Welcome to the Stars Hollow Gazette‘s Health and Fitness News weekly diary. It will publish on Saturday afternoon and be open for discussion about health related issues including diet, exercise, health and health care issues, as well as, tips on what you can do when there is a medical emergency. Also an opportunity to share and exchange your favorite healthy recipes.
Questions are encouraged and I will answer to the best of my ability. If I can’t, I will try to steer you in the right direction. Naturally, I cannot give individual medical advice for personal health issues. I can give you information about medical conditions and the current treatments available.
You can now find past Health and Fitness News diaries here.
To the modern cook, making a gingerbread house may seem nearly as daunting as building a real house. But, like dyeing Easter eggs, it’s a rewarding, hands-on way to connect to holiday traditions of the past. Stretched over a few winter evenings or a weekend, it’s a festive effort — especially with a group. This guide, made with help from Bill Yosses, the former White House pastry chef (and our chief gingerbread adviser), will lead you through the process step by easy step. You won’t even need a pastry bag.
Orange and lemon zests make this recipe, from Bill Yosses, the former White House pastry chef, especially delicious, if you plan on eating your gingerbread house (and you can, even weeks after baking). But feel free to leave them out. We strongly recommend using a scale here. It will make it much easier to accurately measure the ingredients and to evenly divide the dough. This recipe, for the house’s building blocks, is large, and it makes enough for the project featured in our How to Make a Gingerbread House guide. But as the instructions state, you’ll want to make it in two batches, since it’s too big for the average stand mixer. Note that you’ll want to bake your gingerbread at least a few days before assembling the house, to give the slabs time to harden, and set aside a few hours for decoration and assembly.
Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungoverwe’ve been bailed outwe’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
This Day in History
Britain’s Prince Charles and Princess Diana announce they are separating; The Charge of the Light Brigade – is published in Britain; Solidarity union leader Lech Walesa is elected president in Poland; Actor Kirk Douglas is born.
Breakfast Tunes
Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac
We need a president who’s fluent in at least one language.
Should Senator Al Franken (D-MN) have resigned? I’m no sure. I have very mixed feelings about this. Part of me say, yes, he should have resigned but another part thinks the Democrats should have let the process play out with an ethics committee hearing, which Franken, himself advocated and with he said he would fully cooperate. I know the thought is Democrats are by taking the high ground showing up the Republican lack of standards for moral character. But did they, once again cave too soon? A man who bragged about sexually assaulting women is still in the White House and a accused child molester is running for a Senate seat.
What Franken did, and is accused of doing, is wrong but does it come to the same level of taking off your clothes in front of a fourteen year old and stalking underage girls in the mall? Or grabbing a woman by her crotch?
What about the people Franken represents? How do they feel about this? Has anyone asked? The Republicans are saying that the people of Alabama will decide who represents them. Shouldn’t the people of Minnesota have the same opportunity?
Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick angry article notes that the two parties play on an “uneven playing field” where “the game Republicans are forcing everyone to play insists that morality is for losers.”
Is this the principled solution? By every metric I can think of, it’s correct. But it’s also wrong. It’s wrong because we no longer inhabit a closed ethical system, in which morality and norm preservation are their own rewards. We live in a broken and corroded system in which unilateral disarmament is going to destroy the very things we want to preserve. [..]
Who knows why the GOP has lost its last ethical moorings? But this is a perfectly transactional moment in governance, and what we get in exchange for being good and moral right now is nothing. I’m not saying we should hit pause on #MeToo, or direct any less fury at sexual predators in their every manifestation. But we should understand that while we know that our good faith and reasonableness are virtues, we currently live in a world where it’s also a handicap.
Unilateral disarmament is tantamount to arming the other side. That may be a trade worth making in some cases. But it’s worth at least acknowledging that this is the current calculus. It’s no longer that when they go low, we get to go high. They are permanently living underground. How long can we afford to keep living in the clouds?
Michael Tomasky, a contributor at “The Daily Beast,” has similar thoughts:
A part of me does wonder, though, what exactly would have been wrong in this case with letting the ethics process play out, seeing what the committee found, and determining his fate then? Liberals are supposed to love and respect process, which they sometimes do to a fault. So why short-circuit it here?
This is where I see some opportunism at work, in two ways. First, let’s cut to the chase: Do you think we’d have heard all these calls for his resignation from his Democratic colleagues if Minnesota had a Republican governor? No way. Maybe a couple senators would, but as a group they wouldn’t be nearly so cavalier about dumping him if they knew a Republican was going to replace him. And that’s fine; that’s politics. Newsflash: Politics is political. But it does make me take these high-moral-ground statements of his colleagues with a few grains of salt.
Now Governor Mark Dayton is throwing a wrench in the works by evidently appointing a caretaker on the condition she not seek to keep the seat, which opens the seat up to the real possibility of Republican capture in 2018 (maybe by Norm Coleman, the Republican Franken defeated in 2008). I wonder how many Senate Democrats calling for Franken’s head would have thought twice if they’d known Dayton was going to pull that boneheaded move, instead of appointing a younger star like state Attorney General Lori Swanson who could build a real Senate career.
Second, obviously, the Democrats are hoping to present to America a contrast between them and the Republicans. And that contrast is real. But it, too, is not really about morality. It’s because rank-and-file Democrats take sexually inappropriate behavior a lot more seriously than rank-and-file Republicans do. This week, Quinnipiac polled about 1,700 people and asked them whether an elected official accused (and only accused) of sexual harassment or assault “by multiple people” should resign. Among Democrats it was 77 percent yes to 14 percent no. Among Republicans it was 51-37.
Good for rank-and-file Democrats. They’re in the right place on this question, and Republicans are in the wrong one. I’m just positing that if the polls weren’t coming out like this, maybe many of these moral high horses we’ve seen mounted in the last 48 hours would have been kept in the barn.
The Democrats want to be able to say: See, when Al Franken and John Conyers are discovered to have done wrong, we don’t equivocate. We take care of it. Meanwhile, look at those Republicans. They’re all-in behind Roy Moore, whose alleged attacks on women make Franken’s look awfully tame. They have a congressman, Blake Farenthold of Texas, who reached a $84,000 settlement of his sexual harassment charge—paying it with taxpayer money—and still holds his seat with no one batting an eye. And of course, they have Donald Trump. When’s he going to be filing those lawsuits against those 16 women, by the way?
It’s a contrast, and maybe it will impress some female swing voters in Alabama. But it seems more likely that the Republican way of handling these things is going to win. Deny, deny, deny. Lie, lie, lie. Pushback, pushback, pushback. Be so outrageous—the Republican National Committee officially supporting an accused child molester!—that people can barely wrap their heads around it. Sad to say, it wins.
I’m not saying the Democrats should reduce themselves to that level. As I said, Franken should go. But I’m not sure what the Democrats are getting out of it. They’re losing one of their best and smartest senators, somebody who would have been a quite plausible presidential contender in 2020; and failing that would have been a great and important lifetime senator.
But there’s more. They’ve circumvented process and the principle of hearing from both sides. They’ve completely ignored the possibility that a person can reform himself (maybe Franken used to be a sexist jerk but has genuinely changed; aren’t liberals supposed to welcome that?) And they’ve blurred the line, which I think should exist, between different categories of sexual crimes, some of which are obviously worse than others. The day will almost surely come when they’ll regret having established these precedents.
Since Franken left the entertainment part of his life behind, he became a serious force in the Senate. He carefully checked his wry humor at the door and dove into learning his new craft. Most of the accusations against him came before he decided to enter politics. He has apologized to Leeann Tweenden and to the others who claim that they were groped by him. Although he claimed to not remembering doing it or remembering the incident differently, until the last accuser, he did apologize and said that he would be more aware of his actions with women in the future. This is not to say that Franken’s behavior back then was not demeaning, or that his apologies could have been a more sincere, but should the Democrats have been so hasty in forcing his resignation?
Another glaring problem the Democrats have is New Jersey Sen. Robert Menendez who was recently tried for accepting gifts from a friend for favors that ended in a mistrial.Where were all the senators who were clamoring for Franken’s resignation? It’s very obvious why his resignation wasn’t demanded New Jersey has a Republican governor. Although calls for Menendez’s resignation were discussed but only if he was convicted and after Governor Chris Christie left office. So much for the high ground.
Another question that Tomansky raised, but only lightly touch on, is have the Democrats left themselves open to some fraudster, like pro-Trump activist and noted rape apologist Mike Cernovich or video prankster James O’Keefe, making up a false claim about a Democrat in a vulnerable seat. Consider the case of the Washington Post whose editors, though careful diligence, exposed O’Keefe’s latest scam to undermine the Post‘s reporting on Roy Moore. Even MSNBC has back tracked, apologized and reinstated contributor Sam Seder after the fake accusation by Cernovich about a satirical tweet Seder made eight years ago.
Right now, Republicans controls the field. They control the referees and change the rule to suit their agenda. As Ms. Lithwick points out we live in a world where while good faith and reasonableness are a virtues, they are also a handicap.
Unilateral disarmament is tantamount to arming the other side. That may be a trade worth making in some cases. But it’s worth at least acknowledging that this is the current calculus. It’s no longer that when they go low, we get to go high. They are permanently living underground. How long can we afford to keep living in the clouds?
I’ll miss Sen. Franken’s eloquent voice on the Senate floor and his holding witnesses feet to the fire in the Judiciary Committee hearings. I’m sure Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III is relieved. I just hope the Democrats don’t regret their decision.
Actually, I was one of the founding members of that club. It was an elaborate spoof of all the other clubs. We used to turn out to cheer on the Debate and Swim Teams, show up for Chess Club matches. My Ersatz name was “The Pro From Dover”. It lasted 5 or 6 years and by the time I was a Junior we were already in the Yearbook. You know, like the one Roy Moore signed. Not too shabby for an unsanctioned startup with no faculty advisor. Of course we cheated, one of the members was the Editor.
Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungoverwe’ve been bailed outwe’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
This Day in History
America enters World War Two; Former Beatle John Lennon is shot to death in New York
Breakfast Tunes
Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac
We live in a world now where everything is tweeted and Instagrammed and tagged and now, God help us, Vined. Calling out grievances over Twitter has become an industry norm.
There are a couple of things I’ve alluded to in my discussion of the Cut Cut Cut Bill, the first and most important of which is that beyond a naked theft from 90% of the population to line the pockets of the Plutocratic .01% it also is an assault on the benefits of the 90% that will result in personal economic damage as yet uncalculated and, almost certainly, 10s of thousands of unnecessary deaths due to repeal of the individual mandate alone.
It’s a complicated piece to write, made more so by the fact the proper replacement for the individual mandate is single payer and I’m not a defender of Obamacare by any means. There are also many, many other pernicious proposals regarding “Pay Fors” that need to be addressed, not the least of which is immediate cuts to Medicare under existing legislation.
The second is a somewhat easier task- to explain why “Pay Fors” are not needed at all.
The United States has a “sovereign” currency. Debt really doesn’t exist because all our I.O.U.s (“Debt”) consist of promises to give people little green pieces of paper.
And we can print as many as we like.
Now what people do with those green pieces of paper is really up to them. They can use them to wipe their bottoms (though there are better types of paper for that). They can build and start a fire. They can stuff their walls full of them for insulation and use the leftovers for paper. Speaking of which you can write notes on them (something I frequently do if I can’t find something else).
Writing on them doesn’t destroy their symbolic value which is you can trade them for goods and services (medium of exchange).
Now it is theoretically possible that you could print so many that you could impair their utility as a medium of exchange. The problem for people who fret about those things (Deficit Hawks) is there is absolutely no indication we are anywhere near that! Inflation, any way you measure it, is at historically low levels (except in luxury goods). The Federal Reserve is voluntarily paying interest, investors would gladly pay for the privilege of holding our “Debt”.
And that’s all just “classical” Economics 101.
There are 2 particular beliefs that Modern Monetary Theorists hold that are not intuitive, the ideas that Taxes are what give value to money and that Government spending is what creates money.
The first is easiest to explain. If a Government will only accept payments in little green pieces of paper, those pieces of paper have inherent value in obtaining Government services. Some services we don’t think about like Police, Firefighers, Soldiers, others are more obvious like Licenses, Fines, and Fees. I could get more complicated and talk about the debate whether money itself arose as a medium of exchange or as a substitute for physical labor owed to the State but that would just confuse things in this instance.
The second is a little more tenuous and I understand it less well because it’s grounded in Accounting. It holds that Government must create debt in order for there to be money in the non-Government economy. As best I can grasp, if the Government takes back all the money it prints (no deficits, no debt) it gets sucked out of the economy and it’s ability to function as a medium of exchange is impaired just as badly as by inflation.
Now to me it seems obvious that since the only whiff of inflation we have is in luxury goods, if you are serious about fighting inflation you should impose confiscatory Taxes on the wealthy. Too much money chasing too few goods, again- classic Economics 101.
And perhaps I’m misunderstanding MMT. I’m a Historian, not an Economist though I was forced to study it (also English, Art, Art History…, Music and Music History I did to myself).
It is literally painful to watch our political leaders’ efforts to rethink and restructure how we are going levy taxes on ourselves as a collective society. It is like watching a family member struggling with mental illness: the demons being wrestled with are imaginary—yet they have the palpable force somehow of a granite wall. And as the struggle with this palpable monolith unfolds, even we—the clear observers of reality—forget that it is imaginary; when we do remember, the pain becomes excruciating for the simple reason that we know it is completely unnecessary.
Why does our political system choose to believe and struggle with the imaginary constraint that taxes must pay for sovereign spending? How can we explain to ourselves, in the face of this rock-solid demon, that the simple logic of fiat money demonstrates that sovereign spending must occur first, with taxes collected after? How can we reassure our terrified and confused representatives in congress that if our sovereign government collects back fewer dollars than it issues and spends, the difference is not our collective “debt”—it is, in fact, our collective savings? But the demon will not allow us these explanations.
As is the case with every mental illness, the cruelest aspect to observe is how vulnerable our delusion is to being manipulated and taken advantage of by those who are self-serving and greedy. We actually believe the rich fat-cat when he tells us that if we choose to make him richer we, the poor strugglers, will be better off! How, we are told, can the rich fat-cat give us a new job if he is not made richer and fatter? We cannot, after all, give ourselves jobs—can we? Our sovereign government —which we cannot seem to understand represents our collective selves— can (and must) issue and spend fiat-currency. True! But that currency (our demons are whispering) cannot be spent by our collective selves to pay our individual selves wages to accomplish useful things for our families and local communities. The currency, instead (whisper, whisper) must be spent to fatten the fat-cat so that he can pay us wages to accomplish useful things for him. The pain of this logic makes you numb.
Our case is made all the more desperate by the fact that our “therapists”—the economic pundits and budget analyzers—are actively in collusion with the rich fat-cat. We lie down on the couch and are told that we have a deficit. The deficit we have arises from the fact that our sovereign government—which (whisper, whisper) is not really us but, instead, is a conspiring other who wishes nothing more than to confiscate our tax dollars— insists on spending more of those dollars than it can confiscate. So we therefore have a deficit which, even though it is not our fault, we will be forced to somehow make up and repay. Our simple hope that perhaps our tax dollars might provide us with beneficial public goods and services are dashed and trampled by mathematical calculations demonstrating there can never be enough tax dollars to pay for all the public goods we clearly need. Our only hope (whisper, whisper) is to further fatten the fat-cat so he can accomplish everything for us. If we fatten the fat-cat, he will educate us; he will grow our food; he will build our houses; he will cure our aches and pains; he will put gasoline in our fuel tank. All we have to do is give him everything we have: our farmland, our national parks and forests, our wildlife preserves, our streams and estuaries, our mountain tops. All we have to do is give him our air and our water to do with as he needs. All we have to do is make sure he is rich, because only if he is rich can we hope that he’ll give us a job and pay us to do something. We cannot expect him to hire us if he is not rich, can we? No. And we cannot expect him to hire even more of us if we do not make him fatter and richer still. This is all very logical, we are told, as we lie on the couch.
Finally, our prognosis is greatly diminished by the fact that there are influential people—leaders—who know very well that we are delusional, that taxes do not pay for federal spending, that our fiat-money deficit is not a “debt” that we owe to anyone, that fattening the profits of global corporations neither creates meaningful jobs or causes anything useful to be accomplished for our local communities. They know all these things, yet they are required (by what?) to remain silent or, at the very least, dissembling in their objections. They cannot come straight out and say, “Look here, this tax and deficit calculation is sheer nonsense. It is delusional gobbledygook! The sovereign government has to issue and spend its fiat money before it can collect it back in taxes. And that issuing and spending of fiat money is precisely how the sovereign government can pay us to accomplish everything we agree needs to be collectively accomplished.” The fat-cat needs to be put in his place. He just gets one vote, like all the rest of us. He doesn’t get to run the whole show. Unless we let him. Which we surely will as long as we suffer our monetary mental illness.
If there is no money, how can it be collected?
We finish with our favorite Forensic Economist, Bill Black (from the University of Missouri Kansas City). His analysis is not particularly directed by Modern Monetary Theory, but it’s pretty on the money (heh).
(I)t has exploded, one hopes finally, a bunch of myths and made it clear that Trump exists basically to con and to loot his supposed base in response to his desire to make the incredibly wealthy much wealthier. This bill is a travesty on multiple dimensions. Let’s start with the first one: that is that people hide things for good reasons. They’ve hid this bill. They literally conducted no hearings on this bill. Literally brought in no independent experts, so the only people they listened to were lobbyists for overwhelmingly, the ultra wealthy.
Second, these bills are supposed to go through the joint committee on taxation. The Republicans were critical in creating that committee, have praised it for years, and of course they learned that the Joint Committee was going to say that it was all nonsense, that this bill was actually going to make money for the Federal Treasury and in fact was going to, pick your metaphor, but basically dramatically increase the deficit. The Republicans, and this is in the New York Times as we are taping, went on an attack dog plan to discredit precisely the committee that they had created with independence to prevent this kind of travesty. They not only create the travesty but they want to create future travesties by completely discrediting anyone who might say no to all these things.
Next of course, was the fact that it became let’s make a deal. What they learned from the defeat of all their earlier legislation is Oh my god, we can’t go back to our wealthy donors unless we actually get something, so they just bought folks off. They bought them off at the last moment. People have probably seen it. If not, you can go on the net and see all this handwritten language on the printed bill that was to buy senators votes. It turns out that you can buy a US Senator’s votes for somewhere around $30 to $80 million for their donors in return. That’s all areas of insanity.
Then there are things in the tax bill that are outrageous that have nothing to do with taxes. For example, like defining a fetus as an unborn child with the hope that it will lead to overturning Roe vs. Wade. For example, getting rid of the individual mandate under Obamacare. Now, remember it was Republican right wing think tank that came up with the ideas that became Obamacare. I mean, that’s not a conspiracy theory, that’s just outright history. The individual mandate was viewed and conservatives explained, as absolutely essential to make this thing work. They’ve gutted it because they couldn’t get the votes to destroy Obamacare directly. This is going to result after not a terribly long delay in millions of people losing health insurance because they can’t afford them or getting health insurance plans that don’t really ensure you against much of anything because of the exclusions and the deductibles and such.
Outside of tax, it’s insane. Then, within tax we’ve already talked about one of the central insanities, that it’s being sold as if it’s actually going to create net revenue for the Federal government, when it’s going to reduce net revenue. Net of any increase from very modest growth by over $1 trillion according to most anyone. By the way, economists overwhelmingly agree that it will massively increase the deficit, agree that we’ll have only minor effects in terms of growth. You can already see the Republican strategy, and that is going to tell the Democrats to make a series of Sophie’s Choices. Which of your social programs do you want to gut because there’s no longer any money for them? They’re going to go after Medicare and Medicaid. All of the safety net programs, plus all the social programs. That’s going on.
Then, who’s going to end up with the vast amount of bucks? Well, there’s no dispute about that. Seriously, among economists, it’s going to go overwhelmingly to the wealthy. That was even before they made the last minute deals. Oh, and have I mentioned, the bill isn’t final yet. It’s going to go to what’s called a conference committee. A conference committee is the most opaque of this completely opaque process, in which the public learns almost nothing but the lobbyists literally sit just outside the door. They go back and forth and so the bill will almost certainly, absent an immense public uproar, get much worse than it already is.
(T)he first comment by Senator Hatch was in the context of the Children’s Health Insurance Program called CHIP, which provided insurance for nine million kids in very poor families. After admitting that it did very good work, of course the obvious question was, “Why had the Republicans allowed the CHIP program to expire?” His answer was, “We have no money.” Now, this is in the direct context of cutting federal revenues by 1.5 trillion dollars.
So, you can see the priorities and you can see then his answer, remember, we’re talking about kids and health insurance, who are really poor, in saying that he’s sick and tired of supporting these folks who won’t work for themselves, all these six year olds and such. A truly revealing comment about where they were coming from and the tactics they’re going to use, the tax bill not only to reward the rich but as their excuse to slam the poorest Americans.
Then, you have Grassley saying contrary to their explanations for the bill that yes, yes, yes, it was designed to aid rich people because rich people are much better than the rest of us. Because rich people, he says, invest their money. Whereas the rest of us, we spend every darn penny on booze, women and movies, which must be news to Hollywood type of thing and probably to the liquor industry.
But I like the concept of women. I don’t know whether these are supposed to be wives and daughters or he recognizes perhaps that women actually work. It’s a completely bizarre statement and it’s terrible economics, but again, it reveals that they wanted to take money from the middle class and the working class and poor people because they view them not putting enough money into the stock market. They want to give it to people who are going to put their money in the stock market.
What happens if you put an extra billion and a half of money in, I’m sorry, trillion, trillion and a half of money into the stock market? Well, of course, you’re going to tend to cause the stock market to surge and who is that going to benefit? Well, of course, the wealthiest tiny portion of Americans, just like it’s done before. That’s the mindset behind all of this and the only surprise is how open they were in revealing that mindset.
I kind of like the last one because it reinforces my position on inflation in luxury goods and the need for confiscatory Taxes on the wealthy.
It’s been fairly evident that Donald Trump loves conspiracy theories. His claims about the existence of a “deep state” of longtime government officials to undermine him and his administration has come up frequently in his statements. Of course, there is no evidence that this “deep state” even exists except in Trump’s paranoid mind. Unfortunately, he has surrounded himself with people who cater to his delusions. Two such people are CIA Director Mike Pompeo and former Blackwater founder Erik Prince, a former CIA officer and famous Iran-Contra scandal figure Oliver North. As was reported in The Intercept by Jeremy Scahill and Matthew Cole.
The Trump administration is considering a set of proposals developed by Blackwater founder Erik Prince and a retired CIA officer — with assistance from Oliver North, a key figure in the Iran-Contra scandal — to provide CIA Director Mike Pompeo and the White House with a global, private spy network that would circumvent official U.S. intelligence agencies, according to several current and former U.S. intelligence officials and others familiar with the proposals. The sources say the plans have been pitched to the White House as a means of countering “deep state” enemies in the intelligence community seeking to undermine Donald Trump’s presidency.
The creation of such a program raises the possibility that the effort would be used to create an intelligence apparatus to justify the Trump administration’s political agenda.
“Pompeo can’t trust the CIA bureaucracy, so we need to create this thing that reports just directly to him,” said a former senior U.S. intelligence official with firsthand knowledge of the proposals, in describing White House discussions. “It is a direct-action arm, totally off the books,” this person said, meaning the intelligence collected would not be shared with the rest of the CIA or the larger intelligence community. “The whole point is this is supposed to report to the president and Pompeo directly.”
North, who appears frequently on Trump’s favorite TV network, Fox News, was enlisted to help sell the effort to the administration. He was the “ideological leader” brought in to lend credibility, said the former senior intelligence official.
Some of the individuals involved with the proposals secretly met with major Trump donors asking them to help finance operations before any official contracts were signed.
The proposals would utilize an army of spies with no official cover in several countries deemed “denied areas” for current American intelligence personnel, including North Korea and Iran. The White House has also considered creating a new global rendition unit meant to capture terrorist suspects around the world, as well as a propaganda campaign in the Middle East and Europe to combat Islamic extremism and Iran. [..]
According to two former senior intelligence officials, Pompeo has embraced the plan and lobbied the White House to approve the contract. Asked for comment, a CIA spokesperson said, “You have been provided wildly inaccurate information by people peddling an agenda.”
At the heart of the scheme being considered by the White House are Blackwater founder Erik Prince and his longtime associate, CIA veteran John R. Maguire, who currently works for the intelligence contractor Amyntor Group. Maguire also served on Trump’s transition team. Amyntor’s role was first reported by BuzzFeed News.
Michael Barry, who was recently named NSC senior director for intelligence programs, worked closely with Prince on a CIA assassination program during the Bush administration.
Prince and Maguire deny they are working together. Those assertions, however, are challenged by current and former U.S. officials and Trump donors who say the two men were collaborating. [..]
Among the capabilities Prince offers is a network of deniable assets — spies, fixers, foreign intelligence agents — spread across the globe that could be used by the White House. “You pick any country in the world Erik’s been in, and it’s there,” said a longtime Prince associate. “They’re a network of very dark individuals.” The associate, who has worked extensively with Prince, then began rattling off places where the private spies and paramilitaries already operate — Saudi Arabia, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, “all across North Africa.”
Opaque contracting arrangements are typical for Prince, who became a lightning rod in his Blackwater days and now prefers to minimize controversy by operating in the shadows, disguising his involvement in sensitive operations with layers of subcontractors and elaborately crafted legal structures. “That’s his exact MO,” said the longtime Prince associate, adding that Prince consistently attempts to ensure plausible deniability of his role in U.S. and foreign government contracts.
The whole article is an eye popping read into what would constitute a private Black Ops ring of spies and paramilitaries solely under the control of Trump and Pompeo, funded by private donors an accountable to no one.
Investigative reporter Matthew Cole and former CIA analyst Ned Price join MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell to discuss the plan to create a “spy vs spy” network of unaccountable actors.
Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungoverwe’ve been bailed outwe’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
This Day in History
On this date in 1941, Japanese forces attack the home base of the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii – prompting America under President Franklin D. Roosevelt to enter World War II.
Breakfast Tunes
Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac
Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.
It was reported yesterday that Special Counsel Robert Mueller had subpoenaed the bank records of the Trump family from Deutsche Bank. Duetsche Bank has a rather dubious history of laundering money for everyone from drug lords to arms dealers to oligarchs. Just this psst January, the bank was fined $620 million for its part in $10 billion Russian money-laundering scheme that involved the bank’s Moscow, New York, and London branches. The Trump family has had to rely on the bank for loans since they have been blackballed for their underhanded policy of suing the institutes to whom they owe money and declaring multiple bankruptcies. The Trump organization has also been involving in money laundering through its now defunct casinos
The Trump Taj Mahal casino broke anti-money laundering rules 106 times in its first year and a half of operation in the early 1990s, according to the IRS in a 1998 settlement agreement. [..]
The casino repeatedly failed to properly report gamblers who cashed out $10,000 or more in a single day, the government said.
Trump’s casino ended up paying the Treasury Department a $477,000 fine in 1998 without admitting any liability under the Bank Secrecy Act.
The violations date back to a time when the Taj Mahal was the preferred gambling spot for Russian mobsters living in Brooklyn, according to federal investigators who tracked organized crime in New York City. They also occurred at a time when the Taj Mahal casino was short on cash and on the verge of bankruptcy.
More Russians. Who would have guessed?
One of the charges against Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, is money laundering.
According to the CNN artcle there are two kinds of money laundering, international and domestic. Manofort and his partner, Robert Gates, are charged with both.
Citing the international money laundering provision, the indictment alleges that Manafort and Gates conspired to transfer money into or out of the United States with the intent to promote the crime of failing to register as a foreign agent.
Citing the domestic money laundering provision, it alleges that Manafort and Gates conspired to conduct transactions involving the proceeds of the FARA violation with knowledge that the transactions were designed either to conceal or disguise the source of the money or to evade taxes.
The domestic and international money laundering provisions operate differently. Whereas the domestic provision looks rearward — focusing on the source of the money being laundered, in other words, the proceeds of illegal activity (otherwise known as “dirty money”) — the international one looks forward, making it an offense to use money derived from any source, legal or illegal, to promote a specified crime in the future.
Under the international provision, the money can be perfectly “clean;” the crime is in using it to break the law down the road.
City officials slapped a stop-work order on Manafort’s Brooklyn brownstone — a property that federal prosecutors have alleged is one way Manafort was able to launder millions of dollars he earned overseas.
The order isn’t related to the money-laundering allegations — it was issued after somebody complained to 311 that there was no DOB work permit posted outside the property at 377 Union Street. When city inspectors responded on Nov. 28, they discovered that contractors did not have an approved plan for work they were doing to the home, and that they had installed a fire suppression sprinkler system without the proper permits. The department issued two violations and full stop work order.
A nearby resident told neighborhood blog Pardon Me For Asking, which first reported the stop-work order, that it hasn’t actually led to work stopping.
“The Sheriff drove up and they shut lights off,” the neighbor told the blog. “Sheriff drove away, they resumed work.”
So how does money laundering work? MSNBC host Rachel Maddow explains just how a Russian criminal would launder $10 million.
While we are debating changes to the Tax Code that will provide 90% of their benefits to the wealthiest 1% and raises the Taxes of everyone else who makes less than $75,000 a year (in addition to taking away critical benefits to pay for it, not that it needs paying for mind you) it is useful to note the inequality that already exists.
The top 1% own more wealth than the bottom 90% combined.
They own 40% of the entire wealth of the United States.
The wealthiest 1 percent of American households own 40 percent of the country’s wealth, according to a new paper by economist Edward N. Woolf. That share is higher than it has been at any point since at least 1962, according to Woolf’s data, which comes from the federal Survey of Consumer Finances.
From 2013, the share of wealth owned by the 1 percent shot up by nearly three percentage points. Wealth owned by the bottom 90 percent, meanwhile, fell over the same period. Today, the top 1 percent of households own more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined. That gap, between the ultrawealthy and everyone else, has only become wider in the past several decades.
Let’s talk a bit about that wealth gap. Wealth, often described as net worth, describes how much stuff you actually have: It’s the value of your assets minus the value of your debts. If you have a $250,000 house but you still owe $200,000 to the bank on it, and you have no other debts or financial assets, that means your net worth is $50,000.
In the United States, the distribution of that wealth is even more skewed toward the top than the distribution of income.
Now he goes on to use a rather trite pie metaphor and for the sake of clarity I’m just going to edit that part out.
The top 20 percent of households actually own a whopping 90 percent of the stuff in America… Their average net worth? $3 million.
That leaves just 10 percent for the remaining 80 percent of the populace. The next 20 percent of households (average net worth: $273,600) help themselves to (8%), while the middle 20 percent ($81,700 net worth, on average) (2%).
…
The fourth quintile of households gets literally nothing. (T)hey’re still doing better than the bottom 20 percent of households, who are actually in a state of debt: Their net worth is underwater, meaning they owe more than they have. Combined, the average net worth of the bottom 40 percent of households is -$8,900.
Yes, that is a minus sign you see. The bottom 40% owes slightly less than $10,000.
Concentrating on just the top 20% (you know, those people who own 90% of everything)-
The top 1% == 40% of wealth
Those below 1% to 5% == 27% of wealth
Those below 5% to 10% == 12% of wealth
Those below 10% to 20% == 11% of wealth
Now that group between 10 and 20% is larger than the others put together so their individual net worth is relatively low but they have an average of $740,800 each.
Ingraham finishes with this-
If you were designing a tax plan to reduce the extreme inequality in the United States, you’d probably try to find ways to redistribute some of the wealth from the richest households to the poorest ones. But the Senate GOP tax plan does precisely the opposite of that, according to the CBO: In the short term the richest households get the biggest tax cuts, while longer term the taxes of the poorest households actually increase.
Estate tax? Cut. Income tax rate for millionaires? Cut (at least in the Senate bill). Corporate tax rate? Biggest rate cut ever.
In the long term that probably means more for the super-rich, and less for everyone else.
Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungoverwe’ve been bailed outwe’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
This Day in History
Jefferson Davis dies in New Orleans; Four people die at a free Rolling Stones concert at the Altamont Speedway in Livermore, California; America’s first attempt to put a satellite into orbit fails; Jazz pianist Dave Brubeck is born.
Breakfast Tunes
Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac
The progress of rivers to the ocean is not so rapid as that of man to error.
Welcome to the Stars Hollow Gazette‘s Health and Fitness News weekly diary. It will publish on Saturday afternoon and be open for discussion about health related issues including diet, exercise, health and health care issues, as well as, tips on what you can do when there is a medical emergency. Also an opportunity to share and exchange your favorite healthy recipes.
