Author: sherrinichols

North Carolina government, bought and paid for by Art Pope, became one of those laboratories of democracy where the idea of looting the public good and maintaining power by limiting democracy took hold. The Republicans owned by Pope took the levers of power, and with the freedom from racism declared in the Shelby County Supreme Court decision, systematically began to make it harder for African-Americans, poor people, college students, and anyone else who might not be sufficiently Republican to vote.

They were so brazen about it that eventually the courts struck down what they were doing, because Shelby County didn’t get rid of the Voting Rights Act, it just got rid of the part where you had to ask permission before you disenfranchised people. The legislature was so gerrymandered and voting restrictions were so ridiculous that the courts have ordered that districts be redrawn and a special election held next year to elect a new legislature, despite a new legislature being elected this year.

So, when the current sitting legislature calls a special session, it’s a super-duper extra-lame duck legislature, but that’s not stopping them.  The cover reason was to vote on relief for Hurricane Matthew, but having take care of that, they haven’t gone home.  The concern has been that having lost control of the state Supreme Court, they’d try to pack the court by adding members. Now they’re saying they probably won’t do that, instead they’re proposing to rig the board of elections.

Republicans.  Their ideas are so unpopular they can’t face free and fair elections, so they have to blow up democracy to accomplish their goals. Yet they call themselves patriots.
ETA: They’re completely brazen about it.

Why do I donate to the ACLU? The Patroit Act.

When the Patriot Act passed, I realized what should have been obvious to me from history: we can’t depend on partisan politics to protect civil rights. When the US is attacked, or feels attacked, polticians of both parties are going to err on the side of abridging rights in an attempt to increase security. Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts during WWI, FDR ordered Japanese internment.

The ACLU wasn’t around to challenge Lincoln, but they did challenge FDR, and thought they lost Korematsu in the courts, few people today would consider it a good decision.

But understanding that partisan politics won’t protect civil rights is not the same thing as believing that there are no differences between the parties on civil rights, and that it doesn’t matter which party controls Congress or hold the Presidency or appoints Supreme Court justices. It matters a great deal, sometimes in obvious ways (the difference between Clarence Thomas and Sonia Sotomayor) and sometime in less obvious ways.

The differences between the Bush Justice Department and the Obama Justice Department go much deeper than whether to allow torture, and I don’t think those changes have received the attention they deserved. The swing back to a Trump Justice Department head by an Attorney General Jeff Sessions will be even more dramatic, as this article by a former Justice Department lawyer lays out.

I hope the Democrats will fight the confirmation of Jeff Sessions, but I’m not optimistic that anybody better would follow. It is a mainstream Republican position that in person voter fraud is rampant, despite the fact that nobody can find it. Lack of evidence won’t stop states from further restricting voting, and the DOJ won’t do anything about it. Republican ideas are unpopular, and can not win unless voting is restricted.

It will be up to the ACLU to fight.

Not really for your reading pleasure, but for your information, anyway.

While the big boys of the media seem reluctant to engage with reality, Teen Vogue is not being shy. This is the clearest description of the situation around.

Because Trump knows nothing and cares about nothing that isn’t Trump, it’s important to pay attention to the people around him, because they’ll be operating on their own a lot.  Steve Coll, who wrote a book about ExxonMobil, writes about the nominee for Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson. Tillerson is another Trump insider with ties to Putin; ExxonMobil lost a $500 million deal with Putin because of US sanctions.

As I’ve said to friends, the Trump presidency will be a disaster, we just don’t know the scale of the disaster yet, and there’s not a scale I can rule out yet. I’m not sure our institutions are up to the task of limiting the damage. Given what we know about McConnell and other Congressional Republicans, I’m not optimistic.

ETA:  This is one gloriously righteous rant.

Every so often, the carried interest loophole pops back into the news. This is the quirk in the tax laws that allows private equity managers to be taxed at the capital gains rate on the bulk of their compensation. Dems talk about changing that, but nothing happens. There are more ways that private equity takes advantage of the system to create enormous wealth for the few while destroying wealth for the many.

In theory, private equity should perform a useful service in the economy. A private equity firm would take over an underperforming company, use their expertise to turn the company around, and restore a better performing company to the marketplace, preserving jobs and earning a,good return on their investment.

In reality, a private equity firm buys an underperforming company through a leveraged buyout, which means the company is immediately loaded with debt. They may take the company into bankruptcy, to rid themselves of union contracts and pension obligations. If the pension fund was overfunded, they raid that first. They also borrow more money to pay back the investors. Debt also provides tax breaks. They reopen the company with no unions, fewer workers, offshoring where convenient, pension obligations minimal, then sell the company or take it public, if they’re successful for a large multiple of their original purchase price. The carried interest comes from 20% of this sale.

The workers lose, private equity gets insanely rich. You might argue the workers were on their way to losing anyway, but that doesn’t make what private equity does right.

The NYTImes has a long article laying out how this all went down with the maker of the Twinkie.