Moving to Canada just got a lot easier for Americans who hate Trump

 

Better act fast, before the wall goes up.

When Torontonian Sofi Papamarko noted the tragic, meteoric rise of Donald Trump and the Americans who vowed to make their escape to Canada if he becomes president of the United States, she knew she had to do something to make their journey a little easier.

The professional matchmaker, who runs Friend of a Friend Matchmaking, figured that the ones venturing north would have many things in common with her fellow Canadians (e.g. their dislike for Trump and assumed left-leaning ideologies). So, she decided why not help ’em make lemonade out of lemons by launching a matchmaking site that aims to hook up Americans with some fine Canadians.

“We can import eligible bachelors here, and they can benefit from our bounty of smart and cool women, socialized medicine and ketchup chips.”

“I kept seeing stories about Americans Googling ‘How to move to Canada.’ I thoroughly considered their problem…” Papamarko said. “We can import eligible bachelors here, and they can benefit from our bounty of smart and cool women, socialized medicine and ketchup chips.”

And thus, on May 9, “Canadian Girlfriend” was born. Although the site’s primarily aim is to match American men with Canadian women (since Papamarko says this is where there’s the most demand), Americans and Canadians of all sexual orientations are welcome to sign-up.

Here’s how it works. It costs $50 ($39 USD) and you fill out a super simple application form, just like you would for any other dating website. Papamarko says if people want results, they need to be very specific about their likes and dislikes. Next she works her matchmaking magic and, although she can’t guarantee anyone love (who can?), she’ll do her best to link like-minded people up with someone awesome across the border.

You’d think that Papamarko would secretly be rooting for a President Trump since it would clearly be fantastic for business, but she says a Trump win would simply be terrifying.

“I really love the United States and the people in it. I really hope they can avoid President Trump,” she said. “That’s some terrifying Back to the Future-style stuff right there. Please let me know if I can climb any clock towers during lightning storms to help out.”

See, her heart is definitely in the right place. So, eligible Canadians and Americas…what are you waiting for? Let the maple syrup oversized-burger sharing begin.

https://www.theloop.ca/americans-who-want-to-escape-trump-now-have-a-real-canadian-matchmaking-site/

In Remembrance: Ruth Bader Ginsberg

 

This kind of topic is not my usual cup of tea.

An NPR broadcast this afternoon described one of  RBG's major influences on American law and society. NPR's Radiolab program this afternoon described her push against the all male supreme court that led them to reconsider how they treated laws that affected the sexes differently. Her argument in the supreme court led to the court's development of the intermediate scrutiny test for laws that treat the sexes unequal.

This story describes how the young ACLU lawyer Ginsburg convinced an all-male Supreme Court to take discrimination against women seriously. Before this case, the constitution was silent about discrimination against women and it allowed and justified in prior supreme court cases. She shrewdly chose a case about discrimination against men to argue that discrimination against men was no better than discrimination against women. 

That led the court to conclude that discrimination on the basis of gender, a term she intentionally chose instead of the loaded term "sex" to defuse emotions. Her tactic led to a new test of constitutionality the court created and named "intermediate scrutiny." Her tactic was brilliant, rational and convincing to the 1970s all male court. It still generally applies today.

For context, there are three tests for the constitutionality of any law. The rational basis test, the intermediate scrutiny test that Ginsberg provoked, and the strict scrutiny test. Two questions are embedded in each test, what is the purpose of the law, and how closely is the law related to that purpose?

Rational scrutiny is basically no scrutiny

The rational basis test is basically no test at all. All a law needs to do is be somehow, even trivially, rationally related to what the law is intended to do. When the authority that creates a law cannot think of any rational reason for a constitutionally challenged law, the court steps in and make a reason up to find the law rational. Very, very few laws are found unconstitutional on the basis of the rational basis test. Blithering idiots can make laws that pass this level of court scrutiny.

Strict scrutiny is almost impossibly difficult

On the other hand, when the supreme court examines a federal, state or local law that impinges on one of the live wires, e.g., race or national origin, the court applies strict scrutiny. Under that test, most laws are declared unconstitutional and invalidated. Such laws deal with affirmative action and related issues. To meet this test of constitutionality, a legislature must have passed the law to further a "compelling governmental interest," and it must be "narrowly tailored" to achieve that interest.

Courts usually can and do easily think of ways to make a law narrower and thus blow it to bits. This reflects the usual incompetence of local, state and federal legislatures to write coherent laws.

Despite its ostensible strict rationality, strict scrutiny has lead to some utterly irrational decisions. The most commonly cited disaster is the infamous Korematsu v. United States decision (1944), where the court upheld the forced relocation of Japanese Americans in internment camps during World War II.

The Ginsberg-inspired intermediate scrutiny test

Intermediate scrutiny applies a different test for the government. Here the government must prove that the law serves an important purpose and there is a "substantial relationship" between the law and the purpose the law is intended to deal with. The "narrowly tailored" requirement is relaxed a bit and that allows generally more laws to be found constitutional.

Craig v. Boren, 429 U.S. 190 (1976) was the first case where the United States Supreme Court held that statutory or administrative sex-based classifications were subject to an intermediate standard of judicial review. That was directly due to Ginsberg's influence on the court. Before Ginsberg, blatant and irrational discrimination against women was legal because the constitution was mostly silent about women's rights. That was because the Founders believed that women were fundamentally different from men and needed to be "protected." That protection translated into two centuries of rationally unjustified and unwarranted discrimination.

Since the Equal Rights Amendment has failed since the 1970s, Ginsberg's influence is what mostly fills the legal void in protection for women in the US.

Since the intermediate scrutiny test, like rational basis and strict scrutiny, are judge-made laws, the Supreme Court can get rid of one, two or all of them when a five judge majority wants to do that.

Conclusion: Ginsberg was brilliant. She served the real (not partisan) public interest as best she could. She will be sorely missed.

Why do you hate/love him so much?

Hate him or love him, approve of him or disapprove of him, Donald Trump knows how to get to us to emotionally react to him.  So, I have two sets of questions, depending on what love/hate category you fall under.

 

Set one:

Trump Lovers (approvers): Why do you love him so much?

Trump Haters (disapprovers): Why do you hate him so much?

 

Set two:

Trump Lovers (approvers): Why do YOU THINK Trump haters hate him so much?

Trump Haters (disapprovers): Why do YOU THINK Trump lovers love him so much?

 

I realize “hate” is a loaded word, but I mean it in a very generic sense.  I’m not talking about violence here.  Having said that, identify your category, and then tell us how you see yourself, and then how you see your counterpart.

Thanks for posting and recommending.

 

Galloway:
Why do you hate them so much?

Lt. Weinberg:
They beat up on a weakling, and that's all they did. The rest is just smokefilled coffee-house crap. They tortured and tormented a weaker kid. They didn't like him. So, they killed him. And why? Because he couldn't run very fast.

Lt. Weinberg:
Why do you like them so much?

Galloway:
Because they stand upon a wall and say, "Nothing's going to hurt you tonight, not on my watch."

 

Regarding America’s Shaky Money Laundering Industry

Some of the crooks who launder dirty money 

through big banks

(source: ICIJ)

Corrupting corporate media ownership

In a rather disturbing article from Wall Street On Parade, Pam and Russ Martens report on two important aspects of the American situation, banking and news reporting. The first is that corporate-owned mainstream media, depends on financing from big banks. Presumably, most of that is in the form of advertising.   

The Martens comment that Federal Reserve Chairman, Jerome Powell, keeps telling Congress and the press that the banks are a “source of strength” in this economic crisis. That false narrative completely omits the fact that the Fed has loaned banks trillions of dollars at less than 1 percent interest. Naturally, the banks prefer the Fed’s false version of reality that big American banks are in great shape. The real reality is that in fact most or all big US banks are in bad shape. The mainstream media keeps reporting this lie because the banks want Americans to believe it and the mainstream media is willing to go along with the lie, presumably due to profit lust. 

Laundering trillions in dirty money

The Martins write about the scope of the money laundering industry and how their work is kept quiet:

“Wall Street On Parade has repeatedly written about critical reports showing serial corruption at these banks that have been censored by those Pulitzer prize winning media outlets. Yesterday provided another example: the New York Times refused to cover the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists’ (ICIJ) stunning report on how five of the biggest banks on Wall Street have continued to launder dirty money for fugitives and suspected criminals. The Wall Street Journal, whose name suggests that perhaps its focus should be Wall Street, failed to put the story on its front page, opting instead to bury it under an innocuous headline about HSBC’s stock hitting a new low.

The same news blackout occurred last year when the public interest group, Better Markets, published an in-depth report on “Wall Street’s Six Biggest Bailed-Out Banks: Their RAP Sheets & Their Ongoing Crime Spree.” Three days after the report came out, major news outlets were still refusing to cover the report. We wrote this in a report three days after the study was released:

‘We checked the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Financial Times, Bloomberg News, Reuters, CNBC, and CNN. We could find no mention of the Better Markets report. (We checked again this morning. There is still a news blackout.)

We know that the Wall Street Journal was aware of the report because Lalita Clozel, a banking regulation reporter for the Wall Street Journal, Tweeted on April 10 that Democrats in the House Financial Services Committee room were handing out the report to journalists while the Chair of the Committee, Congresswoman Maxine Waters, was introducing the bank CEOs.’”

The ICIJ’s report includes this: 

“The FinCEN Files show trillions in tainted dollars flow freely through major banks, swamping a broken enforcement system.

Secret U.S. government documents reveal that JPMorgan Chase, HSBC and other big banks have defied money laundering crackdowns by moving staggering sums of illicit cash for shadowy characters and criminal networks that have spread chaos and undermined democracy around the world.

The records show that five global banks — JPMorgan, HSBC, Standard Chartered Bank, Deutsche Bank and Bank of New York Mellon — kept profiting from powerful and dangerous players even after U.S. authorities fined these financial institutions for earlier failures to stem flows of dirty money.

U.S. agencies responsible for enforcing money laundering laws rarely prosecute megabanks that break the law, and the actions authorities do take barely ripple the flood of plundered money that washes through the international financial system.

In some cases the banks kept moving illicit funds even after U.S. officials warned them they’d face criminal prosecutions if they didn’t stop doing business with mobsters, fraudsters or corrupt regimes.

JPMorgan, the largest bank based in the United States, moved money for people and companies tied to the massive looting of public funds in Malaysia, Venezuela and Ukraine, the leaked documents reveal.”

The FinCEN Files the ICIJ examined are leaked documents that include more than 2,100 suspicious activity reports filed by banks and other financial firms with the U.S. Department of Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN). FinCEN is a US federal financial intelligence unit. It is at center of the global anti-money laundering system. Apparently, FinCEN has been corrupted and/or broken down for quite some time.

As usual, the banks respond to this with lies and propaganda intended to deceive. For example, JPMorgan claimed it has assumed a “leadership role” in pursuing “proactive intelligence-led investigations” and developing “innovative techniques to help combat financial crime.” If JPMorgan is the anti-corruption leader, one can only wonder how corrupt and inept the followers are.

One can also wonder who leaked those FinCEN documents, how they are hiding and how much more sleaze and corruption FinCEN is hiding. When the president makes comments about Americans who are suckers and losers, maybe it applies to all of us who are kept in the dark and fed bullshit. 

Sanctions evaders in the ICIJ database