By Lambert Strether of Corrente
TPP/TTiP/TISA
Labor: “The actual TPP labour chapter, while including minor concessions to the unions’ concerns, fails to include the most critical amendments that workers in TPP countries had proposed. It does not refer directly to ILO Conventions. The labour chapter still relies on a state-state dispute mechanism which relies entirely on the discretion of TPP governments to prosecute claims against one another; this stands in stark contrast to the investor-state mechanisms available to corporations” [International Trades Union Confederation].
Procurement: “Language included in the TPP procurement chapter jeopardizes Buy American. It would give companies operating in any of the 11 other Pacific Rim member countries equal access to many of the U.S. government contracts that now go to local businesses that build and provide upkeep to key infrastructure in our communities. And that would lead to fewer jobs at home.” [James Hoffa, Detroit News]. Note that Malaysia got a much better deal for its state-owned industries.
“There remain several obstacles to the successful completion of the agreement and its effective WTO integration, with the most important of these being the inclusion of more WTO members among the signatories–and the hearts and minds of citizens” [European Parliament].
Tobacco: “Under the WHO tobacco treaty, FCTC, Malaysia is obligated in to reduce tobacco use and strictly regulate the tobacco industry. The TPPA does the opposite. The problem with TPPA starts in the Preamble itself as it requires [sic] the Parties to ‘establish a predictable legal and commercial framework for trade and investment…’ However the FCTC on the other hand encourages a government to go beyond the basics and do everything needed to save lives, hence a government should not become subservient to the tobacco industry’s commercial pursuits” [Malaysia Kini].
2016
Policy
“Donald J. Trump on Wednesday morning repeated a statement he made the night before in the Republican presidential debate: that wages are ‘too high’ in the United States, an argument he made to explain his opposition to raising the minimum wage” [New York Times]. “The remark is at odds with the otherwise populist message Mr. Trump has often espoused.” Yes. Yes, it is.
Voters
“‘The replacement of working-class whites with upscale professionals has turned the Democratic coalition into an alliance with a built-in class division,’ wrote Columbia Journalism Professor and NYT Columnist, Thomas B. Edsall, on the migration of professionals from the Republican party to the Democrats. ‘While constituting a minority, the relatively upscale wing clearly dominates party policy and provides the majority of the activists who run campaigns, serve as delegates to the convention and have become the core of the party’s donor base'” [Business Insider]. Interesting if true. Important article!
“Since July, Democrats and independents have actually given a more favorable rating of the Republican-controlled Congress than Republicans” [WaPo]. “Just 8 percent of GOP likes GOP-controlled Congress. That’s bad for Paul Ryan and great for Trump and Carson.”
Money
“The [Kock] network’s financial support for Ernst ― detailed here for the first time ― offers the first signs of a move into GOP primaries. The Kochs and their allies are investing in a pipeline to identify, cultivate and finance business-oriented candidates from the local school board all the way to the White House, and Koch operatives are already looking for opportunities to challenge GOP incumbents deemed insufficiently hard-line in their opposition to government spending and corporate subsidies” [Politico]. “the GOP establishment has been nervously watching the Kochs’ evolution from wonky libertarian think tank funders to political kingmakers, which comes as money and power are migrating away from the Republican Party. There is a widespread, if mostly unspoken, concern that the brothers’ network is gradually encroaching on some of the party’s core functions, like candidate recruitment, voter registration and data.”
The Debates
“Democrats scheduled debates on days when no one will watch” [Vox]. “Thursday is prime time for debates. Democrats have just one debate on Thursday.” Gee. That’s odd.
“Trump took 24 percent of the Twitter conversation, followed by former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson and Sen. Ted Cruz (Texas) at 12 percent each. Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) followed at 11 percent, Ohio Gov. John Kasich and Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.) with 10 percent apiece and businesswoman Carly Fiorina at 9 percent” [The Hill].
“For months, the Republican presidential race has been animated by the party’s inchoate anger about the state of the country and an equally undefined hope that a candidate would emerge who could usher in an era of civic renewal. But the debate here and its aftermath marked an abrupt transition from vague promises about making America “great again,” in Donald J. Trump’s phrase, to a new season of the campaign shaped more by the glaring policy fissures that are dividing Republicans over what exactly to do about the nation’s problems” [New York Times]. “Years’ worth of arguments conducted at issues forums and in the pages of policy journals and newspapers are now coming to life. The Republican hopefuls are sparring over such high-fiber fare as tax policy: whether to adhere strictly to the party’s supply-side creed or move at least modestly toward policies aimed at bolstering lesser earners. They are clashing over the role America plays in the world, and whether fiscal conservatism is compatible with a drastically enlarged military.” Maybe. Or Atrios is right, and the only common factor is trolling liberals, so-called.
“John Kasich, already on the ropes in the GOP primary with his low polling numbers, is now confronting the fallout from the fourth Republican debate, with conservative media thrashing the Ohio governor for soft positions on immigration and bank bailouts” [Politico].
The Trail
“The results are in for one Illinois university’s famous mock presidential election, but the clear winner may surprise some” [NBC]. “Western Illinois University’s mock election predicted a landslide victory for Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders, with running mate Martin O’Malley, in 2016. The predicted Sanders-O’Malley ticket garnered 404 electoral votes to Jeb Bush-Marco Rubio’s 114 votes. In the popular vote, Sanders earned 741 votes (49 percent) to Bush’s 577 (38 percent). The famously accurate mock election correctly predicted the outcomes of the 2008 and 2012 elections, and the university claims it’s the “largest and most elaborate mock presidential simulation in the nation.” (This is not the poll mentioned in today’s Links!)
“Nearly 7 in 10 Americans think Hillary Clinton acted either unethically or illegally by using a private email server while secretary of State, a new poll says” [The Hill]. They’re right. She privatized her email server, and then doled out the email she wanted to, and held on to what she didn’t want to. So, she’s not accountable for her official communications.
“Hillary Clinton is on wrong side of everything: Stop telling me I have to vote for her because of the Supreme Court” [Salon]. Amen!
Bob Dole endorses Jebbie [The Hill]. The kiss of death?
Stats Watch
Jobless Claims, October 2015: “Initial jobless claims held unchanged at 276,000 for the highest 2-week run in two months” [Econoday]. “The ratcheting higher of initial claims the last two weeks could become a concern if they fail to show improvement in next week’s report, one that will be very closely watched.” And: “Claim levels are at 40 year lows (with the normal range around 350,000 weekly initial unemployment claims of levels seen historically during times of economic expansion” [Econoday].
JOLTS, September 2015: “In a positive sign for labor demand, job openings in the JOLTS report popped back up” [Econoday]. “But in a contrasting indication of worker hesitance, confidence in the strength of the labor market may be limited based on the report’s quits rate which remains stubbornly low.” But: “[T]he predictive elements show that the year-over-year growth rate of unadjusted private non-farm job openings improved significantly from last months poor numbers” [Econoday]. “JOLTS job openings are a good predictor of jobs growth turning points.”
Bloomberg Consumer Comfort Index, week of November 8, 2015: “The consumer comfort index ended three straight declines” [Econoday]. “Good news for retailers ahead of the holidays.”
Retail: “The retailer of “Miracle on 34th Street” warned Wednesday that its stores were awash with merchandise after a sluggish fall season and that slow business would force it to go all-out on discounts during the holidays” [Across the Curve]. “Aggressive discounting from one of the country’s biggest merchants is bad news for retailers this holiday sales season, which is shaping up to be highly discount-driven. It also raises questions about the strength of the economic recovery, and of consumer sentiment.” Could be e-commerce nuking the box stores; I’ve gotta say, my local Macy’s is pretty sad. Anyhow, warehouse hiring is up, and cardboard is down. But Amazon shipping requires both. So WTF?
Retail: “U.S. consumers are feeling more generous this holiday season and plan to spend more on gifts this year than they did last season as a better economy and lower gas prices leave more wiggle room in their pockets” [Market News].
Rail: “October 2015 is down 4.3% over October 2014. Now the year-over-year rolling average is below than the year-over-year rolling average of one year ago” [Econintersect].
Shipping: “China’s largest shipping company, Cosco, that it will launch regularly scheduled shipping services along Russia’s Northern Sea Route,” spurred by the shrinkage of Arctic ice [Longshore & Shipping News].
Honey for the Bears: “Yesterday came reports that Fidelity had marked down the value of its investment in Snapchat by around 25% between the end of July and the end of September, based on an investment it had made just this past spring” [Fortune]. “Fidelity has [also] taken the red pen out for companies like Blue Bottle Coffee, Dataminr and Zenefits.” Froth.
Honey for the Bears: “Signs have emerged in Silicon Valley that legislation easing private share sales can’t come fast enough for employees who want to divest at a high price, as some big investors are reconsidering the lofty valuations they once put on tech startups” [Bloomberg].
“Total shareholder payouts in 2014 were more than $1.2 trillion, but money moving from investors to businesses in the form of IPOs and venture capital is less than $200 billion,” says CUNY economics professor J.W. Mason [Bloomberg] (original paper). “Instead of being invested, Mason figures, much of the cash being handed to investors is going into increased consumption by the wealthy.” Hermés stocking stuffers…
The Fed: “While noting that the job market has made progress, Dudley said he wasn’t ready to commit to December, adding that ‘we have still not seen compelling evidence’ that a tighter market is leading to greater compensation gains” [Bloomberg]. I remain long Hermés stocking stuffers.
“The Fed: “In comments to reporters after speeches at the Cato Institute, Richmond Fed President Jeffrey Lacker said the Fed’s pledge to move at a gradual pace was simply a forecast. St. Louis Fed President James Bullard said he expected the Fed would not hike rates as fast as they did in 1994 or between 2004 and 2006 but added the Fed would have to respond and hike at a faster pace if the economy showed marked improvement” [MarketWatch].
The Bernanke on interest rates: “The low rate of interest isn’t something that God gave us here. It’s something that is a feature of the economy. There’s a lot of savings in the world looking for a relatively small number of good-return investments, and so the equilibrium real interest rate in the economy is very, very low” [New York Times].
Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 56 (-7); Greed [CNN]. Last week: 72 (Greed). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). Drifting back toward Fear…
Health Care
“Colorado will vote next year on establishing a universal, ‘single-payer’ healthcare system after supporters secured enough signatures to get the measure on the ballot” [The Hill]. Colorado has a population of ~5 million. That’s more than Vermont’s ~630K, but is the scale right?
“Medicare Premiums to Increase by 16% not 52%, as Initially Projected” [Wonkwire]. Wait, wait. I thought Social Security said there was no increase in the cost of living? By which I mean living?
Black Injustice Tipping Point
“Mizzou hunger-strike figure from Omaha, son of top railroad exec” [St Louis Post-Dispatch].
Gunz
“[A] 15-year-old freshman shot himself in the head with a 9mm semiautomatic pistol in front of his English class at Lecanto High School that morning” (they lived) [Star-Telegram]. See, if the damn school hadn’t been a gun-free zone, some other student could have shot the gun out of his hand. Anyhow, it’s a small price to pay for a well-regulated militia.
Our Famously Free Press
“When publications become wire services for platforms, they get flattened out. They focus more and more precious institutional energy on reaching a platform’s audience rather than their own, and their voice changes. They stop paying attention to the needs and preferences of their loyal audiences to cater to their borrowed, disloyal, Facebook-driven one, and they lose intimacy and trust” [Quartz].
“The so-called ‘Shadow Industry’ for ebooks is growing at the expense of the traditional book publishing and selling, ISBN-based, universally trackable contractual infrastructure. ‘Shadow’ books don’t have their rights bought up and traded around like so many credit derivatives, like traditional books are – or perhaps maybe we should start call them ‘subprime’ books instead” [Tech Crunch]. “To be clear, what I’m saying is that traditional publishers actually make their money not from the traits of novels, or biographies, or any other kind of *text:* they make their money from bundles of paper that can essentially be seized or held up at the border, or be pulped, or burned, or just deteriorate in ways a digital file can’t.”
Class Warfare
“If we can’t find ways to boost demand, then we can look for ways to reduce supply. Specifically, we can encourage people to work less. This would mean policies that promote shorter workweeks, paid time off for family leave and sick days, and more paid vacation. Reductions in the average number of hours worked per worker could lead employers to hire more employees. A tighter labor market would help to bring the upward pressure on wages and prices needed to combat secular stagnation” [CEPR].
News of the Wired
“This Microsoft tool recognizes emotions in pictures” [Microsoft]. Better put that sticky note over your laptop’s camera…..
“Finite state machines can also be used to compactly represent ordered sets or maps of strings that can be searched very quickly” [Andrew Gallant’s Blog]. “The technique presented in this article is also how Lucene represents a part of its inverted index.”
“Dating site algorithms are meaningless. They really don’t do anything. In fact, the research suggests that so-called “matching algorithms” are only negligibly better at matching people than random chance” [WaPo]. So Tindr is a phishing operation with a valuation of $5 billion. Alrighty, then.
“‘Engineer’ is an aspirational title in software development. Traditional engineers are regulated, certified, and subject to apprenticeship and continuing education. Engineering claims an explicit responsibility to public safety and reliability, even if it doesn’t always deliver” [The Atlantic]. “The title ‘engineer’ is cheapened by the tech industry. Today’s computer systems pose individual and communal dangers that we’d never accept in more concrete structures like bridges, skyscrapers, power plants, and missile-defense systems.” Damned right.
“Where Disruptive Innovation Came From” [Harvard Business Review]. This is a review of the professional literature. Where “disruption” and “innovation” came from as buzzwords, along with “startups” and “unicorns,” was glibertarian grifters in Silicon Valley floating on a frothy mix of hype and free money from QE. #JustSaying.
Word of the day: Zersetzung [Wikipedia].
“index#1 – 15 things about the left that may or may not undermine the left” [Bella Caledonia].
Readers, feel free to contact me with (a) links, and even better (b) sources I should curate regularly, and (c) to find out how to send me images of plants. Vegetables are fine! Fungi are deemed to be honorary plants! See the previous Water Cooler (with plant) here. And here’s today’s plant:
“Magic Stairway” at the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardesn.
If you enjoy Water Cooler, please consider tipping and click the hat. Winter has come, I need to buy fuel, and I need to keep my server up, too.
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Bob Dole endorses Jebbie? Last time I heard about Dole was when I learned he had killed some federal warrants with the Koch brothers names on them. (I believe this was in the long Bloomberg expose that came out on the Kochs a few years back.) We apparently had the bastards once until Dole let them go.
… hey, it worked for bin Laden too, as I recall. Mission Accomplished!
Darius McCollum on the power of positive thinking:
As Jamie Dimon says when asked about TARP, “I’m stealing the whole Treasury next.”
Isn’t stealing a transportation vehicle (bus, plane, garbage truck, etc.) an act of terrorism? He could have crashed it into a bank or something. When they caught up to him, why didn’t they shoot him 20 or 30 times?
Don’t those things have keys?
Re: …”I’m stealing the whole Treasury next.”
Well, that makes sense. Four of the five regional Fed presidents scheduled to vote on the FOMC at the Fed in 2017 will be Goldman Sachs alums. Maybe they’re simply attempting to establish the market value of the Fed for privatization too:
https://www.economicdynamics.org/meetpapers/2015/paper_1031.pdf
In any event, I am sure all the new appointees will all act in the public interest.
I agree with this statement, though perhaps not in the manner the Donald intended.
Wages are certainly too high for Blackstone C-level execs, MIC leeches and beltway bandits, and an increasingly large chunk of our grifter “economy.”
+1
“Traditional engineers are regulated, certified, and subject to apprenticeship and continuing education.”
What engineering fields are ‘traditional’ and are regulated, certified, and subject to apprenticeship and continuing education? Aerospace? Electrical? Mechanical? No, no and no.
I would guess Civil?
Marine engineers.
Depends on the size of the project, what state they practice in, where the project is, etc.
I’m talking about the guys who work on the vessels. By federal law, they all have to be certified (and periodically re-certified), and have to do an apprenticeship, often as a “wiper.” Updated training also is required.
http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/granule/CFR-2010-title46-vol1/CFR-2010-title46-vol1-sec11-501
If you are an engineer on a train it requires training, apprenticeship, certification, and is regulated.
Mind you it isn’t a strenuous process once you complete the training requirements to keep them you need only take one train per year with the certifier(usually the trainmaster.)
*shrugs*
Marvelous! Labor disputes get mediated through political systems skewed to favor capital via muddled obstruction in the swamp of putative nonpartisanship (recall the recent post that had Carter placidly/passively gazing on the failure of pro-labor legislation), while ISDS favors capital via efficient, decision-focused panels of corporate lawyers.
RE: Single-payer in CO. Colorado is among the ‘thinnest’ states, by several measures. If you consider that to be some kind of proxy for overall health or fitness or wellness, maybe they’re wise to codify their skinny-ness into a group advantage before they start having to foot the bill for all those Mississippians.
The Bernank
“There’s a lot of savings in the world looking for a relatively small number of good-return investments” withholding consumption, only so many hermes stocking stuffers, maybe if they raised their prices there would be better optics
I didn’t realize Bob Dole was still alive?
I believe the punchline is Dorothy Parker’s: Can they tell?
Strom Thurmond had been dead for many years, but the S. Carolinians kept re-electing him to the senate.
“Years’ worth of arguments conducted at issues forums and in the pages of policy journals and newspapers are now coming to life. The Republican hopefuls are sparring over such high-fiber fare as tax policy: whether to adhere strictly to the party’s supply-side creed or move at least modestly toward policies aimed at bolstering lesser earners. They are clashing over the role America plays in the world, and whether fiscal conservatism is compatible with a drastically enlarged military.”
Well, Rand Paul and his dad are ocassionally quoted in the press as saying the Empire has to go, but I, for one, as a 35 year GOP watcher (often in horror), was quite surprised to learn that there are “years’ worth of arguments” about leaving supply siderism in the dust. Besides a few dead enders left over from the first Bush Administration, who in the Party has let go, even tentatively, of this particular voodoo ecomonic theory? Arthur Laffer is still revered and it seems to me that every GOP debate on TV features yet another round of “Cut taxes! Moar Cutting Taxes!” as the penultimate solution to absolutely every mystery in the universe, up to and including the Unified Theory (don’t call it a theory!)
Re; NYT-“Donald Trump Insists That Wages Are ‘Too High’”
Trump: “People have to go out, they have to work really hard, and they have to get into that upper stratum.”
In other words, $15, $100, $1000, are already on the scale, you just have to work harder! Recycled “meritocracy” sophistry.
Trump: “But we cannot do this if we are going to compete with the rest of the world. We just can’t do it.”
He can build a “beautiful” wall to his spec.’s, across the whole border, get his neighbor to “pay” for it, but he “just can’t” raise the minimum wage.
Meanwhile, not a mention of the vultures’, and other oligarchs, selected candidates’ reason for not raising the minimum wage is it would “make people more expensive than a machine” and would “accelerate all this automation that’s replacing jobs and people right now”…in other words, his owners still need cheap labor to replace cheap labor with “machines”, then nl rule #2. Specious sound-bites, and judging by his donors, expensive sound-bites.
AI, like the cure for cancer, is a promise that keeps on promising, and taking(extracting), but always seems to fall just short. “Replacing” and “Displacing” are sophistic arguments intended to “persuade” CITIZENS of their “limited” power as working people.
“Wages are too high”
–From the Guy Who Inherited One Million Dollars from Dad
I think he borrowed a million from his dad to get started in real estate. He probably inherited far more.
Well, we “could” do it . . . if we abolished Free Trade and restored Protectionism.
First there’s this
“The only way to get higher rates is if the economy is recovering.”
Then there’s this re target rates
“He then explained “the correct way” to look at the situation: There is a target interest rate that is consistent with full employment. “And for most of the recovery,” he said, “that number was actually negative.”
Anybody spot the contradiction?
I guess that means we have higher interest rates now…
Probably why he doesn’t think much of non economists
hard to tell if that sloshing sound is QE or kool aid
If he wanted congress to act so badly why did he not raise interest rates and force them to act?
What unstated and vague negative interest rate would have led to full employment? Is it less negative now than it was then but since we’re not at full employment is it still below zero
clearly I’m not an economist so I can feel ok about being unable to understand
I’m a web programmer, or at best, a web developer. I’d never call myself a computer engineer, or a design engineer, or a web engineer.
Engineers are certified, tested, and licensed. They get to put P.E. after their names and not be beaten with a wooden bat by a bunch of mechanized lawn gnomes. They have liability for the things they build, which usually involve people’s safety. When the stuff they build goes wrong, people can (and usually do) die.
There are computer engineers in the world. They make software for automobile engines, airplane avionics, nuclear power stations, power distribution systems, and critical medical systems. You usually never hear about them because they’re good at their jobs. The machines and equipment that run on their code act closer to mechanical equipment than computer software. You usually can’t tell the difference.
People who call themselves engineers because they know a little code makes me want to hit them.
Smack ’em for me too! (Slim’s father was a P.E.)
The trend is based on the same thing as calling a janitor a “sanitation engineer”.
You don’t have to pay people with the title of “engineer” overtime. Labor law with a long history.
There is also the status of the name, which some “computer engineers” get very, very testy about when you inform them that they are not actually engineers, and that their employers are screwing them over by applying it.
“But, it’s MY title!” Not really, and only to the advantage of your employer.
Computer engineering is a legitimate profession. Who exactly do you think designs the processors and peripherals that run the software that the unsung, proper software engineers develop? C’mon, get out your nanometer tweezers and X-acto knives and Verilog compilers and show us what you’re made of. ;)
“Software architects”, on the other hand, are somewhere between paraprofession and skilled labor.
I was using “computer engineer” (see the quotes?) colloquially, as a lot of people seem to do these days.
Yes, computer engineering is a sub-discipline of electrical engineering, and as such, is normally confined to hardware design.
I’ll take an exacto to this-
“Software architects” — no such thing. Invented discipline, for the same reason employers like to call programmers or techs “engineers”, so they don’t have to pay them overtime.
“paraprofession and skilled labor.”
Value laden stew of BS in 4 words or less. Congrats.
All in good fun, guv. I’m not disagreeing that “software engineer” (which I usually pronounce with a hard g) is puffery for a code grinder that gets no overtime pay.
“Architects” are the people they used to call analysts, right? I think the Gang of Four (Fowler et al) and their medieval OOP text Design Patterns are largely to blame for the crowded bandwagon of “architects” (first syllable rhymes with march), due to their elevation of Christopher Alexander’s approach to design.
Um, what? I happen to know many people who work in archives and digital preservation, and any one of them would tell you that this is backwards. Paper books are actually more safe, more stable, less subject to arcane IP rules and licenses, and generally less bad for the environment, due to the complete lack of any need for an electrical infrastructure. Even if that weren’t the case, does no one recall the time Amazon wiped Orwell books from people’s Kindles without notice or remuneration for works they’d already purchased?
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html?_r=0
A Bush-Rubio ticket is unlikely as the Constitution prohibits the presidential and vice presidential candidates coming from the same state…a nasty reminder of 1800. So much for the mock election.
How is ‘coming from’ defined though? Jebbie was born in Texas. Is it defined as where youre born or where you were in office?
> ‘The replacement of working-class whites with upscale professionals has turned the Democratic coalition into an alliance with a built-in class division,’…Interesting if true.
You doubt it?
Really interesting article. I wish they would have pointed out that single-payer should be the one political program uniting both sides. Nothing would do more to make the gig economy more tolerable.
I meant the demographics exactly as the author described them. I remember Richard Florida’s “creative class” in election 2008. That turned out to be a very partial and temporary truth.
The tone of that article put me off from the get-go & I’m in a hurry, but while agreeing with you the article might have things a bit askew, the point made in quotes is absolutely true. Democrats want to know why thy aren’t raking the votes of poor/working class people (while keeping in mind that they aren’t doing as badly in this area as the media likes to pretend; iirc they actually win in this block, but media distortion is a whole different issue), or why most poor/working class people don’t even bother to vote? Let me tell you a BIG reason:
Those party leaders/policy drivers almost universally hold us in contempt, and it shows. Some of them want to think well of themselves and that requires attending to the needs of their perceived inferiors, and some of them actually get it and aren’t snotty sh*ts, but most are absolutely contemptuous of people further down the socioeconomic ladder (many of them unknowingly, I’ll grant you, and probably about a quarter or a third of those have good intentions despite the elitism, which does matter), but the majority, just plain don’t trust or like us. Not surprisingly, this open (even if unrealized) contempt fails to rally the base of voters the dem establishment feels should be falling at their feet in gratitude over their policies, which on the balance fuck us over and sell us out less badly than Republican policies. Hey guys–screwing us over less badly is still screwing us over. We owe you nothing. Well, nothing good, anyway.
I work with a much more mixed group of people than most of you (and god knows more than most of the blindered fools in DC, and yes, I have lived there and hung out with some of them so I know of whom I’m speaking), and a sizable minority of the younger people and a majority of the older people I work with are conservative. The conservatives disagree with me/tune me out on the vast majority of political or economic things I say, but the one thing they immediately agreed with me upon with when I mentioned dem elites basically don’t give a sh*t about us any more than the Republican elites do. Not saying the Republicans like poor/working class people any better, but they at least try to pretend (ok, with whites and asians they try to pretend, with latinos some of them try to pretend and can’t figure out what to do with the people who are openly racist, and with african-americans the ones who do try to pretend are as bad at it as dems are with working class whites). And they do a hella lot better job of faking it than the dems do. (and again, some on both sides actually aren’t snotty sh*ts, they are just very small in #). Tho the Republican base is finally starting to wake up also. The actual on-the-ground reality of people in this country is way worse than most stats show, and it’s getting harder to hide the cracks and convince people they aren’t there.
This isn’t a theoretical divide–it’s a very real and obvious divide. And I’m already running way behind so no time to elaborate further. Apologies to Yves/Lambert if the tone is too strong, but I think people need to have some idea of the actual perception out there. Most dems/greens/progressives (even most dems here and the two other places I regularly read comments) really don’t get this.
“The actual on-the-ground reality of people in this country is way worse than most stats show, and it’s getting harder to hide the cracks and convince people they aren’t there.” Yep.
looks like the language in the last comment got me put in the moderation queue even with asterisks, I’d really rather not change it because the words in question conveyed exactly what I wanted; if need be tho let me know and I will.
The article’s premise of demographic shift is defensible, but I don’t buy the framing that it uses. It appears to take the Silicon Valley bros human flourishing cover story at face value. The bros are not building the infrastructure for making every citizen a successful entrepreneur of the self. Instead they are building predatory systems in which all victims are expected to blame themselves for their failure to flourish in the best of all possible worlds.
Yep.
seconding Lambert’s “yep” now that I’ve forced to read rather than skim. The framing was horrible, and some of the assumptions were downright insulting. A MUCH better discussion of class division, or more accurately class warfare, within the party is here:
https://ourfuture.org/20151112/the-new-democrats-and-the-new-reality?utm_source=progressive_breakfast&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pbreak
(h/t Bernie’s Marines)
In 1961, a year before comprehensive health care to all its citizens was introduced in Saskatchewan (which helped lead to comprehensive, publicly-fund health care throughout Canada), its population was 925,181.
I don’t think the issue in Vermont was one of scale but of other, somewhat overlapping issues that made what Vermont was trying to do difficult:
(1) Vermont’s system, as PNHP tirelessly pointed out, was not a single payer plan—Steffie Woolhandler of PNHP says federal statutes maybe have “preclude[d] folding Medicare and the military’s Tricare program into a state single-payer plan, and restrict[ed] states’ ability to outlaw private employer-provided coverage that duplicates the public plan,” which added to the administrative complexity (and cost) of the plan.
(2) The program would cover out-of-state commuters who work in the state, adding to the cost, in order to reduce the administrative complexity of segregating them out (according to this Vox piece).
(3) Single payer plans are transparent financially. Although the cost of health care to Vermonters overall would not increase and would likely go down, the cost to families with annual incomes greater than or equal to $150,000 and to high-wage employers would have gone up. If anything, it wasn’t lack of scale that killed the Vermont plan, it was its transparency about its relative progressivity (in a tax sense)—low-wage earners and those who employ them would no longer be paying a disproportionately high portion of the overall health costs in the state (which is kept opaque in the current system, a point the Vox piece makes). It’s easier politically to have people who are already carrying—unknowingly—a disproportionate share of a burden continue to do so than to have a much smaller group knowingly assume a larger but more proportionate burden.
” It’s easier politically to have people who are already carrying—unknowingly—a disproportionate share of a burden continue to do so than to have a much smaller group knowingly assume a larger but more proportionate burden.”
Similar to S.S. where the expected life span of people earning more than the threshold is longer than that for those below it
re: The Hill snippet on Colorado universal health care vote
I am one of more than 600 volunteers who collected signatures to get ColoradoCare on the 2016 ballot (it will be Amendment 69). I don’t know if scale alone is enough to determine whether or not the Colorado plan will succeed where the Vermont plan failed. The comparatively small population in Vermont was cited as a reason the proposed system was too costly. It was not a true single payer plan; it was multi payer plan with a tax funded public option.
One could say that ColoradoCare is not a true single payer plan either; it would be supplemental to Medicare, VA and TriCare. It would simplify healthcare access and bring down costs (The Hill article fails to elucidate that the 10% tax metric is a 3.33% individual income tax and a 6.67% payroll tax paid by the employer). There are no deductibles, often no copays, and patients can choose their own physicians (no narrow-network nonsense).
These articles pertain to what happened in Vermont and the pros vs. cons of ColoradoCare:
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/28404-lessons-on-the-struggle-for-health-care-as-a-human-right
http://pnhp.org/blog/2015/10/28/evaluation-of-the-coloradocare-initiative-by-pnhps-founders-and-policy-director/
Among the people campaigning for ColoradoCare, I don’t know of any who wouldn’t prefer the national single payer plan (Medicare for All: H.R. 676) to ‘somewhat single payer’ proposals at the state level. I, for one, am not willing to wait any longer for a bought legislature to grow a mind, a heart and a ‘pair’ to do the right thing.
Did you guys catch this from THE INTERCEPT? —
Nominee to Oversee Wall Street Works at Think Tank Dedicated to Blocking Regulation
https://theintercept.com/2015/11/12/nominee-to-oversee-wall-street-works-at-think-tank-dedicated-to-blocking-regulation/
‘President Barack Obama recently nominated Hester Maria Peirce to fill a Republican seat on the Securities and Exchange Commission.
His announcement included her formal title — senior research fellow and director of the Financial Markets Working Group at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University — which sounds a lot like an academic post.
But Peirce, new disclosures show, received 98 percent of her salary directly from the Mercatus Center, a “think tank” that provides an academic façade to a radical anti-regulatory agenda. The Center’s so-called research reflects the lobbying priorities of its corporate funders — chief among them, Koch Industries….’
More via the link.
Thanks, always nice to have fresh examples of what right wing reactionary our president is…
Well, since Obama killed the Koch’s Keystone (but not the mini pipes along the way), this is his way of giving them a “failing upward” consolation prize.
http://www.cleveland.com/open/index.ssf/2015/11/nina_turner_changes_her_mind_o.html
Thanks for that Marym – that’s good news. :^)
I wonder what happened…