Fire away…

I Was at the Tulsa Rally With Anti-Trump Vets. The President Should Be Worried.

And then, of course, there was the version of patriotism on display in the arena. I’ve never seen so many representations of the Stars and Stripes in my life, classic flags everywhere and flag designs plastered on all manner of attire. Remember, I went to West Point. No one showed the slightest concern that many of the red-white-and-blue adaptations worn or waved strictly violated the statutes colloquially known as the US Flag Code (United States Code, Title 4, Chapter 1).

That said, going undercover in Trumplandia means entering a universe in which it’s exceedingly clear that one political faction holds the flag hostage. They see it as theirs—and only theirs. They define its meaning, its symbolism, and its proper use, not to speak of whom it represents. The crowd, after all, was vanilla. (There were more people of color serving beers than cheering the president.)

By a rough estimate, half of the attendees had some version of the flag on their clothing, Trump banners, or other accessories, signaling more than mere national pride. Frequently sharing space with Old Glory were images of (often military-grade) weaponry, skulls (one wearing an orange toupee), and anti-liberal slogans. Notable shirts included: the old Texas War of Independence challenge “Come and Take It!” above the sort of AK-47 assault rifle long favored by America’s enemies; a riff on a classic Nixonian line, “The Silent Majority Is Coming”; and the slanderous “Go To Your Safe Space, Snowflake!”; not to mention a sprinkling of the purely conspiratorial like “Alex Jones Did Nothing Wrong” (with a small flag design on it, too).

The banners were even more aggressive. “Trump 2020: Fuck Your Feelings” was a fan favorite. Another popular one photoshopped The Donald’s puffy face onto Sylvester Stallone’s muscle-bound physique, a machine gun at his hip. That image, of course, had been lifted from the Reagan-era, pro–Vietnam War film Rambo: First Blood Part II, a fitting accompaniment to Trump’s classically plagiarized Reaganesque rallying cry “Make America Great Again.” Finally, a black banner with pink lettering read “LGBT.” Above the letters, also in pink, were logos depicting, respectively, the Statue of Liberty, a gun (an M16 assault rifle), a beer mug, and a profile bust of Donald Trump. Get it?

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/veterans-trump-2020/

Shrink Wall Street to Guarantee Good Jobs

A new House bill would tax Wall Street windfalls to guarantee good jobs for people in high unemployment areas.

The Workforce Promotion and Access Act would ensure employment in jobs that pay at least $15 per hour with benefits and address local needs, such as childcare, eldercare, and infrastructure. Democratic Representatives Bonnie Watson Coleman and Ilhan Omar are the bill’s lead sponsors.

In 2018, Watson Coleman joined with Senator Cory Booker to introduce the first federal jobs guarantee bill. The new proposal differs from the original model in two important ways.

First, while the 2018 bill aimed to create pilot programs in no more than 15 communities and regions, the new bill expands the scope to respond to the scale of the current economic crisis. It would provide job creation grants to states and localities where the unemployment rate is higher than 10 percent or 100 percent of the national unemployment rate.

Every adult in these hard-hit areas would have the opportunity to have a job, something Erica Smiley, Executive Director for Jobs with Justice, sees as a way to reduce the excessive power corporations hold over their employees.

“Working people who stand up to corporate bosses and get fired as a result face loss of income, loss of housing, loss of medical care, and food insecurity,” Smiley said in a press release. “The Workforce Promotion and Access Act blunts the threat of firing and allows working people to demand a role in our economic system.”

Smiley also noted that Black people and other communities of color that have been most affected by the twin pandemics would benefit most from the bill. A recent reportby the Institute for Policy Studies and the National Community Reinvestment Coalition listed a federal jobs guarantee as one of eight solutions to the racial wealth divide. As of July 2, the Black unemployment rate was 15.4 percent, compared to 12.4 percent for whites.

A second difference in the new bill over the 2018 model is that it includes a mechanism for covering the cost of the jobs program. While lawmakers shouldn’t wait to take crisis response action until they can pay for every dime of spending, this particular “pay for” is worth pursuing because it would have multiple benefits.

The proposal would apply a tax of 0.1 percent on each trade of stocks, derivatives, and other financial instruments. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that such a tax could generate $777 billion over 10 years.

Because the tax applies to every Wall Street trade, high frequency traders who flip stocks every second or even millisecond would pay the bulk of the tax. For pension holders with ordinary turnover rates in their portfolios, the cost would be negligible.

By elevating market volatility, the crisis has increased profits for fast traders who use advanced technologies to spot market movements and capitalize on them before traditional investors. As the Wall Street Journal explains it, “High-frequency traders, which typically deploy sophisticated algorithms and powerful computers to move in and out of markets at lightning speeds, tend to do well when markets are volatile.” High levels of market volatility are expected to continue throughout 2020.

A financial transaction tax would significantly reduce high frequency trading, which has no real economic value, drains profits from traditional investors, and benefits only the wealthy.

Susan Harley, deputy director of Public Citizen’s Congress Watch division, applauded the inclusion of the tax, which has garnered support over the past year from Democratic Presidential candidate Joe Biden and former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin.

“By implementing a Wall Street tax, the Workforce Promotion and Access Act both provides a focus on equity and redistributing tax responsibility while making real progress on the road to relief for families in America by providing a job to those who need it,” Harley said.

The Pandemic Proved That Cash Payments Work. An extra $600 a week buys freedom from fear.

Like millions of other workers, Bridgit Fatora was facing a financial abyss. Before the pandemic hit, she was a freelance photographer and part-time nanny in Seattle. The coronavirus made both of her jobs untenable. Her photography bookings disappeared when Washington State banned mass gatherings, and the couple who employed her to watch their kid laid her off, too.

Normally, she made $375 a week for nannying and an additional $150 or so working as a photographer and babysitter. On standard unemployment insurance (UI), her income would have dropped to roughly $200 a week, not enough for anyone to live on for any kind of extended period and below the federal poverty line. But Congress’s emergency legislation added bonus payments of $600 a week for UI recipients, and expanded the program’s eligibility to include gig workers. Fatora did not just stay out of poverty. Her income went up to $735 a week.

“It’s the first time I’ve been financially stable since graduating college,” she told me. “I’ve been able to pay down my credit-card debt and have some sort of savings account, which I am going to have to use when the $600 a week goes away.”

The UI bonus in the CARES Act expires at the end of July, and Congress is in the midst of a roiling debate over whether to extend it, winnow it down, or end it entirely. Democrats largely favor keeping the bonus payments in place, given the scope of the recession. Republicans have argued that, by allowing workers to stay home rather than look for jobs, the bonus is harming the recovery. White House officials are pushing for it to end, too.

But the economic evidence, as well as testimonials from Americans receiving the bonus, supports not just keeping the $600 payment, but expanding it to encompass millions more Americans. Simply giving people cash turns out to be a powerful way to protect workers during a public-health crisis, to alleviate poverty, and to empower employees to bargain with employers. Uncle Sam needs to give out a lot more.

The CARES Act’s changes to the UI system were unprecedented. With 40 million Americans losing their jobs in a matter of weeks and the jobless rate soaring well above the peak hit during the Great Recession, Democrats negotiated a provision that added gig and informal workers to the system and tacked $600 a week onto the standard state payments, which are generally between $100 and $500 a week.

The effect was dramatic. The federal government prevented joblessness from turning into actual income loss for millions of families. Two in three UI recipients ended up making more than they were before with the $600 boost, with one in five workers doubling their income. And the UI expansion, along with the $1,200 onetime checks that Congress sent to most adults, at least temporarily prevented the poverty rate from increasing—an astonishing feat, given the size and scope of the economic shutdown.

In more human terms, the helicopter money and UI boost kept families in their home, with food on the table, gas in the car, and the electric bill paid. Without the UI bump, “I would have been quite screwed,” Carrie Callison of Olympia, Washington, told me. She was a full-time student and a part-time receptionist in the spring, before she graduated and lost her job at a primary-care clinic in short order. Her financial aid and steady paycheck disappeared all at once. Her household, which includes her partner and her partner’s young son, might not have been able to keep paying the rent, she said.

The UI payments have also helped workers transition from one part of the labor market to another. During the pandemic, tens of thousands of jobs have disappeared at bars, concert venues, airlines, and conference centers and are unlikely to return for months, if not years. George Watt of Portland, Maine, had been working as a massage therapist—a job that carries high risks and will likely be in low demand until a coronavirus vaccine arrives. “I’m pretty versatile,” he told me, describing the gig work he would sometimes pick up as a gardener or a wintertime lift operator at ski resorts. But with the UI bump, he said, he had been expanding his résumé to include white-collar skills that will allow him to work at home. “I’ve been using this time to learn so much, to work on things like affiliate marketing and Photoshop and website design.”

America’s looming housing crisis

Purely out of curiosity the other day I decided to look at who was hiring in the ZIP codes closest to me. It’s not that I am searching for a new line of work, though if something in the professional hammock testing line were to open up one would be sorely tempted. Instead I looked at 55 listings for things with names like “credit manager” and “collections specialist” before one (perhaps somewhat old-fashioned) company decided to spell things out for me: “debt collector.”

Sooner or later, one suspects, this will be the only form of gainful employment available to most Americans. Instead of working somewhere and earning wages that we in turn use to buy things, we will all go around harassing one another for debts we have run up with companies that no longer actually employee anyone, much less sell us stuff or provide services. As long as we all use the money we make to run up new deficits no one will be out of a job. Full employment is on its way, I daresay.

So far this month, one third of Americans have failed to make their full monthly housing payments on time. The figures were roughly the same last month and the month before that. Similar numbers are being reported for automobile loans and credit cards. Federal student loans have not been collected in months. Around 10 percent of mortgages in this country have gone into forbearance. Similar so-called “hardship” programs are locking in millions of people to terms with which they may or may not be able to comply next week, much less six months from now.

Eventually the pain will come, probably sooner rather than later with the end of the $600 in additional weekly unemployment benefits set to expire at the end of July along with moratoriums on eviction in many cities. Defaults are going to pile up until practically the only people continuing to pay rent in this country will be the foreign tycoons sitting on former mom-and-pop storefronts in Manhattan, holding out hope for the return of the city’s wealthy population and a return to in-person Lululemon sales.

Like every other aspect of the lockdown crisis, the coming avalanche of housing-related debt has been entirely predictable. With real estate prices grotesquely inflated and wages that were already stagnant either falling or non-existent, something like this was bound to happen sooner or later. Even before the unilateral suspension of civilization brought unemployment to Great Depression levels, the average American household had no savings or, on the eve of payday, liquid cash of any kind. We are not a saving people.

Why should we be? Corporations as a rule do not have rainy day funds; when they make money they spend it or pass it on to shareholders. Every aspect of our society is organized around the idea of relentless consumption; whenever people buy 0.02 percent fewer Chinese plastic toys between Thanksgiving and the New Year, economists start making prophecies of doom. In many cases companies fire people. We are supposed to buy things all the time, which is a nice arrangement if you have limitless funds at your disposal; for the rest of the American people, it means going into debt, regardless of how much you already owe towards your house, your vehicle, and the piece of toilet paper inscribed with Latin initials your high-school guidance counselor convinced you to purchase on credit for $35,000 when you were 18.

This is from USNews.com

7 Marijuana Stocks That Could Be Election Winners

The U.S. election may be a major catalyst for marijuana stocks.

U.S. Election Day in November is just four months away, and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has been surging in the polls. Democrats also apparently have a good chance of taking over both houses of Congress. Biden said earlier this year that marijuana “has to be, basically, legalized.” Regardless of how quickly Democrats would move on marijuana, cannabis investors likely see a Democratic sweep as the best shot at federal legalization. Here are seven marijuana stocks to watch that could get an election boost.

The point here is that if Biden can’t be persuaded for medical reasons to legalize cannabis, maybe his GOP friends will make the financial case. Problem is that cannabis prices would go down and that could hurt the shareholders proceeds. But we’ll see. US News must be in touch with John Boehner, who sits on the National Cannabis Roundtable.

National Review is Trying to Rewrite Its Own Racist History

STUART STEVENS, who has gone from running Mitt Romney’s campaign for president in 2012 to a perch as a leading Never Trumper, is out with a new book: his mea culpa of sorts, “It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump.”

Some of Stevens’s former colleagues don’t like it, and one of them, Matthew Scully, savaged it in National Review. “Perhaps the most devastating book review you’ll ever read,” National Review editor Rich Lowry promised.

The review is, to be sure, unfriendly, countering that Stevens is, in so many words, a clown, a hack, a liar, a grifter — and wrong. I’m not here to referee the bulk of their dispute, but one particular claim by Scully in his review merits a closer look.

In his book, Stevens apologizes for his role in propping up a Republican Party he now considers to be little more than a “white grievance party” cynically exploiting racism in the pursuit of power. Scully objects to much of what Stevens has to say in the book, and he zeroes in on Stevens’s claim that, in hindsight, he should have seen all along that Republicans were getting ahead by exploiting racism. Stevens cites the rise of the New Right with Barry Goldwater’s campaign in 1964 straight through to President Donald Trump.

Scully is appalled at such libel upon the GOP, and comes to the spirited defense of Goldwater and one of his chief advocates, William F. Buckley Jr. Buckley was a founder of the National Review and, in many respects, the modern conservative movement, who, Stevens wrote, was simply “a more articulate version of the same deep ugliness and bigotry that is the hallmark of Trumpism.”

William F. Buckley, Stevens wrote, was simply “a more articulate version of the same deep ugliness and bigotry that is the hallmark of Trumpism.”

“As a rule of thumb,” Scully responds in the reportedly devastating review, “anyone so glib and presumptuous as to brush off as ‘ugliness and bigotry’ the enduring political and moral legacy of William F. Buckley Jr. has, for that reason alone, no business involving himself in Republican affairs.”

Scully might want to take a dive through the archives of his own magazine before offering such a definitive judgment. A review of that record shows there is no doubt which side of history Buckley placed himself on. Now, he stands athwart it with Trump, like it or not. Stevens, if anything, was being too polite.

IN 1957, as Congress was debating the first Civil Rights Act since Reconstruction, Buckley penned an op-ed that scrubbed away the euphemisms to get straight to the heart of the matter.

“Let us speak frankly,” Buckley wrote in the editorial, titled “Why The South Must Prevail.”

“The South does not want to deprive the Negro of a vote for the sake of depriving him of the vote,” he goes on. “In some parts of the South, the White community merely intends to prevail — that is all. It means to prevail on any issue on which there is corporate disagreement between Negro and White. The White community will take whatever measures are necessary to make certain that it has its way.”

Buckley goes on to weigh whether such a position is kosher from a sophisticated, conservative perspective. “The central question that emerges,” he writes, “is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically?” His answer is clear:

The sobering answer is Yes — the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race. It is not easy, and it is unpleasant, to adduce statistics evidencing the median cultural superiority of White over Negro: but it is a fact that obtrudes, one that cannot be hidden by ever-so-busy egalitarians and anthropologists. The question, as far as the White community is concerned, is whether the claims of civilization supersede those of universal suffrage. The British believe they do, and acted accordingly, in Kenya, where the choice was dramatically one between civilization and barbarism, and elsewhere; the South, where the conflict is by no means dramatic, as in Kenya, nevertheless perceives important qualitative differences between its culture and the Negroes’, and intends to assert its own. NATIONAL REVIEW believes that the South’s premises are correct. If the majority wills what is socially atavistic, then to thwart the majority may be, though undemocratic, enlightened. It is more important for any community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority.

Having justified denying the vote to Black people in the South as “enlightened,” Buckley then grapples with the proper level of violence needed to sustain the “civilized standards” he is intent on upholding.

Sometimes it becomes impossible to assert the will of a minority, in which case it must give way, and the society will regress; sometimes the numerical minority cannot prevail except by violence: then it must determine whether the prevalence of its will is worth the terrible price of violence.

By 1957, when Buckley was writing the column and Congress was considering its civil rights legislation, lynchings were continuing in the South, a mechanism of discipline to enforce Jim Crow, a regime that rendered the post-Civil War constitutional guarantees of the franchise and the right to equal protection of the laws mere words on paper. Buckley concluded the editorial by suggesting that with enough guidance and charity from white people in the South, Black people may one day be worthy of an equal standing.

I missed this earlier this week. Apologies if it is a dupe.

Company Linked to Jay-Z’s TIDAL Reportedly Received PPP Loan Before TIDAL Laid Off 15 Furloughed Employees

Malibu Entertainment, a company linked to TIDAL reportedly applied for and received a Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan—money set aside in the CARES Act to help small businesses affected by the pandemic—for about $2.1 million, according to a source via Variety. The company was apparently among the businesses that applied for the loans, which were between $2 million and $5 million, according to Small Business Administration and Treasury Department documents.

In addition to that, TIDAL and Roc Nation reportedly laid off, furloughed or cut salaries 10-20 percent across as much as half of the company in March, shortly before the loan was approved on April 7. Apparently, TIDAL and Roc Nation’s big moneymakers—music touring and sports—had understandably halted due to the pandemic and the subsequent lockdown, so the company downsized quickly. Further, a source told Variety that 15 furloughed TIDAL employees were laid off just last week.

snip

While Malibu is technically a separate company—a Black-owned motion picture and video production business based in New York with 95 jobs supported, according to the SBA document—it is part of the Tidal infrastructure. It shares the two most recent addresses with both companies; a 2017 lawsuit alleged that Roc Nation, Tidal, Malibu Entertainment and Tidal parent Aspiro are essentially the same company (although the lawsuit was dismissed without a clear ruling on the matter); in 2017 Malibu submitted for H1B visas for graphic designers providing as a contact for Joseph Borrino, CFO of Roc Nation at the time, who used a Tidal.com email address; and several Tidal employees tell Variety that their paychecks come from Malibu Entertainment(source: Variety).

The recent report about TIDAL is just another tick in the column of other billionaires and wealthy businesses who have received the loans, including Kanye West’s Yeezy company.

The U.S. likely chartered at least 351 deportation flights to at least 15 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean between February and late June.

Some of those flights had people on board who tested positive for the coronavirus after landing. https://t.co/ta5fiGeYo6 pic.twitter.com/9Stp6dEtvA

— The Intercept (@theintercept) July 10, 2020