Sunday, December 23, 2018

Week-end Wrap - December 22, 2018

Week-end Wrap - December 22, 2018
by Tony Wikrent
Economics Action Group, North Carolina Democratic Party Progressive Caucus

How Britain stole $45 trillion from India
[Al Jazeera, via Naked Capitalism 12-18-18] 

2,000 Years of Economic History in One Chart
[Economic Policy Insitute, via Naked Capitalism 12-19-18]  
“A PAYGO rule means that any tax cut or spending increase passed into law needs to be offset in the same spending cycle with tax increases or spending cuts elsewhere in the budget. Incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has indicated that the House of Representatives will abide by PAYGO in the next Congress, and this decision has sparked much controversy…. [F]undamentally, it is terrible economics to view federal budget deficits as always and everywhere bad. Making good policy in the future will require that voters be educated on this front. Why not start now?… Why am I taking you on this extended walk down the memory lane of irrational deficit-phobia? Because it had terrible consequences. The recovery from the Great Recession was the slowest in post-World War II history, and the degree of fiscal austerity can entirely explain its slowness.”

Obama Admits Bipartisan Capitalist ‘Washington Consensus’ Fueled Far-Right & Multiplied Inequality
[Real News Network, December 21, 2018]
Former US President Barack Obama admitted that the neoliberal capitalist policies he and his predecessors supported fostered the rise of the far-right and grossly exacerbated inequality.


[Foreign Policy, via Naked Capitalism 12-20-18]

[Condemned to Debt, via Naked Capitalism 12-18-18] 
Twenty-seven years ago,Vicky Jo Metz, took out $16,613 in student loans to go to community college. Over time, she paid back 90 percent of what she borrowed--almost $15,000. But interest accrued at the rate of 9 percent, and by the time Metz came to bankruptcy court in 2018, her debt had quadruped--that's right, quadrupled--to $67,277! 
Educational Credit Management Corporation, the federal government's most ruthless student-loan debt collector, opposed discharging Metz's loans. Put Ms. Metz in a 25-year income-based repayment plan, ECMC argued. 
But Kansas Bankruptcy Judge Robert E. Nugent rejected ECMC's heartless argument. Ms. Metz is 59 years old, Judge Nugent pointed out. By the time she finishes a 25-year IBRP, she will be 84. 
ECMC testified that Metz's monthly payments under a 25-year IBRP would only be $203. But, Judge Nugent observed, such a payment is about $300 a month less than the amount necessary to pay the accruing interest. Thus, after making minimal payments for 25 years, Metz would owe $152,277.88--nine times more than she borrowed. Under the terms of an IBRP, Ms. Metz's loan balance would be forgiven after 25 years--the entire $152,000. But the forgiven debt would be taxable to her as income. "That," Judge Nugent remarked with powerful understatement, "could generate considerable tax liability for a retired 84-year-old living on social security." 
Judge Nugent sensibly concluded that Metz could not pay back the $67,000 she currently owed while maintaining a minimal standard of living. He also concluded that Metz's financial situation was unlikely to change. In fact, with very little retirement savings, Metz's income would probably go down because she would be living almost solely on Social Security in her retirement years. 
Finally, Judge Nugent determined that Metz had made a good faith effort to repay her student loans. "She has paid more than $14,000 toward this loan," he noted, "not a dime of which has gone to principal."
Uber’s entire business model is in jeopardy after losing its latest legal battle over the rights of UK drivers 
[Reuters, via Naked Capitalism 12-21-18]
“Uber has lost its latest court bid to stop its British drivers being classified as workers, entitling them to rights such as the minimum wage, in a decision which jeopardizes the taxi app’s business model…. Uber said it would appeal the verdict, meaning the legal process will continue.”
CNBC offers financial advice for 25-year-olds earning six figures; internet offers a reality check
Walter Einenkel [Daily Kos 12-21-18]

First Step Act Has Sinister Implications for the Poor and Marginalized 
[TruthOut, via Naked Capitalism 12-20-18]
[Who What Why, via Naked Capitalism 12-19-18]
....so there’s two things that basically are being done by the Pentagon accountants that is deceptive, and deliberately deceptive. One is they have these things called “plugs,” and that’s not an accounting term. That’s a Pentagon term for plugging in numbers in the budgets that have no basis in reality and no ledger entries to support them. 
Then you have something else, called “nippering,” which was explained to me by a longterm Pentagon accounting person, who’d been there for 30 years and is now a lobbyist. He explained that what they do… A nipper is a metal shear that cuts metal, and so you can cut out pieces of metal, and then move it around to something else. Nippering is to snip out part of the budget and move it, so that you don’t have to do what the Congress requires, which is, if you don’t spend your money by the end of the year, you have to return it to the Treasury. The Pentagon avoids that by shifting it into other budgets.
Potential for 100,000-Plus Jobs If We Fix Our Parks
[Pew Charitable Trust, via Naked Capitalism 12-19-18]  
“A Pew-commissioned analysis by the Cadmus Group, a consulting company, found that addressing the National Park Service’s $11.6 billion maintenance backlog would create or support nearly 110,000 infrastructure-related jobs. This number, based on fiscal year 2017 NPS data, is a reminder of the powerful economic impact of national parks. California has the most to gain, with the potential for more than 17,000 jobs. Rural states also stand to benefit, with a possible 6,600 jobs in Wyoming. And Virginia, which has a mix of urban and rustic settings, could benefit from 9,600 jobs. If NPS’ deferred maintenance was fully funded, communities could see construction workers repairing roads and trails, preservation experts restoring deteriorating historic sites, and engineers overhauling outdated sewer, water, and electrical systems that can threaten safety and the environment.”
Decades after service, Gladys West is inducted into Air Force Hall of Fame for pioneering GPS work
[DailyKos 12-18-18]
West, now 87 years old, was a mathematician; when she was hired in 1956 to work on calculations, the programming of early computers, and space data collection, she was one of only four African-Americans at the U.S. Naval Weapons Laboratory in Dahlgren, Virginia. The work she did at the facility was part of the foundation on which the Global Positioning System was developed. 
West had been a forgotten figure in history until she happened to mention “her contribution in a biography she wrote for a sorority function,” at which point the community around her took notice and began to push for her recognition. The Washington Informer reports today that West has finally been recognized with the Air Force Space and Missile Pioneers award and induction into the Air Force Hall of Fame. 
This is another story of how the US economy was actually built. The financiers and "captains of industry" are actually secondary figures. It's the scientists and engineers who actually create new productive potential in an advanced industrial economy. My post on NASA aerodynamics expert Richard Whitcomb includes at the bottom a list of other posts in my How America Was Built series.

How to fix America’s dysfunctional trade system
Ryan Cooper [The Week, , via Naked Capitalism 12-21-18]   
“Timothy Meyer and Ganesh Sitaraman at the Great Democracy Initiative have a new paper that presents a solid starting point for developing a fundamental reform of American trade structure….  
Then there is the problem of pro-rich bias. Put simply, the last few decades of trade deals have been outrageously biased towards corporations and the rich. They have powerfully enabled the growth of parasitic tax havens, which allow companies to book profits in low-tax jurisdictions, starving countries of rightful revenue (and often leading to companies piling up gargantuan dragon hoards of cash they don’t know what to do with). Corporations, meanwhile, have gotten their own fake legal system in the form of Investor-State Dispute Settlement trade deal stipulations…. Meyer and Sitaraman suggest renegotiating the tax portions of trade deals to enforce a “formulary” tax system — in which profits are taxed where they are made, not where they are booked.” 
....for all its other disastrous side effects, Trump’s haphazard tax on aluminum has dramatically revived the American aluminum industry. Ensuring a reasonable domestic supply of key metals like that is so obviously a security concern — for military and consumer uses alike — that it wouldn’t have even occurred to New Deal policymakers to think otherwise. It takes a lot of ideological indoctrination to think there’s no problem when a small price disadvantage causes a country to lose its entire supply chain of key industrial commodities. 
Boeing’s new plant in China just delivered its first plane
[Fortune, via Naked Capitalism 12-17-18]
“Work at the facility was limited to the plane’s interior, including installing seats and other cabin equipment. More responsibilities will be added over time, such as painting the exterior, but the center is primarily meant for completion and delivery, with the main manufacturing remaining in the US.” • Maybe so. On the other hand, the pattern of first moving to the non-union South (South Carolina) and then overseas (China) is one with which workers in other formerly American industries (textiles) will be familiar. And but: “One of every four Boeing deliveries goes to China, and the company expects Chinese carriers to buy one in six of all jetliners sold globally over the next two decades” [Wall Street Journal, via Naked Capitalism 12-16-18] “Boeing is the single biggest American exporter to China.”
This Was the Year the Robot Takeover of Service Jobs Began 
Gizmodo, via Naked Capitalism 12-20-18]

Citi, Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank were tipped off before regulatory inspection
Francine McKenna [MarketWatch, via Naked Capitalism 12-16-18] 
“The auditor of some of the world’s largest banks including Citigroup, Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank was tipped off before a regulator inspected them. It’s been previously reported that KPMG executives were able to extract from the regulator, the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, confidential information ahead of inspections, and use that information to correct their work and at least in one instance, withdrawn an opinion…. The SEC moreover said in January that the KPMG audits of these companies should continue to be relied upon…. Corporate governance expert Nell Minow, the vice chair of ValueEdge Advisors, said investors shouldn’t be satisfied with the SEC’s statement. ‘The breadth and seriousness of the charges and the importance to the financial markets of the companies affected should require a through internal investigation with results made public. If the SEC or KPMG do not insist on it, investors and clients should.'”
Wall Street’s Billionaire Machine, Where Almost Everyone Gets Rich 
[Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism 12-21-18] 
“Eric Smidt is a new kind of super-rich. He made his fortune by transforming an old-fashioned business into a giant ATM, an overhaul aided by one of the hottest plays on Wall Street: collateralized loan obligations. Meet the new aristocrats of debt—the people and companies cashing in on a record boom in these once-marginal investments whose relatively high returns have attracted yield-hungry investors. They’ve fueled a rapid buildup in corporate debt that some think could become the epicenter of the next credit crisis but has been minting money for many.”
Political elites like to make a display of their concern for the national government debt that "threatens the future of our children." How often do you hear them talk about the dangers of private debt? From Forbes in June 2018:
...corporate debt is now 72% of GDP. That's in addition to the government debt that is approaching (or has passed depending on how you count debt) 100% of GDP and household debt at 77% of GDP. Add in 81% financial sector debt, and the U.S. combined debt-to-GDP ratio is near 330%.
And from MarketWatch, November 30, 2018: These 5 charts warn that the U.S. corporate debt party is getting out of hand.


The problem is not government debt. Nor corporate debt, per se. The problem is usury.

Malaysia files criminal charges against Goldman Sachs
[via Naked Capitalism 12-17-18]

‘The Ugliest Chapter Since Slavery’: How Illicit Financial Flows Thwart Human Rights in Africa [Foreign Policy in Focus, via Naked Capitalism 12-17-18]

How McKinsey Has Helped Raise the Stature of Authoritarian Governments
[New York Times, via Naked Capitalism 12-16-18]



Walk into a non-smoker's house and light up a cigarette. Watch how they react. We need *that* reaction to carbon gluttony.

If the top 10% of global carbon emitters reduced their individual carbon footprint to the level of the average European citizen there would be a one-third cut in global emissions - .
3:29 PM - 12 Dec 2018

From Obama to Trump, climate negotiations are being run by the same crew of American technocrats [The Intercept, via Naked Capitalism 12-16-18]

Climate change: The massive CO2 emitter you may not know about
[BBC, via Naked Capitalism 12-17-18]
Concrete is the most widely used man-made material in existence. It is second only to water as the most-consumed resource on the planet.
But, while cement - the key ingredient in concrete - has shaped much of our built environment, it also has a massive carbon footprint.
Cement is the source of about 8% of the world's carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions,according to think tank Chatham House.
If the cement industry were a country, it would be the third largest emitter in the world - behind China and the US. It contributes more CO2 than aviation fuel (2.5%) and is not far behind the global agriculture business (12%).
Seven Billion-Dollar Disasters From 2017 Likely Affected by Climate Change
Jeff Masters [Weather Underground, via Naked Capitalism 12-18-18]

Offshore wind lease prices soar in US
[Bloomberg, via American Wind Energy Association 12-21-18]
Offshore wind leases in the US have become significantly more expensive in the past few years, with US Wind acquiring a site off the coast of New Jersey in 2015 for $1 million and selling it this year for $215 million -- a 21,000% increase, Chris Martin writes. General Counsel Salvo Vitale says US Wind will invest the profit in developments off the coast of Maryland and South Carolina.
What should a green infrastructure bill look like in US?
[The Hill, via American Wind Energy Association 12-21-18]
The US should adopt a green infrastructure bill that would encourage a switch to a clean energy economy that creates jobs, sparks economic investment and an increase in renewables, writes Rep. A. Donald McEachin, D-Va. "Investing in truly green infrastructure could help save the world as we know it," he writes.
Climate measure with 100% renewables advances in D.C.
[WAMU-FM (Washington, D.C.), via American Wind Energy Association 12-21-18]
The Council of the District of Columbia unanimously approved a bill Tuesday that addresses climate change on multiple fronts, including a goal to power the district with 100% renewable energy by 2032. Councilmember Mary Cheh called the bill "historic" and said that it "will place the District of Columbia at the national forefront in efforts to reduce greenhouse gasses and achieve 100 percent renewable electricity" after the mayor signs it.
[North American Windpower online, via American Wind Energy Association 12-19-18]
Corporate deals to acquire output from renewables soared in 2018, resulting in contracts for a record-breaking 6.43 gigawatts of capacity, according to the Business Renewables Center at the Rocky Mountain Institute. "The record number of companies successfully pursuing renewable energy this year sends a clear signal that environmental sustainability is a serious priority for business leaders across the economy," says RMI CEO Jules Kortenhorst.
Analysis: Installed US wind capacity could power 77 million cars
CleanTechnica, via American Wind Energy Association 12-20-18]
The US has enough installed wind capacity to power 77 million -- or 28% -- of the nation's vehicles for one year if they drove an average of 13,476 miles, Michael Barnard writes.
Sen. Markey: Clean energy, infrastructure are national priorities
[The Boston Globe , via American Wind Energy Association 12-18-18]
The 116th Congress can help the US take transformational action against climate change without the Trump administration, writes Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass. Markey calls for a "forward-thinking energy policy" that includes equal investments in infrastructure and clean energy.

Exclusive: Oil giant Exxon secured U.S. hardship waiver from biofuel laws – sources 
[Reuters, via Naked Capitalism 12-20-18]

 The economic impacts of climate change could limit climate change 
[Ars Technica, via Naked Capitalism 12-20-18]

[Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism 12-20-18] 
“Parts of Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor route, which carries 12 million people each year between Boston and Washington, face “continual inundation.” Flooding, rising seas, and storm surge threaten to erode the track bed and knock out the signals that direct train traffic. The poles that provide electricity for trains are at risk of collapse, even as power substations succumb to floodwaters. “If one of the segments of track shuts down, it will shut down this segment of the NEC,” warned members of Amtrak’s planning staff. “There is not an alternate route that can be used as a detour.'” 
De-Growth vs a Green New Deal.
[New Left Review, via Naked Capitalism 12-20-18] 
“Returning to climate change, it is in fact absolutely imperative that some categories of economic activity should now grow massively—those associated with the production and distribution of clean energy. Concurrently, the global fossil-fuel industry needs to contract massively—that is, to ‘de-grow’ relentlessly over the next forty or fifty years until it has virtually shut down. In my view, addressing these matters in terms of their specifics is more constructive in addressing climate change than presenting broad generalities about the nature of economic growth, positive or negative….
Cargo Ships Are the World’s Biggest Polluters — but No One Wants to Fix It 
[Inverse, via Naked Capitalism 12-21-18] 

[Huffington Post, via Naked Capitalism 12-21-18]
It’s time for a Bill of Data Rights
[MIT Technology Review, via Naked Capitalism 12-17-18]

China Is Now the Greatest Threat to Americans’ Privacy 
[Buzzfeed, via Naked Capitalism 12-17-18]  
“At the root of rural America’s angst is a fairly simple story that many rural voters recognize. Over the course of a generation, major sectors of the rural economy have been rolled up and are now controlled by a handful of predatory, extractive multinational corporations. As a result, manufacturing and farming jobs have left the area, and opportunities — to change jobs, start your own business, fund good schools, and build communities where your kids can thrive and start their own families — are the exception, not the rule. It is no surprise that many of those who remain in these communities have lost any sense of respect, dignity, and self-determination. Instead of fighting this concentrated corporate power, many leading Democrats embraced and continue to embrace an economic ideology centered on efficiency that paved the way for the merger mania and manufacturing exodus that have been at the root of rural America’s economic undoing.”
Small assault-style rifle firms thriving under activists’ radar 
[Reuters, via Naked Capitalism 12-18-18]  Naked Capitalism reader EM comments: 
“The irony of course being that such products are one of the few remaining areas where domestic manufacturing is thriving. So the next time your hear one of the globalist-shill papers like the NYT opining (cf. Sunday’s Links) that ‘we simply don’t have the manufacturing culture’ to build e.g. Apple products, here is your proof that that argument is BS, and that a proper long-term-outlook national industrial strategy could put many millions of Americans to work manufacturing items that are in demand, high-tech and rather less lethal than assault weapons.”
GE Powered the American Century—Then It Burned Out
How the company that was once America’s biggest, the maker of power turbines, the seller of insurance, the broadcaster of ‘Seinfeld,’ became a shadow of its former self
The Wall Street Journal normally hides its content behind a paywall, but this in-depth report on the collapse of GE is entirely open for public viewing. The world's best accounting gimmicks by the world's supposedly best business managers could not stop the collapse of General Electric. Jack Welch turned out to be more a charlatan than a business genius. The story of GE is a pretty good summary of the deindustrialization of America.
General Electric Co. GE 1.82% helped invent the world as we know it: wired up, plugged in and switched on. Born of Thomas Alva Edison’s ingenuity and John Pierpont Morgan’s audacity, GE built the dynamos that generated the electricity, the wires that carried it and the lightbulbs that burned it. 
To keep the power and profits flowing day and night, GE connected neighborhoods with streetcars and cities with locomotives. It soon filled kitchens with ovens and toasters, living rooms with radios and TVs, bathrooms with curling irons and toothbrushes, and laundry rooms with washers and dryers.... 
GE Capital sucked in debt and spat out money. Created in the first half of the last century to help people buy home appliances, it now financed fast-food franchises, power plants and suburban McMansions, and leased out railroad tank cars, office buildings and airliners. The industrial spine of the company gave GE a AAA credit rating that allowed it to borrow money inexpensively, giving it an advantage over banks, which relied on deposits.
Health Care Systems – Four Basic Models
[Physicians for a National Health Program, via Naked Capitalism 12-17-18]  
“[W]e don’t have to study 200 different systems to get a picture of how other countries manage health care. For all the local variations, health care systems tend to follow general patterns. There are four basic systems.” The Beveridge Model (Great Britain, Spain, most of Scandinavia and New Zealand, Hong Kong), the Bismarck Model (Germany, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Japan, Switzerland, and, to a degree, in Latin America), the National Health Insurance Model (Canada, Taiwan, and South Korea), and the Out-of-Pocket Model: “Only the developed, industrialized countries — perhaps 40 of the world’s 200 countries — have established health care systems. Most of the nations on the planet are too poor and too disorganized to provide any kind of mass medical care. The basic rule in such countries is that the rich get medical care; the poor stay sick or die… The United States is unlike every other country because it maintains so many separate systems for separate classes of people. All the other countries have settled on one model for everybody. This is much simpler than the U.S. system; it’s fairer and cheaper, too.” 
Republicans Killed Much Of Obamacare Without Repealing It 
[FiveThirtyEight, via Naked Capitalism 12-19-18]

Breakthrough Ultrasound Treatment To Reverse Dementia Moves To Human Trials 
[New Atlas, via Naked Capitalism 12-21-18]   

Chicago Teachers Win First Charter Strike in History
[Labor Notes, via Naked Capitalism 12-17-18]   
“Chicago teachers are leading the way again. They have declared victory in the first charter school strike in U.S. history. The four-day strike included 550 teachers and paraprofessionals who work at all 15 Chicago charter schools in the Acero charter chain. It ended December 9 with an agreement that includes smaller class sizes and salary increases that will align charter teachers with their counterparts in the Chicago Public Schools. The union hopes to schedule a ratification vote before the end of the year. The strikers wanted to ‘put a check on privatization and the idea that schools are a business,’ said Joanna Wax Trost, a seventh-grade English-language teacher at Acero’s Marquez Elementary School.” • Amusing, since charters were invented to, among other things, bust unions and turn schooling into a business.
California transit agencies have 21 years to build zero-emissions bus fleets
[Ars Technica, via Naked Capitalism 12-17-18]

NYC Subway Chief Warns of ‘Death Spiral’ Without $40 Billion Fix 
[Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism 12-20-18]

Hopelessness is what conservatives want
[CurrentAffairs, via Naked Capitalism 12-20-18]
Generally the pessimist has very limited confidence that human beings can do much to alter their existing condition.
Conservatism is often pessimistic, if not necessarily about “the future” as a whole, then definitely about humankind’s capacity for self-improvement. Whether it’s Thomas Hobbes talking about the nastiness and brutishness of human nature, Thomas Sowell on the “constrained” vision that sees people as fundamentally self-interested, or Michael Oakeshott talking about the conservative preference for the “familiar” over the “unfamiliar,” conservative philosophy often runs something like this: We are flawed creatures kept from descending into barbarism through the institutions we have built, in particular Western Capitalist Democracy and the Rule Of Law. These institutions are fragile and precious, tinkering with them leads to catastrophe, and the best course we can generally take is to preserve what we have rather than try for anything radically different. Attempts to significantly change the existing order of things are doomed to either fail or make things worse, because they are based on an irrational confidence that human perfectibility is infinite.... 
In saying that conservatism is a philosophy of pessimism about change, I am being more generous to it than many on the left. I am taking conservatives at their word. Corey Robin, in The Reactionary Mind, has a more cynical view, seeing conservatism as essentially a justification of existing power structures. The ideas are jury-rigged to defend present-day hierarchies, rather than resulting from an honest examination of the world. Slavemasters used to come up with intellectual reasons why slavery was necessary, then Jim Crow politicians insisted Jim Crow was necessary, now Charles Murray insists black social inferiority is necessary.  
[Benjamin Studebaker, via Naked Capitalism 12-19-18]  
“The vast majority of would-be young Bernies will still be under 35 in 2020 and won’t be legally allowed to run for president. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez isn’t even 30 yet. She’s about as old as Jennifer Aniston was in the middle of her Friends run…. Most of us in the left-wing political space haven’t actually done anything yet. Ocasio-Cortez is young by American political standards but she’s older than the vast majority of young people I know who might one day be interested in running for stuff…. The people in their 40s who support Bernie never received the kind of grassroots support Bernie received when they were younger, and consequently they never had the opportunity to build a resume for the presidency. As a result, the overwhelming majority of Democratic politicians in their 40s and 50s are centrists who came of age politically in the 90s and 00s… They were advanced in the party because the Clinton generation promoted them. They have spent their political lives working with Gore and Kerry and Obama and that’s the discourse they swim in. Corey Booker is 49. Kamala Harris is 54. Beto O’Rourke is 46. Kirsten Gillibrand is 52. Amy Klobuchar is 58. This group has a shared set of political instincts–they are the instincts that helped them build the careers they now enjoy, but they are not instincts we can trust. They have been tutored in triangulation from the time they were political toddlers. From the point of view of the left, the 40-60 group is a lost generation. It’s an entire generation of American politicians who were taught all the wrong things… [I]f we want a left-wing politician, we need to go all the way back to the people who got their start in politics before the Clintons showed up. We need someone who was left-wing even before the Clintons watered that down and changed what it meant for most people. Forget the 90s, we need someone who was too left-wing for the Democratic Party in the 70s. There is only one such person left alive. First name Bernie, last name Sanders.” 
Lambert Strether, again: 
This is a neat example of viewing an institutional problem through a generational lens. Who, then, would run a Sanders administration? Probably not a lot of people from Harvard and Yale. People from state schools like UMKC. Lots of adjuncts. Rather like FDR, as Thomas Frank says in one of his talks (which I’m too lazy to find). You’d have to blow up the system of liberal credentialing, the backscratchocracy so-called meritocracy. If you think the liberal reaction to Trump was intense…
Emphasis mine. My friend, Jon Larson, who runs this Real Economics blog, is fond of reminding people that the Apollo moon landing program was overwhelmingly staffed by graduates of the public universities. not the Ivy League.

How Come So Many Bernie Bros Are Women and People of Color? Katie Halper, Common Dreams, via Naked Capitalism 12-19-18]  
 “A recent CNN poll shows that among potential Democratic candidates in Iowa caucuses Senator Bernie Sanders has the highest approval rating from people of color…. But despite evidence like the new CNN poll, in which Sanders had the highest approval among non-white voters, outlets reporting on the survey studiously avoided mentioning that key finding which undermines the media narrative about Sanders’ struggle to appeal to minority voters.”
Clara Jeffery, editor in chief of Mother Jones, is promoting a poll of black women, showing that Sanders is a top three candidate selection of only 12 percent of those polled. What Jeffery does not mention is that the poll was "exclusively a poll of politicians, donors, and operatives." Ahh, yes __ the professional class, which was so thoroughly dissected and dissed by Thomas Frank in Listen Liberal.

Which goes a long way in explaining why Bernie Sanders is the only person on the national stage raising this issue:

Bernie Sanders, ✔@SenSanders

What I want to know is: if Sears has $25 million to give bonuses to executives, why is the company telling laid off employees they don't have the money to pay their severance?

Critics Say Bernie Sanders Is Too Old, Too White, and Too Socialist to Run for President in 2020. They’re Wrong.  [The Intercept, via Naked Capitalism 12-20-18]

Democrats Just Blocked Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Push For A Green New Deal Committee [Huffington Post, , via Naked Capitalism 12-21-18]   
“Democratic leaders [***cough*** Pelosi ***cough***] on Thursday tapped Rep. Kathy Castor (D-Fla.) to head a revived U.S. House panel on climate change, all but ending a dramatic month long effort to establish a select committee on a Green New Deal. Castor’s appointment came as a surprise to proponents of a Green New Deal. … Despite weeks of protests demanding House Democrats focus efforts next year on drafting a Green New Deal, the sort of sweeping economic policy that scientists say matches the scale of the climate crisis, Castor told E&E News the plan was “not going to be our sole focus.” She then suggested that barring members who have accepted donations from the oil, gas and coal industries from serving on the committee could be unconstitutional. “I don’t think you can do that under the First Amendment, really,” she said.”
AshleyStevens‏ @The_Acumen Dec 14

Remember that Crime Bill and those 3 Strikes Laws? You know, the one’s that locked up our brothers, cousin, uncles, fathers? Yeah, you remember. That’s when ya’ll wanted to “Get Tough On Crime!!” A the expense of our community. Oh, we remember too. We remember very well.

You see, we’ve lived it. We ARE those crack babies ya’ll left to die, the children whose schools ya’ll let go unfunded, roads left unpaved, our neighborhoods...guns, drugs and narcs were planted in. Cops on every corner and told to “pick ourselves up!”

If you’re a white dem running for office in 2020, pro tip. Going to the “Black Church” as black people outreach just shows millennials you have zero interest in black issues and are pandering. It also shows 0 connection and history of work in our community in these times.

AshleyStevens‏ @The_Acumen 14 Dec 2018

We want policies like Medicare for All, Free College, Jobs Programs, Unions, etc because we would greatly benefit from them as a community. If you think dancing at our cookouts an going to our grandparents churches are going to distract us from our goals, think again.

For generations ya’ll have used the “fire wall” of black voters without a lick of reciprocity. We needs that reciprocity right nah homies!! Making weed legal now? Oh, okay, let our people outta jail and expunge their records. They’ve paid enough. Give us our voting rights back.
Posted by Tony Wikrent at 9:10 AM

1 comment:

  1. All Pets AdvisorMay 6, 2021 at 9:50:00 AM CDT

    Grants are an excellent way to pay off student loans 2021 and are money that typically does not need to be repaid.

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)