Niantic Says It'll Perma-Ban Pokémon Go Cheaters

By Carli Velocci

Niantic Inc., the company behind that app you won’t stop hearing about Pokémon Go, has taken a stand against cheaters in the past, or anybody who violates its terms of service, such as sending out cease and desist letters to tracker apps. Now the company has stated that it will outright ban users for those violations.

In a post on the official website, Niantic writes that accounts can be fully terminated for a number of reasons.

“This includes, but is not limited to: falsifying your location, using emulators, modified or unofficial software and/or accessing Pokémon GO clients or backends in an unauthorized manner including through the use of third party software.

Our goal is to provide a fair, fun and legitimate game experience for everyone. We will continue to work with all of you to improve the quality of the gameplay, including ongoing optimization and fine tuning of our anti-cheat system.”

Some of the best parts at following the game’s success online have been seeing the myriad of ways people try and skirt around the system.

There’s a way to hack your phone in order to tap to walk anywhere on the Pokémon Go map; you can trick your phone into faking your GPS location; and a group of hackers cracked a piece of the code to create a new API that can be integrated into bots.

There’s also fun, not-as-technical ways people have tried to cheat the game, including that guy who tried to use a drone to catch Pokémon (it didn’t work).

Niantic came under fire after it issued the cease and desist letters to programs like Pokevision, which was a live updating Pokémon tracker. People in suburban or rural areas made use of similar programs since finding actual things to interact with is more complicated. The company also wrote a letter to Twitch, which streamed live videos of hacks and cheats on its website.

It’s also unclear how this will work. If Niantic bans an account, couldn’t users just make another one? If it’s done by IP address, it runs into the issue of addresses that are shared among users in the same area. Is it done by device? There are so many questions and Niantic isn’t known for being transparent.

Niantic does add in its post that anybody whose account has been suspended should not make a plea on social media due to “privacy reasons,” but also so that Niantic can manage requests better and you don’t call them out publicly if you disagree.

The issue of what is allowed with this app is up in the air, but because this is the Internet, I’m sure people will find ways around even these new restrictions.

[Verge]

TNA iMPACT Wrestling 11 Aug 2016 Full Show

Imam And His Assistant Shot Dead In Queens; Local Muslims Blame Trump For Encouraging Islamophobia

http://www.mediaite.com/online/imam-and-his-assistant-shot-dead-in-queens-local-muslims-blame-trump-for-encouraging-islamophobia/

In Texas, you can be executed even if you didn't kill anybody

http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/texas/article/In-Texas-a-man-who-didn-t-kill-anybody-is-about-9139382.php

If the 2016 election is hacked, it's because no one listened to these people

By Cory Doctorow

(Image: Andrew Appel, by Alex Halderman) 

Ever since the Supreme Court ordered the nation's voting authorities to get their act together in 2002 in the wake of Bush v Gore, tech companies have been flogging touchscreen voting machines to willing buyers across the country, while a cadre computer scientists trained in Ed Felten's labs at Princeton have shown again and again and again and again that these machines are absolutely unfit for purpose, are trivial to hack, and endanger the US election system.

Felten has moved on to the White House, where he's deputy CTO, while his grad students have fanned out across the country to take positions at some of America's top universities, where they and their students continue to mercilessly attack the unsound computers that America has put its democracy inside of.

Ben Wofford's comprehensive account of the war on shitty voting machines in Politico is by turns frightening and enraging, and even though the touchscreen voting era appears to finally be drawing to its inevitable close, the remaining machines in the field are, if anything, even more vulnerable to remote attacks, and, worryingly, many are clustered in hotly disputed districts in key battleground states for the 2016 presidential race.

It's not for lack of trying to raise alarms. Felten's team and proteges have gone to far as to meet mysterious whistleblowers in dark New York alleys to take receipt of smuggled-out voting machines to run tests on, and then produced some of the most mediagenic, easy-to-understand videos and articles detailing their findings that you could ask for.

Combine this indifference with North Korea's attack on Sony, China's attack on the Office of Personnel Management, and Russia's (presumptive) attack on the DNC, and you've got a situation where it's all-too-plausible that the coming election will be hacked, and where it's certain that any irregularities will be blamed on hackers, domestic and foreign.

After all, Virgina took 13 years to ditch its wifi-connected Winvote machines, whose crypto key is now known to be "abcde," and which runs a version of Windows that hasn't been updated since 2005.

Jeremy Epstein, the whistleblower who fought for the machines' removal for all that time, says of the elections that were balloted on Winvote systems, "If these machines and elections weren’t hacked, it was only because no one tried."

To make things worse, many of the same vendors who denied, threatened, and obfuscated when caught selling defective voting machines are now trying to sell online voting systems that will have every problem of the worst voting machines, times a thousand.

The Princeton group has no shortage of things that keep them up at night. Among possible targets, foreign hackers could attack the state and county computers that aggregate the precinct totals on election night—machines that are technically supposed to remain non-networked, but that Appel thinks are likely connected to the Internet, even accidentally, from time to time. They could attack digitized voter registration databases—an increasingly utilized tool, especially in Ohio, where their problems are mounting—erasing voters’ names from the polls (a measure that would either cause voters to walk away, or overload the provisional ballot system). They could infect software at the point of development, writing malicious ballot definition files that companies distribute, or do the same on a software patch. They could FedEx false software to a county clerk’s office and, with the right letterhead and convincing cover letter, get it installed. If a county clerk has the wrong laptop connected to the Internet at the wrong time, that could be a wide enough entry window for an attack.

“No county clerk anywhere in the United States has the ability to defend themselves against advanced persistent threats,” Wallach tells me, using the parlance of industry for highly motivated hackers who “lay low and stick around for a while.” Wallach painted an unseemly picture, in which a seasoned cyber warrior overseas squared off against a septuagenarian volunteer. “In the same way,” continues Wallach, “you would not expect your local police department to be able to repel a foreign military power.”

In the academic research, hacks of the machines are far more pervasive; digitized voting registrations or tabulation software are not 10 years old and running on Windows 2000, unlike the machines. Still, they present risks of their own. “There are still plenty of computers involved” even without digital touch screens, says Appel. “Even with optical scan voting, it’s not just the voting machines themselves—it’s the desktop and laptop computers that election officials use to prepare the ballots, prepare the electronic files from the OpScan machines, panel voter registration, electronic poll books. And the computers that aggregate the results together from all of the optical scans.”

“If any of those get hacked, it could could significantly disrupt the election.”

The digital touch screens, even with voter verified paper trail, will still be pervasive this election; 28 states keep them in use to some degree, including Ohio and Florida, though increasingly in limited settings. Pam Smith, the director of Verified Voting—a group that tracks the use of voting equipment by precinct in granular detail—isn’t sure how many digital touch screens are left; no one I spoke with seemed to know. Nor is it clear where they’ll be deployed, a decision left up to county administrators. Smith confirms that after 2007, the number of states that adopted the machines plateaued, and has finally begun to shrink. The number of states using paperless touch screens—and nothing else—is five: South Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana, New Jersey and Delaware. But the number of states with a significant number of counties with the easily hacked machines is much larger, at 13, including Indiana, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. For hacking purposes, there’s little difference: In a close election, only a few precincts with paperless touch screens would be required to deflate vote totals, says Appel, even if the majority of counties are still in the Stone Age. Many of Felten’s mad-scientist experiments were designed to metastasize the nefarious code once it gained entry into a machine system.

How to Hack an Election in 7 Minutes [Ben Wofford/Politico]
(via Memex 1.1)

Protester Interrupts Rally To Call Donald Trump ‘Putin’s Bitch’

By Sean Colarossi

A man was thrown out of a Trump campaign event in Kissimmee, Florida on Thursday after shouting about Donald Trump’s affection for Russia and, more specifically, Vladimir Putin.



“You love Russia,” the heckler shouted at Trump. “You’re Putin’s bitch.”

The Republican nominee, who has become very low-energy since his poll numbers began to plummet, repeatedly told the protester “goodbye” before asking, “Where the hell did he come from?”

Not only was the protester’s comment funny, but it also hits on a larger truth about Trump – that he seems to admire Putin and favor Russia-friendly policies.

The Republican nominee has repeatedly praised Putin’s leadership abilities. Even when asked about the Russian government’s alleged killing of journalists, Trump said, “at least [Putin’s] a leader.”

The spray-tanned buffoon had also called Putin’s land grab in the Ukraine “so smart,” and his campaign went out of its way to remove anti-Russian language from the 2016 Party Platform.

None of this is all that surprising given the fact that Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort spent over a decade as a pro-Russian lobbyist.

So, while stunts by protesters can often be laughed off, there is a great dose of truth in the message this particular one was trying to send to Trump.

McGinty overtaking Toomey in Pa. Senate race

Larry Roberts and Nate Guidry/Post-Gazette

Democratic Senate candidate Katie McGinty and Republican U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey.

---

By Jonathan Tamari / The Philadelphia Inquirer

WASHINGTON - Another new poll has found Democrat Katie McGinty surging into a late summer lead over Republican Sen. Pat Toomey in the critical Pennsylvania senate race.

A Quinnipiac University survey released this morning found Ms. McGinty leading Mr. Toomey, 47 percent to 44 among likely Keystone State voters. That's within the poll's margin of error, but suggests a far tighter contest than pollsters found earlier this summer, when Mr. Toomey had solid leads.

The new poll is the third in the past week showing Ms. McGinty, Gov. Tom Wolf's former chief of staff, with a small lead a few weeks ahead of Labor Day, when campaigns typically kick into high gear. Her rise coincides with Hillary Clinton's sharp gains in Pennsylvania in the wake of the Democratic National Convention.

Mr. Toomey's 44 percent support is similar to the 42 percent backing Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump registered in the same poll. But while Ms. Clinton had 52 percent support, Ms. McGinty - who has never held elected office and is still introducing herself to many voters - has won less backing.

The poll shows sharp disparities among races and genders. Mr. Toomey, seeking his second senate term, won 51 percent of white voters, but only 12 percent of non-whites. Women favor Ms. McGinty 52 - 38, while men support Mr. Toomey 51 – 41.

Pollsters have cautioned that surveys at this point may still be picking up the effects of the Democratic convention, which was held in Philadelphia and dominated media coverage. The poll was conducted immediately after the convention, from July 30 to Aug. 7, and surveyed 815 Pennsylvania voters. It has a margin of error of 3.4 percentage points.

Joe Scarborough Re-Writes His Own Internal History

By Frances Langum

Retcon! Joe Scarborough Re-Writes His Own Internal History

Just days after Mr. Helms, a Republican from North Carolina, created a furor by saying that President Clinton was not up to the job of Commander in Chief, he told The News and Observer, a newspaper in Raleigh: "Mr. Clinton better watch out if he comes down here. He'd better have a bodyguard." -- New York…

Donald Trump's faithful manservant, Chris Christie, might be in a spot of bother, again!

Back in 2013, Christie did a press conference where he vehemently assuring reporters that he had no idea at all about any of those political vengeance bridge closings!

 http://wonkette.com/605379/surprise-chris-christie-is-a-lying-liar-who-lies-about-stuff-love-his-staff

Americans deserve more than an apology for the foreclosure fraud epidemic

Despite talk of "recovery," former homeowners remain scarred after their government abandoned them

By David Dayen

(Credit: Reuters/John Gress)

“I lost my home of 30 years to fraudclosure.”

“I have been fighting this bank for over five years now. I am finally losing everything to their fraud.”

“We feel captive in our own home.”

This is a sampling of what I have awakened to practically every day for the past few months, since my book “Chain of Title: How Three Ordinary Americans Uncovered Wall Street’s Great Foreclosure Fraud” came out. Hundreds of people have emailed me, sent me letters, attended my public events, to relate their personal horror stories of foreclosure and dispossession. They come from across America, from different social and economic backgrounds. Some lost everything, and some haven’t given up.

They contact me, a non-lawyer who has only written about and not participated in their struggle, because they have been abandoned, by a government that chose sides against them after the crash of 2008. They seek answers that I mostly don’t have and support I mostly cannot provide. Outside of referring them to legal aid, I cannot solve their foreclosure problems. I cannot convince a judge disinclined to rule in their favor, or a bank disinclined to see them as anything but a financial asset to be plucked, to change their minds. I can only note in sorrow that the massive netting of fraud laid by the mortgage industry over a decade ago continues to capture people like them.

But despite my lack of assistance, they typically express to me their gratitude, for one simple reason: just by giving voice to similar nightmares, I have instilled in them hope that they aren’t utterly alone in their misery, that they haven’t been singled out by a vengeful nation, that somewhere out there they have an ally and a confidant.

I wrote my book for them, for everyone who suffered as a result of the largest consumer fraud in American history and the greatest economic collapse in nearly a century. They shouldn’t be forgotten. In fact, somebody should apologize to them for having to bear the weight of the financial collapse on their shoulders, even while that suffering was exacted through outright fraud. It might as well be me.

In “Chain of Title”, I detailed how three foreclosure victims uncovered an unparalleled pattern of deceit: mortgage companies systematically using false evidence in courtrooms and county offices to take people’s homes away. This routine document fabrication covered up the unspeakable crime of breaking the chain of title on millions of home mortgages, confusing the underlying ownership and damaging 350 years of functioning property records law.

It was a work of history, depicting events mainly in 2009 and 2010. But that history lives on in my email inbox, to this very day.

Julian Soncco of Phoenix, Arizona, told me how his bank, GMAC Mortgage, broke into his home and changed the locks while he was supposed to be under bankruptcy protection. He received a favorable judgment on two occasions but has still never recovered his home. “In this country,” Soncco wrote, “no such person, no matter how much power they hold, should have the right to take or rob a family from their home without any just reason.”

Michael Powell of Albuquerque, New Mexico, said he survived two foreclosure cases over the past five years, with a third attempt possible. “People would look at me like I was crazy when I’d talk of bogus documents and robo-signing,” he wrote. Diane Bauman of Baldwin, New York, described a foreclosure case against her by JPMorgan Chase going on six years, where affidavits suddenly turned up in the last month, purporting to fix defective documents.

Kim Bolin of St. Louis, Missouri, was told to stop making payments while she negotiated a modification, and then was put into foreclosure simultaneously. The lender submitted as proof of ownership an assignment dated 2013 from the original lender Intervale Mortgage, which went out of business in 2008. Kim, her husband and her three kids expect to be out on the street in the next two weeks. “The feeling of failing your kids is unbelievable,” Bolin wrote. “I now have a heart condition that is causing rapid breathing and a rapid heart rate – the only reason they can find is the huge amount of stress I’m living with every day.”

It’s impossible to expend the time and resources necessary to verify these and the hundreds of other stories I get daily. I can’t even get through all the names of these victims. But I can paint a picture of the type of people who write them, which is nothing like the one the industry frames, a tale of deadbeats and losers who miss mortgage payments and try to scam banks into acquiring a free house.

These people are meticulous. They’ve kept every scrap of paper related to their cases, probably to preserve their own sanity. They know how the law works. Their perseverance, even while recognizing the odds against them, is remarkable.

Andy Williams drove four hours from Chicago to St. Louis to see me speak last month. His foreclosure case began eleven years ago, and he’s compiled a half-dozen law firms to help borrowers in foreclosure in the Chicago area. His lonely battle for consumer rights occurred in parallel with the subjects of my book, thousands of miles away in Florida. There was no wide-ranging community to bring all these voices together, nobody to tell them they weren’t alone.

Which I guess made me the conduit. So I hear all these stories, knowing that years after the foreclosure crisis began, judges and lawyers and prosecutors and politicians don’t want to hear them anymore. Any drive to protect the public, if it was ever there, has withered. Having exhausted other options, foreclosure victims have to approach a writer as a last line of defense. It powerfully illustrates the dislocation people feel, of being stuck in a Kafka-esque trauma without resolution.

Political analysts still manage to wonder why people are angry in a time of economic recovery, without ever even hinting recognition of the scarring impact of the foreclosure disaster. More than 9.3 million American families gave up their home between 2006 and 2014, either in a foreclosure or a short sale or some other transaction. That translates to about 14 million people, all of whom have family and friends and colleagues who at least know of the pain caused by the foreclosure crisis. 

There have been more since then.

It didn’t have to turn out that way. All of the losses didn’t have to be placed upon homeowners. Somebody could have been held responsible. We could have enforced the simple rule that you can’t take a person’s home with false evidence. This bare minimum would have engendered some faith that the system works, that justice still burns somewhere in America.

So to those who have reached out to me, and those who haven’t, to everyone still feeling the pain of foreclosure, I have just one thing to say. Your government failed you. Those entrusted with protecting you failed you. And when in your desperation you turned to me, I failed you. Because I wish I had something better to express than an apology.

POSTSCRIPT: This is my last column for Salon as a contributing writer. I am tremendously thankful to everyone I worked with here for their encouragement and support, and I exit with the best wishes that this incredible operation will thrive in the future. Thanks.

David Dayen is a contributing writer for Salon. His first book, "Chain of Title," is out now. Follow him on Twitter at @ddayen.

More David Dayen.

Are You Ready For The End Of The Republican Party?

It's been a long, a long time coming...

Getty Chip Somodevilla

By Charles P. Pierce

(Optional Video Accompaniment To This Post)

In Friday's New York Times, the former director of the CIA wrote something that's going to leave a mark even through nine layers of spray-on tan.

Mr. Putin is a great leader, Mr. Trump says, ignoring that he has killed and jailed journalists and political opponents, has invaded two of his neighbors and is driving his economy to ruin. Mr. Trump has also taken policy positions consistent with Russian, not American, interests—endorsing Russian espionage against the United States, supporting Russia's annexation of Crimea and giving a green light to a possible Russian invasion of the Baltic States. In the intelligence business, we would say that Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.

The polls have gone so utterly sour on the Republican presidential nominee over the past week that many Very Serious People inside the Beltway have developed an even more devastating night-terror than El Caudillo de Mar-A-Lago with a nuclear arsenal at his beck and call—namely, that Hillary Rodham Clinton will get elected and then try to govern according to the progressive platform that was hashed out with so much sturm und drang with the Democratic primary process. This likely is also true of the many billionaires who have rushed to her side as the GOP nominee cratered.

There already is a strong undertow pulling HRC toward "reaching out" to the GOP, toward governing from "the middle," and toward not accelerating the now-rapid descent of the Republican Party into the final madness of the prion disease it has welcomed so warmly into itself ever since the late 1970's. 

Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker even posited that, as a gesture of good faith, HRC should allow the Republicans to pick a Supreme Court justice, a stratagem that has been proven to work only on The West Wing, which was not a documentary series.

Professor Krugman has knocked down most of the arguments in favor of this rainbows-and-unicorns idea. First of all, it's insane politics. It will divide the Democratic Party just as the Republicans are engaging in what is bound to be an entertaining interlude of public fratricide.

Second, it would be an act of astonishing bad faith that would set in concrete all of the most unflattering opinions held about HRC by the people who trust her the least.

Third, it assumes Democratic control of the Congress, which remains a long shot. As long as the Republicans still hold the House of Representatives, where all the bills involving federal spending are born, and assuming that the Democrats aren't gifted with a super-majority in the Senate, it's logical to expect that the GOP won't be any more willing to cooperate with a President Clinton II in governing the country than they were with either President Clinton I or Barack Obama.

 

And, finally, and this is something Professor Krugman touches on only briefly, there is a more important reason for a President HRC to press her advantages on all fronts to put in place the policies she committed herself to run on: For the good of the nation, the Republican Party as it is presently constituted has to die.

Ever since the late 1970's, when it determined to ally itself with a politicized splinter of American evangelical Protestantism, having previously allied itself with the detritus of American apartheid, the Republican Party has been reeling toward catastrophe even as it succeeded at the ballot box, and taking the country along with it. 

Crackpot economic theories were mainstreamed in the 1980's. Crackpot conspiracy theories and god-drunk fantasies were mainstreamed in the 1990's. Crackpot imperial adventures abroad were mainstreamed in the 2000's. And all of these were mainstreamed at once in opposition to the country's first African American president over the past eight years.

Modern conservatism has proven to be not a philosophy, but a huge dose of badly manufactured absinthe. It squats in an intellectual hovel now, waiting for its next fix, while a public madman filches its tattered banner and runs around wiping his ass with it. It always was coming to this.

For the good of the nation, the Republican Party as it is presently constituted has to die.

There have been three chances since 2000 for the Democratic Party to beat the crazy out of the Republicans. The first was after the thumping that the Avignon Presidency received in the 2006 midterms. The second was immediately after the election of Barack Obama. Both of those went a'glimmering because the Democrats listened to people who convinced them that, because they were the grown-up governing party, they had to make nice with the pack of vandals on the other side of the aisle. Even this president bought this line of argument, until it became obvious to him that the prion disease was too far gone.

 

Ever since he looked deeply into that big back of fucks and discovered that it had been empty for a while, the president obviously determined to keep proposing sensible measures even though he knows the Congressional majorities will decline to do even the minimal work required of them by the Constitution. My god, they won't even come back into session to address the Zika epidemic that is now breaking out in Florida. Merrick Garland is sipping a cool one on the veranda somewhere, waiting for someone to tell him where he'll be working come winter. The president is not budging.

Why should he? He's not the crazy one. He doesn't belong to the party that, with its eyes wide open, nominated a vulgar talking yam for president.

It long has been the duty of the Democratic Party to the nation to beat the crazy out of the Republican Party until it no longer behaves like a lunatic asylum. The opportunity to do this, to act unilaterally in returning sanity to the Republic, never has been as wide and gleaming as it is right now. To argue that responsible government requires that you treat sensibly a party that has gone as mad as the Republicans have is to argue for government by delirium.

Trump doesn't need an intervention. His party does.

Nina Turner weighing offer to join Green Party ticket as Vice President

By Nathan Wellman

Nina Turner, former Democratic state senator from Cleveland and high profile Bernie Sanders supporter, has confirmed that she’s received an offer from the Green Party to run for Vice President under Jill Stein. Turner said that she is still considering the offer to cleveland.com today in a telephone interview.

Both Stein and Turner have become rallying figures for Bernie Sanders supporters who have become disenchanted by the Democratic party and the Clinton campaign.

Turner was at the center of controversy last week when her previously scheduled speech nominating Bernie Sanders for President was cancelled by the Democratic National Convention at the last minute. A small rally protesting her treatment by the Democrats was held on Wednesday involving Hollywood actors Rosario Dawson, Susan Surandon, and Danny Glover. Some Sanders delegates at the DNC even pushed to nominate Turner for Vice President as an alternative to Senator Tim Kaine.

The Green Party holds its convention in Houston starting this Thursday, so Turner’s answer to the Stein campaign’s invitation is expected within the next few days.
 

Tim Kaine has belonged to a black church for more than 30 years

By kwassa

Kaine and his wife, Anne Holton attend St. Elizabeth Catholic Church in a poor, predominantly black working-class neighborhood in Richmond, Virginia. It is the same church that they have been attending for 30 years, and where they were married in 1984. 

Kaine is also a Tenor in the church choir. In an interview with NPR, Father Jim Arsenault, the priest at St. Elizabeth, had the following to say about Kaine as church parishioner and member of the close-knit community:

This past Good Friday, we were about ready to start the procession for the veneration of the cross. And Tim was in back of church. And I said to him, hey Tim, we need your help. Help us carry this cross. It was sort of life-size. And he said sure. And gospel choir was singing some gospel spiritual songs. And Tim was there as people with tears in their eyes would venerate the cross. And they’d come up, and he’d help them up after they were kneeling or something. And he’d shake their hand, and he’d practically pull them up. And then they’d give Tim a nice hug. Everybody knows Tim Kaine.

http://heavy.com/news/2016/07/tim-kaine-religion-catholic-jesuit-religious-faith-church-missionary-wife/



Tim's wife, Anne Holton,

As a schoolgirl in 1970, she was on the front lines of the fight to desegregate Virginia’s public schools. Holton is the daughter of Virginia Gov. A. Linwood Holton (R), who championed integration in a state that was known for its vigorous efforts to resist it. To drive home this point, he sent his daughters to a historically all-black Richmond City public school, escorting Anne Holton’s sister to class in a gesture captured in a historic photograph.

“I have spent much of my working life focused on children and families at the margin, with full appreciation of the crucial role education can and must play in helping young people escape poverty and become successful adults,” Holton wrote in a Washington Post op-ed in June 2015.

Holton and Kaine also sent their three children, who are now grown, to Richmond public schools.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/7/23/1551522/--Meet-Tim-Kaine-s-Wife

Gig economy workers: Independent contractors or indentured servants?

By Julie Gutman Dickinson


(Credit: Reuters/Chris Keane)
This article originally appeared on Capital & Main.

What if millions of American workers were being denied health insurance, job security and the most basic legal protections, from overtime pay to workers compensation to the right to join a union? What if tens of billions of dollars in taxpayer revenues — money desperately needed to address everything from crumbling roads to education to health care — were never making it to local, state and federal treasuries? What if thousands of companies were violating the law with impunity?

That is exactly what is happening in the United States today, thanks to a rampant practice known as worker misclassification — illegally labeling workers as independent contractors when in fact they are employees under the law. In some cases it’s occurring in plain sight, in others it’s more hidden — but regardless of the circumstances, it is taking an enormous toll on the country.

According to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), workers misclassified as independent contractors can be found in nearly every industry, and the phenomenon has grown considerably with the rise of the gig economy. Uber, the ride-hailing company, has become the poster child for worker misclassification, with numerous lawsuits alleging that Uber wrongly classifies its drivers as independent contractors. But Uber is hardly alone — examples of worker misclassification can be found in scores of new sectors, from house cleaners to technical workers.

Workers misclassified as independent contractors are also legion in established sectors of the economy, notably residential construction, in-home caregiving and the port trucking industry. Conditions for these workers have been compared to indentured servitude, and for good reason.

Misclassification enables employers to get away with widespread wage theft and a range of other illegal practices.

In a 2015 report, EPI described the advantages to employers of misclassifying workers. “Employers who misclassify avoid paying payroll taxes and workers’ compensation insurance, are not responsible for providing health insurance and are able to bypass requirements of the Fair Labor Standards Act, as well as the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act.” If this weren’t enough, the report continues, “misclassified workers are ineligible for unemployment insurance, workers’ compensation, minimum wage and overtime, and are forced to pay the full FICA tax and purchase their own health insurance.”

How do employers get away with such violations? The answer is complex, involving anemic labor laws, lax enforcement of the protections that do exist and the savvy exploitation of both by companies in key industries. While some businesses misclassify their workers out of ignorance, others do it very deliberately, and have spent millions of dollars defending the practice.

A case in point is the port trucking industry, which was deregulated in the 1980's, leading to a proliferation of companies whose business model was predicated on the use of independent contractors. That model has resulted in a workforce of close to 75,000 truck drivers at ports across the country laboring in mostly abysmal conditions. Among the indignities endured by drivers are such neo-Dickensian schemes as negative paychecks — an inconceivable but well-documented occurrence in which drivers labor full time or more, yet actually owe money to the trucking companies they work for due to paycheck deductions for everything from truck payments to insurance to repairs.

In the last several years, port truck drivers and their labor, community and political allies have begun to successfully challenge misclassification, winning a series of legal victories, particularly in California. Every government agency that’s conducted an investigation into the practices of the port trucking industry — from the United States Department of Labor and National Labor Relations Board to the California Labor Commissioner and Economic Development Department — has determined that port drivers are employees, not independent contractors. The state’s labor commissioner alone has issued more than 300 decisions on misclassification of drivers in Southern California, and drivers have prevailed in every decision, winning over $35 million in back pay.

How can these successes be replicated and enhanced to end misclassification? Three strategies stand out:

Litigation: The successful track record in California has proven that misclassification is vulnerable to sustained litigation. An important factor is whether elected and appointed officials are willing to aggressively pursue or support such litigation — if not, the efforts will yield far less favorable results.

Policy changes: The enactment of policies that clamp down on misclassification, increase penalties and ban law-breaking companies from operating can have significant impact. However, as with litigation, this strategy depends on the presence of lawmakers willing to take on the issue.

Worker organizing: In Los Angeles, port truck drivers frustrated with the exploitative conditions in their industry have waged a multi-year campaign to expose the practice of misclassification. That effort, which has included multiple strikes, has been supported by a broad coalition of community groups — a potent combination that has played a crucial role in challenging the trucking industry’s “independent contractor” business model.

Taking on misclassification is important not just to workers, but to businesses and taxpayers as well. In the current system, law-abiding companies are forced to compete with low-road operators, creating an uneven playing field. Likewise, the cost to taxpayers in lost revenues from employers that illegally misclassify workers as independent contractors is enormous, cheating government out of resources that could and should be used for the common good.

Reining in worker misclassification and the abuse of so-called “independent contractors” is one of the more daunting challenges in taking on economic inequality. But any serious plan to address the nation’s economic divide must include an aggressive strategy to take on this costly epidemic.

Trump: Republicans 'have no choice' but to vote for me

By Jesse Byrnes

 

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Donald Trump said Thursday that Republicans wary of his campaign have little choice but to vote for him anyway.

 

"If you really like Donald Trump, that's great, but if you don't, you have to vote for me anyway. You know why? Supreme Court judges, Supreme Court judges," Trump said at a rally in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

 

"Have no choice, sorry, sorry, sorry. You have no choice," Trump continued, calling the late Justice Antonin Scalia a "great guy" and acknowledging tied decisions at the Supreme Court after his death.

 

Trump said the next president "will probably have three, could be four, could even be five" appointments to make to the Supreme Court, alluding to the ages of senior justices.

 

Trump dismissed critics who speculate he may appoint liberal judges and said if Hillary Clinton appoints judges: "You're going to end up with another Venezuela. You're going to be Venezuela."

 

Senate Republicans have denied hearings and a vote on President Obama's Supreme Court pick to fill the seat vacated by the death of Scalia in February, arguing the next president should make the pick.

 

Trump scheduled his rally Thursday night to counteract speeches in the final night of the Democratic National Convention, where Clinton will officially accept her party's nomination.

IGN Presents the History Of Bourne

In the mid-1970s notorious Venezuelan terrorist Carlos the Jackal orchestrated a high-profile attack on an OPEC meeting in Vienna, Austria which resulted in the deaths of three people. It was just one of a string of crimes committed by Carlos across the continent, making him one the most-wanted fugitives of the era.

Back in the 70's American author Robert Ludlum didn’t know a great deal about Carlos the Jackal, but that soon changed.

One night Ludlum and his wife tuned in to a radio program featuring journalist Pierre Salinger; Ludlum wasn’t aware what he was on air to speak about and had chosen to listen largely due to the fact Salinger had written an introduction to the French edition of Ludlum’s 1977 novel The Chancellor Manuscript.

It turned out Salinger was discussing Carlos the Jackal, which piqued Ludlum’s interest. He immediately began researching the infamous assassin.

Outraged By DNC Leaks, More And More Sanders Supporters Plan To Vote Third Party

By Rania Khalek

“I’m a life-long Democrat and life-long disappointed,” said 47-year-old Bill Frantal of Indiana.

Frantal was among hundreds of Bernie Sanders supporters who gathered outside Philadelphia’s City Hall in the sweltering heat on Sunday afternoon to protest the Democratic National Committee ahead of the convention.

Outrage at the Democratic party establishment was magnified by the batch of internal DNC emails published by WikiLeaks over the weekend proving that the DNC conspired with the Clinton campaign and the media to undercut Sanders during the primary.

Anger was also directed at the corporate media, as demonstrated by the crowd’s reaction to the presence of a CNN news crew at the rally. For ten minutes, Sanders supporters surrounded CNN, chanting, “shame, shame” and “CNN has got to go!” out of frustration over biased anti-Sanders coverage from the establishment press.

Bernie Sanders supporters want cod CNN to leave. Yelling "CNN has got to go!" and "shame, shame!" And " pic.twitter.com/GHc4csaEXi

— Rania Khalek (@RaniaKhalek) July 24, 2016

“When I was brought up, Republicans were for corporate interests and Democrats were for public interests,” Frantal told Shadowproof. “Unfortunately, the Democratic Party is now the left-wing of the Republican Party. They’re all for corporate interests.”

While Frantal remains undecided about voting for Clinton in November, he was one of the few people I could find who would even consider casting a ballot for her, and it was purely out of fear of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. Far more people said they plan to vote for Green Party candidate Jill Stein.

Protester at the March For Bernie. Photo by Rania Khalek.

Pasu Tivoret likened the race between Trump and Clinton to “choosing to vote for Lex Luthor or the Joker.” Formerly a Green Party member from California, Tivoret became a Democrat to support Sanders but plans to re-register with the Green Party. “I dropped the Dems just like they dropped Bernie,” he reasoned.

Scott Brown, a 31-year-old Sanders delegate from Atlanta, Georgia, is “withholding judgment” about voting for Clinton until after the convention. “I just have to think about the right strategy for a progressive future,” he told Shadowproof. While he recognizes the importance of stopping Trump in the short term, Brown argued that “in the long term, if we keep electing Democrats with a neo-liberal agenda, we’re going to keep enabling them.”

As for Sanders’ call for party unity in the aftermath of the DNC leaks scandal, Brown said, “There’s a contrast between unity and having the strongest party you can, not just to win this election but to win the long-term ideological battle in this country. If we let our party get away with short-changing its constituents, then people will lose faith in our party.”

Brown’s friend, Astrid Rodas, 37, flat out refused to vote for Clinton because “she doesn’t represent my values, she sides with Wall Street.”

A sign from the March For Bernie at the 2016 Democratic National Convention. Photo by Rania Khalek.

“The Democratic Party lost me,” said Rodas, who plans to cast a ballot for Jill Stein. She also expressed disappointment in Sanders’ endorsement of Clinton ahead of the convention. “It hurt everyone a lot,” she observed, though she still appreciates Sanders’s push for a progressive agenda.

Brown agreed that Sanders’ premature endorsement was painful. “That bothered me a lot at first too. I thought it hurt our momentum,” he said. But he now believes “it gave Democrats a chance to see Clinton’s poll numbers without Bernie in the race” and they’re still terrible.

Indeed, with Sanders out of the race, Clinton is polling within the margin of error against Donald Trump. In key battleground states, he’s polling ahead of her.

Lauren Teffers, 18, and Madi Aha, 20, from Baltimore, Maryland, are both registered Democrats who plan to vote for Stein. “[Clinton’s] not for the people. She’s taking money from Banks and big oil companies” and will be returning the favor once elected, said Aha, who also expressed concern about Clinton’s hawkish foreign policy.

Maureen Maske, 37, is also Democrat who plans to vote for Stein. Clinton, she says, is “too aggressive” on foreign policy. “I think it’s an insult to make Americans choose between this lesser-of-two-evils crap,” argued Maske.

It’s appears that the treatment of Sanders throughout the primary has exposed the corruption within the Democratic Party like never before. Based on the reaction of some of his most enthusiastic supporters, it’s clear that the outrage he unleashed can’t be tamed by his endorsement of Clinton, especially among his younger supporters.

Protester at the March For Bernie. Photo by Rania Khalek

According to one poll, nearly half of millennials who supported Sanders plan to vote for a third party despite his endorsement.

Seattle councilwoman Kshama Sawant believes that progressive disillusionment with the Democratic Party presents a unique and pressing opportunity to finally build an independent and viable third party alternative.

Asked how she responds to those who argue that a vote for a third party is a vote for Trump, Sawant replied putting energy into supporting another corporate Democrat is the more dangerous option.

“I am as horrified as any other progressive who finds Trump’s agenda stomach-turning. But what I’m worried about is far bigger than Trump himself. Trump’s rise signifies decades of betrayal by both the Democratic and Republican parties, that is why he’s risen up,” Sawant argued.

“In 2010, the Tea Party made gains not because the country was turning right-wing, but because people were angry at the corporate bailouts of Obama,” she continued. “And the left and the labor movement stood by at that time, passively cheer leading Obama. Meanwhile, there was burning anger among ordinary people.”

“What’s happening now is Trump is tapping into it. That’s dangerous, because if Trump can tap into it, far more dangerous right-wing elements can tap into it,” Sawant explained. “We could even see the formation of a far-right party. The only way to stop that from happening is to build the left immediately and have a sense of urgency about this.”

“Black Men For Bernie” bus at the March For Bernie. Photo By Rania Khalek.

“Folding our movements behind Hillary and her Wall Street agenda will feed into the right because people are angry and they need an alternative. The right-wing right now has a monopoly on that. We need the left to take that monopoly.”

While Sawant’s message resonated in the street, the idea of supporting a third party remains a major point of contention among Sanders supporters.

State Representative Carol Ammons, a Sanders delegate and the first black woman to be elected in Illinois 103rd district, understands that people are frustrated, “but at the end of the day we must consider the outcome of a Trump presidency,” she told Shadowproof.

“I would hope that those of us who were Sanders supporters would not get lost in discussion of a third party candidate only to give it over to Trump. Numerically that is what it will do,” Ammons insisted, adding that “we have a candidate in the White House that we can work with.”

Judging by the attitudes witnessed among Sanders supporters outside City Hall, Ammons argument has little chance of persuading a significant slice of Sanders supporters who are fed up.

DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz to resign

DNC chair Wasserman Schultz leaving under fire 

 

© Patrick T. Fallon Debbie Wasserman Schultz, chair of the Democratic National Committee, speaks during a campaign event for Hillary Clinton on Saturday, July 23, 2016, in Miami. 
 
PHILADELPHIA — Debbie Wasserman Schultz is resigning under pressure as Democratic Party chairwoman, a stunning leadership shakeup as party officials gather in Philadelphia to nominate Hillary Clinton.

Wasserman Schultz's announcement Sunday follows a firestorm over hacked emails suggesting the Democratic National Committee favored Clinton during the primary, despite pledging neutrality. The leaked emails prompted primary runner-up Bernie Sanders to call for Wasserman Schultz's immediate resignation.

In a statement, Wasserman Schultz said she will step down at the end of the four-day convention. She said she plans to formally open and close the convention, as well as address delegates.

Her statement does not address the email controversy.

Wasserman Schultz's swift ouster underscores party leaders' desire to avoid convention confrontations with Sanders' loyal supporters. The chairwoman has been a lightning rod for criticism throughout the presidential campaign, with Sanders repeatedly accusing the DNC of backing Clinton.

Sanders said the 19,000 emails published by the website Wikileaks appeared to confirm his suspicions.

In one leaked email, a DNC official wondered whether Sanders' religious beliefs could be used against him, questioning whether the candidate may be an atheist.

Sanders pressed for Wasserman Schultz to quit as chairwoman immediately. He also suggested that Clinton's choice of running mate, Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine, was a disappointment and that he would have preferred Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a favorite of liberals.

"His political views are not my political views. He is more conservative than I am. Would I have preferred to see somebody like an Elizabeth Warren selected by Secretary Clinton? Yes, I would have," Sanders told NBC's "Meet the Press."

The Clinton team worked to portray their party's convention in a different light from the just concluded Republican gathering in Cleveland, where Donald Trump accepted the GOP nomination but party divisions flared when his chief rival, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, refused to endorse the billionaire businessman.

Trump cast himself as the law-and-order candidate in a nation suffering under crime and hobbled by immigration, as the GOP convention stuck to a gloom-and-doom theme. Democrats said they wanted to convey a message of optimism and improving the lives of all Americans.

But party disunity also seems to be a factor in Philadelphia, given Sanders' demands for a new leader and general unhappiness among his many supporters about how the nomination process unfolded.

Norman Solomon, a delegate who supports Bernie Sanders, says there is talk among Sanders' delegates of walking out during Kaine's acceptance speech or turning their backs as a show of protest.

Solomon said he believes a "vast majority" of Sanders delegates support these kinds of protests to express their dismay. Sanders' supporters say they are concerned that Kaine is not progressive enough.

Dan O'Neal, 68, is a retired school teacher and delegate from Arizona, said Wasserman Schultz has to be censured.

"We knew they were stacking the deck against Bernie from the get-go, but this type of stuff coming out is outrageous," he said. "It proves our point that they've tried to marginalize him and make it as difficult as possible."

Trump's campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, agreed, saying Sanders' supporters "have a lot to complain about."

"The emails have proven the system was rigged from the start," Manafort told "Fox News Sunday."

Clinton's campaign manager, Robby Mook, tried to shift blame away from DNC officials to "Russian state actors" who, he said, may have hacked into DNC computers "for the purpose of helping Donald Trump," the Republican presidential nominee.

How the emails were stolen hasn't been confirmed.

"It was concerning last week that Donald Trump changed the Republican platform to become what some experts would regard as pro-Russian," Mook said.

Clinton is within just days of her long-held ambition to become the party's official presidential nominee.

After the DNC released a slightly trimmed list of super delegates — those are the party officials who can back any candidate — it now takes 2,382 delegates to formally clinch the nomination. Clinton has 2,814 when including super delegates, according to an Associated Press count. Sanders has 1,893.

Sanders has endorsed Clinton, but his delegates are pushing for a state-by-state tally. The state-by-state roll call is scheduled for Tuesday.

Also Sunday, Kaine and his wife, Anne Holton, were back at their longtime church in Richmond, Virginia, a day after he made his campaign debut with Clinton.

Kaine, a former choir member at St. Elizabeth Catholic Church, sang a solo during Communion. He later told reporters outside the church: "We needed some prayers today and we got some prayers, and we got some support and it really feels good."
___
Associated Press writers Chad Day and Hope Yen in Washington, Alan Suderman in Richmond, Virginia, and Alex Sanz in Philadelphia contributed to this report.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/dnc-chair-wasserman-schultz-leaving-under-fire/ar-BBuKYdJ

Bernie Sanders Must Disavow Hillary Clinton Endorsement: Rigged Election

Bernie Never Had a Chance: The Fix Was In

By Samantha Chang, July 24th, 2016 

Bernie Sanders is being pressured to disavow his endorsement of Hillary Clinton after a WikiLeaks release of 20,000 DNC e-mails shows the DNC rigged the primary election. (Photo: Twitter)

Bernie Sanders is facing mounting pressure from his supporters to disavow his endorsement of Hillary Clinton after a WikiLeaks release of 20,000 internal e-mails of the Democratic National Committee indicates the primary election was rigged.

Bernie’s campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, said someone must be held accountable for cheating voters out of a fair and impartial election.

“Someone has to be held accountable,” Weaver told ABC News. “The DNC, by its charter, is required to be neutral among the candidates. Clearly it was not.

“We spent 48 hours of public attention worrying about who in the Donald Trump campaign was going to be held responsible for the fact that some lines of Mrs. Obama’s speech were taken by Melania Trump.”

The WikiLeaks release of 20,000 internal DNC e-mails shows DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz routinely harangued “journalists” like CNN anchor Jake Tapper and MSNBC’s Chuck Todd to provide positive news coverage of Hillary Clinton and to squelch bad publicity.

Tapper and Todd often tried to placate the ill-tempered Wasserman Schultz.



Another e-mail shows DNC chief financial officer Brad Marshall suggested that staffers orchestrate a media campaign to paint Bernie Sanders (who is Jewish) as an atheist in order to turn religious voters in Kentucky and West Virginia against him:

“It might may no difference, but for KY and WVA can we get someone to ask his belief. Does he believe in a God. He had skated on saying he has a Jewish heritage.

“I think I read he is an atheist. This could make several points difference with my peeps. My Southern Baptist peeps would draw a big difference between a Jew and an atheist.”


In another email, national press secretary Mark Paustenpach told DNC staffers to plant a story to further the narrative the Sanders campaign was in total chaos:

“Wondering if there’s a good Bernie narrative for a story, which is that Bernie never ever had his act together, that his campaign was a mess.”

DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz — who was scheduled to speak at the convention this week — will no longer preside over the event. Ohio Congresswoman Marcia Fudge was named the new chair of the DNC.



The Clinton campaign blamed Russians hackers for hacking into the DNC database in order “to help Donald Trump,” without any evidence to support their accusations.

Meanwhile, Hillary has repeatedly claimed the personal e-mail account she used during her four years as Secretary of State — which she operated from an unsecured secret server in her basement — was never hacked by enemies of the United States, despite multiple reports suggesting otherwise.

Bernie Sanders is set to speak at the Democratic National Convention in support of Hillary, but his followers say he must disavow his endorsement.

In TV interviews July 24, Bernie said Wasserman Schultz should resign, but he stands by his endorsement of Clinton.

For months, the Sanders campaign and his supporters had accused the DNC of having its “finger on the scale” to rig the election in Clinton’s favor. The DNC and Wasserman Schultz laughed off the suggestions, calling them silly conspiracy theories.

Debbie Wasserman Schultz was the co-chair of Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign.

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