City, Conflicts of Interest, Ethics, Local Government, Newspapers, School District, Whitewater, WI Conflict of Interest Gallery™

The Whitewater, WI Conflict of Interest Gallery™

by JOHN ADAMS • 09/15/2019 • Comments

Ours is an era of conflicts of interest and self-dealing. Conflicts of interest sometimes begin with ignorance but they persist through arrogance. Simple principles of separation between roles that were once understood and respected (in the main) are now commonly rationalized away. If one bemoans degraded national ethics, one should be clear that local officials and private parties paved the way for ethical lapses through their own lesser standards.

And so, and so — a gallery of conflicts and ethical lapses, to be updated so often as necessary. One can – and should – match each lapse with a reply.

Latest Submission: School Board Member Reports for Local Newspaper on His Own District’s Meetings (online 9.6.19, in print 9.9.19).

Whitewater Unified School District board member Tom Ganser writes as a ‘correspondent’ for Daily Union editor Chris Spangler in a story entitled Whitewater School District Holds Annual Data Retreat. He is nowhere in the story identified as a school board member. That’s the editor’s lapse of journalistic standards. The board member has an official duty of oversight on a public body, but reports on those over whom he has oversight. That’s his lapse into a conflict of interest between roles as an impartial overseer and a mere press agent.

The Whitewater, WI Conflict of Interest Gallery™

In fairness, this conflict-laden approach has beset Whitewater for years. A truly proper gallery of this sort would require an entire wing dedicated to the work of longtime Whitewater councilmember and current school board member Jim Stewart, who so often published accounts of the very meetings and government initiatives of which he was a part. I’ve a fair number of saved examples, but perhaps the current owners of Stewart’s archive will place the full oeuvre de l’artiste online.

Uncategorized

Daily Bread for 9.15.19

by JOHN ADAMS • 09/15/2019 • Comments

Good morning.

On this day in 1950, United Nations forces under the command of Gen. MacArthur land at Inchon, and within two weeks liberate Seoul from North Korean occupation.

Recommended for reading in full:

Izabela Zaluska reports Pay-to-stay, other fees, can put jail inmates hundreds or thousands in debt (‘In some Wisconsin counties, inmates pay an average of $390 a month in pay-to-stay fees; advocates say such fees can criminalize poverty’):

In 2011, Sean Pugh was arrested for allegedly violating terms of his release from prison. A year and a half into his roughly two-year stay in the Brown County Jail, he realized he owed the county around $17,000 — the result of a $20 daily “pay-to-stay” fee plus fees from previous jail stints.

Brown County is one of at least 23 Wisconsin counties that assess “pay-to-stay” fees, which charge inmates for room and board for the time they are incarcerated, according to a Wisconsin Watch survey of county jails.

….

Under Wisconsin law, pay-to-stay can apply to the entire period of time the person is in jail, including pretrial detention. It is then up to the counties whether they want to charge only sentenced inmates or also charge those who are not sentenced.

The jail systems in Wisconsin’s two largest counties — Dane and Milwaukee — do not levy pay-to-stay fees. But in other Wisconsin counties, jails are taking in hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, the Wisconsin Watch survey found.

Such fees have escalated in recent decades. The U.S. Supreme Court recently ruled in a 9-0 decision that financial penalties levied by states may be so high as to violate the federal Eighth Amendment constitutional protection against excessive fines.

Noting that excessive fines for “vagrancy” were used after the Civil War to re-enslave freed men, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in his concurrence: “The right against excessive fines traces its lineage back in English law nearly a millennium, and … has been consistently recognized as a core right worthy of constitutional protection.”

(On this point, Thomas is right.)

Washington and Lincoln were great presidents. But only one was a great poet:

When it comes to ranking the presidents, there are only two contenders for the top spot: George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. They had a few things in common: Both lost a parent as a child, both had a serious demeanor, and both dabbled with writing poetry.

But only one was any good at poetry. Listen to this story on “Retropod”:

This Swiss Restaurant Is Built Into the Side of a Mountain:

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 9.14.19

by JOHN ADAMS • 09/14/2019 • 3 Comments

Good morning.

On this day in 1812, a surprise awaits when Napoleon enters Moscow:

he was surprised to have received no delegation from the city. At the approach of a victorious general, the civil authorities customarily presented themselves at the gates of the city with the keys to the city in an attempt to safeguard the population and their property. As nobody received Napoleon he sent his aides into the city, seeking out officials with whom the arrangements for the occupation could be made. When none could be found, it became clear that the Russians had left the city unconditionally. In a normal surrender, the city officials would be forced to find billets and make arrangements for the feeding of the soldiers, but the situation caused a free-for-all in which every man was forced to find lodgings and sustenance for himself. Napoleon was secretly disappointed by the lack of custom as he felt it robbed him of a traditional victory over the Russians, especially in taking such a historically significant city. To make matters worse, Moscow had been stripped of all supplies by its governor, Feodor Rostopchin, who had also ordered the prisons to be opened.

Recommended for reading in full:

Shamane Mills reports Wisconsin’s Obesity Rate Remains Unchanged (‘Report By Trust For America’s Health Shows Nearly A Third Of Residents Are Obese’):

Federal health data shows obesity rates went up in 33 states last year. Wisconsin remained stable with 32 percent of the state’s residents qualifying as obese — a number above the national average of nearly 31 percent.

“These latest data shout that our national obesity crisis is getting worse,” said John Auerbach, president and CEO of Trust for America’s Health which compiled a report using the federal statistics.

Nine states had obesity rates above 35 percent: Alabama, Arkansas, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota and West Virginia.

A number of health providers and advocacy groups in Wisconsin have put out recommendations to curb obesity which increases risk for Type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, stroke and many types of cancers.

It Was Easier to Be Skinny in the ’80s:

A 2015 study revealed that people today are 10 percent heavier than they were in the 1980s—even with the same diets and exercise regimens. A new episode of The Idea File investigates the plethora of complex factors that may be contributing to our increasing BMI, including a changing microbiome and toxic chemicals in the environment.

(The EU has banned certain chemicals that might lead to obesity, but people in a free society can and should manage their choices of cosmetics, for example, without government intervention.)

Trump Claims That Energy-Efficient Light Bulbs Make Him Look Orange:

Comet Borisov May Be Insterstellar – Orbit Animation:

See Astronomers May Have Found an Interstellar Comet. Here’s Why That Matters.

Assault Awareness & Prevention, Crime, Law

Unbelievable

by JOHN ADAMS • 09/13/2019 • Comments

In December 2015, T. Christian Miller of ProPublica and Ken Armstrong of The Marshall Project published An Unbelievable Story of Rape, about a woman (her middle name is Marie) who was raped, pressured to recant her account, and later found herself charged with a misdemeanor offense. In fact, she was raped, her attacker was later found to be a serial rapist, and her experience shows how indifferent – or hostile – the law can be to honest people simply trying to recount their injuries.

I read the story when it came out, and there is now a Netflix limited series, Unbelievable, that tells of Marie’s case.

The Netflix series comes recommended from those reviewers who have previewed it; I have yet to see it. The story, however, I would recommend now, with the reminder that well-written accounts of crimes – and of the indifference of others to those crimes – are painful to read. (One can say, that having re-read the story before the release of the series, the written account is as powerful as when one first read it years earlier.)

From Pro-Publica and The Marshall Project:

An Unbelievable Story of Rape

From Netlflix, the trailer for Unbelievable:

Cats

Friday Catblogging: Black Cat Edition

by JOHN ADAMS • 09/13/2019 • Comments

more >>

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 9.13.19

by JOHN ADAMS • 09/13/2019 • Comments

Good morning.

On this day in 1862, Union soldiers discover Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Special Order 191, detailing Confederate troop movements; the discovery gave Union generals valuable information they used to their advantage at the Battle of Antietam.

Recommended for reading in full:

David Corn reports How to Stop Russia From Attacking and Influencing the 2020 Election:

And Trump, who has never fully acknowledged Putin’s attack in 2016, recently noted that he would accept secret help, in the form of dirt on a political rival, from a foreign government for his reelection campaign. That remark, his call to allow Russia to reenter the G8, and his general Russia-didn’t-do-anything stance certainly send a signal to Putin: Feel free to do it again. Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has blocked votes on a variety of election security bills.

All of this is particularly maddening because there are steps the US government could take to prevent a repeat of 2016 or something worse. A new report released by the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, chronicles what other Western governments have done to counter Moscow’s efforts and outlines steps that could be adopted in the United States to beat back an attack on the next election. (CAP was founded by John Podesta, who certainly cares a lot about Russian attacks: When he was chair of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, his emails were hacked by Russian operatives and leaked by WikiLeaks through the final four weeks of the 2016 campaign.)

The study, written by James Lamond and Talia Dessel, notes that “Russia is consistently shifting and updating its interference tactics, making it even harder to protect future elections,” and the paper examines several case studies of Russian intervention since the 2016 election. In 2017, Moscow sought to influence the French presidential election to boost the odds for Marine Le Pen, the National Front candidate running against Emmanuel Macron on an anti-immigrant, anti-EU, anti-NATO, and pro-Russia platform. During that race, Russia mounted a disinformation campaign using rumor and forged documents, cyberattacks on campaign officials, and a leak of stolen data. That same year, Russia-linked trolls and bots amplified the messages of the far-right Alternative for Germany party, known as the AfD, in Germany during the federal election there. (The Kremlin also boosted the themes of the left-wing anti-fascists—a sign Moscow was aiming to sow overall political discord.) In 2018, Russian state propaganda outfits consistently smeared Sweden, while a populist, anti-immigrant party was vying for power in that country’s election. In 2019, Russia-linked operatives used disinformation efforts during elections for the European Parliament to suppress voter turnout.

Sen. Harris last night offered a timely reminder about Trump’s intentions:

NASA Goddard has posted Hubble’s Brand New Image of Saturn:

America, History, Liberty, Never Trump, Politics, Trump

After This Conflict Is Won

by JOHN ADAMS • 09/12/2019 • Comments

These last years have been difficult, and one can reasonably expect worse from Trumpism before that ideology is consigned – as it will be – to the political outer darkness. A necessary condition for optimism is an understanding of the present from which one can build a better future. (Local boosterism and babbittry are failures because they’re built on exaggerations and lies that produce only more exaggerations and lies.) Even in the midst of these troubled times, one sees the outlines of a restored, reconstructed America. One can see these outlines from events at home and abroad.

Over a year ago, Anne Applebaum observed Greece offers a glimpse of life after populism:

There was a moment, at the height of the Greek debt crisis in July 2015, when many Athenians went to sleep expecting to wake up in a different country. One Greek academic told me he feared Greece would crash out of the euro currency overnight, that there would be no money in the banks in the morning, that there would be food shortages and then riots: “Greece is a middle-class country,” he told me. “I didn’t think we would be able to cope with the shock.” Several others told me that they had genuinely expected the arrival of a Venezuelan-style dictatorship, perhaps with tanks on the street.
….
But the failure of Syriza [a populist party] has also triggered the opposite reaction [to apathy]: a small but growing attempt to revive economic liberalism, for the first time in recent memory, and to celebrate liberal democracy as well. A decade ago, fashionable intellectuals were all left-wing in Greece, and most books on politics and economics were written by Marxists. Now, it’s possible to sit down in a cafe with young people who describe themselves not only as “economic liberals” but also as “neoliberals,” adopting a phrase that was used as a harsh insult only a few years ago.

In America, Robert Reich observes Don’t Give Up — America Will Bounce Back:

The arc of American history reveals an unmistakable pattern. Whenever privilege and power conspire to pull us backward, we eventually rally and move forward.
Sometimes it takes an economic shock like the bursting of a giant speculative bubble. Sometimes we just reach a tipping point where the frustrations of average Americans turn into action.
Now, come forward in time with me.
Look at the startling diversity of younger Americans. Most Americans now under 18 years old are ethnically Hispanic, Asian or Pacific Islander, African-American, or of more than one race. In ten years, it’s projected that most Americans under 30 will be.
Three decades from now, most of America will people of color or of more than one race. That diversity will be a huge strength. Hopefully, it will mean more tolerance, less racism, less xenophobia.
Young people are determined to make America better. I’ve been teaching for almost 40 years, and I’ve never taught a generation of students as committed to improving the nation and the world as is the generation I’m now teaching. A record percentage of them voted in the 2018 midterm elections. Another sign of our future strength.

Federal Government, Government Spending

$1,000,000,000,000

by JOHN ADAMS • 09/12/2019 • Comments

BREAKING: The U.S. budget deficit surpassed $1 trillion in the first 11 months of the fiscal year through August, according to data from the Treasury Department https://t.co/cVndXhFyxh

— Bloomberg (@business) September 12, 2019

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 9.12.19

by JOHN ADAMS • 09/12/2019 • Comments

Good morning.

On this day in 1940, Marcel Ravidat discovers the entrance to Lascaux Cave, a cave complex with over 600 drawings from the Upper Paleolithic era. The next day, “he returned to the scene with three friends….The teenagers discovered that the cave walls were covered with depictions of animals.”

Recommended for reading in full:

Rick Newman reports Trump’s trade war has killed 300,000 jobs:

President Trump says he is “winning big time, against China.” But his trade war is causing measurable damage to the U.S. economy, with the pain likely to worsen.

Forecasting firm Moody’s Analytics estimates that Trump’s trade war with China has already reduced U.S. employment by 300,000 jobs, compared with likely employment levels absent the trade war. That’s a combination of jobs eliminated by firms struggling with tariffs and other elements of the trade war, and jobs that would have been created but haven’t because of reduced economic activity.

The firm’s chief economist, Mark Zandi, told Yahoo Finance that the job toll from the trade war will hit about 450,000 by the end of the year, if there’s no change in policy. By the end of 2020, the trade war will have killed 900,000 jobs, on its current course. The hardest-hit sectors are manufacturing, warehousing, distribution and retail.

Other data back up the Moody’s Analytics numbers. Employers have created 1.3 million jobs so far this year, down from 1.9 million during the same period in 2018. The manufacturing sector has actually contracted, with many producers struggling with higher prices caused by Trump’s tariffs. Business investment is growing by the smallest amount since late 2016.

Dan Spinelli writes Trump’s National Security Team Is Now a Wholly Owned Subsidiary of the Defense Industry:

With John Bolton out as national security adviser, the defense industry is poised to receive even more representation in the highest levels of President Donald Trump’s foreign policy team. Bolton deputy Charlie Kupperman—a former executive at Boeing and Lockheed Martin—was tapped to fill the job in an acting capacity, giving industry veterans another prominent perch in the administration. Ex-Raytheon lobbyist Mark Esper already serves as Secretary of Defense.

While in office, Trump has become a major booster for American defense contractors. He’s urged Vietnamese leaders to buy “the best military equipment in the world by far” from American firms and has even promoted specific companies, such as Lockheed Martin, from the White House’s official Twitter feed. When Saudi Arabia, a longtime US ally, drew international condemnation for its role in ordering the death of a Washington Post journalist, Trump appeared to excuse the kingdom’s behavior due, in part, to the “record amount of money” it had spent on “military equipment from Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and many other great US defense contractors.”

Who Are Trump’s Republican Challengers?:

Bad Ideas, CDA, Corporate Welfare, Development, Foxconn, Government Spending, Mendacity, That Which Paved the Way, UW Madison, WEDC

Be Patient, UW-Madison: Only $99,300,000.00 to Go!

by JOHN ADAMS • 09/11/2019 • 5 Comments

If a group invited a guest speaker who said the world was flat, then that group would be rightly discarded as a credible policy advocate. In Whitewater and other towns, crony-capitalist groups of different sizes proudly declared the Foxconn project a boon for Wisconsin. (Trump, himself, declared it a boon for the whole planet: “the eighth wonder of the world.”)

These gentlemen might ask UW-Madison how Foxconn’s promises have turned out for that school. Kelly Meyerhofer reports Foxconn pledged $100 million to UW-Madison. The school has so far received $700,000:

Roughly a year since Foxconn Technology Group pledged $100 million to help fund a new UW-Madison engineering building and company-related research, the university said it has received $700,000, less than 1% of the original commitment.

….

Foxconn’s master agreement with UW-Madison does not say how much it plans to provide the university or when, although the agreement is for five years. In fact, the 12-page document does not even mention a dollar figure and instead notes the company “intends to make a substantial investment in research and other activities” with UW-Madison, despite public statements in August 2018 referencing $100 million.

(Emphasis added.)

Be patient, Badgers – you’ve only $99,300,000.00 to go. Hey, Greater Whitewater Committee and Whitewater Community Development Authority – how about a bake sale to speed this process along?

I’d happily spring for a dozen croissants…

Previously: 10 Key Articles About Foxconn, Foxconn as Alchemy: Magic Multipliers, Foxconn Destroys Single-Family Homes, Foxconn Devours Tens of Millions from State’s Road Repair Budget, The Man Behind the Foxconn Project, A Sham News Story on Foxconn, Another Pig at the Trough, Even Foxconn’s Projections Show a Vulnerable (Replaceable) Workforce, Foxconn in Wisconsin: Not So High Tech After All, Foxconn’s Ambition is Automation, While Appeasing the Politically Ambitious, Foxconn’s Shabby Workplace Conditions, Foxconn’s Bait & Switch, Foxconn’s (Overwhelmingly) Low-Paying Jobs, The Next Guest Speaker, Trump, Ryan, and Walker Want to Seize Wisconsin Homes to Build Foxconn Plant, Foxconn Deal Melts Away, “Later This Year,” Foxconn’s Secret Deal with UW-Madison, Foxconn’s Predatory Reliance on Eminent Domain, Foxconn: Failure & Fraud, Foxconn Roundup: Desperately Ill Edition, Foxconn Roundup: Indiana Layoffs & Automation Everywhere, Foxconn Roundup: Outside Work and Local Land, Foxconn Couldn’t Even Meet Its Low First-Year Goal, Foxconn Talks of Folding Wisconsin Manufacturing Plans, WISGOP Assembly Speaker Vos Hopes You’re Stupid, Lost Homes and Land, All Over a Foxconn Fantasy, Laughable Spin as Industrial Policy, Foxconn: The ‘State Visit Project,’ ‘Inside Wisconsin’s Disastrous $4.5 Billion Deal With Foxconn,’ Foxconn: When the Going Gets Tough…, The Amazon-New York Deal, Like the Foxconn Deal, Was Bad Policy, Foxconn Roundup, Foxconn: The Roads to Nowhere, Foxconn: Evidence of Bad Policy Judgment, Foxconn: Behind Those Headlines, Foxconn: On Shaky Ground, Literally, Foxconn: Heckuva Supply Chain They Have There…, Foxconn: Still Empty, and the Chairman of the Board Needs a Nap, Foxconn: Cleanup on Aisle 4, Foxconn: The Closer One Gets, The Worse It Is, Foxconn Confirm Gov. Evers’s Claim of a Renegotiation Discussion, America’s Best Know Better, Despite Denials, Foxconn’s Empty Buildings Are Still Empty, Right on Schedule – A Foxconn Delay, Foxconn: Reality as a (Predictable) Disappointment, Town Residents Claim Trump’s Foxconn Factory Deal Failed Them, Foxconn: Independent Study Confirms Project is Beyond Repair, It Shouldn’t, and Foxconn: Wrecking Ordinary Lives for Nothing, and Hey, Wisconsin, How About an Airport-Coffee Robot?

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 9.11.19

by JOHN ADAMS • 09/11/2019 • Comments

Good morning.

Today is the eighteenth anniversary of the September 11th Al Qaida attacks on the United States.

Recommended for reading in full:

Bruce Reidel writes Al-Qaida today, 18 years after 9/11:

Eighteen years after the 9/11 attacks, the al-Qaida organization that carried them out is a shell of its previous self. The global campaign against Osama bin Laden’s creation has achieved notable success. The ideas that inspired bin Laden and his followers have lost some, but not all, of their attractiveness. There is no place for complacency, but the threat is different.

….

The 9/11 attacks also transformed the American national security bureaucracy more thoroughly than any event since the dawn of the Cold War. New organizations like the National Counter Terrorism Center, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Director of National Intelligence owe their creation to 9/11. This infrastructure is still essential to detecting and disrupting plots. The next administration should review the infrastructure with an eye to strengthening damaged foreign alliances.

Shawn Donnan reports Recession Already Grips Corners of U.S., Menacing Trump’s 2020 Bid:

Somewhere between his home near Madison and the factory he runs on the edge of the small town of Brodhead, the news will turn to the trade wars and Donald Trump will again claim that China is bearing the cost of his tariffs. That’s when Petras loses it.

“It’s just an outright lie, and he knows it,” says Petras, president of Kuhn North America, which employs some 600 people at its farm-equipment factory in Wisconsin. For Kuhn, Trump’s trade war has produced a toxic mix of rising costs and falling revenues. “You’re slamming your fist on the steering wheel and saying ‘Why would you tell people this?’”

About 250 Kuhn employees spent the Labor Day holiday caught in a two-week furlough, and they’re facing another in early October. A shrinking order book means Kuhn is cutting costs and slashing production as Petras and his managers peer out at a U.S. economy that looks far bleaker from the swing-state heartland than it does in either the White House or on Wall Street.

….

In 22 states—including electorally important ones like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania—the number of people working in factories actually fell in the first seven months of this year, according to figures compiled by the Economic Innovation Group, a think tank.

This isn’t what Trump promised. From his trade policy to tax cuts and deregulation, his grand economic vow was to bring factories home. By unraveling trade deals such as Nafta, taking on China, and deploying tariffs like economic cruise missiles, Trump’s “America First” agenda was supposed to boost growth in an iconic sector of the economy.

New Zealand v. Rats:

Kakistocracy, Trump

Top Trump Departures

by JOHN ADAMS • 09/10/2019 • Comments

Top Trump Departures
Flynn
Walsh
Comey
Dubke
McFarland
Spicer
Priebus
Mooch
Bannon
Gorka
Price
Powell
Manigault
McCabe
Porter
Hicks
Cohn
Tillerson
McMaster
Shulkin
Bossert
Pruitt
Short
Haley
Sessions
Kelly
Ayers
Zinke
Mattis
Shine
McMahon
Nielsen
Sanders
Acosta
Greenblatt
Bolton

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) September 10, 2019

CDA, City, Development, Economy, Local Government, Poverty, Taxes/Taxation

Trump Tax Bill is the Predictable Failure Sensible People Warned It Would Be

by JOHN ADAMS • 09/10/2019 • Comments

In Whitewater, there’s a business lobby that amounts to a right-wing landlord or two, the dogsbodies who follow three paces behind, and the municipal officials who have been, variously, beguiled or browbeaten into asserting that government-directed capital spending means general prosperity. It doesn’t; it’s the great myth of municipal policy. A building here, a building there, yet family poverty has grown worse in Whitewater since the end of the Great Recession.

These men don’t believe in free markets (of capital, labor, and goods) in constant, voluntary private transactions to achieve advantageous results for individuals and collectively for society.

Instead, they believe in – crave, truly – the manipulation of public policy for their own ends, imagining themselves especially clever and convinced they’re especially worthy.

On a national scale, Trump’s tax bill represents the misdirection of tax policy to benefit a few just as local policy claims ‘community development’ that has done little for the community’s individual or household incomes (as the city still has high levels of poverty).

About that Trump tax bill: it’s a failure even on its own terms. John Cassidy writes A Decline in Capital Investment Reveals the False Promise of Trump’s Tax Bill:

It didn’t take long for the White House to claim that the tax bill had worked. This time last year, Trump pointed out that private-business investment was rising at an annual rate of more than nine per cent. “So that’s a very tremendous increase,” he said. “There hasn’t been an increase like that in many, many years—decades. And I think the most important thing, and Larry Kudlow”—the director of the National Economic Council—“just confirmed to me, along with Kevin Hassett, that these numbers are very, very sustainable. This isn’t a one-time shot.”

As usual, Trump was exaggerating. The upturn in business investment during the first half of last year was by no means unprecedented, but it did represent an increase on the previous few years. However, it was fleeting. In the second half of last year, the growth in business investment fell sharply, and the slowdown has continued into 2019. During the second quarter of this year, according to last week’s G.D.P. report from the Commerce Department, it turned negative. If you exclude investment in residential real estate, which also fell, business-fixed investment declined at an annual rate of 0.6 per cent in three months, from April to June.

Update, 9.10.19: The policy of the last state administration was a series of interventions to redistribute resources to favored businesses. Over that time, local special interests merely chanted the state administration’s tune. Community Development Authorities across the state became miniature WEDCs. That approach has been, to put it mildly, a bad one. See Three Fundamental Failures: Employment, Income, and Poverty.

These men went too far, and did too much, leaving a mess that sugary falsehoods cannot conceal…

/div

more >>

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 9.10.19

by JOHN ADAMS • 09/10/2019 • Comments

Good morning.

Whitewater’s Public Works Committee meets at 6 PM.

On this day in 1813, America is victorious at the Battle of Lake Erie: “Nine vessels of the United States Navy defeated and captured six vessels of the British Royal Navy. This ensured American control of the lake for the rest of the war, which in turn allowed the Americans to recover Detroit and win the Battle of the Thames to break the Indian confederation of Tecumseh. It was one of the biggest naval battles of the War of 1812.”

Recommended for reading in full:

Toluse Olorunnipa and Scott Clement report Six in 10 Americans expect a recession and higher prices as Trump’s approval rating slips, Washington Post-ABC News poll finds:

Trump’s approval rating among voting-age Americans stands at 38 percent, down from 44 percent in June but similar to 39 percent in April, with 56 percent now saying they disapprove of his performance in office. Among registered voters, 40 percent say they approve of Trump, while 55 percent disapprove.

Concern over the economy — and specifically Trump’s handling of trade negotiations with China — have become a drag on the president’s public standing, particularly with women.

The Post-ABC poll finds Trump’s economic approval rating has also declined from 51 percent in early July to 46 percent in the new survey, with 47 percent disapproving. His relatively positive standing on the economy continues to buoy his reputation amid public criticism on other issues.

In the July survey, the economy was the sole issue where Trump received positive numbers, with more than half of all Americans disapproving of his handling of immigration, health care, gun violence, climate change and other issues.

Trump’s handling of trade negotiations with China is a particularly weak spot, with 35 percent in the new poll approving of him on this issue and 56 percent disapproving.

Christopher Flavelle, Lisa Friedman, and Peter Baker report Commerce Chief Threatened Firings at NOAA After Trump’s Hurricane Tweets, Sources Say:

The Secretary of Commerce threatened to fire top employees at NOAA on Friday after the agency’s Birmingham office contradicted President Trump’s claim that Hurricane Dorian might hit Alabama, according to three people familiar with the discussion.

That threat led to an unusual, unsigned statement later that Friday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration disavowing the office’s own position that Alabama was not at risk. The reversal caused widespread anger within the agency and drew criticism from the scientific community that NOAA, a division of the Commerce Department, had been bent to political purposes.

A Standing Ovation For Birmingham NWS After They Stood Up To Trump:

Why Uber Still Can’t Make a Profit: