Never Too Young To Master Personal Attacks And Voter Manipulation

Guardian |  Niall Ferguson, the conservative British historian and political commentator, has resigned from a key position on a US university free speech programme after leaked emails revealed that he urged a group of Republican students to conduct “opposition research” on a leftwing student.

Ferguson had been serving in a senior leadership role on the Cardinal Conversations, a Stanford University programme that has given a platform to contentious speakers including Charles Murray, the controversial social scientist who has claimed that black and Latino genetics are linked to intellectual inferiority.

The leaked emails, which first appeared in the Stanford Daily newspaper, revealed that, following a backlash against Murray’s appearance, the Sunday Times columnist urged conservative students to conduct “some opposition research on Mr O” – a reference to a leftwing activist student at Stanford, Michael Ocon.

After the emails were published last Thursday, Ferguson said he regretted his actions but explained that he had been “deeply concerned” that Stanford’s student steering committee was in danger of “being taken over by elements that were fundamentally hostile to free speech”.

In one email sent to various conservative students, including John Rice-Cameron, the president of Stanford College Republicans and the son of Susan Rice, a former national security adviser to Barack Obama, Ferguson confides: “Now we turn to the more subtle game of grinding them down on the committee. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.

“Unite against the [social justice warriors],” he instructed students in another email, urging them “to bury whatever past differences they may have for the common good”.

Rice-Cameron replies: “Slowly, we will continue to crush the left’s will to resist, as they will crack under pressure.”

Murray spoke on 22 February after students had complained to the university’s president, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, and expressed their disapproval at his inclusion in the debate series.

“Murray’s history of racism and using pseudo-science to further racist ideas is deeply disturbing,” read the letter from Students for a Sustainable Stanford.

Neoliberal Identitarianism - Race Discouse Displaces Political Economy

nonsite |  Black political debate and action through the early 1960s focused on concrete issues—employment, housing, wages, unionization, discrimination in specific venues and domains— rather than an abstract “racism.” It was only in the late 1960s and 1970s, after the legislative victories that defeated southern apartheid and restored black Americans’ full citizenship rights, that “racism” was advanced as the default explanation for inequalities that appear as racial disparities. That view emerged from Black Power politics and its commitment to a race-first communitarian ideology that posited the standpoint of an idealized “black community” as the standard for political judgment, which Bayard Rustin predicted at the time would ensue only in creation of a “new black establishment.” It was ratified as a commonsense piety of racial liberalism by the Report of the Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders—popularly known as the Kerner Commission, after its chair, Illinois Governor Otto Kerner—which asserted that “white racism” was the ultimate source of the manifold inequalities the Report catalogued as well as the pattern of civil disturbances the commission had been empaneled to investigate.

Reduction of black politics to a timeless struggle against abstractions like racism and white supremacy or for others like freedom and liberation obscures the extent to which black Americans’ political activity has evolved and been shaped within broader American political currents. That view, which oscillates between heroic and tragic, overlooks the fact that the mundane context out of which racism became a default explanation, or alternative to explanation, for inequality, was a national debate over how to guide anti-poverty policy and the struggle for fair employment practices in the early 1960s. Left-of-center public attention to poverty and persistent unemployment at the beginning of the 1960s divided into two camps. One, represented most visibly by figures like Secretary of Labor W. Willard Wirtz, Senators Joseph Clark (D-PA) and Hubert H. Humphrey (D-MN), United Auto Workers President Walter Reuther, and black labor and civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph, argued that both phenomena stemmed from structural inadequacies in the postwar economy, largely the consequence of technological reorganization, especially in manufacturing. From that perspective, effectively addressing those conditions would require direct and large scale federal intervention in labor markets, including substantial investment in public works employment and skills-based, targeted job-training.

The other camp saw poverty and persistent unemployment as residual problems resulting from deficiencies of values, attitudes, and human capital (a notion then only recently popularized) in individuals and groups that hindered them from participating fully in a dynamic labor market rather than from inadequacies in overall economic performance. In that view, addressing poverty and persistent unemployment did not require major intervention in labor markets. A large tax cut intended to stimulate aggregate demand would eliminate unacceptably high rates of unemployment, and anti-poverty policy would center on fixing the deficiencies within residual populations. Job training would focus on teaching “job readiness”—attitudes and values—more than specific skills. Liberals connected to the Ford Foundation and the Kennedy and Johnson administrations saw chronic poverty as bound up with inadequate senses of individual and group efficacy rather than economic performance. That interpretation supported a policy response directed to enhancing the sense of efficacy among impoverished individuals and communities, partly through mobilization for civic action. The War on Poverty’s Community Action program gave that approach a militant or populist patina through its commitment to “grassroots” mobilization of poor people on their own behalf. In addition, Community Action Agencies and Model Cities projects facilitated insurgent black and Latino political mobilization in cities around the country, which reinforced a general sense of their radicalism. At the same time, however, those programs reinforced liberals’ tendencies to separate race from class and inequality from political economy and to substitute participation or representation for redistribution.

Both camps assumed that black economic inequality stemmed significantly from current and past discrimination. A consequential difference between them, though, was that those who emphasized the need for robust employment policies contended that much black unemployment resulted from structural economic factors that were beyond the reach of anti- discrimination efforts. To that extent, improving black Americans’ circumstances would require broader social-democratic intervention in the political economy, including significantly expanded social wage policy. As Randolph observed at the 1963 March on Washington, “Yes, we want a Fair Employment Practices Act, but what good will it do if profit-geared automation destroys the jobs of millions of workers, black and white? We want integrated public schools, but that means we also want federal aid to education—all forms of education.” The other camp, in line with then Assistant Secretary of Labor Moynihan’s Negro Family jeremiad, construed black unemployment and poverty as deriving from an ambiguous confluence of current discrimination and cultural pathologies produced by historical racism. For a variety of reasons having to do with both large politics and small, the latter vision won.

Having Upgraded His Wardrobe and Paid in Full - Jordan Peterson's 15 Minutes Nearly Over...,

WaPo |  The world is wretched with weak men. Slouchers, slackers, chumps, low-status dudes who have amassed a crumpled pile of inferior habits and made the world a messier place. 

Or so Jordan Peterson will tell you. But fear not, the doctor is here to help, preaching his thoroughly footnoted gospel of order and discipline, one rule at a time — in a popular book, in lectures far from his ivory tower roost and, most potently, on YouTube.

The man of the moment, the self-proclaimed “professor against political correctness,” sits in his Manhattan hotel aerie before another sold-out talk based on his best-selling “12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos.” The University of Toronto clinical psychologist also sold out his date at Washington’s Warner Theatre on Friday, so he’ll return next month to lecture there again. Plenty of men are listening. Even Kanye West, who amid his still-unspooling existential crisis on Twitter, shared an image of his computer screen, on which a tab for a Peterson video was visible. 

Peterson elicits nearly every opinion except indifference. “The most influential public intellectual in the Western world right now,” wrote David Brooks in the New York Times, calling him “a young William F. Buckley.” Critics, and there are plenty, raise serious doubts.

“He takes a really simplistic approach toward gender inequality. It feels like a dressed-up version of misogyny,” says Gary Barker, a developmental psychologist who has studied ways to promote gender equality and violence prevention. “The scary part is it doesn’t provoke men to be better but to live with this inequality and get what you can out of it.”

Peterson rails against victimhood and “radical left-wing identity politics.” He’s an opponent of regulated equality and a skeptic of the notion of male or white “privilege.” Like many thought leaders who flirted with socialism in their youth, Peterson crusades against anything that he thinks smacks of Marxist tendencies and groupthink, which means a lot of inveighing against “postmodernist” scholars, who are probably a bigger nuisance at faculty confabs than in the lives of his fans.

Motives for the Skripal Poisoning Narrative and Sanctions Regime

CounterPunch |  In this episode we discuss the economic and political implications of the attempted murder of former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal. We also touch upon the long history of collaboration between Russian oligarchs and Western banks and how it fits into the larger neoliberal project pursued after the collapse of the Soviet Union. 

Michael Palmieri: Professor Hudson welcome back to the third episode of The Hudson report. It’s great to have you here.

Michael Hudson:It’s good to be here.

Michael Palmieri: So everyone who’s been following the news media for the last week or so has become–even if they didn’t want to be–pretty familiar with the case of Sergei Skripal and his daughter. He was once a double agent for British intelligence and recently there’s been allegations that he’s been poisoned by or attempted to be poisoned by Russian intelligence services. Although much of the coverage seems to be pretty breathless in condemning Russia for an attempted assassination. You seem to have a different perspective or perhaps believe that we should be looking somewhere else and the kind of larger implications of what this may mean. So can you start us off and kind of explain what you see to be going on here right now?

Michael Hudson: Well I was puzzled at first about the whole treatment of the affair of poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter because the treatment is so out of proportion–the reaction is so out of proportion–that it’s obvious that the issue is not about the poisoning itself. First of all there’s no evidence to show Russian involvement. But the important thing to realize is that even if there were a government assassination attempt, the reaction is entirely different things. It’s really about international diplomacy and NATO maneuvering for a military posturing and the reaction has no connection at all according to the poisoning, they’re only using the poisoning as an excuse to wrap a policy that was already thought of and sort through before the actual Skripel Gate occurred. I think anyone who’s seen James Bond movies knows that 07 can kill enemies. And the U.S. assassinates people all the time. It’s killed foreign leaders like the president Allende in Latin America and the whole wave of political terrorism that followed–killing tens of thousands of union leaders, and university professors, and land reformers, and the Obama administration targeted foreigners for drone strikes. Even when this kills large numbers of civilians as collateral damage.

No foreign country broke relations with Britain, or the United States, or Israel, or any other countries using targeted assassination as a policy. So this pretense that Russia has killed someone even without any evidence or with any trial is implausible on the very surface.

So, the question is why are they doing this with Russia? Why are they imposing sanctions and mounting a great publicity campaign? And I think the answer has to lie in looking at why are they doing this now. Timing is the key. So let’s step back a minute and note what seems to be out of the ordinary in the British and US and NATO reaction.

Mercer/Thiel vs Kochtopus? Finance/Geopolitics/Data Science/Livestock Management

GregPalast |  There are two dangers in the media howl over Trump’s computer gurus Cambridge Analytica, the data-driven psy-ops company founded by billionaire brown-shirts, the Mercer Family.

The story is that Cambridge Analytica, once directed by Steve Bannon, by shoplifting Facebook profiles to bend your brain, is some unique "bad apple" of the cyber world.

That's a dangerously narrow view. In fact, the dark art of dynamic psychometric manipulation in politics was not pioneered by Cambridge Analytica for Trump, but by i360 Themis, the operation founded by… no points for guessing… the Brothers Koch.

Mark Swedlund, himself an expert in these tools, explained in the film The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, that i360 dynamically tracks you on 1800 behaviors, or as Swedlund graphically puts it [see clip above],

"They know the last time you downloaded porn and
whether you ordered Chinese food before you voted."

Swedlund adds his expert conclusion: "I think that’s creepy."

The Koch operation and its competitor, DataTrust, use your credit card purchases, cable TV choices and other personal info — which is far more revealing about your inner life than the BS you put on your Facebook profile. Don’t trust DataTrust: This cyber-monster is operated by Karl Rove, "Bush’s Brain," who is principally funded by Paul Singer, the far Right financier better known as The Vulture.

Way too much is made of the importance of Cambridge Analytica stealing data through a phony app. If you’ve ever filled out an online survey, Swedlund told me, they’ve got you — legally.

The second danger is to forget that the GOP has been using computer power to erase the voting rights of Black and Hispanic voters for years — by "caging," "Crosscheck," citizenship challenges based on last name (Garcia? Not American!!), the list goes on — a far more effective use of cyberpower than manipulating your behavior through Facebook ads.

Just last week, Kris Kobach, Secretary of State of Kansas and Trump's chief voting law advisor, defended his method of hunting alleged "aliens" on voter rolls against a legal challenge by the ALCU. Kobach's expert, Jessie Richman, uses a computer algorithm that can locate "foreign" names on voter rolls. He identified, for example, one "Carlos Murguia" as a potential alien voter. Murguia is a Kansas-born judge who presides in a nearby courtroom.

It would be a joke, except that Kobach's "alien" hunt has blocked one in seven new (i.e. young) voters from registering in the state. If Kobach wins, it will, like his Crosscheck purge program and voter ID laws, almost certainly spread to other GOP controlled states. This could ultimately block one million new voters, exactly what Trump had in mind by pushing the alien-voter hysteria.

"Progressive Journalists" All-In On Russiagate...,

consortiumnews |  Jane Mayer of The New Yorker and Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks are the latest progressives to jump on the anti-Trump, pro-Russiagate bandwagon. They have made it crystal clear that, in Mayer’s words, they are not going to let Republicans, or anyone else, “take down the whole intelligence community,” by God.

Odd? Nothing is too odd when it comes to spinning and dyeing the yarn of Russiagate; especially now that some strands are unraveling from the thin material of the “Steele dossier.”

Before the 2016 election, British ex-spy Christopher Steele was contracted (through a couple of cutouts) by the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee to dig up dirt on candidate Donald Trump. They paid him $168,000. They should ask for their money back.

Mayer and Uygur have now joined with other Trump-despisers and new “progressive” fans of the FBI and CIA – among them Amy Goodman and her go-to, lost-in-the-trees journalist, Marcy Wheeler of Emptywheel.net. All of them (well, maybe not Cenk) are staying up nights with needle and thread trying to sew a silk purse out of the sow’s-ear dossier of Steele allegations and then dye it red for danger.

Monday brought a new low, with a truly extraordinary one-two punch by Mayer and Uygur.

Democracy Now Suspect? Say It Isn't So...,

strategic-culture |  The following report exposes one faux-‘progressive’ war-monger and propagandist for U.S. invasions of countries that never invaded nor even threatened the U.S.: Amy Goodman, and her “Democracy Now!” ‘alternative’ ’news’ media for Democratic Party billionaires’ international operations (such as for regime-change in Syria). These propaganda-operations (just like the acknowlegedly mainstream ones, such as TIME) promote using U.S. taxpayers’ money (the U.S. military, which is the most respected institution amongst Americans and thus receives “the benefit of the doubt” regarding any atrocities it may perpetrate — such as its having poisoned Iraq with depleted uranium, for example) — using taxpayers’ money for so-called ‘humanitarian’ reasons that are actually just sales-angles for American billionaires’ bloody conquests of resistant foreign countries (in this case, Syria). This propaganda is aimed at fooling liberals, or even “peaceniks,” into supporting what are actually hidden financial benefits for these behind-the-scenes billionaires.

Exposed here will be the depths that hypocrisy and psychopathy (both of which are pervasive at the very top of society, amongst the aristocrats and their retainers) plunge down to, in American ‘news’. This type of operation can be done only by taking advantage, especially, of well-intentioned Democrats, in order for billionaires to become enabled to use taxpayers’ money, to boost actually the private wealth not only of Democratic Party billionaires, but even of Republican Party billionaires — even of ‘the political opposition.’ The example that will be presented in detail here, typifies a depraved scheme for the warfare-state (not the welfare-state, which instead becomes proportionately reduced as the warfare-state becomes increased), a scheme (support of the military-industrial complex, or “MIC,” and its permanent-war-for-permanent-peace economy) which largely controls America, in order to build and maintain the public’s support for obscenely high ‘defense’ spending and billionaires’ ‘defense’ profits, which government-spending produces catastrophes for the victim-nations, such as Iraq 2003, Libya 2011, and Syria 2012-, all of which invasions are especially profitable for the owners of America’s ‘defense’ contractors such as General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin, which depend upon war in order to funnel money from the domestic masses, to the domestic classes, via taxes. And, of course, American resource-extraction corporations, such as oil-and-gas giants, also benefit handsomely from it, by grabbing foreign resources. Megabanks benefit, too. After all: it’s the U.S. aristocracy that’s behind this, the ultimate paymasters for these propaganda-operations (and some details of this fact of aristocratic sponsorship will be documented here).

No Bucks, No Buck Rogers...,

tothestarsacademy |  The New York Times has published a stunning exposé titled “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program.” In it, former Pentagon military intelligence official LUIS ELIZONDO confirmed the existence of a hidden government program (the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program) that investigated the existence of U.F.O’s, a department he ran under a veil of secrecy since 2009.

The Times story featured an excerpt from Elizondo’s resignation letter in which he expressed his frustration with the limitations placed on the program, telling higher-ups “there remains a vital need to ascertain capability and intent of these phenomena for the benefit of the armed forces and the nation.”

Elizondo left his Pentagon post to join To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science, a consortium of scientists, aerospace engineers and creatives founded by company President and CEO Tom DeLonge, VP of Science and Technology Dr. Hal Puthoff (also quoted in the Times story) and = VP of Operations Jim Semivan. The principals include Aerospace Division Director Steve Justice and National Security Affairs Advisor Chris Mellon. The company launched this past October with a mission to explore exotic science and technologies to rapidly transition innovative ideas into world-changing products and services.

"I am first and foremost a soldier,” says Elizondo, who now serves as Director of Global Security & Special Programs for To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science. “I was honored to serve at the DOD and took my mission of exploring unexplained aerial phenomena quite seriously.  In the end, however, I couldn’t carry out that mission, because the Department — which was understandably overstretched — couldn’t give it the resources that the mounting evidence deserved.  So, under very good terms, I left to find an environment where investigating these phenomena is priority number one. I’m thrilled to say I found that environment at the To The Stars Academy, an amazing team of top-flight scientists  from the defense, industry and intelligence communities alongside passionate creatives to help tell the story.  We look forward to working closely with the US government to produce the best possible results for America and the world."

Today Elizondo and the TTS Academy launched a “Community of Interest” website to serve as a central database and communal hub – clickHERE. The website will be home to video footage, documents and other materials that can be studied and explored for transformative breakthroughs in science and engineering through a unique collaboration among scientists, academics, industry partners, government and the public at large.

Its content at launch includes two of the first official U.S. government videos of unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) referenced in the Times article, which have recently gone through the U.S. government’s official declassification review process to be approved for public release. Alongside each video is technical analysis from Elizondo and TTS Academy’s Aerospace Division Director (and former Program Director for Advanced Systems at Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works) Steve Justice. Click HERE.

Footage in the videos was captured by advanced sensor tracking technology in separate U.S. Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter jets. In the 34-second “Gimbal” (the name likely a reference to the UAP’s free-tilting movement), astonished pilots can be heard talking excitedly about an oval-shaped craft spotted at an altitude close to 25,000 feet.  The object has no distinguishable flight surfaces or exhaust plume, and its flight seems to defy the known laws of physics.  In the under-1:30 video “FLIR1” (reference to footage captured by the F/A-18’s Forward Looking Infrared System), an unknown object is seen at appx. 24,000 feet.  The footage, which has no sound, shows the object hovering with no exhaust plume, displaying extreme maneuverability and sudden acceleration that cannot be achieved by any known aircraft. These are two of several official videos obtained by TTS Academy that serve as credible proof of the physics of advanced flight.

Visitors to TTS Academy’s Community of Interest website are encouraged to sign up for email to receive updates when additional intelligence is added.

Bitshit: BUY! BUY! BYE!

ibankcoin |  Crypto currency Bitconnect (BCC) plunged from $321 to a tad over $35 today, a drop of more than 86% after regulators from state authorities issued cease and desist letters for unauthorized sale of securities. That’s right. Just because your shit is on the blockchain, that doesn’t mean you get to solicit your fucking Ponzi scheme to people in America. State regulators will have something to say about that.

Via the company’s website, as per the reasons for shutting down.

The reason for halt of lending and exchange platform has many reasons as follow:
The continuous bad press has made community members uneasy and created a lack of confidence in the platform.
We have received two Cease and Desist letters, one from the Texas State Securities Board, and one from the North Carolina Secretary of State Securities Division. These actions have become a hindrance for the legal continuation of the platform.
Outside forces have performed DDos attacks on platform several times and have made it clear that these will continue. These interruptions in service have made the platform unstable and have created more panic inside the community.

Price action.

What did Bitconnect do? They quite literally ran a Ponzi scheme. Look at one of their brochures, promising investors 40% returns, PER MONTH.

Via Tech Crunch:

Many in the cryptocurrency community have openly accused Bitconnnect of running a Ponzi scheme, including Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin.
The platform was powered by a token called BCC (not to be confused with BCH, or Bitcoin Cash), which is essentially useless now that the trading platform has shut down. In the last The token has plummeted more than 80% to about $37, down from over $200 just a few hours ago.
If you aren’t familiar with the platform, Bitconnect was an anonymously-run site where users could loan their cryptocurrency to the company in exchange for outsized returns depending on how long the loan was for. For example, a $10,000 loan for 180 days would purportedly give you ~40% returns each month, with a .20% daily bonus.
Bitconnect also had a thriving multi-level referral feature, which also made it somewhat akin to a pyramid scheme with thousands of social media users trying to drive signups using their referral code.
The platform said it generated returns for users using Bitconnnect’s trading bot and “volatility trading software”, which usually averaged around 1% per day.
Of course profiting from market fluctuations and volatility is a legitimate trading strategy, and one used by many hedge funds and institutional traders. But Bitconnect’s promise (and payment) of outsized and guaranteed returns led many to believe it was a ponzi scheme that was paying out existing loan interest with newly pledged loans.
The requirement of having BCC to participate in the lending program led to a natural spike in demand (and price) of BCC. In less than a year the currency went from being worth less than a dollar (with a market cap in the millions) to a all-time high of ~$430.00 with a market cap above $2.6B.

Lenders into the Bitconnect Exchange have revealed the company is closing out accounts, issuing BCC in exchange for their dollars — which is causing the price to plummet.

Bitconnect is officially closing up. They sent me 33 BCC for my $11k+ in loans. Worth $6600 and dropping by the second. Their exchange is down so the only option is to send the BCC to an external exchange.

— LifeByAdam (@LifeByAdam1) January 16, 2018

Luxturna Is An Apt Name For An $850,000 Drug...,

technologyreview |  The $850,000 price of a newly approved gene therapy for blindness stunned patient advocates, but the sticker shock could quickly wear off.

Many costly drugs need to be purchased year after year. But gene therapies are given only once, with potentially permanent effects.

Mark Trusheim, who directs MIT’s New Drug Development Paradigms program, says gene therapies are moving medicine from a model of “renting” treatments to one of “buying” long-term health improvements.

“The challenge is like going from being an apartment renter to a condo buyer and being shocked at [the] purchase price,” he says.

Philadelphia-based Spark Therapeutics said yesterday that it planned to charge $425,000 per eye for Luxturna, the first gene therapy for an inherited disease to reach the U.S. market.

David Mitchell, founder and president of the advocacy group Patients for Affordable Drugs, is concerned that the treatment will be out of reach for people with high-deductible health plans and would bankrupt those without insurance.

Hillary #MeToo Dindu Clinton Claims "See, What Happened Wuz.., I Dindu Nuffin!!!"

thehill |  Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Monday that renewed focus on Russian uranium deals approved during her tenure is nothing more than debunked “baloney" and a sign that Republicans are nervous about the current intelligence probe into Moscow's efforts to meddle with last year's election.

"I think the real story is how nervous they are about these continuing investigations," the former Democratic presidential nominee said during an interview broadcast on C-SPAN.

The renewed interest in the so-called Uranium One deal came after The Hill reported last week that the FBI had gathered solid evidence that Russian nuclear industry officials were engaged in bribery and extortion before the Obama administration approved the sale to Russia of a company that controls 20 percent of America's uranium supply.

The Hill further reported Sunday that the FBI had identified a Russian spy ring's attempt in 2009 and 2010 to infiltrate Clinton's inner circle through a donor friend in order to spy on the State Department. Agents arrested and deported the female spy before anything could happen.

Though stories in The Hill were based on court documents, declassified law enforcement memos and interviews with career officials, Clinton said any accusations of wrongdoing were partisan in nature.

Merck's Fraudulent Virtue Signalling A Moral Atrocity

statnews |  The warning signs of what would become a deadly opioid epidemic emerged in early 2001. That’s when officials of the state employee health plan in West Virginia noticed a surge in deaths attributed to oxycodone, the active ingredient in the painkiller OxyContin.

They quickly decided to do something about it: OxyContin prescriptions would require prior authorization. It was a way to ensure that only people who genuinely needed the painkiller could get it and that people abusing opioids could not.

But an investigation by STAT has found that Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of OxyContin, thwarted the state’s plan by paying a middleman, known as a pharmacy benefits manager, to prevent insurers from limiting prescriptions of  the drug.

The financial quid pro quo between the painkiller maker and the pharmacy benefits manager, Merck Medco, came to light in West Virginia court records unsealed by a state judge at the request of STAT, and in interviews with people familiar with the arrangement.

“We were screaming at the wall,” said Tom Susman, who headed the state’s public employee insurance agency in the early 2000s and led the push to limit OxyContin prescribing in West Virginia.

“We saw it coming,” he said of the opioid epidemic, which today causes 28,000 overdose deaths a year in the United States. “Now to see the aftermath is the most frustrating thing I have ever seen.”

Overprescribing of OxyContin and other opioid painkillers is blamed for helping to plant the seeds for the current opioid crisis. West Virginia has been hit harder than any other state: It suffers the highest per capita drug overdose death rate in the country — more than double the national average. It also has one of the highest rates of painkiller prescribing.

Speech as Violence: Celebrity Peddling Degeneracy to Black Folks is SUCH HARD WORK...,

allure |  Yet I was hopeful that I could use the show’s vast platform to speak directly to their predominantly black and Latinx listeners, who are often excluded from the conversations held in mainstream LGBT spaces (which are largely white, moneyed, and concerned with the centering of cis folk). I hoped I could make listeners aware of the lived realities of their trans sisters, and let them know that we deserve to be seen, heard, and acknowledged without the threat of harassment, exclusion, and violence.

My ultimate goal was to be accessible — to not judge, to call in rather than call out, and, above all, to exercise patience as the (straight cis male) hosts processed my existence. It’s rare that I do Trans 101 lecturing anymore, because I’ve already done that work with my first book, Redefining Realness, which was filled with plain speak and explanatory commas about definitions, statistics, and context.

In fact, I’ve turned down thousands from colleges and corporations because I refuse to engage in Trans 101. Trans folk, especially of color, should not be obligated to help cis folk play catch-up on our experiences. The effort can detract from our work to protect and liberate ourselves. Yet I also know that black and Latina trans women often live in communities of color, so outreach to viewers of color, from The Wendy Williams Show and Essence to Desus & Mero, was vital as I set out on my book tour.

I was invited to “The Breakfast Club” because cohost Yee chose my second memoir, Surpassing Certainty, for her book club. It was my last scheduled media appearance after a long, grueling tour in support of Surpassing Certainty, which is about the years in my life I decided to keep my trans-ness private — largely in order to gain access and maintain my safety. These years coincided with my 20s, when I navigated college, graduate school, and my early media career. The interview aired on radio stations across the country (edited and condensed) and in its entirety on YouTube a week later.

Though I have not been able to watch the video of my interview (I have already experienced it and won’t be doing so again), I’m proud of the labor I put forth, and I’m grateful to Yee for her preparation and effort to steer the conversation away from the particulars of my body and instead toward my work. The interview was what it was, and I refuse to re-experience being asked about my vagina in such blatant, irrelevant, and sensational ways. Again, if I am not fucking you, why do you care?

Addicts Pawns in a Sprawling National Network of Insurance and Treatment Fraud

BostonGlobe  |  Drug users, desperate to break addictions to heroin or pain pills, are pawns in a sprawling national network of insurance fraud, an investigation by The Boston Globe and STAT has found.

They are being sent to treatment centers hundreds of miles from home for expensive, but often shoddy, care that is paid for by premium health insurance benefits procured with fake addresses.

Patient brokers are paid a fee to place insured people in treatment centers, which pocket thousands of dollars in claims for each patient. They often target certain Blue Cross Blue Shield plans, because of their generous benefits and few restrictions on seeking care from out-of-network treatment programs.

The fraud is now so commonplace that brokers use a simple play on words to describe how it works: “Do you want to Blue Cross the country?”

Partisan Fraud Spotting: 1600 Words With No Mention of Organic Competency Development

NYPost |  Since the 1960s, black leaders have placed a heavy emphasis on gaining political power, and Barack Obama’s presidency represented the apex of those efforts. The assumption — rarely challenged — is that black political clout must come before black social and economic advancement. But as JASON L. RILEY argues in this excerpt from his new book, “False Black Power” (Templeton Press), political success has not been a major factor in the rise of racial and ethnic groups from poverty to prosperity.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was followed by large increases in black elected officials. In the Deep South, black officeholders grew from 100 in 1964 to 4,300 in 1978. By the early 1980s, major US cities with large black populations, such as Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Washington and Philadelphia, had elected black mayors. Between 1970 and 2010, the number of black elected officials nationwide increased from fewer than 1,500 to more than 10,000.

Yet the socioeconomic progress that was supposed to follow in the wake of these political gains never materialized. During an era of growing black political influence, blacks as a group progressed at a slower rate than whites, and the black poor actually lost ground.

In a 1991 book, social scientist Gary Orfield and his co-author, journalist Carole Ashkinaze, assessed the progress of blacks in the 1970s and ’80s following the sharp increase in black officeholders. The thinking, then and now, was that the problems of the cities “were basically the result of the racism of white officials and that many could be solved by black mayors, school superintendents, policemen and teachers who were displacing white ones.” The expectation, they added, “was that black political and education leaders would be able to make large moves toward racial equity simply by devising policies and practices reflecting their understanding of the background and needs of black people.”

But the integration of these institutions proved to be insufficient. “Many blacks have reached positions of local power, such as mayor, county commission chairman or superintendent of schools, positions undreamed of 30 years ago,” they wrote. Their findings, however, showed that “these achievements do not necessarily produce success for blacks as a whole.” The empirical evidence, they said, “indicates that there may be little relationship between the success of local black leaders and the opportunities of typical black families.”  Fist tap Big Don.

Bill Maher Gatekeeping and Permitted Discourse Productions Promoting Transitive Victimization

vice |  I used to be close to 300 pounds, so a lot of what you wrote hurt to read—it took me back to a time when I wasn't fitting in airplane seats. Reading your book really made me think back to that girl and how I still end up being her, even after losing weight.Exactly. After writing this book, I realized that I want to change my body, but not in the way that you would think. I started seeing a dietician. We don't even talk about food. We talk about behaviors around food. On the first day, she was asking me about the traumas in my life. And I started to list them: "Well, I was assaulted." And then I thought about it longer and said: "Well, being fat." I just started crying because I realized, "Oh God, this is a thing that is never going to leave me." It's not about self-loathing at all. It's because of societal loathing and the ways in which people talk about our bodies and frame our bodies. I just realized that it is a trauma—and that shows how pervasive fatphobia is.

Yep.

I've told my parents many times that I'm as over being raped as I'll ever be. It's 30 years later. It's not fine, but I've dealt with it. I've gone to therapy, I have worked through those issues. But I don't know if I'll ever overcome the ways in which I was treated for daring to be fat. Honestly, I think it's one of those final frontiers of discrimination. People feel very comfortable being cruel to fat people and talking shit about fat people. Very fucking comfortable.

They think, I'm at work, I'll just fire off a tweet at some woman about how fat she is. It's hard, I think, particularly for men, to handle a woman who can't easily be made into a sexual object.

Exactly. They don't know what to do. They lose their fucking minds. They get confused. "Wait, I'm not getting a boner from you? What are you doing on this planet? You don't belong here! Get out of here!"

"The implication is that if you have a body that doesn't fit, fix your body because they're not going to fix the chair."

This sort of goes back to the idea in your book about being seen as genderless because of your weight.Being fat means you aren't desirable. So as a woman, you are basically degendered. People also often read fat bodies as male. I was just in Australia and almost every person there called me "sir." And it really drives me crazy because I have huge boobs and they are incredible. So it's like, "Come on. What are you fucking talking about?"

One part of the book that really broke my heart was hearing about the planning that you do when you visit different cities to make sure a restaurant has chairs that will accommodate you. This idea that you couldn't just show up somewhere made me so fucking mad for some reason.Well, it's either prepare or be humiliated. And I have learned to prepare. The world is not accommodating. I spend a lot my time in LA these days. All the chairs are tiny and super modern and sleek. And that's cute but my ass is not going to fit on those chairs for two hours. When a chair designer is creating a chair, they're creating it for one type of body. And it's not my kind of body. The implication is that if you have a body that doesn't fit, fix your body because they're not going to fix the chair.

By the end of the book, you emerge as this fierce being—open, raw, defiant in book and body. Did you feel that way while writing it?Partly I did. Partly I was like this is the book of no fucks given. I was terrified to write the book, but when I got to certain places, I was like, "You know what? I'm going to let it all fucking hang out."

One thing that was so interesting about this book is that you don't wrap it up in a neat bow. You don't end it with a declaration of diet or anything like that.That's exactly why I wrote the book. There is no easy answer for our bodies. There is no closure.

Chasing Perpetual Motion in the Gig Economy

NYTimes |  The promises Silicon Valley makes about the gig economy can sound appealing. Its digital technology lets workers become entrepreneurs, we are told, freed from the drudgery of 9-to-5 jobs. Students, parents and others can make extra cash in their free time while pursuing their passions, maybe starting a thriving small business.

In reality, there is no utopia at companies like Uber, Lyft, Instacart and Handy, whose workers are often manipulated into working long hours for low wages while continually chasing the next ride or task. These companies have discovered they can harness advances in software and behavioral sciences to old-fashioned worker exploitation, according to a growing body of evidence, because employees lack the basic protections of American law.

A recent story in The Times by Noam Scheiber vividly described how Uber and other companies use tactics developed by the video game industry to keep drivers on the road when they would prefer to call it a day, raising company revenue while lowering drivers’ per-hour earnings. One Florida driver told The Times he earned less than $20,000 a year before expenses like gas and maintenance. In New York City, an Uber drivers group affiliated with the machinists union said that more than one-fifth of its members earn less than $30,000 before expenses.

Gig economy workers tend to be poorer and are more likely to be minorities than the population at large, a survey by the Pew Research Center found last year. Compared with the population as a whole, almost twice as many of them earned under $30,000 a year, and 40 percent were black or Hispanic, compared with 27 percent of all American adults. Most said the money they earned from online platforms was essential or important to their families.

Since workers for most gig economy companies are considered independent contractors, not employees, they do not qualify for basic protections like overtime pay and minimum wages. This helped Uber, which started in 2009, quickly grow to 700,000 active drivers in the United States, nearly three times the number of taxi drivers and chauffeurs in the country in 2014.

"Truth" is Whatever Those in Authority Say It Is

consortiumnews |  On Nov. 20, the Times published a lead editorial calling on Facebook and other technology giants to devise algorithms that could eliminate stories that the Times deemed to be “fake.” The Times and other mainstream news outlets – along with a few favored Internet sites – joined a special Google-sponsored task force, called the First Draft Coalition, to decide what is true and what is not. If the Times’ editorial recommendations were followed, the disfavored stories and the sites publishing them would no longer be accessible through popular search engines and platforms, essentially blocking the public’s access to them. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “What to Do About ‘Fake News.’”]

On Thanksgiving Day, the Post ran a front-page story citing an anonymous group, called PropOrNot, blacklisting 200 Web sites, including Consortiumnews.com and other important sources of independent journalism, because we supposedly promoted “Russian propaganda.”

Although PropOrNot and the Post didn’t bother to cite any actual examples or to ask the accused for comment, the point was clear: If you didn’t march in lockstep behind the Official Narrative on, say, the Ukraine crisis or the war in Syria, you were to be isolated, demonized and effectively silenced. In the article, the Post blurred the lines between “fake news” – stories that are simply made up – and what was deemed “propaganda,” in effect, information that didn’t jibe with what the U.S. State Department was saying.

Back then, in November, the big newspapers believed that the truth was easy, simple, obvious, requiring only access to some well-placed government official or a quick reading of the executive summary from some official report. Over the last quarter century or so, the Times, in particular, has made a fetish out of embracing pretty much whatever Officialdom declared to be true. After all, such well-dressed folks with those important-sounding titles couldn’t possibly be lying.

That gullibility went from the serious, such as rejecting overwhelming evidence that Ronald Reagan’s Nicaraguan Contra rebels were deeply involved in drug trafficking, to the silly, trusting the NFL’s absurd Deflategate allegations against Tom Brady. In those “old” days, which apparently ended a few weeks ago, the Times could have run full-page ads, saying “Truth is whatever those in authority say it is.”

Deconstruction of the Administrative State Will Require Unending Daily Battle

WaPo |  Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump’s reclusive chief strategist and the intellectual force behind his nationalist agenda, said Thursday that the new administration is locked in an unending battle against the media and other globalist forces to “deconstruct” an outdated system of governance.

In his first public speaking appearance since Trump took office, Bannon made his comments alongside White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus at a gathering of conservative activists. They sought to prove that they are not rivals but partners in fighting on Trump’s behalf to transform Washington and the world order.

“They’re going to continue to fight,” Bannon said of the media, which he repeatedly described as “the opposition party,” and other forces he sees as standing in the president’s way. “If you think they are giving you your country back without a fight, you are sadly mistaken.”

Atop Trump’s agenda, Bannon said, was the “deconstruction of the administrative state” — meaning a system of taxes, regulations and trade pacts that the president and his advisers believe stymie economic growth and infringe upon one’s sovereignty.

“If you look at these Cabinet nominees, they were selected for a reason, and that is deconstruction,” Bannon said. He posited that Trump’s announcement withdrawing from the Trans-Pacific Partnership was “one of the most pivotal moments in modern American history.”

Good Only for Rotting Fish - CIA's Newspaper Wrapping Itself in Patriotism and Service...,

spokesman |  Thomas Gibbons-Neff, a fourth-generation military man, deployed twice to Afghanistan. The second time, as a 22-year-old Marine corporal in 2010, he led an eight-man infantry team into combat. Two of his men were wounded by enemy sniper fire, and one of his best buddies later died in combat.

Now President Trump says Thomas is an enemy of the American people.

Thomas, a Pentagon correspondent for the Washington Post, was so labeled, along with everybody else in the media, by the commander in chief on Friday. “The FAKE NEWS media,” Trump tweeted, “is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!”

I asked my colleague, who went to Georgetown University on the G.I. Bill before joining the Post two years ago, how it felt to be called an enemy of the country he volunteered to serve in combat.

“It’s alarming, like a bunch of other things these days,” Thomas said. “It also feels like bait.”

And Thomas isn’t taking the bait. Like the rest of us, he’s keeping his head down and doing his job.

Trump’s Stalinist labeling of the media is his latest attempt to delegitimize the structures of civil society, following similar attacks on the courts and the intelligence community. We in the press are an easy mark because we’re already held in low esteem. In this case, the charge, using the universal language of autocrats, probably shouldn’t be dignified with a refutation: To be forced to make the case that a free press isn’t the enemy of a free people is to fight on Trump’s terms.