Everything the critics predicted seems to have taken place. Wasn’t it obvious from the beginning that abandoning a trade alliance would hurt your economy?

From the EU, the drama of the Brexit negotiations was watched with mixed feelings. Initial regret shifted to a desire to limit the damage. Some economic opportunities to fill the gaps left by the UK opened up. Brexit was clearly going to be a loss for everyone, but far greater for the UK than for any continental European economy.

The negative impact on trade, so far, is substantial for the UK. The Centre for European Reform recently estimated that there has been an 11.2% negative impact on trade as a result of Brexit. The UK share of world trade has fallen by a further 15% compared to pre-referendum projections.

Assessing the impact of Brexit on the EU presents a challenge, as macro-economic data is contaminated by the pandemic shock. However, digging into the details of trade flows, there has been a noticeable negative effect on some countries, sectors and firms. This has been especially sizeable for small producers who used to have unbounded single market access to the UK. Now, the extra paperwork puts off firms that lack the critical mass to absorb the extra fixed costs of handling non-EU trade procedures. Over time, the situation may well improve, but some companies have already given up. British consumers have paid the price, EU consumers far less.

And yet, even now, the Tories and that idiot, Boris Johnson, are in charge of the country. The rest of Europe is sitting back and watching in amazement as the Brits punch themselves in the face, over and over again. Here in America, we’re also impressed at how much self-harm is going on, but we’re less surprised since we’re experiencing our own ongoing madness.

Oh, look, I learned a new acronym. Handy!

There’s a pointless wrangle going on in this thread about the slogan “Defund the police”, which CripDyke also addresses reasonably on the Pervert Justice blog. DILLIGAF, people. ACAB. Defund the police, whatever that means to you. Change is necessary. That’s where the focus ought to be, not on the pedantry of how the demand is phrased, but recognizing the reality of how awful the police are in this country.

For example, here’s the story of the NYPD police squad rousting black teenagers on Halloween, even hitting one of them with their car. A civilian review board found that the police were out of line, so the police voided their conclusion and said they’d handle it entirely internally. These are the kinds of people we’re looking at.

One of the officers, the report noted, was wearing a sweatshirt with a logo of the Punisher, a Marvel character who kills lawbreakers, which is popular with cops and white nationalists. The sweatshirt also had a blue line over the American flag and the acronym DILLIGAF. (“Do I Look Like I Give a Fuck.”) The officer told investigators he hadn’t known the meaning of the logo or the acronym on his sweatshirt.

Isn’t that charming. That’s the face of the police they are proud to present.

You might wonder what’s happened to the bad cops. Here you go:

Officer Christopher Brower drove into the boy, according to the report. Officer Christopher Digioia wore the Punisher sweatshirt and is the one officer still facing a disciplinary trial, for allegedly swearing at the teens. A search of their respective CCRB files shows they were also disciplined for another case together. Investigators found that, in April 2019, about six months before the Halloween incident, the two had refused to provide their names or badge numbers to a civilian. The NYPD penalized them for that with “instructions.”

The precinct commander who the CCRB concluded oversaw the wrongful arrests is Inspector Megan O’Malley. She told investigators she believed the arrests were justified because the boys ran and one had dropped a kitchen knife. O’Malley has since been promoted and now heads a precinct in midtown Manhattan.

The officer who, the report said, first ordered the boys to be stopped and then pointed a gun at one of them is Lt. John Dasaro. He told investigators he had been worried that the boy was armed. Dasaro was moved to work at the internal affairs unit that investigates use of force against civilians.

It’s not just big city problems. Here’s the story of Brookside, Alabama, a little tiny town like a model Mayberry.

The town of 1,253 just north of Birmingham reported just 55 serious crimes to the state in the entire eight year period between 2011 and 2018 – none of them homicide or rape. But in 2018 it began building a police empire, hiring more and more officers to blanket its six miles of roads and mile-and-a-half jurisdiction on Interstate 22.

By 2020 Brookside made more misdemeanor arrests than it has residents. It went from towing 50 vehicles in 2018 to 789 in 2020 – each carrying fines. That’s a 1,478% increase, with 1.7 tows for every household in town.

The growth has come with trouble to match. Brookside officers have been accused in lawsuits of fabricating charges, using racist language and “making up laws” to stack counts on passersby. Defendants must pay thousands in fines and fees – or pay for costly appeals to state court – and poorer residents or passersby fall into patterns of debt they cannot easily escape.

“Brookside is a poster child for policing for profit,” said Carla Crowder, the director of Alabama Appleseed Center for Law & Justice, a nonprofit devoted to justice and equity. “We are not safer because of it.”

Defund the police. Does anyone want to argue that at least Brookside is one place that needs savage cuts to police funding? Anyone? They expanded the police force ten fold, and the town wants to increase it even more. Look at what they have now!

This is indefensible. Defunding is the answer.

The pandemic has been a good thing for the rich. They’ve consolidated their power.

The wealth of the world’s 10 richest men has doubled since the pandemic began. The incomes of 99% of humanity are worse off because of COVID-19. Widening economic, gender, and racial inequalities—as well as the inequality that exists between countries—are tearing our world apart. This is not by chance, but choice: “economic violence” is perpetrated when structural policy choices are made for the richest and most powerful people. This causes direct harm to us all, and to the poorest people, women and girls, and racialized groups most. Inequality contributes to the death of at least one person every four seconds. But we can radically redesign our economies to be centered on equality. We can claw back extreme wealth through progressive taxation; invest in powerful, proven inequality-busting public measures; and boldly shift power in the economy and society. If we are courageous, and listen to the movements demanding change, we can create an economy in which nobody lives in poverty, nor with unimaginable billionaire wealth—in which inequality no longer kills.

It’s only a small ‘elite’.

The world’s small elite of 2,755 billionaires has seen its fortunes grow more during COVID-19 than they have in the whole of the last fourteen years—fourteen years that themselves were a bonanza for billionaire wealth.
This is the biggest annual increase in billionaire wealth since records began. It is taking place on every continent. It is enabled by skyrocketing stock market prices, a boom in unregulated entities, a surge in monopoly power, and privatization, alongside the erosion of individual corporate tax rates and regulations, and workers’ rights and wages—all aided by the weaponization of racism.
These trends are alarming. By not vaccinating the world, governments have allowed the conditions for the COVID-19 virus to dangerously mutate. At the same time, they have also created the conditions for an entirely new variant of billionaire wealth. This variant, the billionaire variant, is profoundly dangerous for our world.
New figures and analysis released in December 2021 by the World Inequality Lab reveal that since 1995, the top 1% have captured 19 times more of global wealth growth than the whole of the bottom 50% of humanity. Inequality is now as great as it was at the pinnacle of Western imperialism in the early 20th century. The Gilded Age of the late 19th Century has been surpassed.

The good news: we’ll only need a small number of guillotines to take care of that group.

The bad news: they control the media, and have succeeded in brainwashing hundreds of millions to act against their own interests and prop up the oligarchs. It’s shocking how thoroughly they’ve convinced the mob to spurn vaccination, the most effective tool to control the pandemic. It’s as if the media moguls and politicians are finding it advantageous to promote death and disease.

The next election is going to be a doozy. The Republicans have been pulling out all the stops to claim that the last one was fraudulent, and you just know that the only time a Republican will accept an election result is if a Democrat loses. Every election is going to be surrounded with a cloud of lawsuits, and further, they imagine that victory means they get to trample over the law even more. Steve Bannon is already planning to lock Joe Biden up.

Fringe conservative Steve Bannon announced that the 2023 Republican agenda, should they win the House and Senate back in 2022, will be to impeach and arrest President Joe Biden.

Newt Gingrich went even further. He’s going to lock up every congressperson who had the temerity to investigate the 6 January insurrection.

Newt Gingrich, a former House speaker and candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, stoked outrage on Sunday by predicting members of the House committee investigating the Capitol attack will be imprisoned if Republicans retake the chamber this year.

Do they even realize these are extraordinarily anti-democratic proposals? You can dislike Biden and the Democrats, but doing their job is not criminal activity — unlike, say, using a political office to enrich themselves or conspiring to revolt if an election doesn’t go their way. Meanwhile, over on Fox News, we see the end product of this kind of thinking. Tucker Carlson Wonders Why the U.S. Would Side With Ukraine’s Fledgling Democracy Against Putin’s Russia. Charming.

“Why is it disloyal to side with Russia but loyal to side with Ukraine?” Carlson asked. “They’re both foreign countries that don’t care anything about the United States. Kind of strange.”

Carlson’s comments came as Russia has steadily massed troops on Ukraine’s border over the last few months. The latest assessment by the Ukrainian Defense Ministry estimates that there are 127,000 Russian troops in the region. In response, up to 8,500 U.S. troops have been put on heightened alert for a possible deployment, the Pentagon confirmed Monday, with most of them intended to aid NATO forces.

Such countermeasures are pointless, Carlson argued, because Ukraine, a fledgling democracy, is “strategically irrelevant” to the U.S.

I remember when Republicans were fanatically anti-Russia, and they defended their position by advocating for Democracy and the American Way of Life; we were the forces of Good, that shining light on a hill, and they were the evil empire. Now Tucker Carlson declares No rational person could defend a war with Russia over Ukraine. Nobody thinks a war like that would make America safer or stronger or more prosperous. I wouldn’t suggest we should go to war, again — we’ve been rather quick on the trigger to plunge into wars — but there’s a difference between that and thinking we should side with an openly tyrannical dictator like Putin. It’s nice that they aren’t even pretending these wars aren’t about profit and gain, but that they’re even baffled by someone who’d take the side of a democratic underdog against an oppressive authoritarian invasion is revealing.

But then it’s become obvious that Republicans don’t like democracy and are eager to set up their own authoritarian dictatorship.

Even if they like that idea, though, they should look at their prospective emperors. There isn’t an Augustus among them, just a lot of bumbling poseurs and deeply stupid demagogues.

This is the first time I learned about the Burn Pits problem.

During the live recorded meeting, which ran close to three hours, politicians listened to veteran advocacy groups discuss how uniformed military personnel have been exposed to dangerous toxins when ordered to stand by burn pits—an ill-conceived method of burning trash at military sites in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere.

That grimy duty usually fell to low-ranking soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines, some of whom developed heart, lung, and digestive ailments after hours of standing over smoke from the burning plastics, rubber, and paper envelopes from families back home.

That’s bad on a couple of levels: bad for the environment, bad for the people living there, bad and wasteful of resources. I can see why it’s an important issue, and I didn’t even listen to the testimony, but I hadn’t heard anything about it before. That I now have we can thank Madison Cawthorn for being such a colossal, posturing asshole, so I guess his bad behavior did one good thing. He was on the committee, and instead of paying close attention, he used that time to…play with his gun? I guess he was bored. Other members of the panel noticed how little attention he paid to a life-or-death issue for veterans.

Rosie Lopez Torres, the cofounder of Burn Pits 360, told The Daily Beast that she did not notice that Cawthorn was working on his gun. She only recalled that he seemed distracted at times. But when she saw the picture of what he was doing, she was livid.

“Oh wow,” she said. “That is insane. Total disregard and disrespect to America’s war fighters. He was so bored with the topic. Those that are sick and dying and the widows in his district should see how much he cares about the issue.”

Don’t worry. Cawthorn has an excuse.

The Daily Beast asked Cawthorn’s office if the congressman thought this an appropriate time to clean his firearm. His communications director, Luke Ball, responded: “What could possibly be more patriotic than guns and veterans?”

That’s a problem right there, that anyone thinks guns are “patriotic”.

I kinda think dedicated civil service is more patriotic than guns.

Today I learned that Abraham Lincoln and Karl Marx corresponded…and that Lincoln was sympathetic to many of Marx’s ideas (that strange squelching sound you hear in the distance is the sound of generations of zombie Republicans rising up from their TV chairs to slobber and point an accusing finger at me.) The Red Scare of the middle of the last century sure managed to destroy a lot of good ideas and reasonable history with the scorching heat of fanaticism. It’s sad how much we lost in the aftermath of the Civil War.

Lincoln was not, of course, a Communist. And yet some of the ideas he absorbed from Marx’s Tribune writings — many of which would later be adapted for the first volume of Capital — made their way into the Republican Party of the 1850s and 60s. That party, writes Brockell, was “anti-slavery, pro-worker and sometimes overtly socialist,” championing, for example, the redistribution of land in the West. (Marx even considered emigrating to Texas himself at one time.) And at times, Lincoln could sound like a Marxist, as in the closing words of his first annual message (later the State of the Union ) in 1961.

“Labor is prior to and independent of capital,” the country’s 16th president concluded in the first speech since his inauguration. “Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.” That full, 7,000 word address appeared in newspapers around the country, including the Confederate South. The Chicago Tribune subtitled its closing arguments “Capital vs. Labor.”

Oh my god. Do you remember when the United States had a pro-labor political party? Neither do I.

Here’s how the Democratic party reacted to teachers voting to demand remote teaching options.

When Chicago teachers voted to work remotely last week to protest COVID-19 safety protections in the nation’s third-largest school district, Democratic Party officials leapt into action.

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker pushed for a quick end to the job action and helped secure rapid tests to entice teachers back to the classroom. Mayor Lori Lightfoot said the teachers “abandoned their posts” in “an illegal walkout.” White House press secretary Jen Psaki stressed that students should be in school. The standoff ended with a tentative agreement late Monday.

“Leapt into action”…to get teachers back into the classroom, to continue unsafe pandemic practices, to put more students and their families at risk, all in defiance of what medical experts have been advising. Keeping the schools open is so important to Democrats that they’d oppose the teacher’s union to get the back to work.

At least that’s not as bad as the recommendation of asshole conservative Henry Olsen (why does that guy get published in the Washington Post, our supposedly liberal paper? Maybe because it’s not as liberal as they want you to think.)

Teachers unions are in the wrong on covid-19. Democrats must force them back to work.
The Chicago Teachers Union’s vote to return to remote learning over what it says are unsafe conditions due to covid-19, forcing the city’s schools to close on Wednesday, not only defies reason; it’s also an assault on the well-being of children. City, state and national Democrats should act to bring vaccinated teachers back to work and prevent future unjustified work stoppages.

Let’s hope the Democratic party doesn’t ever listen to Henry Olsen, and why the hell is Henry Olsen trying to advise the Democrats in the first place?

Those are the two poles of the politics of the labor movement in America: on one side, Republicans who would be fine with sending workers into their workplaces at gunpoint, if necessary, and on the other side, Democrats who will more gently pressure unions to obey the dictates of the bosses, exactly the same outcome the Republicans want.

Poor Abraham.

Here’s a chilling statistic.

But there are important questions that are attracting little attention: Why does America not have enough hospital beds to deal with this emergency? Why does an increase in 155,000 patients, about 3,000 additional patients per state, push the system to its breaking point?

The answer is that there are far fewer hospital beds in the United States today than there were just a few decades ago. In 1975, when the United States had 113 million fewer people, there were 1.5 million hospital beds in the United States. Today, there are just over 900,000.

That seems backwards. Why would one of the richest countries in the world start stripping itself of healthcare facilities before the pandemic hit? Read the link, it goes on at length about the processes that led to a reduction in hospital services, in short:

Vertical and horizontal consolidation means there is little competition for hospitals and related services that hospitals also own. By 2016, “90 percent of all metropolitan areas had highly concentrated hospital markets.” The lack of competitors has allowed hospitals to raise prices for outpatient services “four times faster than what doctors charge.”

In other words, hospitals are getting rid of hospital beds because they are making more money diverting patients elsewhere. The focus on the bottom line applies both to for-profit and non-profit hospital networks, which operate nearly identically.

I can be even shorter: because capitalism. The purpose of hospitals is to make money for their owners, don’t you know.

I’m a little envious that, in the UK, you have an opposition that’s willing to stand up and tell Boris Johnson to resign. We had a president who was just as bad and our opposition party just whined about the difficulty of scraping up support for an impeachment, while the Republicans lined up in lockstep behind the buffoon.

Here is Boris Johnson acting like a child at #PMQs while Ian Blackford replies with “what a look, the Prime Minister laughing once again at the British public.” pic.twitter.com/rPDwO6ZmNM

— Mike H (@mikoh123) January 19, 2022

This could be really interesting. Will BoJo’s ego even allow him to resign? I suspect not. He’s going to have to be pried out of his chair with a no confidence vote.