Dominos and disability rights

Mike Ervin writes in the December 2019/January 2020 issue of The Progressive magazine about the way that the Dominos pizza chain responded to a blind customer Guillermo Robles who filed a lawsuit in 2016 that the company’s mobile app did not have the features that would enable blind people to navigate it, thus violating Title III of the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act that requires that disabled people be provided with access to places of “public accommodation”. This act has opened up vast areas of life that had hitherto been closed to people with disabilities.
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Trump’s deranged rally speech

Seth Meyers describes the rally that Trump held while the impeachment process was going on, where he went on a tirade against dishwashers, showers, sinks, toilets, and other household items.

It seems to me that the places that Trumps lives in, which proudly bear his name, have the lousiest appliances. How many people have exploding dishwashers or showers that give out four drops of water or toilets that must be flushed ten times?

This is what happens because of Trump’s xenophobic rhetoric

The hatred that he has been promoting has reached such a pitch that ordinary people are trying to kill random strangers on the spur of the moment.

A woman has been charged with attempted murder after telling police in Iowa that she deliberately drove into a girl because she appeared “Mexican”.

The victim, who is 14, sustained “numerous injuries” in the incident.

Police say she was struck while walking to a local school, near Des Moines, on the evening of 9 December.

They initially appealed for the public’s help in identifying the hit-and-run before Nicole Marie Poole Franklin was arrested.

“Investigators determined that this incident was an intentional act, not an accident,” Clive police said in a Thursday statement announcing the attempted murder charge.

Speaking at a press conference on Friday, Police Chief Michael Venema said he was “shocked” by the suspect’s admission.

“Franklin told investigators that she ran the girl over because she was, in her words, ‘a Mexican’,” Chief Venema said. “She went on to make a number of derogatory statements about Latinos to our investigators.”

“I want to say, in the strongest terms possible, that there is no place in our community, or any other for that matter, for this type of hatred and violence,” he added.

The poisonous climate that has been created will take a long time to clear away. What I fear is that it will get even worse before it gets better.

It never seems to strike these people that the many Americans in Mexico might be endangered because of revenge attacks.

Christianity Today approves impeaching Trump

In an interesting development that has caused some consternation in Christian circles, the evangelical magazine Christianity Today founded in 1956by the late Billy Graham has come out with an editorial approving the impeachment of Donald Trump. It says that the fact that Democrats have been out to get him from the day he took office and that they support Trump’s pro-life and religious freedom positions is not enough to counterbalance the fact that he is unfit for the office he holds.
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HSBC and the drug cartels

The war on drugs is a massive paramilitary and military operation involving the US working with the military of various countries armed forces that can erupt into in gunfights with drug cartels. But as the excellent program Cartel Bank in the Netflix documentary series Dirty Money points out, there is a weak link in the drug business that can be more easily targeted but is not being done. The real pressure point that can be applied to stop or at least limit the drug trade is to choke off the money flow because, after all, the drug cartels are in it for the money not for any ideology.
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Let the game of chicken begin!

Republican senate leader Mitch McConnell has made no secret of the fact that he plans to use the Senate trial on impeachment as a pro forma exercise in which he uses his party’s majority to ram through an acquittal as soon as possible without calling on any witnesses or even presenting any defense. Then he and Donald Trump can claim a great and glorious victory. In fact, he has proudly boasted that this is his goal. If that were to come to pass, one can already write Trump’s tweets: “It was the greatest acquittal in the history of the world.” “I am the most innocent person the world has ever seen.” And so on. You know the dreary script by now.
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The menace of private equity firms

Cory Doctorow argues that private equity firms are terrible and should be abolished and points to 1982 as the year they took off, thanks to former treasury secretary William Simon.

This was the starter pistol for future leveraged buyouts, through which companies like Bain Capital and the Carlyle Group buy multiple companies in the same sector and transmit “winning strategies” between them: new ways to dodge taxes, raise prices, and avoid regulation. PE owners suck any financial cushion out of companies — funds that firms set aside for downturns or R&D — and replace it with “brutal debt schedules.” The PE owners benefit massively when this drives up share prices, but take no downsides when the companies fail.

Under PE, companies have emphasized firing workers and replacing them with overseas subcontractors, and amassing “brands, patents and tax loopholes” as their primary assets. PE firms specialize in self-dealing, cutting in the banks and brokers who set up the deals for a share of the upside. A company bought by a private equity firm is ten times more likely to go bankrupt than one with a traditional capital/management structure.

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Revealing behavior of the Democratic establishment

There was an uproar recently when the Democratic party establishment in the form of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee said that they would cut off any consultants and vendors who worked for primary challengers to party incumbents. This was seen as yet another example of the party leadership trying desperately to retain its neoliberal ideology in the face of more progressive challengers who had succeeded in unseating entrenched conservative incumbents.
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Get a grip, Carly!

Carly Fiorina is the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard who ran for president in 2016 and faced withering and scornful attacks by Donald Trump who even stooped as low as denigrating her looks, not that that kind of behavior should come as a surprise anymore.

In an interview, Fiorina says that she thinks Trump should be impeached and then in the very next breath says that she might vote for him in 2020.

“I think it is vital that he be impeached,” Fiorina said. But whether Trump should be removed from office, Fiorina said, “this close to an election, I don’t know.”
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After dropping out of the race for the Republican nomination in 2016, Fiorina said she did vote for Trump in 2016, citing her disapproval of then-Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, but since then she has been “bitterly disappointed.” But when asked whether she would vote for Trump in next year’s presidential election, Fiorina did not rule out voting for him again.

“It depends who the Democrats put up,” she said.
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In a September 2015 Rolling Stone interview, Trump mocked Fiorina’s looks and said, “Look at that face! Would anyone vote for that? Can you imagine that, the face of our next president?” Trump later said he was talking about her persona, not her appearance.

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The aftermath of the Bolivian coup

Wyatt Reed writes that Evo Morales’s party the MAS is regrouping in Bolivia after the coup that overthrew Morales while the right wingers who conspired to create the coup are now fighting with each other over who should get the spoils of their plotting.

Local analysts had predicted that coup leader Luis Fernando Camacho and businessman Marco Pumari could unite the right from the country’s east and west, both indigenous and white or mestizo. They were seen as an insurmountable dream team.

That alliance now lies smoldering, with the two presidential frontrunners openly airing their dirty laundry amid a vicious power struggle.

The battle between the two right-wing heavyweights began when Camacho secretly taped and leaked a conversation in which he accused Pumari of soliciting a bribe of $250,000 and control of two customs checkpoints in return for his spot on the presidential ticket. Camacho fervently denied leaking the tape, which has left Pumari’s presidential aspirations in shambles.
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Within the span of just a week, Camacho and Pumari have gone from theoretical frontrunners to national laughingstocks.
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In spite of its forced removal from power, MAS is poised to emerge from the US-backed coup with an unprecedented level of organizational rigor.

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