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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: Snowshoe who wrote (159898)7/7/2020 7:42:25 AM
From: TobagoJack  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 217603
 
sounds about right

cannot be pleasant

I guess particularly jarring for those guilty before proven innocent

bloomberg.com

Ghislaine Maxwell Goes From Luxury Retreat to Turkish-Style Jail
Patricia Hurtado7 July 2020, 12:00 GMT+2



The Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, New York, on July 6.

Photographer: Johannes Eisele/AFP via Getty Images

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Ghislaine Maxwell spent the last few months at a secluded 156-acre estate called “Tuckedaway,” hidden in the woods of Bradford, New Hampshire, -- the type of luxury retreat she’s grown accustomed to as Jeffrey Epstein’s girlfriend. Now, however, she’s having to deal with accommodations that have been compared to a Turkish prison.

Her new digs are at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, New York -- a dusty lockup adjacent to the waterfront and expressway in Sunset Park. It’s a place so notorious that a magistrate judge once said she was reluctant to send women there because of the “unconscionable” conditions.



U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Audrey Strauss holds a news conference on July 2.

Photographer: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg

Maxwell, 58, has been in U.S. custody since her arrest Thursday in New Hampshire on multiple charges, including conspiracy to entice underage girls to engage in illegal sex acts with Epstein from 1994 through 1997. Epstein hung himself in a federal jail in Manhattan while awaiting trial on federal sex-trafficking charges.

Maxwell agreed to appear before a judge in Manhattan by videoconference from jail on July 14, when she is likely to be formally charged and enter a plea.



Photographer: Laura Cavanaugh/Getty Images

Since at least December, prosecutors say Maxwell has been “hiding out” in the sprawling four-bedroom and four-bath New Hampshire mansion which boasts cathedral ceilings, a barn and views of Mount Sunapee foothills from every room. The house was described by Sotheby’s as “an amazing retreat for the nature lover who also wants total privacy.”

But on Monday, U.S. Bureau of Prisons officials confirmed Maxwell was moved from a New Hampshire jail to the Metropolitan Detention Center, a federal jail that houses more than 1,600 male and female detainees. It’s part of a compound of massive shipping warehouses built at the turn of the century and used during both world wars.

No one wants to go to jail, but the conditions described at the MDC have been the subject of numerous complaints and scrutiny that rival the rat-infested federal lockup in Lower Manhattan where Epstein was held.

In early 2019, hundreds of inmates at the MDC were locked shivering in their cells for at least a week after an electrical fire knocked out power in the building. The inmates spent some of the coldest days of that winter in darkness, largely without heat and hot water.

Over the years, federal investigators have concluded the jail is among the worst in the U.S. Bureau of Prisons system, finding that prisoners have been beaten, raped or held in inhumane conditions. Two inmates died recently.

After the coronavirus hit New York, Homer Venters, a former chief medical officer for the city’s jails, visited the facility and concluded in a report that the facility was “ill-equipped” to deal with Covid-19 cases and failed to implement adequate infection-control practices.

Venters said he was “concerned about the ongoing health and safety of the population” at MDC, and condemned the failure of the jail’s officials to take simple steps to identify potentially sick patients and isolate them.

On LockdownIn a sworn statement filed April 28, Derrilyn Needham said she’d been incarcerated at the MDC since November 2019, along with 30 other women. They slept in bunk beds, and she said it was difficult to stay six feet apart. From April 20 to April 23, Needham said the women were on “lockdown on our bunk beds, not able to leave our bunks except to use the bathroom or shower.”

The inmates were allowed to make phone calls one day, Needham said, but they hadn’t been given gloves, hand sanitizer or disinfectant wipes. After suffering from symptoms she thought could be Covid-19, including chills, fever, extreme fatigue, cough and trouble breathing, she said the assistant warden told her she couldn’t be tested.

Voice mail and email messages to the U.S. Bureau of Prisons on Monday seeking comment about the MDC weren’t immediately returned.

Cheryl Pollak, the federal magistrate in Brooklyn, has repeatedly voiced concerns about the MDC after reviewing a report by the National Association of Women Judges, who visited the facility and found that 161 female inmates were housed 24 hours a day, seven days a week, in two large rooms that lacked windows, fresh air or sunlight and weren’t allowed out to exercise.

“Some of these conditions wouldn’t surprise me if we were dealing with a prison in Turkey or a Third World Country,” Pollak said during one 2016 hearing. “It’s hard for me to believe it’s going on in a federal prison.”

— With assistance by Clare Roth

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To: Snowshoe who wrote (159898)7/7/2020 9:52:18 AM
From: marcher  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 217603
 
--base jumpers and mountaineers shared similar personality characteristics to criminal psychopaths--

one might conclude that acting crazy is not a crazy thing...
at all.
-g-



To: Snowshoe who wrote (159898)7/8/2020 12:24:50 AM
From: TobagoJack  Respond to of 217603
 
Gathering force per agi-prop?

bloomberg.com

Pandemic Aid Helps Make the Case for Basic Income

Generous benefits don’t seem to be discouraging work.

Noah SmithJuly 7, 2020, 4:00 PM GMT+2



It’s not because of the government check.

Photographer: Evening Standard/Hulton Archive
LISTEN TO ARTICLE
The relief programs supporting Americans through the pandemic are also demonstrating the viability of a bold proposal for reducing poverty: basic income.

The idea of basic income -- paying a monthly fixed amount to each person in the country -- has been around for a long time. Recently it has gained more attention and support. It has the advantages of simplicity and universality, but one big question has always loomed: What if it stopped people from working? Ultimately, society’s wealth is based on human beings producing things, and if people feel that a basic income means they don’t need to work, they might stop producing altogether, leaving society poorer.

Empirical studies and limited experiments have generally found that basic income does little to discourage paid work. But these studies have lacked the scale to tell us much about how a large nationwide program would work.

Now, the national response to the coronavirus pandemic is giving us some valuable information. The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security(Cares) Act, passed in March, provided a small payment to every adult, but it also delivered very generous unemployment benefits to American workers who lost their jobs because of the pandemic. Under this program, a family of four with one laid-off worker would receive $4,100 a month, in addition to normal unemployment benefits. That’s in the ballpark of the country’s median family income of $4,920 -- in other words, an unprecedentedly large cash handout.

This benefit was so generous that -- according to a new working paper by economists Jeehoon Han, Bruce Meyer and James Sullivan -- it actually reduced poverty in the U.S., compared with the pre-pandemic period. And so far, it seems to have accomplished this without deterring people from working.

When the relief package was announced, there was much fretting that paying people more than one dollar for every dollar of market income that they lost created an obvious incentive for people not to work. But a preliminary analysis by economists Hilary Hoynes and Jesse Rothstein found that states where unemployment benefits were higher relative to lost wages actually saw less of a drop in employment. In other words, more generous payouts haven’t been associated with more job loss.

Reducing poverty without deterring work sounds like a great deal. So basic income advocates are looking at this success and asking: If giving people money reduces poverty during a pandemic, why not do it in normal times, too?

Of course, Cares Act unemployment benefits differ from basic income in several important ways. First, the payout is conditional. Although some workers can continue to claim some benefits if they go back to work, some can’t, and those who never lost their jobs or who never had jobs in the first place don’t get the benefit at all.

But this only strengthens basic income’s case. If payments that vanish or diminish when you go back to work don’t deter people from getting jobs, then basic income shouldn’t do so either.

A more important caveat is that the pandemic relief benefits are not permanent. The payouts are set to expire at the end of this month, and though they may be extended for a while, Republicans are already starting to push back. That gives people an added incentive to find work because a job will last longer than the government checks will. Basic income, on the other hand, never ends, so the incentive to be a couch potato and live off the dole might be greater.

It’s also possible that as the pandemic progresses, labor disincentive effects might appear. States with higher replacement rates are really just states with low wages; these might be the very places that avoided the worst of the virus in the first wave, but are now getting hit hard. So Hoynes and Rothstein’s tentative conclusions might be premature.

Finally, there’s the question of how to pay for basic income. Pandemic unemployment benefits are driving an unprecedented expansion of federal debt, which is set to exceed the record levels set in World War II. That can’t continue forever. Basic income, by contrast, will have to be paid for with taxes on high earners. It’s not clear that such taxes would be politically sustainable or would have negative effects on the economy in the long run.

But although the case for basic income is not yet a slam dunk, pandemic relief benefits add circumstantial evidence in favor. The idea deserves more serious attention than it has received so far.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

To contact the author of this story:
Noah Smith at nsmith150@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story:
James Greiff at jgreiff@bloomberg.net
Mark Whitehouse

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