A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things.
Manhattan prosecutors have told lawyers for the Trump Organization that they have until this afternoon to argue why ex-President Donald Trump’s company should not get slapped with criminal charges, according to the New York Times and the Washington Post.
Jr. and iBanka aren’t being left out…
Some signs that gutting unemployment benefits in the theory that people would be forced to go back to work….doesn’t actually work and people still refuse to work for exploitative jobs anymore!
This is very true, and cannot be over-emphasized. Jobs either have meaning for people (career), or they provide a means to live. All this “right to work” BS in red states simply creates a labor pool that is fucked in terms of having any means to live. Republicans’ dying wish is to create a world of indentured servitude, all over again. There are workers, and there are owners. If you’re not born as an owner, tough shit.
From Josh’s Editor’s Blog…
Yesterday the conventional wisdom among DC reporters was that yes this was all known. But Biden stated it too openly. So it was excessive candor that upset a fragile bipartisan coalition rather than any change of strategy or position. But hear Annie Linskey in the Post last night: “President Biden on Saturday reversed a stand he had taken forcefully just two days earlier …” The weekend clarification statement has now gone from being a fuzzy and ambiguous statement muddying up linkage to an abject surrender after a forceful assertion of a new policy.
Paraphrased…
On the one hand we were calling them “essential” and now employers want to treat them as before. One of the hardest things to take from someone is their dignity.
Pay them more!
CEOs say it’s Amazon driving wages up:
FT:
Companies struggling to find workers as the US economy reopens from the worst effects of the pandemic have blamed higher unemployment benefits, limited immigration and childcare challenges. Now, some are pointing to another factor: Amazon.
The ecommerce leader recruited aggressively last year, hiring 500,000 people worldwide to meet the demands of homebound consumers at a time when millions of workers were losing their jobs. In the US, it paid at least $15 an hour before benefits, a rate it introduced in 2018 that is double the federal minimum wage.
Large employers such as Walmart and Target followed its lead during the pandemic, establishing a new $15 minimum hourly wage rate regardless of federal law. The hourly rate has become the minimum at the Vail ski resort in Colorado, Universal’s theme park in Orlando and the Tyson Foods poultry plant in Pine Bluff, Arkansas.
Dave Gitlin, chief executive of air conditioning manufacturer Carrier, told the Financial Times that he had needed to adjust pay in factories from Tennessee to Minneapolis to respond to raises from Amazon and FedEx.
“There is absolutely an Amazon effect,” said Aaron Cheris, head of Bain & Company’s retail practice for the Americas. Jeff Bezos’s company should not be blamed for labour shortages, he argued, but “most of my retail clients would blame them for the rising wage expectations”.
‘Utterly deranged’ is fat Donnie’s baseline.
Seattle actually does have a $15 minimum wage and Amazon HQ is in Seattle.
He can go fuck himself. When CEOs make millions while producing absolutely nothing of tangible value, certainly the front line actually producing and selling the goods and services deserve something.
Ruh-ro.
Hunter Clark - Anna Wong article on underreporting of US-China trade.
The United States’ bilateral goods trade deficit with China appeared to have narrowed substantially since the escalation of the U.S.-China trade conflict in 2018, or so U.S. trade data suggest. By contrast, the Chinese data tell a much different story: the deficit, as implied by China’s bilateral surplus, nearly reached historical highs by the end of 2020. Historically, the discrepancy between these trade balance figures had remained fairly predictable and stable. But with the onset of the trade conflict, U.S.-reported import values from China have fallen more sharply than the China-reported export values to the United States. Two reasons are likely responsible for this phenomenon: (1) U.S. importers underreporting Chinese imports in order to evade U.S. tariffs, and (2) Chinese exporters reporting higher exports due to changes in tax incentives in China. In this note, we find that the majority of the shift in discrepancy can be explained by the first factor, with an estimated $10 billion annual loss in U.S. tariff revenues due to underreported U.S. imports.
And now for your Monday morning nut
Crazy Pastor Warns Of Child Trafficking Tunnels Under White House | Crooks and Liars
Duh. Hillary had those drilled while hubby was distracted in the oval office, they run out to comet pizza.
Awhile back much was made of how stupid is was for Giuliani to want to see what it was prosecutors had on him pre-indictment, so that he could prepare and respond to any looming legal issues. It was noted prosecutors just don’t show their hand or make targets privy to such things.
I also read that Trump’s legal team being afforded the opportunity to request prosecutors just drop any plans for criminal indictments is standard procedure. If Trump’s lawyers have no definitive knowledge of what prosecutors have, what would their basis be for asking they drop whatever it is they plan to do? Just “because”? “Do us that favor, please?” Why is this standard procedure if the defense has no factual basis for requesting it, and prosecutors have spent months gathering evidence and taking grand jury testimony?
It seems it would be prosecutorial negligence for Vance, or James, to just say “OK, since you asked, we’ll just forget the whole thing. Never mind.”
Based on what? WTF?
The rest of the country is a bit bigger than Seattle and Seattle’s $15 minimum wage is just for Seattle.
Amazon pays $15/hour EVERYWHERE which puts huge pressure on local governments and employers in place like here (NC), Alabama, Iowa to increase their minimums.
Now, if we could get McDonalds, WalMart, Starbucks (theirs are already fairly high, I think), Verizon, etc. to follow suit - we would be getting somewhere better.
Mixed bag, though, for some of the poorer places where it’s going to continue the death spiral of small, locally-owned businesses who can’t afford to compete, and can’t raise prices enough to compensate for the higher wages.
Almost need some sort of wage assistance program available to folks like that, or every small town is going to end up with main street empty, but a Dollar General and Walmart right outside city limits. (Noting here that that’s already the sad case in way too many places)
“Utterly Deranged Trump Has Full Meltdown” really should be carved on Fat Ass’s headstone. And, hopefully, very soon!
The big kerfuffle with Rudy was that he wanted to be able to determine which evidence prosecutors could use against him and which evidence was privileged communication that was not relevant to their probe. It wasn’t so much about seeing the evidence, he wanted to determine what could be used as evidence.
My main curiosity still remains. Prosecutors spend months or years amassing voluminous evidence of alleged crimes. Attorneys for the target spend a Monday afternoon pleading with them to drop it all. And there is at least the possibility prosecutors say “OK, pretend none of this happened.”?