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Javier E

India Is Passing China in Population. Can Its Economy Ever Do the Same? - The New York ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...india-china-population.html

india china population economy history crisis politics culture policy economics

shared by Javier E on 19 Apr 23 - No Cached
  • The two nations share several historical parallels. The last time they traded places in population, in the 18th century or earlier, the Mughals ruled India and the Qing dynasty was expanding the borders of China; between them they were perhaps the richest empires that had ever existed
  • But as European powers went on to colonize most of the planet and then industrialized at home, the people of India and China became among the world’s poorest.
  • As recently as 1990, the two countries were still on essentially the same footing, with a roughly equal economic output per capita. Since then, China has shaken the world by creating more wealth than any other country in history. While India, too, has picked itself back up in the three decades since it liberalized its economy, it remains well behind in many of the most basic scales.
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  • Today, China’s economy is roughly five times the size of India’s. The average citizen of China has an economic output of almost $13,000 a year, while the average Indian’s is less than $2,500
  • In human-development indicators, the contrast is even sharper, with infant mortality rates much higher in India, life expectancy lower and access to sanitation less prevalent.
  • The divergence, analysts say, comes down largely to China’s central consolidation of policy power, an earlier start in opening up its economy to market forces starting in the late 1970s, and its single-minded focus on export-led growth.
  • China took the first-mover advantage and then compounded its dominance as it pursued its plans relentlessly.
  • India started opening its quasi-socialist economy nearly a decade later. Its approach remained piecemeal, constrained by tricky coalition politics and the competing interests of industrialists, unions, farmers and factions across its social spectrum.
  • “There is that element where China is a natural role model — not for its politics, but for the sheer efficiency,”
  • The world now has a radically different power structure than it did in 1990. China has already made itself the world’s factory, all but closing off any path India could take to competitive dominance in export-driven manufacturing.
  • A “Make in India” campaign, inaugurated by Mr. Modi in 2014, has been stuttering ever since. Wage costs are lower in India than in China, but much of the work force is poorly educated, and the country has struggled to attract private investment with its restrictive labor laws and other impediments to business, including lingering protectionism.
  • service-sector growth can go only so far in reaping India’s promise of a demographic dividend, or blunt the peril of an unemployment crisis. Hundreds of millions of people can’t find jobs or are underemployed in work that pays too little.
  • the employment entrance exams at government agencies. These jobs are still coveted as private sector work remains limited and less stable.
  • 650,000 students will apply for just 600 or 700 jobs in the national civil service this year.
  • The civil service is a tiny part of the work force, but it is prestigious — in part because it comes with job security for life. Most applicants spend years, and a big chunk of their family’s savings, and still fail to make the cut.
  • “Here there is no enterprise, no companies,” Mr. Kumar said. For any young person, “the question comes, ‘What next? What can I do?’”
  • The lessons Mr. Modi is taking from China are most apparent in his push for infrastructure development, investing heavily in highways, railways and airports to improve supply chains and connectivity.
  • India has quintupled its annual spending on roads and railways during Mr. Modi’s nine years in power
  • As Mr. Modi has boxed in opponents, cowed the press and overwhelmed independent elements of civil society, his government has lashed out at expressions of concern from abroad as evidence of a colonial plot to undermine India or a lack of understanding of India’s “civilizational” approach — both elements that diplomats had long heard in China’s own defensiveness.
  • All the while, the increasing militancy of his Hindu nationalist supporters, as arms of the state hang back and give perpetrators a free pass, exacerbates India’s religious fault lines and clashes that threaten to disrupt India’s rise.
  • Even as India tries to align its growing technological and economic capacity to capitalize on the Western tensions with China, it is determined to stick to its neutrality and maintain a balancing act between the United States and Russia. There is also the question of whether the West’s shift from China, the linchpin of the global economy, is a temporary recalibration or a more fundamental one.
  • “China took advantage of a favorable geopolitical moment to really transform itself by having access to technology, to capital, to markets led by the United States. It took advantage of that to build itself up,” Mr. Saran said. “This could be that moment for India.”
Javier E

An Embattled Public Servant in a Fractured France - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ant-in-a-fractured-france.html

secularism laicité france Culture politics history

shared by Javier E on 06 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • rance is in theory a nondiscriminatory society where the state upholds strict religious neutrality and people are free to believe, or not, in any God they wish. It is a nation, in its self image, that through education dissolves differences of faith and ethnicity in a shared commitment to the rights and responsibilities of French citizenship.
  • This model, known as laïcité, often inadequately translated as secularism, is embraced by a majority of French people. They or their forebears became French in this way. No politician here would utter the words “In God we trust.” The Roman Catholic Church was removed more than a century ago from French public life. The country’s lay model supplants any deity.
  • Mr. Cadène, 39, runs the Laïcité Observatory as its “general rapporteur,” a weighty title for a young man
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  • At the Interior Ministry, where she works, anger has mounted at what is seen as Mr. Cadène’s “laïcité of appeasement,” one that is more concerned with the “struggle against stigmatization of Muslims” than with upholding the Republic against “militant Islamists,” the weekly magazine Le Point reported.
  • Among the disadvantaged “are a majority of French Muslims, even if the situation is evolving,” Mr. Cadène said. The result, as he sees it, is discrimination that is religious and social: the inferior schools in ghettoized neighborhoods on the outskirts of big cities mean Muslim children have fewer chances.
  • “As laïcité is a tool to allow us all to live together, whatever our condition, it’s also necessary that we be together,” he said. “That we live in the same places. That we interact. And this happens too rarely.” A lot of schools, neighborhoods and workplaces were very homogeneous, he noted. “This insufficient social mixing spurs fears because when you don’t know the other you are more afraid.”
  • “It would be very dangerous to turn laïcité into a political tool,” he said. “It is not an ideology. It is absolutely not anti-religious. It should be a means to bring people together.”
  • Hakim El Karoui, a Muslim business consultant and senior fellow at the Institut Montaigne, said the problem is that laïcité has many meanings. It can represent the law of 1905, freedom of conscience and the neutrality of the state.
  • Or it can be philosophical, a form of emancipation against religion, a battle for enlightenment against religious obscurantism, something close to atheism. Islam, with its vibrant appeal to young Muslims, then becomes the enemy
  • Mr. Cadène’s views seem broadly aligned with Mr. Macron’s. While condemning the extremist Islamism behind recent terrorist attacks, including the beheading of a schoolteacher, the president has acknowledged failings. In an October speech he said France suffered from “its own form of separatism” in neglecting the marginalization of some Muslims.
  • Draft legislation this month seeks to combat radical Islamism through measures to curb the funding and teachings of extremist groups. It was a necessary step, Mr. Cadène said, but not enough. “We also need a law of repair, to try to ensure everyone has an equal chance.”
  • A law, in other words, that would help forge a France of greater mingling through better distributed social housing, more socially mixed schools, a more variegated workplace. The government is preparing a “national consultation on discrimination” in January, evidence of the urgency Mr. Macron accords this question in the run-up to the 2022 presidential election.
  • In France, saying to someone, “Tell me your laïcité and I’ll tell you who you are,” is not a bad compass.
  • So, I asked Mr. Cadène about his. “It’s the equality before the state of everyone, whatever their conviction. It’s a public administration and public services that are impartial. And it’s fraternity because that is what allows us to work together in the respect of others’ convictions.”
  • He continued: “In theory it’s a wonderful model. But if the tool is not oiled it rusts and fails. And the problem today is that equality is not real, freedom is not real, and fraternity even less.”
  • or many decades the model made French citizens of millions of immigrants, and it remains for many French people of different backgrounds and beliefs and skin color, a noble idea, without which France would lose some essence of itself.
  • “I believe that our Republic is laïque’’ — secular — “and dedicated to social justice, and that laïcité can only survive on that basis.”
Javier E

Opinion | Is the Religious Right Privileged? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...religion-race-liberalism.html

religious right post-liberalism American idea culture

shared by Javier E on 19 Jun 19 - No Cached
  • Serwer is stating with particular force something that most liberals seem to believe: That populism in all its forms, but maybe religious conservatism especially, is best understood as the illiberal rage of the formerly privileged, the longtime white-male-Christian winners of our history, at discovering that under conditions of equality they don’t get to be the rulers anymore.
  • I want to complicate the first argument, and challenge the second one
  • The complication has to do with the history of black emancipation and black politics
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  • the challenge has to do with the actual composition of the religious right and the history of liberalism’s relationship to Christianity.
  • On the first point, it’s true that black America has never formed an illiberal bloc in American politics, and true as well that the dominant, so far victorious strain in African-American activism and political thought is represented by the fulfill-the-founding patriotism that binds Frederick Douglass and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
  • slavery was abolished only because of the interaction between Southern paranoia, ambition and vainglory and Northern abolitionists who regarded the constitutional order as a “compact with hell” — an interaction that led first to political violence, then a breakdown of the constitutional order and then a civil war
  • a stark reminder that our system has advanced morally through effective re-foundings as well as liberal reforms, and that some moral-religious-cultural chasms can be closed only by extra-constitutional events.
  • As an undercurrent, at least, the black political tradition in America has included many “post-liberal” forays and flirtations, sharpest in periods of apparent political breakdown, that encompass everything from the Communist affiliations of many black intellectuals in the 1930s to the Black Panther Party, the Nation of Islam and other black nationalist movements in the civil rights era.
  • If you live under a system that claims to have high ideals but seems ineradicably opposed to your own people’s flourishing, the desire for idealistic reform within the system has to coexist with an openness to more radical possibilities. And defenders of the system should accept that openness
  • the idea that the religious-conservative coalition just represents the former big winners of American history, resentful of their lost privilege and yet even now so secure within it that they can’t imagine being on the receiving end of state oppression, is … not really an accurate description.
  • the religious right consists of an alliance of several groups that, without experiencing anything like the oppression visited on black Americans, have consistently occupied lower rungs in the American social hierarchy.
  • because I would prefer that political liberalism turn away from the trajectory that is inspiring both integralism and Trumpism, I want liberals — liberals like Serwer, perhaps liberals like you, reader — to embrace a historical perspective that is wider and more complicated than a partisan story about privileged white Christians whining because they’ve never lost anything before
  • Its allies in pro-life, pro-family politics include Orthodox Jews, whose history is not exactly one of power; Mormons, who were harried westward by a brutal persecution and then forced to rewrite their doctrines by state power; and conservative Roman Catholics
  • all of these groups are embedded in global religious communities in which persecution is as common as privilege — which if anything probably leads them to worry too much about what a hostile government might do to them, not to fail to imagine such oppression.
  • secular liberalism, in its meritocratic-elite form, may present itself as a vehicle for long-suffering minorities to finally grasp power, in many ways it is also a peculiar post-Protestant extension of the old WASP ascendancy
  • to impose the current doctrines of Episcopalians on the Baptists and the Papists.
  • after 50 years of small-d democratic activism by pro-lifers, the pro-choice side seems to be hardening into a view that such activism is as un-American as racism. Legally, elite liberalism is increasingly embracing arguments that would make it difficult or impossible for the church to operate hospitals and adoption agencies today, and perhaps colleges and grammar schools tomorrow
  • they threaten the return of longstanding tendency in modern secular polities — an institutionalized anti-Catholicism that effectively oppresses the church even if it stops short of persecuting it, a form of liberalism that is (if you will) integrally opposed to my religion’s flourishing
  • Today’s evangelicalism is a complicated mix, but it is heavily descended from Bible Belt, prairie and Sun Belt folkways that were often poor and marginalized and rarely close to the corridors of power.
  • two arguments, two lines of thinking, that it eloquently distills.
  • The first argument is a broad historical defense of the American experiment
  • America was born imperfect and remains so, in this story, but it is a place where the most oppressed and disfavored people need never despair of their future, need never abandon the promise of the founding, because the arc of our national story can always, with enough activist zeal and procedural perseverance, be bent toward justice.
  • Then the second argumen
Javier E

Climate activists mixed hardball with a long game - 0 views

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climate politics policy gnd activism green

shared by Javier E on 29 Jul 22 - No Cached
  • Although the story will be much more heroic if this bill or something like it passes into law, the achievement is already heroic, by bringing such legislation, in this country, even this close.
  • In less than five years, a new generation of activists and aligned technocrats has taken climate action from the don’t-go-there zone of American politics and helped place it at the very center of the Democratic agenda, persuading an old-guard centrist septuagenarian, Biden, to make a New Deal-scale green investment the focus of his presidential campaign platform and his top policy priority once in office
  • This, despite a generation of conventional wisdom that the issue was electorally fraught and legislatively doomed. Now they find themselves pushing a recognizable iteration of that agenda — retooled and whittled down, yes, but still unthinkably large by the standards of previous administrations — plausibly forward into law.
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  • If you believe that climate change is a boutique issue prioritized only by out-of-touch liberal elites, as one poll found, then this bill, should it pass, represents a political achievement of astonishing magnitude: the triumph of a moral crusade against long odds.
  • if you believe there is quite a lot of public support for climate action, as other polls suggest — then this bill marks the success of outsider activists in holding establishment forces to account, both to their own rhetoric and to the demands of their voters.
  • whatever your read of public sentiment, what is most striking about the news this week is not just that there is now some climate action on the table but also how fast the landscape for climate policy has changed, shifting all of our standards for success and failure along with it
  • The bill may well prove inadequate, even if it passes. It also represents a generational achievement — achieved, from the point of view of activists, in a lot less time than a full generation.
  • None of this is exclusively the work of the climate left
  • To trust the math of its architects, this deal between Manchin and the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, splits the difference — the United States won’t be leading the pack on decarbonization, but it probably won’t be seen by the rest of the world as a laughingstock or climate criminal, either.
  • Technological progress has driven the cost of renewable energy down so quickly, it should now seem irresistible to anyone making long-term policy plans or public investments. There has been rapid policy innovation among centrists and policy wonks, too, dramatically expanding the climate tool kit beyond carbon taxes and cap-and-trade systems to what has been called a whole-of-government approach to decarbonizing.
  • They got their wish. And as a result, we got a bill. That’s not naïveté but the opposite.
  • as the political scientist Matto Mildenberger has pointed out, the legislation hadn’t failed at the ballot box; it had stalled on Manchin’s desk
  • He also pointed to research showing climate is driving the voting behavior of Democrats much more than it is driving Republicans into opposition and that most polling shows high levels of baseline concern about warming and climate policy all across the country. (It is perhaps notable that as the Democrats were hashing out a series of possible compromises, there wasn’t much noise about any of them from Republicans, who appeared to prefer to make hay about inflation, pandemic policy and critical race theory.)
  • It is hard not to talk about warming without evoking any fear, but the president was famous, on the campaign trail and in office, for saying, “When I think ‘climate change,’ I think ‘jobs.’”
  • He focused on green growth and the opportunities and benefits of a rapid transition.
  • In the primaries, Sunrise gave Biden an F for his climate plan, but after he sewed up the nomination, its co-founder Varshini Prakash joined his policy task force to help write his climate plan. As the plan evolved and shrank over time, there were squeaks and complaints here and there but nothing like a concerted, oppositional movement to punish the White House for its accommodating approach to political realities.
  • over the past 18 months, since the inauguration, whenever activists chose to protest, they were almost always protesting not the inadequacy of proposed legislation but the worrying possibility of no legislation at all
  • When they showed up at Manchin’s yacht, they were there to tell him not that they didn’t want his support but that they needed him to act. They didn’t urge Biden to throw the baby out with the bathwater; they were urging him not to.
  • When, last week, they thought they’d lost, Democratic congressional staff members staged an unprecedented sit-in at Schumer’s office, hoping to pressure the Senate majority leader back into negotiations with Manchin. And what did they say? They didn’t say, “We have eight years to save the earth.” They didn’t say, “The blood of the future is on your hands.” What their protest sign said was “Keep negotiating, Chuck.” As far as I can tell, this was code for “Give Joe more.”
  • The present-day climate left was effectively born, in the United States, with the November 2018 Sunrise Movement sit-in. At the time, hardly anyone on the planet had heard of Greta Thunberg, who had just begun striking outside Swedish Parliament — a lonely, socially awkward 15-year-old holding up a single sign. Not four years later, her existential rhetoric is routinely echoed by presidents and prime ministers and C.E.O.s and secretaries general, and more than 80 percent of the world’s economic activity and emissions are now, theoretically, governed by net-zero pledges pointing the way to a carbon-neutral future in just decades.
  • The deal, if it holds, is very big, several times as large as anything on climate the United States passed into law before. The architects and supporters of the $369 billion in climate and clean-energy provisions in Joe Manchin’s Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, announced Wednesday, are already calculating that it could reduce American carbon emissions by 40 percent, compared with 2005 levels, by 2030. That’s close enough to President Biden’s pledge of 50 percent that exhausted advocates seem prepared to count it as a victory
Javier E

Some Cracks in the Cult of Technocrats - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...24iht-letter24.html

economics technocracy political unintended consequences

shared by Javier E on 26 May 13 - No Cached
  • We are living in the age of the technocrats. In business, Big Data, and the Big Brains who can parse it, rule. In government, the technocrats are on top, too. From Washington to Frankfurt to Rome, technocrats have stepped in where politicians feared to tread, rescuing economies, or at least propping them up
  • the familiar pleas for common sense and a centrist approach, free from the taint of ideology, usually boil down to a call to put the technocrats in charge.
  • Technocrats have a lot to recommend them. We do, after all, live in the age of Big Data, and ignoring it or not being able to use it is a sure path to either bankruptcy or humiliation
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  • there are also sound reasons not to rely mechanically on technocratic solutions.
  • their concern is that policy which is eminently sensible in theory can fail in practice because of its unintended political consequences.
  • we need to be cautious about “good” economic policies that have the side effect of either reinforcing already dominant groups or weakening already frail ones.
  • “The central starting point is a certain suspicion of elites. You really cannot trust the elites when they are totally in charge of policy.”
  • “Faced with a trade union exercising monopoly power and raising the wages of its members, most economists would advocate removing or limiting the union’s ability to exercise this monopoly power, and that is certainly the right policy in some circumstances. But unions do not just influence the way the labor market functions; they also have important implications for the political system. Historically, unions have played a key role in the creation of democracy in many parts of the world, particularly in Western Europe.”
  • An example discussed in the paper — and an issue on which Dr. Acemoglu changed his own mind in the course of writing it — is the role of trade unions.
  • Two other important examples the study dissects are financial deregulation in the United States and privatization in post-Soviet Russia. In both cases, economic reforms that made a lot of sense in the abstract and in terms of economic efficiency had the unintended consequence of strengthening already powerful political interests.
  • The result was a political spiral which in the United States helped set off the 2008 financial crisis and in Russia led to the rise of President Vladimir V. Putin and his authoritarian regime.
  • In both the United States and in Russia, the reforms which strengthened powerful vested interests didn’t begin as a cunning plot by a wealthy cabal, intent on further enriching itself. Instead, they were endorsed and advocated by today’s high priests, the technocrats, who sincerely believed they were acting in the common good.
  • “What our paper is targeted at is, there is a certain hubristic attitude among economists — we are the queen of the social sciences because we use numbers and data,” said Dr. Acemoglu, who is a professor in M.I.T.’s department of economics. “But that can ignore the implications of political power.”
  • There is no such thing as pure policy, and we should check our pockets and lock our doors when someone tells us otherwise.
Javier E

The Global Context of the Hamas-Israel War - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...hamas-israel-war.html

context world order US hegemony multipolar history trump bush GWB

shared by Javier E on 09 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • Russia has started the largest war in Europe since World War II.China has become more bellicose toward Taiwan.India has embraced a virulent nationalism.Israel has formed the most extreme government in its history.And on Saturday morning, Hamas brazenly attacked Israel, launching thousands of missiles and publicly kidnapping and killing civilians.
  • All these developments are signs that the world may have fallen into a new period of disarray. Countries — and political groups like Hamas — are willing to take big risks, rather than fearing that the consequences would be too dire.
  • The simplest explanation is that the world is in the midst of a transition to a new order that experts describe with the word multipolar. The United States is no longer the dominant power it once was, and no replacement has emerged
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  • As a result, political leaders in many places feel emboldened to assert their own interests, believing the benefits of aggressive action may outweigh the costs. These leaders believe that they have more sway over their own region than the U.S. does.
  • “A fully multipolar world has emerged, and people are belatedly realizing that multipolarity involves quite a bit of chaos,”
  • Zheng Yongnian, a Chinese political scientist with ties to the country’s leaders, has similarly described the “old order” as disintegrating. “Countries are brimming with ambition, like tigers eyeing their prey, keen to find every opportunity among the ruins of the old order,”
  • Why has American power receded?
  • Some of the change is unavoidable. Dominant countries don’t remain dominant forever.
  • But the U.S. has also made strategic mistakes that are accelerating the arrival of a multipolar world.
  • In Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. spent much of the early 21st century fighting costly wars. The Iraq war was especially damaging because it was an unprovoked war that George W. Bush chose to start. And the humiliating retreat from Afghanistan, overseen by President Biden, made the U.S. look weaker still.
  • Among those mistakes: Presidents of both parties naïvely believed that a richer China would inevitably be a friendlier China — and failed to recognize that the U.S. was building up its own rival through lenient trade policies, as the political scientist John Mearsheimer has argued.
  • Perhaps the biggest damage to American prestige has come from Donald Trump, who has rejected the very idea that the U.S. should lead the world. Trump withdrew from international agreements and disdained successful alliances like NATO. He has signaled that, if he reclaims the presidency in 2025, he may abandon Ukraine.
  • In the case of Israel, Trump encouraged Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, to show little concern for Palestinian interests and instead seek a maximal Israeli victory
  • Netanyahu’s extremism has contributed to the turmoil between Israel and Palestinian groups like Hamas
  • An editorial in Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper, yesterday argued, “The prime minister, who has prided himself on his vast political experience and irreplaceable wisdom in security matters, completely failed to identify the dangers he was consciously leading Israel into when establishing a government of annexation and dispossession.” Netanyahu, Haaretz added, adopted “a foreign policy that openly ignored the existence and rights of Palestinians.”
  • I understand that some readers may question whether the long era of American power that’s now fading was worth celebrating. Without question, it included some terrible injustices, be they in Vietnam, Iran, Guatemala or elsewhere.
  • But it also made possible the most peaceful era in recorded history, with a sharp decline in deaths from violence, as Steven Pinker noted in his 2011 book, “The Better Angels of Our Nature.” And the number of people living in a democracy surged.
  • Smith concluded his Substack newsletter on the new Middle Eastern war this way:Over the past two decades it had become fashionable to lambast American hegemony, to speak derisively of “American exceptionalism,” to ridicule America’s self-arrogated function of “world police” and to yearn for a multipolar world. Well, congratulations, now we have that world. See if you like it better.
aleija

Opinion | Biden Can Fix Latinos' Disappointment With Democrats - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...biden-promises-latinos.html

opinion US policy global immigration Politics

shared by aleija on 02 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • For Joe Biden to make sure he gets more Latino votes than Hillary Clinton did in 2016 — for him to defeat President Trump and win the White House — he has to convince millions of Latinos that he won’t make the mistakes that Barack Obama made during his presidency. And he doesn’t have much time left to do it.
  • More than three million immigrants, many without criminal records, were deported during the Obama administration.
  • Nor should he back the prison system that has been locking immigrants and their children behind bars. During an interview with Mr. Biden in February, I showed him a photo of an 8-year-old boy from Honduras inside what looked like a metal cage in a detention center in McAllen, Texas. It was taken not during the Trump administration, but in 2014. These inhumane practices must stop.
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  • The big promise that Democrats failed to keep was the passage of an immigration reform bill that would legalize the approximately 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States.
  • Latinos haven’t forgotten Mr. Obama’s promise. That’s why Democrats have a “Latino problem.”
  • Now it falls to Mr. Biden and his running mate, Senator Kamala Harris, to overcome this lack of trust within the Latino community. “I think it was a big mistake,” Mr. Biden said of the Obama administration’s mass deportations during our interview. “It took too long to get it right.”
  • Mr. Biden’s second promise is specifically for Dreamers. “I will also legalize Dreamers again,” he said during our February interview, “making sure they are not deported. These are already Americans.”
  • Mr. Trump’s policies have had a profound effect on immigration: From 2016 to 2019, annual net immigration to the United States fell by almost half, to about 600,000 migrants per year.
  • It’s possible that Mr. Biden’s policies could send the wrong message to people in the Southern Hemisphere. So, in order to discourage new caravans of people from traveling to the United States from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, Mr. Biden has said he plans to invest $4 billion to create jobs in Central America and tackle the root causes of migration.
Javier E

The Big Fail - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...krugman-the-big-fail.html

economics policy crisis austerity international

shared by Javier E on 07 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • It’s tempting to argue that the economic failures of recent years prove that economists don’t have the answers. But the truth is actually worse: in reality, standard economics offered good answers, but political leaders — and all too many economists — chose to forget or ignore what they should have known.
  • Mr. Blanchard, the I.M.F.’s chief economist, isn’t an ordinary researcher, and the paper has been widely taken as a sign that the fund has had a major rethinking of economic policy.
  • the adverse effect is much stronger than previously believed. The premature turn to austerity, it turns out, was a terrible mistake.
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  • it deserves credit for being willing to rethink its position in the light of evidence.
  • . European leaders, having created Depression-level suffering in debtor countries without restoring financial confidence, still insist that the answer is even more pain. The current British government, which killed a promising recovery by turning to austerity, completely refuses to consider the possibility that it made a mistake. And here in America, Republicans insist that they’ll use a confrontation over the debt ceiling — a deeply illegitimate action in itself — to demand spending cuts that would drive us back into recession.
Javier E

What Do These Midterms Mean? « The Dish - 0 views

dish.andrewsullivan.com/...what-do-these-midterms-mean

politics Obama election history crisis narrative economics foreign policy

shared by Javier E on 02 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • these midterms mean nothing? That can’t be right either. They seem to me to be reflecting at the very least a sour and dyspeptic mood in the country at large, a well of deepening discontent and concern, and a national funk that remains very potent as a narrative, even if it has become, in my view, close to circular and more than a little hysterical.
  • what is the reason for this mood – and why has Obama taken the biggest dive because of it?
  • Even though the economic signals in the US are stronger than anywhere else in the developed world, even as unemployment has fallen, and as energy independence has come closer than anyone recently expected, the underlying structure of the economy remains punishing for the middle class. This, in some ways, can be just as dispiriting as lower levels of growth – because it appears that even when we have a recovery, it will not make things any better for most people.
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  • This shoe falling in the public psyche – a sense that we are in a deep structural impasse for the middle class, rather than a temporary recessionary hit – means a profound disillusionment with the future. And the fact that neither party seems to have a workable answer to this problem intensifies the sense of drift.
  • The emergence of ISIS has dimmed that hope as well. It does two things at once: it calls into question whether our departure from Iraq can be sustained, and it presents the threat of Jihadist terror as once again real and imminent. So ISIS is a reminder of the worst of 9/11 and the worst of Iraq.
  • The last great triumph of the US – the end of the Cold War, the liberation of Central Europe, the emergence of a democratic Russia – is now revealed as something more complicated. If Americans thought that the days were long gone that they had to worry about Russian military power, they’ve been disabused of that fact this past year.
  • the other recent success: getting out of Iraq and defeating al Qaeda. For many of us, this was one of Obama’s greatest achievements: to cauterize the catastrophe of the Iraq War, to decimate al Qaeda’s forces in Af-Pak, and to enable us to move forward toward a more normal world.
  • Events overseas have had another, deeply depressing effect.
  • So the core narrative of the Obama presidency – rescuing us from a second Great Depression and extricating us from a doomed strategy in response to Jihadism – has been eclipsed by events. And that’s why Obama has lost the thread. He has lost the clear story-line that defined his presidency.
  • You can argue, and I would, that Obama is not really responsible for the events behind this narrative-collapse.
  • But most Americans are not going to parse these trends and events and come to some nuanced view. They see the economy as still punishing, Jihadist terror just as frightening, and they are increasingly unable to avoid the fact that we lost – repeat, lost – the Iraq War. They’re also aware that the US, after Iraq, simply has historically low leverage and power in the world at large, as the near-uselessness of our massive military in shaping the world as we would like has been exposed in the deserts of Iraq and mountains of Afghanistan. Now throw in a big bucket of Ebola, and what on earth is there to be cheerful about?
  • And who else do you hold responsible if not the president?
  • They want to create a Carter-like narrative that can bring down the Democrats and turn the Obama presidency into an asterisk. But the difference between now and the late 1970s is that Obama is not a Carter and the GOP have no Reagan, or, more importantly, no persuasive critique of Obama that is supplemented by a viable alternative policy agenda that isn’t just a warmed-over version of the 1980s.
  • The future as yet seems to contain no new or rallying figure to chart a different course. Ever-greater gridlock seems the likeliest result of the mid-terms; polarization continues to deepen geographically and on-line
  • the Democrats have only an exhausted, conventional dynasty to offer in 2016; and the Republicans either have dangerous demagogues, like Christie or Cruz, or lightweights, like Walker or Rubio or Paul, or, even another fricking Bush.
  • it is not too late for Obama to lead the way, to construct a new narrative that is as honest and as realist as it is, beneath it all, optimistic. It’s a hard task – but since his likeliest successors are failing to do so, he has as good a shot as any. In these circumstances, treating the last two years of a presidency as irrelevant could not be more wrong. They could, with the right policies and the right message, be the most relevant of them all.
Javier E

As the rest of Europe lives under lockdown, Sweden keeps calm and carries on | World ne... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...eden-keeps-calm-and-carries-on

sweden pandemic strategies response

shared by Javier E on 29 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • “It’s the Swedish trust in government,” says Elias Billman, 22. “No one told me you have to stay home right now,” agrees his friend, Fredrik Glückman, a history student at Lund University. “We’re not in quarantine. And as soon as we hear from our government that we have to stay in, like you do in Britain, then we will do it.”
  • While every other country in Europe has been ordered into ever more stringent coronavirus lockdown, Sweden has remained the exception. Schools, kindergartens, bars, restaurants, ski resorts, sports clubs, hairdressers: all remain open, weeks after everything closed down in next door Denmark and Norway.
  • Universities have been closed, and on Friday, the government tightened the ban on events to limit them to no more than 50 people. But if you develop symptoms, you can still go back to work or school just two days after you feel better. If a parent starts showing symptoms, they’re allowed to continue to send their children to school.
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  • he defended the decision not to implement the tighter restrictions seen in Denmark, France and the UK. “We all, as individuals, have to take responsibility. We can’t legislate and ban everything,” he said. “It is also a question of commonsense behaviour.
  • The best explanation for why Sweden is such an outlier centres on the unusual level of independence given to government agencies such as Tegnell’s, and the reluctance of politicians to override them.
  • His team at the Public Health Agency of Sweden is critical of the Imperial College paper that warned this month that 250,000 people in the UK would die if the government failed to introduce more draconian measures.
  • “We have had a fair amount of people looking at it and they are sceptical,” says Tegnell. “They think Imperial chose a number of variables that gave a prognosis that was quite pessimistic, and that you could just as easily have chosen other variables that gave you another outcome. It’s not a peer-reviewed paper. It might be right, but it might also be terribly wrong. In Sweden, we are a bit surprised that it’s had such an impact.”
  • “As long as the Swedish epidemic development stays at this level,” he tells the Observer, “I don’t see any big reason to take measures that you can only keep up for a very limited amount of time.”
  • “They’re listening to the health department; they’re listening to the experts they have on hand.”
  • More than 2,000 Swedish university researchers published a joint letter on Wednesday questioning the Public Health Agency’s position, while the previous week saw leading epidemiologists attack the agency in emails leaked to Swedish television.
  • “How many lives are they willing to sacrifice so as not to lockdown and risk greater effects on the economy?”
  • Tegnell argues that because in Sweden there are almost no stay-at-home parents, closing schools would have knocked out at least a quarter of doctors and nurses, crippling the health service
  • Tegnell even questions whether stopping the progress of the virus is desirable. “We are just trying to slow it, because this disease will never go away. If you manage, like South Korea, to get rid of it, even they say that they count on it coming back
  • While Tegnell understands that he will be blamed if Sweden ends up in a similar situation to that of Italy, he refuses to be panicked. “I wouldn’t be too surprised if it ended up about the same way for all of us, irrespective of what we’re doing,” he says. “I’m not so sure that what we’re doing is affecting the spread very much. But we will see.”
Javier E

The Long March of the American Right - NYTimes.com - 0 views

economix.blogs.nytimes.com/...ng-march-of-the-american-right

economics us government dysfunction legitimacy New Deal history fiscal crisis policy

shared by Javier E on 19 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • the last week has provided additional insight into how and why the current governmental arrangement known as the United States of America will end.
  • The mainstream narrative is that the problem is “dysfunctional government” or “paralysis in Washington.” That’s true, up to a point, but the real problem is the steady decline in legitimacy of the federal government – and the way this is related to what has happened on the right of the political spectrum.
  • In the 1940s, many people believed, with good reason, in the ability of the federal government to both organize activities at home and to have a positive impact around the world.
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  • In the 1930s, the private economy stumbled and private financial arrangements failed in many ways – but, on the whole, government was perceived as stepping in to help.
  • The politician whose career better matches the long march of the American right is Newt Gingrich. Mr. Gingrich, elected to Congress in 1978, astutely saw the possibility of building a coalition that would turn the South into a Republican stronghold. Mr. Gingrich voted against the fiscal compromises between George H.W. Bush and the Democrats and, as speaker of the House, crafted the confrontations that led to the government shutdowns in late 1995 and early 1996.
  • According to the latest C.B.O. numbers, debt relative to gross domestic product remains below 120 percent through the 2030s. I regard this as manageable, with the major wild cards being the extent of additional foreign war follies or big financial system blowups.
  • This backlash against government has been a long time coming, but – perhaps in the final irony – America’s fiscal affairs were in relatively good shape until quite recently.
  • these developments have been backed by people with deep pockets and a great deal of patience.
  • The economic recovery, although weak, has improved the nation’s fiscal picture – as have the large spending cuts and more modest revenue increases in the last few years
  • it only indicated what was to come – increasing willingness to further undermine the government and to question the validity of its debts. Every time the United States comes to a line, the most extreme voices in the Republican Party want to go even further – this time calling for an actual default on government obligations in some form as a potentially good thing.
  • I recommend that the revenue base be strengthened as the economy recovers further over the coming decade, while keeping a lid on spending increases. There is no case for precipitous fiscal adjustment, let alone a political confrontation that generates great uncertainty and therefore deters both investment and the purchase of consumer durables (including housing).
  • But it’s too late for good short-term fiscal news or to insist that the problem the country faces over coming decades is the rising cost of health care (not the government-paid part of health care, but all health care costs). Too many people are convinced strongly that they know better than what is in the numbers.
  • the decline in legitimacy of the United States government is real and lasting; it cannot regain the prestige it had in the 1940s and 1950s. Reinforcing and accelerating this trend is perhaps the greatest damage caused by the financial crisis of 2007-8 and the “rescue” measures that ensued.
  • Sooner or later, the American public may elect a group of politicians determined to end the belief that the federal government can be trusted. Their initial steps in that direction will strengthen their showing in opinion polls – and they will be encouraged to go further. At that time, the United States will default on its debts and the world’s financial and fiscal systems will be plunged into chaos.
woodlu

The mess Merkel leaves behind | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...the-mess-merkel-leaves-behind

politics policy economics

shared by woodlu on 23 Sep 21 - No Cached
  • Mrs Merkel’s achievements are more modest. In her 16 years in the chancellery she has weathered a string of crises, from economic to pandemic. Her abilities as a consensus-forger have served her country and Europe well.
  • But her government has neglected too much, nationally and internationally.
  • when a new government forms after an election this weekend, admiration for her steady leadership should be mixed with frustration at the complacency she has bred.
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  • The public sector has failed to invest adequately or wisely, falling behind its peers in building infrastructure, especially the digital sort.
  • Penny-pinching is hard-wired into the state. In 2009, on Mrs Merkel’s watch, Germany hobbled itself with a constitutional amendment that makes it illegal to run more than a minute deficit. With interest rates so low, sensible governments ought to have been borrowing for investment, not fainting at the first spot of red ink.
  • Germany’s most severe domestic problem is a failure to reform its pension system. Germans are ageing fast, and the baby-boomers will place an even heavier burden on the budget later this decade as they retire
  • Germany has also been sluggish, and still emits more carbon per head than any other big EU country, not helped by Mrs Merkel’s shutdown of Germany’s nuclear industry after the Fukushima disaster in Japan in 2011.
  • The EU has not grappled sufficiently with the weakness of its indebted southern members. Only during the pandemic did it create a financial instrument that lets the EU issue jointly guaranteed debt, and dispense some of the cash as grants, rather than yet more loans.
  • Worse, the “stability” rules that will force countries back into austerity to shrink their stocks of debt are ready to revive, unless amended.
  • China is an increasingly challenging economic and strategic rival, Russia an unpredictable threat and America a distracted and uncertain ally.
  • Despite recent increases, it spends too little on defence. It cosies up to Beijing in the hope of better trading terms. It is giving Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, a chokehold over European energy supplies by backing the new Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline which, as it happens, makes landfall in Mrs Merkel’s own constituency.
  • The polls suggest that Germany is set for a messy new parliament, with no single party, or even two, able to form a government. Instead, some sort of ideologically incoherent three-way coalition is on the cards—one that, by combining high-spending greens and pro-business liberals, may struggle to agree on anything ambitious.
  • Comfortable, cautious Germans seem uninterested in serious debate about the future. Crisis-management has become a substitute for initiative. Candidates have no incentive to highlight their country’s looming problems.
  • One is a coalition headed by Mrs Merkel’s party, the Christian Democrats and their Bavarian sister-party (the CDU/CSU), led by Armin Laschet. The other is a coalition led by Olaf Scholz, of the Social Democrats (SPD), who is Germany’s finance minister. In either case, the coalition would be joined by the Greens and by the pro-business Free Democrats.
  • Sixteen years in power has been enough. The party has run out of ideas and drive, as its decision to choose the gaffe-prone and uninspiring Mr Laschet for chancellor makes clear. An affable lightweight, he has run a dismal campaign, and is predicted to lead his team to its worst result since the second world war. The polls say that Mr Scholz is preferred by twice as many voters.
  • The problem is that although he belongs to the business-friendly wing of his party, the SPD is stuffed with left-wingers.
  • They may try to drag him further in their direction than the Free Democrats will wear and enterprise can comfortably bear.
Javier E

Regulatory Relief for Banks That Rarely Fail - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...or-banks-that-rarely-fail.html

financial banking regulation reform risk policy economics

shared by Javier E on 19 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • Rolling back regulations created after the 2008 crisis has been Job 1 for leaders of many of the nation’s large and powerful banking institutions. So it’s no surprise that recent proposals for regulatory reform in the financial industry have overwhelmingly been the work of big banks or their supporters. The bankers want to return to the days when they could roll the dice, pocket their winnings and rely on the taxpayer if something went wrong.
  • That’s what makes a reform proposal put forward last week so unusual. It actually outlines smart ways to give regulatory relief only to low-risk, traditional banks that did not cause the financial crisis. Those institutions that did contribute to the 2008 mess get no relief under the plan.
  • The proposal comes from Thomas M. Hoenig, vice chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. In an interview last week, Mr. Hoenig told me he had been hearing more and more calls to reform the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 and he wanted a surgical and effective response to those requests.“There has been a lot of discussion about the need for reform,” Mr. Hoenig said. “But you can’t just say there’s too much of a burden. You have to think through what are the conditions where you might consider providing relief.”
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  • Mr. Hoenig devised a list of three criteria for banks that could be exempted from some regulations without posing risks to the financial system and taxpayers.The winners: banks that hold no trading assets or liabilities, those that have no derivatives positions other than plain-vanilla interest-rate swaps and foreign exchange derivatives and, finally, banks whose notional value of all derivatives exposures totals less than $3 billion.
  • Roughly 6,100 of the more than 6,500 commercial banks would pass this test, according to the F.D.I.C. Of the remaining 400 that would not, many are behemoths: 310 of them have more than $250 million in assets.Clearly, this is a regulatory relief proposal that benefits bankers on Main Street, not Wall Street.
  • it’s not only small banks that could catch a break on regulations under the Hoenig plan. His office said it had identified 18 banks with total assets greater than $10 billion that would qualify
  • Banks meeting the criteria set out by Mr. Hoenig would not be exempt from the Volcker Rule, which was intended to separate banks’ risk-taking trading desks from their federally insured units. That’s because these banks aren’t engaging in these kinds of practices.
  • The clamor for regulatory relief from large and politically connected financial institutions has been a constant ever since Dodd-Frank was enacted five years ago. First, these institutions worked to water down the rules as the regulators were writing them. Now they are pushing for repeal.
Javier E

Opinion | How Capitalism Betrayed Privacy - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...privacy-capitalism.html

capitalism privacy surveillance

shared by Javier E on 16 Apr 19 - No Cached
  • For much of human history, what we now call “privacy” was better known as being rich
  • depended on another, even more impressive achievement: the creation of a middle class
  • The historical link between privacy and the forces of wealth creation helps explain why privacy is under siege today. It reminds us, first, that mass privacy is not a basic feature of human existence but a byproduct of a specific economic arrangemen
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  • in a capitalist country, our baseline of privacy depends on where the money is. And today that has changed.
  • The forces of wealth creation no longer favor the expansion of privacy but work to undermine it
  • We have witnessed the rise of what I call “attention merchants” and what the sociologist Shoshana Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism” — the commodification of our personal data by tech giants like Facebook a
  • We face a future in which active surveillance is such a routine part of business that for most people it is nearly inescapable
  • we are on the road back to serfdom.
  • stronger privacy protections. But that will require laws that do not merely tinker with but fundamentally alter the economics of privacy.
  • In the United States, it is safe to say, privacy “won” the 20th century. Its crowning triumph was the Supreme Court’s recognition in 1965 of a constitutional right to privacy
  • By the 1960s the rise of a propertied middle class had put each man in his “castle,”
  • new technologies coupled with new theories of value have transformed the economics of privacy. A drastic decrease in the cost of mass surveillance (thanks to the internet) has increased the value of two types of asset: our data and our attention.
  • The race to maximize those assets by companies big and small has made surveillance a growth industry. It is in this sense that capitalism has begun to change sides.
  • the richest companies in the world now generate wealth by putting as many trackers, devices and screens inside our homes and as close to our bodies as possible
  • money can be made by consolidating everything that is known about an individual.
  • There is good reason to believe that, if nothing is done, gratuitous surveillance will be built into nearly every business and business model.
  • Some have argued that there’s no need to be concerned
  • The end result is selling people stuff, not sending them to Siberia.
  • data and surveillance networks created for one purpose can and will be used for others. You must assume that any personal data that Facebook or Android keeps are data that governments around the world will try to get o
  • once you realize you’re being watched, it is a tough sensation to shake. As our experiences with social media have made all too clear, we act differently when we know we are “on the record.”
  • Mass privacy is the freedom to act without being watched and thus, in a sense, to be who we really are — not who we want others to think we are. At stake, then, is something akin to the soul.
  • To be truly effective, privacy laws must seek to change the incentives that foster gratuitous surveillance and the reckless accumulation of personalized data. We need strong bans, including those that prohibit companies from sharing their customers’ personal information
  • companies that repeatedly fail to protect sensitive data need to face dire consequences.
Javier E

Opinion | Testing Can't Stop Coronavirus Now, But There Are Still Things We Can Do - Th... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...s-trump-testing-shortages.html

strategies pandemic equipment testing

shared by Javier E on 28 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • Of all the resources lacking in the Covid-19 pandemic, the one most desperately needed in the United States is a unified national strategy, as well as the confident, coherent and consistent leadership to see it carried out
  • The country cannot go from one mixed-message news briefing to the next, and from tweet to tweet, to define policy priorities. It needs a science-based plan that looks to the future rather than merely reacting to latest turn in the crisis.
  • rom an epidemiological perspective, the current debate, which pits human life against long-term economics, presents a false choice.
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  • Just as a return to even a new normal is unthinkable for the foreseeable future — and well past Easter, Mr. Trump — a complete shutdown and shelter-in-place strategy cannot last for months
  • A middle-ground approach is the only realistic one — and defining what that looks like means doing our best to keep all such workers safe.
  • In three to four weeks, there will be a major shortage of chemical reagents for coronavirus testing
  • When leaders tell the truth about even near-desperate situations, when they lay out a clear and understandable vision, the public might remain frightened, but it will act rationally and actively participate in the preservation of its safety and security.
  • begin by stating a number of hard truth
  • The first is that no matter what we do at this stage, numerous hospitals in the United States will be overrun. Many people, including health care workers, will get sick and some will die. And the economy will tank. It’s too late to change any of this now.
  • It also means leadership. Above all, it means being realistic about what is possible and what is not, and communicating that clearly to the American public.
  • Much better, instead, to immediately gear up for epidemic intelligence
  • it simply won’t be available.
  • The second hard truth is that at this stage, any public health response that counts on widespread testing in the United States is doomed to fail.
  • illness surveillance, in which epidemiologists survey a sample of doctors’ offices in a given geographic region each day to learn how many patients sought care for illnesses with symptoms of fever, cough and muscle aches.
  • A third hard truth is that shortages of personal protective equipment — particularly N-95 masks — for health care workers will only get worse in the United States as global need continues to rise precipitously
  • If you can’t make nearly enough masks to meet the need, then you must conserve the masks you can make. Unfortunately, some hospitals in the United States are not employing science-based methods for conserving these invaluable lifesaving masks.
  • Making ventilators — machines that breathe for patients who cannot effectively do so on their own — poses an even more formidable challenge
  • a Medtronic ventilator has about 1,500 parts, supplied by 14 separate countries.
  • More machines might, at best, be manufactured by the hundreds a month — but not by the thousands, as is needed right now.
  • a national strategy and leadership are crucial. Otherwise, hospitals, governors and politicians will only vie against one anothe
  • “Respirators, ventilators, all of the equipment — try getting it yourselves,” Mr. Trump said
  • This is exactly the wrong message. The White House must take charge, keeping track of national inventory, purchasing the precious resources and distributing them where they are most needed at the moment.
  • More than anything, what the United States needs right now is for the president to undertake an intellectual Manhattan Project: gather the best minds in public health, medicine, medical ethics, catastrophe preparedness and response; political leadership; and private-sector manufacturing and the pharmaceutical industry.
  • The effort against Covid-19 will need to be bear fruit within days — and come up with a comprehensive but realistic blueprint for getting America through the next 12 to 18 months, or however long it takes for a vaccine to become widely available or herd immunity to take hold in the population
Javier E

Trump's war on pragmatism - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...a-9040-68981f488eed_story.html

trump pragmatism strategies pandemic politics

shared by Javier E on 20 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • We Americans have always fancied ourselves practical, can-do people who put old feuds aside when faced with a big collective problem.
  • it’s no accident that one of the United States’ great contributions to philosophy is William James’s theory of pragmatism. Our bias is toward ideas that work and innovation by way of trial and error.
  • This tradition acknowledges that we often have multiple goals. In the coronavirus crisis, this means beating the pandemic and getting the economy humming again.
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  • President Trump is failing because he has abandoned our commitments to favoring problem-solving over ideological posturing and to acting nationally in the face of looming catastrophe.
  • Instead of rallying the resources required for a nationally organized testing program, Trump told the nation’s governors that the federal government will “be standing alongside of you.”
  • Having thrown the burden of resolving the crisis on those governors, Trump might at least have encouraged his own supporters to back off their reflexive opposition to a gradual and considered approach to economic recovery
  • Instead, Trump championed the extremists who continued their marches on several state capitals over the weekend demanding an abrupt and reckless end to the temporary shutdowns that have slowed the virus’s spread
  • Why? “They seem to be protesters that like me,” he said gleefully.
  • Considering this lack of leadership, what would a William James pragmatist do?
  • Virtually everyone except for Trump and his apologists understands the obvious: Reopening the economy requires, first, a national commitment to a robust testing program fully backed by the federal government
  • “Even if the government-imposed social distancing rules are relaxed to encourage economic activity, risk-averse Americans will persist in social distancing, and that behavior, too, will restrain the hoped-for economic rebound,
  • Those who shout for opening the economy in the name of freedom don’t think much about the freedom of workers to protect themselves from a potentially deadly disease. And employers do not want to find themselves facing legal liabilities for infected employees.
  • If the economy is substantially reopened without adequate testing, said Thea Lee, president of the Economic Policy Institute, the most vulnerable would include “low-wage workers, women, people of color, immigrants, and the elderly.” They are “concentrated in the riskiest jobs, with the least financial cushion, and the least likely to have employer-provided benefits or protections,”
Javier E

Tougher climate policies could save a stunning 150 million lives, researchers find - Th... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...million-lives-researchers-find

climate change policies deaths crisis

shared by Javier E on 20 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • According to the study, premature deaths would fall on nearly every continent if the world’s governments agree to cut emissions of carbon and other harmful gases enough to limit global temperature rise to less than 3 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century. That is about a degree lower than the target set by the Paris climate agreement.
  • The benefit would be felt mostly in Asian countries with dirty air — 13 million lives would be saved in large cities in India alone, including the metropolitan areas of Kolkata, Delhi, Patna and Kanpur. Greater Dhaka in Bangladesh would have 3.6 million fewer deaths, and Jakarta in Indonesia would record 1.6 fewer lives lost. The African cities of Lagos and Cairo combined would register more than 2 million fewer deaths.
  • In the United States, the Clean Air Act has improved air quality over the years. Still, more than 330,000 lives in Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Detroit, Atlanta and Washington would be spared
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  • “Americans don’t really grasp how pollution impacts their lives,” said Drew Shindell, a professor of Earth science at Duke University and the study’s lead author. “You say, ‘My uncle went to the hospital and died of a heart attack.’ You don’t say the heart attack was caused by air pollution, so we don’t know. It’s still a big killer here. It’s much bigger than from people who die from plane crashes or war or terrorism, but we don’t see the link so clearly
  • The models calculated about 7 million deaths per year if governments fail to work toward zero emissions by the end of the century, starting today.
  • they “calculated the human health impacts of pollution exposure under each scenario all over the world — but focusing on results in major cities — using well-established epidemiological models based on decades of public health data on air-pollution related deaths,”
  • Shindell used an automaker’s problem with faulty ignition switches in 2014 to further illustrate his point. When the switches failed, more than 3 million recalls were involved and auto executives were summoned to Washington to testify before Congress. “But the combined tailpipes of automobiles kill dozens and dozens more people than faulty ignition switches,” the researcher said. “We should be far more worried about pollution than the things we actually worry about.
  • “There’s got to be a significant amount of progress within the 2020s or it’s too late,” Shindell said. Even for the researchers, it’s a pie-in-the-sky goal, given that South Asian nations such as India, where pollution is among the worst in the world, argue correctly that their per-capita use is small compared with historical use in the Western Hemisphere and that they should be allowed time to develop just as other countries did.
aleija

Opinion | The Senate's F-Bomb - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-filibuster-biden-manchin.html

Politics US opinion crisis

shared by aleija on 12 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • oe Biden’s big virus relief plan is about to become law. And the Senate has confirmed Merrick Garland as attorney general.“The president and his team must be thrilled that Senate Republicans are proving to be more fair and more principled on personnel matters than the Democratic minority’s behavior just four years ago,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell just before the Garland vote.
  • “It’s way too easy,” says Senator Jeff Merkley, an Oregon Democrat who’s been a long-running opponent of the filibuster as it stands today. His solution, which makes perfect sense, is that anybody who wants to stall the Senate by staging a filibuster should actually have to keep talking.
  • The Democrats have been waiting a long while to get through an agenda more exciting than not-going-bankrupt. One after another, Fallon predicted, legislation like the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act will make it through the House and then turn the Senate into a kind of “Kabuki theater,” where, thanks to the filibuster, “they bring up one bill after another and have them fail.”Finally, Democrats will be so exhausted they’ll demand some action. “If they can summon their nerve to do it before August recess. …” he mused hopefully.
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  • But hey, who’s bitter?Not Biden, who’s ready to move on to the rest of his agenda: immigration, climate change, education, infrastructure …
  • Or you can worry about filibusters. The only thing standing between Biden and real White House happiness is Republicans’ ability to demand 60 votes for passage of important legislation in a body that has 50 Democrats.
  • When it comes to something like the rules of the Senate, filibustering is a superstar. In our mind’s eye, we have a vision of an exhausting marathon in which a brave senator has the gumption to stand up and keep orating until his or her colleagues see the point.
  • The bottom line on the filibuster is that it’s really, really hard to get anything ambitious through the U.S. Senate. There are exceptions — like nominations. And, as we just saw, some money bills. And, the Republicans insist, tax cuts. But once we get past celebrating Biden’s big coronavirus victory, all those proposals on immigration, voting rights, the environment and protecting union organizers are going to run into a Republican demand that the 50 Democrats produce a 60-vote majority or throw in the towel.
Javier E

This Is What the Trump Abyss Looks Like - 0 views

nymag.com/...he-trump-abyss-looks-like.html

trump demagogue politics Culture authoritarian mob Democratic party

shared by Javier E on 27 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • there is a credible argument that, given soaring inequality, and globalization’s disproportionate impact on the middle classes and working poor, tax relief for many in the lower half of the earning population is a good idea. I agree. So why not give it to them, rather than the obscenely wealthy? And why not make it revenue-neutral or even debt-reducing as well as helpful to social stability?
  • You could indeed pay for big middle class tax cuts or an increase in tax credits for the working poor if you doubled the estate tax, or adding a new tax bracket - say, 45 percent - for those earning over $1 million a year. This would be a political master-stroke for the Trump administration (which is why Steve Bannon was rumored to favor something on these lines). It would instantly rebrand the GOP. It might even get buy-in from the Democrats. It could pass without using reconciliation rules in the Senate, thus helping entrench it in the system. It would help defuse our dangerous tribalism. It would do a lot to restore generational fairness, and counter the emergence of a rich caste of people who are fabulously wealthy for doing nothing. It would support work rather than privilege, a meritocracy rather than an oligarchy.
  • If the Democrats were smart, they would propose something like this themselves - and get ahead of the GOP, using it as a platform for 2018. And if the Republicans could abandon zombie Reaganism, they could rescue themselves from the electoral oblivion they so richly deserve. There’s a win-win here for both parties and the country.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • The key is to sustain a sense of the urgency of the moment, a resolute refusal to accept this descent into an illiberal authoritarianism, and a decision to put all our differences aside for a year in order to mobilize a turnout next year that eclipses Obama’s. We have to turn the mid-terms into a presidential election. Sane Republicans need to vote for the Democrat. Leftists have to put aside their divisive identity politics. Liberals need to coalesce around a simple strategy - not impeaching but checking Trump decisively.
  • the only reliable and sane solution is a massive mobilization of the anti-Trump majority at the polls next year. The huge Democratic fundraising advantage is encouraging; as are the new grass roots organizations that are going in strength. Maybe an unexpected leader from the left or center might emerge. Maybe a strong Democratic message that can somehow keep its minority edge and simultaneously re-engage the white Obama-Trump voters in the midwest.
  • He is the total master of an enormous mob that, so far, has completely overcome the elites. He achieves this mastery through incendiary oratory, hourly provocations, and relentless propaganda. His rallies are events of mass hysteria and rage. His propaganda machines - Fox News, Limbaugh, Breitbart, Drudge - rarely crack
  • And there is no one in our political life capable of matching this power. Name one, if you can. And when you look at the Democratic field of 2020, no one seems up to it at all. Among the few responsible Republicans left, what we see is either utter cowardice in the face of an enraged base, or the kind of courage that manifests itself too late to make a difference, which is to say no real courage at all.
  • this base support is unshakable. It is not susceptible to reason. No scandal, however great, will dislodge it - because he has invaded his followers’ minds and psyches as profoundly as he has the rest of ours. He is fused with them more deeply now, a single raging id, a force that helps us understand better how civilized countries can descend so quickly into barbarism.
  • In a country led by a swirling void, all sorts of inhibitions slowly slip away. Nativism, racism, nationalism: these are very potent catalysts of human darkness
  • by far the most important development in all this, the single essential rampart, is how, through all this, Trump has tightened his grip on 35 percent of the country. He has done this when he has succeeded but also critically when he has failed, because he has brilliantly turned his incapacity to be president into an asset with his base. No wall? Congress’ fault. Obamacare in place? The GOP’s fault. No tax cut? Ditto. The only way forward? A deeper and deeper trust in him. Only he can fix the Congress by purging it. Only he can fix the Courts through nominees who will never stand up to him.
  • And we know something after a year of this. It will go on. This is not a function of strategy or what we might ordinarily describe as will. It is because this president is so psychologically disordered he cannot behave in any other way. His emotions control his mind; his narcissism overwhelms even basic self-interest, let alone the interest of the country as a whole. He cannot unite the country, even if, somewhere in his fathomless vanity, he wants to. And he cannot stop this manic defense of ego because if he did, his very self would collapse.
  • This is why he lies and why he cannot admit a single one of them. He is psychologically incapable of accepting that he could be wrong and someone else could be right. His impulse - which he cannot control - is simply to assault the person who points out the error, or blame someone else for it.
  • Yes, the forms of the Constitution remain largely intact after nine months. But the norms that make the Constitution work are crumbling. The structure looks the same, but Trump has relentlessly attacked their foundations
katherineharron

What Matters: Here's what connects Covid denial and election denial - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

trump

shared by katherineharron on 10 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • There are two core strains of denialism apparent in mainstream America today: that the election was a fraud and that Covid doesn't exist.
  • What ties these lies together:President Donald Trump won't admit defeat in the election or missteps on Covid, creating a bedrock of inaccuracyThe democratization of information on the internet enables everyone to publish their thoughts, even if they're totally made upAs the country gets more tribal in its politics, people find satisfaction in blaming villains, regardless of facts.
  • Either Trump is spinning an alternate reality for followers who agree with him or he is just channeling and amplifying what he hears from them. Regardless, in his four years in office, he has totally normalized bad information.
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  • Climate change, the Russia investigation, his own impeachment, the election he won four years ago, President Barack Obama's birth certificate -- Trump's said so many things are hoaxes or fakes that he may personally not know what is real and what is imagined anymore.
  • Certainly the news Wednesday that President-elect Joe Biden's son Hunter is under investigation by US attorneys in Delaware over his business dealings with Chinese nationals will fuel renewed efforts to smear the President-elect through his son. Misinformation needs a kernel of truth to flourish. Here's what we actually know about the investigation into Hunter Biden.
  • Dr. Anthony Fauci complained Tuesday about trying to reach people in communities where hospitals are nearly overrun, but denialists stubbornly reject masks and social distancing.
  • The Supreme Court, which is controlled by conservatives, shut the door on Trump's election fraud fantasy and his efforts to get state legislators to bypass the voters have so far failed.
  • "The fact that the justices issued a one-sentence order with no separate opinions is a powerful sign that the court intends to stay out of election-related disputes, and that it's going to leave things to the electoral process going forward," CNN legal analyst Steve Vladeck said after the ruling.
  • The Texas lawsuit is concerned only with the ones in key states where Biden won, which has been described as hypocrisy, but that seems like not strong enough a word here.
  • If the Supreme Court's Pennsylvania ruling is any indication, this Texas suit is just the latest in a series of increasingly desperate last gasps as Trump hops from one dead-end lawsuit to the next.
  • The cliché descriptor for the internet is that the world's information is at our fingertips. Which is true. But it also means the world's misinformation is at our fingertips. If you want to make a lie seem legit, it's easy to find a handful of pieces of misinformation or out-of-context articles and videos to bolster pretty much any false narrative.
  • People have all different motivations for peddling misinformation. Sometimes it's political, sometimes financial, sometimes a mix of both -- and of course some people just share it and want to believe it because it confirms their biases. With Trump, for instance, his reasons for pushing misinformation are both political and financial -- he doesn't want to admit he lost and he is fundraising off the back of the lies.
  • a lot of Americans are dreaming of the post-Trump era where he fizzles out of their daily lives. I don't think that is going to happen on social media. Trump has too big a footprint.
  • He drives so much of the right-wing ecosystem and I still think he and his proxies, like his sons, are going to hold a lot of influence.
  • The covert nature of these operations means it's always hard to tell, but certainly the experts we have spoken to this year believe Russian trolls and their ilk have been amplifying existing divisive narratives in the US rather than creating their own
  • I think the problem is going to get worse before it gets better. It's depressing, but I think a lot of people do not want facts
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