F’n great read.
“America badly needs a serious centre-right party, committed to fiscal restraint, prudently and without rancour, not just to cutting taxes. The Republicans were at their best an approximation of that party. They are currently nothing of the kind.”
Reagan would have adapted to the current political climate, for better or worse. (Worse.) He was very adaptable.
The GOP’s most vocal just seem to want to return to the 50s, pre Civil Rights of course, and to the glory days where they just gloss over what the tax rates actually were back then.
Yeah, they want the 50’s without any of the things that we did back then. Well, other than keeping those gays and brown people in their place.
Along those same lines:
Followed quickly this morning by…
For years the GOP has been the party that pushed “Let’s kill Social Security and let people manage their own retirement right from the start!”…and now they literally want to discourage exactly that by cutting the tax deferment on 401(k) contributions. But they are champions of the middle class!
The thing that’s amazing is that they are putting forward all of this shit in an effort to pay for tax cuts to billionaires.
I like this from the twitter thread:
Stealing for facebook.
You know what’s wrong with this? Transparency! Trump needs to change things so abuse like this will stay hidden!
Sometimes I feel hopeless. Stuff like this is so bad, but we already saw it with Halliburton after the Iraq war.
Nothing as blatant and obscene as this though.
I mean, holy shit, the company is barely a company at all. A two man LLC?
These people literally need to die when this is all over.
Yeah, how can a two-year old, two-person company land a fat contract like this? I hope this gets pushed and pushed by the press.
You haven’t seen War Dogs have you?
If they landed the contract, doesn’t that mean they offered a better price? What were the others offering?
Probably not.
Federal contracting rules allow agencies to OK deals without standard competitive bidding in “urgent” circumstances.
One quarter of contracts were labeled urgent or were not open to competition for Harvey contracts. In the case of Irma, less than half of contracts fell in the same category.
The power authority, also known as PREPA, opted to hire Whitefish rather than activate the “mutual aid” arrangements it has with other utilities. For many years, such agreements have helped U.S. utilities — including those in Florida and Texas recently — to recover quickly after natural disasters.
The unusual decision to instead hire a tiny for-profit company is drawing scrutiny from Congress and comes amid concerns about bankrupt Puerto Rico’s spending as it seeks to provide relief to its 3.4 million residents, the great majority of whom remain without power a month after the storm.
“The fact that there are so many utilities with experience in this and a huge track record of helping each other out, it is at least odd why [the utility] would go to Whitefish,” said Susan F. Tierney, a former senior official at the Energy Department and state regulatory agencies. “I’m scratching my head wondering how it all adds up.”
Techmanski said in an interview that the contract emerged from discussions between his company and the utility rather than from a formal bidding process.
Only eight contracts larger than $20 million have been approved for Puerto Rico by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers, with half of those for shipments of food and bottled water. Whitefish’s contract surpasses the $240 million contract the Army Corps awarded to engineering giant Fluor to “augment ongoing efforts” to repair the power grid.
So they didn’t have to bid, they were just selected by Techmanski, even though they had other deals (mutual aid) set up already.
That’s pretty messed up.
Spokesman Chris Chiames dismissed criticism about the company’s qualifications. “We are taking personal risks and business risks working in perilous physical and financial conditions,” Chiames said. “So the carping by others is unfounded, and we stand by our work and our commitment to the people of Puerto Rico.”
Yeah so they’re not the only company in the country working in less than ideal conditions. WTH. I’ve got no reason to question their work but their salaries seem questionable.
What’s happening with Telsa too? God, there is just too much news to keep up with.
Yeah, they have like… 280 employees or something.
So… they’re basically paying everyone that works there… a million dollars for 2 years of work.
I’m fairly sure mining Spice would cost less.
For those who don’t know, Sinclair mandates pro-trump editorials on local news for stations they own (and they own a lot.)
The swamp just got 10 feet higher.
Whitefish, one of America’s smallest electric companies, landed Puerto Rico’s biggest contract to get power back on.
The two-person, two-year-old company hails from Whitefish, Mont. — hometown of Interior Sec. Ryan Zinke — and won an unusual arrangement.
Zinke’s son worked for Whitefish for a summer. The CEO and Zinke say knew each other, but both say that had nothing to do with $300M deal.
A House Committee with oversight of PR bankruptcy says it is concerned about deal. Lawmakers may be more concerned when they price tag:
Whitefish is charging $300+ per hour for lineman to do the work that utilities from states offered through mutual aid.
A month after Maria, Whitefish says it still needs to get hundreds more linemen to the island. W/ @StevenMufson @jackgillum @arelisrhdz
This is just absurd.