Big Time News Blog: 03/02/20

Monday, March 2, 2020

Barack Obama told Joe Biden he won’t endorse him yet, report claims

Despite Joe Biden’s commanding victory in Saturday’s South Carolina primary, in which he garnered close to 50 per cent of the vote, an endorsement from the president with whom he served seems not to be forthcoming.Speaking to CNN, a source close to Barack Obama said that in a congratulatory phonecall after Mr Biden’s victory, the president told Mr Biden he would not be endorsing him any time soon, citing worries that he could badly divide the party during a still-messy nominating process.

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Brief elation, then crushing disappointment for migrants who sent children across U.S. border

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Manila mall hostage-taker surrenders

A sacked security guard gave himself up and set free dozens of hostages he seized at gunpoint Monday in a Manila mall, ending a day-long standoff that terrified shoppers and left one man wounded. "The crisis is over," said Francis Zamora, mayor of San Juan City, which includes the mall. The drama kicked off Monday morning when the suspect shot and wounded another security guard, who was rushed to hospital in stable condition, and barricaded the hostages in an office.

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After rising from relative obscurity, Pete Buttigieg ends his White House bid as crowd chants '2024'

He said he would no longer seek the nomination but would "do everything in my power to ensure that we have a new Democratic president come January.”

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Vladimir Putin Bets His Political Legacy on a Tax Whiz

(Bloomberg) -- Vladimir Putin’s political legacy may hinge on the technocratic skills of a little-known tax whiz who revolutionized Russian revenue collection and now aims to bring the same efficiency to the Kremlin’s ambitious spending plans.With parliamentary elections a year away and Putin preparing the public for constitutional changes the would allow him to retain some power after his term ends, Russia’s president surprised the country by replacing long-serving Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev in January with Federal Tax Service chief Mikhail Mishustin, a career bureaucrat who’s never held a political post.Over the past several years, as Medvedev failed to implement the big-ticket infrastructure projects Putin says are needed to revive a moribund economy, Mishustin helped return the budget to surplus by doubling revenue from value-added taxes to about a fifth of all state income, behind only the extraction and profit taxes.In a rush to get results in his new job, Mishustin, 53, is wasting no time reshaping the bureaucracy to his liking.“He’s a good practitioner who understands what needs to be done, knows how to do it, and does it,” Putin, 67, said on Feb. 20.Breaking with tradition, Mishustin convenes his first weekday meeting with subordinates at 9 a.m. sharp - practically the crack of dawn by Moscow standards – and then meets with his own staff on Saturdays and Sundays, according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter.A look at Mishustin’s decade-long tenure as the country’s top taxman may offer some indications about how he intends to govern. His streamlining of the tax regime won praise from international bodies like the World Bank, which cited those improvements as it gradually raised Russia’s ranking in its annual Ease of Doing Business survey to No. 28 last year from 120th in 2012.His signature achievement was overseeing the nationwide installation of more than 3.5 million internet-connected cash registers at retail outlets and restaurants -- all of which feed into two giant server farms, a main one near Moscow and an identical backup near Nizhny Novgorod. The system enables anyone with clearance and a laptop to sift through millions of transactions in real time.“We even have import-export data, so we can surf through the entire economy to track the value-added chain from origination to final sale,” Mishustin’s successor and longtime deputy, Danill Egorov, said in an interview at the service’s headquarters in downtown Moscow.Sitting at a table in front of a wall-sized monitor, Egorov was able to pull up a list of all the most recent transactions at a luxury department store nearby with just a few clicks of a mouse.“Look, someone just bought a pair of jeans for 67,000 rubles ($1,000),” he said. “That’s a crazy price to pay for jeans!” Like all receipts in Russia, the one for designer denim noted that the price included a 20% surcharge for VAT, resulting in the ruble equivalent of a $200 windfall for the government.Egorov, 44, then pulled up a map of Russia on his giant screen, clicked at random on the southern region of Krasnodar and drilled into one of the thousands of local companies that popped up. From there, he could find all the dates and amounts of VAT payments made by that company, as well as all of its suppliers and even the contractors of those suppliers.Another innovation Mishustin introduced is the mandatory printing of a unique QR (quick response) code on every receipt. This allows consumers to log into the Tax Service’s portal, upload a photo of their code and verify that the store or restaurant they just paid money to is operating legally. It also helps authorities root out black-market activity.“Mishustin created a nationwide information service, merging all available data together to enable analysis and management,” Egorov said. “His data-centric platform laid the foundation and we’ve been working step-by-step to build different solutions around it.”The system’s algorithms are now able to identify discrepancies and instances of potential cheating in each step of the manufacturing process. Once spotted, suspect transactions generate automatic alerts that are forwarded to both the companies involved and the local inspectors who oversee them.The trove of information is so valuable that the Tax Service decided to open its interface to third parties, creating an incentive for both companies and consumers to help make sure retail outlets run each purchase through official registers.Some 150 companies are already working to capitalize on the information. These include Edadeal, a marketing company that partners with product makers like Coca-Cola to offer cash-back rewards through a special app that scans QR codes and wires money directly to a consumer’s bank account.With Mishustin now busy running the whole government, it’s up to his protege to finish the work they started in trying to conquer the final frontier in the hunt for new tax revenue: the self-employed.An estimated 25 million Russians, a third of the country’s workforce, has some form of income that isn’t taxed -- from taxi drivers and handymen to landlords and tutors. Always mindful of Putin’s diktat that the state should serve the people and not the other way around, Egorov said he’s approaching these people gingerly.The Tax Service started a pilot program last year to help people legalize their “gray” incomes by paying a flat 4% tax through a special entrepreneur app -- but not before gauging public reaction.At the service’s request, Russia’s biggest online platforms asked their self-employed users how much they’d be willing to pay, and, to Egorov’s surprise, 60% said from 2% to 5% would be fair.“I though everyone would say zero,” Egorov said. “I could easily find these people and urge them to pay, but such a Soviet-style approach would be too harsh and unproductive,” he said. “To paraphrase Adam Smith, a tax should be levied in the manner that’s most convenient for the contributor to pay.”\--With assistance from Anya Andrianova.To contact the reporters on this story: Evgenia Pismennaya in Moscow at epismennaya@bloomberg.net;Ilya Khrennikov in Moscow at ikhrennikov@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Paul Sillitoe at psillitoe@bloomberg.net, Brad CookFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.

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Mike Bloomberg made crass sexual remarks about women in the workplace as recently as 2014, according to a former executive

After he returned to Bloomberg LP from his stint as mayor, Michael Bloomberg regularly made crass sexual jokes and demeaning comments about women, a former executive says

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California's rules for independent party voters could suppress the Bernie vote

The state’s arcane and complex voting system could steal hundreds of thousands of votes from Bernie SandersIn February, California mailed 3.7m primary ballots that, to the astonishment of many who received them, excluded the presidential candidates. These ballots do have candidates for all other primary races, including for Congress, but not the race for president.Within this mountain of primary ballots, artifacts of California’s arcane and complex voting system, lies the potential to cripple the campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders, the favored candidate among independent party voters.Particularly at risk of losing their vote are 18- to 24-year-olds and Latinx voters, groups that strongly favor “Tio Bernie”. A quarter of independent voters, more than 1 million people, are Latinx, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.Even if Sanders, as expected, wins the plurality of California’s votes, he could well be shorted out of hundreds of thousands of votes and scores of delegates. The other candidate at risk in California’s odd, troubled balloting: Mike Bloomberg.How did this happen? While Californians, including independent voters, vote overwhelmingly for Democrats in general elections, 5.3 million Golden state voters register “NPP”,: no party preference.These 5 million independents legally have the right to vote in the Democratic primary, but the Democratic party has created an inscrutable obstacle course for them to do so, one that amounts to another type of voter suppression.dividerThe problem begins with a postcard.Last autumn, all 5 million NPP voters were mailed a postcard allowing them to request a ballot with the Democratic party presidential choices. However, as many states have learned, postcards with voter information largely look like junk mail and get thrown out.If the independents don’t respond to the postcards, they get a ballot without presidential choices. But they have one more chance to vote for a candidate in the primaries: at the ballot box.At the polling station, though, things remain confusing. According to rules set by the national Democratic party, the independent voters have to bring in their NPP ballot to the polling station and request to exchange it for a “crossover Democratic” ballot that lists the candidates.However, if the voter fails to ask for the “crossover” ballot by its specific name, the poll worker is barred from suggesting it and they won’t receive it.Jen Abreu, a poll worker, told me about the disaster this created in 2016: “If this NPP voter did not specifically ask for a Democratic crossover ballot, they were given an official NPP ballot, which did not list presidential candidates.”There’s another, new way NPP voters may obtain a presidential ballot: re-register from NPP to Democrat right at the polling station on election day and thereby get a presidential ballot.However, this same day registration option is little known, not advertised by the state – and I found not a single sign at the four voting centers I visited that mentioned the new option.dividerWhat’s the impact of this labyrinthine ballot dance? A lot, according to the statistician Paul Mitchell, vice president of Political Data Inc, a private firm employed by both the Republican and Democratic parties.Mitchell recently completed a poll of 700 independent voters and found that while 61% wanted to vote in the Democratic primary, nearly half (45%) were clueless about how to get a Democratic ballot. Another third of NPP voters believed that they could not exchange their no-candidate ballots – though the law says they may.This year, hundreds of thousands of these voters have already mailed back the NPP ballot without presidential candidates because, according to Mitchell’s polling, they assumed they had no ability to exchange it.This past week, Mitchell’s pollsters also asked 300 NPP voters whom they’d vote for if they had obtained the correct ballot. About 26% preferred Sanders, which translates to 553,000 potential lost votes, by Mitchell’s estimates. Mike Bloomberg, meanwhile, could come up 383,000 votes short.dividerThe Democratic National Committee chiefs, who created and uphold the rules, show little sympathy for the millions of non-Democrats who want to exercise their right to vote in their primary but refuse to register as Democrats.And that could be because they will continue to back only establishment candidates. Notably, Joe Biden is endorsed by the California official who directs this tragi-comic voting process, the secretary of state, Alex Padilla.By contrast, in Colorado, another vote-by-mail state, the secretary of state simply ignores the DNC, sending every independent voter both a Republican and a Democratic party primary ballot – providing an easy way to vote as they choose.Will California’s voters choose the Democratic candidate ... or will the DNC obstacle course bend the outcome? * Greg Palast has investigated vote suppression for 20 years for the Guardian, Rolling Stone and the BBC’s Newsnight