#trump fuckery

[icarusinstatic]

#blessed #thank you #fani willis #Trump fuckery #american politics

[ausetkmt]

"BREAKING: New York AG SERVES Trump Lawsuit PER COURT ORDER that also EXPEDITES Injunction Hearing"

oh they really speeding things up and I like it go ahead We get to see the shenanigans pop off before Thanksgiving

#Trump #Trump fuckery #New York attorney general #New York Supreme Court #Leticia James #New York AG serves Trump lawsuit per court order #Youtube

[martinmarysblog]

#fine as fuck #next level fuckery #fuck trump #fuck russia #meet and fuck #fuck you #fuck doll #fucking grifters #mentally fucked #monster fucker #thicc as fuck

[buddleuart]

childe mugshot

#genshin impact #genshin impact fanart #childe #childe fanart #genshin impact childe #genshin impact tartaglia #tartaglia #tartaglia fanart #trump mugshot #meme redraw #finished piece #4.0 spoilers #genshin spoilers #i totally didnt spend 10 hours on this i promise (lie) #some artstyle fuckery here #buddleuart

[reasoningdaily]

https://x.com/ektaka/status/1701347314353504672?s=20

President Biden wasn't the one who negotiated an unconditional surrender to the Taliban, released 5000 hardened Taliban fighters and left our Afghan allies high and dry while making sure President Biden couldn't do anything about it when he took over...

“I started the process, all the troops are coming home, they (Biden) couldn’t stop the process. 21 years is enough. They (Biden) couldn’t stop the process, they (Biden) wanted to but couldn’t stop the process.” - Trump, 1 month ago

#trump #afghanistan #taliban #white hate #gop #fuckery in politics

[hotpinkcyanmillie]

Imo voting down ballot is more effective than being particularly picky about which genocidal president we pick

Neither Biden nor Trump can get much of anything done* without a stacked house and senate. Having a thin majority in the senate for example leads to shit like your rotating turncoat dems voting against their own party's platform for an entire administration. Likewise Trump was similarly foiled a few times by rogue Republicans he'd pissed off like McCain.

So yeah personally I don't give a crap who wins the presidency, because their ability to act on their party's agenda will be dependent on who you vote for the house and senate.

(EDIT: *Domestically. I will admit in terms of foreign policy, Biden isn't afraid to use the power of his office to bypass Congress and supply Israel with weapons to level Gaza.)

#I've been very vocal about my dem support in the past #the genocide in Palestine is a bridge too far for me but if you're insisting on voting to try and make social change consider... #We lost multiple SC seats due to fuckery from the Republican Senate under Obama #and if even if we assume Biden gives a crap about LGBT issues the entire country is being flooded with anti-LGBT and especially #anti-trans legislation and Biden can't just undo that without support from the other branches that just does not exist. #So to me it is Irrelevant who is president #if we don't get clear majorities in the house and senate it literally does not matter #A second Biden term with MAGA majorities looks indistinguishable to me from a Trump presidency from where I sit

[ghostlyhideoutsweets]

Wanna have some naughty fun together 👅🍆💓

#next level fuckery #fuck trump #meet and fuck #wet ass pussy #fuck doll

[cyarskaren52]

If this is true then death to him!!

truly the bottom of the barrel,

loser fucking scum.

i really do wish the worst for that man.

#next level fuckery! #the worsttttttt #Listen #yes #Jax is a pathological liar but I think his need to bury Tom Sandoval trumps his need to lie. I believe him #I’m feeling stabby #Wowww Tom is scum #This guy SUCKS #Electric chair #What a dick #TomSandoval #Apology #vanderpumprules #TeamAriana #RaquelLeviss #drama #pumprules #Scandoval #bravo #bravotv #VanderpumpRules #Rachel and Tom are both not seeing heaven for doing Ariana so wrong. #The punkassness #The bitchassery #The cowardice #the unfaithfulness #The caucasity #The cuntery #the fuckery #The dustbucketery

[wanderingandfound]

There was some medication fuckery going on but for context about the I Am Not Allowed to Fail working until it didn't, my lowest grade in college was a B+ until suddenly it went D+, D+, Withdrawal due to Health and I dropped out of school to get a handle on things. It wasn't a steady decline, it was a plummet.

#The medicine fuckery is that my wake-up medicine was too good and so my body stopped shutting down in the middle of class and homework for #sleep but my brain sure was shut off. #All those classes were in my major too. #It was bad. On one of the allnighters that wasn't supposed to be an allnighter Trump won the election. #And that was the most coherent thing I experienced for months. #personal #learning to function

[icarusinstatic]

This is the face of a man who enjoys making trump suffer.

#trump fuckery. #American policy #current events #arthur engoron #the man the myth the legend

[ausetkmt]

Trump Says America Will 'Cease To Exist' If He Doesn't Get To Play President again..

Quite to the contrary, if he is once again in the white house, america will cease to exist as a democratic country.

He has already said in the 2025 plan that the g o p is working that he will demolish the constitution.

If you think this is going to happen in America during your lifetime, then you better get your ass out to the polls to protect your own ass because Donald Trump wants to sell it like the pimp he is

#End of america #Donald trump fuckery #Youtube

[cyarsk52-20]

Especially after he ran his mouth the other night. I want him Punished so bad , I want him broken and broke , for what he did to those two women, I want him to suffer tremendously. Heck if I could make him begin to cough in three days I could .

#ruby freeman #shaye moss #rudy Giuliani #georgia #donald trump #what they went through was unforgivable #that’s unforgivable #next level fuckery #president biden #kamala harris #trump #indictment of trump #dark brandon #lock him up! #biden administration #classified documents #hillary clinton #ari melber #jack smith #view post #merrick garland #fani willis #fulton county #district attorney #tish James #2020 presidential election #trump indictment #SpongeBob memes #georgia election #political memes

[reasoningdaily]

to watch his video click here

#ice cube #gop fuckery #joey on twitter #trump indicted

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Worker misclassification is a competition issue

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/02/upward-redistribution/#bedoya

The brains behind Trump's stolen Supreme Court have detailed plans: they didn't just scheme to pack the court with judges who weren't qualified for – or entitled to – a SCOTUS life-tenure, they also set up a series of cases for that radical court to hear.

Obviously, Dobbs was the big one, but it's only part of a whole procession of trumped-up cases designed to give the court a chance to overturn decades of settled law and create zones of impunity for America's oligarchs and the monopolies that provide them with wealth and power.

One of these cases is Jarkesy, a case designed to allow SCOTUS to euthanize every agency in the US government, stripping them of their powers to fight corporate crime:

https://www.americanprogress.org/article/sec-v-jarkesy-the-threat-to-congressional-and-agency-authority/

The argument goes, "Congress had the power to spell out every possible problem an agency might deal with and to create a list of everything they were allowed to do about these problems. If they didn't, then the agency isn't allowed to act."

This is an Objectively Very Stupid argument, and it takes a heroic act of motivated reasoning to buy it. The whole point of expert agencies is that they're experts and that they might discover new problems in American life, and come up with productive ways of fixing them. If the only way for an agency to address a problem is to wait for Congress to notice it and pass a law about it, then we don't even need agencies – Congress can just be the regulator, as well as the lawmaker.

If there was any doubt that Congress created the agencies as flexible and adaptive hedges against new threats and problems, then the legislative history of the FTC Act should dispel it.

Congress created the FTC through the FTCA because the courts kept misinterpreting its existing antitrust laws, like the Sherman Act. Companies would engage in the most obvious acts of naked, catastrophic fuckery, and judges would say, "Welp, because Congress didn't specifically ban this conduct, I guess it's OK."

So Congress created the FTC with an Act that included a broad authority to investigate and punish "unfair methods of competition." They didn't spell these out – instead, they explicitly said (in Section 5) that it was the FTC's job to determine whether something was unfair, and to act on it:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge

The job of the FTC is to investigate unfair conduct before it becomes such a problem that Congress takes action, and to head that conduct off so that it never rises to the level of needing Congressional intervention.

Now, it's true that since the Reagan years, the FTC has grown progressively less interested in using this power, but that's broadly true of all of America's corporate watchdogs. But as the public all over the world has grown ever more furious about corporate abuses and oligarchic wealth, governments everywhere have rediscovered their role as a public protector.

In America, the Biden administration altered the course of history with the appointment of new enforcers in the key anti-monopoly agencies: the FTC and the DOJ's antitrust division. But more importantly, the Biden admin created a detailed, technical plan to use every agency's powers to fight monopoly, in a "whole of government" approach:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/party-its-1979-og-antitrust-back-baby

Now, this can give rise to seeming redundancies. Take labor issues. The NLRB is a (potentially) powerful regulator that had been in a coma for decades, but has awoken and taken up labor rights with a fervor and cunning that is a delight to behold:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/06/goons-ginks-and-company-finks/#if-blood-be-the-price-of-your-cursed-wealth

At the same time, the FTC has also taken up labor rights, using its much broader powers to do things like ban noncompetes nationwide, unshackling workers from bosses who claim the right to veto who else they can work for:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/02/its-the-economy-stupid/#neofeudal

But the NLRB doesn't make the FTC redundant, or vice-versa. The NLRB's role is principally reactive, punishing wrongdoing after it occurs. But the FTC has the power to intervene in incipient harms, labor abuses that have not yet risen to the level of NLRB enforcement or new acts of Congress.

This case is made beautifully in Alvaro Bedoya's speech "'Overawed': Worker Misclassification as a Potential Unfair Method of Competition," delivered to the Law Leaders Global Summit in Miami today:

https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/Overawed-Speech-02-02-2024.pdf

Bedoya describes why the FTC has turned its attention to the problem of "worker misclassification," in which employees are falsely claimed to be contractors, and thus deprived of the rights that workers are entitled to. Worker misclassification is rampant, and it transfers billions from workers to employers every year. As Bedoya says, 10-30% of employers engage in worker misclassification, allowing them to dodge payment for overtime, Social Security, workers' comp, unemployment insurance, healthcare, retirement and even a minimum wage. Each misclassified worker is between $6k-18k poorer thanks to this scam – a typical misclassified worker sees a one third decline in their earning power. And, of course, each misclassified worker's boss is $6k-$18k richer because of this scam.

It's not just wages, it's workplace safety. One of the most dangerous jobs in the country is construction worker, and worker misclassification is rampant in the sector. That means that construction workers are three times more likely than other workers to lack health insurance.

What's more, misclassified workers can't form unions, because their bosses' fiction treats them as independent contractors, not employees, which means that misclassified construction workers can't join trade unions and demand health-care, or safer workplaces.

Contrast this with, say, cops, who have powerful "unions" that afford them gold-plated health care and lavish compensation, even for imaginary ailments like "contact overdoses" from touching fentanyl – a medical impossibility that still entitles our nation's armed bureaucrats to handsome public compensation:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/27/extraordinary-popular-delusions/#onshore-havana-syndrome

Cops have far safer jobs than construction workers, but cops don't get misclassified, so they are able to collect benefits that no other worker – public or private – can hope for.

Not every employer wants to cheat and maim their employees, of course. In Bedoya's speech, he references Sandie Domando, an executive VP at a construction company in Palm Beach Gardens. Domando's company keeps its employees on its books, giving them health-care and other benefits. But when she started bidding against rival firms for jobs funded by the covid stimulus, she couldn't compete – two thirds of those jobs went to other firms that were able to put in cheaper bids. Those bids were cheaper because they were defrauding their workers by misclassifying them. Thus, publicly funded projects were overwhelmingly handed over to fraudulent companies. Fraud becomes a fitness-factor for winning jobs. It's a market for lemons – among employers.

Employee misclassification is a pure transfer from workers to bosses. Bedoya recounts the story of Samuel Talavera, Jr, a short-haul trucker who worked for decades in the Port of Los Angeles. For decades, his job paid well: enough to support his family and even take his kids to Disneyland now and again.

But in 2010, his employer reclassified him as a contractor. They ordered him to buy a new truck – which they financed on a lease-purchase basis – and put him to work for 16 hours stretches in shifts lasting as much as 20 hours per day. Talavera couldn't pick his own hours or pick his routes, but he was still treated as an independent contractor for payroll and labor protection purposes.

This lead to an terrible decline in Talavera's working conditions. He gave up going home between shifts, sleeping in his cab instead. His pay dropped through the floor, thanks to junk-fees that relied on the fiction that he was a contractor. For example, his boss started to charge him rent on the space his truck took up while he was standing by for a job at the port. Other truckers at the port saw paycheck deductions for the toilet-paper in the bathrooms!

Talavera's take-home pay dropped so low that he was bringing home a weekly wage of $112 or $33 (one week, his pay amounted to $0.67). His wife had to work three jobs, and they still had to declare bankruptcy to avoid losing their home. When Talavera's truck needed repairs he couldn't afford, his boss fired him and took back the truck, and Talavera was out the $78,000 he'd paid into it on the lease-purchase plan.

This story – and the many, many others like it from the Port of LA – paint a clear picture of the transfer of wealth from workers to their bosses that comes with worker misclassification. The work that Talavera did in the Port of LA didn't get less valuable when he was misclassified – but the share of that value that Talavera received dropped to as little as $0.67/week.

Worker misclassification is rampant across many sectors, but its handmaiden is technology. The fiction of independence is much easier to maintain when the fine-grained employer-employee control is mediated by an app (think of Uber):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

That's why those scare-stories that AI trucks were going to make truckers obsolete and create an employment crisis were such toxic nonsense. Not only are we unlikely to see self-driving trucks, but the same investors that back AI technology are making bank on companies that practice worker misclassification through the "it's not a crime if we do it with an app" gambit:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/11/robots-stole-my-jerb/#computer-says-no

By focusing our attention on a hypothetical employment crisis that will supposedly be caused by future AI developments, tech investors can distract us from the real employment crisis that's created by app-enabled worker misclassification, which is also the source of much of the capital they're plowing into AI.

That's why the FTC's work on misclassification is so urgent. Misclassification is a scam that hurts workers and creates oligarchic power – and it's also a mass-extinction event for good companies that don't cheat their workers, because those honest companies can't compete.

Worker misclassification is having a long-overdue and much needed moment. The revolutionary overthrow of the rotten old leadership at the Teamsters was caused, in part, by a radical wing that promised to focus the Teamsters' firepower on fighting worker misclassification:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/19/hoffa-jr-defeated/#teamsters-for-a-democratic-union

This has become a focus of labor organizers all around the world, as worker misclassification-via-smartphone has infected labor markets everywhere:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/22/kropotkin-graeber/#an-injury-to-one

Bedoya's speech is a banger, and it reminds us that labor rights and anti-monopoly have always been part of the same project: to rein in corporate power and protect workers from the insatiable greed of the capital class:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/14/aiming-at-dollars/#not-men

#pluralistic #automation panic #automation #scotus #market for lemons #worker misclassification #ftc #competition #antitrust #trustbusting #ftc act #ftc 5 #unions #labor #jarksey #alvaro bedoya #nlrb #whole of government

[qqueenofhades]

I don't know why I thought it was a good idea to argue with people about the worthlessness of voting third party. They just keep insisting that the influence is worth it, and that I was a coward for daring to suggest that we don't HAVE any other options than Democratic. I even cited how voting third party likely played a part in Al Gore losing ffs.

There's no "likely" about it, Ralph Nader DID directly cost Gore the election. He ran explicitly on the same "both parties are the same, so leftists/liberals should vote for me instead" rhetoric that we are still seeing among the Online Left, and it was successful: he got, for example, over 97,000 votes in Florida. Bush won Florida (and thus the presidency) by a miniscule 537 votes, after the fuckery of Bush v. Gore and SCOTUS ordering the recount stopped in Bush's favor. If the tiniest percentage of those Nader voters had gone for Gore, we would have had a president who was arguing in favor of tackling climate change in the year 2000. We would have been incredibly ahead of the curve. We would, in all likelihood, have a president who took the CIA's warnings of an impending al-Qaeda attack in the US seriously. We would not have had the disastrous Afghanistan and Iraq invasions and the "War on Terror," the rampant Islamophobia, "No Child Left Behind," the 2008 economic crash, and everything else that Dubya and his band of bloodthirsty neocons inflicted on us in the early aughties. Look, I try not to look back too much, but having Gore instead of Bush as president would have reshaped the entire timeline we're living in to such an unfathomably better degree that every moron thinking of voting third party For The Protest should be sat down and forced to learn this history intimately. Of course, they already saw it happen in real time in 2016, but they didn't care about that either.

The good news is: there are plenty of persuadable voters out there, and you can do work to reach them and convince them to vote for Democrats! They're just not online, because all the Online Leftists are terminally brain-poisoned against voting anyway and trying to argue with them is generally a waste of time. Instead, what you should do is take a gander at the following links:

This is the one-stop shop page for volunteering to get Democrats elected. You can do in-person and remote work, there are tons of different ways to get involved (i.e. you don't have to go directly out and knock doors if that's not something you're comfortable with), and your local Democratic party will welcome the volunteer help. There is also a page for finding your state party website:

I went there, clicked on my state, opened the webpage, and there was a "Volunteer" link right in the header, with an easy and quick form to fill out to register your interest and explain the kinds of work you would be interested in doing. You can canvass directly, you can manage data on the back end, you can phone bank, you can send texts and postcards to voters who may need an extra nudge, you can otherwise work with your state party in lots of ways, and it will be so much more productive and make you feel so much better than arguing with online idiots who will never, ever change their minds. What you can do is reach out to voters in your own community, in your own state, and have conversations with people who actually ARE willing to listen, but might need a little more educating on the facts, what's at stake, the truth about this election, and the danger that Trump poses. All of this will convert into critically important Democratic votes, and you can actually put your desire to make a difference into action. So yeah. I would 100% suggest you do it this way instead. Good luck.

#anonymous #ask #politics for ts