Week-end Wrap - January 12, 2019
by Tony Wikrent
Economics Action Group, North Carolina Democratic Party Progressive Caucus
Constitutional Foundation of the US Economy: Powers are Implied Not Enumerated
Tony Wikrent, April 9, 2017 [RealEconomics]
These issues go to the heart of the question: What is the role and purpose of government? They include such specific issues as the General Welfare clause, states rights, implied versus enumerated powers, and the reach and scope of the Commerce clause. Contrary to the idealized wrong-wing myth of the U.S. economy being founded on the principles of laissez-faire, the framers of the Constitution deliberately set out to create a central government strong enough to force the thirteen states into one national economy. To do this, the national government undertook a number of programs and policies to build and strengthen the national economy by encouraging and protecting manufactures and commerce, establishing a national banking system, and promoting and directly assisting the development of transportation.
The first Act of Congress established the administering of oaths of office for federal officials, but the second Act was the imposition of the Hamilton Tariff to protect domestic industry and raise revenue. In 1791, Congress chartered the First Bank of the United States. The Patent Office was created in 1802. Direct federal involvement in the building of transportation infrastructure included projects authorized under the 1807 Coast and Geodetic Survey, and other measures to improve river and harbor navigation, which were formalized and put on a more permanent footing by the 1824 Rivers and Harbors Act. Various Army expeditions to the west, beginning with Lewis and Clark's Corps of Discovery in 1804 and continuing into the 1870s, gathered and disseminated geographical and scientific knowledge that was crucial to opening the West to settlement (see for example, the careers of Major Stephen Harriman Long, Major General John C. Frémont, and Brigadier General Randolph B. Marcy). These expeditions were almost always under the direction of an officer from the Army Corps of Topographical Engineers, an organization that has been almost completely written out of American history, but which comprised the elite of U.S. Army officers. Pursuant to the General Survey Act of 1824, Army officers were assigned to assist or direct the surveying and construction of the early roads, railroads and canals -- whether they were private or state projects did not matter.
Our national government has also played a crucial role in the development of metal-cutting and metal-forming machine tools and mass mechanical assembly, which form the basis of modern industrial economies; the building of a trans-continental railroad system; the application of science to agriculture, and the mechanization of farming; improvements of steam propulsion for maritime transport; development of radio; creation of a nation-wide electricity power grid; creation of a national system of paved roads; development of aviation; development of frozen foods; development of electronics; creation of nuclear power; the creation of computers, and development of the internet.
Life expectancy is only dropping for the 90%, not the 10%, let alone the 0.1%.
"The Association Between Income and Life Expectancy in the United States, 2001–2014"
[National Center for Biotechnology Information, U.S. National Library of Medicine, via Naked Capitalism 1-10-18]
Michael Hudson: Oligarchy will never cancel the debt
Michael Hudson: Oligarchy will never cancel the debt
[via Mike Norman Economics 1-10-19]
Michael Hudson says that the Western oligarchy would sooner let 90% of people in the world die rather than cancel any of debt they believe is owed to them.
Michael Hudson says that the Western oligarchy would sooner let 90% of people in the world die rather than cancel any of debt they believe is owed to them.
Hudson states that the problem originates with the privatization of finance. “Every society in history for the last 4,000 years has found that the debts grow more rapidly than people can pay,” he says. “The problem is a small oligarchy of 10 percent of the population at the top to whom all of these net debts are owed to. You want to annual the debts to the top 10 percent. That’s what they’re not going to do. The oligarchy is running things. They would rather annul the bottom 90 percent right to live than to annul the money that’s due to them. They would rather strip the planet and shrink the population and be paid rather than give up their claims. That’s the political fight of the 21st century.”
Congressional Staffing for Dummies: The Pay Go Dispute
Matt Stoller, January 06, 2019 [Medium, via Common Dreams]
This is well worth sitting down with a full cup of coffee and reading in its entirety. It is a fascinating picture of the legislative process in the House of Representatives, and how complicated it is to figure out if someone in Congress is moving in a good progressive direction or not.
Stoller also ends by pointing to the real problem: "which is the ideological problem with how we frame fiscal responsibility." He then explains how the forecasts and studies of the Congressional Budget Office are always in error because CBO is dominated by neoclassical economists with a distinct set of preferred policies.
Iowa “Ag-Gag” Law Suppressing Journalism Ruled Unconstitutional
How an outdated law is leaving millions of low-income college students hungry
Matt Stoller, January 06, 2019 [Medium, via Common Dreams]
This is well worth sitting down with a full cup of coffee and reading in its entirety. It is a fascinating picture of the legislative process in the House of Representatives, and how complicated it is to figure out if someone in Congress is moving in a good progressive direction or not.
Stoller also ends by pointing to the real problem: "which is the ideological problem with how we frame fiscal responsibility." He then explains how the forecasts and studies of the Congressional Budget Office are always in error because CBO is dominated by neoclassical economists with a distinct set of preferred policies.
In 2010, the Obama administration and a Democratic Congress passed a law to ensure Congress would be ‘fiscally responsible. Nancy Pelosi was the Speaker in 2010 when Congress passed the statute, and she is proud of being fiscally responsible. This law says that if Congress doesn’t go through a PayGo process for its aggregate spending and taxing in the full fiscal year, the White House’s Office of Management and Budget gets to choose a bunch of programs to cut in a process known as as sequestration. Sequestration is in law. It was a law that sort of made sense at the time, because Obama was President and Democrats didn’t so much mind if a Democratically controlled OMB got to make a bunch of important decisions. But guess what? Trump is now President, which means he’s the one that gets to decide the cuts that happen if Congress doesn’t use a PayGo decision-making process....
Now this is where it gets a bit weird. You see, the House has a rules package at the beginning of its session. But it also changes its rules pretty much every legislative day through what’s called the Rules Committee. Every time the House puts forward a bill to vote on the floor, it has to first vote on a rule for that bill. Floor time is extremely valuable, because you need floor time to pass a bill. Rules structure how floor time is used, and every rule must go through the Rules Committee. A typical House rule will say ‘here’s the bill that’s being voted on, here’s who gets to talk on the floor, here are the amendments that get a vote, here’s how much time to dedicate, etc.’ But a House rule can also change or waive any other rule at any point, including rules put forward at the beginning of the House term, like #PayGo. The Republicans, for instance, waived their #CutGo rule to pass the Trump tax cuts. And rules are routinely waived or changed when there is legislation for ‘emergencies,’ like war, bailouts, disaster relief, or anything else Congress dubs an emergency....
...CBO is wrong in dangerous ways. CBO is full of neoclassical economists, who are basically people trained in doing econometric models using quasi-libertarian assumptions. When they ‘score’ a bill what it means is they are making a long-term guess about the revenue and spending impacts of a piece of legislation. But these determinations — and errors — are highly political. Goldman Sachs’s chief economist is an advisor to CBO. So is that of hedge fund D.E. Shaw. So are executives of bunch of health care corporations. These people have a formal role as a choke point in our legislative process as a sort of ‘voice of God’ telling elected leaders what the costs and benefits of proposed legislation is, even though those costs and benefits are arbitrarily selected based on hidden political assumptions....
But even more fundamentally, why do we care about whether a budget is balanced? We didn’t really have this weird fetish over deficits and an accumulating national debt until the 1970s. Until 1974, the House spent money through one committee (Appropriations), and brought in money through a different committee. (Ways and Means). If the government spent more than it taxed, it had to borrow money by issuing debt. If it spent less than it taxed, it retired debt. This debt is managed by a combination of the government’s Treasury department and the government’s bank, which is called the Federal Reserve. The Federal debt is older than the Constitution, so if there are long term problems they haven’t shown up in 200+ years....
...money is a made up political commodity. This is a huge deal, and it’s something that fancy people in suits spend a lot of time trying to lie to people about. Because if the truth were to come out that ‘balancing the budget’ is just cover for letting neoclassical economists have a choke hold on how our democratic institutions operate, then the people themselves might want to spend some of it on things like health care or nice things for themselves instead of the wars and bailouts that are somehow always emergencies and exempt from these PayGo rules....
The bottom line is, the reason very serious people say we must reduce the deficit is to limit the ability of democratic institutions to make choices over political economy. This is the real function of the Congressional Budget Office, and the real point of PayGo. People like Pelosi, who means well, saw this recipe deliver real wage gains in the 1990s, and so she buys into it.AOC’s Green New Deal as Policy
Lambert Strether, January 06, 2019 [Naked Capitalism]
A full review of Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasia Cortez's DRAFT TEXT FOR PROPOSED ADDENDUM TO HOUSE RULES FOR 116TH CONGRESS OF THE UNITED STATES accompanied by a bunch of excellent links.
Raising the Bar on the Green New Deal
Black Agenda Report, via Naked Capitalism 1-11-18]
There’s a lot of talk lately about the Green New Deal. The phrase was first used in the US by Howie Hawkins , the Green party candidate for governor in New York state in 2010, 2014 and 2018.
Howie says he stole it from the European Greens who’d been intrigued by the old American New Deal of the 1930s under Franklin Roosevelt. European Greens wanted to regulate the banking sector, something we can't seem to do here. They wanted to raise wages, to shorten working weeks, to stimulate the econony with massive infrastructure upgrades and repair, and to pay for the whole thing with higher taxes on the rich, all of that straight out of the playbook of the 1930s, plus putting the economies of their countries on a path to zero emisions . Their vision included giving away, not selling but giving away the new green technologies enabling such a transition to the global south as reparations. Altogether it was a really ambitious and humane extension upon the old New Deal.
Howie Hawkins stole the slogan and the idea back from the European Greens.
This came up as the FIRST listing in a Google search for "Green New Deal policy details." Seems obvious Google has become seriously impaired in its attempt to steer people away from what Google executives believe is the "radical left." But that's another issue. This article by Fox is full of half-truth, distortions, and outright lie, but I present it here as what we can expect from the conservative and libertarian noise machines as they crank up their responses to the popularity of a surging left populist insurgency, of which they are making Senator Sanders and Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez the symbolic leader of.
The Green New Deal would dramatically reshape the U.S. economy and add tens of trillions of dollars to the national debt. The radical plan would force families to pay more to heat, cool and provide electricity to their homes. It would raise the same costs for businesses, farmers, government and organizations, driving up their operating costs – and raising the prices for just about all the good and services Americans buy.
The author, Justin Haskins, is the executive editor and a research fellow at The Heartland Institute and the editor-in-chief of StoppingSocialism.com. According to SourceWatch, Heartland Institute is funded by the Kochs; is an associate member of the right-wing State Policy Network; and is tied to the American Legislative Exchange Council Haskins is also supported by the Institute for Energy Research, which, according to SourceWatch, was founded in 1989 from a predecessor non-profit organization registered by Charles G. Koch and Robert L. Bradley Jr.. Bradley served previously as Director of Public Policy Analysis at Enron, where he wrote speeches for late Enron CEO Kenneth Lay, who was convicted on fraud and conspiracy charges in May 2006.
[KUT, via Naked Capitalism 1-9-18]
[Shadowproof, via Naked Capitalism 1-11-18]
[New Food Economy, via Naked Capitalism 1-11-18]
A 2017 survey of the California public university system, for instance, found that 40 percent of its undergraduate and graduate students faced food insecurity—defined by the Department of Agriculture (USDA) as a range of experiences including reduced quality of diet and reduced food intake.... From kindergarten through high school, students from low-income families can often qualify for free or reduced-price meals. The GAO report defines “low-income” as earning a household income at or below 130 percent of the federal poverty line, which is also the income eligibility limit to qualify for SNAP (that’s currently $1,316 for a single-person). But there’s no equivalent college-level program, the GAO report points out. Kids who may have counted for years on free breakfast and lunch every day are left in the lurch when they advance to college....
Since 1975, college attendance among low-income high school graduates has more than doubled from 31.2 to 65.4 percent, according to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). That’s about the rate at which high-income high school graduates were already attending college back in 1975.
So a typical student body in the 1980s is no longer emblematic of college campus demographics today. The trouble is, our perception of college students as middle- and upper-class kids with parental support persists. That’s why some school officials perpetuate the misconception that college students are ineligible for SNAP, and why many believe it.
To make matters worse, food stamps laws are also stuck in the past. In 1977, Congress passed a food stamp act that barred “any such person enrolled in an institution of higher education” from participating in SNAP, with limited exceptions for single parents, students with disabilities, and those attending federal or state work-study programs.
Biggest Threat to Single-Payer? Democrat Support for a Public Option.
Newsom Comes Out Swinging On Day One For Single-Payer, Immigrant Coverage
[Business Insider, via Naked Capitalism 1-8-18]
Wall Street Intensified Housing Crisis: Fed Study
Elwood, Illinois (Pop. 2,200), Has Become a Vital Hub of America’s Consumer Economy. And It’s Hell.
[Truthout, via Naked Capitalism 1-8-18]
[Kaiser Health News, via Naked Capitalism 1-8-18]
“Within hours of assuming office Monday, Gov. Gavin Newsom issued a defiant challenge to the Trump administration with sweeping plans to expand health coverage to more Californians, pushing for a single-payer system and insurance for undocumented young adult immigrants. He also called for new state-funded subsidies to help people afford health insurance, coupled with a requirement that all Californians have health insurance. And he signed an executive order that directs state agencies to work together to negotiate prescription drug prices.”De Blasio says every resident in NYC will be guaranteed health care
[Pix11, via Naked Capitalism 1-8-18]
“De Blasio took to Twitter after his Tuesday morning appearance, writing ‘Today I’m announcing a plan to guarantee health care for all New Yorkers. Through our own public option and a new program called NYC Care, we’ll ensure the first stop for people isn’t the emergency room.’ Under de Blasio’s program, 600,000 estimated uninsured residents will soon be insured. De Blasio also said the city would not raise taxes to pay for the program and will use the city’s public health care system to fund it.”250 more hospitals just joined in on a plan to make their own drugs and the effort could upend the generic pharma business
[Business Insider, via Naked Capitalism 1-8-18]
“Hospitals have a creative plan to tackle the high price and frequent shortages of generic drugs… To start, Civica will focus on making 14 drugs that are used in hospitals, typically injectable drugs. Those are expected to come in 2019. The company’s priorities include making essential medicines that have been on the FDA drug shortage list, and taking on decades-old drugs that have artificially higher prices because they don’t face any competition.”Cooperative Enterprise as an Antimonopoly Strategy
[SSRN, via Naked Capitalism 1-8-18]
From the abstract: “Corporations threatened by cooperatives have used the antitrust laws to frustrate the growth of these alternative businesses. To insulate cooperatives from the antitrust threat, Congress has enacted exemptions to protect cooperative entities, notably a general immunity for farm cooperatives in the 1922 Capper-Volstead Act. As part of an agenda to tame corporate monopoly, all three branches of the federal government and the states should revisit these ideas and seek to protect and enable the cooperative model across the economy. While protections that farmers fought for a century ago may seem obsolete in an era of big-box retail and online platforms, matters of ownership design have at least as much relevance today and should be a part of the antimonopoly arsenal.”
[New York Times, via Naked Capitalism 1-9-18]
David Sirota [Splinter News, via Naked Capitalism 1-10-18]
Wall Street firms drove up housing and rent prices while depressing homeownership rates after the financial crisis, according to a new study of economic data.
The analysis from researchers at the Philadelphia Federal Reserve found that after the collapse of the housing market a decade ago, institutional investors such as Blackstone, Cerberus Capital and Golden Tree seized on the opportunity to buy up homes and convert them into rental units.
In all, the researchers found that institutional investors’ purchases of residential properties represented nine percent of the overall housing price increases since the crisis — and 28 percent of the decline in homeownership rates.‘Income Sharing’ Is Wall Street’s Potentially Predatory Alternative to Student Loans
[Vice, via Naked Capitalism 1-10-18]
[New Republic, via Naked Capitalism 1-10-18]
In a few short years after the Intermodal opened, Elwood became the largest inland port in North America. Billions of dollars in goods flowed through the area annually. The world’s most profitable retailers flocked to this stretch of barren country, while the headline unemployment rate plunged. Wal-Mart set up three warehouses in Will County alone, including its two largest national facilities, both located in Elwood. Samsung, Target, Home Depot, IKEA, and others all moved in. Will County is now home to some 300 warehouses. A region once known for its soybeans and cornfields was boxed up with gray facilities, some as large as a million square feet....
Instead of abundant full-time work, a regime of partial, precarious employment set in. Temp agencies flourished, but no restaurants, hotels, or grocery stores ever came, save for the recent addition of a dollar store. Tens of thousands of semis rumbled through Will County every day, wreaking havoc on the infrastructure. And as the town of Elwood scrambled to pave its potholes, its inability to collect taxes from the facilities plunged it into more than $30 million in debt....
With nearly 100 staffing agencies promising access to the same low-wage workforce, offering a competitive cost advantage to warehouses looking to staff up is nearly impossible. That pressure leads to corner-cutting of all sorts, which often includes wage theft, in the form of paying piece rates, skimping on hours, or having workers pay for their own drug tests, a process that was only recently outlawed. “How else are you going to cut costs?” posited Clack. “It’s this race to the bottom mentality.”
[New York Review of Books, via Naked Capitalism 1-11-18]
[Aviation Week and Space Technology 1--19]
[Jacobin, via Naked Capitalism 1-8-18]
[The Wire, via Naked Capitalism 1-11-18]
The government has no idea how many gig workers there are, and that’s a problem
Yves Smith [Naked Capitalism 1-8-18]
Even Davos Man is worried that currently used economic statistics and measures are not providing a full picture of what's really going on.
Cutting wages — the wrong medicine
THE TRUTH ABOUT ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ: The inside story of how, in just one year, Sandy the bartender became a lawmaker who triggers both parties
Resolution calling on Democrats in House of Representatives to investigate Republican vote suppression relentlessly and persistently next two years.
DSA Two Years Later: Where Are We At? Where Are We Headed?
The Era Of Easy Recycling May Be Coming To An End
[FiveThirtyEight, via Naked Capitalism 1-11-18]
U.S. Carbon Emissions Surged in 2018 Even as Coal Plants Closed
The government has no idea how many gig workers there are, and that’s a problem
[MarketWatch, via Naked Capitalism 1-7-18]
“[S]o-called “side hustlers” or “gig workers” [are] essentially invisible in the eyes of the U.S. Bureau of Labor statistics. Though the agency is a key source of information about the labor market, it doesn’t keep tabs on how much people make in what the government calls ‘non-primary work.’… The BLS does not have an explicit definition for a gig worker, or a formal way of tracking them. It comes closest in a survey called the Contingent Worker Supplement, which studies “contingent workers” in temporary working arrangements that they don’t expect to last more than a year. But prior to last month, the BLS had not released the Contingent Worker Supplement since 2005 due in large part to a lack of funding. The most recent report found that 5.9 million people or 3.8% of all workers are contingent workers.”Richard Murphy: Davos Wants a Better Measure of Failure
Yves Smith [Naked Capitalism 1-8-18]
Even Davos Man is worried that currently used economic statistics and measures are not providing a full picture of what's really going on.
Cutting wages — the wrong medicine
Lars P. Syll [via Naked Capitalism 1-8-18]
[via Naked Capitalism 1-8-18]
New Documents Reveal a Covert British Military-Intelligence Smear Machine Meddling In American Politics
Yves Smith [Naked Capitalism 1-10-18]
I have long argued that it is a huge mistake to believe any members of the British oligarchy are true friends of the American republic. The British have been quite successful in squashing the American school of political economy and replacing it with neo-classical economics, which is basically the British school. Look at how many Americans erroneously believe the USA economy was founded on the ideas of Adam Smith and have no idea of the crucial importance of Alexander Hamilton. Many on the left in USA even believe Alexander Hamilton was just as bad as the British oligarchs!
“Wall Street executives are hearing from Cory Booker, Kamala Harris and other Democrats as they gauge interest in possible 2020 presidential campaigns”
As in the 1930s, more and more right-wing politicians — and economists — now suggest that lowering wages is the right medicine to strengthen the competitiveness of their faltering economies, get the economy going, increase employment and create growth that will get rid of towering debts and create balance in the state budgets.
But, intimating that one could solve economic problems by wage cuts and impairing unemployment compensations, in these dire times, should really be taken more as a sign of how low the confidence in our economic system has sunk. Wage cuts and lower unemployment compensation levels do not save neither competitiveness nor jobs.
What is needed more than anything else is stimuli and economic policies that increase effective demand.
On a societal level wage cuts only increase the risk of more people getting unemployed. To think that that one can solve economic crises in this way is a turning back to those faulty economic theories and policies that John Maynard Keynes conclusively showed to be wrong already in the 1930s. It was theories and policies that made millions of people all over the world unemployed.
"An informal boycott of US products also seems to be taking place."
BofAML notes that China consumers seem to be cutting down on US products much more than US consumers are cutting down on China imports.
New Documents Reveal a Covert British Military-Intelligence Smear Machine Meddling In American Politics
Yves Smith [Naked Capitalism 1-10-18]
I have long argued that it is a huge mistake to believe any members of the British oligarchy are true friends of the American republic. The British have been quite successful in squashing the American school of political economy and replacing it with neo-classical economics, which is basically the British school. Look at how many Americans erroneously believe the USA economy was founded on the ideas of Adam Smith and have no idea of the crucial importance of Alexander Hamilton. Many on the left in USA even believe Alexander Hamilton was just as bad as the British oligarchs!
“Wall Street executives are hearing from Cory Booker, Kamala Harris and other Democrats as they gauge interest in possible 2020 presidential campaigns”
[CNBC, via Naked Capitalism 1-8-18]
“Despite the left’s outcry against Wall Street money, political financiers believe candidates are going to have to appeal to both the grassroots and big donors in order to compete with Trump’s massive campaign warchest…. ‘I think you have to have to do both or you’re not going to have a campaign,’ said a Democratic bundler who spoke on the condition of anonymity. ‘If you don’t take big money at all, that’s going to be a problem. I would be very surprised I saw anybody say I’m only doing the low end. They are probably going to start with that.'” Lambert Strether observes: The bundler — and the story! — somehow omit to mention Sanders did exactly that in 2016.Progressive Ideas Matter to Voters. So Why Do Democrats Fixate on the Identity of the Messenger?” Briahna Gray
[The Intercept, via Naked Capitalism 1-8-18]
“The thing is, although much is made of the browning of America, the country is still 70 percent white, and electoral strategies that are wholly dismissive of that population set themselves at an unnecessary disadvantage….. [M]delanin doesn’t guarantee Democratic support. Of the 4.3 million Obama voters who stayed home or voted for third parties in 2016, a third were black. So as important as it is to register voters, ensuring access to franchise is not enough. Americans need a reason to go to the polls — something that makes them feel like their vote matters. Something more than being anti-Trump. Something ideological.”
THE TRUTH ABOUT ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ: The inside story of how, in just one year, Sandy the bartender became a lawmaker who triggers both parties
[Business Insider, via Naked Capitalism 1-8-18]
“‘She seems quite charming, she seems quite open and accessible and likable, and I think some people will be surprised at how much they like her,’ the strategist said. "
Isaac Chotiner, January 10, 2019 [The New Yorker, via Naked Capitalism 1-11-18]
This is obviously a changing of the guard. When I watch Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez operate with such aplomb and skill and obvious erudition, she reminds me of when people like you and me stood around at a cocktail party or a dinner party and inevitably the conversation turned to, Why are the Democrats where they are? Why don’t they take the fights to the enemy? Why don’t they pivot off troll-y comments from the Republicans, instead of playing the game on their terms? Why aren’t they offering clear, bold, long-term, super-jumbo policy solutions that people can remember instead of triangulating everything the Republicans suggest?
And, suddenly, someone emerges who seems to be listening to all this, who is probably part of those conversations. And, suddenly, she has the power to actually act in a way that the Party hasn’t—a party that, almost forty years later, is still traumatized by the success of Ronald Reagan. It’s a profoundly generational phenomenon, and, clearly, it’s scary....
The Democratic Party doesn’t even know how to take yes for an answer. They can’t even accept the idea that they are a majority party. There’s this great line, “He who seems most kingly is the king.” Unless you act like a leader, people aren’t going to treat you like a leader.
Take Tlaib using a swear word. Truman got in trouble for saying “If you vote for Nixon, you ought to go to hell.” And that was a brassy sort of rhetoric people had come to expect from Democrats. Not this pearl-clutching response that, every time someone uses strong language, they have to apologize for it.Locally, I am working to get a message to my Congressman, David Price - who represents Durham, Chapel Hill, Raleigh NC, one of the safest Democratic districts in USA - that the time has come to reject the chimera of bipartisanship and start treating Republicans with the severity and harshness they have practiced the past few decades. This resolution will be considered by the Orange County Democratic Party Executive Committee this coming week. Please feel free to copy as much or all of it for your own local political organizations.
Resolution calling on Democrats in House of Representatives to investigate Republican vote suppression relentlessly and persistently next two years.
WHEREAS voter suppression efforts were open, systematic and widespread in the 2016 election—not just in North Carolina, but in many other states of the Union—and the rights to vote of Black, Asian, Hispanic, and other Americans were denied or abridged through use of the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck (IVRC) Program, long voter lines, unreasonable and unfair voter ID requirements, reduced numbers of polling locations, and other voter suppression measures; and
WHEREAS leaders of the Republican Party have rejected the Growth and Opportunity Project of Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus (the 2016 election post-mortum which concluded that the Republican Party faces increasing electoral difficulty if it does not soften its hardline ideological commitments on immigration reform, gay rights, and corporate governance and regulation) and have instead adopted tactics aimed at preserving power for a party that finds its voter support base shrinking as national demographics’ evolve. These tactics include gerrymandering; voter suppression; manipulation of the census process; efforts to stack the federal judiciary with like-minded jurists; and, as we now see Wisconsin and Michigan as well as North Carolina, Republican legislative majorities rushing to pass laws that strip away the legitimate powers of newly elected Democratic governors; and
WHEREAS Jeff Flake, the outgoing Republican senator from Arizona, recently characterized his Party’s tactics as “a race to the bottom to see who can be meaner and madder and crazier. It is not enough to be conservative anymore. You have to be vicious,” and
WHEREAS these Republican tactics are assaults on basic political rights and norms which increasingly endanger free and fair elections, public support for our political system and institutions, and democratic government;
Now be it RESOLVED: the Democratic Party of Orange County urges Representative David Price to fully and unconditionally support and promote investigations and hearings in the House of Representatives on Republican efforts at vote suppression; that these investigations and hearings should demand and force testimony by Republican officials and officers from local and state Republican parties, as well as the national party organization, including, but not limited to, county and state party organizations, and state and local government agencies and entities responsible for conducting elections and voter registration; and that these investigations and hearings be relentless, unremitting, and persistent over the next two years.
DSA Two Years Later: Where Are We At? Where Are We Headed?
[New Politics, via Naked Capitalism 1-8-18]
“We have not had such a vibrant left in America for forty or fifty years, no socialist group this big in 70 years, and nothing exactly like this ever. Everyone on the left should celebrate this remarkable development. Which is not to say there are no problems, but many are good problems, almost all of them necessary ones, and only a few of them seriously troubling. The real issue is the direction: where is DSA going? And the biggest question regarding the group’s future is its relationship to the Democratic Party, a party itself in flux. Will DSA, whose rebirth began in Sanders Democratic Party primary campaign, be able to attain escape velocity and become a truly independent socialist organization, or will the greater gravity of the Democratic Party—its size, money, influence, connections, power—succeed in keeping DSA within its orbit?”
Zaid Jilani [Jacobin, via Naked Capitalism 1-9-18]
When I worked at PCCC [supporting Warren], I was once told that Warren decided to run for the Senate after witnessing the amount of power she had as an oversight chair for the bank bailouts. She believed that “being in the room” with decision-makers in the Obama administration was essential to creating change. While Warren wants to be at the table with elites, arguing for progressive policies, Sanders wants to open the doors and let the public make the policy.The House Democrats’ Best Path Forward
[The New Yorker, via Naked Capitalism 1-9-18]
One of the worst side effects of Trumpism is the way that it drives its opponents into reactive mode, amid an atmosphere of cooked-up chaos.... the most effective way to counter the Administration’s frantic, unmoored agenda-setting, while also motivating voters for 2020—will be to pursue ambitious ideas. These could include the once utopian-sounding Medicare for All; a Green New Deal, to combat climate change while creating jobs; a national fifteen-dollar minimum wage; and a Voting Rights Advancement Act, to revive some of the protections that the Supreme Court eradicated in 2013, in Shelby County v. Holder.
Such proposals are backed by the Party’s fired-up progressives, but not all Democrats in the House support them, and they are highly unlikely to pass the Republican-controlled Senate, let alone be signed into law by Trump. Yet they strike many people as fair and humane, if politically complicated. In a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll, seventy per cent of respondents were in favor of Medicare for All. Support has also grown among doctors, who were once vocal critics of any single-payer system.
The Era Of Easy Recycling May Be Coming To An End
[FiveThirtyEight, via Naked Capitalism 1-11-18]
On average, about 25 percent of the stuff we try to recycle is too contaminated to go anywhere but the landfill, according to the National Waste and Recycling Association, a trade group. Just a decade ago, the contamination rate was closer to 7 percent, according to the association. And that problem has only compounded in the last year, as China stopped importing “dirty” recyclable material that, in many cases, has found no other buyer.
Most recycling programs in the United States are now single stream. Between 2005 and 2014, these programs went from covering 29 percent of American communities to 80 percent, according to a survey conducted by the American Forest and Paper Association. The popularity makes sense given that single-stream is convenient and a full 66 percent of people surveyed by Harris Poll last October said that they wouldn’t recycle at all if it wasn’t easy to do.
Some experts have credited single stream with large increases in the amount of material recycled. Studies have shown that people choose to put more stuff out on the curb for recycling when they have a single-sort system. And the growth of single-stream recycling tracks with the growth of recycling overall in this country
U.S. Carbon Emissions Surged in 2018 Even as Coal Plants Closed
[New York Times, via Naked Capitalism 1-9-18]
“‘The big takeaway for me is that we haven’t yet successfully decoupled U.S. emissions growth from economic growth,’ said Trevor Houser, a climate and energy analyst at the Rhodium Group.”Exxon Is Finally Being Forced to Turn Over Docs Showing What It Knew About Climate Change
[Earther, via Naked Capitalism 1-10-18]
EIA: Wind will account for 46% of capacity additions in 2019
EIA: Wind will account for 46% of capacity additions in 2019
[North American Windpower online, via North American Wind Energy Association 1-11-19]
The US is expected to add 23.7 gigawatts of new generating capacity in 2019, with wind representing 46% of that total, according to the Energy Information Administration. Wind farms totaling 10.9 GW are slated to come online this year, with most projects launching toward the end of the year.
Gregor Macdonald | TerraJoule Publishing (Behind a paywall; costs $9.00 to access.
Electricity is the new oil, and if you'd like to understand better how clean energy, electric vehicles, and grid technology will profoundly impact the oil market, then you should read Oil Fall, a now completed series that shows how wind and solar power will jailbreak the powergrid, and find their way into global transportation.
In domains from California to Texas, and from Europe and the UK to China, the titanic growth of new power generation from wind and solar is now dominating market share, cutting off growth opportunities for other energy sources. But now the great rollout of electric vehicles, and grid technology, will increasingly exploit this new source of power, depriving oil too of future growth....
...in part three, Waste Crash, the Oil Fall series concludes with an accounting of the enormous waste and lost wealth that occurs each day from fossil fuel combustion. Those domains like China, California, the UK, and Europe that are running ahead of the world towards clean energy will be the early winners of a systemic harvesting operation that will secure large efficiency gains, and economic surpluses.
[Nikkei Asian Review, via Naked Capitalism 1-9-18]
Norway Embarks On Its Most Ambitious Transport Project Yet China's high-speed rail ambitions in Southeast Asia don't end in Bangkok, however. Under its planned 3,000-km pan-Asian railway network, Chinese rail lines will extend even further south, stretching through Malaysia and feeding into Singapore.
Located at the tip of the Malay Peninsula, Singapore is the most developed member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. It also has one of the strongest relationships with Washington in the region -- giving the project added significance for China."If Beijing can court Singapore successfully and brings it into its orbit, that likely means that Singapore may decrease its security relationship with the U.S." and would give Beijing more space to operate in Southeast Asia, says Stephen Nagy, senior associate professor at International Christian University in Tokyo. It could mean that ASEAN would become more amenable to Chinese demands, such as its push for control over the South China Sea, he added.
Singapore is also the gateway to the Strait of Malacca, the chokepoint for maritime traffic connecting the oil-rich Middle East to energy-hungry East Asia.
[NPR, via Naked Capitalism 1-10-18]
Driving the nearly 700 miles along the coastal route from the city of Kristiansand in the south to the city of Trondheim now takes about 21 hours and requires seven ferry crossings. To cut travel time in half, the Norwegian Public Roads Administration has launched a nearly $40 billion transportation project that will include the world's longest floating bridge and — perhaps — a first-of-its-kind floating underwater traffic tunnel.
First Look at Bell's New Nexus Flying Taxi
[Aviation Week and Space Technology 1-11-19]
[Aviation Week and Space Technology 1-11-19]
Bell debuted its new Nexus flying taxi concept at the 2019 Consumer Electronic Show this week. Bell's VP of Innovation Scott Drennan and Kyle Heironimus, propulsion lead for the Nexus, share details about the eVTOL (electric vertical takeoff and landing) vehicle's systems, what its maintenance model will look like and when the Nexus is set to hit the skies.Bell’s Nexus Air Taxi Concept Rings Changes For eVTOL Market
[Aviation Week and Space Technology 1--19]
[Aviation Week and Space Technology 1-10-19]
Boeing has unveiled a refined design for its Transonic Truss-Braced Wing (TTBW) ultra-efficient airliner concept. The 737-class aircraft, with a 170-ft.-span low-drag wing, is designed to fly at Mach 0.8, a typical airliner cruise speed and faster than previous versions of the design. The TTBW concept was originally developed in 2010 under the Boeing and NASA Subsonic Ultra Green Aircraft Research (SUGAR) program to study new configurations for ultra-efficient airliners that could enter service in the 2035 time frame.
[Aviation Week and Space Technology 1-9-19]
[Locus, via Naked Capitalism 1-9-18]
In 2016, the City of Austin played a game of high-stakes chicken with Uber and Lyft. Austin cab drivers have to get fingerprinted as part of a criminal records check, and Austin wanted Uber and Lyft drivers to go through the same process.
Uber and Lyft violently objected to this. They said it would add a needless barrier to entry that would depress the supply of drivers, and privately, they confessed their fear that giving in to any regulation, anywhere, would open the door to regulation everywhere. They wanted to establish a reputation for being such dirty fighters that no city would even try to put rules on them....
Austin wasn’t intimidated. They enacted the rule, and Uber and Lyft simply exited the city, leaving Austin without any rideshare at all. All the drivers and passengers who’d come to rely on Lyft and Uber were out of luck.
But the drivers were undaunted. They formed a co-operative and in months, they had cloned the Uber app and launched a new business called Ride Austin, which is exactly like Uber: literally the same drivers, driving the same cars, and charging the same prices. But it’s also completely different from Uber: the drivers own this company through a worker-owned co-op. They take home 25% more per ride than they made when they were driving for Uber. Uber and Lyft drivers commute into Austin from as far away as San Antonio just to drive for Ride. That’s how much better driving for a worker co-op is....
The [1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act] and the ... Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998... have given digital businesses access to a shadowy legal doctrine that was never written by Congress but is nevertheless routinely enforced by the courts: Felony Contempt of Business-Model.
The CFAA and DMCA 1201 have been carefully distorted into defensive, anti-disruption shields that are only available to digital businesses.Facebook is the new crapware
[TechCrunch, via Naked Capitalism 1-9-18]
“Yesterday Bloomberg reported that the scandal-beset social media behemoth has inked an unknown number of agreements with Android smartphone makers, mobile carriers and OSes around the world to not only pre-load Facebook’s eponymous app on hardware but render the software undeleteable; a permanent feature of your device, whether you like how the company’s app can track your every move and digital action or not. Consumers who do not want their digital activity and location surveilled by the people-profiling giant will likely crave the peace of mind of not having any form of Facebook app, stub or otherwise, taking up space on their device. But an unknown number of Android users are now finding out they don’t have that option. Not cool, Facebook, not cool. Another interesting question the matter raises is how permanent Facebook pre-installs are counted in Facebook’s user metrics, and indeed for ad targeting purposes.”
No comments:
Post a Comment