Sunday, January 20, 2019

Week-end Wrap - January 19, 2019

Week-end Wrap - January 19, 2019
by Tony Wikrent
Economics Action Group, North Carolina Democratic Party Progressive Caucus

The Green New Deal: How We Will Pay For It Isn’t ‘A Thing’ – And Inflation Isn’t Either
Robert Hockett, January 16, 2019 [Forbes,via Naked Capitalism 1-18-19] 
I was frankly surprised to find so good an article in Forbes, which is usually a voice for the reactionary rich. But, stopping to consider: it makes sense that any person, even if rich and reactionary, who accepted the facts on the looming disasters threatened by climate change, would realize at some point that solutions are incredibly expensive, on the order of at least $100 trillion. The next obvious question: how to pay for the solutions? If you're rich and reactionary, it must be pretty terrifying to suddenly comprehend that if society is going to survive climate change, society is going to have to take a LOT of your money in taxes to be able to afford the fixes required. Modern monetary theory and its promise that governments can just create all the money needed, must appear as nothing short of salvation.
The short answer to ‘how we will pay for’ the Green New Deal is easy. We’ll pay for it just as we pay for all else: Congress will authorize necessary spending, and Treasury will spend. This is how we do it – always has been, always will be. 
The money that’s spent, for its part, is never ‘raised’ first. To the contrary, federal spending is what brings that money into existence. 
If years of bad or no economic education make that ring counterintuitive to you, you’re not alone: politicians and pundits who ought to know better are with you. But the problem is readily remedied: just take a look at a dollar (or five dollar, or ten dollar, or … dollar) bill. The face you see is George Washington’s – a public official’s – not yours or some other private sector person’s. The signatures you’ll find, for their part, are those of the Treasurer and the Treasury Secretary, not yours or some other private sector person’s. And the inscription you’ll read across the top is ‘Federal Reserve Note,’ not ‘Private Sector Sally’s Note.’

‘Note’ here, note carefully, means ‘promissory note.’ Money betokens a promise. Hence money’s relation to credit. We’ll come back to this later. The money that Treasury spends is, in any event, jointly Fed- and Treasury-issued, not privately issued. That is to say it’s the citizenry’s issuance, not some single citizen’s issuance. It’s like a promise we make to each other. Hence the term ‘full faith and credit’ you’ll hear about when asking what ‘backs’ our currency and our Treasury securities.... 
The truth of the resource constraint is that money usually can be publicly issued and spent only at a rate commensurate with new goods and services supply. If the money supply grows too rapidly for goods and services to keep up, you get the old problem of ‘too many dollars chasing too few goods’ – inflation. If the money supply grows too slowly to keep up with productive capacity, you get the opposite problem – deflation, a far more serious threat, as we’ve seen since the crash of ‘08. 
Over the past four decades or so, inflation in consumer goods markets – so-called ‘Consumer Price Inflation,’ or ‘CPI’ – has been by and large nonexistent in the ‘developed’ world. Our problem has been just the opposite – deflation. That is what slow, ‘anemic,’ and even ‘negative’ growth rates across the ‘mature’ economies in recent decades have been about. What inflation we’ve had has been concentrated in financial markets, where the ever-more rich in our ever-more unequal societies gamble their winnings. Meanwhile those below the top have had to spend less and borrow more, bringing deflation and, worse still, debt-deflations after the financial crashes inevitably brought on by asset price hyperinflations in our financial markets. 
Which takes us to the Green New Deal. Representative Ocasio-Cortez, whose educational background is in economics, understands as few leaders seem to do that our problems of late have been problems of deflation, not inflation. She also knows well that both inequality and the loss of our middle class have both caused and been worsened by these deflationary trends, along with their mirror images in the financial markets: our asset price hyperinflations – ‘bubbles’ – and busts. Her Green New Deal aims to do nothing short of reversing this slow-motion national suicide – and end our ongoing ‘planet-cide’ in the process.
[Axios, North American Wind Energy Association 1-16-19]
A combination of state, regional and federal policies could make the ambitions of the Green New Deal's goal for 100% renewables a reality, writes Robbie Orvis, director of energy policy design at Energy Innovation. "Although a massive undertaking, this energy transition is technologically feasible and economically beneficial," he writes.
[The Hill, via American Wind Energy Association 1-14-19]
American lawmakers must support the Green New Deal plans to shift away from carbon-emitting fuel sources toward completely renewable energy, wrote hundreds of environmental organizations in letter to the House of Representatives. "As the United States shifts away from fossil fuels, we must simultaneously ramp up energy efficiency and transition to clean, renewable energy to power the nation's economy," they wrote.


Nearly Half of Workers Earn Less than $30,000
Barry Ritholtz [The Big Picture 1-9-19]
The Social Security Administration (SSA) tracks net income numbers after taxes through the Average Wage Index (AWI). We broke the AWI into a three-part hierarchy of $5K increments, letting you easily see the reality of income inequality in the U.S.. Astonishingly, 13% of workers make less than $5K, and nearly half, or 48%, take home $31,561 or less in net compensation (the dark red on our visual). 
1.4% of workers make between $250K – 50M, and another 8.2% bring home between $100K – 250K. Remember, these numbers reflect individual earners, meaning they don’t take into account household earnings. We mention this only because wealthy people tend to get married at higher rates than poor people. In other words, wage earners at the top of the income ladder are probably much wealthier than even these numbers would suggest since their spouses are generally highly educated and well-compensated too.

Poll: A majority of Americans support raising the top tax rate to 70 percent
[The Hill, via Naked Capitalism 1-16-19]



Bernie Sanders
✔@SenSanders

On nearly every "radical" idea the American people are with us:

72% want to expand Social Security.
70% want Medicare for All.
65% want a jobs guarantee.
64% want to legalize marijuana.
60% want tuition-free public colleges.
58% want $15 min wage.
57% want to break up big banks.

41K
2:24 PM - Jan 15, 2019


Twitter Ads info and privacy
[The Big Picture 1-13-19]

The richest 1% own 50% of stocks held by American households
[Yahoo Finance, via Naked Capitalism 1-18-19] 
“Market volatility is unsettling to investors. But just who makes up the investor class? According to Goldman Sachs, stock ownership is extremely concentrated because of the growing wealth gap in the U.S., and thus the market’s performance affects households making up the wealthiest 1% of Americans much more significantly than the other 99%. “The wealthiest 0.1% and 1% of households now own about 17% and 50% of total household equities respectively, up significantly from 13% and 39% in the late 80s,” Daan Struyven, Goldman Sachs’s chief economist said in a note earlier this week.”
Lambert Strether added this note: "Hence, the disportionate focus on Mr. Market and his feels, and the confusion between “the economy” and “the market.” "


Why doesn’t any other candidate talk like this? 

The White House now thinks the shutdown will be twice as bad for the economy than they originally thought 
[Business Insider, via Naked Capitalism 1-16-19]
“After a tweak to the internal White House model, the administration now expects that the shutdown will deduct 0.13 percentage points from quarterly GDP for every week the closure persists, a White House official told INSIDER. Most Wall Street economists believe the shutdown will shave off 0.05 percentage points from quarterly GDP growth per week, though some have bumped up their estimates recently. This means that the White House number is more than twice as pessimistic as the consensus. Originally the model only included the lost productivity from 380,000 federal workers placed on furlough. But now the model also incorporates the downsides caused by the loss of revenue to federal contractors….”

The role of financial elites in spreading political extremism: Interview of Maria Silvia Bastos Marques, president and CEO of Goldman Sachs Brazil
Goldman Sachs Investment Outlook, January 14, 2019
During the campaign, financial markets supported Bolsonaro's candidacy early on given expectations that Bolsonaro, if elected, would appoint Paulo Guedes, a pro-markets economist from the University of Chicago, as the country's finance minister. After the election, Guedes took on a larger and more comprehensive role, assuming responsibility for a newly created Ministry of Economy that was formed through the merger of the former Ministries of Finance, Planning and Industry and Commerce. 
The corporate sector in Brazil had some concerns about then-candidate Bolsonaro during the campaign, but many are hopeful today that the new administration will push concessions and privatizations, approve the mandatory social security reform and improve the Brazilian business environment by opening the economy, implementing tax reform and pursuing other microeconomic measures necessary to resume sustainable growth.
India’s Great Wall of Equality
Jayati Ghosh [Project Syndicate, via Naked Capitalism 1-14-19]
...on January 1, in the Indian state of Kerala, an estimated five million women formed a human chain – or “women’s wall” – stretching nearly 400 miles across the length of the state, to demonstrate their commitment to the fight for gender equality.

One cannot overstate the symbolic power of the women’s wall, which included more than one-third of Kerala state’s entire female population over the age of six – about two million more people that even its organizers had anticipated. The event had the backing of the state government, but it owes its success to the engagement of a variety of groups and organizations, not to mention the individual women who participated. 
Those women came from all strata of society. There were doctors, lawyers, teachers, students, nuns, domestic workers, agricultural laborers, wage workers, and homemakers. There were Hindus, Muslims, and Christians. There were mothers holding babies, young girls, and elderly women who could barely stand, resting on others for support. In many areas, there were also chains of the women’s male allies, standing across the road from them in solidarity.
To Take Back the Map, Democrats Need a Plan to Revive Heartland Cities
[Washington Monthly, via Naked Capitalism 1-14-19] 
“To avoid watching in horror as the Senate slips away forever while the Electoral College map becomes ever more daunting, liberals need a long-term strategy to combat the decline of heartland cities—to turn Clevelands into Denvers. To do so, they need to first recognize that geographic inequality did not come out of nowhere. It is not the inevitable product of free market forces clustering new skill and innovation around where all the old skill and innovation are found—nothing makes people in St. Louis or Milwaukee any less talented than people in San Francisco or Washington, D.C. Instead, it’s the result of nearly four decades of policy choices in Washington—such as giving large banks and other corporations in elite coastal cities free rein to acquire rival firms headquartered in cities in America’s interior. This has stripped those interior cities of what were once their economic engines, even as it has enriched the already wealthy coastal megalopolises.”
Basic income works and works well
[The Hindu, via Naked Capitalism 1-13-19]
In 2010-2013, I was principal designer of three basic income pilots in West Delhi and Madhya Pradesh, in which over 6,000 men, women and children were provided with modest basic incomes, paid in cash, monthly, without conditions. The money was not much, coming to about a third of subsistence. But it was paid individually, with men and women receiving equal amounts and with children receiving half as much, paid to the mother or surrogate mother. The pilots involved the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) and financial assistance from UNICEF and the UNDP. 
The outcomes exceeded expectations, partly because everybody in the community, and not just select people, received their own individual transfer. Nutrition improved, sanitation improved, health and health care improved, school attendance and performance improved, women’s status and well-being improved, the position of the disabled and vulnerable groups improved by more than others. And the amount and quality of work improved.
The White House calls food stamp funds for Puerto Rico ‘excessive and unnecessary’ 
[Grist, via Naked Capitalism 1-19-19]

Two Lessons From France’s Yellow Vest Protests
Ian Welsh [via Naked Capitalism 1-13-19]
No Centralized Control 
The great weakness of modern unions is leadership, bank accounts and law. They are easy to break if the state cooperates with corporations, or by the state alone. You can bribe the leadership, you can scare the leadership, or you can break the union. 
Because unions have things like headquarters, leaders and bank accounts the state can simply take all of those things away any time it wants to if the unions don’t have enough internal support in the government to stop them. This matters because unions tend to have centralized leadership: take out the leadership, get rid of the strike funds, and they can be broken. 
The Yellow Vests have none of this. What tiny leadership they have is some facebook pages. They have no united bank account, no buildings, no strike funds, etc… They cannot be broken by a strike on a few people and some pooled resources. Instead the yellow vests are just whoever wants to show up for any given protest and put on a yellow vest. This causes some problems, yes, but it means that they cannot easily be taken out. 
Scare The Opposition (State/Corporate) Leadership 
Why is Macron giving in to some demands? Well, perhaps because he’s scared (and, I suspect, personally a coward, which he has struck me as from the first.)
During the January 5 edition, protesters commandeered a forklift and broke open the office door of Macron spokesperson Benjamin Griveaux, forcing him to flee through the back entrance, while an ex-professional boxer was filmed punching and kicking a gendarme. Some reports have stated that Macron is worried for his personal safety. Protesters attempted to break through police lines that were guarding his home in Touquet in December, and his wife’s family has voiced concerns that their chocolate shop in their hometown, Amiens, will be attacked. 
....Here’s the thing: most protests get nowhere because they threaten no one and nothing. The elite, being rich and powerful, can wait out those protests they cannot buy, scare or break. They know it.... Macron is scared. He is scared for himself. For his family. For his staff and probably for his friends.... Normally, no one a politician cares about is threatened. Protesters get beaten, maybe the occasional cop gets a beating (being a cop is NOT dangerous compared to most manual labor jobs so spare me the hand wringing about people who beat people for a living, very occasionally getting beaten themselves.)
But politicians and corporate leaders are safe. The protesters suffer, strikers lose money, etc, etc… The yellow vests have threatened Macron. He is personally frightened, and he is giving in. Always, always find a way to threaten your opponents directly if the stakes merit it. Find something or someone they care about and go after it.
[Time, via Naked Capitalism 1-19-19]
[Business Insider, via Naked Capitalism 1-13-19]

[Counterpunch, via Naked Capitalism 1-13-19]
3) Media agencies boycott news stories about what people in poor countries are doing, achieving, calling for, hoping for, or building. By omitting this sort of coverage, one gets the false impression that people in poor countries aren’t doing anything about their economic or political situations. That contributes to the myth perpetuated by charities that poor people are incapable and passive and need outside help.

....mainstream media has stopped seeing itself as an active force in the world that has a responsibility to inform people and to help them understand what is going on – if it ever did see itself that way. Instead of being a public service, the news is a commodity. As such, media companies understand that stories about first world events, white people, celebrities and the rich and powerful tend to get more clicks than those about the poor.

“The Stealthy Corporate Scheme to Privatize Pittsburgh’s Water System” 
[In These Times, via Naked Capitalism 1-15-19] 
“The most recent news on this front came with the surprise announcement in October that private water powerhouse Aqua America [HQ ‎Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania] was buying Peoples Gas, which is the local gas company. Why would a water company swoop in to buy a gas company? Food and Water Watch, the advocacy organization I work for, has battled water privatization around the world for over a decade, and that experience leads us to suspect this isn’t about taking over a gas company. It’s a roundabout plan to privatize Pittsburgh’s water system by buying up the gas utility that has also been targeting the water system. For months, Peoples Gas had been selling the city on what it was calling a strategic public-private partnership. The company would replace aging lines and build a massive new treatment facility to boot — somehow without raising rates. As you might expect, the details were scarce. City officials, including Mayor Bill Peduto, have been carefully and conspicuously pledging to keep PWSA in public hands, while appearing very open to the company’s pitch. But even if a private company does not buy the system outright, giving a profit-seeking corporation power to make key decisions or determine user rates is not a ‘partnership.’ It’s a form of privatization….”
Former SEC Attorney James Kidney Is Captured Regulators’ Worst Nightmare
Pam Martens: January 18, 2019 [Wall Street on Parade]
A jaw-dropping video of a lecture James Kidney delivered at Lake Forest College outside of Chicago on October 12 arrived in our incoming email last Friday. The courage and frankness of that lecture took our breath away. It has also, no doubt, caused major ripples among the top brass at what is supposed to be the nation’s most formidable Wall Street cop, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). 
In the lecture, Kidney calls the leadership of the SEC when he worked there “self-serving cowards” who didn’t go after the higher ups on Wall Street following the crash of 2008 because they were simply “looking to move on, to return to their Wall Street job.” (We don’t think much has since changed at the SEC. See SEC Nominee Has Represented 8 of the 10 Largest Wall Street Banks in Past Three Years.) Kidney was a trial attorney at the SEC for 25 years until his retirement in 2014. He had never lost a case.... 
Kidney had pushed, to no avail, for higher ups in the chain of command at Goldman Sachs to be prosecuted along with Paulson. In his lecture at Lake Forest College, Kidney now concedes that all that pushing got him was “bounced” from the case. After that, he says he was mostly given “small potato” cases that someone of his experience should not have been given. Kidney includes a slide in his lecture comparing Goldman Sachs to a snake oil salesman. (The company is currently facing criminal charges in Malaysia on allegations of participating in another massive fraud there, with news breaking today that it may also pay its way out of that fraud.) 
But Kidney didn’t stop with his blistering retirement speech. In 2016, Jesse Eisinger ran an article at ProPublica on the Abacus case, indicating that “Kidney recently provided me with a cache of internal documents and emails about the Abacus investigation.”
When Eisinger’s book, The Chickenshit Club, was published the following year, it included excerpts of numerous documents on the Abacus case, including this memo from Kidney which argued that the SEC should have considered charging Paulson & Co., John Paulson, as an individual, and others for the Abacus fraud.... 
During the Lake Forest College lecture, Kidney put up a chart to show how Wall Street’s epic corruption impacted the average American and the U.S. economy. The chart shows that $19 trillion in U.S. wealth was lost; there was a 30 percent drop in housing prices; 8.8 million American jobs were lost; and 10 million homes were lost to foreclosure.
It was the largest financial collapse in America since the Great Depression with troves of documents and whistleblower reports showing that the largest U.S. banks (like JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup) knew that the pooled mortgage products they were peddling to investors were defective. Despite that, the only man to see the inside of a jail cell as a result of criminal charges brought by the U.S. Department of Justice was Kareem Serageldin of Credit Suisse – an Egyptian born trader from a Swiss bank — who was sentenced to 30 months in jail in 2013. 
Listen to James Kidney’s lecture at Lake Forest College here.
Student debt hinders millennial homeownership 
[Curbed, via Naked Capitalism 1-17-19]
“A new study by the Federal Reserve further quantifies what many millennials and mortgage lenders have long suspected: rising student debt burdens have significantly hampered homeownership among today’s young adults…. The study found that 20 percent of the drop in homeownership among this age group can be attributed to student loan debt. Researchers concluded that 400,000 more young adults would have owned homes in 2014 if they didn’t have to deal with rising debt burdens.”
What Truck Drivers Say about “Driver Shortage” and Pay Increases
Yves Smith [Naked Capitalism 1-16-19]

Government Shutdown Threatens Section 8 and Food Stamps
[TruthOut, via Naked Capitalism 1-13-19]

[AP, via Naked Capitalism 1-13-19]

[Politico, via Naked Capitalism 1-14-19]

GoFundMe CEO: ‘Gigantic Gaps’ In Health System Showing Up In Crowdfunding
Rachel Bluth [Kaiser Health News, via Naked Capitalism 1-17-19]

[Health Affairs, via Naked Capitalism 1-17-19] 
“Hospitals and health care systems have started to address these social determinants of health through initiatives that buy food, offer temporary housing, or cover transportation costs for high-risk patients. The prevalence and initial success of these efforts are clear in headlines such as: “What Montefiore’s 300% ROI from Social Determinants Investments Means for the Future of Other Hospitals,” “Social Determinants of Health Gain Traction as UnitedHealthcare and Intermountain Build New Programs,” and “How Addressing Social Determinants of Health Cuts Healthcare Costs.” But when you take a closer look, these articles aren’t about improving the underlying social and economic conditions in communities to foster improved health for all – they’re about mediating patients’ individual social needs. If this is what addressing the social determinants of health has come to mean, not only has the definition changed, but it has changed in ways that may impede efforts to address those conditions that impact the overall health of our country.”

Welcome Their Hatred
[Jacobin, via Naked Capitalism 1-13-19]
Democratic leaders are outraged at Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s actions in Congress and are trying to reel her in. It’s a clear sign she’s antagonizing all the right forces in the party.... Elected leaders warn she will be isolated in the House if she doesn’t tone it down and back off what Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO) calls “sniping [with]in our Democratic Caucus.” 
“The chances that the Democratic caucus will stand by and watch its chair [Rep. Hakeem Jefferies (D–NY)] get attack[ed] and people piling on him — by Democrats! — is so obscene that I think you’ll find one of the strongest reactions that could possibly be anticipated,” Rep. Cleaver said.... 
The article paints a portrait of a fairly pathetic party, led by officials who style themselves as #Resistance leaders but shit their pants when a twenty-nine-year-old with a Twitter following joins them and actually takes pro-working class, stop-the-world-from-burning-to-a-crisp policies seriously. “People are afraid of her,” one jittery, anonymous Democratic aide says, perhaps while wearing a fake mustache and trench coat, calling from a payphone on the outskirts of the capital.
The War on Populism
[ConsentFactory.com, via Naked Capitalism 1-13-19]
Remember when the War on Terror ended and the War on Populism began? That’s OK, no one else does. It happened in the Summer of 2016.... 
Here we are, two and a half years later, and “democracy” is under constant attack by a host of malevolent “populist” forces …. Russo-fascist Black vote suppressors, debaucherous eau de Novichok assassins, Bernie Sanders, the yellow-vested French, emboldened non-exploding mail bomb bombers, Jeremy Corbyn’s Nazi Death Cult, and brain-devouring Russian-Cubano crickets. The President of the United States is apparently both a Russian intelligence operative and literally the resurrection of Hitler. NBC and MSNBC have been officially merged with the CIA. The Guardian has dispensed with any pretense of journalism and is just making stories up out of whole cloth. Anyone who has ever visited Russia, or met with a Russian, or read a Russian novel, is on an “Enemies of Democracy” watch list (as is anyone refusing to vacation in Israel, which the Senate is now in the process of making mandatory for all U.S. citizens). Meanwhile, the “terrorists” are nowhere to be found, except for the terrorists we’ve been using to attempt to overthrow the government of Bashar al Assad, the sadistic nerve-gassing Monster of Syria, who illegally invaded and conquered his own country in defiance of the “international community.” 
....But, seriously, all that actually happened back in the Summer of 2016 was the global capitalist ruling classes recognized that they had a problem. The problem that they recognized they had (and continue to have, and are now acutely aware of) is that no one is enjoying global capitalism … except the global capitalist ruling classes. The whole smiley-happy, supranational, neo-feudal corporate empire concept is not going over very well with the masses, or at least not with the unwashed masses. People started voting for right-wing parties, and Brexit, and other “populist” measures (not because they had suddenly transformed into Nazis, but because the Right was acknowledging and exploiting their anger with the advance of global neoliberalism, while liberals and the Identity Politics Left were slow jamming the TPP with Obama and babbling about transgender bathrooms, and such).
[Axios, via Naked Capitalism 1-14-19]
Jerri-Lynn Scofield adds: "I know she’s savvy, and appears to possess a rare political talent. She’s also preaching popular, common sense, underexpressed messages. But honestly, would a new member of Congress be so dominating the national conversation, if other Democrats were either less clueless or less beholden to their donors?"

[Guardian, via Naked Capitalism 1-16-19]

 This Is One of the Most Important Legal Battles for Labor in Decades
[In These Times, 1-10-19, via North Carolina AFL-CIO]
Over the last few decades, a growing number of American workers have effectively lost many of their labor rights because of the way their bosses structure the employment relationship. These workers are contractors who are hired by one company but work for another: the Hyatt Hotel housekeepers who actually work for Hospitality Staffing Solutions, the Microsoft tech workers who actually work for a temp agency called Lionbridge Technologies, and the Amazon warehouse workers who actually work for Integrity Staffing Solutions. These workers often perform the same work at the same place as other workers, frequently on a permanent basis. 
But because their employers have entered into complicated contracts with each other, these workers have been unable to exercise their labor rights. If the workers can only bargain with the staffing company and not the lead company where they actually work, they are negotiating with the party that often has no power to change the terms of their employment. For that reason, workers have fought for a more inclusive definition under the National Labor Relations Act of what constitutes an employer—and when two employers are joint employers. 
Recently, the Washington, D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a major ruling that was a win for workers, and now this issue seems destined for the Supreme Court. As the legal battle heats up, workers everywhere should be paying close attention, since their livelihoods—or unions—could be affected.
....Recognizing this growing problem, in 2015 the NLRB changed the test to determine when two employers constitute a joint employer in its landmark Browning-Ferris Industries decision.....

Reaction among corporate groups and Republicans was immediate, severe and comprehensive. Within two weeks, both House and Senate Republicans had introduced the Protecting Local Business Opportunity Act, which would amend the National Labor Relations Act to define joint employers as those who “directly, actually and immediately” exercise control. In 2017, the House passed its version of the bill in a vote that fell largely along party lines. 
Once the NLRB came under Republican control and was presented with a case that touched upon the joint employer question, the NLRB, in the Hy-Brand case, overruled Browning-Ferris. This decision was so potentially damaging to workers that former NLRB Member and current executive director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School, Sharon Block, wrote that the decision constituted part of a “December Massacre.
L.A. teachers’ strike: Tens of thousands walk off job in Los Angeles 
[Los Angeles Times, via Naked Capitalism 1-14-19]
“Tens of thousands of Los Angeles teachers went on strike Monday after negotiations in the nation’s second-largest school district collapsed. Braving rain, teachers carrying signs saying “on strike for our students” and umbrellas stood in picket lines Monday morning demanding smaller class sizes, more nurses, counselors and librarians, higher wages for educators and more accountability for charter schools. There were picket lines at 900 schools across the city, United Teachers Los Angeles union president and teacher Alex < said at a news conference Monday."
How Teacher Strikes Are Exposing the Corrupt Charter School Agenda
Yves Smith [Naked Capitalism 1-18-19]

[Portside, Naked Capitalism 1-16-19] 
“Unlike many labor actions, the Los Angeles teachers’ strike is not really about wages or benefits. At its core, this is a struggle to defend public schools against the privatizing drive of a small-but-powerful group of billionaires…. Like the electoral insurgencies of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, LA teachers have posed the central question of our time: Who should determine governmental policy — the working class or the rich?”
L.A. teacher strike may be cutting edge of a revolution against what’s rotten in America 
[Philly.com, via Naked Capitalism 1-19-19]
[Jacobin, via Naked Capitalism 1-14-19]
“On Saturday, one of the biggest retail traffic days of the year, she released a Bernie Sanders-style video, in which she interviews laid-off Toys “R” Us workers in the Bronx. The video is notable for how it addresses class struggle head on. Workers tell stories of working conditions steadily deteriorating until they lost their jobs altogether, followed by their bosses denying them promised severance pay. The workers subsequently won about $20 million for a severance fund for around thirty-three thousand workers. But workers and advocates claim they are owed at least $75 million. The video runs across the screen the names of the heads of venture capital firms and lenders responsible for shutting down Toys “R” Us, noting how much each has paid to the workers’ severance fund. As we might expect, most have contributed nothing. Sanders has been producing class-struggle videos and posting them online regularly since early 2017. Many of the videos are wildly popular, with some of the live town hall–style events receiving more viewers than cable news programs running at the same time. Sanders is reportedly obsessed with the videos’ view numbers, frequently asking staff how recent videos are being received.”
Secret White House memo says end pensions and retiree health benefits
[People's World, January 11, 2019, via North Carolina AFL-CIO]
A Trump White House budget memo, leaked to news services and publicized by the Electrical Workers, proposes killing traditional “defined benefit” pensions and retiree health benefits for newly hired federal workers. 
And James Sherk, the labor advisor for Trump’s Domestic Policy Council, also demands Trump call for enacting pension “reforms” – a code word for cuts – for the nation’s current two million federal workers. And he wants to “bring paid leave in line with private sector norms,” while forcing federal workers to pay more for their health care, by eliminating a 25 percent cap on the workers’ co-pays. 
Sherk, a former analyst at the right-wing Heritage Foundation, contributed those sections as his part of the Domestic Policy Council’s budget memo. The DPC sent the memo upwards as Trump prepares his proposed federal budget for fiscal 2020, which starts Oct. 1. But Trump has already imposed one of Sherk’s schemes: Freezing civilian federal workers’ pay for this calendar year.

Free Market Boner Rand Paul Is Getting Hernia Surgery in Canada
[SplinterNews, 1-15-19]
.... [hardcore libertarian Republican Senator from Kentucky] Paul—an ophthalmologist by trade who once compared the right to healthcare to slavery—is going to another country where healthcare for everyone is guaranteed and funded by the government via a program called Medicare, in order to get better quality care than he would have here in the United States, which has a Frankenstein-like monstrosity of a healthcare system that still leaves tens of millions uninsured.
Turns out the invisible hand isn’t as good at fixing hernias as a real one.
Company known for deep cost-cutting offers to buy Gannett 
[Associated Press, via Naked Capitalism 1-15-19] 
"A hedge fund-backed bid to buy Gannett Co., the publisher of USA Today and several other major dailies, is renewing fears of consolidation and job losses — as well as a decline in the quantity and quality of news coverage — in the already battered newspaper industry. MNG Enterprises, better known as Digital First Media, offered $1.36 billion on Monday for Gannett, saying in a letter that it can run the company more profitably via tight cost controls and consolidation of operations such as printing and administration.”
Will Bunch [Philadlephia Inquirer], via Naked Capitalism 1-17-19]  
“[M]ost citizens in Boulder didn’t know what [Dave Krieger of the Denver Daily Camera] knew: That the newspaper’s shrinkage was the direct result of a distant Wall Street hedge fund that — through its investment vehicle with the Orwellian-like dishonest name of Digital First Media — had since 2013 been sucking money in full vampire-squid mode out of the Daily Camera’s newsroom revenue stream. Much of the cash that formerly paid reporters, editors and photojournalists instead went into the pocket of billionaire Randall Smith as Smith added to his collection of multi-million-dollar mansions around Palm Beach and the Hamptons (said at one point to be 18 — that’s not a typo — and counting).” • Why are 18 mansions more important than local news?
At some point in the next few years, we will have to liberate the news media from the deadening clutch of control by billionaires and financial institutions like hedge funds. I think we will need a national mandate that any new organization must be minimally  51 percent owned by employees. Also, force news media companies to use Alexander Hamilton's scheme to prevent one share-one vote stock ownership.

Editorial Mutiny at Elsevier Journal 
[Inside Higher Ed, via Naked Capitalism 1-16-19] 
“The entire editorial board of the Elsevier-owned Journal of Informetrics resigned Thursday in protest over high open-access fees, restricted access to citation data and commercial control of scholarly work. Today, the same team is launching a new fully open-access journal called Quantitative Science Studies. The journal will be for and by the academic community and will be owned by the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics (ISSI). It will be published jointly with MIT Press. The editorial board of the Journal of Informetrics said in a statement that they were unanimous in their decision to quit. They contend that scholarly journals should be owned by the scholarly community rather than by commercial publishers, should be open access under fair principles, and publishers should make citation data freely available.”
[Science Magazine, via Naked Capitalism 1-16-19]

[Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, via Naked Capitalism 1-16-19]

How Corning Makes Super-Pure Glass For Fiber-Optic Cable
Susan Crawford [Wired 1-8-19]
A description of a visit to a Corning facility making optic fiber, from an excerpt of Crawford's book Fiber: The Coming Tech Revolution—and Why America Might Miss It (Yale University Press, 2019)

Global economy puts pressure on Vermont’s local sawmills 
[VTDigger, via Naked Capitalism 1-16-19]
The number of small family owned sawmills in Vermont has dropped steeply in the last two decades, and several are on the brink of closure now because of changes in the industry, including high log prices, competition from Quebec, and an upcoming wave of owner retirements. 
In 1970, Vermont had about 130 permanent sawmills, said Paul Frederick, who leads the wood utilization and wood energy program for the Vermont Department of Forests, Parks & Recreation. By 2017, there were fewer than 50, he said. 
Global economic forces have played a large part in altering the financial picture for local sawmills. Just a few decades ago, Vermont sawmills typically processed logs from nearby woodlots and sold them to local manufacturers, said Sam Lincoln, the deputy commissioner of Forests & Parks. 
Now, “these enterprises are competing in a global economy,” Lincoln said. He said half of the hardwood lumber sawed in the U.S. is exported to Asia, where the wood manufacturing business has moved. 
“Asian log buyers are working steadily to purchase logs all over the region and, anecdotally, we hear that they are paying significantly higher prices to the middlemen to acquire these logs than the local mills can compete with,” Lincoln said. “The logs are loaded into shipping containers in our woods and then shipped halfway around the globe.”
Free trade DOES NOT WORK.

Future of coffee in doubt as 60 per cent of plants now at risk of extinction 
[Telegraph, via Naked Capitalism 1-17-19]  
Researchers at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, have found that 75 of the world's 124 wild coffee species are under threat from the loss of forests, climate change and the worsening problem of fungal disease and pests. They include wild Arabica, a species from Ethiopia that has been cultivated to provide 60 per cent of the multibillion-pound global trade in coffee.
Four decades of Antarctic Ice Sheet mass balance from 1979–2017 
Eric Rignot, Jérémie Mouginot, Bernd Scheuchl, Michiel van den Broeke, Melchior J. van Wessem, and Mathieu Morlighem, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, via Naked Capitalism 1-15-19]  
“The total mass loss from Antarctica increased from 40 ± 9 Gt/y in the 11-y time period 1979–1990 to 50 ± 14 Gt/y in 1989–2000, 166 ± 18 Gt/y in 1999–2009, and 252 ± 26 Gt/y in 2009–2017, that is, by a factor 6… This change in mass loss reflects an acceleration of 94 Gt/y per decade in 1979–2017, increasing from 48 Gt/y per decade in 1979–2001 to 134 Gt/y per decade in 2001–2017, or 280%… The mass loss from West Antarctica is three to four times larger than that from East Antarctica and the Peninsula, respectively. We find that the Antarctic Ice Sheet has been out of balance with snowfall accumulation the entire period of study, including in East Antarctica.” 
“Antarctica is melting more than six times faster than it did in the 1980s, a new study shows. Scientists used aerial photographs, satellite measurements and computer models to track how fast the southern-most continent has been melting since 1979 in 176 individual basins. They found the ice loss to be accelerating dramatically — a key indicator of human-caused climate change.”

California’s largest utility just declared bankruptcy. Hello, climate change.
[Vox, via Naked Capitalism 1-15-19] 

[MarketWatch, via Naked Capitalism 1-19-19] 


 100% clean energy pledges are in place in 9 states
[The Dispatch/Rock Island Argus (Moline, Ill.), via American Wind Energy Association 1-14-19]
Governors in Illinois, California and at least seven other states have joined the League of Conservation Voters' pledge to move to 100% clean energy by 2050. California likely will serve as an example as the other states pursue their goals, says Niskanen Center Chief Counsel David Bookbinder.
Tax credits for renewables are justified, says expert
[S & P Global Platts (free registration), via American Wind Energy Association 1-14-19]
Federal support mechanisms for renewables compensate for the environmental benefits wind and solar offer, and have helped the industry mature just like similar programs did for natural gas in the 1990s, says Columbia University assistant professor A.J. Goulding, in response to an Institute for Energy Research study on the issue. American Wind Energy Association spokesperson Evan Vaughan notes that while the wind PTC is phasing out, "traditional" sources have received hundreds of billions of dollars in support historically and many incentives for traditional energy sources are permanent.
[Offshore Wind Journal (U.K.), via American Wind Energy Association 1-15-19]
Offshore wind has reached a tipping point in the US and is maturing into an attractive industry, as seen by the recent procurement round in Massachusetts, according to Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis analysts Karl Cates and Seth Feaster. "Much of the momentum around offshore wind is driven by companies with expertise in offshore oil platform activity, an advantage that brings a certain synergy," they add.
[Greentech Media, via American Wind Energy Association 1-10-19]
Unexpected bottlenecks in the wind supply chain present a significant threat for the 23 gigawatts of capacity expected to come online over the next two years, endangering up to $2.1 billion worth of investments, says Wood Mackenzie Power & Renewables. "Increased demand for transportation capacity due to growth in partial repowering activity, logistics requirements and competition from other industrial sectors could severely hamper the transportation segment's ability to ship components," says head of global wind research Dan Shreve.
U.S. Wind Capacity Installations, 2010 - 2020 Estimated* 


Vestas has installed more than 100 GW of wind capacity
[CNBC, via American Wind Energy Association 1-10-19]
Vestas has installed more than 66,000 turbines with a collective capacity of more than 100 gigawatts in about 80 countries. The milestone was reached while installing a V110 2.0-MW machine at MidAmerican Energy's Wind XI project in Iowa
Global investment in clean energy hit $332B in 2018
[CleanTechnica (1/16), via American Wind Energy Association 1-17-19]
Companies worldwide invested a total of $332 billion in clean energy in 2018, surpassing $300 billion in spending for the fifth consecutive year, according to Bloomberg NEF. Investments in wind expanded by 3% in 2018, with $25.7 billion spent on offshore wind and $100.8 billion on land-based wind.
EIA: US wind will likely surpass hydro in 2019
[CleanTechnica (1/16), via American Wind Energy Association 1-17-19]
The US is expected to source more of its total electricity from wind than hydropower for the first time in 2019, according to the Energy Information Administration. The report says the nation's installed wind capacity will likely reach 107 gigawatts by the end of 2019 and 114 GW by the following year.
N.Y. governor unveils new 100% by 2040 renewables goal
[North American Windpower online (1/16), Utility Dive (1/16), via American Wind Energy Association 1-17-19]
New York is working toward its own Green New Deal to source 100% of its electricity from renewables by 2040, says Gov. Andrew Cuomo, adding that the plan calls for 9 gigawatts of installed offshore wind capacity by 2035, instead of 2030's 2.4-GW target. "By more than tripling New York's already impressive offshore wind goal, Governor Cuomo has redefined offshore wind ambition nationwide," says Nancy Sopko, director of offshore wind policy and siting at the American Wind Energy Association.
Siemens Gamesa introduces first 10-MW turbine
[Energy Digital, via American Wind Energy Association 1-17-19]
Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy introduced the SG 10-megawatt 193 DD offshore wind turbine Wednesday, making the model the largest of its kind in the world. "The new SG 10.0-193 DD combines experiences and knowledge from five generations of proven direct drive technology in one 10 MW turbine," says CEO Markus Tacke.
Experimenting with Cancer Treatments Outside the Human Body
[Machine Design Today 1-18-19]
A new 3D-printed device from MIT researchers allows for the testing of different cancer treatments on live tumor tissue outside the human body.
Doc in a Box Knows What Ails You
[Machine Design Today 1-17-19]
This mobile diagnostic machine can test for viruses, bacteria, and active toxins.
Neurostimulator “Listens,” then Applies “Curing” Stimulation to the Brain
[Machine Design Today 1-15-19]
A new neurostimulator developed by engineers at UC Berkeley can listen to and stimulate electric current in the brain at the same time, potentially delivering fine-tuned treatments to patients with diseases like epilepsy and Parkinson’s.
The Vice President’s Men
[London Review of Books, via Naked Capitalism 1-18-19] 
NC reader Chuck L commented: “Hersh at his best. A long, weekend read about VP Poppy Bush’s secret covert action group during the first 2/3 of the Reagan administration. Frightening how out of touch the Gipper was from the get go, plus surprising revelations about Iran-Contra.”










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