IBM Internet Security Systems (ISS) warns against a new wave of security threats during the holidays and provides guidance on how consumers and businesses can protect themselves.

IBM today announced that Victoria University has selected IBM to design and build the university’s first green data centre.

IBM (NYSE: IBM ) today announced the local availability of the Virtual Desktop for Smart Business, a new workforce mobility solution offering anytime, anywhere, access to corporate data from mobile devices, such as tablets or laptops on the move.

IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced the appointment of David La Rose as Managing Director of IBM Australia and New Zealand (A/NZ). He replaces Kerry Purcell, who will return to a senior leadership role in IBM Japan.

(I know I've been scarce lately -- it's been a bad two years or so -- and I keep swearing I'm going to get back to posting regularly and it keeps not happening, but this was worth using up some spoons for.)

Background

The context, for those who've missed it: The Archive of Our Own was awarded the 2019 Hugo Award™ for "Best Related Work" in August by the voting membership of this year's Worldcon™. As fandom does, a lot of people predictably joked about "welp, my Stucky tentacle porn just won a Hugo" or "my Stucky A/B/O has won 0.0000482% of a Hugo!" The World Science Fiction Society™, who holds the service mark for "The Hugo Awards"™ and licenses the ability to award those awards each year to the independent organization that seeks the license to throw each year's Worldcon™, decided that they would like us all to know we should stop doing that and this award being given to "The Archive Of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works" does not mean that we, users of the AO3 or members of the OTW, are 'Hugo winners'. (Repeatedly. In great detail and at great length.)

( cut for length )

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rickowensonline:

LAS PALMAS AVE, HOLLYWOOD, 2002

At the most recent MSRI board of trustees meeting on Mar 7 (conducted online, naturally), Nicolas Jewell (a Professor of Biostatistics and Statistics at Berkeley, also affiliated with the Berkeley School of Public Health and the London School of Health and Tropical Disease), gave a presentation on the current coronavirus epidemic entitled “2019-2020 Novel Coronavirus […]

A friend wrote to me today urging me to read Killing the Rising Sun as, by he said, Bill O’Reilly, since it made the case that the U.S. had to drop atomic bombs on Japan. My reply: You underestimate me, my friend; I’ve already read to Killing the Rising Sun. The key issue out of […]

The times they are a-changin’ in publishing, and so I’ve set up a Patreon page at patreon.com/robertjsawyer, where my readers can support my work directly. Please check it out! Many thanks! Robert J. Sawyer online:Website • Facebook • Twitter • Email

In my new novel, The Oppenheimer Alternative — coming June 2, 2020, and available for pre-order now — the following exchange occurs between J. Robert Oppenheimer and his wife Kitty (with Kitty employing a racial slur that was regrettably all-too-common during the Second World War): “They … they’ve dropped a second bomb,” Oppie said, holding her. […]

My week has been stressful. They called Thursday and offered me the half-time job. They needed to know that day -- we haven't heard back on the lucrative job James has applied for, so I declined, citing the fact that I'm the only breadwinner and James hasn't heard back about the job he was waiting to hear from (I didn't mention to the HR person that it's a job at my same employer, because it's probably not her fault they're lagging on his job, and I'm not an asshole). She wanted to know when I'd know, and I said, "Well, I was supposed to know two weeks ago, so I mean, soon, I hope, but no guarantees."

She called me back an hour later and offered to give me a week to decide (because they actually don't want the other two people who interviewed, is my surmise), so yeah, rollercoaster day on Thursday.

And then a student's mom called and cussed me out for like half an hour. I don't take that stuff personally, but it does wear on me. My co-workers marvelled over and over about how calm I stayed, and I said (and I meant it), "She was frustrated. That's understandable. And I don't have to attend every fight I'm invited to," which became a theme for the week.

My mom got in a fracas with another member of her senior center, and I shared my week's theme with her. I think she felt a little chastised, but she also seemed to latch onto the theme as a potential sanity saver.

And then today at the donut shop, I accidentally passed up another person who was waiting to pay (because I followed the person who gave me our donuts to the register and didn't notice the other person who was standing away from the registers at the window. She berated me for many minutes about how rude I was, and how I should give a bitch some space, and how in America, we call this White Privilege, and and and... I just apologized, didn't engage beyond that, (felt frankly detached and mildly amused -- not sure what that says about me) and then once she'd left, the cashier apologized to me for the customer.

Me: "Nah, she's not wrong. I didn't see her, but I did cut in front of her."

I mean, I don't like being yelled at, or having people behave in ways that I perceive as rude towards me, but I'm not gonna fault someone for standing up for their space when I've violated it, so long as they're not hitting me or something. Not a fight I need to get into; not a hill I'm gonna die on.

So yeah, stressful week for many reasons, but not something that's gonna ruin my Saturday, which will now be completed by spending many many many hours writing and catching up on webcomics.

And how are YOU, dear ones?

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Two StarWars.com writers debate Luke’s choice in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back.

Continuing my project to journal all of my travel adventures, we come to an entertaining entry: The Big Island of Hawaii and the Great Luggage Chase of 2013.

The trip was well planned but poorly executed due to weather mishaps. I was supposed to fly DCA-JFK-LAX-KOA but snow dropped visibility to near zero at JFK so my plane was rerouted to Providence, RI after we took off from DCA. After several hours Delta put everyone back on a plane to JFK and rescheduled the connecting flights outbound from there. There was no way I was going to make it out to LAX in time to catch the Delta flight to Hawaii,  but as I was still a shiny Diamond Medallion back then and mattered to the airline, Delta put me on an AA flights to ensure I would get to Hawaii one way or another. The AA flight routed through PDX (Portland) and because of more weather problems our flight into Portland was delayed and I missed my Hawaii flight after all. Now I was stranded in Portland overnight, while my luggage (including my coat) was in LAX (it had remained on my original itinerary). 44 degrees Fahrenheit and I was dressed in anticipation of Hawaii with my sleeveless summer dress and flip-flops. Gah! Are you laughing yet? 

Delta put me up in a hotel for the evening and in the next morning I was back at the airport in my dirty clothes, tired, cranky, and eager to get to Hawaii. Let this vacation start already! I landed on Kona Island (also called Hawaii Island or the Big Island) and was immediately dismayed to find my luggage wasn’t due to arrive until that evening (having missed the evening flight the night before, they put it on the next evening flight available 24 hours later). This was a problem as I was going to be on the road for most of the trip, exploring. I left information with Delta on my whereabouts for that evening and hoped for the best. I hopped into my rental car and headed for Volcano National Park. Along the way, the scenery was gorgeous and for a good portion of the trip my car was the only one on the highways I traveled.

I journeyed to the end of the Chain of Craters Road, which follows along the ocean and dead ends at a lava flow that closed the road beyond.

As I approached Volcano National Park, the sun began to set.

There was a beautiful lava lake in the Halema’uma’u crater (the 2019 eruption of Mt. Kilauea drained it) and I was lucky enough to stand before it that evening and enjoy its stunning ebb and flow. My poor quality cell phone picture cannot capture its essence.

I had an intense dinner at Thai Thai in Volcano. It was the hottest Thai food I have ever had outside of Bankok and it brought on an instant headache and the feeling that my lips were on fire. I recommend the place only if you can stand the heat.

The next morning I was up at 4am with plans to visit the highest point on the island and the summit of the tallest mountain in the world – Mauna Kea. From its base, Mauna Kea is over 10,000 meters tall (Mt. Everest is just 8,850 for comparison). It was a cold journey as my luggage still had not arrived into Hawaii (Delta was frantically searching for my bags and could not locate them in the system at all) and so I had only my summer dress I wore on the flight to Hawaii and the t-shirt/shorts combo I purchased the day before. The view from the top proved more than worth the discomfort of the cold.

As I was descending from the summit, Delta called with some good news. They found my bags at KOA. They said they would hold them for me till later that evening when I arrived for my flight to HNL. And they gave me a $200 delta voucher for my trouble. That made me feel a little bit better, but it reinforced the universal travel truth: checking luggage for a weekend trip is almost always a bad idea.

It was a leisurely drive back to KOA, with more scenic shots along the way.

When I got to KOA airport, Delta had some fun news for me. My bags weren’t at the airport anymore where they were supposed to be. As a “courtesy”, Alaska had picked them up from Delta baggage and sent a courier across the island to the hotel I stayed at the night before (2.5 hours away) to hand deliver them to me. With just a few hours before my departing flight for HNL, I told Delta they needed to get ahold of the driver and advise him to race his ass back to this side of the island to the airport. I was doubtful I would ever see my luggage again, but thirty minutes before takeoff, a very tired and sweaty courier waved at me and handed me my bags. As soon as I got to Waikiki and checked into my hotel, I took a long shower and enjoyed the luxury of putting on clean clothes- a ritual I usually take for granted.

I enjoyed a couple of relaxing days taking in the sun and fruity cocktail drinks on the beaches of Waikiki before heading home to Virginia.  That trip was delayed too, because of storms in Virginia, and I ended up spending the night near LAX and coming home a day later. All in all a good trip, excluding the weather and luggage fiascos. I have since been back to the Hawaiian Islands two or three times (to Oahu and Maui) but the Big Island is definitely the most spectacular of them all.  Go to Oahu for the history and shopping, go to Maui for the food, but go to the Big Island for the rugged scenery that will take your breath away.

These panties are super soft and comfortable American Apparel hot shorts! They come in white with the STARFIGHTER logo on the derriere and stars on the front! Perfect for the sexy ladies to flaunt their fandom! They're limited in quantity, so get them while they're available!

ORDER AVAILABLE ONLINE @ STARFIGHTER SHOP
http://shop.starfightercomic.com/

The panties ship on September 7th! More merchandise is on the way! -HamletMachine

Starfighter prints are now up for sale at the online shop! These have previously only been available at conventions, but now you can have a print of your very own! There are five different illustrations to choose from; each print is 8 1/2" x 11" on matte paper, wrapped with a backboard.

Enjoy! -HamletMachine

Dopravní podniky i soukromí dopravci obnovují běžné jízdní řády. Přestože stále hromadnou dopravu využívá zlomek lidí než před zahájením karanténních opaření, poklesy o 80 nebo 90 procent proti běžnému stavu už jsou minulostí.

U dvou zaměstnanců mladoboleslavské automobilky Škoda Auto byla zjištěna nákaza covid-19. Podle zjištění Práva to však nebude mít vliv na nedávno obnovený provoz závodu.

Ministerstvo obchodu Spojených států připravuje nová digitální pravidla. Americké podniky by na základě nich mohly spolupracovat s čínskou firmou Huawei Technologies na stanovování norem pro mobilní sítě (5G). Agentuře Reuters to řekly zdroje obeznámené se situací. Loni touto dobou přitom USA uvalily restrikce na obchodování s Huawei.

Méně stolů a větší rozestupy. Jihomoravské restaurace v pondělí otevřou své zahrádky. Musí dodržet přísná opatření proti šíření koronaviru, přesto nemají alternativu pro špatné počasí.

Americké trhy rostou rapidním tempem. A to i přes to, že ekonomiky po celém světě drtí koronavirus. Jejich dubnový růst je nejvyšší za desítky let – naposledy tak rychle za měsíc vyrostly v roce 1987. Nahoru akciové indexy ženou nejen vládní intervence a úspory, ale i investoři samotní.

The coronavirus outbreak has officially been labeled a pandemic by the World Health Organization, potentially grinding the global economy to a halt. Yet every step of the way, the Trump administration’s response has been to deny, blame, obfuscate, and generally cover up. 

Trump and his enablers are focused only on mitigating the economic consequences of the outbreak, especially before the election – mulling proposals like corporate tax cuts and bailouts for airlines and the hotel industry, but resisting the needs of average Americans and our broken healthcare system. 

The outbreak has also revealed the utter weakness of our social safety nets: workers may be forced to choose between a missed paycheck and risking their health because too many employers have no paid sick leave, schools are weighing whether or not to shut down because hundreds of thousands of poor children rely on them for hot meals, and our cruel for-profit healthcare system is preventing people from getting tested for the virus for fear of a hefty bill.

And, remember, 80 percent of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. Coupled with Trump’s incompetence and narcissism, it’s a recipe for total disaster.

Meanwhile, the Democratic electorate is in the midst of a primary to unseat this sociopath. After Tuesday, Biden has kept his delegate lead with wins in Idaho, Michigan, Missouri, and Mississippi. And while the race isn’t over yet, it’s wise to start making contingency plans.

Biden’s biggest weakness is his failure to attract progressives and young voters. In a CNN exit poll for Michigan, Bernie won a whopping 82 percent of voters age 18-29. Without these voters, if Biden is the nominee, Democrats will not be able to get the votes needed to defeat Trump.

So what are Biden’s options for getting out the vote of this crucial portion of the Party? He must select a true progressive for Vice President, like Elizabeth Warren or even Bernie Sanders, who can push bold progressive ideas like a wealth tax, Medicare for All, tuition-free college, cancelling student debt, and a Green New Deal.

These progressive policies are also winners with the electorate – a majority of voters even in Mississippi and other southern states supported replacing the current healthcare system with a single-payer system, and polling continues to reflect this appetite for transformative change. Even if Bernie isn’t getting the support he counted on, his ideas are.

And don’t count Bernie out just yet. A debate is coming up this weekend that could boost his campaign enough to help him secure wins in later key states like Ohio and Pennsylvania.

But if he fails to get traction, he needs to do whatever he can to help reunite the party, and most importantly, keep working to shift the party in a progressive direction. Behind the scenes he needs to negotiate with Biden a pathway to gain progressive support.

Meanwhile, Biden needs to take up the issues of concern to young people, who are the future of the party and who Democrats can’t win without. This might seem like a pipe dream, but Biden has no choice. This is not 2016. The nation cannot afford another 4 years of Trump. If you’re angry – and rightfully so – use that anger to keep pushing the movement.

Dr. Anthony S Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and just...

What’s Missing From the Coronavirus Bill

The public health and economic crises we’re experiencing are closely related. They reveal in stark terms the dangerous mythology of trickle-down self-sufficiency and the need for policies that respond to the real needs of people who are or will soon be affected.

But Trump doesn’t seem to understand that. Before agreeing to an actual coronavirus relief bill, his administration was considering more corporate tax cuts, tax cuts targeted to the airlines and hospitality industries, and a temporary payroll tax cut. 

But tax cuts will be useless. They’ll be too slow to stimulate the economy, and won’t reach households and consumers who should be the real targets. And they’ll reward the rich, who don’t spend much of their additional dollars, without getting money into the hands of the poor and middle-class, who do.

Thankfully, Congress has moved forward on some of the most urgent priorities like free coronavirus testing, strengthening unemployment insurance and food security programs. But it doesn’t go far enough.

Instead, Congress must immediately provide an emergency $500 billion to help all Americans protect themselves and their families, and keep the economy going.

The money should be used for:

Coronavirus testing and treatment. Diagnostic tests should be mandatory and universal, and free. And everyone with the virus should have access to treatment and to any future vaccines, regardless of ability to pay.

Guaranteed paid sick leave for ALL employees. The current relief bill does cover paid sick leave for some but has huge carve-outs, exempting all companies with over 500 employees and some small businesses under 50 employees. That exclusion could affect up to 20 million Americans. Without guaranteed paid sick leave and family leave, workers who are sick will not remain home and will end up exposing others.

Extended unemployment insurance. Without it, large numbers of Americans will be furloughed or laid off without adequate income to support themselves and their families. As it is, unemployment insurance reaches a measly 27 percent of the unemployed. 

Extended Medicaid. No one should avoid seeing a doctor because of fears about out-of-control medical bills. Right now, 28 million Americans have no health insurance, and countless more are reluctant to see a doctor because of large deductions or co-payments. Especially in a health emergency, health care should be available to all regardless of ability to pay. 

Immediate one-time payments of $1,500 to every adult and $500 per child, renewable if necessary. Some consumers might spend the money right away to meet rent if they lose their regular paycheck. Others might have stronger balance sheets and spend the money at whatever uncertain date the virus is contained. 

Suspension of the Trump administration’s “public charge” rule that enables federal officials to deny green cards to immigrants who use social safety net programs. Programs like, Medicaid, Food Stamps, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, and Women Infants and Children are more important than ever.

For the same reason, testing and treatment should be available to undocumented immigrants, without fear of deportation.

Trickle-down economics and trickle-down public health are deeply flawed. Corporate tax cuts won’t save us. The coronavirus doesn’t distinguish between rich and poor. We are in this imminent health and economic emergency together, and our own health and wellbeing are dependent on the health and wellbeing of everyone else. 

Each of us is only as healthy as the least-healthy among us.

The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It 

The coronavirus has starkly revealed what most of us already knew: The concentration of wealth in America has created a a health care system in which the wealthy can buy care others can’t. 

It’s also created an education system in which the super-rich can buy admission to college for their children, a political system in which they can buy Congress and the presidency,  and a justice system in which they can buy their way out of jail. 

Almost everyone else has been hurled into a dystopia of bureaucratic arbitrariness, corporate indifference, and the legal and financial sinkholes that have become hallmarks of modern American life.

The system is rigged. But we can fix it.

Today, the great divide in American politics isn’t between right and left. The underlying contest is between a small minority who have gained power over the system, and the vast majority who have little or none. 

Forget politics as you’ve come to see it – as contests between Democrats and Republicans. The real divide is between democracy and oligarchy.

The market has been organized to serve the wealthy. Since 1980, the percentage of the nation’s wealth owned by the richest four hundred Americans has quadrupled (from less than 1 percent to 3.5 percent) while the share owned by the entire bottom half of America has dropped to 1.3 percent.

The three wealthiest Americans own as much as the entire bottom half of the population. Big corporations, CEOs, and a handful of extremely rich people have vastly more influence on public policy than the average American. Wealth and power have become one and the same.

As the oligarchs tighten their hold over our system, they have lambasted efforts to rein in their greed as “socialism”, which, to them, means getting something for doing nothing.

But “getting something for doing nothing” seems to better describe the handouts being given to large corporations and their CEOs. 

General Motors, for example, has received $600 million in federal contracts and $500 million in tax breaks since Donald Trump took office. Much of this “corporate welfare” has gone to executives, including CEO Mary Barra, who raked in almost $22 million in compensation in 2018 alone. GM employees, on the other hand, have faced over 14,000 layoffs and the closing of three assembly plants and two component factories.

And now, in the midst of a pandemic, big corporations are getting $500 billion from taxpayers. 

Our system, it turns out, does practice one form of socialism – socialism for the rich. Everyone else is subject to harsh capitalism.

Socialism for the rich means people at the top are not held accountable. Harsh capitalism for the many, means most Americans are at risk for events over which they have no control, and have no safety nets to catch them if they fall.

Among those who are particularly complicit in rigging the system are the CEOs of America’s corporate behemoths. 

Take Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, whose net worth is $1.4 billion. He comes as close as anyone to embodying the American system as it functions today.

Dimon describes himself as “a patriot before I’m the CEO of JPMorgan.”

He brags about the corporate philanthropy of his bank, but it’s a drop in the bucket compared to his company’s net income, which in 2018 was $30.7 billion – roughly one hundred times the size of his company’s investment program for America’s poor cities. 

Much of JP Morgan’s income gain in 2018 came from savings from the giant Republican tax cut enacted at the end of 2017 – a tax cut that Dimon intensively lobbied Congress for.

Dimon doesn’t acknowledge the inconsistencies between his self-image as “patriot first” and his role as CEO of America’s largest bank. He doesn’t understand how he has hijacked the system.

Perhaps he should read my new book.

To understand how the system has been hijacked, we must understand how it went from being accountable to all stakeholders – not just stockholders but also workers, consumers, and citizens in the communities where companies are headquartered and do business – to intensely shareholder-focused capitalism.

In the post-WWII era, American capitalism assumed that large corporations had responsibilities to all their stakeholders. CEOs of that era saw themselves as “corporate statesmen” responsible for the common good.

But by the 1980s, shareholder capitalism (which focuses on maximizing profits) replaced stakeholder capitalism. That was largely due to the corporate raiders – ultra-rich investors who hollowed-out once-thriving companies and left workers to fend for themselves.

Billionaire investor Carl Icahn, for example, targeted major companies like Texaco and Nabisco by acquiring enough shares of their stock to force major changes that increased their stock value – such as suppressing wages, fighting unions, laying off workers, abandoning communities for cheaper labor elsewhere, and taking on debt – and then selling his shares for a fat profit. In 1985, after winning control of Trans World Airlines, he loaded the airline with more than $500 million in debt, stripped it of its assets, and pocketed nearly $500 million in profits.

As a result of the hostile takeovers mounted by Icahn and other raiders, a wholly different understanding about the purpose of the corporation emerged.

Even the threat of hostile takeovers forced CEOs to fall in line by maximizing shareholder profits over all else. The corporate statesmen of previous decades became the corporate butchers of the 1980s and 1990s, whose nearly exclusive focus was to “cut out the fat” and make their companies “lean and mean.”

As power increased for the wealthy and large corporations at the top, it shifted in exactly the opposite direction for workers. In the mid-1950s, 35 percent of all private-sector workers in the United States were unionized. Today, 6.4 percent of them are.

The wave of hostile takeovers pushed employers to raise profits and share prices by cutting payroll costs and crushing unions, which led to a redistribution of income and wealth from workers to the richest 1 percent. Corporations have fired workers who try to organize and have mounted campaigns against union votes. All the while, corporations have been relocating to states with few labor protections and so-called “right-to-work” laws that weaken workers’ ability to join unions.

Power is a zero-sum game. People gain it only when others lose it. The connection between the economy and power is critical. As power has concentrated in the hands of a few, those few have grabbed nearly all the economic gains for themselves.

The oligarchy has triumphed because no one has paid attention to the system as a whole – to the shifts from stakeholder to shareholder capitalism, from strong unions to giant corporations with few labor protections, and from regulated to unchecked finance.

As power has shifted to large corporations, workers have been left to fend for themselves. Most Americans developed 3 key coping mechanisms to keep afloat.

The first mechanism was women entering the paid workforce. Starting in the late 1970s, women went into paid work in record numbers, in large part to prop up family incomes, as the wages of male workers stagnated or declined. 

Then, by the late 1990s, even two incomes wasn’t enough to keep many families above water, causing them to turn to the next coping mechanism: working longer hours. By the mid-2000s a growing number of people took on two or three jobs, often demanding 50 hours or more per week.

Once the second coping mechanism was exhausted, workers turned to their last option: drawing down savings and borrowing to the hilt. The only way Americans could keep consuming was to go deeper into debt. By 2007, household debt had exploded, with the typical American household owing 138 percent of its after-tax income. Home mortgage debt soared as housing values continued to rise. Consumers refinanced their homes with even larger mortgages and used their homes as collateral for additional loans.

This last coping mechanism came to an abrupt end in 2008 when the debt bubbles burst, causing the financial crisis. Only then did Americans begin to realize what had happened to them, and to the system as a whole. That’s when our politics began to turn ugly.  

So what do we do about it? The answer is found in politics and rooted in power.

The way to overcome oligarchy is for the rest of us to join together and form a multiracial, multiethnic coalition of working-class, poor and middle-class Americans fighting for democracy.

This agenda is neither “right” nor “left.” It is the bedrock for everything America must do.

The oligarchy understands that a “divide-and-conquer” strategy gives them more room to get what they want without opposition. Lucky for them, Trump is a pro at pitting native-born Americans against immigrants, the working class against the poor, white people against people of color. His goal is cynicism, disruption, and division. Trump and the oligarchy behind him have been able to rig the system and then whip around to complain loudly that the system is rigged.

But history shows that oligarchies cannot hold on to power forever. They are inherently unstable. When a vast majority of people come to view an oligarchy as illegitimate and an obstacle to their wellbeing, oligarchies become vulnerable.

As bad as it looks right now, the great strength of this country is our resilience. We bounce back. We have before. We will again.

In order for real change to occur – in order to reverse the vicious cycle in which we now find ourselves – the locus of power in the system will have to change.

The challenge we face is large and complex, but we are well suited for the fight ahead. Together, we will dismantle the oligarchy. Together, we will fix the system.

How to Prepare for the Trump Recession

The global coronavirus pandemic has put our economy in free-fall.

Even through Donald Trump’s reckless economic policies, like his pointless trade war with China or his deficit-busting tax cuts for his billionaire donors, the economy has somehow managed to keep chugging along — until now. 

All of the stock market gains from Trump’s time in office have been wiped out, and over the course of just over one week in March the Dow Jones Industrial Average experienced its five largest drops in history. 

Worse than a plummeting stock market, businesses and major industries have been forced to shutter their windows to help combat the rapid spread of the virus, putting hundreds of thousands of workers’ paychecks at risk. 

A recession is inevitable at this point. Here are 3 things we can do to prepare.  

Number one: We need to reform unemployment insurance so it reflects the needs of today’s economy. 

When it was first created in 1935, unemployment insurance was designed to help full-time workers weather downturns until they got their old jobs back. But there are fewer full-time jobs in today’s economy, and fewer people who are laid off get their old jobs back again. 

As a result, only 27% of unemployed workers receive benefits today, compared to 49% of workers in the 1950s. We need to expand unemployment coverage so that everyone is protected.

Number two: We need to strengthen Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, also known as  public assistance. 

Since its creation in 1996, the number of families receiving cash assistance has declined dramatically – and not because they’re doing well. Between 2006 and 2018, just 13% of families were lifted out of poverty, while the number of families receiving public assistance fell by 39%.

Already weak, the program didn’t hold up well during the Great Recession. Funding doesn’t automatically expand during economic downturns – meaning the more families are in need, the less money there is to help them. The program also has strict work requirements, which can’t be fulfilled in a deep recession. Worse yet, many individuals in need have already exhausted their five years of lifetime eligibility for assistance.

We need to reform the public assistance program so that more families in need are eligible. It should be easier to waive the strict work eligibility requirements during the economic downturn, and the lifetime five-year limit should be suspended.

Number three: We need to protect the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as SNAP or food stamps. 

Unlike public assistance, SNAP responded well during the Great Recession. Its requirements are designed to expand during economic downturns or recessions.

Waiving work requirements during the Great Recession made thousands of people in need eligible for the program who otherwise wouldn’t have been. Between December 2007 and December 2009, the number of SNAP participants rose by 45%. The program helped keep an estimated 3.8 million families out of poverty in 2009.

But that might not be an option this time around, as SNAP has come under attack from the Trump administration, which is trying to enact a draconian rule change that would kick an estimated 700,000 of our most vulnerable citizens off of the program. Luckily, a judge blocked the rule from going into effect, but the administration is still fighting to enforce it — even in the middle of a global pandemic. We need to make sure SNAP’s flexibility and ability to respond to economic downturns is protected before the next recession hits.

Stronger safety nets are not only good for individuals and families in need. They will also prevent the looming recession from becoming an even deeper and longer economic crisis. 

Trump’s Failed Coronavirus Response

The Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic has been a deliberate disaster from the beginning. But don’t take my word for it – just look at the facts.

Here’s the timeline: 

In 2018, he let the pandemic-preparedness office in the National Security Council simply dissolve, and followed up with budget cuts to HHS and CDC this year. That team’s job was to follow a pandemic playbook written after global leaders fumbled their response to Ebola in 2014. Trump was briefed on the playbook’s existence in his first year - had he listened, the government would’ve started getting equipment to doctors two months ago.

The initial outbreak of the coronavirus began in Wuhan, China, in December, 2019.  

By mid-January, 2020, the White House had intelligence reports that warned of a likely pandemic.

On January 18th, HHS Secretary Azar spoke with Trump to emphasize the threat of the virus just as US Diplomats were being evacuated from Wuhan.

Two days later, the virus was confirmed in both the US and South Korea.

That week, South Korean officials immediately drafted medical companies to develop test kits for mass production. The WHO declared a global health emergency. But Trump … did nothing.

As Hubei Province went on lockdown, Trump, who loves any excuse to enact a racist travel ban, barred entry of any foreigners coming from China (it was hardly proactive) but took no additional steps to prepare for infection in the United States.

He said, “We pretty much shut it down, coming in from China,”

He didn’t ramp up production of test kits so we could begin isolating the virus.

By February, the US had 14 confirmed cases but the CDC test kits proved faulty; there weren’t enough of them, and they were restricted to only people showing symptoms. The US pandemic response was already failing.

Trump then began actively downplaying the crisis and baselessly predicting it would go away when the weather got warmer.

Trump decided there was nothing to see here, and on February 24th, took time out of his day to remind us that the stock markets were soaring.

A day later, CDC officials sounded the alarm that daily life could be severely disrupted. The window to get ahead of the virus by testing and containment was closing. 

Trump’s next move: He compared Coronavirus to the seasonal flu…and called the emerging crisis a hoax by the Democrats.

With 100 cases in the US, Trump declined to call for a national emergency.

Meanwhile, South Korea was now on its way to testing a quarter million people, while the US was testing 40 times slower.

When a cruise ship containing Americans with coronavirus floated toward San Francisco, Trump said he didn’t want people coming off the ship to be tested because they’d make the numbers look bad.

It wasn’t until the stock market reacted to the growing crisis and took a nosedive that Trump finally declared a national emergency.

By this time, South Korea had been using an app for over a month that pulled government data to track cases and alert users to stay away from infected areas.

Over the next weeks, as the virus began its exponential spread across the US, and Governors declared states of emergency, closing schools and workplaces and stopping the American economy in its tracks –  Trump passed on every opportunity to get ahead of this crisis.

Trump’s priority was never public health. It was about making the virus seem like less of a nuisance so that the “numbers” would “look good” for his reelection.

Only when the stock market crashed did Trump finally begin to pay attention…and mostly to bailing out corporations in the form of a massive $500 billion slush fund, rather than to helping people. And then, with much of America finally and belatedly in lockdown, he said at a Fox News town hall that he would “love” to have the country “opened up, and just raring to go” by Easter.

At every point, Trump has used this crisis to compliment himself.

This is not leadership. This is the exact opposite of leadership. 

Coronavirus and the Height of Corporate Welfare

With the coronavirus pandemic wreaking havoc on the global economy, here’s how massive corporations are shafting the rest of us in order to secure billions of dollars of taxpayer-funded bailouts.

The airline industry demanded a massive bailout of nearly $60 billion in taxpayer dollars, and ended up securing $50 billion – half in loans, half in direct grants that don’t need to be paid back. 

Airlines don’t deserve a cent. The five biggest U.S. airlines spent 96 percent of their free cash flow over the last decade buying back shares of their own stock to boost executive bonuses and please wealthy investors.

United was so determined to get its windfall of taxpayer money that it threatened to fire workers if it didn’t get its way. Before the Senate bill passed, CEO Oscar Munoz wrote that “if Congress doesn’t act on sufficient government support by the end of March, our company will begin to…reduce our payroll….”

Airlines could have renegotiated their debts with their lenders outside court, or file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. They’ve reorganized under bankruptcy many times before. Either way, they’d keep flying.

The hotel industry says it needs $150 billion. The industry says as many as 4 million workers could lose their jobs in the coming weeks if they don’t receive a bailout. Everyone from general managers to housekeepers will be affected. But don’t worry – the layoffs won’t reach the corporate level.

Hotel chains don’t need a bailout. For years, they’ve been making record profits while underpaying their workers. Marriott, the largest hotel chain in the world, repurchased $2.3 billion of its own stock last year, while raking in nearly $4 billion in profits. 

Thankfully, Trump’s hotels and businesses, as well as any of his family members’ businesses, are barred from receiving anything from the $500 billion corporate bailout money. But the bill is full of loopholes that Trump can exploit to benefit himself and his hotels.

Cruise ships also want to be bailed out, and Trump called them a “prime candidate” to receive a government handout. But they don’t deserve it either. The three cruise ship corporations controlling 75 percent of the entire global market are incorporated outside of the United States to avoid paying taxes.

They’re floating tax shelters, paying an average U.S. tax rate of just 0.8 percent. Democrats secured key provisions stipulating that companies are only eligible for bailout money if they are incorporated in the United States and have a majority of U.S. employees, so the cruise ship industry likely won’t see a dime of relief funding. However, Trump has made it clear he still wants to help them.

The justification I’ve heard about why all these corporations need to be bailed out is they’ll keep workers on their payrolls. But why should we believe big corporations will protect their workers right now? 

The $500 billion slush fund included in the Senate’s emergency relief package doesn’t require corporations to keep paying their workers and has dismally weak restrictions on stock buybacks and executive pay. 

Even if the bill did provide worker protections, what’s going to happen to these corporations’ subcontractors and gig workers? What about worker benefits, pensions and health care? How much of this bailout is going to end up in the pockets of executives and big investors?

The record of Big Business isn’t comforting. Amazon, one of the richest corporations in the world, which paid almost no taxes last year, is only offering unpaid time off for workers who are sick and just two weeks paid leave for workers who test positive for the virus. Meanwhile, it demands its employees put in mandatory overtime.

Oh, and these corporations made sure they and other companies with more than 500 employees were exempt from the requirement in the first House coronavirus bill that employers provide paid sick leave.

And now, less than a month into statewide shelter-in-place orders and social distancing restrictions, Wall Streeters and corporate America’s chief executives are calling for supposedly “low-risk” groups to be sent back to work to restart the economy. 

They’re so concerned about protecting their bottom line that they’re willing to let people die to preserve their stock portfolios, all while they continue working from the safety and security of their own homes. It’s the most repugnant class warfare you can imagine.

Here’s the bottom line: no mega-corporation deserves a cent of bailout money. For decades these companies and their billionaire executives have been dodging taxes, getting tax cuts, shafting workers, and bending the rules to enrich themselves. There’s no reason to trust them to do the right thing with billions of dollars in taxpayer money. 

Every penny we have needs to go to average Americans who desperately need income support and health care, and to hospitals that need life-saving equipment. It’s outrageous that the Senate bill gave corporations nearly four times as much money as hospitals on the front lines. 

Corporate welfare is bad enough in normal times. Now, in a national emergency, it’s morally repugnant. We must stop bailing out corporations. It’s time we bail out people.

From Ukraine to Coronavirus: Trump’s Abuse of Power Continues

Donald Trump has spent a lifetime exploiting chaos for personal gain and blaming others for his losses. The pure madness in America’s response to the coronavirus pandemic – shortages of equipment to protect hospital workers, dwindling supplies of ventilators and critical medications, jaw-dropping confusion over how $2.2 trillion of aid in the recent coronavirus law will be distributed – has given him the perfect cover to hoard power and boost his chances of reelection.

As the death toll continues to climb and states are left scrambling for protective gear and crucial resources, Trump is focused on only one thing: himself. 

He’s told governors to find life-saving equipment on their own, claiming the federal government is “not a shipping clerk” and subsequently forcing states and cities into a ruthless bidding war.

Governors have been reduced to begging FEMA for supplies from the dwindling national stockpile, with vastly different results. While we haven’t seen what “formula” FEMA supposedly has for determining who gets what, reports suggest that Trump’s been promising things to governors who can get him on the phone. 

Our narcissist-in-chief has ordered FEMA to circumvent their own process and send supplies to states that are “appreciative”.

Michigan and Colorado have received fractions of what they need while Oklahoma and Kentucky have gotten more than what they asked for. Colorado and Massachusetts have confirmed shipments only to have them held back by FEMA. Ron DeSantis, the Trump-aligned governor of Florida, refused to order a shelter-in-place mandate for weeks, but then received 100% of requested supplies within 3 days. New Jersey waited for two weeks. New York now has more cases than any other single country, but Trump barely lifted a finger for his hometown because Governor Andrew Cuomo is “complaining” about the catastrophic lack of ventilators in the city.

A backchannel to the president is a shoe-in way to secure life-saving supplies. Personal flattery seems to be the most effective currency with Trump; the chain of command runs straight through his ego, and that’s what the response has been coordinated around.

He claims that as president he has “total authority” over when to lift quarantine and social distancing guidelines, and threatens to adjourn Congress himself so as to push through political appointees without Senate confirmation.

And throughout all of this, Trump has been determined to reject any attempt of independent oversight into his administration’s disastrous response.

When he signed the $2 trillion emergency relief package into law, he said he wouldn’t agree to provisions in the bill for congressional oversight – meaning the wheeling-and-dealing will be done in secret.

He has removed the inspector general leading the independent committee tasked with overseeing the implementation of the massive bill.

He appointed one of his own White House lawyers, who helped defend him in his impeachment trial, to oversee the distribution of the $500 billion slush fund for corporations. That same day, he fired Inspector General Michael Atkinson – the inspector general who handed the whistleblower complaint to Congress that ultimately led to Trump’s impeachment.

There should never have been any doubt that Trump would try to use this crisis to improve his odds of re-election.

Stimulus checks going to the lowest-income earners were delayed because Trump demanded each one of them bear his name. As millions of the hardest-hit Americans scrambled to put food on the table and worried about the stack of bills piling up, Trump’s chief concern was himself.

It doesn’t matter that this is a global pandemic. Abusing his power for personal gain is Trump’s MO.

Just three and a half months ago, Trump was impeached on charges of abuse of power and obstructing investigations. Telling governors that they need to “be appreciative” in order to receive life-saving supplies for their constituents is the same kind of quid pro quo that Trump tried to extort from Ukraine, and his attempts to thwart independent oversight are the same as his obstruction of Congress.

Trump called his impeachment a “hoax”. He initially called the coronavirus a “hoax”. But the real hoax is his commitment to America. In reality he will do anything – anything – to hold on to power.

To Donald Trump, the coronavirus crisis is just another opportunity.

Corporations Will Not Save Us: The Sham of Corporate Social Responsibility

Last August, the Business Roundtable – an association of CEOs of America’s biggest corporations – announced with great fanfare a “fundamental commitment to all of our stakeholders” and not just their shareholders. 

They said “investing in employees, delivering value to customers, and supporting outside communities“ is now at the forefront of their business goals — not maximizing profits.

Baloney. Corporate social responsibility is a sham.

One Business Roundtable director is Mary Barra, CEO of General Motors. Just weeks after making the Roundtable commitment, and despite GM’s hefty profits and large tax breaks, Barra rejected workers’ demands that GM raise their wages and stop outsourcing their jobs. Earlier in the year GM shut its giant assembly plant in Lordstown, Ohio.

Nearly 50,000 GM workers then staged the longest auto strike in 50 years. They won a few wage gains but didn’t save any jobs. Barra was paid $22 million last year. How’s that for corporate social responsibility?

Another prominent CEO who made the phony Business Roundtable commitment was AT&T’s Randall Stephenson, who promised to use the billions in savings from the Trump tax cut to invest in the company’s broadband network and create at least 7,000 new jobs. 

Instead, even before the coronavirus pandemic, AT&T cut more than 23,000 jobs and demanded that employees train lower-wage foreign workers to replace them.

Let’s not forget Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon and its Whole Foods subsidiary. Just weeks after Bezos made the Business Roundtable commitment, Whole Foods announced it would be cutting medical benefits for its entire part-time workforce.

The annual saving to Amazon from this cost-cutting move is roughly what Bezos – whose net worth is $117 billion – makes in a few hours. Bezos’ wealth grows so quickly, this number has gone up since you started watching this video.

GE’s CEO Larry Culp is also a member of the Business Roundtable. Two months after he made the commitment to all his stakeholders, General Electric froze the pensions of 20,000 workers in order to cut costs. So much for investing in employees.  

Dennis Muilenburg, the former CEO of Boeing, also committed to the phony Business Roundtable pledge. Shortly after making the commitment to “deliver value to customers,” Muilenburg was fired for failing to act to address the safety problems that caused the 737 Max crashes that killed 346 people.  After the crashes, he didn’t issue a meaningful apology or even express remorse to the victims’ families and downplayed the severity of the fallout to investors, regulators, airlines, and the public. He was rewarded with a $62 million farewell gift from Boeing on his way out.

Oh, and the chairman of the Business Roundtable is Jamie Dimon, CEO of Wall Street’s largest bank, JPMorgan Chase. Dimon lobbied Congress personally and intensively for the biggest corporate tax cut in history, and got the Business Roundtable to join him. JPMorgan raked in $3.7 billion from the tax cut. Dimon alone made $31 million in 2018.

That tax cut increased the federal debt by almost $2 trillion. This was before Congress spent almost $3 trillion fighting the pandemic – and delivering a hefty portion as bailouts to the biggest corporations, many of whom signed the Business Roundtable pledge. 

As usual, almost nothing has trickled down to America’s working class and poor. 

The truth is, American corporations are sacrificing workers and communities as never before in order to further boost runaway profits and unprecedented CEO pay. And not even a tragic pandemic is changing that. 

Americans know this. A record 76 percent of U.S. adults believe major corporations have too much power. 

The only way to make corporations socially responsible is through laws requiring them to be – for example, giving workers a bigger voice in corporate decision making, requiring that corporations pay severance to communities they abandon, raising corporate taxes, busting up monopolies, and preventing dangerous products (including faulty airplanes) from ever reaching the light of day.  

If the CEOs of the Business Roundtable and other corporations were truly socially responsible, they’d support such laws, not make phony promises they clearly have no intention of keeping. Don’t hold your breath.  

The only way to get such laws enacted is by reducing corporate power and getting big money out of our politics.

The first step is to see corporate social responsibility for the sham it is. The next step is to emerge from this pandemic and economic crisis more resolved than ever to rein in corporate power, and make the economy work for all. 

This is from the tour show. It's the image we put up at the start of the sketch about the designer of the snake, to try to get across the idea of an animal design department. Tomorrow, I'll put up the image that replaces it when the head of the department says he has one or two questions about the new design...

Странные данные по NYC
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data:COVID-19_cases_in_New_York_City.tab
трупов, оказывается, не 300-400 в день, как
объявлялось, а всего 200 в день, то есть около половины
мертвецов в NYC болели короной (или меньше; нормальная
смертность в NYC 400-500 человек в день).

Похоже, оно не растет даже, ну типа - ковид
выкашивает тех, кто и так на пороге смерти,
а остальные могут особо не беспокоиться.

Привет

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