Tag Archives: national

Surprise! WikiLeaks’ Assange Backs Trump on Russia Hacking Report

by KaliSeton93839 Posted on January 9, 2017

Mother Jones

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During a live press conference broadcast from the Ecuadorian embassy in London via Twitter’s livestream app Persicope, WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange on Monday blasted the recent US intelligence report on Russian hacking during the 2016 election.

“It is, frankly, quite embarrassing to the reputation of the US intelligence services to be putting out something that claims to be a report like that,” Assange said. “This is a press release. It is clearly designed for political effect and US intelligence have been politicized by the Obama administration in the production of this report and a number of other statements.”

Assange called the report a “political attack cannon against Donald Trump” and a way “to defend the reason why the Democratic Party lost.” And he claimed that its true purpose was to bolster certain officials within the Democratic Party and “delegitimize the election of Donald Trump.”

Assange’s press conference comes three days after the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a declassified report outlining its assessment of alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential campaign via hacks of US political targets, including the Democratic National Committee and the personal email account of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman. The materials were stolen from those organizations by Russian intelligence, according to the report, and then passed to WikiLeaks, but it does not specify whether this occurred through an intermediary. An online persona known as “Guccifer 2.0” claimed credit for the DNC hack and for passing the information along to WikiLeaks and also for providing the material to media outlets and reporters.

“Moscow most likely chose WikiLeaks because of its self-proclaimed reputation for authenticity,” the declassified report stated, adding that the material published by WikiLeaks did “not contain any evident forgeries.” The report stated that Russian intelligence fed the materials to WikiLeaks but didn’t say how, or whether it was through a third-party. The Washington Post reported Thursday night that US intelligence had identified the “actors” involved in getting the materials to WikiLeaks.

Assange has consistently denied that the materials came from the Russian government and addressed the issue again on Monday.

“We haven’t said we know or don’t know our sources,” he said. “We have made one statement, which is that our sources in the US election-related matter are not a state party.” Assange noted the “incredible care” with which WikiLeaks speaks about its sources, but this case “does not sufficiently threaten our sources to make this very bland disclosure.” With a “state” source, however, “we would have a lot less concern in attempting to protect them.”

Assange’s explanation seems to leave the door open that an intermediary passed the material from Russian intelligence to WikiLeaks.

Assange also discussed the penchant for outgoing administrations to destroy information on the way out the door and said WikiLeaks’ recent offer of $30,000 for information that leads to “the arrest or exposure of Obama admin sic officials destroying info sic,” is an effort to preserve information that belongs to the public. He implored government employees with access to data to grab it (not mentioning that doing so is a serious crime).

“Our request to system administrators in the Obama administration, and this goes for other administrations around the world, is take the data,” he said. “Just take it now, keep it under your bed, or with your mother, and then you can give that to WikiLeaks or other journalists at your leisure. Get a hold of that history and protect it because that is something that belongs to humanity and does not belong to a political party.”

Assange blasted President Obama for his administration’s treatment of whistleblowers but said that things weren’t likely to improve under a President Trump.

“While there are some anti-DC elements in the Trump cabinet and a lot in his base, very quickly, based on the history of all previous administrations, the Donald Trump administration will form its own establishment and enter into a power-sharing relationship with the existing powers in DC,” Assange said. “No system of authority likes those who undermine its authority.”

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Surprise! WikiLeaks’ Assange Backs Trump on Russia Hacking Report

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Here’s the Truth Behind Obamacare’s Horror Story Deductibles

by ZegBrewster Posted on January 9, 2017

Mother Jones

Recently, the go-to argument from the anti-Obamacare forces has been about deductibles. Sure, 20 million people have insurance. Sure, most of them can afford the premiums. But what’s the point if all it buys you is crappy insurance with a $6,000 deductible? As Nathan Nascimento put in National Review a few months ago, “what good is health-insurance coverage for middle- and low-income families if they can’t afford to use it?”

These crocodile tears would be amusing if they weren’t so infuriating. Nobody on the right has ever been willing to support higher funding so that deductibles can come down. In fact, folks on the right love high deductibles. It puts “skin in the game.” A combination of HSAs and high-deductible health policies is one of the standard bits of smoke-and-mirrors offered up by conservatives when you ask them what kind of national health care plan they’d like to see replace Obamacare.

But let’s put that aside for a moment and ask another question: what are the deductibles under Obamacare really like, anyway?1Here’s the answer:

The average deductible decreased from $900 to $850 in 2016. And as you can see if we extrapolate from the figures in the table, it looks like nearly two-thirds of all enrollees had deductibles under $1,000. Only about a fifth had the horror-story $6,000+ deductibles that we hear so much about.

But that’s not all. We don’t have figures for how this breaks down, but my guess is that the majority of the people with high deductibles are the famous “young invincibles” who are single, don’t qualify for subsidies because they’re fairly well off, and don’t think they’re going to get sick. So they buy the cheapest plan they can, take advantage of the preventive care stuff they’re allowed before the deductible kicks in, and go about their lives. No one in their right mind who had any kind of real health issues would ever buy a plan like this.

There are undoubtedly exceptions to this. There always are in a country the size of ours. I’m all for helping these folks out, but one way or another, that calls for more money, not less. Anybody who says otherwise is just playing with you.

1Hat tip to Andrew Sprung, who drew my attention to this table today.

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Here’s the Truth Behind Obamacare’s Horror Story Deductibles

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Diet and Climate Change: Cooking Up a Storm

by JayneWiggins Posted on January 6, 2017

One of the most prestigious medical journals in the world editorialized that climate change represents the biggest global health threat of the 21st century. Currently, chronic diseases are by far the leading cause of death. Might there be a way to combat both at the same time? For example, riding our bikes instead of driving is a win-win-win for the people, planet, and pocketbook. Are there similar win-win situations when it comes to diet?

As I discuss in my video below, the foods that create the most greenhouse gases appear to be the same foods that are contributing to many of our chronic diseases. Researchers found that meat (including fish), eggs, and dairy had the greatest negative environmental impact, whereas grains, beans, fruits, and vegetables had the least impact. And not only did the foods with the heaviest environmental impact tend to have lower nutritional quality, but they also had a higher price per pound. So, avoiding them gives us that triple win scenario.

The European Commission, the governing body of the European Union, commissioned a study on what individuals can do to help the climate. For example, if Europeans started driving electric cars, it could prevent as much as 174 million tons of carbon from getting released. We could also turn down the thermostat a bit and put on a sweater. But the most powerful action people could take is shift to a meat-free diet.

What we eat may have more of an impact on global warming than what we drive.

Just cutting out animal protein intake one day of the week could have a powerful effect. Meatless Mondays alone could beat out a whole week of working from home and not commuting.

A strictly plant-based diet may be better still: Its responsible for only about half the greenhouse gas emissions. Studies have suggested that moderate diet changes are not enough to reduce impacts from food consumption drastically. Without significant reduction in meat and dairy, changes to healthier diets may only result in rather minor reductions of environmental impacts. This is because studies have shown that the average fossil energy input for animal protein production systems is 25 calories of fossil energy input for every 1 calorie producedmore than 11 times greater than that for grain protein production, for example, which is around 2 to 1.

Researchers in Italy compared seven different diets to see which one was environmentally friendliest. They compared a conventional omnivorous diet adhering to dietary guidelines; an organic omnivorous diet; a conventional vegetarian diet; an organic vegetarian diet; a conventional vegan diet; an organic vegan diet; and a diet the average person actually eats. For each dietary pattern, the researchers looked at carcinogens, air pollution, climate change, effects on the ozone layer, the ecosystem, acid rain, and land, mineral, and fossil fuel use. You can see in the video how many resources it took to feed people on their current diets, all the negative effects the diet is having on the ecosystem, and the adverse effects on human health.

If people were eating a healthier diet by conforming to the dietary recommendations, the environmental impact would be significantly less. An organic omnivorous diet would be better still, similar to a vegetarian diet of conventional foods. Those are topped by an organic vegetarian diet, followed by a conventional vegan diet. The best, however, was an organic vegan diet.

The Commission report described that the barriers to animal product reduction are largely lack of knowledge, ingrained habits, and culinary cultures. Proposed policy measures include meat or animal protein taxes, educational campaigns, and putting the greenhouse gas emissions information right on food labels.

Climate change mitigation is expensive. A global transition to even just a low-meat diet, as recommended for health reasons, could reduce these mitigation costs. A study determined that a healthier, low-meat diet would cut the cost of mitigating climate change from about 1% of GDP by more than half, a no-meat diet could cut two-thirds of the cost, and a diet free of animal products could cut 80% of the cost.

Many people arent aware of the cow in the room. It seems that very few people are aware that the livestock sector is one of the largest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. But thats changing.

The UKs National Health Service is taking a leading role in reducing carbon emissions. Patients, visitors, and staff can look forward to healthy, low-carbon menus with much less meat, dairy, and eggs. Evidence shows that as far as the climate is concerned, meat is heat.

The Swedish government recently amended their dietary recommendations to encourage citizens to eat less meat. If we seek only to achieve the conservative objective of avoiding further long-term increases in [greenhouse gas] emissions from livestock, we are still led to rather radical recommendations such as cutting current consumption levels in half in affluent countriesan unlikely outcome if there were no direct rewards to citizens for doing so. Fortunately, there are such rewards: important health benefits… By helping the planet, we can help ourselves.

In health,
Michael Greger, M.D.

PS: If you havent yet, you can subscribe to my free videoshereand watch my live, year-in-review presentations2015:Food as Medicine: Preventing and Treating the Most Dreaded Diseases with Diet, and my latest, 2016:How Not to Die: The Role of Diet in Preventing, Arresting, and Reversing Our Top 15 Killers.

Related
Never Too Late to Start Eating Healthier
Combating Common Diseases With Plants
One in a Thousand: Ending the Heart Disease Epidemic

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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Diet and Climate Change: Cooking Up a Storm

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CIA Says Russians Celebrated Trump’s Victory

by BerryC7650437138 Posted on January 6, 2017

Mother Jones

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The Washington Post passes along the juiciest bit of the CIA’s classified report on Russian hacking:

Senior officials in the Russian government celebrated Donald Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton as a geopolitical win for Moscow, according to U.S. officials who said that American intelligence agencies intercepted communications in the aftermath of the election in which Russian officials congratulated themselves on the outcome.

The ebullient reaction among high-ranking Russian officials — including some who U.S. officials believe had knowledge of the country’s cyber campaign to interfere in the U.S. election — contributed to the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment that Moscow’s efforts were aimed at least in part at helping Trump win the White House.

Then NBC News got into the act:

The official agreed to talk to NBC News after the Post published leaked details of the review because the official felt that the details the paper chose focused too much on the Russian celebration and not enough on the thrust of the report.

Two top intelligence officials with direct knowledge told NBC News that the report on Russian hacking also details Russian cyberattacks not just against the Democratic National Committee, but the White House, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the State Department and American corporations.

….The report, on which Obama was also orally briefed, explains what intelligence agencies believe are Moscow’s motives, including, in part, a desire to disrupt the American democratic process. But the intelligence analysts who prepared the report also concluded that the hacks were payback for the Obama administration’s questioning of Vladimir Putin’s legitimacy as president.

Tomorrow Donald Trump will get his own briefing on the CIA report. That oughta be good. And in other Trump-related news, we got yet another outraged tweet about cars today:

It’s true that Toyota is moving production of the Corolla to Mexico. But here’s the thing: they’re moving it from Canada. This is not exactly breaking news, either: the Canadian media reported all this nearly two years ago.

Right now, about half of the Corollas sold in the US are made in Mississippi and the other half in Canada. When the new plant is finished, about half will be made in Mississippi and the other half in Mexico. Nothing changes. We’re still importing the same number of Corollas. And the Canadian plant will be reconfigured to build more profitable SUVs and mid-sized cars.

Unless it infuriates you that we’re importing some Corollas from Mexico instead of Canada, this is a nothingburger. On the other hand, if you just want to demagogue Mexico, I guess it’s tailor made.

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CIA Says Russians Celebrated Trump’s Victory

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Clapper: Election Cyber Attacks Were Directed By the Kremlin

by TyreeKruse Posted on January 5, 2017

Mother Jones

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Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said today that the intelligence community believed “more resolutely” than it did three months ago that Russia was behind a campaign of cyberattacks during the presidential election. The LA Times reports on his testimony before Congress:

Three U.S. spy chiefs testified publicly for the first time Thursday that the Kremlin’s most senior leaders approved a Russian intelligence operation aimed at interfering in the U.S. presidential race, a conclusion that President-elect Donald Trump has repeatedly challenged.

….“We assess that only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized the recent election-focused data thefts and disclosures, based on the scope and sensitivity of the targets,” they wrote in joint remarks submitted for the hearing.

….U.S. intelligence analysts have concluded that the Russian cyber operation sought to damage Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and to help Trump’s bid for the White House. Clapper did not confirm that judgment Thursday, although he indicated it would be included in the classified report. “Yes, we will ascribe a motivation,” he said. “I’d rather not preempt the report.”

The full House and the full Senate will be briefed on a classified version of the review next week, Clapper said. After those briefings, a declassified version will be made public, he said….“I intend to push the envelope as much as we can in the unclassified version because I think the public should know as much about this as possible,” Clapper said. “There are some fragile sources and methods.”

I don’t have anything to say about this since, obviously, I don’t know any more than what Clapper told us. We’ll just have to wait for the unclassified report and see what it says.

But I will comment on one thing: aren’t liberals supposed to be the ones who are skeptical of the intelligence community? Are we suddenly defending them just because it’s politically convenient?

There’s some of that going on, I’m sure. But the real reason is a lot simpler: the intelligence community doesn’t really have any motivation to make this stuff up aside from a generalized dislike of Russia. They are interested in keeping everyone on edge about cyberattacks, but that doesn’t require Russia to be involved in what happened. In fact, doubling down on the Russia story even after Trump won is nothing but bad for the CIA. All they’re doing is pissing off the incoming president, something they could easily avoid by keeping the cyberattack story but downplaying the Russia angle.

So this is sort of an admission against interest. The CIA’s interest is in getting more money for cyber security and cultivating a strong relationship with a new president. The fact that they’re doing just the opposite suggests pretty strongly that they believe in no uncertain terms that Russia really is behind this.

Continued here – 

Clapper: Election Cyber Attacks Were Directed By the Kremlin

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Swamp Watch – 3 January 2017

by KathaleRanclaud Posted on January 4, 2017

Mother Jones

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It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these. After a flurry of activity Trump slowed down when he got to the tail end of his cabinet, but today he finally decided on a nominee for US Trade Representative. It might seem as if this position is more important than usual, since Trump campaigned heavily on trade, but it’s probably not. Trump has already said that his commerce secretary will be more involved than usual in trade deals; Peter Navarro will head up a new National Trade Council; and Jason Greenblatt, Trump’s longtime business lawyer, will be his “special representative for international negotiations.”

That’s a lot of cooks stirring the broth, and it’s unclear just how much influence Lighthizer will have on this team. That said, Lighthizer knows the ins and outs of trade law, so he’ll be pretty useful in a technical capacity. Aside from that, he’s been a DC lawyer and lobbyist for the past two decades, but hasn’t served in a government position since the Reagan administration. Does that make him part of the swamp? I’m not sure.

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Swamp Watch – 3 January 2017

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Trump’s Treasury Pick Excelled at Kicking Elderly People Out of Their Homes

by BeatrizViner Posted on January 1, 2017

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared on ProPublica.

In 2015, OneWest Bank moved to foreclose on John Yang, an 80-year-old Korean immigrant living in Orange Park, Florida, a small suburb of Jacksonville. The bank believed he wasn’t living in his home, violating the terms of its loan. It dispatched an agent to give him legal notification of the foreclosure.

Where did the bank find him? At the same single-story home the bank had said in court papers he did not occupy.

Still OneWest pressed on, forcing Yang, a former Christian missionary, to seek help from legal aid attorneys. This year, during a deposition, an employee of OneWest’s servicing division was asked the obvious question: Why would the bank pursue a foreclosure that seemed so clearly unjustified by the facts?

The employee’s response was blunt: “You’re trying to make logic out of an illogical situation.”

Yang was lucky. The bank eventually dropped its efforts against him. But others were not so fortunate. In recent years, OneWest has foreclosed on at least 50,000 people, often in circumstances that consumer advocates say run counter to federal rules and, as in Yang’s case, common sense.

President-elect Donald Trump’s nomination of Steven Mnuchin as Treasury Secretary has prompted new scrutiny of OneWest’s foreclosure practices. Mnuchin was the lead investor and chairman of the company during the years it ramped up its foreclosure efforts. Representatives from the company and the Trump transition team did not respond to requests for comment.

Records show the attempt to push Mr. Yang out of his home was not an unusual one for OneWest’s Financial Freedom unit, which focused on controversial home loans known as reverse mortgages. Regulators and consumer advocates have long worried that these loans, popular during the height of the housing bubble, exploit elderly homeowners.

The loans allow people to benefit from the equity they have built up over many years without selling their houses. The money is paid in a variety of ways, from lump sums to a stream of monthly checks. Borrowers are allowed to stay in their homes for as long as they live.

The loans are guaranteed by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, meaning the agency pays lenders like Freedom Financial the difference between the ultimate sale price of the home and the size of the reverse mortgage.

But the fees are often high and the interest charges mount up quickly because the homeowner isn’t paying down any of the principal on the loan. Homeowners remain on the hook for property taxes and insurance and can lose their homes if they miss those payments.

A 2012 report to Congress by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau said that “vigorous enforcement is necessary to ensure that older homeowners are not defrauded of a lifetime of home equity.”

ProPublica found numerous examples where Financial Freedom had foreclosed for legally questionable reasons. The company served several other homeowners at their homes to let them know they were being sued for not occupying their homes. In Florida, a shortfall of only $0.27 led to a foreclosure attempt. In Atlanta, the company sought to foreclose on a widow after her husband’s death, but backed down when a legal aid attorney sued, citing federal law that allowed the surviving spouse to remain in the home.

“It appears their business approach is scorched earth, in a way that doesn’t serve communities, homeowners or the taxpayer,” said Alys Cohen, a staff attorney for the National Consumer Law Center in Washington D.C.

Since the financial crisis, OneWest, through Financial Freedom, has conducted a disproportionate number of the nation’s reverse mortgage foreclosures. It was responsible for 16,200 foreclosures on government-backed reverse mortgages, or 39 percent of all foreclosures nationwide, from 2009 through late 2014, even though it only serviced about 17 percent of the loans, according to government data analyzed by the California Reinvestment Coalition, an advocacy group for low-income consumers. While some foreclosures were justified, legal aid attorneys say Financial Freedom has refused to work with borrowers in foreclosure to establish payment plans, in contrast with other servicers of reverse mortgages.

Experts say the companies are not entirely to blame for the wave of foreclosures. HUD oversees standards on most reverse mortgages. In the years after the housing crash, HUD’s rules evolved, creating a miasma of confusion for mortgage servicers. Companies say the new federal rules required them to foreclose when borrowers fell far behind on property and insurance costs, rather than work out payment plans.

OneWest’s rough treatment of homeowners extended to its behavior toward borrowers with standard mortgages in the aftermath of the housing crash. In 2009, the Obama administration launched a program to encourage mortgage servicers to work out affordable mortgage modifications with borrowers. OneWest, weighed down by several hundred thousand souring mortgages, signed up.

It didn’t go well. About three-quarters of homeowners who sought a modification from OneWest through the program were denied, according to the latest figures from the Treasury Department. OneWest was among the worst performing large servicers in the program by that measure. In 2011, activists protested OneWest’s indifference at Mnuchin’s Bel Air mansion in Los Angeles.

“We’re in a difficult economic environment and very sympathetic to the problems many homeowners face, but under the government’s program there’s not a solution in every case,” Mnuchin told the Wall Street Journal in that year.

Despite the controversy, Mnuchin and the other investors in OneWest made a killing on their purchase. In 2009, Mnuchin’s investment group bought the failed mortgage bank IndyMac, which had been taken over by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation after the financial crisis, changing the name to OneWest. They paid about $1.5 billion, with the FDIC sharing the ongoing mortgage losses. George Soros, a Clinton backer at whose hedge fund Mnuchin had worked, and John Paulson, a hedge fund manager who also supported Trump, invested alongside Mnuchin in IndyMac.

In 2015, CIT, a lender to small and medium-sized businesses, bought OneWest for $3.4 billion, more than doubling the Mnuchin group’s initial investment. Mnuchin personally made about $380 million on the sale, according to Bloomberg estimates. He retains around a 1 percent stake in CIT, worth around $100 million, which he may have to divest if confirmed.

CIT has found the reverse mortgage business to be a headache. Recently, CIT took a $230 million pretax charge after it discovered that OneWest had mistakenly charged the government for payments that the company should have shouldered itself. An investigation of Financial Freedom’s practices by HUD’s inspector general is ongoing.

Yang’s lawyers at Jacksonville Area Legal Aid fought his foreclosure for a year. Though Yang had run a dry cleaning business in Florida and roamed the world as a missionary, working in North Korea, China, and Afghanistan, the bank’s torrent of paperwork had overwhelmed him. Yang didn’t speak English well. OneWest claimed it had sent him forms to verify he was living at his home, but that he never sent them back.

Under HUD rules, OneWest was required to verify that each borrower continued to use the property as a principal residence. It is a condition of all the HUD-backed loans in order to help ensure the government subsidy goes to those who need it.

But Yang can be forgiven for thinking that OneWest could not have doubted that he was still in his home. During the same period that OneWest was moving to foreclose on Yang for not living in his home, another arm of the bank regularly spoke and corresponded with him at his home about a delinquent insurance payment, according to court documents.

A Financial Freedom employee testified in the case that the department that handled delinquent insurance payments and the department that handled occupancy did not communicate with each other in those circumstances.

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Trump’s Treasury Pick Excelled at Kicking Elderly People Out of Their Homes

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2015: The Great Crime Wave That Wasn’t

by HassanE54kqinqhe Posted on December 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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Was there a huge crime wave in 2015? There are two main sources for crime rates in the United States. The FBI produces the Uniform Crime Report (UCR), which is based on reporting from police agencies. The Bureau of Justice Statistics produces the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), which conducts surveys of ordinary Americans and asks if they’ve been a crime victim in the past year. Rick Nevin breaks down the numbers:

The 2015 NCVS property crime rate (household burglary, motor vehicle theft, and other theft) was down 6.3% from 2014…2015 UCR burglary rate…down 8.5%…UCR larceny-theft rate…down 2.5%…UCR property crime rate…down 3.4% from 2014….roughly consistent with the NCVS data showing the property crime rate falling 6.3% in 2015 to a record low.

The UCR violent crime rate (murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault) should be roughly consistent with the NCVS serious violent crime rate (sexual assault, robbery, and aggravated assault),1but the UCR violent crime rate increased 3.0% in 2015 as the NCVS serious violent crime rate fell 11.7%….

OK, hold on. Everyone agrees that property crime is down, but the FBI says the reported violent crime rate increased 3 percent while the NCVS survey data says it decreased 11.7 percent? What’s going on? The biggest components of the violent crime index are robbery and aggravated assault. Both the UCR and the NCVS agree closely about the robbery rate, so that means there must be some kind of discrepancy in the aggravated assault rate:

The 2015 UCR aggravated assault rate was up 3.8% from 2014….NCVS total aggravated assaults were down 25.2% in 2015, and NCVS aggravated assaults reported to police were down 20.7%.

Yikes! Long story short, Nevin shows that this divergence between UCR and NCVS has been increasing for the past decade. The culprit, apparently, is exactly the opposite of the frequent allegation that police departments understate serious crime in order to make themselves look better. “The fact that NCVS victims are reporting aggravated assaults far below UCR recorded aggravated assaults suggests that police have become far more expansive than crime victims are when it comes to defining aggravated assault, perhaps to protect against allegations that the police undercount serious violent crime.”

Most likely, then, there’s a longstanding issue of how aggravated assault is reported and categorized. Basically, police departments underreported it in the past and are now overreporting it. Aggravated assault probably decreased or held steady in 2015, which means the overall rate of violent crime was also either down or steady.

There was an increase in the murder rate last year, from 4.44 in 2014 to 4.88 in 2015 (per 100,000). This is a significant jump, and it was apparently fueled by an especially large jump in about a dozen big cities. This is cause for concern, especially since the murder rate usually correlates roughly with the overall violent crime rate. The divergence last year is unusual, and we don’t yet know what explains it. It might just be a random spike, or it could suggest something worse.

But while murder gets the headlines, it’s only one small component of the overall crime rate. Overall property crime was down last year and overall violent crime was probably down too. These are, by far, the crimes that actually affect most people. With the exception of a few pockets of increased homicide, America continues to get safer and safer.

1The NCVS numbers don’t include homicide because you obviously can’t survey murder victims. However, homicide is a tiny part of the overall violent crime rate, so that doesn’t account for the difference between UCR and NCVS figures.

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2015: The Great Crime Wave That Wasn’t

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Trump’s Pick for Labor Secretary Doesn’t Think Workers Should Get Breaks

by LynIrvin725 Posted on December 28, 2016

Mother Jones

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The US Department of Labor exists to “foster, promote, and develop the welfare of the wage earners and job seekers,” and to “improve working conditions” and “assure work-related benefits and rights.” Andrew Puzder, Donald Trump’s choice to lead the department, has not exactly embodied those values in his career as CEO of CKE Restaurants, parent company of fast-food chains Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr. He’s a staunch and vocal opponent of minimum-wage hikes, and his company has had to pay out millions of dollars to settle overtime claims (more here).

And now, thanks to OC Weekly‘s Gabriel San Roman, we know what Puzder thinks of worker breaks. Spoiler: not much.

San Roman got to digging into the archives of Cal State Fullerton’s Center for Oral and Public History, where he found a 2009 interview (not available online) with Puzder. According to San Roman, Puzder “complained about regulations and overtime laws, claiming workers are overprotected.” San Roman adds, quoting from the interview:

“Have you ever been to a fast food restaurant and the employees are sitting and you’re wondering, ‘Why are they sitting?'” Puzder asked. “They are on what is called a mandatory break emphasis his.” He shared a laugh with the interviewer, saying the so-called nanny state is why Carl’s Jr. doesn’t open up any new restaurants in California anymore.

Now, anointing a burger tycoon who openly disdains worker rights as labor secretary might seem like a quintessentially Trumpian move. But it’s worth remembering that Puzder is very much an establishment Republican. A major donor to GOP political campaigns, he served as an economic adviser and spokesman for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, and as a delegate to the 2012 Republican National Convention and as chairman of the Platform Committee’s Sub-Committee on the Economy, Job Creation, and the Debt.

In late 2014, as the 2016 presidential race was about to heat up, Puzder listed his top three choices for the Republican nomination: Romney, former Texas Gov. Rick Perry (now Trump’s choice to lead the Department of Energy), and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. That same year, Puzder and then-Gov.Perry even appeared together at a Carl’s Jr. event in Austin, to roll out the burger chain’s “Texas BBQ Thickburger” and raise funds for a veterans’ charity, along with Sports Illustrated swimsuit model Hannah Ferguson. Puzder declared Perry “America’s best governor.”

And now they’ll both be in the Cabinet. Trump ran hard against the GOP establishment, only to hand it the keys to power.

Continue at source:  

Trump’s Pick for Labor Secretary Doesn’t Think Workers Should Get Breaks

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26 Words of a Trump Tweet, Fully Dissected

by JanisMir82 Posted on December 27, 2016

Mother Jones

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This is hardly earthshaking, I know, but take a look at this Donald Trump tweet from Monday evening:

No hope! But put the narcissism and egotism aside.1 In a mere 26 words Trump has managed to mislead his audience in three separate ways without quite lying about anything. First, no matter how many times the press pushes this meme, the world was not especially gloomy before he won. Nor was America. Consumer sentiment has been steadily rising since 2011 and personal satisfaction is near its all-time high:

Second, the stock market is indeed up, but it’s been rising steadily for President Obama’s entire term. That “nearly 10 percent” uptick—actually 6 percent since Election Day, and mostly driven by big banks, but who’s counting?—is that teensy blip at the very end of the chart:

Finally, retail sales have been rising steadily during Obama’s entire term, and so has holiday spending. The National Retail Federation forecasts that holiday spending will increase 3.6 percent this year (1.9 percent in real terms), and will finish up not at “over a trillion dollars,” but at $655 billion:

In the grand scheme of things, this doesn’t matter. But it’s still a fascinating little insight into how Trump gaslights his followers and the nation into believing that he’s the savior of the country. Most people have no idea about any of these numbers, so he can say anything he wants and he’s likely to be believed. Nor will fact-checking change this even a tiny bit. Politics has always been about exaggeration and cherry picking, but we’re now living through an era in which the truth flatly doesn’t matter. At this point, I’m pretty sure Trump’s followers would believe him if he said that Obama had tried to give Alaska back to the Russians but he managed to stop it. Then the press would stroke its collective chin and write careful pieces about how Trump was really talking about some rocky shoal that nobody cared about but had been officially disputed since Seward bought the place. Nuance, you see.

1Though I suppose we shouldn’t. What kind of person writes stuff like this?

Link to article: 

26 Words of a Trump Tweet, Fully Dissected

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