Karl Baker Deconstructs The Bond Bill. It’s not pretty:
Signed into law June 30 by Gov. John Carney, Delaware’s billion-dollar bond bill is sending tens of millions of dollars to downtown Wilmington through a litany of curious appropriations, some buried deep within the epilogue section of the omnibus spending legislation.
There’s more than $18 million to renovate an office building the state purchased in January from Alpha Technologies.
There’s $10 million more for a renovation of a building within the expansive and largely vacant Bracebridge complex, planned as a future home of Widener University’s law school, and other college’s operations.
And, there are unspecified millions of dollars more to fund the pharmaceutical company Incyte’s move into still another of the Bracebridge complex’s office buildings.
The Incyte money adds to $14.8 million that Delaware’s economic development office awarded the company in May for its long-planned relocation of its Pennsylvania satellite office into Wilmington.
Officials from Carney’s administration did not respond to emailed questions for this story. (They never do.)
Despite the significance of it all, state lawmakers did not reveal details about the bond bill’s curious Wilmington appropriations in a celebratory press release issued last week.
Oh, man, I’m pushing fair use. There are so many more hinky appropriations that Baker has flagged. If you want to know about the Delaware Way, you need to read this article. Oh, lest you haven’t figured it out, the Delaware Way has become so sophisticated in that the Bond Bill is designed specifically to prevent people from figuring out all the dirty deals snuck into it. Without the likes of Karl Baker and Cris Barrish, we’d never know about them.
Might have to drop Daily Kos from my list of places I scour every day for items for the Open Thread. Much like they did in 2016, where they circled the wagons around Hillary, they’re doing the same now for Biden. Two headlines from today’s edition: “Biden Delivers Strong Insightful Performance In Closely-Watched Press Conference”, and “Wanting Biden To Step Out Is No Longer About Concern Over His Health, It’s Anti-Democratic”.
Leaving the Democratic Party in, well, let’s let the Neville Brothers set the scene:
There wasn’t a better live band in America in the mid-eighties to the early-nineties than the Neville Brothers. But, I digress.
Nike Big-Foots Promises To Reduce Carbon Footprint:
Eight years ago, the world’s largest sports apparel brand made a bold commitment. Nike was embarking on what it called a moonshot: doubling its business while halving its impact on the warming planet.
To get there, then-CEO Mark Parker said the Oregon-based company’s innovations in environmental sustainability would become a “powerful engine for growth,” a catalyst capable of changing industries. The company’s chief sustainability officer at the time, Hannah Jones, said achieving the goal would take “innovation on a scale we’ve never seen before.”
Nike’s Sustainable Innovation team embodied the commitment. It looked for environmentally friendly new materials, like leather made from kelp and foams made from plants, that could replace some of the hundreds of millions of pounds of rubber, leather and cotton used in traditional Nike products. It assisted in testing and refining the foam in the new Pegasus 41 that Nike says cut the carbon footprint of the shoe’s midsole by at least 43%.
So it came as a surprise one Sunday night in December when the dozen or so people on the team got summoned to a mandatory meeting the next morning. In a Zoom call before sunrise, they learned why. The team was being eliminated. The vice president who ran the team was gone. The call lasted less than 10 minutes.
It was the first in a series of deep cuts that one former Nike employee called “the sustainability bloodbath.”
Rethug Voter Suppression Continues Apace:
Tennessee’s top election official asked more than 14,000 registered voters to prove their citizenship in a vaguely worded letter last month in what voting and immigrant groups say is an attempt to intimidate voters.
The office of the Tennessee secretary of state, Tre Hargett, a Republican, sent the letter to 14,375 voters on 13 June, weeks before early voting was to begin for the state’s August primary. “Our office has received information that appears to indicate that your voter information matches with an individual who may not have been a United States citizen at the time of obtaining a Tennessee license or ID card,” the letter says.
It goes on to remind the recipient that illegal voting is a felony in Tennessee punishable with up to two years in prison and a $5,000 fine. It requests that any person who received the letter who is a citizen provide proof, such as a US passport, birth certificate, naturalization papers, or other document.
Jeff Preptit, a staff attorney with the Tennessee chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, said his organization had heard from “countless voters” who were concerned about the letter.
“It is all new Americans who have received this letter,” he said. “It’s had the very distinct effect … of not only just confusing people, but causing fear, intimidating them, and making them feel as if they have done something criminally wrong for exercising their constitutional rights for registering to vote.
“I think that this is a classic example of targeting a constitutional classification of individuals to discourage them from exercising their constitutional right to vote,” he added.
A feature, not a bug.
If I haven’t pissed anybody off with this Open Thread, just wait until I unveil (unleash?) the final Delaware Political Weekly of the season in just a short while.
What do you want to talk about?