these invitations last week as evidence of the Kochs’ attempt to change their image as a “secretive” network with a “culture deeply allergic to the spotlight.” But in reality, those reporters who covered the event were subject to numerous restrictions — restrictions one media ethics expert called “outrageous.”

ThinkProgress obtained a copy of the conditions sent by Freedom Partners to reporters. These included demands that reporters “not report on anyone’s attendance at the event unless you are specifically granted an interview request or they are a part of the formal program,” that they “treat their attendance as off the record unless otherwise discussed and approved prior to an interview,” and that “interview requests should only be made through the Freedom Partners communications team.” It also noted that media attendees would have to “stay off-site,” and only be granted access “on-site during the general program hours.”

Only the reporters who agreed to the following provisions would be allowed to attend:

We would like to invite you to cover this private event; however, we ask that you agree to the ground rules below.

1) Media credentials will be given to those covering the event on-site. These credentials must be prominently displayed at all times. Credentials are non-transferable.

2) You have been invited to cover the program, general mood of the event and interviews with program participants, elected officials, and leaders from each group represented at the seminar.
Continue reading “Koch rules for journalists” →

We’re finally catching on

~ susie

_DSC3940

If you’re a longtime reader, you know I’ve been saying this for ten years or more. The alleged STEM jobs shortage is merely a plan to suppress wages. Michael Hiltzik of the L.A. Times has the details:

Alice Tornquist, a Washington lobbyist for the high-tech firm Qualcomm, took the stage at a recent Qualcomm-underwritten conference to remind her audience that companies like hers face a dire shortage of university graduates in engineering. The urgent remedy she advocated was to raise the cap on visas for foreign-born engineers.

“Although our industry and other high-tech industries have grown exponentially,” Tornquist said, “our immigration system has failed to keep pace.” The nation’s outdated limits and “convoluted green-card process,” she said, had left firms like hers “hampered in hiring the talent that they need.”

What Tornquist didn’t mention was that Qualcomm may then have had more engineers than it needed: Only a few weeks after her June 2 talk, the San Diego company announced that it would cut its workforce, of whom two-thirds are engineers, by 15%, or nearly 5,000 people.

The mismatch between Qualcomm’s plea to import more high-tech workers and its efforts to downsize its existing payroll hints at the phoniness of the high-tech sector’s persistent claim of a “shortage” of U.S. graduates in the “STEM” disciplines — science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

As millions of students prepare this summer to begin their university studies, they’re being pressed to choose STEM fields, if only to keep America in the lead among its global rivals. “In the race for the future, America is in danger of falling behind,” President Obama stated in 2010. He labeled the crisis “our generation’s Sputnik moment.”

The high-tech industry contends that U.S. universities simply aren’t producing enough graduates to meet demand, leading to a “skills gap” that must be filled from overseas if the U.S. is to maintain its global dominance. Low unemployment rates among computer workers imply that “demand has outpaced supply,”Jonathan Rothwell of the Brookings Institution told me by email. “Companies struggle to fill job vacancies for skilled programmers and other STEM fields.”

Yet many studies suggest that the STEM shortage is a myth. In computer science and engineering, says Hal Salzman, an expert on technology education at Rutgers, “the supply of graduates is substantially larger than the demand for them in industry.” Qualcomm is not the only high-tech company to be aggressively downsizing. The computer industry, led by Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft, cut nearly 60,000 jobs last year, according to the outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. The electronics industry pared an additional 20,000 positions.

Nevertheless, high-tech employers such as Qualcomm, Google, Microsoft and Facebook lobby hard for more latitude in employing workers on H-1B visas. These are designed to serve high-skilled immigrants but often enable the importing of Indian and Chinese guest workers to replace an older, more experienced, but more expensive domestic workforce. Visa issuance is capped at 85,000 per year, including foreign holders of U.S. advanced degrees, but a bill sponsored by Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) would raise the limit to as many as 195,000.

“If you can make the case that our security and prosperity is under threat, it’s an easy sell in Congress and the media,” says Michael Teitelbaum, a demographer at Harvard Law School and author of the 2014 book “Falling Behind? Boom, Bust, and the Global Race for Scientific Talent,” which challenges claims of a STEM shortage in the U.S.

Despite its “cost-cutting initiative,” a company spokesperson says, Qualcomm “continues to have open positions in specific areas, and still faces a “‘skills deficit’ in all areas of today’s workforce, especially engineering.”