Judge dismisses Trump request to keep taxes secret in New York – CNNPolitics
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Category: Money, Class, and Poverty,
BuzzFeed Investigates Net Neutrality Fake Comments: How Political Operatives Duped Ajit Pai’s FCC
The New York attorney general opened an investigation and has since issued subpoenas to more than a dozen entities — estimating that “as many as 9.6 million comments may have used stolen identities.” But the FCC went ahead and scrapped the net neutrality rule in a massive victory for the broadband industry and a huge blow, consumer advocates said, for users. Some suspicious comments have been tracked back to particular political operatives. But the question of how millions of identities were marshaled without consent has largely remained a mystery. Until now.
…The anti–net neutrality comments harvested on behalf of Broadband for America, the industry group that represented telecommunications giants including AT&T, Cox, and Comcast, were uploaded to the FCC website by Media Bridge founder Shane Cory, a former executive director of both the Libertarian Party and the conservative sting group Project Veritas. Cory has claimed credit for “20 or 30” major public advocacy campaigns in recent years, including, he says, record-setting submissions to the IRS, Environmental Protection Agency, Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, and “probably a handful of others.” On Media Bridge’s website, the company has described itself as having expertise in “overwhelming government agencies” with avalanches of public submissions, and has publicly dubbed its approach to marshaling comments the “Big Hammer.”
In the FCC campaign, Cory was working for Ralph Reed — a high-powered political strategist and titan of the Christian right who himself was working for Broadband for America. Cory, in turn, enlisted LCX Digital to find the commenters.
…In a sworn deposition, a cofounder of LCX described the business as a “completely fraudulent” enterprise that had routinely faked data in its corporate work.
…“Spend a million dollars with Media Bridge,” Cory’s company told prospective clients in a post on its website, “and most likely, you’ll have a million people + advocating for your position.”
…Suddenly, despite polling showing substantial support for net neutrality, Americans appeared to be flocking online to defend the rights of the telecom giants.
Almost immediately, observers started sounding alarms. The tech publication ZDNet found that “anti-net neutrality spammers are flooding FCC’s pages with fake comments” and that several people whose names appeared as commenters said they had not posted a word. Reporters at Gizmodo and the Verge found similar examples.
Pro–net neutrality comments were called into question, too. Nearly 8 million identical one-sentence comments supporting the existing regulations were tied to email addresses from FakeMailGenerator.com. Many of those used plausible names but with nonsensical street-and-city combinations that do not exist. Another million comments, also supporting net neutrality, claimed to come from people with @pornhub.com email addresses.
By the time the comment period closed at the end of August, the number of comments had obliterated all previous records, with more than five times as many as the last time the issue had come up for debate.
…In one particular group of 1.9 million comments, according to BuzzFeed News’ analysis, 94% of the email addresses belonged to people who had fallen victim to a hack known as the Modern Business Solutions data breach, in which millions of people’s personal information, including full names, birthdates, home addresses, and email addresses, had been stolen. In 2016, a hacker had tweeted links to the breached data, which security researchers eventually traced back to an Austin-based data management company whose servers had been unguarded.
All these comments were uploaded by Cory, using his Media Bridge email address. (Some of the comments were full duplicates; after removing them, there were just over 1.5 million comment-and-email combinations.)
…Even the names, in some cases, were red flags. Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley and Arizona Rep. Ruben Gallego — both Democrats — appeared to advocate against net neutrality, contrary to their party’s position. Merkley has previously said he didn’t write the comment attributed to him, and last year he called on the FCC to investigate its fake-comment problem.
…Fictional characters had also chimed in: Boba Fett and Luke Skywalker made their cases against net neutrality, although they claimed to live in Colleyville, Texas, and Marietta, Georgia.
…The most remarkable pattern concerned the timestamps in the data. If LCX’s data is to be believed, Texans were just as likely to sign the letter at 3 a.m. as at 3 p.m. — or any other hour of the day, for that matter. But that’s not how people normally behave online. A typical person’s internet activity peaks during the most common waking hours and crashes after that.
The IP addresses listed in the data also raise questions. All 11 people listed from Keene, Texas, for instance, purportedly approved their letter-signing through IP addresses on a specific address range owned by Major League Baseball Advanced Media, which is headquartered more than a thousand miles away in New York City.
Net Neutrality Fake Comments: How Political Operatives Duped Ajit Pai’s FCC
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Slavery, black history, DNA genealogy: Learnings from a trip to Africa
In a land that had tried to rob their people of dignity, strip them of their identity and steal their labor, the Tuckers knew they were somebody.
As she grew up, Wanda came to realize that history was an ever-changing story, and it depended on who was telling it.
…Two Angolans named Anthony and Isabella, along with 20 or so others, staggered off a ship into Point Comfort in what is now Hampton, Virginia. They’d been taken from the Ndongo kingdom in the interior of Angola and marched to the coast. They’d endured months packed in the bottom of a ship named the San Juan Bautista. When raiders attacked in the Gulf of Mexico, the captives were rerouted to Virginia aboard the White Lion, changing the course of a nation.
Anthony and Isabella probably weren’t their real names. Their Angolan names were likely subbed out by whichever Catholic priest baptized them for the journey.
The reason they are remembered and other Africans are not is the anomaly that someone bothered to record their names at all. A 1625 census noted that they belonged to the household of Capt. William Tucker and that they had a child named William. Wanda and her family believe they are descended from William, the first named African born in what would become America. An American forefather most history ignores.
…Anthony and Isabella came from the powerful Ndongo kingdom, whose descendants still lived in the Angolan interior near the Lukala and Kwanza rivers. Many from the kingdom were skilled iron workers and farmers.
…Angola was barely mentioned in most histories of the slave trade, but this was where it had begun. Historians had learned fairly recently that the first Africans had been captured here.
…In the time of Anthony and Isabella, Wanda also learned, the slave trade had been dominated by the Portuguese. The Portuguese would stoke tensions between African tribes and reap the captives from those battles. The English were not yet as involved – they were plundering gold and silver from Ghana.
…Father Gabriele Bortolami, an Italian Capuchin priest and professor of anthropology ….took a thick book from a wooden cabinet. The cover barely clung to the binder, but the words – in Italian – were bold against the white pages. “Istorica Descrittione De’ Tre Regni Congo, Matamba Et Angola.”
Historical description of the three kingdoms of Congo, Matamba and Angola.
It was written in 1690.
…Njinga, queen of the Ndongo and Matamba kingdoms, fought to defend her people from Portuguese conquerors in the 1600s.
Njinga, who came to power five years after Anthony and Isabella were captured, is the most awe-inspiring of the Angolan ancestors.
…Njinga demanded the Portuguese treat her as an equal. When they showed up to a meeting with chairs only for themselves, expecting her to sit on the floor, she had a servant kneel on all fours and used his back as a stool. She made the Portuguese look her in the eye.
But even Njinga has seen her legacy questioned. She submitted to baptism by the Portuguese – a political move some saw as weak. She gave up prisoners of war to placate the Portuguese, who betrayed her.
…The elders spoke a mix of Portuguese and Kimbundu, the Bantu language Anthony and Isabella likely spoke. They told of villagers captured and sent away. They told her they had a word for the sea: kalunga – death. No one who crossed those waters ever returned.
“We suffered a lot,’’ said the soba, whose name was Antonio Manuel Domingos. The slave trade devastated communities, and many never recovered.
Wanda asked what she should tell fellow African-Americans back at home.
“You have relatives here,” he replied.
Slavery, black history, DNA genealogy: Learnings from a trip to Africa
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Research: When Women Are on Boards, Male CEOs Are Less Overconfident
Having women on the board results better acquisition and investment decisions and in less aggressive risk-taking, yielding benefits for shareholders. What’s less clear is why these effects happen.
Our research suggests one potential reason: Having female board members helps temper the overconfidence of male CEOs, improving overall decision making for the company.
…One benefit of having female directors on the board is a greater diversity of viewpoints, which is purported to improve the quality of board deliberations, especially when complex issues are involved, because different perspectives can increase the amount of information available. At the same time, research has found that female directors tend to be less conformist and more likely to express their independent views than male directors because they do not belong to old-boy networks.
…Our study has two important policy implications. First, it suggests that female board representation matters more in certain industries, because some industries have more overconfident CEOs. Second, our findings suggest female board representation can be especially beneficial in helping firms weather crises. Overall, our research supports the view that having women on boards improves strategic decision making and benefits firms.
Research: When Women Are on Boards, Male CEOs Are Less Overconfident
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Trump administration privatizing migrant child detention
“The United States is the country in the world that detains the most children for immigration reasons, and probably for the longest period of time. No other country comes close,” said Michael Bochenek, a Human Rights Watch attorney who serves on a United Nations research team examining the global detention of children. “To have private companies move into the area of the care and custody of children in detention-like settings is especially troubling.”
…Nonprofit providers, however, have faced criticism of their own. Earlier this year, a review of 38 legal claims obtained by the AP — some of which have never been made public — showed taxpayers could be on the hook for more than $200 million in damages from parents who said their children were harmed while under care from nonprofit foster providers and other shelters.
…The Trump administration has started shifting some of the caretaking of migrant children toward the private sector and contractors instead of the largely religious-based nonprofit grantees that have long cared for the kids.
So far, the only private company caring for migrant children is CHS, owned by beltway contractor Caliburn International Corp. In June, CHS held more than 20% of all migrant children in government custody. And even as the number of children has declined, the company’s government funding for their care has continued to flow. That’s partly because CHS is still staffing a large Florida facility with 2,000 workers even though the last children left in August.
…DC Capital Partners bought CHS, a company with a troubled past. The firm agreed in 2017 to pay out $3.8 million to settle an investigation involving allegations that it double billed and overcharged the federal government for medical services.
Despite the fraud settlement, CHS went on to win a no-bid contract to operate Homestead. At the time, federal officials said they didn’t have to open the bidding to competitors, typically the way taxpayer dollars are spent, because there was “unusual and compelling urgency.”
…No-bid contracts can lead to higher costs. CHS, a contractor, typically hires locally, staffing up as quickly as it can, hiring hundreds of people through online ads and at community job fairs. In contrast, nonprofits typically are paid through grants. They have screened staffers on call, who can be flown in if a shelter needs to care for a sudden increase of children for a short period.
…Former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly joined Caliburn’s board this spring after stepping down from decades of government service; he joined the Trump administration as Secretary of Homeland Security, where he backed the idea of taking children from their parents at the border, saying it would discourage people from trying to immigrate or seek asylum.
Critics say this means Kelly now stands to financially benefit from a policy he helped create.
…Kelly and other corporate directors including Retired Gen. Anthony C. Zinni, Retired Admiral James G. Stavridis and Retired Rear Admiral Kathleen Martin could have received at least $100,000 a year for their service and advice, and a $200,000 bonus if the company went public.
…CHS’s business plan going forward depends on having more kids in their shelters, according to a prospectus its parent company Caliburn filed last year to go public with a $100 million stock offering.
…Overall, the federal government spent a record $3.5 billion caring for migrant children over the past two years to run its shelters through both contracts and grants.
…The government doesn’t disclose the names of individual shelters, nor how many children are in each one. But confidential government data obtained by the AP shows that in June nearly one in four migrant children in government care was housed by CHS. That included more than 2,300 teens at Homestead, Florida, and more than 500 kids in shelters in Brownsville, Los Fresnos and San Benito, Texas. For each teen held at Homestead at that time, it cost taxpayers an average $775 per day.
Trump administration privatizing migrant child detention – MarketWatch
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Zuckerberg says if Warren becomes president, Facebook would sue U.S. gov’t: ‘You go to the mat and fight’
“You have someone like Elizabeth Warren thinks that the right answer is to break up the companies … I mean, if she gets elected president then I would bet that we will have a legal challenge, and I would bet that we will win the legal challenge,” Zuckerberg is quoted as saying in two Q&A sessions with Facebook employees during July.
“And does that still suck for us? Yeah. I mean, I don’t want to have a major lawsuit against our own government. I mean, that’s not the position that you want to be in when you’re, you know, I mean … It’s like, we care about our country, and want to work with our government and do good things. But look, at the end of the day, if someone’s going to try to threaten something that existential, you go to the mat and fight.”
Strong words for someone who, under a different administration, could be looking at legal difficulties for assisting a foreign government influence national elections.
Make cops carry liability insurance: The private sector knows how to spread risks, and costs
Like police, doctors have a difficult and stressful job that sometimes involves making life-or-death decisions under conditions of uncertainty. But unlike police, doctors don’t expect the rest of us to pay for their mistakes. Instead, doctors carry professional liability insurance, which pays to defend them against malpractice claims and protects them from financial ruin by paying out damage awards to successful plaintiffs.
…Unfortunately, police departments have a hard time getting rid of their own bad apples: For example, the officers who tried to frame Wiggins are still employed by the NYPD; no charges have been filed against them.
…This is the policy change we need to better align police incentives with public safety and respect for constitutional rights. Police officers are engaged in a profession that, while indispensably crucial, also poses serious risk, and that risk is causing taxpayers to foot an enormous bill when the officers fail to meet the standard of care.
…The relationship between police and many of the communities they serve is in a state of crisis. Much of that is due to a perception that police are insufficiently respectful of people’s rights and too quick to use force.
Private liability insurance provides an extremely powerful tool for distinguishing between the best and the worst cops.
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Marijuana Banking Bill Passes House in Historic Vote | National News | US News
The legislation, if ultimately made into law, would protect financial institutions and ancillary firms that serve marijuana businesses from criminal prosecution and other consequences – a long-awaited move that would provide stability and security to the multibillion-dollar cannabis industry.
…The bill moved out of the House Financial Committee in March and was sponsored by more than 200 lawmakers at the time of the vote. It is backed by a slew of national banking groups, including the American Bankers Association, the Credit Union National Association and the Independent Community Bankers of America, which have pushed Congress to act on the issue for some time. The National Association for State Treasurers, a bipartisan group of more than 30 state attorneys general, and the governors of 20 states have urged Congress to pass the bill.
Marijuana Banking Bill Passes House in Historic Vote | National News | US News
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Greta Thunberg: why the right’s usual attacks don’t work on her – Vox
These moments of accountability on the right are rare, of course — there are dozens, hundreds more examples of attacks far uglier than this that have brought no pushback at all. But they help illustrate that Thunberg has the rare ability to tap into something human, something that, at least sporadically, can break through the media filter pushing the public into partisan camps.
…It’s important to note, as she frequently does, that Thunberg has not single-handedly created this movement. She stands on the shoulders of generations of activists before and alongside her, many of them people of color, who are, to say the least, less likely to be adopted as icons by Westerners.
…Opponents of action — generally far-right coalitions fueled by a mix of fossil-fuel cronyism and populist ethnonationalism — don’t assail it. They do everything they can to distract from it.
…That almost always involves attacking the messengers (“Al Gore has a big house”) and their proposed solutions (“the Green New Deal will take away your hamburgers”). The scientists are after grant money; the activists are undercover socialists; the leaders are hypocrites; the marchers litter. Casting doubt on the motives and authenticity of people fighting for progressive causes is the right’s primary political tool, with efforts now led out of the White House.
For climate scientists and advocates, it’s a familiar trap. Any political program sufficient to address climate change at scale is, almost by definition, going to be radical, which allows the right to dismiss it as “far left.” The go-to attack on the climate movement is that it’s a “watermelon,” green on the outside and socialist red on the inside — that climate change is just a cover story for the political program.
Thunberg has sidestepped attacks on her motives by almost entirely refraining from endorsing specific political reforms or policies.
…In characteristically vile fashion, the right in both Europe and the US has attempted to use Thunberg’s mental health against her, but the attempt has largely backfired. For one thing, it is virtually impossible to watch her speak for any length of time and maintain a good-faith belief that she is responding to social pressure from adults. She is manifestly authentic, direct in a way unique among public figures, no more subject to flattery than to coercion.
…She’s not intimidated or dazzled by social hierarchy. She just drags the focus, again and again, back to her fixation, what the grown-ups don’t want to talk about: the need for immediate action and their long-standing failure to take any.
…She takes the facts seriously, even when very few adults are modeling how to do so, even when it’s uncomfortable or inconvenient for those around her. She’s vegan, she won’t fly, and she’s devoting her young life to prodding adults into action; the default right-wing accusations of hypocrisy and duplicity simply don’t stick.
The right has established a social environment in which speaking up on climate change leads to bullying and shaming, but those tactics just don’t seem to work on Thunberg. And without them, the right has nothing to fall back on (not one of the hundreds of attacks launched at her has the courage to directly dispute the IPCC report she submitted).
In ignoring social cues, Thunberg has become one: A signal to other young people around the world that, yes, this really is an emergency, and yes, they really can and should speak up.
Greta Thunberg: why the right’s usual attacks don’t work on her – Vox
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Clean-air scientists fired by EPA to reconvene in snub to Trump | Environment | The Guardian
The Trump administration is accused by at least half a dozen whistleblowers of muzzling climate and pollution science.
The air pollution experts follow in the footsteps of a separate group that reassembled to call for the government to better prepare for climate disasters. Their advice will come as EPA conducts a scheduled review of its standards for particle pollution, the tiny specks that enter the lungs and cause breathing and heart problems that can kill.
…Weak standards, Goldman said “means cities across the country wouldn’t have to do as much to keep their air clean, industry could get more permits approved, it would be easier to rollback environmental regulations”.
The finding that particle pollution is dangerous is integrated into nearly all major pollution standards, for power plants, cars and project permits, she said.
…If Trump officials can argue that particle pollution isn’t as bad as previously thought, they can strengthen industry arguments for rolling back environment and health protections.
Trump’s EPA ended the particulate matter advisory board nearly a year ago. The agency also replaced many of the academic scientists on a broader science panel with scientists from industry and conservative states.
Earlier this month, EPA chief Andrew Wheeler selected a new group of “non-member consultants” to assist that panel with work on both particle pollution and smog. About half of the new consultants are linked with industry. Their recommendations to the panel will happen behind the scenes, rather than in public meetings.
Clean-air scientists fired by EPA to reconvene in snub to Trump | Environment | The Guardian
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Irate mom calls for teacher’s ouster after he cuts student’s hair as punishment – New York Daily News
A New Hampshire mother is calling for the removal of a teacher who she said grabbed her daughter and chopped a chunk of hair when she wouldn’t stop playing with it.
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Hawaii becomes 26th state to decriminalize marijuana – ABC News
Under the new law, people caught with small amounts of marijuana will no longer face a misdemeanor charge that had been punishable by up to 30 days in jail and a $1,000 fine. Now people caught with 3 ounces or less of weed can still be hit with a citation carrying a $130 fine, but no jail term.
…While Ige took a hands-off approach to decriminalizing pot, he vetoed two other marijuana bills passed by the legislature.
He struck down legislation that would have made it legal for people to transport medical cannabis from island to island, and another bill that would have created an industrial hemp licensing program.
Hawaii becomes 26th state to decriminalize marijuana – ABC News
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Trump Didn’t Bribe Ukraine. It’s Actually Worse Than That.
Using presidential power to withhold aid to a nation that was recently invaded by Russia unless its investigates your political rival sounds like the definition of a criminal quid pro quo. The possibility that Trump pressured another nation to interfere in the next presidential election on his behalf—not long after the completion of a multiyear investigation into interference in the 2016 presidential election by Russia on his behalf—is jaw-dropping.
…What is abhorrent about the alleged conduct here is not that Trump is pushing a foreign government to do something, but rather that he might have used his presidential power to get a foreign government to help him win the next election.
…What Trump is alleged to have done is not a garden variety crime; it’s worse. It involved misusing $250 million in aid appropriated by Congress for his benefit—the kind of gross misconduct that easily clears the bar of high crimes and misdemeanors set by the Constitution when impeaching a president.
Labeling Trump’s alleged conduct as “bribery” or “extortion” cheapens what is alleged to have occurred and does not capture what makes it wrongful. It’s not a crime—it’s a breach of the president’s duty to not use the powers of the presidency to benefit himself. And he invited a foreign nation to influence the 2020 presidential election on the heels of a nearly three-year investigation that proved Russia had tried to influence the 2016 presidential election.
Trump Didn’t Bribe Ukraine. It’s Actually Worse Than That. – POLITICO Magazine
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Comments From The Peanut Gallery 