To all of the DU members for the hearts.....................Thank You.......... Wado

They help relieve the stress.....................

BECK'S BOLERO (1967) by the Jeff Beck Group

ICE Wants to Be an Intelligence Agency Under Trump

Officials at Immigration and Customs Enforcement are actively exploring joining the U.S. Intelligence Community, The Daily Beast has learned.

The effort is helmed by a small cohort of career Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials, and has been underway since the Obama administration, according to an ICE official familiar with the matter.

Internal advocates for joining the America’s spy agencies—known as the Intelligence Community or the IC—focus on the potential benefits to the agency’s work on counterproliferation, money laundering, counterterror, and cybercrime. The official added that joining the IC could also be useful for the agency’s immigration enforcement work––in particular, their efforts to find and arrest undocumented immigrants with criminal arrest warrants (known in ICE as fugitive aliens).

But civil liberties advocates and government watchdog groups—as well as some current and former U.S. officials—are concerned at the prospect of the nation’s immigration enforcers joining the ranks of America’s spies.


https://www.thedailybeast.com/ice-wants-to-be-an-intelligence-agency-under-trump?ref=scroll


Then what happens to transparency.........................



November 2018 cannot get here fast enough

From the Green Book to Facebook, how black people still need to outwit racists in rural America

Over a barbecue grill last summer in a park in Springfield, Missouri, Jonathan Herbert and his friend Marlin Barber fell to ruminating about the challenges they faced as African Americans when driving across the country.

Barber, who teaches history at Missouri State University, was planning a road trip to Arkansas with his white wife and two young children, and was apprehensive about what they might encounter in the rural backwaters. Herbert had an idea – why not float the dilemma to friends on Facebook and see what came back?

“Sadly, it’s 2017,” Herbert went ahead and posted, “and we still have to consider the racial climate of some of the most beautiful places in this country before we decide to vacation there with our families.”

The comment sparked intense Facebook reaction. A black friend divulged the fact that he had been called the N-word in Oklahoma and had run into the KKK in Texas. “I remember not taking our kids through parts of Missouri or Arkansas out of fear,” he said.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/11/green-book-facebook-black-motorists-racist-america-road-trip-pitstops-safe


November 2018 cannot get here fast enough

Koch-backed group fights paid sick leave laws as flu sweeps US

This week marks 25 years since Bill Clinton signed the Family and Medical Leave Act, which gives US workers the right to unpaid time off to care for themselves and close family members.

It took another decade for some to win paid sick leave, when San Franciscans approved a ballot initiative in 2006 for private employees to earn an hour of paid sick time for every 30 hours worked. Similar measures now benefit 14 million workers in 32 municipalities and nine states.

Paid sick leave advocates cite studies showing flu infection rates decrease in cities where workers earn sick days, and that parents who cannot take leave are two times more likely to send their sick children to school. They also point to a 2012 poll of restaurant servers and cooks that revealed two-thirds had served or cooked food while ill, threatening the health of their co-workers, customers and the companies that employ them.

But with a flu epidemic currently raging across the US, potential new sick leave measures are facing opposition from the same Koch Brothers-backed lobbying group that led the legal assault on Obamacare.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/feb/11/paid-sick-leave-koch-brothers-nfib





November 2018 cannot get here fast enough

'Trump doesn't understand history': Native Americans tell their story in DC

“Indians are less than 1% of the population. Yet images and names of Indians are everywhere. How is it that Indians can be so present and so absent in American life?”

This is the question posed by Americans, a new exhibition at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, exploring how Native Americans have been central to America’s sense of itself even as they were systematically persecuted, marginalised and erased.

The myth-busting show contains an array of nearly 300 objects and images of Indians and Indian stereotypes. They include a Tomahawk flight-test missile, a 1948 Indian Chief motorcycle, a Washington Redskins football team baby blanket, photos of presidents and celebrities wearing feather headdresses, footage from westerns and scale models of Chinook, Kiowa and Apache Longbow helicopters.

-snip-

In an interview on Friday, Garcia, who has indigenous roots on her father’s side, added: “The experience of Native American women has been missing from the #MeToo movement when they suffer the highest rates of abuse. The only way to understand an epidemic is to acknowledge those who are most vulnerable.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/feb/11/native-americans-indians-smithsonian-trump

Kentuckys Medicaid Work Requirement Is an About-Face

Kentucky is about to become the first state to impose a work rule for Medicaid. Ben Abell and Bree Pearsall worry about what it will mean for their business. The married couple raise lamb and grow 40 crops on a farm outside Louisville that Abell says is “minimally profitable.” They don’t have pay stubs or time sheets to document the hours they work. That could be a problem starting this summer, when the state will require Medicaid recipients to prove that they’re working or that they qualify under a handful of exemptions. The couple has been on Medicaid since their daughter was born in 2015. Although Pearsall, who’s pregnant with their second child, will probably be exempt from the requirements, Abell could find his coverage at risk. Paying for private insurance would mean “we’d have less to invest in growing the business,” he says.


Tightening access to Medicaid has been a long-held goal of conservatives. The 53-year-old state and federal partnership provides insurance to 72 million low-income Americans and, at a cost of $586 billion, accounts for 17 percent of all health spending in the U.S. On Jan. 11 the Trump administration gave states authority to begin adding “community engagement” requirements such as work, volunteering, or job training for nondisabled adult recipients. The next day it approved Kentucky’s bid to do so, which had been pending since 2016.


https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-18/kentucky-s-medicaid-work-requirement-is-an-about-face


I don't know about anyone else, but I would be out in the streets of Kentucky right now over this assholes governor and the sexual predator asshole trying to use the "blame game" that people are are trying to stiff the system........................this is outrageous





November 2018 cannot get here fast enough

Beware the $500 Billion Bond Exodus

Farewell, Ireland: It looks like corporate America will finally bring that cash home.

For years, the likes of Apple Inc. and Microsoft Corp. have stashed billions of dollars offshore to slash their U.S. tax bills. Now, the tax-code rewrite could throw that into reverse.

The implications for the financial markets are huge. The great on-shoring could prompt multinationals -- which have parked much of their overseas profits in Treasuries and U.S. investment-grade corporate debt -- to lighten up on bonds and use the money to goose their stock prices. Think buybacks and dividends.

It’s hard to say how much money the companies might repatriate, but the size of their overseas stash is staggering. An estimated $3.1 trillion of corporate cash is now held offshore. Led by the tech giants, a handful of the biggest companies sit on over a half-trillion dollars in U.S. securities. In other words, they dwarf most mutual funds and hedge funds.

“There is going to be a significant unloading,” particularly of Treasuries, said Reuven Avi-Yonah, a professor who specializes in corporate and international taxation at the University of Michigan Law School. “The general consensus is that the best use of the funds is to distribute it out to shareholders.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-17/beware-the-500-billion-bond-exodus-as-offshore-cash-comes-home


Just a reminder that December led tax scam by the republicans, is still a tax scam

Ten Years After the Crisis, Banks Win Big in Trumps Washington

In early February, with the Treasury secretary testifying about wild gyrations in the stock market and the Federal Reserve leveling unprecedented penalties against Wells Fargo & Co., it may have felt like 2008 again, with the financial system under siege. In reality, banks are booming, at least in Washington.

As the 10th anniversary of the financial crisis approaches, many of the restrictions put in place to rein in Wall Street risk-taking are quietly being unwound. The Senate is considering legislation that would remove dozens of major banks from stepped-up oversight. The bill has broad Republican support and has been endorsed by 11 Democrats. In recent months a handful of the federal agencies that supervise financial companies have taken steps to revise two complex rules—one restricting trading and one requiring extra capital—that banks have long complained cost them millions of dollars in profits.

Other requirements are also being eased, including the stress tests the government uses to measure banks’ abilities to withstand economic shocks. Conducted by the Fed, the tests were widely credited with restoring public confidence in the financial system after the 2008 meltdown.

Banks and their once-embattled Washington advocates are cautiously acknowledging their return to good graces after years of fighting against what they argued was regulatory overreach. “It just feels good,” says Wayne Abernathy, an executive vice president for the American Bankers Association. Things “are looking up for the customers of the banks, looking up for the economy, and for the banks as well,” he says.

https://www.bloomberg.com/businessweek


What the fuck: " Banks and their once-embattled Washington advocates are cautiously acknowledging their return to good graces after years of fighting against what they argued was regulatory overreach. good graces mean after years "


Good graces my ass and looking up.............these assholes bankrupted over 10 million human beings based on fucking greed

Cliven Bundy has set his sights on a new target

For the first time in nearly two years, Cliven Bundy is a free man.

In January, U.S. District Judge Gloria Navarro ruled that the 71-year-old scion of the Bundy family — best known for leading an armed 2014 standoff with federal officials in Bunkerville, Nevada after he refused to pay his grazing fees — should be released from custody and sent on his way. The government’s bungling of the case is just the latest failure in efforts to bring the Bundy family to justice; a 2016 ruling set Cliven’s sons, Ammon and Ryan, free following their hostile takeover of the Malheur wildlife refuge in Oregon.

Citing “flagrant” behavior on the part of federal prosecutors, Navarro, who had already declared a mistrial, specifically cited the government’s move to withhold evidence on surveillance and snipers near the Bundy ranch in her decision. Said Navarro, “The court finds that the universal sense of justice has been violated.” And just like that, with over 100 Bundy supporters watching in the courtroom, all charges against Bundy were dropped. As with the Oregon case against Cliven’s sons, the ruling — which should have all but certainly gone against Bundy, given that so much of his flagrantly illegal behavior was obvious for all to see — illustrated just how poorly the government had presented its arguments.

https://thinkprogress.org/cliven-bundy-roams-free-160eb7f35a7a/


Not only is this asshole free, he has now taken up the traitors cause of putting his illegal cattle back on the land the size of Rhode Island, but he now is going around, in the west, spreading his fucking bullshit.



I hate traitors............................