Bits’ n pieces of the east, west and beyond



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In the east, west or beyond, sooner or later events elsewhere can have a local impact. Recent sampling:

Masks Torn: Far-right internet company Epik, which allows anonymous messages from people associated with hate groups, suffered a massive hack last week, The Washington Post reported. Those who research extremists see the new information as the Panama Paper of hate groups. Epik founder Robert Monster – not a typo – said that “it won’t work” for people who use the hacked information for “negative intent” purposes.

US Senate candidate Lucas Kunce, a former Marine, told MSNBC “the people who really did [from the Afghan war] were elites on both sides, ”defense contractors and politicians. During his campaign, he says taxpayers spent $ 6.4 trillion to “send soldiers like me on a doomed mission to build someone else’s country.” Then they say we can’t afford to build a nation here at home.

The Institute for Economic Policy found that although the recovery from the economic shock of the pandemic is proceeding faster than what happened after the Great Recession, overall employment is still 5.3 million lower. ‘jobs at February 2020 levels. To maintain the momentum of the recovery, EPI argues that the passage of the Build Back Better Act, which specifically supports employment in child and personal protection sectors. aging, manufacturing, construction and climate-related industries, will create four million jobs per year. Seventeen Nobel Prize winners signed a letter of support for the BBB Act. Among these, economist and political analyst Joseph Stiglitz said the legislation would transform the US economy, making it more “sustainable and prosperous in the long run.”

The Cyber ​​Ninjas have released their report on the 2020 voting in Maricopa County, Arizona. Compared to the original certified tally, it showed 99 more votes for Joe Biden and 261 fewer votes for Donald Trump. Forbes said the recount effort cost $ 6 million. Despite the report’s findings, Trump claimed soon after that the Ninja’s job showed Biden lost, Newsweek reported.

Bob Woodward and Robert Costa’s new book “Peril” has received so much media coverage that some may not read it, thinking they’ve heard it all before. What stood out for Business Insider was the way former House Speaker Paul Ryan responded to Trump’s election: Ryan sought advice on handling Trump from donor and doctor Republican who advised him to familiarize himself with “narcissistic personality disorder”. Ryan did his own research and concluded that the donor’s assessment was correct.

Extract from the “raise the ceiling” file: the debt ceiling pays for federal spending that has already occurred and does not authorize any new spending. Congress is debating raising the ceiling. Failure to raise the ceiling, said Robert Reich, a former labor secretary, will shut down the government. Reich said most modern democracies do not have debt ceilings.

“Not raising it when the Treasury runs out of money,” Reich says, “would mean a cataclysmic default by the United States, which has never happened before. ”

What bad? Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said failure to raise the debt ceiling could cause interest rates to spike, stock prices to drop significantly and trigger a recession. Moody’s Analytics warns of up to six million jobs lost, unemployment reaching nearly 9% and a loss of $ 15 trillion in household wealth. Moody economists also said that a failure to raise or suspend the debt ceiling would cause chaos to global financial markets that “will be hard to bear”, especially since there is “a long way to go. travel to recover “from the pandemic recession.

Every Republican in the House voted against a fundraising bill that would prevent a halt and default on US debt. Politico reported Democrats were working on a debt ceiling bypass to prevent Republicans from crashing the economy. Senator Mark Warner (D-Va.) Noted that even pre-shutdown procedures have “enormous costs”. And Business Insider has said that without Republicans ‘help, Democrats’ efforts to raise the debt ceiling have no guarantee of success.

Congress approved a short-term spending bill on September 30 to keep government open.

Blast from the past: Historically, Congress raised the debt ceiling more than 100 times, including 18 times under Ronald Reagan, and notably again under Trump (Republicans added nearly $ 6.5 billion to debt in due to tax cuts and spending related to the pandemic). To raise the current debt ceiling, 10 Republicans must join Democrats to avoid a Republican-led obstruction.

The Fourteenth Amendment, Fourth Section, created in the 19th century, says: “The validity of public debt … including debts incurred for the payment of pensions and bonuses for services rendered in suppressing insurrection or rebellion , should not be questioned. The amendment was created after the civil war when southern interests attempted to undermine the Union.

And another blast from the (recent) past: Before election results certify Joe Biden as president, Federalist Society member John Eastman proposed a six-step plan to overturn the election and keep Donald Trump in the House. White. As recently reported in the Washington Post, the plan was for Vice President Mike Pence to break with the process outlined in the Electoral Count Act.

Two issues thwarted the plan: Pence did not agree to follow along and, despite the claim that there were “substitute voters”, they did not exist. The Eastman memo is expected to help those investigating the Jan.6 insurgency determine Trump’s level of involvement and motives.

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