Not Enough Bullets

In the brave new world of f%$#ing over the American worker, we have the financial innovation (hold on to your wallets) of payroll cards:

Hey, remember our old friends, Darden Restaurants? They’re the dickbag parent company of Olive Garden, Longhorn Steakhouse, and (formerly) Red Lobster, who (allegedly knowingly) source from slave labor and who are legendary within the restaurant industry for screwing over their workers. Yeah, turns out they have a fun new way of screwing their employees out of their hard-earned money. The best part? It’s (mostly) perfectly legal.

The secret is a fun (not at all fun) method of paying their employees called payroll cards. The way payroll cards work is that instead of actual paychecks, employees are given what amounts to a debit card they can use to access their pay. Some (assholes) have argued that this is actually good for workers, because it means they can access their money immediately. But a new report from Restaurant Opportunities Centers United sheds some light on the practice and, well … Darden doesn’t come out of it looking pretty. Among other things, the report found that:

• 23% of employees surveyed said they were never given instructions on how to use the cards
• 42% had trouble accessing their money using the cards
• 63% weren’t told about the fees associated with the card when it was foisted on them
• 49% said they had no access to an ATM from which they could withdraw their money without a fee
• 24% reported fees at point of purchase — meaning they had to pay fees when they tried to use the payroll card for a purchase, rather than just a withdrawal

Payroll cards are great for banks: they get to charge exorbitant ATM fees to people whom they would otherwise have never been able to gouge. They’re just as great for the companies themselves, especially in Darden’s case: all told, the practice of using payroll cards saves the company $5 million per year, according to the report. The only people they’re not great for are actual workers, who (as per usual) get hosed in a big way.

Employers are required to offer an alternative, but a lot of them don't, and those that do try to hide it from their workers.

F%$# these folks, without lube.

Primary Results

Kentucky and Oregon both had primaries tonight.

These were both closed primaries, and Hilary was supposed to crush both of these.

Well, as I am writing this, Clinton is barely ahead in Kentucky (not been called yet), and Sanders has won by about 7 points in Oregon.

Hillary spent a lot of time and effort in Kentucky, so she has to feel like Pyrrhus of Epirus right now.

Oh Snap!

Despite a veto threat from the Obama administration, the Senate passed a bill allowing 911 victims to sue them for their ties to the terrorists:

A bill that would let the families of those killed in the Sept. 11 attacks sue Saudi Arabia for any role in the terrorist plot passed the Senate unanimously on Tuesday, bringing Congress closer to a showdown with the White House, which has threatened to veto the legislation.

The Senate’s passage of the bill, which will now be taken up in the House, is another sign of escalating tensions in a relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia that once received little scrutiny from lawmakers.

Administration officials have lobbied against the bill, a view that the White House spokesman Josh Earnest reiterated after the vote. And the Saudi government has warned that if the legislation passes, it might begin selling off up to $750 billion in Treasury securities and other assets in the United States before they face a danger of being frozen by American courts. Adel al-Jubeir, the Saudi foreign minister, delivered the warning to lawmakers and the administration while in Washington in March.

The House of Saud is claiming that if this passes, they will dump their Treasuries on the market, which will cause the dollar to tumble.

So the dollar falls, making imports more expensive, and our exports more expensive.

This would have the effect of reinforcing our manufacturing economy and improving our balance of trade.^*

The Senate bill carves out an exception to the [1976] law [which grants immunity to foreign governments] if foreign countries are found culpable for terrorist attacks that kill American citizens within the United States. If the bill were to pass both houses and be signed by the president, it could clear a path for the role of the Saudi government to be examined in the Sept. 11 suits.

………

Mr. Schumer said he believed that Democrats would override a veto from Mr. Obama. ………

So, if the House follows suit, and Obama vetoes the bill, this is going be a major sh%$ storm, and it's going to jam up the Democrats something fierce.

It plays into one of Trump's narratives, and it's a very popular idea among the American public.

What's more, Republicans would love to override an Obama veto.

The simple solution would be for Obama not to veto the bill, but because the foreign policy establishment continues to view the House of Saud to be an invaluable ally, as opposed to the medieval terrorism supporters that they actually are, so the ever establishment Obama will follow through on his veto.

^*Only please, Brer Fox, please don't throw me into the briar patch.

Quit Drawing Targets on Your Shoes, Morons

The useless meat sacks known as "Senate Moderates" are now prostrating themselves before the possibility of President Trump:

As Democrats portray Donald Trump as a dangerous leader for his party, most of them barely acknowledge he could be president. But some centrist Democrats say they’re ready and willing to work with the business mogul should he defeat their party’s nominee.

“The people will have a chance to vote. If Donald Trump is elected president there will be a great opportunity to sit down and have a conversation about what that agenda looks like,” explained Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.), who has long backed Hillary Clinton. “If he’s president, we’re going to have disagreement. But we’d better all figure out how to come up with an agenda for the American people.”

Getting ready for a potential Trump presidency in their home states may just be good politics for moderate senators such as Heitkamp, Jon Tester of Montana and West Virginia’s Joe Manchin. They’ll be top targets for Republicans in 2018, a midterm year that could favor the GOP if recent trends of lower turnouts in nonpresidential elections continue. And it’s a good bet that they’ll need Trump voters to keep their jobs.

Seriously?

These cheese eating surrender monkeys are panicking over the midterms, and so they are engaging in activities calculated to demoralize the base.

It's stupid on a policy level, it's stupid, on a political level, it's even worse.

This is blind unreasoning panic.

I've seen zebras chased by cheetahs that carry themselves with more grace and dignity.

Why Ignoring CIA Torture Was a Bad Idea

Some how or other, the CIA "accidentally" deleted the Senate Intelligence Committee's torture report, though there appears to be another copy "safe":

……

Yeah, good luck with those files, especially given the spectacular news from this side of the pond regarding one of the CIA's most recent escapades in international thooleramawnery. Once again, the dedicated worker bees of our intelligence community have proven themselves tragically accident prone. As Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News reports:

Although other copies of the report exist, the erasure of the controversial document by the CIA office charged with policing agency conduct has alarmed the U.S. senator who oversaw the torture investigation and reignited a behind-the-scenes battle over whether the full unabridged report should ever be released, according to multiple intelligence community sources familiar with the incident. The deletion of the document has been portrayed by agency officials to Senate investigators as an "inadvertent" foul-up by the inspector general. In what one intelligence community source described as a series of errors straight "out of the Keystone Cops," CIA inspector general officials deleted an uploaded computer file with the report and then accidentally destroyed a disk that also contained the document, filled with thousands of secret files about the CIA's use of "enhanced" interrogation methods.

And I am the Tsar of all the Russias.

It is a good thing that the Congressional oversight panels have been right on the ball in informing we suckers who foot the bill about this flagrant disregard for security protocols and spectacular bungling by the relevant authorities in The Company. No, wait.

The incident was privately disclosed to the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Justice Department last summer, the sources said. But the destruction of a copy of the sensitive report has never been made public. Nor was it reported to the federal judge who, at the time, was overseeing a lawsuit seeking access to the still classified document under the Freedom of Information Act, according to a review of court files in the case. A CIA spokesman, while not publicly commenting on the circumstances of the erasure, emphasized that another unopened computer disk with the full report has been, and still is, locked in a vault at agency headquarters. "I can assure you that the CIA has retained a copy," wrote Dean Boyd, the agency's chief of public affairs, in an email.

Well, I'm certainly reassured. They're probably using the disc to play floor hockey at Langley.

But Senator Dianne Feinstein is still a trusting soul.

The functions of our state security apparatus are important.

The enormous intelligence industrial complex that we have created is not.

It is out of control, wasteful, and incompetent.

Cuomo Has to be Sh%$ting Bullets Now

It's pretty clear that US Attorney U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara's investigations of corruption in Albany have not ended with the convictions of the speaker of the assembly and the majority leader of the state senate:

As U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara’s office issues a storm of subpoenas to the administration of Governor Andrew Cuomo and his close associates in relation to the state’s Buffalo Billion economic development program, the governor and his aides have delivered a consistent message: the investigation targets the dealings of a few bad apples, the governor wasn’t aware of any wrongdoing and he wants to get to the bottom of the situation as quickly as possible.

“I’ve said to all my people, and I’ve said to the U.S. attorney, any way we can find out and be helpful and be cooperative, we will be,” Cuomo told reporters during a press conference in the Adirondacks on Tuesday. “Nobody wants the facts more than us. That’s why we started our own private investigation. We know the questions: did two people act improperly? Did they represent companies they shouldn’t have? Was there undue influence for those companies? Those are the questions, we now need the answers and we don’t have the answers.”

The message rings as spin to a number of expert observers who insist Cuomo has long overseen a system that allows, at the very least, for the appearance of pay-to-play to flourish as mini-economies have popped up around the state where connected consultants work with both state government entities and those looking to win state contracts, and where the state funnels money through non-profits, allowing them to avoid scrutiny and standard state contracting procedures.

Bharara’s probe appears to have also spurred inquiries into surrounding issues by Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli - all of whom, like Cuomo, are Democrats.

It is unclear whether the two men who have been reported to be at the center of the probe - longtime Cuomo aide Joe Percoco and Cuomo family associate and lobbyist Todd Howe - violated the law or how Bharara’s many subpoenas that have targeted the executive chamber, former Cuomo aides, consultants, and businesses involved in the Buffalo Billion all fit together. However, the scope of the investigation and the deep layers of connections between and among some of the players involved makes it fairly clear that the target of Bharara’s investigation is not simply two Cuomo associates.

………

“The governor is looking at it in terms of the mistakes, or poor behavior of a couple aides that he seems to be disassociating himself with,” said John Kaehny, executive director of Reinvent Albany. “But what the subpoenas are targeting seems to be the corruption risk and bid-rigging favoring the governor’s campaign contributors. No one cares Todd Howe did something dumb. This is not what this is about - the governor sidestepped the larger issues.”

At least six current or former members of the Cuomo administration have been targeted by subpoenas. The administration has defended some of them.

A review of a number of businesses targeted by Bharara’s subpoenas shows that most of them are regular contributors to Cuomo’s campaigns. That leads some observers, including Kaehny, to believe that Bharara is interested in the state’s economic development subsidy programs as a whole.

“The Buffalo Billion is just a microcosm of the pay-to-play racket that has engulfed economic development under Governor Cuomo,” said Kaehny. “It is just a giant machine that takes in donations and doles out grants to donors. It is remarkable in its scope, consistency, and is dramatic in how it all leads back to the same people. What caught Bharara's interest in this is a system - not a rogue agent, not a bad apple, it's a system.”

………

Gerald Benjamin, a professor of political science at SUNY New Paltz noted that the fact SUNY Polytechnic President Alain Kaloyeros has been subpoenaed and appears to have been a target of the probe since the fall, “makes it a much bigger matter that could be focused on systemic practices.”

Kaloyeros has overseen much of the Buffalo Billion contracting and has become a major figure in the Cuomo administration as the governor has ramped up his economic development programs.

“The issue we have is confidentiality,” Kaloyeros told Gotham Gazette by Facebook messenger last fall when being asked about the Buffalo Billion investigation. “We were instructed in no uncertain terms not to comment on the inquiry from down South with the threat of jail which is being interpreted as we are the target of an investigation. So that part we cannot comment on beyond what we were authorized to say publicly."

………

Aside from the red flags sent up by donations and dealings with the air of conflict of interest, watchdog groups say they believe Bharara may be examining the Buffalo Billion because it is clear that up until now on one on the state level has been.

Cuomo and the Legislature crippled the Comptroller’s ability to audit deals made regarding the Buffalo Billion in 2011, [New York Comptroller Thomas] DiNapoli and others say, by passing legislation that prevented auditing of SUNY, CUNY, hospital or construction funds. That is important to the Buffalo Billion because the state funnels cash for Buffalo Billion contracts through two non-profits controlled by SUNY.

The question at this point whether Cuomo was merely willfully blind or complicit.

My money is on the former.  He's a former prosecutor, and he knows how to walk that line.

It's a pity.  He is an evil rat-bastard.

Yep. This is a Woman of the People

If Hillary were serious about inequality, she wouldn't be hosting $100,000.00 a head fundraisers:

Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton is ramping up her fundraising schedule, attending a number of fundraisers this week that cost donors six-figures to attend.

The former secretary of state attended a pair of small, intimate gatherings in New York City on Thursday evening that cost donors a minimum of $100,000 to attend, according to a campaign official. On Wednesday, she attended two $100,000-a-head events in Englewood, N.J., and New York City.

Maureen White and Steven Rattner, two prominent Democratic fundraisers, hosted one of the Thursday fundraisers at their home in Manhattan. Mr. Rattner also was a prominent businessman and served in the Obama administration. The second Thursday event was at the home of Lynn Forester de Rothschild, a prominent New York businesswoman and supporter of Mrs. Clinton and Democratic candidates. On Wednesday, architect Jon Stryker and hedge fund manager Orin Kramer played host.

Rattner settled with the SEC and the New York State Attorney General over kickbacks.

Lynn Forester de Rothschild is one of Those Rothschilds, the original multinational banksters.

And $100,000.00 a head for the contributors.

Does this sound like a woman who has the slightest interest in addressing the parasitic finance that is at the heart of Wall Street?

Does the former board member for Walmart sound like someone who would support labor unions?

Win or lose, this little foray into dynastic politics will not end well.