They’re also chipping away at the most fundamental freedom of all: the right to vote – restricting everything from mail-in voting to ballot dropboxes.
But their chipping away at freedom is even bigger than all this.
Can you really be free if you’re saddled with medical debt and have to routinely pay outrageous health care costs?
Can you really be free if you have no voice in your workplace and your employer refuses to let you organize with your coworkers for the right to collectively bargain?
Can you really be free if you’re not paid a living wage and have to choose between feeding your family or keeping your lights on?
A living wage, the right to join a union, guaranteed healthcare, the right to vote – these are the foundations of real freedom.
Yet Republicans oppose all of these.
There’s a reason the historic 1963 rally was called The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Because freedom also means the ability to work in a job that pays enough to provide food, clothing, shelter, and medical care.
What Republicans want to preserve isn’t freedom, it’s power. The power to impose their narrow ideology on everyone else, no matter who suffers. Don’t let their propaganda convince you otherwise.
Even for Twitter the reaction is bizarre to the extreme
Wow. The big news came, simple and straightforward, on Monday afternoon. Eastern time. From the official press release: “Twitter, Inc. (NYSE: TWTR) today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by an entity wholly owned by Elon Musk, for $54.20 per share in cash in a transaction”
What came next was a tsunami of extreme emotions – mostly negative by casual observation. The happiest seemed to be MAGA dreamers that somehow think that Elon Musk will be all about enabling Trump and his minions to get back into social media shenanigans, a.k.a. “free speech’. Which is, to put it mildly, doubtful.
To get the color of this intense reaction here are just a few example headlines:
Oddly, the most ferocious detractors of this deal are the “left” and those that are also believing the nonsense that somehow this is a big win for the right and for Trump (huh?) and therefore – the friend of my enemy is my enemy, or some such thing.
Naturally, Trump says he would not tweet again even if invited since he has his own useless and failed app. This is the basic problem of 90% of the reactions – the more extreme they are the more ridiculous the assumptions as to what Elon Musk will actually do.
Bots, often controlled by foreign actors, were the issue in 2020, not the tweets by actual people
If you were on twitter in 2020 during the run-up to the election, or in 2016 for that matter, the biggest issue was not the real tweets from Trump and others of his ilk, no matter how stupid and deranged those tweets were.
It was, instead, the thousands of fake accounts amplifying the “message” and creating a wall of lies and disinformation. Those bots would attack any anti-Trump or Pro-Biden (or Pro-Hillary) tweets and applaud all pro-Trump messages with likes, re-tweets etc. And they still exist to today.
They were ridiculously obvious as fake, for anyone who bothered to check, but the massive number and the fact they they were allowed to run-rampant made this stupid, primitive method of perverting actual free speech and behavior bizarrely successful.
This is just one small point. The idea that Elon Musk bought Twitter so that he can re-instate Trump and his bot-army goes against literally everything that is known about him as well as what he has actually said.
Of course anyone can say that Musk is not sincere, etc. But stating unequivocally that he will defeat the bots is a step in the right direction. Bots and fake accounts are epidemic in all social media and are likely tolerated for nefarious reasons – the least negative of which would be that it’s too expensive to care.
The fact that he would make mention of the “shadow ban council” also shows an awareness of the problems associated with algorithms that have agendas that punish and shadow ban at the whim of those in charge as being important- < it is > – that’s a huge plus, at least in terms of transparency or dialog about actual problems that exist.
And let’s not forget that Elon Musk is not beholden to a specific political party (everyone accuses him of being on the other side or of being a libertarian, and that maybe a good fit for some of his expressed views, but he has not specifically aligned himself with a particular party).
What this all boils down to – as alluded to in the title, is that there’s a strong sense that nearly all these opinions and much of the outrage is dead wrong about what will actually happen.
Can Elon Musk ‘Fix’ Twitter?
It would be equally insane, however, to assume that anyone, even the world’s richest person, can just buy Twitter, or any other huge tech platform (Web2 platform) and then fix all the problems.
The idea and service is all that matters to me, and I will do whatever it takes to protect both. Twitter as a company has always been my sole issue and my biggest regret. It has been owned by Wall Street and the ad model. Taking it back from Wall Street is the correct first step.
Can anyone even agree on what Twitter is or what it should be? And so many of the problems that twitter has are baked-in to the whole huge-Web2-platform-defacto-monopoly thing that makes life online so frustrating and, at times, hopeless.
But what a private company, run by a “brash” gazillionaire is, at least, is something different. Well, sort of. That’s where it comes down to a probably crazy experiment in just how much worse can it get… Zuckerberg, Bezos, the Google Twins? Tough acts to follow?
Some have pointed out that Elon Musk will have even more power and control over Twitter than, for example, Zuckerberg has over FaceBook-er-Meta. And that is, for some, a scary and infuriating concept. On the other hand, what if more control, in the hands of someone who at least appears to have a sincere desire to see Twitter succeed as a “Town Square” and communication tool for humanity is actually what it takes to get things on the road to betterville…?
It’s hard to give a guy with $350 billion the benefit of the doubt, I get it
In other words, instead of seeing Twitter as a battleground between left and right, where one or the other should “win”, there is at least the possibility that Elon Musk sees it as much more than that.
That he sees it a bit closer to what it was created to be – a tool for people to communicate is a novel way.
Call it micro-blogging or shit-posting or memeifycation of life or what you will, the idea is, that if it were possible to create a tool that did indeed allow and even encourage actual online free speech is one that could at least be an experiment worth trying.
Is ‘this guy’ the right person to do it? Maybe not. Is a public company, with the explicit primary goal of enriching shareholders a better way? Not so far in any known example.
In fact this seems to be the ‘secret’ that is hiding in plain sight, that an altruistic goal by a super-rich private individual who decides to take over a social media company, to try to do something never done before – might actually be exactly what it takes to begin a new way for people to communicate online.
And, regardless of how skeptical we may be of that idea, the fact is that extreme change is urgently needed – leads to the reality that anything new and different should at least be tolerated and tried before it is condemned and attacked.
Below we’ve embedded the new video, along with the text of the video.
Your life could get a lot more dangerous. Republican appointees on the Supreme Court seem poised to strip away basic safety standards for our workplaces, our food, our air and water.
Congress gives federal agencies the authority to enact regulations that protect us in our daily lives. Congress defines the goals, but leaves it up to the health and safety experts in those agencies to craft and enforce regulations. I know regulations don’t sound very exciting, but they’re how our government keeps us safe.
Remember when lots of romaine lettuce was recalled because it was causing E.coli outbreaks? That was the Food and Drug Administration protecting us from getting sick. Working in a warehouse? The Occupational Safety and Health Administration sets standards to ensure you don’t breathe in dangerous chemicals like asbestos. Enjoying the fresh air on a clear, sunny day? Thank the Environmental Protection Agency for limiting the amount of pollution that can go into our air.
These agencies save lives. Since OSHA was established a half-century ago, its workplace safety regulations have saved more than 618,000 workers’ lives.
Republicans have been trying to gut these agencies for decades. Now, with the Supreme Court’s right-wing majority solidly in place, they have their best chance yet.
The Court claimed that Covid isn’t an “occupational hazard” because people can become infected outside of work, and that allowing OSHA to regulate in this manner “would significantly expand” its authority without clear Congressional authorization.
This is absurd on its face. Section 2 of the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 clearly spells out OSHA’s authority to enact and enforce regulations that protect workers from illness, injury, and death in the workplace. Congress doesn’t need to list every specific workplace hazard before OSHA can protect workers.
What this ruling tells us is that the Republican appointees on the Supreme Court are intent on gutting the power of agencies to issue regulations.
This term, the Court will also hear a case regarding the EPA’s authority to enforce the Clean Water Act. If the Court undermines the EPA’s authority, it will put our environment – and our health – at risk. Remember when the Cuyahoga River caught on fire because it was brimming with oil, acid, and factory chemicals? That’s what we may be returning to.
And what’s next? Will they gut the Federal Trade Commission and put us all at risk of being defrauded? Target the Securities and Exchange Commission and deregulate the financial sector, sparking another financial crisis?
Beware. If Republican appointees on the Supreme Court succeed in gutting regulatory agencies, we all lose. This agenda is anti-worker, anti-consumer, and anti-environment. The only thing it’s good for is corporate profits.
Early in 2020, as the pandemic gripped the nation, JPMorgan Chase offered to help customers weather the crisis by taking a temporary pause on mortgage, auto and credit card payments. Chase’s CEO, Jamie Dimon, sounded sympathetic about a year later as he offered broader reflections on what was ailing the country. “Americans know that something has gone terribly wrong,” he wrote in a letter to shareholders. “Many of our citizens are unsettled, and the fault line for all this discord is a fraying American dream — the enormous wealth of our country is accruing to the very few. In other words, the fault line is inequality.”
But even as those words were published, the bank had quietly begun to unleash a lawsuit blitz against many of its struggling customers. Starting in early 2020 and continuing to today, Chase has filed thousands of lawsuits against credit card customers who have fallen behind on their payments.
Chase had stopped pursuing credit card lawsuits in 2011, in the wake of the last major economic downturn, after regulators found that the company was filing tens of thousands of flimsy suits, sometimes overstating what customers owed. Rather than being backed by extensive billing records to document the debts, according to the regulators, the suits were typically filed with a short affidavit from one of a half-dozen Chase employees in one office in San Antonio who vouched for the accuracy of the bank’s information in thousands of suits.
Chase “filed lawsuits and obtained judgments against consumers using deceptive affidavits and other documents that were prepared without following required procedures,” the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau concluded in 2015. At times, Chase employees signed affidavits “without personal knowledge of the signer, a practice commonly referred to as ‘robo-signing.’” According to the CFPB’s findings, there were mistakes in about 10% of cases Chase won and the judgments “contained erroneous amounts that were greater than what the consumers legally owed.”
Chase neither admitted nor denied the CFPB’s findings, but it agreed, as part of a consent order, to provide significant evidence to make its cases in the future. The company also agreed it would provide “relevant information and documentation maintained by [Chase] to support their claims” in cases — the vast majority of those it filed — in which customers did not respond to the lawsuit.
But that provision expired on New Year’s Day 2020. And since then the bank has gone back to bringing lawsuits much as it did before 2011, according to lawyers who have defended Chase customers.
“From what I can see, nothing has changed,” said Cliff Dorsen, a consumer-rights attorney in Georgia who represents Chase credit card customers.
Chase declined to make executives available for interviews. It said in a statement that the timing of the resumption of its credit card lawsuits was just a coincidence. “We have engaged with our regulators throughout this process,” said Tom Kelly, a bank spokesperson. “We continue to meet the requirements of the consent order.” (Kelly said Chase also filed some credit card lawsuits in 2019.)
Kelly declined to say how many suits it has filed in its blitz of the past two years, but civil dockets from across the country give a hint of the scale — and its accelerating pace. Chase sued more than 800 credit card customers around Fort Lauderdale, Florida, last year after suing 70 in 2020 and none in 2019, according to a review of court records. In Westchester County, in New York’s suburbs, court records show that Chase has sued more than 400 customers over credit card debt since 2020; a year earlier, the equivalent figure was one.
A similar surge is occurring in Texas, according to January Advisors, a data-science firm. Chase filed more than 1,000 consumer debt lawsuits around Houston last year after filing only seven in 2020, the analytics firm’s review of court records in Harris County shows. Chase instigated 141 consumer debt cases in Austin last year after filing only one such case in 2020, according to January Advisors, which is conducting research for a nationwide study ofdebt collection cases.
Today, just as it did before running afoul of the CFPB, Chase is mass-producing affidavits from the same San Antonio office where low-level employees generated hundreds of thousands of affidavits in the past, according to defense attorneys and court documents. Those affidavits are often the main piece of evidence that Chase uses to win its case while detailed customer records — and any errors they may contain — remain out of sight.
“Our clients deserve to see everything that Chase has in its files,” Dorsen said. “Instead, Chase gives us these affidavits and says: ‘You can trust us about the rest.’”
Before the robo-signing scandal a decade ago, Chase recovered about a billion dollars a year with its credit card collections business, according to the CFPB. Why would Chase stop suing customers for years, forgoing billions of dollars, only to ramp up its suits once key provisions of the CFPB settlement had expired?
Craig Cowie thinks he has an answer. “Chase did not think it could make money if it had to sue customers and abide by the CFPB settlement,” said Cowie, who worked as an enforcement attorney at the CFPB during the Obama administration and now teaches at the University of Montana Law School. “That’s the only explanation that makes sense for why the bank would have held back.”
Cowie, who did not work on the CFPB’s case against Chase, said he doesn’t know why the agency agreed to a time limit on some settlement provisions. He pointed out that such agreements are negotiated and the CFPB cannot just dictate the terms. The agency may have felt it had to let some provisions of the settlement expire to get Chase to agree to the deal, Cowie said.
The CFPB declined to comment.
For its part, Chase said it waited years to restart its lawsuits because it took that long to get the system working right. “We rebuilt the litigation program slowly and methodically to make sure we had the right controls in place,” said its spokesperson, Kelly.
At the time, the CFPB had found numerous flaws in Chase’s suits. The agency concluded that Chase used “unfair” legal tactics when it promised that its credit card account information was reliable and mistake-free. It wasn’t simply a matter of errors in calculating how much was owed; in some cases the company even got the customer’s name wrong. Chase would sometimes pass accounts with errors — including instances where customers had been victims of credit card fraud, others who had tried to settle their debts and even some who had died — on to outside debt collectors, who might then take action based on that information.
Once Chase won a victory in court, the bank could seek to garnish a customer’s wages or raid their bank accounts, and those customers would pay a further price: a stain on their credit report that could make it harder to “obtain credit, employment, housing, and insurance,” the CFPB wrote.
Those sued by Chase, then and now, might spot errors if the company provided full records in its court filings, consumer advocates say. Instead, Chase typically submits copies of a few credit card statements along with a two-page affidavit attesting that the bank’s records were accurate and complete.
Consumer advocates say they do not expect that the majority of Chase’s credit card records are tainted with errors. But if today’s error rate is the same 10% that the CFPB estimated in the past and the Chase lawsuit push continues, thousands of customers may be sued for money they don’t owe. And there is no easy way to check when Chase keeps so many of its records out of sight.
Chase said that its current system for processing credit card lawsuits is sound and reliable. “We quality-check 100% of our affidavits today,” the company said in a statement.
Credit card customers do not respond to collections lawsuits in roughly 70% of cases, according to research from The Pew Charitable Trusts. In those instances, the customer typically loses by default.
In the small percentage of cases where a customer gets a lawyer or otherwise fights back, Chase still has the advantage because it can access all of the customer’s account records easily, according to consumer lawyers. (The bank typically closes accounts of customers who have failed to pay their debts, leaving them unable to access their records online.) Chase usually shares the complete credit card account file only after a legal fight, according to attorneys and pleadings from across the country. “Chase has all the evidence and we have to beg to get it,” said Jerry Jarzombek, a consumer-rights attorney in Fort Worth, Texas, who is defending several Chase customers.
The result leaves many defendants in a bind: They don’t have enough information to know whether they should dispute the company’s claims. “Chase wants us to believe its records are reliable so we don’t need to see them,” Jarzombek said. “Well, I’m sorry. I’ve dealt with Chase for decades. I’d prefer to see what evidence they’ve actually got.”
The robo-signing scandal exposed Chase’s affidavit-signing assembly line. Before the settlement, Chase had about a half-dozen employees churning through affidavits stacked a foot high or taller, according to the former Chase executive who brought the practices to light at the time. Kamala Harris, who was then California’s attorney general and is now vice president, likened the process to anaffidavit mill.
The current operation involves roughly a dozen “signing officers” working from the same San Antonio offices as before and performing many of the same tasks, according to Chase employees and outside lawyers who have represented the company.
Chase used to prepare affidavits “in bulk using stock templates,” according to the 2015 CFPB findings. That is again happening today, according to two of Chase’s outside lawyers who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the process.
The lawyers said they typically send their affidavit requests in batches. The requests already contain the basic details of the customer’s account when they arrive in Chase’s San Antonio office, they said. An affidavit request that is sent one day can typically be processed and returned the next business day, the lawyers said.
Chase affidavits contain stock language that the “signing officer” has “personal knowledge of and access to [Chase’s] books and records.” That “personal knowledge” is limited, said one signing officer who declined to be named. Chase does not expect signing officers to perform a forensic review of an account but rather to follow computer prompts to complete the affidavit, said the employee. “We just work with what’s on the screen.”
Chase declined to discuss its process for creating affidavits, but the bank said it satisfies the rules set by courts in the places where it operates. “Judges, clerks and other judiciary staff are well versed in the court rules and laws in their jurisdictions,” said the statement by the bank’s spokesperson, Kelly. “Through our counsel, we provide the information those parties require in matters before them.”
Courts around the country have grown too accepting of what big banks and debt collectors say, according to consumer advocates. And the justice they dispense can feel as cursory and hurried as the suits that Chase files.
In Texas a decade ago, lawmakers pushed most credit card cases into the state’s version of small claims courts, known as justice courts. The rules of evidence are more lax there and the judge might not even be a lawyer. A retired basketball player presides over one suchcourtroom in Houston. “One of these judges said to me: ‘What’s the point of seeing a bunch of evidence? We already know these people borrowed the money,’” said Jarzombek, the Fort Worth attorney. “I said: ‘Why even have a trial, then? Let the banks take whatever they want.’”
In Houston, where Chase has more than 1,000 consumer credit suits on the docket, only one defendant in those cases has fought to a trial on her own, according to court records.
That person’s experience is instructive. Like many, Melissa Razo struggled financially during the early pandemic. A former restaurant manager, the 42-year-old Razo had gone back to school, the University of Houston, to study psychology, and she supported herself by doing typing for an online transcription service. That work suddenly dried up when the pandemic hit, and Razo began missing credit card payments. Her debt escalated. Chase sued her in January 2021, claiming she owed a total of about $8,500 on two credit cards.
Razo had a previous court experience stemming from an acrimonious divorce, where she had learned that a plaintiff needs facts and evidence to win. “Nothing I presented was good enough,” she recalled of the divorce case.
Using what she’d learned, Razo prepared for her day in court against Chase. She could not access her account anymore, she said, because the bank had shut it down. So in late June, as her hearing date approached, Razo pulled together as many of her credit card statements as she could find. They told a story of grocery runs and shopping at Target and Goodwill, along with missed payments and penalties.
Razo presumed Chase would have to back up its claims just as she had been expected to do in divorce court. She expected the company’s lawyers would have five years of statements and documents to show that she owed exactly what they said she owed. This was a trial, after all.
The trial lasted perhaps a minute, according to Razo. It boiled down to two questions. Was Razo present? the judge asked over Zoom. When she announced herself, the judge asked if she had a Chase credit card. Yes, Razo said, that was true. Then, she said, the judge ruled in favor of Chase.
Chase declined to comment on the case. The judge was not authorized to speak about the matter, according to a court clerk. And the justice courts do not transcribe their hearings, so ProPublica could not verify what was said. (The court’s docket did confirm that a judgment was entered in Chase’s favor after a judge trial.)
Razo’s courtroom experience, though, sounds typical, according to Rich Tomlinson, a lawyer with Lone Star Legal Aid. “I can’t recall ever seeing a live witness in a debt case,” said Tomlinson, who has represented hundreds of debtors in his career. “These trials are not like Perry Mason. They’re not even Judge Judy.”
ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
Above: Video Snippet from MSNBC / Photo Collage / Lynxotic
The host of MSNBC, Nicolle Wallace confronted Republican former NJ Gov. Chris Christie surrounding his more recent break from Trump.
Wallace pressed Christie on his past enabling of Trump’s behaviors and election conspiracies, never once speaking out. She then asked if his motives were more of the strategic sort, as its been implied that Christie may be thinking about running for president come 2024.
I didn’t hear you, after he called African nations ‘bleep-hole nations.’ I didn’t hear you distance yourself from this president at any point until the target for his ire and lawlessness was the democracy you haven’t ruled out leading in four years.
Are you simply making a political calculation that you can clean the Trump stink off you faster than Marco Rubio or some of your other competitors?”
Look up Trump Boot-licker in Wikipedia and probably you’ll see photos of Chris Christie
The post-Trump white-washing is already starting, apparently. Getting the Trump-Stink won’t be so easy though. There’s just so much of it. And the enablers, assuming they avoid prison themselves, will have a lot of radio-active debris to remove for a very long time. Particularly when there are still two weeks of the, most likely, most extreme stink still to be added.
What an opportunity for Christie ! When Trump declares martial law (if he goes that far) Christie can meekly point out that he was not around when Trump pulled the trigger. Hooray, that must make him presidential material. Please.
The next four years will see even more massive and unexpected changes than even Donald the menace was a part of in the last four. The problems that will need to be unwound will be so extensive that new problems will arise from the trajectory that has already been set in motion.
And then there are the 70 million toxic delusional, fake-news loving conspiracy swallowing folks that will start pining away for an even worse “solutions” at 12:01 am on January 21st. Let’s hope we can all start at that same moment to wash the stink of the last four years (and beyond) off and find a way to some kind of less disgusting beginning. One, most certainly, without the likes of Chris Christie.
Nixon once asserted: “Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal”. The implication was not lost on Trump who has seemingly flaunted the law throughout his life and then appeared to shift into overdrive once in the White House.
Naturally, as has been evident as well, also even boasted “I don’t pay taxes because I’m smart”, and when money, especially free money gained at the expense of the less fortunate, it seems Trump and his “Jr. partner Jared Kushner might indeed pull out all the stops.
Therefore, it comes as no surprise that, once details on who received pandemic relief loans were revealed by the Small Business Administration, including the PPP or Paycheck Protection Program, multiple businesses linked to both were allegedly present.
NBC news: Over 25 PPP loans worth more than $3.65 million were given to businesses with addresses at Trump and Kushner real estate properties, paying rent to those owners. Fifteen of the properties self-reported that they only kept one job, zero jobs, or did not report a number at all.
While there have been many reports of fraud and abuse related to this and other pandemic relief programs, most stories on these were slanted towards shaming various individuals who had engaged in fraud to obtain the loans.
There were also numerous accounts of, in some cases, public companies with access to billions in capital applying for and receiving $100s of millions of dollars in forgivable loans. Names like Shake Shack, Ruth’s Chris, Potbelly Corp. and others were embroiled in controversy when some information leaked, and in some cases the companies, fearing public boycott or backlash, returned funds. While these examples show no specific wrongdoing on any particular company, the appearance of impropriety is nevertheless in question.
Now with more data the headlines are expanding to include potential impropriety , if not possible criminal action of Trump and Kushner seen as bilking the program at will, as well as massive and tragically-comical mismanagement of the “relief” funds with 100s of examples such as loans payed to companies that did not supply a name and many larger companies using multiple subsidiaries to gang together groups of smaller loans into sums totally tens of millions or more.
According to NBC, All these tricks and potentially more were employed (surprise!) by Trump and Kushner affiliated firms.
NBC: Sweeping [analysis of] data released by the Small Business Administration…found that properties owned by the Trump Organization as well as the Kushner Companies, owned by the family of Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, profited from the program.
The potential abuses, beyond the obvious one that this money was meant to relieve business not connected to government officials, and those who’s business were damaged by the pandemic in general, followed a pattern where the money flowed to those that needed it least (due to massive wealth, such as stories that have circulated about Kanye West) or due to already having existing access to nearly unlimited capital (such as the public companies that lined up to access relief funds rather than use billions they had in reserve).
Other examples of Trump allegedly using and exploiting the presidency are so common as to make it almost redundant to cite these massive, and if true, unethical and potentially criminal abuses. So many have already been noted and cited in the press – from the profits flowing into his properties directly from taxpayer dollars or by diverting foreign officials to them, tax cheating, dirtying money to his daughter and son-in-law, on and on it goes.
The only question that remains is why there appears to be “no-one home” when it comes to holding Trump and his family of abusers accountable. Much has been made of his soon-to-be gone immunity from federal prosecution, but what about the family? Pardons and tra-la-la?
That can’t be the way this ends. Otherwise the rest of us are just as corrupt by letting it happen without a response of appropriate magnitude.
