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Daily Bread, Ethics, Free Markets, Law, Medicine, Misconduct, Police

Daily Bread for 8.21.21: Hundreds of Wisconsin Police Officers Back on the Job after Being Fired or Forced Out

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Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be variably cloudy with scattered thunderstorms and a high of 81. Sunrise is 6:08 AM and sunset 7:46 PM, for 13h 37m 26s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 98.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1911, the Mona Lisa is stolen by Vincenzo Peruggia, a Louvre employee.

Peter Cameron writes Nearly 200 Wisconsin police officers back on the job after being fired or forced out:

One officer was accused by a supervisor of snoozing in his squad car while on duty. Another had multiple drunken run-ins with police, including after bar fights. A third repeatedly sent lewd photos to a female officer.

All of them were fired or forced out. And all of them are back working in law enforcement in Wisconsin.

Nearly 200 law enforcement officers currently employed in the state were fired from previous jobs in law enforcement, resigned before completion of an internal investigation or in lieu of termination, according to data from the Wisconsin Department of Justice obtained through an open records request.

….

A huge study in The Yale Law Journal titled The Wandering Officer found that Florida cops who had been fired from a previous law enforcement job were more likely to be fired from their next job or to receive a complaint for a “moral character violation,” compared to rookies and officers who have never been fired.

The study analyzed nearly 100,000 full-time law-enforcement officers from almost 500 agencies in Florida over a 30-year period. The study concluded that “wandering officers may pose serious risks, particularly given how difficult it is to fire a police officer.”

Union contracts can give police officers strong job security, sometimes even when misconduct is committed. The controversial Act 10 legislation passed by Republicans in 2011 crippled organized public-sector labor in Wisconsin, but largely left police and fire unions, groups that lean to the political right, untouched.

A profession —properly understood — has substantive and ethical standards for membership that the profession requires and consistently enforces against its own members. Many occupations are styled as professions, but genuine professions monitor and discipline their own members. 

Across America, traditional professions like medicine, law, and the clergy find in their respective institutions a willingness to overlook, excuse, and even reward (through promotion) misconduct.

This willingness to overlook inadequacy, misconduct, and outright criminality belies talk about ‘excellence,’ ‘service,’ ‘honor,’ etc.

Cameron writes that a “bill that would require law enforcement agencies to maintain a personnel file for each employee and disclose that file to any agency that may want to hire them has bipartisan support. If enacted, the measure would bar future nondisclosure agreements that shield police personnel files from prospective employers.”

The disabled or disadvantaged in society deserve compassion and support that professionals most certainly do not. We’ve too many professionals who want authority over others while simultaneously demanding tender regard that only the disabled or disadvantaged deserve.

In law, medicine, the clergy, or policing there should be no right to perpetual membership: lawyers, doctors, clergy, or police officers who fail the standards required of them can — and should —find other, less demanding occupations in the free labor market.

Gov. DeSantis, King of Self-Awareness:

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Crime, Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 8.20.21: Regarding Attorney General Kaul’s ‘Regardless’

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Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 89. Sunrise is 6:07 AM and sunset 7:47 PM, for 13h 40m 06s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 94.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1794, United States troops force a confederacy of Shawnee, Mingo, Delaware, Wyandot, Miami, Ottawa, Chippewa, and Potawatomi warriors into a disorganized retreat at the Battle of Fallen Timbers.

Katelyn Ferral reports No criminal charges for mishandled Wisconsin National Guard sexual assault cases, state justice department says:

No criminal charges will be filed for 33 sexual assault cases mishandled by the Wisconsin National Guard, but the state Department of Justice says changes are needed to prevent future problems.

The department on Thursday issued the results of its 18-month review of National Guard sexual assault cases in which it examined botched investigations dating from 2009 to 2019. The agency, which does not file its own criminal charges in such instances, said it examined the Guard’s case files and referred them to local district attorneys, who ultimately declined to prosecute.

“Regardless of whether there is ultimately a prosecution, it’s important for our system of justice that when there are allegations made there is a full and thorough review that takes place,” Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul said in an interview Wednesday. “We wanted to ensure that kind of review happened.”

The agency review followed a 2019 investigation by the federal National Guard Bureau that found at least 33 sexual assault cases had been mishandled by the Wisconsin Guard. The Guard had been improperly investigating sex assault allegations for years, failing to track such cases and punish some perpetrators.

The Guard Bureau investigation came after the Cap Times and Milwaukee Journal Sentinel found the Guard was violating state and federal rules by discouraging victims from going to police and conducting internal investigations [to discourage federal involvement] into allegations of sexual assault. 

Thirty-three cases, yet not a single district attorney’s office would prosecute anyone responsible. Case after case, of obstructing claimants’ legal recourse and official concealment to avoid federal scrutiny, yet no criminal action.

Attorney General Kaul tells Wisconsinites that one should look beyond a lack of prosecutions — literally, regardless —to lessons he wishes to impart.

On the contrary, it’s prosecution, itself, that would impart the lessons Wisconsinites need to hear.

NASA’s Curiosity Mars Rover Finds A Changing Landscape:

City, Film

Film: Tuesday, August 24th, 1 PM @ Seniors in the Park, Emma

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This Tuesday, August 24th at 1 PM, there will be a showing of Emma @ Seniors in the Park, in the Starin Community Building:

Comedy/Drama/Romance

2 hours, 4 minutes

Rated PG (2021)

A requested film: Jane Austen’s beloved costume comedy. In 1800s England, a well-meaning but selfish young woman meddles in the love lives of her friends. A star-studded adaptation with Anya Taylor-Joy, Johnny Flynn, Rupert Graves, and Bill Nighy.

If vaccinated, no mask is required. Reservations are no longer required. Free popcorn and a beverage re-instituted!

One can find more information about Emma at the Internet Movie Database.

Conspiracy Theories, Daily Bread, Disinformation, Education, School District

Daily Bread for 8.19.21: ‘People Into Chimpanzees’

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Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with scattered afternoon thunderstorms and a high of 88. Sunrise is 6:06 AM and sunset 7:49 PM, for 13h 42m 45s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 88.6% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1812, the American frigate USS Constitution defeats the British frigate HMS Guerriere off the coast of Nova Scotia, Canada earning the nickname “Old Ironsides.”

Davey Alba reports Facebook removes Russian-based network that spread vaccine misinformation:

Facebook said on Tuesday [8.10.21] that it had removed a network of accounts based in Russia that spread misinformation about coronavirus vaccines. The network targeted audiences in India, Latin America and the United States with posts falsely asserting that the AstraZeneca vaccine would turn people into chimpanzees and that the Pfizer vaccine had a much higher casualty rate than other vaccines, the company said.

The network violated Facebook’s foreign interference policies, the company said. It traced the posts to a marketing firm operating from Russia, Fazze, which is a subsidiary of AdNow, a company registered in Britain.

Facebook said it had taken down 65 Facebook accounts and 243 Instagram accounts associated with the firm and barred Fazze from its platform. The social network announced the takedown as part of its monthly report on influence campaigns run by people or groups that purposely misrepresent who is behind the posts.

“This campaign functioned as a disinformation laundromat,” said Ben Nimmo, who leads Facebook’s global threat intelligence team.

….

The Fazze campaign was carried out in two waves, Facebook said. In late 2020, Fazze created two batches of fake Facebook accounts that initially posted about Indian food or Hollywood actors. Then in November and December, as the Indian government was discussing emergency authorization for the AstraZeneca vaccine, the accounts started pushing the false claim that the vaccine was dangerous because it was derived from a chimpanzee adenovirus. The campaign extended to websites like Medium and Change.org, and memes about the vaccine’s turning its subjects into chimpanzees proliferated on Facebook.

Facebook is a private platform, and it can (and in this situation should) ban Fazze.

The implications of Fazze’s people-into-chimpanzees disinformation campaign extend far beyond Facebook’s Menlo Park, CA headquarters. It is, after all, a local audience in towns across America that Fazze sought to impress.

They could not be impressed if they were not impressionable. 

People are impressionable through ignorance, not stupidity. There are very few people who might possibly be considered ‘stupid.’ There are, however, any number of crackpot theories circulating every day.

QAnon, lies about vaccines that are truly safe and effective, the Big Lie that Trump actually won in 2020 (he lost by millions of votes), etc.: these are educational and cultural failures.

We have taught poorly – and tolerated substandard reasoning and conspiracy theories – while claiming in a vision statement to teach “Every student, Every Day, in a Unified Way.” 

In a community beset with a faction lapping ignorance and superstition, our vision statement is little more than a rhyming self-parody.

Tasmanian Devil Twins Born at Australia Animal Park:

Daily Bread, Government Spending

Daily Bread for 8.18.21: Paycheck Protection Loan Fraud

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Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with scattered thunderstorms and a high of 84. Sunrise is 6:05 AM and sunset 7:51 PM, for 13h 45m 23s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 80.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

The Tech Park Board meets at 8 AM and the Parks and Recreation Board meets at 5:30 PM. 

 On this day in 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution is ratified, guaranteeing women’s suffrage.

Stacy Cowley reports 15% of Paycheck Protection Program Loans Could Be Fraudulent, Study Shows (‘Some $76 billion of the program’s $800 billion in loans may have been taken improperly, a new paper concludes’):

When the Paycheck Protection Program began last year to help small businesses that were struggling during the pandemic, the federal government was determined to get the relief money out fast — so it waived much of the vetting lenders traditionally do on business loans.

The absence of those safeguards meant that fraud was highly likely. But just how much of the program’s $800 billion was taken illicitly?

A new academic working paper released on Tuesday contains an estimate: Around 1.8 million of the program’s 11.8 million loans — more than 15 percent — totaling $76 billion had at least one indication of potential fraud, the researchers concluded.

“There’s been a lot of anecdotes about fraud, but the tricky thing about anecdotes is that it’s very difficult to put them together and get at the scale of what’s going on,” said Samuel Kruger, an assistant professor of finance at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business and one of the paper’s authors. “We wanted to look for patterns in the data.”

The study pins blame for many of the questionable loans on one particular group of lenders: financial technology firms, known as “fintechs,” which focus on digital lending. Nine of the 10 lenders with the highest rate of suspicious loans fell into that group.

“Certain fintech lenders seem to specialize in dubious loans,” the authors wrote. Collectively, fintechs made around 29 percent of the program’s loans but accounted for more than half of its suspicious loans, the study concluded.

The Paycheck Protection Program, which ran intermittently from April 2020 to May 2021, relied on banks and other lenders to make the government-guaranteed loans, which are designed to be forgiven if borrowers followed the program’s rules. Government watchdogs have long warned of a high fraud risk on the rushed loans; the Justice Department has charged more than 500 people with improperly claiming hundreds of millions of dollars in borrowing.

These billions are those with one indication of fraud. One reads further on that a “more restrictive calculation by the researchers, of loans with at least two suspicious characteristics, identified 1.2 million potentially fraudulent loans, totaling $38 billion.”

And yet, and yet, even a single billion saved or properly & lawfully spent would make a considerable difference. If, for example, Wisconsin had an additional billion to save or spend it would amount to roughly $175 per person.

How easily these numbers tally.

Orphaned Monkeys Receive Much-Needed TLC at Bolivian Sanctuary:

Daily Bread, Demographics, Economy

Daily Bread for 8.17.21: Decline in Trump-Supporting America

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Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 80. Sunrise is 6:04 AM and sunset 7:52 PM, for 13h 48m 01s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 70.7% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Common Council meets at 6:30 PM.

 On this day in 1945, George Orwell’s novella Animal Farm is published.

Jordan Weissman writes The Census shows that vast stretches of America are shrinking. Almost all of them voted for Donald Trump (Ninety percent of counties that lost population in the last decade backed the ex-president’):

Donald Trump and the Republican Party he shaped represent the fading face of the United States, winning over an older, more rural, and overwhelmingly caucasian bloc of voters that reflected the country’s past more than its more urban and diverse future.

The latest data from the 2020 Census, which the government released on Thursday to kick off the congressional redistricting process, illustrate that fact in incredibly stark terms. It shows that the white population fell for the first time in history during the last decade, and that Americans continued to cluster in growing cities and suburbs, whether in Texas, Georgia, Virginia, or New York.

Perhaps most strikingly, while metro areas grew, vast stretches of the country continued to bleed population. About 53 percent of all U.S. counties shrank between 2010 and 2020. You can see them in the sea of burnt orange on the graph below, rural regions and small towns that often have few residents to begin with. In total, they were home to about 50.5 million people in a nation of more than 331 million.

….

Given what we already knew about Trump’s base of support, it seemed likely that most of these emptying counties voted Republican in the last election. But how many, exactly? Mark Muro of the Metropolitan Policy Project at Brookings ran the numbers for me. He found that, in the 1,636 counties that shrank during the 2010s, the former president won a majority of votes in 90 percent of them. (Muro’s team had to exclude Alaska from its numbers because of a technical glitch.) If a corner of America is depopulating, it is almost certainly part of Trump country.

This is not to say that Trump country on the whole is in decline. The former president only received about 19 percent of his 74 million votes from counties with shrinking populations, according to Muro and his team’s analysis. Overall, the counties where he won added 7.8 million people during the previous decade. But Biden counties nearly doubled that total, expanding by 14.9 million individuals. Blue America is driving America’s population growth.

But the fact that places with diminishing populations so overwhelmingly backed our last president is one more data point in a bigger story about how the country has been polarizing between thriving metros dominated by Democrats and increasingly conservative communities that are either growing more slowly than major cities or are in outright decline. This is true both demographically and economically (though of course those things are intertwined). The Metropolitan Policy Project has previously found, for instance, that Biden counties generated 70 percent of the country’s GDP. “Republican counties represent a waning, traditional economic base, situated in struggling small towns and rural areas,” Muro told me. “And the Census story underscores the sense that growth, in the most literal sense, is somewhere else. Prosperity is out of reach.”

Emphasis added.

Decline, however, comes in one of two ways: absolute or relative. Absolute decline in population is easy to see: there are fewer people. Relative decline, of people or productivity, is more subtle: one slips slowly from a national standard. The gap from year to year may seem small; look back a decade and that gap is evident.

The MAGA crowd impoverishes its own communities.  The answer – one that many of these communities will not choose – is to turn away from Trumpism.

Massive Cargo Ship Splits in Half Near Japan:

City, Daily Bread, Economy, Poverty, School District, Technology

Daily Bread for 8.16.21: Broadband Gaps, Right Here in Whippet City

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Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 84. Sunrise is 6:03 AM and sunset 7:54 PM, for 13h 50m 37s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 59.7% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Equal Opportunities Commission meets at 5 PM, the Community Development Authority at 5:30 PM, and the Library Board at 6:30 PM.

 On this day in 1930, the first color sound cartoon, Fiddlesticks, is released by Ub Iwerks.

Rick Barrett reports Numerous tech developers are looking for a game-changer to bridge the digital divide:

New technologies could help bridge the digital divide in sparsely populated places where it can cost $30,000 a mile to deploy fiber cable for just a few customers.

Jonathan Sharp has been a beta tester for one of them, Starlink, from his home in Wisconsin’s Northwoods.

Starlink is an effort by SpaceX founder Elon Musk to deliver broadband to rural America via thousands of satellites in orbit closer to the Earth than conventional satellites. Last December, Musk was awarded $886 million from the federal Rural Digital Opportunity Fund to get service to nearly 643,000 locations in 35 states.

Sharp said he’s gotten speeds comparable to living in a city, a major improvement from conventional satellite service that’s been part of the rural landscape for decades and has often been labeled unreliable and expensive.

Here in Whitewater and the nearby towns of the Whitewater Unified School District – far from the most rural parts of the state – there are problems with broadband access and speeds for many residents. The pandemic made this plain: while the district had some early ambition to offer virtual services to students beyond the district’s boundaries, many district families had inadequate online access. The plan was later, and sensibly, set aside.

In the city, and in the school district, this much one can say: years of boosterism have yet to boost access to online services for all.

Indeed, the stark truth these development men and women face: there are families in the district without homes, without electricity, without water.

Broadband, sadly, is a bit farther down on these families’ lists of needs.

Fiddlesticks (1930):

Daily Bread, Employment, Free Markets, Populists, Trumpism, Vaccines

Daily Bread for 8.15.21: The ‘Personal Responsibility’ Crowd Wants a Handout

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Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 81. Sunrise is 6:02 AM and sunset 7:55 PM, for 13h 53m 13s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 48.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1944, Allied forces land in southern France in Operation Dragoon.

Molly Beck reports GOP lawmakers propose making workers who are fired, quit over vaccine mandates eligible for unemployment benefits:

MADISON – Republican lawmakers want to provide unemployment benefits to anyone who quits or is fired over a COVID-19 vaccine mandate — legislation Gov. Tony Evers said he would veto.

The proposal comes as health systems across the state are implementing new requirements for staff to be vaccinated against COVID-19 in addition to the other vaccines that have been required for years.

Hospitals are bracing for a new surge of COVID-19 infections that has materialized as not enough people are vaccinated to isolate the fast-spreading delta variant and keep it from spreading to those who are unable to get vaccinated, like children.

A number of protests have taken place in the wake of the systems’ new requirements with some health care workers pushing back against them citing the vaccines’ emergency-use approval status.

Republican Reps. Dan Knodl, Rick Gundrum, Rob Brooks and Sen. Duey Stroebel released proposed legislation on Thursday that would create an exemption in Wisconsin’s unemployment rules that would allow anyone who quit over such mandates or was fired over violating them to collect benefits.

“Individual liberty is the bedrock of a free republic and must be respected and protected. The decision of whether or not to get the COVID-19 vaccine is a decision to be made by individuals, not government bureaucrats or employers,” bill authors wrote in a memo to colleagues seeking support.

These WISGOP men talk about individual liberty, but they’re not prepared to accept the consequences of choice in a free society. Instead, these able-bodied, populist men want a government handout from others while exercising free choice.  That’s not liberty; it’s state-subsidized dependency. These populists, Trumpists one and all, talk about personal responsibility but will not accept the consequences of employers’ decisions on workplace protocols.

The answer for employees who do not want to accept employers’ vaccine requirements is to quit and find other jobs, not to ask for state-provided benefits.

One hears so much from these right-wing populists about how their political opponents – those of us in the majority across America – are afraid, motivated by fear, etc. It’s all nonsense. No group that claims to be rational talks so much about fear as the populists. It’s all evident projection with them.

Their declarations of ‘hope over fear’ melt away at the sight of a hypodermic needle. These big, bad Trump men – who claim to be rugged individualists – plead for handouts at others’ expense rather than take a jab.

No, and no again.

Those who will not comply with employers’ lawful workplace mandates are free (as they should be) to quit and find other jobs. They should use their time while unemployed to search through Help Wanted ads for less demanding workplaces.

They are not, and should never be, entitled to unemployment compensation for their vaccine refusal.

See also Jane Jacobs with Useful Advice on Responsibility (for Whitewater, Richmond Township, Delavan, Etc.),  A Private Insurance Response to Vaccine Refusal (Updated), Daily Bread for 8.11.21: Summerfest & Private Business Requirements, and No Shirt, No Shoes? No Service.

SpaceX Starship and Super Heavy become world’s tallest rocket after stacking:

Daily Bread, Fair Maps, Gerrymandering, Liberal Democracy, Wisconsin

Daily Bread for 8.14.21: Deserts

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Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 79. Sunrise is 6:01 AM and sunset 7:57 PM, for 13h 55m 47s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 37.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1933, loggers cause a forest fire in the Coast Range of Oregon, later known as the first forest fire of the Tillamook Burn, destroying 240,000 acres of land.

David Daley and Gaby Goldstein write America is full of ‘democracy deserts’. Wisconsin rivals Congo on some metrics:

The United States is becoming a land filled with “democracy deserts”, where gerrymandering and voting restrictions are making voters powerless to make change. And this round of redistricting could make things even worse.

Since 2012, the Electoral Integrity Project at Harvard University has studied the quality of elections worldwide. It has also issued biannual reports that grade US states, on a scale of 1 through 100. In its most recent study of the 2020 elections, the integrity of Wisconsin’s electoral boundaries earned a 23 – worst in the nation, on par with Jordan, Bahrain and the Congo.

….

In Wisconsin, for example, voters handed Democrats every statewide race in 2018 and 203,000 more votes for the state assembly – but the tilted Republican map handed Republicans 63 of the 99 seats nevertheless. Democratic candidates have won more or nearly the same number of votes for Michigan’s state house for the last decade – but never once captured a majority of seats.

There are some measures in which all places are alike; no one committed to a respectable constitutional order would want Wisconsin to be similar to the Congo in commitment to liberal democracy. (Since Trump, it’s been necessary to remind that liberal democracy does not mean left-of-center; it means popular sovereignty that recognizes individual rights (‘recognizing and protecting a sphere beyond the rightful reach of government in which individuals can enjoy independence and privacy’).

Gerrymandering has fated Wisconsin with legislative control by a minority over the state’s majority. This ideologically and ethnically homogenous minority prefers to govern, almost to rule, this way. They favor their own control over any fair arrangement or fair maps.

There’s talk about Wisconsin as a place of deserts, of news or democracy. This talk sometimes assumes that deserts are places without life, empty of anything except sand.

That’s not true, of course. Deserts do harbor creatures; some kinds of life flourish in a desert’s arid sands.

It’s simply that the denizens of the desert are disagreeable or deadly to those of more temperate climes.

The Rise And Fall of Convertible Cars In The U.S.:

Daily Bread, Demographics, Wisconsin

Daily Bread for 8.13.21: Wisconsin’s 2020 Census

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Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 82. Sunrise is 6:00 AM and sunset 7:59 PM, for 13h 58m 20s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 26.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1961, East Germany closes the border between the eastern and western sectors of Berlin to thwart its inhabitants’ attempts to escape to the West, and construction of the Berlin Wall begins. The day is known as Barbed Wire Sunday.

Molly Beck reports Wisconsin grows modestly and more diverse while Milwaukee plummets to 1930s levels, Census data show:

MADISON – Wisconsin has grown more racially diverse over a decade of modest growth, with population gains concentrated around the state’s capital city while its largest city, Milwaukee, fell to its smallest population in nearly a century, new U.S. Census data show.

The state’s population grew 3.6% since 2010 to 5.9 million — lagging the national growth of 7.4% and less than half the rate of its neighbor Minnesota.

The new data also reveal a notable drop — 4% — in the number of children living in Wisconsin, forecasting consequences for the state’s education systems and labor force.

The state is becoming more racially diverse with Hispanic residents growing in population by 33% and now accounting for the largest racial minority group in the state, surpassing the state’s Black population.

More than one-third of Wisconsin’s population growth over the last decade occurred in Dane County, in and around Madison. The county grew by 15% to add more than 73,000 people — the highest county-level increase in the state — with the city of Verona experiencing some of the fastest growth at 32%.

Meanwhile, the state’s largest city has hit its lowest population since 1930. Milwaukee’s population fell to 577,222 — a drop of about 17,000 people since 2010. Milwaukee County also saw a tiny population decrease of less than a percentage point.

These Wisconsin trends are similar to a national trend toward a more multi-racial and multi-ethnic society. See Census data: US is diversifying, white population shrinking (‘No racial or ethnic group dominates for those under age 18, and white people declined in numbers for the first time on record in the overall U.S. population as the Hispanic and Asian populations boomed this past decade, according to the 2020 census data’).Local census data for Whitewater and smaller cities are not yet, to my knowledge, available.

All these data prompt this question: is America great from a given racial composition, or from a constitutional order among citizens of whatever race or ethnicity? For those who see superiority in their race, those men of blut und boden and herrenvolk, these are unfavorable data. For those of us committed to liberal democracy, to a constitutional order of equal justice under law, there can be no favorable or unfavorable demographics on race or ethnicity.

America now finds herself in a continental conflict between these two ways of seeing and being.

This conflict will not soon end.

Kiwi watchers capture bird song in previously silent sites:

The call of New Zealand’s iconic kiwi has been captured in sites that were previously silent five years ago. The recordings come after the threatened bird has begun to return to patches of forest where the population had dropped.

Daily Bread, Sen. Ron Johnson

Daily Bread for 8.12.21: Ron Johnson’s Generous Benefactors

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Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 91. Sunrise is 5:59 AM and sunset 8:00 PM, for 14h 00m 52s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 17.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1981, IBM releases the IBM Personal Computer.

Over at ProPublica, Secret IRS Files Reveal How Much the Ultrawealthy Gained by Shaping Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Tax Cut.” Their exhaustive reporting reveals the zealous role that Sen. Ron Johnson played in getting tax breaks for his campaign donors.

The story helps answer part of the question on Johnson’s motivations (U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson: Ambitious, Compromised, or Crackpot?).  Johnson may be all three, but he’s plainly beholden to a few donors by ideology or ambition. The entire story is recommended in full. Excerpts on Johnson’s role for two big donors appear below: 

Johnson’s demand was simple: In exchange for his vote, the bill must sweeten the tax break for a class of companies that are known as pass-throughs, since profits pass through to their owners. Johnson praised such companies as “engines of innovation.” Behind the scenes, the senator pressed top Treasury Department officials on the issue, emails and the officials’ calendars show.

Within two weeks, Johnson’s ultimatum produced results. Trump personally called the senator to beg for his support, and the bill’s authors fattened the tax cut for these businesses. Johnson flipped to a “yes” and claimed credit for the change. The bill passed.

….

Confidential tax records, however, reveal that Johnson’s last-minute maneuver benefited two families more than almost any others in the country — both worth billions and both among the senator’s biggest donors.

Dick and Liz Uihlein of packaging giant Uline, along with roofing magnate Diane Hendricks, together had contributed around $20 million to groups backing Johnson’s 2016 reelection campaign.

The expanded tax break Johnson muscled through netted them $215 million in deductions in 2018 alone, drastically reducing the income they owed taxes on. At that rate, the cut could deliver more than half a billion in tax savings for Hendricks and the Uihleins over its eight-year life.

….

Johnson’s intervention in November 2017 was designed to boost the bill’s already generous tax break for pass-through companies. The bill had allowed for business owners to deduct up to 17.4% of their profits. Thanks to Johnson holding out, that figure was ultimately boosted to 20%.

That might seem like a small increase, but even a few extra percentage points can translate into tens of millions of dollars in extra deductions in one year alone for an ultrawealthy family.

The mechanics are complicated but, for the rich, it generally means that a business owner gets to keep an extra 7 cents on every dollar of profit. To understand the windfall, take the case of the Uihlein family.

Dick, the great-grandson of a beer magnate, and his wife, Liz, own and operate packaging giant Uline. The logo of the Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin, firm is stamped on the bottom of countless paper bags. Uline produced nearly $1 billion in profits in 2018, according to ProPublica’s analysis of tax records. Dick and Liz Uihlein, who own a majority of the company, reported more than $700 million in income that year. But they were able to slash what they owed the IRS with a $118 million deduction generated by the new tax break.

Liz Uihlein, who serves as president of Uline, has criticized high taxes in her company newsletter. The year before the tax overhaul, the couple gave generously to support Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. That same year, when Johnson faced long odds in his reelection bid against former Sen. Russ Feingold, the Uihleins gave more than $8 million to a series of political committees that blanketed the state with pro-Johnson and anti-Feingold ads. That blitz led the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel to dub the Uihleins “the Koch brothers of Wisconsin politics.”

Johnson’s campaign also got a boost from Hendricks, Wisconsin’s richest woman and owner of roofing wholesaler ABC Supply Co. The Beloit-based billionaire has publicly pushed for tax breaks and said she wants to stop the U.S. from becoming “a socialistic ideological nation.”

Hendricks has said Johnson won her over after she grilled him at a brunch meeting six years earlier. She gave about $12 million to a pair of political committees, the Reform America Fund and the Freedom Partners Action Fund, that bought ads attacking Feingold.

In the first year of the pass-through tax break, Hendricks got a $97 million deduction on income of $502 million. By reducing the income she owed taxes on, that deduction saved her around $36 million.

See also Johnson & Fitzgerald: Betrayers of Wisconsin, Ron Johnson Reads Lies about the Capitol Riot, Sen. Ron Johnson: ‘An all-access purveyor of misinformation,’ and Famous Moments in Climatology: Sen. Ron Johnson Shares His Insights.

The smart chain mail fabric that can stiffen on demand: