I have tried to make the case before that there are certain universal services that ought not be subject to profit. At the top of my list are education and healthcare. When a profit motive is introduced to either—no matter how well intentional or meaning—they are corrupted. When the question shifts from “how best can we serve those who need our services?” to “how best can we increase shareholder value?” then the organization can no longer be trusted.

Ralph Nader, in End the Greedy Silence—Enough Already, writes:

It is time Americans rise up against the corruption, inefficiency, and cruelty of our healthcare system and tell its corporate captors and Congress—Enough Already!

For decades other countries have guaranteed universal health insurance for all their people, at lower costs and better outcomes (President Truman proposed it 72 years ago in the US). When are we going to break out of this taxpayer-subsidized prison built by the giant insurance companies, drug Goliaths and monopolizing hospital chains?

How long is Uncle Sucker going to pay through the nose for gouging drug prices, patient-denying health insurance companies and all the brutal fine print rules in consumer contracts whose trap doors are maddening tens of millions of Americans?

Deductibles, exclusions, waivers, co-pays, corporate immunities from injured patients, disqualifying changes in patients’ status and just plain stonewalling are just some examples of this cruel madness.

Not to mention the endless electronic bills with their inscrutable codes and unchallengeable charges—that is if you can get anyone on the phone to answer your questions. Billing fraud and abuses alone cost us up to $330 billion Continue Reading »

The cheers, jeers and chants of candidate Donald John Trump’s campaign rallies continue to bring out Americans on the fringe. In the past there have been assaults and beatings, but now a pathetic hate-fueled white man unable or unwilling to take a breath, has killed to upstanders and injured a third in Portland, Oregon.

Portlandia can never be the same again.

Jason Wilson, reporting in Portland Republican says party should use militia groups after racial attack for The Guardian, writes:

Multnomah County GOP chair James Buchal… told the Guardian that recent street protests had prompted Portland Republicans to consider alternatives to “abandoning the public square”.

“I am sort of evolving to the point where I think that it is appropriate for Republicans to continue to go out there,” he said. “And if they need to have a security force protecting them, that’s an appropriate thing too.”

Asked if this meant Republicans making their own security arrangements rather than relying on city or state police, Buchal said: “Yeah. And there are these people arising, like the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters.”

Asked if he was considering such groups as security providers, Buchal said: “Yeah. We’re thinking about that. Because there are now belligerent, unstable people who are convinced that Republicans are like Nazis.”

Buchal ran for Oregon attorney general in 2012 and has stood for election to Congress and the state legislature. The Oath Keepers are described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as “one of the largest radical antigovernment groups in the US”, recruiting current and former military and law enforcement personnel. They have recently appeared at rallies from Berkeley to Boston, standing with activists from the far right, activists holding what were once fringe positions who have recently risen to national prominence.

The Three Percenters are described by Political Research Associates as “a paramilitary group that pledges armed resistance against attempts to restrict private gun ownership”. They were a highly visible presence in Burns, Oregon, before and during the occupation of the Malheur wildlife refuge by rightwing militia early in 2016.

Buchal told the Guardian it was important not to become involved with extremists, and said that on the Three Percenters website, “right there on the front page there is what looks like a solid commitment to this not being about race at all”.

The president, responding to the murders said fucking tweeted:

The violent attacks in Portland on Friday are unacceptable. The victims were standing up to hate and intolerance. Our prayers are w/ them.

This is the response of a 14-year-old schoolgirl, not the leader of the free world.

*For those who don’t remember…

When corporate mercenaries thugs strike are Americans safe? There is a long history in the United States of corporations using private armies to destroy those who threaten their profits. The latest permutation of this abomination comes in the form of Energy Transfer Partners’ (builder of the Dakota Access and Rover—here in Ohio—pipe lines) hiring of TigerSwan: A shadowy international mercenary and security firm, to thwart the peaceful assembly of American citizens seeking to protect their sacred religious heritage and safe drinking water for their families.

My representative in Congress, Jim Bupkis* Renacci, remains silent on the Rover pipeline and I can only assume that that silence is an endorsement of unleashing TigerSwan on his constituents—and, since he seeks the governorship of Ohio—the entire state.

Alleen Brown, Will Parrish and Alice Speri, reporting in Leaked Documents Reveal Counterterrorism Tactics Used at Standing Rock to “Defeat Pipeline Insurgencies” for The Intercept, write:

TigerSwan targeted the movement opposed to the Dakota Access Pipeline with military-style counterterrorism measures, collaborating closely with police in at least five states, according to internal documents obtained by The Intercept. The documents provide the first detailed picture of how TigerSwan, which originated as a U.S. military and State Department contractor helping to execute the global war on terror, worked at the behest of its client Energy Transfer Partners, the company building the Dakota Access Pipeline, to respond to the indigenous-led movement that sought to stop the project.

Internal TigerSwan communications describe the movement as “an ideologically driven insurgency with a strong religious component” and compare the anti-pipeline water protectors to jihadist fighters. One report, dated February 27, 2017, states that since the movement “generally followed the jihadist insurgency model while active, we can expect the individuals who fought for and supported it to follow a post-insurgency model after its collapse.” Drawing comparisons with post-Soviet Afghanistan, the report warns, “While we can expect to see the continued spread of the anti-DAPL diaspora … aggressive intelligence preparation of the battlefield and active coordination between intelligence and security elements are now a proven method of defeating pipeline insurgencies.”

More than 100 internal documents leaked to The Intercept by a TigerSwan contractor, as well as a set of over 1,000 documents obtained via public records requests, reveal that TigerSwan spearheaded a multifaceted private security operation characterized by sweeping and invasive surveillance of protesters.

This is not just an event happening on the other side of the globe in Iraq or Afghanistan. This is not an atrocity occurring in another state half-way across the country. This is a corporate bad actor that, if protests get out of hand and threaten profits, has the will to unleash these thugs on Ohioans who think the Rover pipeline is bad for Ohioans.

This is how TigerSwan thinks:

One report, dated February 27, 2017, states that since the movement “generally followed the jihadist insurgency model while active, we can expect the individuals who fought for and supported it to follow a post-insurgency model after its collapse.” Drawing comparisons with post-Soviet Afghanistan, the report warns, “While we can expect to see the continued spread of the anti-DAPL diaspora … aggressive intelligence preparation of the battlefield and active coordination between intelligence and security elements are now a proven method of defeating pipeline insurgencies.”

Pay close and careful attention to the language here: American citizens seeking to protect their land, their water and their heritage from rapacious corporate greed are following the jihadist insurgency model and with the continued spread of the anti-DAPL diaspora … aggressive intelligence preparation of the battlefield is needed.

Not in my Ohio.

*After extensive searches, I have been unable to determine what Renacci’s middle initial stands for. Until I can find a reliable reference to Renacci full name, Bupkis will do.

Previously…

*And a cat…

So, turns out that the FBI’s person-of-interest is President Donald John Trump’s son-in-law Jared Corey (of course his middle name would be Corey) Kushner and the investigation is focused, so far, on allegations that Kushner, in December talks with Russian Ambassador to the United States Sergey Kislyak, attempted to establish a back-channel communications channel between Russia and his father-in-law and soon to be President, Donald Trump. As bad, and possibly treasonous, as those allegations are, Mano Singham writes in Jared and Ivanka Kushner—slumlords about revelations actually more likely to shake the White House.

Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner ooze with the kind of upscale celebrity lifestyle as her father. But like so many wealthy people, their luxurious lifestyle is squeezing money out of poor people. Alec MacGillis of the investigative journalism outfit ProPublica has an expose of the practices of Donald Trump’s son-in-law’s real estate business and it is not pretty. It says that the company, through another agency, hounded the poor people who live in the units that qualify for Section 8 vouchers to help pay the rent, taking them to court to squeeze money out of them over the smallest infraction.

Mano concludes: The entire Trump family is rotten to the core. They exemplify the greed and selfishness and the lack of ethics and simple human decency that has pervaded almost the entire ruling class in the US.

I second that conclusion and suggest Gary Trudeau may have an answer to the question: How does the president solve a problem like Jared?

Everybody SING…!

There is a hint of historical remembrance in the air over the ill-fated money grab by Cleveland’s wealthy and their political minions. Way back in the last decade another Cleveland mayor, in this case Jane Campbell, got behind a controversial development called Steelyard Commons (which gave birth to The Writing On The Wal, nee No Cleveland Walmart). Campbell shafted Clevelanders by allowing the neighborhood business-destroying big boxes, mainly Walmart, to infiltrate the central city.

Campbell lost her re-election bid in 2005 to Frank Jackson, who seeks election to a fourth term this fall, partly because of the Steelyard Commons deal. On Monday, a coalition of citizen groups presented city council with 20,603 signatures on petition calling for a referendum to stop the issuing of bonds to expand the Quicken Loans—doesn’t anyone else see the irony in that name?—Arena unless a like some of monies is invested in Cleveland’s neighborhood. Those petitions were rejected out of hand and people are pissed.

Yesterday, the next phase of the legal battle—and quite possibly the end of Frank Jackson’s re-election bid—began. Sam Allard, reporting in Lawyers to City Law Director: Certify Q Deal Referendum Signatures or We’ll See You in Court for Scene, writes:

Attorneys at the Chandra law firm representing the Q deal referendum coalition filed a taxpayer demand letter Friday morning, demanding that the Clerk of City Council accept the initiative petition that was rejected earlier this week.

“Swift action is required,” the letter says. “Not only is the City apparently expending resources against the will of the electorate under the false pretense of a so-called ’emergency measure,’ it is invoking inapplicable constitutional arguments in an apparent effort to thwart the electorate’s statutory right to referendum.”

Timing is critical here because there is a narrow construction window between Cavaliers seasons. If litigation lasts even a few weeks (and I expect several months is far more likely) the deal is dead in the water and any financial institution (except perhaps Quicken Loans) would be crazy to invest in the bonds.

Oh yeah, the Pee Dee cobbled together a response as well.

Maxine Waters (@MaxineWaters)

Jared Kushner is under scrutiny in the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation. In other news, water is wet.

May 26, 2017

John “Derf” Backderf does a lot of amazing art, but I’ve always been partial to his True Stories. There was a Miklos Coffee on Lee Road in Cleveland Heights, just north of the city’s main library, in the spot now occupied by Phoenix Coffee and I enjoyed many gallons of coffee in both. In the spirit of True Stories, Alfred Jarry did write the 1896 play Ubu Roi.

If I had overheard the conversation—and like Derf, I’ve overheard volumes of such conversations there—my advice to the young woman would have been to run as fast as she could from the pretentious twit.

Yesterday on The Sound Of Ideas, host Mike McIntyre featured an encore presentation of a show first aired on 6 April of this year: Know the Risks of Opioid Addiction. The first half of the show featured to recovering addicts and a physcian specialing in recovery. The second half brought on two members of the law-enforcement community to talk about a shift from arrest and incarceration to directing addicts to social services to help them break their addiction.

The repeat of the show was timely for two reasons. First, Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner Dr. Thomas Gilson testified yesterday before a U.S. Senate Committee. Second, we now have an Attorney General directing federal prosecutors to go for maximum sentences.

Into this national theatre of the absurd comes Ralph Nader, who in The Left/Right Challenge to the Failed “War on Drugs,” writes:

More and more conservatives and liberals, from the halls of Congress to people in communities across the country, are agreeing that the so-called “war on drugs” needs serious rethinking.

First, we should define our terms. The “war on drugs” that was started by Richard Nixon in 1971 and persists to this day, refers to illegal “street drugs”—cocaine, heroin, marijuana and variations thereof. It is not used to mean a war on legal pharmaceuticals, whose excessive and often inappropriate prescribing takes over 100,000 lives a year in our country. Ironically, prescription opioids alone took 35,000 lives last year—about equal to traffic fatalities.

The argument to criminalize “street drugs”, and severely punish their sellers and users, is largely based on the assumption that a “tough on crime” approach will reduce addiction and abuse of these dangerous substances. Criminalizing drug use consistently fails to address the health problems of addiction, and drives the drug Continue Reading »

Can you imagine if the Cleveland Cavaliers again defeated the Golden State Warriors that the Plain Dealer’s next edition would ignore it? Just let it pass. No comment.

They didn’t fail on Wednesday to run 14 pages in two sports sections. It wasn’t the Warriors but the mere Boston Celtics.

Sports reigns. Beats real necessary news.

I didn’t see a column, an editorial or a follow-up article to what happened on Monday. Dropped after a brief nod on Tuesday.

“Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear,” according to George Orwell.

Then what’s not telling them what they should hear? The Plain Dealer way.

What happened on Monday: Council president Kevin Kelley, a dufuss if there ever was one, turned away petitioners with four boxes of signatures he knew were Continue Reading »

Last evening, while searching YouTube, I came across a Stephen Colbert interview with one of my favorite actors, Kevin Spacey. Spacey was on The Late Show, of course, because of the much anticipated season five of House of Cards which airs Tuesday on Netflix.

What caught my attention, however, was Spacey’s discussion of his one-man-show—Darrow. I went searching for video on the show and discovered the 1991 PBS movie, Darrow. That movie would have aired at about the same time that I tossed my television out on the treelawn so I missed seeing the movie then.

Clearly Spacey shares my fascination with Clarence Darrow and I’m very glad that I came across the show because Clarence Darrow is one of my personal heroes. One of his biographies, Clarence Darrow for the Defense is on my list of Eighteen Books That Have Shaped My World. From page 171 of that book I took a Darrow quote that I strive to live by:

I can say with perfect honesty that I have never knowingly catered to anyone’s ideas, and I have expressed what was within me, regardless of consequences.

I considered The Law in 1984, but stuck with writing and journalism. Perhaps if I had found Clarence Darrow before that I might have made a different decision. (Yes, I had seen Spencer Tracy’s Oscar nominated portrayal of the attorney in Inherit The Wind, but somehow that movie didn’t grip me the way this one has.

So, most mornings I post one new pipeline story to my running Keep Carbon In The Ground page, but this morning my news feed gushered.

First up is this story from Taylor McKinnon at The Center For Biological Diversity—Public Records Sought Over Rover Pipeline’s Compliance With Environmental Laws. McKinnon writes:

The Center for Biological Diversity today filed four public records requests to state and federal agencies demanding disclosure of environmental compliance documents relating to the Rover pipeline in Ohio. The natural gas pipeline is owned by Energy Transfer Partners, the company behind the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline.

Earlier this month the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission halted construction of unbuilt pipeline sections and required a doubling of environmental inspectors after 18 spills were reported. One of the spills released about 2 million gallons of drilling fluid into a pristine wetland along the Tuscarawas River south of Akron.

“Wildlife, including endangered species, can’t afford more spills and environmental disasters,” said Taylor McKinnon, with the Center. “We rely on state and federal agencies to protect us from these kinds of incidents, but clearly that didn’t happen with the Rover pipeline.”

Today’s requests target records relating to Endangered Species Act compliance in connection with all phases of the Rover pipeline construction and operation from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Ohio EPA.

According to the Fish and Wildlife Service, 30 species protected under the federal Endangered Species Act live in Ohio, many of which are dependent on streams, rivers and wetlands that could be harmed by the pipeline or associated fracking spills.

The second story comes from Larry Stine reporting for television station WMFD in Mansfield, Ohio. Reading a prepared public relations release from Energy Transfer Partners (despoiler of both the Rover and Dakota Access pipelines) over video showing the rabid destruction of Ohio farmland sacrificed to ETP profits, Stine offers no new information, but provides a visual reminder of what we’re dealing with.

The third story moves west: Two More Spills for Dakota Access Pipeline where sieve, er pipeline, has dumped 104 gallons of oil on North Dakota land. Before you dismiss such a small amount, consider how you would feel if a pickup truck stopped in front of your home and a worker proceeded to open and dump 104 gallon jugs of used motor oil on your lawn. These spills add up.

Something in Cleveland stinks. Badly.

The Gund Arena—now Quicken Arena—cost $157 million to build. That was the overrun cost. Originally, they it said it would cost $75 million. We amazingly are still paying for overrun bonds issued by Cuyahoga County (till 2023).

But time for more!

The new façade for Quicken Arena will costs an estimated $140 million (more than the original estimated cost of the arena) with borrowing costs skyrocketed to $282 million. And they call it “citizen owned.” How quaint.

Something smells BAD.

What’s going on here?

What I’ve been trying to say for some time.

The media—led by the Plain Dealer and led by the nose by County Executive Armond and Mayor Frank Jackson—has been selling us dog meat for hamburger, if Continue Reading »

Be sure to click through for the punchline…

I tell students that I awaken each morning celebrating my own ignorance because that means I get to learn new information. Yet, back in the ’90s a young man on my staff told me that I was intimidating because I always seemed to have information just waiting between my ears to answer a particular question.

That moment was an eye opener for me and ever since I have battled this predilection I have to blurt out answers as if I were a contestant on Jeopardy. (Many have asked why I did not try out for the show, but my answer has always been that, like Bull on Night Court, I know I would freeze.) I focus on two practices: keeping my mouth shut and saying I don’t know whenever I’m the least uncertain.

I wish I could have read Oliver Burkeman’s Don’t be fooled by a know-all 50 years ago.

The curse of overconfidence afflicts anyone who believes themselves to be knowledgeable, including those who hold that belief because it’s true. Thinking of ourselves as experts—even when we are experts—seems to turn us, at least partially, into fools.

All of which implies something odd about how we assess our own levels of knowledge, as Wray Herbert explained in a post [Impossible Knowledge: Are You an Expert? JH] on the Psychological Science blog.

So, what is impossible knowledge? Impossible knowledge is believing we know to be true information that simply isn’t. Wray Herbert writes:

I grew up with a habitual overclaimer. He wildly exaggerated his expertise, at times claiming knowledge of things he couldn’t possibly know—people, events, ideas that simply do not exist. Being unfamiliar with overclaiming, I just called him a liar.

I couldn’t have known the word overclaimer, nor the concept. The word didn’t exist, and is only used today in the world of psychological science. Even so, we’re all familiar with these people who feel the need to overestimate what they know about the world. What underlies such assertions of impossible knowledge?

A team of researchers at Cornell University—Stav Atir, Emily Rosenzweig and David Dunning—have a theory about overclaiming, one they decided to test in a series of studies. They had the idea that people’s perceptions of their own knowledge of specific domains—biology, personal technology, sculpture—might play a role in overclaiming expertise in that domain. So for example, if I believe my understanding of biology is excellent, and you are a little shaky on the field, I will be more likely to claim knowledge about biology—even non-existent biological concepts.

I hope that I’ve never been as bad as Herbert’s friend—friend-of-friend?—but I acknowledge that I have to police myself when I’m in company.

So, the impeachment discussions have begun and we need to carefully consider President Donald John Trump’s pocket ju-ju that Steve Bannon promised would protect him from removal from office: Vice President President Michael Richard Pence who operatives may have been setting up for a 10-year term in the White House from the get-go.

Writing in President Mike Pence? Dems should be ‘careful what they wish for’, experts say for The Guardian, David Smith explains:

The 22nd amendment to the constitution, Galen noted, stipulates that if the vice-president takes over with more than two years left in the term, he can only run for re-election once. If he takes over with less than two years remaining, he can run twice, raising the prospect of Pence serving as president for nearly 10 years.

Even our first impeached president—no, not this one, this one—held on for just a few days short of three years in office before being impeached and, like President William Jefferson Clinton, was found not guilty by the senate. Johnson, like Clinton, finished his term in office. Only one president, Richard Milhous Nixon, left office under investigation.

Tom McCarthy, reporting in What would happen if Donald Trump were impeached? for The Guardian, writes:

The president may… have broken his oath of office, according to analysis at Lawfareblog, whose top six analysts joined in a byline to write: “It’s very hard to argue that carelessly giving away highly sensitive material to an adversary foreign power constitutes a faithful execution of the office of president.”

The blog notes that allegations of oath violations have been central to every previous case of impeachment or near impeachment.

“Let’s not minimize it,” legal scholar Alan Dershowitz said on CNN late Monday. “Comey is in the wastebasket of history. Everything else is off the table. This is the most serious charge ever made against a sitting president of the United States. Let’s not underestimate it.”

The case against Trump was, to some minds, already strong. A campaign is under way to impeach Trump for allegedly violating constitutional bans on receiving certain gifts. Others have argued for an arcane application of constitutional law under which the vice-president and cabinet together might declare the president unfit to serve.

President Trump has now effectively shut down the Republican party wet dream trifecta of a Republican president working with a congress in which the party controls both houses. If this were a movie script, no one would look twice.

Matt Taibbi delivers the best obituary for Ohio’s worst ever export. My highlights:

When I mentioned to one of my relatives that I was writing about the death of Ailes, the response was, “Say that you hope he’s reborn as a woman in Saudi Arabia.”

Ailes has no one but his fast-stiffening self to blame for this treatment. He is on the short list of people most responsible for modern America’s vicious and bloodthirsty character.

We are a hate-filled, paranoid, untrusting, book-dumb and bilious people whose chief source of recreation is slinging insults and threats at each other online, and we’re that way in large part because of the hyper-divisive media environment he discovered.

Ailes was the Christopher Columbus of hate. When the former daytime TV executive and political strategist looked across the American continent, he saw money laying around in giant piles. He knew all that was needed to pick it up was a) the total abandonment of any sense of decency or civic duty in the news business, and b) the factory-like production of news stories that spoke to Americans’ worst fantasies about each other.

Like many con artists, he reflexively targeted the elderly – “I created a TV network for people from 55 to dead,” he told Joan Walsh – where he saw billions could be made mining terrifying storylines about the collapse of the simpler America such viewers remembered, correctly or (more often) incorrectly, from their childhoods.

And, Ailse’ parting fuck you!

The presidency of Donald Trump wouldn’t have been possible had not Ailes raised a generation of viewers on these paranoid storylines. But the damage Ailes did wasn’t limited to hardening and radicalizing conservative audiences.

The world is a little bit better place this week.

*That would be Rot In Hell, of course.

A cursory search on line did not turn up a reasonable facsimile of what wartier Ahdaf Soueif describes as his Victorian reading chair, but I think the chair, with a built-in book arm is near perfect.

Making people aware of a bad behavior makes people more likely to engage in that bad behavior. Our mothers were wrong: if everybody is jumping off the bridge, of course you’re going to want to jump off the bridge, even if doing so is blindingly stupid.

Yes, yes. I know that that is counter intuitive and makes no sense. But Oliver Burkeman, writing in When raising awareness backfires for The Guardian, makes the case:

The underlying issue here is a big headache for anyone involved in “awareness-raising campaigns”, and for anyone trying to solve a social problem: making people aware they’re doing something bad doesn’t necessarily make them more likely to stop. Sometimes, that’s down to the frustrating perversity of the human mind: for instance, there are some signs that scary campaigns against smoking or overeating backfire, not least because they make people anxious, and when smokers or overeaters get anxious, the first thing they do is… Well, yes, exactly. But often it’s simply because the greater the number of people engaged in a given behaviour, the less wrong it feels. Even campaigns against something as obviously criminal as domestic violence, research suggests, may prove similarly self-sabotaging: being an abuser feels less shameful when you know you’re not alone.

There is also more than a little oppositional psychology at work here. If you want someone to not do something, your first step ought not to be telling them not to do that. Burkeman gave me the headline when he concluded:

Consider this column an awareness-raising campaign about the limitations of awareness-raising campaigns. Which means I’ve probably made matters worse.

Make sure that you read the comments on this one. There are some possible insights into President Trump there.

Feck…