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7 Ways the Printing Press Changed the World - HISTORY - 0 views

www.history.com/...printing-press-renaissance history
shared by brookegoodman on 26 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Knowledge is power, as the saying goes, and the invention of the mechanical movable type printing press helped disseminate knowledge wider and faster than ever before.
  • German goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg is credited with inventing the printing press around 1436
  • His greatest accomplishment was the first print run of the Bible in Latin, which took three years to print around 200 copies,
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  • Gutenberg died penniless, his presses impounded by his creditors.
  • Since literacy rates were still very low in the 1490s, locals would gather at the pub to hear a paid reader recite the latest news, which was everything from bawdy scandals to war reports.
  • Italian emissaries spent years in the Ottoman Empire learning enough Ancient Greek and Arabic to translate and copy rare texts into Latin.
  • but publishing the texts had been arduously slow and prohibitively expensive for anyone other than the richest of the rich.
  • As the legend goes, Luther nailed his “95 Theses” to the church door in Wittenberg on October 31, 1517. Palmer says that broadsheet copies of Luther’s document were being printed in London as quickly as 17 days later.
  • There’s a famous quote attributed to German religious reformer Martin Luther that sums up the role of the printing press in the Protestant Reformation: “Printing is the ultimate gift of God and the greatest one.”
  • The largest European library in 1300 was the university library of Paris, which had 300 total manuscripts.
  • Thanks to the printing press and the timely power of his message, Luther became the world’s first best-selling author.
  • Not only were handwritten copies of scientific data expensive and hard to come by, they were also prone to human error.
  • The people most willing to take risks and make the effort to be early adopters are those who had no voice before that technology existed.
  • As critical and alternative opinions entered the public discourse, those in power tried to censor it. Before the printing press, censorship was easy. All it required was killing the “heretic” and burning his or her handful of notebooks.
  • During the Enlightenment era, philosophers like John Locke, Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau were widely read among an increasingly literate populace.
  • Even the illiterate couldn’t resist the attraction of revolutionary Enlightenment authors, Palmer says.
  • The Industrial Revolution didn’t get into full swing in Europe until the mid-18th century, but you can make the argument that the printing press introduced the world to the idea of machines “stealing jobs” from workers.
  • Before Gutenberg’s paradigm-shifting invention, scribes were in high demand. Bookmakers would employ dozens of trained artisans to painstakingly hand-copy and illuminate manuscripts. But by the late 15th century, the printing press had rendered their unique skillset all but obsolete.
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'This is the golden age': eastern Europe's extraordinary 30-year revival | World news |... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-extraordinary-30-year-revival europe revival Eastern Europe economic
shared by Javier E on 27 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • The “shock therapy” reforms that speedily pushed Poland and other countries in the region into capitalism have come in for criticism, but Leszek Balcerowicz, the architect of Poland’s reforms, still believes they were the best option for the country in the circumstances. “If you move fast from a bad system to a better one, you release new forces for growth,
  • While communism left the region an economic basket case, it did also provide some of the seeds for growth: well-educated societies with low levels of inequality
  • Particularly in Poland, the transition led to a class of entrepreneurs like Grabski, rather than a small group of oligarchs. “We had the Solidarity movement in the factories and they were like a watchdog. So directors couldn’t go into shabby deals like in Russia,”
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  • crucially, unlike in Russia and Ukraine, central European countries largely avoided a situation where a few people walked off with the majority of the prized former state assets.
  • “Joining the EU was the key moment, not because of subsidies, but because of frameworks: anti-monopoly rules, environmental protection and so on,” says Grabski
  • In some countries in the region, these institutional frameworks are still under attack from governments, but the situation compared with neighbouring Ukraine, for example, where the courts, police and tax authorities are hopelessly dependent on political and big business interests, is incomparable
  • if there is one factory that symbolises both central Europe’s growth over the last three decades and the potential pitfalls going forward, it is not the Gdańsk shipyard but the Audi plant at Győr, in north-west Hungary.
  • Things took off when Hungary joined the EU in 2004 and could be integrated fully into the manufacturer’s supply chain. Today, Audi Hungaria is a modern-day capitalist version of a Soviet monogorod, or one-factory town. The vast complex on the outskirts of Győr is a set of nondescript white hangars linked by an internal road system, and the plant has its own restaurants, medical clinic, fire station and postal service.
  • Going forward, the key will be moving away from an economic model of western European countries outsourcing production to the east, and towards one that sees ideas and innovation developed inside the region. Only in this way, analysts say, will the countries of the region be able to fully close the gap in wealth and living standards with the other half of Europe. So far, however, there is little sign of the spending on research and development, or institutional reforms, that would be required for such a long-term shift
  • on average even the poorest parts of society are better off than they were 30 years ago, this is little comfort to those in former industrial areas or rural regions where there is an overwhelming sense of decay; indeed, that decay can feel ever more pressing when compared to the progress experienced in shinier areas
  • In the three decades since independence, the populations of all the region’s countries have shrunk. Latvia has lost more than a quarter of its population, Bulgaria and Romania around a fifth. With higher salaries a short and easy flight away, the process was inevitable. In parts of the region, this has led to chronic shortages of doctors and other skilled workers.
  • it’s worth acknowledging just how fast things have improved. Poland has moved from 25% of German income levels 30 years ago to 60% today. “You can’t expect Poles to completely catch up with Germans within one generation. It’s only natural for people to aspire to a good life as quickly as possible. But it’s just unrealistic for this to happen. The whole region has been the dark periphery of Europe for the last 1,000 years,”
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Opinion | China's New Civil Religion - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...chinas-religion-xi.html china religion history culture politics
shared by Javier E on 22 Dec 19 - No Cached
  • From the 19th century onward, China’s elites argued that the country’s traditions and faiths were a major reason for its decline. Reformers in 1898 called for temples to be converted into schools. While the Nationalist Party under Chiang Kai-shek approved of four religions — Buddhism, Taoism (sometimes called “Daoism”), Christianity and Islam — it largely considered traditional Chinese beliefs to be superstitions and advocated the destruction of temples.
  • Scholars estimate that by the middle of the 20th century, half of the temples that existed in China at the end of the 19th century had been destroyed. An 1851 survey of the old city of Beijing listed 866 temples; today, I count just 18. At the end of the 19th century, most villages had at least one temple and many had half a dozen; vast sections of the Chinese countryside now have no temples at all.
  • When the Communists took power in 1949, they, like the Nationalists, officially recognized four religions — but then promptly began persecuting them. Traditional faiths came under especially harsh treatment, with the government banning bedrock traditional practices, from worshiping ancestors and local deities to following the advice of geomancy masters and spirit mediums.
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  • The three decades of reform that started in the late 1970s loosened controls over society, allowing the revival of all religions and many traditions that had been proscribed
  • Xi Jinping’s rise to power in late 2012 marks a new era, the third, in the history of the Chinese Communist Party’s religious policies. Instead of the destruction of the Mao years and the relatively laissez-faire approach of the reform period, the state has embarked on a form of highly curated revivalism.
  • The state recently issued a landmark plan to improve social mores, the first such program since 2001.
  • in contrast to the previous such document from 2001 — which made only passing reference to Chinese traditions — it calls the past a “rich source of morality.” The plan orders party officials to promote “ancient and worthy sages,” as well as to “deeply expound” traditional concepts such as “ren’ai” (benevolence), “zhengyi” (righteousness) and “jianyi zhengwei” (standing up bravely for the truth).
  • This effort is not an attempt to replace Communism with Confucianism. Yet it is fair to say that for the first time since China’s imperial order collapsed in 1911, a central government is embracing the ideas that made up the political-religious order that ran China for much of the past 2,500 years
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Child Labor - HISTORY - 0 views

www.history.com/...child-labor history culture
shared by brookegoodman on 16 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • Although children had been servants and apprentices throughout most of human history, child labor reached new extremes during the Industrial Revolution
  • The new supply of child workers was matched by a tremendous expansion of American industry in the last quarter of the nineteenth century that increased the jobs suitable for children.
  • During the Great Depression, Americans wanted all available jobs to go to adults rather than children
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  • In colonial America, child labor was not a subject of controversy. It was an integral part of the agricultural and handicraft economy.
  • They could be paid lower wages, were more tractable and easily managed than adults, and were very difficult for unions to organize.
  • In 1900, 18 percent of all American workers were under the age of 16.
  • Children were useful as laborers because their size allowed them to move in small spaces in factories or mines where adults couldn’t fit, children were easier to manage and control and perhaps most importantly, children could be paid less than adults.
  • Despite these activities, success depended heavily on the political climate in the nation as well as developments that reduced the need or desirability of child labor.
  • ucational reformers of the mid-nineteenth century convinced many among the native-born population that primary school education was a necessity for both perso
  • Many laws restricting child labor were passed as part of the progressive reform movement of this period.
  • The Great Depression changed political attitudes in the United States significantly, and child labor reform benefited.
  • Although child labor has been substantially eliminated, it still poses a problem in a few areas of the economy.
  • Employers in the garment industry in New York City have turned to the children of illegal immigrants in an effort to compete with imports from low-wage nations.
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Putin is sending a message to the world with his shock announcement - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html putin politics
shared by johnsonel7 on 17 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • Earlier in the day, Vladimir Putin had announced his plan to push through reforms that would make his successor as president less powerful, by redistributing power in such a way that the Russian parliament and office of prime minister will have greater clout. He thanked the resigning members of the government for their service, but said that "not everything worked out."
  • In the last two years, Putin's approval ratings have taken a dip, partly a result of unpopular pension reforms and a stagnating economy. 2019 was also riddled with street protests over municipal elections as Russia's fragmented opposition expressed discontent with what they see as a president and the ruling elite that have overstayed their power.
  • Those changes appear to be a redistribution of power, giving parliament the power to appoint a prime minister, who will then appoint a cabinet to be approved by parliament. In Putin's own words: "In this case, the president will be obliged to appoint them; that is, he will not have the right to reject parliament-approved candidacies."The Russian constitution forbids Putin from standing for re-election as president in 2024. However, there is nothing stopping him from becoming prime minister, as he did in 2008, when he and Medvedev swapped roles for four years.
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  • By taking steps to tighten his grip on power, Putin is also sending a message to the wider world. More Putin in Russia means more Putin on the international stage. And if the last few years have taught us anything, that means a Russia willing to go to extraordinary lengths to act as a direct rival for influence to the US-led world order -- and create more headaches for America and its allies.
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Mikhail Mishustin: What we know about Russia's new prime minister - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html politics economics
shared by anniina03 on 17 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • He may not even have had an English-language Wikipedia page on Wednesday morning, but former tax official Mikhail Mishustin is now Russian prime minister.Russia's lower house of parliament, the State Duma, confirmed Mishustin's new role Thursday amid a major political shakeup.
  • Prior to his appointment, Mishustin served as the head of the Federal Tax Service, where he forged a reputation as a skilled technocrat who successfully reformed the country's fiscal system.
  • Mishustin is largely unknown to the Russian public and had previously showed little political ambition.
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  • Mishustin's appointment comes after previous prime minister Dmitry Medvedev, along with the entire Russian government, resigned Wednesday to clear the way for reforms that could potentially extend Putin's grip on power after his presidential term ends in 2024.
  • Putin has proposed constitutional amendments that would effectively strengthen the powers of the prime minister and parliament at the expense of the presidency -- weakening his successor in the process -- but the exact machinations behind the plan remain unclear.
  • "Mishustin -- this is digitalization, clarity, modern professionalism, decency, the elimination of barriers to legitimate activity, innovative solutions, openness to world technology while taking care of proper sovereignty ... hostility to violent power methods -- in short, everything that we need right now,"
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Opinion: Criminal justice reform can start with employers who give felons a second chan... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html Politics US crisis Culture policy history criminal-justice-reform racial-equality racism second-chance-hiring
shared by aidenborst on 04 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • We waste far too much human capital in a system that penalizes too many people for too long.
  • About 19 million Americans are burdened with a felony record, yet fewer than half of those transgressions were serious enough to require an actual prison sentence.
  • An improved criminal justice environment fosters prosperity and builds a society of stronger workers and consumers. For too long, the business community has had only a peripheral role in debates about how to reform our criminal justice system, but Corporate America should recognize that it has a strong business interest in the outcomes and must take a greater leadership role. It must embrace second chance hiring, the employment of people with criminal records.
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  • This is also critical if we are to overcome the demographic hurdles our labor market faces as Baby Boomers retire and the influx of Millennials slows.
  • The ugly truth of our criminal justice system is that one in three Black men in the United States has a felony record, putting them at a severe disadvantage.
  • Admirable commitments by companies to be more inclusive in hiring must be coupled with an intentional process for second chance hiring. My research has shown that "disposable employee" labor, in which the employer is trying to get the cheapest effective wage possible through minimum wage jobs that are subsidized by temporary tax credits (Work Opportunity Tax Credits), will not work because they do not adequately distinguish who is ready for reemployment nor do they make the sufficient investment to support rehabilitation.
  • Done right, second chance hiring that offers the needed training and support repays the required investment with loyal, productive and profitable employees (the upfront costs can even effectively be offset by tax credits). Without such an approach, our labor force cannot hope to reflect the diversity of our population.
  • Employment is foundational to rehabilitation for the millions of Americans with records and the more than 600,000 who exit prisons each year.
  • Even those businesses such as schools, defense contractors and financial institutions that have regulatory constraints on who they can hire have important roles to play. They can support education, reentry and workforce development nonprofits or advocate for policies that improve employment outcomes. 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Opinion | Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...oyd-abolish-defund-police.html police reform law enforcement violence
shared by Javier E on 13 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • The first thing to point out is that police officers don’t do what you think they do. They spend most of their time responding to noise complaints, issuing parking and traffic citations, and dealing with other noncriminal issues
  • We’ve been taught to think they “catch the bad guys; they chase the bank robbers; they find the serial killers,” said Alex Vitale, the coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College, in an interview with Jacobin. But this is “a big myth,” he said. “The vast majority of police officers make one felony arrest a year. If they make two, they’re cop of the month.”
  • Second, a “safe” world is not one in which the police keep black and other marginalized people in check through threats of arrest, incarceration, violence and death.
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  • here’s an immediate demand we can all make: Cut the number of police in half and cut their budget in half. Fewer police officers equals fewer opportunities for them to brutalize and kill people
  • After the 1967 urban uprisings, the Kerner Commission found that “police actions were ‘final’ incidents before the outbreak of violence in 12 of the 24 surveyed disorders.”
  • don’t get me wrong. We are not abandoning our communities to violence. We don’t want to just close police departments. We want to make them obsolete.
  • even a member of the task force, Tracey Meares, noted in 2017, “policing as we know it must be abolished before it can be transformed.”
  • The philosophy undergirding these reforms is that more rules will mean less violence. But police officers break rules all the time.
  • Minneapolis had instituted many of these “best practices” but failed to remove Derek Chauvin from the force despite 17 misconduct complaints over nearly two decades
  • The final report of the Obama administration’s President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing resulted in procedural tweaks like implicit-bias training, police-community listening sessions, slight alterations of use-of-force policies and systems to identify potentially problematic officers early on.
  • We can build other ways of responding to harms in our society. Trained “community care workers” could do mental-health checks if someone needs help. Towns could use restorative-justice models instead of throwing people in prison.
  • What about rape? The current approach hasn’t ended it. In fact most rapists never see the inside of a courtroom. Two-thirds of people who experience sexual violence never report it to anyone.
  • In 2015, The Buffalo News found that an officer was caught for sexual misconduct every five days
  • When people, especially white people, consider a world without the police, they envision a society as violent as our current one, merely without law enforcement — and they shudder
  • As a society, we have been so indoctrinated with the idea that we solve problems by policing and caging people that many cannot imagine anything other than prisons and the police as solutions to violence and harm.
  • People like me who want to abolish prisons and police, however, have a vision of a different society, built on cooperation instead of individualism, on mutual aid instead of self-preservation.
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The Chomsky Position On Voting ❧ Current Affairs - 0 views

www.currentaffairs.org/...the-chomsky-position-on-voting voting lesser of two evils analysis politics
shared by Javier E on 20 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • getting Joe Biden elected is important for the left, for reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with Biden’s own politics. If Donald Trump is reelected, the chance of serious climate action dwindles to nothing, while there is at least a chance of compelling Biden to actually act on his climate platform. It will not be easy. At every turn the Democratic Party will try to compromise and take measures that are symbolic rather than substantive. But there is a conceivable strategy. 
  • Understandably, many leftists are not terribly pleased by the prospect of having to vote for Joe Biden, a man who has shown contempt for them and their values, and has a documented history of predatory behavior towards women. But when voting is considered in terms of its consequences rather than as an expressive act, our personal opinions of Joe Biden become essentially irrelevant. If, under the circumstances we find ourselves in, a Biden presidency is a precondition for any form of left political success, and there are no other options, then we must try to bring it about
  • Isn’t supporting “the lesser of two evils” still supporting evil? Why should I help someone get into office who has shown no willingness to support my policies, who feels entitled to my vote, who is not going to do anything to woo me?
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  • In that election, awful as the choices were, it was necessary to support Edwards. Bumper stickers read “Vote For The Crook: It’s Important.”
  • Reed used this example to show why voting for Clinton was so necessary in a race against Donald Trump, regardless of Clinton’s long record of terrible policies. “Vote for the lying neoliberal warmonger,” Reed said. “It’s important.”
  • He, and many other famous leftists like Angela Davis, Noam Chomsky, and Cornel West, are saying the same thing this time around. “An anti-fascist vote for Biden is in no way an affirmation of Neoliberal politics,” West commented.
  • Some people on the left find this argument very difficult to stomach, though. In a recent conversation on the Bad Faith podcast, Briahna Joy Gray and Virgil Texas debated Chomsky about his stance.
  • In response to the “vote Biden to stop Trump” argument, they and others ask questions like the following:  But if we are willing to vote for the Democrat no matter how awful they are, what incentive will the Democratic party have to ever get better? How are we ever going to get better candidates if we don’t have some standards? Is there really no one we wouldn’t support, if they were the “lesser evil”?
  • while they are important, they can also seem strange if we examine how they would sound in other contexts. After all, think back to David Duke in 1991. Or the German election of 1932. Would it have seemed reasonable, faced with a Klan governorship, to ask: “But if I vote for Edwards, won’t I be incentivizing corruption? Isn’t the lesser evil still evil? Shouldn’t I demand Edwards stop being corrupt before I give him my vote?”
  • It’s also a mistake to think that the decision about whether or not to vote for Democrats in a general election can operate as an effective form of political pressure on Democrats. The mainstream Democratic Party does not see losing elections as a sign that it needs to do more to excite its left flank. John Kerry did not look at the 2000 election and think “My God, I need to work hard to appeal to Nader voters.”
  • The answers to these questions are: (1) maybe, but it doesn’t matter in the situation we’re currently in (2) yes (3) no, because if he declines to stop being corrupt, you’re still going to have to give him your vote, because the alternative is putting a Klansman in office, and “do unlikely thing X or I will help white supremacists win, or at least not work to stop them” is an insane threat to make.
  • The easy way to avoid being troubled by having to vote for people you loathe is to give less importance to the act of voting itself. Don’t treat voting as an expression of your deepest and truest values
  • Don’t let the decision about who to vote for be an agonizing moral question. Just look at the question of which outcome out of the ones available would be marginally more favorable, and vote to bring about that outcome
  • if faced with two bad candidates, forget for the moment about the virtues of the candidates themselves and look only at the consequences for the issues you care about.
  • Voting can have immensely important consequences—the narrow 2000 election put a warmongering lunatic in power and resulted in a colossal amount of unnecessary human suffering.
  • The mainstream (I would call it “propagandistic”) view of political participation is that you participate in politics through voting. But instead, we’re better off thinking of voting as a harm-reduction chore we have to do every few years.
  • (Reed compares it to cleaning the toilet—not pleasant but if you don’t hold your nose and get on with it the long-term consequences will be unbearable.) Most of our political energy should be focused elsewhere. 
  • Reed used an illuminating comparison to explain why it was so important in 2016 to vote for Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump. In the 1991 Louisiana gubernatorial primary, the Republican candidate was former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke. The Democratic candidate was the infamously corrupt Edwin Edwards, who would ultimately end his career in prison on charges of racketeering, extortion, money laundering, mail fraud, and wire fraud. It’s hard to imagine anyone you could possibly trust less in public office than Edwin Edwards… except David Duke.
  • it overemphasizes the role of “deciding who to vote for in the general election” as a tool of politics. One way to get better Democrats in general elections is to run better candidates and win primaries. Another would be to build an actually powerful left with the ability to coordinate mass direct action and shape the political landscape
  • the general election vote itself is not how we effectively exercise pressure, in part because it would be unconscionable to actually go through with anything that made Donald Trump’s win more probable. The threat not to vote for Biden is either an empty one (a bluff) or an indefensible one (because it’s threatening to set the world on fire).
  • The conversation between Chomsky, Gray, and Texas frustrated everyone involved, as these conversations often do. Essentially, for most of the hour, Gray and Texas asked variations of the same question, and Chomsky offered variations of the same answer. They appeared to think he was ignoring the question and he appeared to think they were ignoring the answer.
  • The question that is on the ballot on November third,” as Chomsky said, is the reelection of Donald Trump. It is a simple up or down: do we want Trump to remain or do we want to get rid of him? If we do not vote for Biden, we are increasing Trump’s chances of winning. Saying that we will “withhold our vote” if Biden does not become more progressive, Chomsky says, amounts to saying “if you don’t put Medicare For All on your platform, I’m going to vote for Trump… If I don’t get what I want, I’m going to help the worst possible candidate into office—I think that’s crazy.” 
  • In fact, because Trump’s reelection would mean “total cataclysm” for the climate, “all these other issues don’t arise” unless we defeat him. Chomsky emphasizes preventing the most catastrophic consequences of climate change as the central issue, and says that the difference between Trump and Biden on climate—one denies it outright and wants to destroy all progress made so far in slowing emissions, the other has an inadequate climate plan that aims for net-zero emissions by 2050—is significant enough to make electing Biden extremely important.
  • This does not mean voting for Biden is a vote to solve the climate crisis; it means without Biden in office, there is no chance of solving the crisis.
  • TEXAS: If these capitalist institutions result in recurring ecological crisis, and existential ones, as they do, then isn’t the real fight against those institutions instead of a reform that maybe gets us over the hump in 30 years
  • CHOMSKY: Think for a second. Think about time scales. We have maybe a decade or two to deal with the environmental crisis. Is there the remotest chance that within a decade or two we’ll overthrow capitalism? It’s not even a dream, okay? So the point that you’re raising is basically irrelevant. Of course let’s work to try to overthrow capitalism. It’s not going to happen *snaps fingers* like that. There’s a lot of work involved. Meanwhile we have an imminent question: are we going to preserve the possibility for organized human society to survive?
  • The important point here is that the question is not whether we attack capitalist institutions “instead of” reforms. The reforms are necessary in the short term; you fight like hell to force the ruling elite to stop destroying the earth as best you can even as you pursue larger long-term structural goals.
  • Gray and Texas note to Chomsky that for people who are struggling in their daily lives, climate may seem a somewhat abstract issue, and it may be hard to motivate them to get to the polls when the issue is something so detached from their daily reality. Chomsky replied that “as an activist, it is your job to make them care.”
  • Some have pointed out a tension in Chomsky’s position: on the one hand, he consistently describes voting as a relatively trivial act that we should not think too much about or spend much time on. On the other hand, he says the stakes of elections are incredibly high and that the future of “organized human life” and the fate of one’s grandchildren could depend on the outcome of the 2020 election.
  • There’s no explicit contradiction between those two positions: voting can be extremely consequential, and it can be necessary to do it, but it can still be done (relatively) briefly and without much agonizing and deliberation.
  • However, if the presidential election is so consequential, can we be justified in spending only the time on it that it takes to vote? Surely if we believe Trump imperils the future of Earth, we should not just be voting for Biden, but be phone-banking and knocking doors for him. Well, I actually think it might well be true that we should be doing that, reluctant as I am to admit it.
  • I actually asked Chomsky about this, and he said that he does believe it’s important to persuade as many people as possible, which is why at the age of 91 he is spending his time and energy trying to convince people to “vote against Trump” instead of sitting by a pool and hanging out with his grandkids
  • one thing is evident: if we want to look toward electoral strategies for change, it had better be mass-based oppositional models like the Bernie campaign, not third-party protest candidacies or the threat of nonvoting
  • The question of how to win power does not have easy answers. What to do from now until November 3rd is, however, easy; what to do afterwards is much, much more complicated no matter who wins. But political activism is not an untested endeavor. We can study how social movements set goals and win them.
  • Noam Chomsky’s view of electoral politics is, I believe, a sensible one. In fact, it’s not his; as he says, it’s the “traditional left view,” just one that we’ve lost clarity on
  • People mistakenly assume that by saying “vote against Trump,” Chomsky is putting too much stock in the power of voting and is insufficiently cynical about the Democratic Party. In fact, it’s completely the opposite: he puts very little stock in voting and is perhaps even more cynical about the Democrats than his critics, which is why he doesn’t think it’s surprising or interesting that Biden is offering the left almost nothing and the party is treating voters with contempt.
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Opinion | How Long Can Democracy Survive QAnon and Its Allies? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...democracy-qanon.html electoral system democracy government US reform
shared by Javier E on 10 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • “The central weakness of our political system now is the Republican Party,” Daniel Ziblatt, a political scientist at Harvard, said in an interview with Vox on Jan. 13, a week after the storming of the Capitol.
  • “The American Republican Party looks like a European far-right party,” Ziblatt continued. “But the big difference between the U.S. and a lot of these European countries is that the U.S. only has two parties and one of them is like a European far-right party. If the G.O.P. only controlled 20 percent of the legislature, like you see in a lot of European countries, this would be far less problematic — but they basically control half of it.”
  • A central question, then, is how distant from the rest of the American electorate the voters who align themselves with the radical wing of the Republican Party are.
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  • They found that “at least 60 percent of them are white, Christian and male. Further, around half are retired, over 65 years of age, and earn at least $50K per year. Finally, roughly 30 percent have at least a college degree.” More than 50 percent were born at a time of white hegemony, before the civil rights and women’s rights movements and the sexual revolution.
  • whether Trump “bears responsibility for the Capitol riot.” They found that “barely 30 percent of these respondents believe Trump bears any responsibility whatsoever,” and, of those, more than half said Trump bears “a little” responsibility.
  • Not only are these voters partisan, the authors note, but “when we asked our respondents about whether or not they agreed with Trump’s fraud claims, 98 percent believed them valid.”
  • “75 percent of Americans believe that Trump bears at least some responsibility” for the Jan. 6 mob attack on Congress. Among all Republicans, “this figure declines significantly to 52 percent.”
  • These MAGA supporters, who were recruited after signaling sympathy for the movement on Facebook, were rock-solid Republicans, Blum and Parker found, voting at or near 100 percent for the party’s House and Senate candidates in 2018 and 2020, and for Trump last year. They are far more engaged in politics — contributing money, going to meetings and volunteering — than the average American. “By any metric, this group appears committed to the political process,” Blum and Parker wrote.
  • Should Trump be “charged with the crime of inciting a riot?” All adults: yes 54, no 43. Republicans: yes 12, no 84.
  • Along similar lines, a Washington Post/ABC News survey taken Jan. 10-13 demonstrated how the views of a majority of Republicans stand far apart from the views of a majority of Americans.
  • Asked if Trump has acted “responsibly” or “irresponsibly” since the Nov. 3 election, the 1002 adults polled chose “irresponsibly” by 66-30. Republicans, in contrast, chose “responsibly” by 66-29.
  • It would come at a cost: more government instability as potential coalition allies jockey over cabinet posts, a particular issue or a budget item. It would also give the far ends of the political spectrum continuous formal representation in the political system. The Trumps could more easily realize their goal of becoming the Le Pens of America.
  • Using their accusations almost as a lingua franca, a way to identify the like-minded, MAGA partisans and followers of QAnon signal one another by alleging that pedophile rings seek to wrest control of government or by alleging that school shootings were staged by leftists to win passage of gun control. They evoke a world in which unknown forces pull the levers of government, where nothing is as it seems to be. Professing your belief in claims like these attests to MAGA loyalties while expressing — in an arcane, politicized shorthand — your fervent opposition to liberalism and racial and cultural change
  • In contrast, they wrote, “roughly 95 percent of MAGA supporters believe Antifa — the left wing protest group — bears some responsibility for the riots,” with more than 85 percent agreeing that Antifa bears “a great deal” or “a lot” of responsibility.
  • Drutman wrote that he has “come to realize how much of an existential threat the current Republican Party is to the continuation of America democracy.” A two-party democracy cannot survive “for very long if one of two dominant parties gives up on the foundational institution of democracy: free and fair elections, in which all votes count equally.”
  • I’ve also come to appreciate how much democracy depends on a conservative party that believes in democracy, and thus how important it is to create electoral institutions in this moment that will allow the currently-marginalized small “l” liberal Republicans to separate from the MAGA wing of the party and still win some representation in the Congress.
  • Proportional representation, he argued “is the only way to break up the current Republican coalition and free the pro-democracy forces within the Republican Party to compete on their own.”
  • Representative Don Beyer, Democrat of Virginia, plans to reintroduce The Fair Representation Act, which would, if enacted, put into place many of the reforms Drutman supports. Beyer wrote on his website that the measurewould move U.S. House elections into multi-member districts drawn by independent redistricting commissions and elected through ranked choice voting. The multi-member districts would be effective in states apportioned six or more seats in the House, and would elect three to five Representatives each, depending on the size of the state. Taken together, these three measures would incentivize congressional candidates to appeal to a broader range of voters.
  • Pippa Norris, a political scientist at Harvard who examined different levels of dissatisfaction in democratic countries in “Is Western Democracy Backsliding?” finds evidence supportive of Drutman’s argument:Parliamentary democracies with PR elections and stable multiparty coalition governments, typical of the Nordic region, generate a broader consensus about welfare policies addressing inequality, exclusion, and social justice, and this avoids the adversarial winner-take-all divisive politics and social inequality more characteristic of majoritarian systems.
  • I would prefer ranked-choice voting with some multi-member districts for state and national legislatures, and proportional representation (by state popular vote, not by Congressional district which are already gerrymandered) for the Electoral College.” These, she wrote, “could all be accomplished with just legislative change, no constitutional amendments.
  • Stephen Ansolabehere, a political scientist at Harvard, said by email that “a PR system would be political suicide for the parties.” Why, he asked, “would either party — let alone both — want to change?”
  • Several political scholars and strategists argue that the fault lies in our political system, that the unique way America has combined its government structure with the mechanics of its elections serves to exacerbate conflict in a deeply polarized country. These scholars have produced a variety of proposals, many involving the creation of multi-member congressional districts and the encouragement of proportional representation to replace the current single district, winner-take-all system.
  • a separate 2019 survey by Echelon Insights, a survey research firm, that asked voters “Suppose the Democratic and Republican Parties were replaced by a new set of political parties. Which of these parties would you be most likely to support?”
  • A center-left party committed to putting “the middle class first, pass universal health insurance, strengthen labor unions, and raise taxes on the wealthy to support programs for those less well off” amassed 28 percent.A green party with a platform calling for passage of “a Green New Deal to build a carbon-free economy with jobs for all, break up big corporations, end systemic inequality, and promote social and economic justice” picked up 10 percent.
  • A traditional-right party, committed to “defend the American system of free enterprise, promote traditional family,” won 21 percent.A culturally liberal and globalist party with a platform committed to “advance social progress including women’s rights and LGBTQ rights, to work with other countries through free trade and diplomacy, to cut the deficit, and reform capitalism with sensible regulation” gathered 12 percent.
  • The firm gave respondents five choices,A nationalist-right party promising to “stop illegal immigration, put America First, stand up to political correctness” attracted 19 percent.
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The Land That Failed to Fail - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...china-rules.html Politics US policy
shared by kaylynfreeman on 20 Nov 18 - No Cached
  • China now leads the world in the number of homeowners, internet users, college graduates and, by some counts, billionaires. Extreme poverty has fallen to less than 1 percent. An isolated, impoverished backwater has evolved into the most significant rival to the United States since the fall of the Soviet Union.
  • in Beijing the question these days is less how to catch up with the West than how to pull ahead — and how to do so in a new era of American hostility
  • The pattern is familiar to historians, a rising power challenging an established one, with a familiar complication: For decades, the United States encouraged and aided China’s rise, working with its leaders and its people to build the most important economic partnership in the world, one that has lifted both nations.
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  • During this time, eight American presidents assumed, or hoped, that China would eventually bend to what were considered the established rules of modernization: Prosperity would fuel popular demands for political freedom and bring China into the fold of democratic nations. Or the Chinese economy would falter under the weight of authoritarian rule and bureaucratic rot.
  • China’s Communist leaders have defied expectations again and again. They embraced capitalism even as they continued to call themselves Marxists. They used repression to maintain power but without stifling entrepreneurship or innovation. Surrounded by foes and rivals, they avoided war, with one brief exception, even as they fanned nationalist sentiment at home. And they presided over 40 years of uninterrupted growth, often with unorthodox policies the textbooks said would fail.
  • There is no simple explanation for how China’s leaders pulled this off. There was foresight and luck, skill and violent resolve, but perhaps most important was the fear — a sense of crisis among Mao’s successors that they never shook, and that intensified after the Tiananmen Square massacre and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
  • China’s Communists studied and obsessed over the fate of their old ideological allies in Moscow, determined to learn from their mistakes. They drew two lessons: The party needed to embrace “reform” to survive — but “reform” must never include democratization.
  • China has veered between these competing impulses ever since, between opening up and clamping down, between experimenting with change and resisting it, always pulling back before going too far in either direction for fear of running aground.
  • The careers of these men from Moganshan highlight an important aspect of China’s success: It turned its apparatchiks into capitalists.
  • Party leaders called this go-slow, experimental approach “crossing the river by feeling the stones” — allowing farmers to grow and sell their own crops, for example, while retaining state ownership of the land; lifting investment restrictions in “special economic zones,” while leaving them in place in the rest of the country; or introducing privatization by selling only minority stakes in state firms at first.
  • Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, tried to break the hold of these bureaucrats on the economy by opening up the political system. Decades later, Chinese officials still take classes on why that was a mistake. The party even produced a documentary series on the subject in 2006, distributing it on classified DVDs for officials at all levels to watch.
  • Afraid to open up politically but unwilling to stand still, the party found another way. It moved gradually and followed the pattern of the compromise at Moganshan, which left the planned economy intact while allowing a market economy to flourish and outgrow it.
  • American economists were skeptical. Market forces needed to be introduced quickly, they argued; otherwise, the bureaucracy would mobilize to block necessary changes. After a visit to China in 1988, the Nobel laureate Milton Friedman called the party’s strategy “an open invitation to corruption and inefficiency.”
  • The United States and Japan, both routinely vilified by party propagandists, became major trading partners and were important sources of aid, investment and expertise
  • At the same time, the party invested in education, expanding access to schools and universities, and all but eliminating illiteracy
  • mainland China now produces more graduates in science and engineering every year than the United States, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan combined.
  • In cities like Shanghai, Chinese schoolchildren outperform peers around the world. For many parents, though, even that is not enough. Because of new wealth, a traditional emphasis on education as a path to social mobility and the state’s hypercompetitive college entrance exam, most students also enroll in after-school tutoring programs — a market worth $125 billion, according to one study, or as much as half the government’s annual military budget.
  • party made changes after Mao’s death that fell short of free elections or independent courts yet were nevertheless significant
  • The party introduced term limits and mandatory retirement ages, for example, making it easier to flush out incompetent officials. And it revamped the internal report cards it used to evaluate local leaders for promotions and bonuses, focusing them almost exclusively on concrete economic targets.
  • These seemingly minor adjustments had an outsize impact, injecting a dose of accountability — and competition — into the political system, said Yuen Yuen Ang, a political scientist at the University of Michigan. “China created a unique hybrid,” she said, “an autocracy with democratic characteristics.”
  • They were rewarded with soaring tax revenues and opportunities to enrich their friends, their relatives and themselves. A wave of officials abandoned the state and went into business. Over time, the party elite amassed great wealth, which cemented its support for the privatization of much of the economy it once controlled.
  • The private sector now produces more than 60 percent of the nation’s economic output, employs over 80 percent of workers in cities and towns, and generates 90 percent of new jobs
  • the bureaucrats stay out of the way. “I basically don’t see them even once a year,” said James Ni, chairman and founder of Mlily, a mattress manufacturer in eastern China. “I’m creating jobs, generating tax revenue. Why should they bother me?”
  • even as he wraps himself in Deng’s legacy, Mr. Xi has set himself apart in an important way: Deng encouraged the party to seek help and expertise overseas, but Mr. Xi preaches self-reliance and warns of the threats posed by “hostile foreign forces.
  • China tapped into a wave of globalization sweeping the world and emerged as the world’s factory. China’s embrace of the internet, within limits, helped make it a leader in technology. And foreign advice helped China reshape its banks, build a legal system and create modern corporations.
  • It was a remarkable act of reinvention, one that eluded the Soviets. In both China and the Soviet Union, vast Stalinist bureaucracies had smothered economic growth, with officials who wielded unchecked power resisting change that threatened their privileges.
  • Mr. Lin was part of a torrent of investment from ethnic Chinese enclaves in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and beyond that washed over China — and gave it a leg up on other developing countries
  • The timing worked out for China, which opened up just as Taiwan was outgrowing its place in the global manufacturing chain. China benefited from Taiwan’s money, but also its managerial experience, technology and relationships with customers around the world. In effect, Taiwan jump-started capitalism in China and plugged it into the global economy.
  • Before long, the government in Taiwan began to worry about relying so much on its onetime enemy and tried to shift investment elsewhere. But the mainland was too cheap, too close and, with a common language and heritage, too familiar.
  • Now Taiwan finds itself increasingly dependent on a much more powerful China, which is pushing ever harder for unification, and the island’s future is uncertain
  • Many in Washington predicted that trade would bring political change. It did, but not in China. “Opening up” ended up strengthening the party’s hold on power rather than weakening it. The shock of China’s rise as an export colossus, however, was felt in factory towns around the world.
  • In the United States, economists say at least two million jobs disappeared as a result, many in districts that ended up voting for President Trump.
  • The pro-democracy movement in 1989 was the closest the party ever came to political liberalization after Mao’s death, and the crackdown that followed was the furthest it went in the other direction, toward repression and control. After the massacre, the economy stalled and retrenchment seemed certain. Yet three years later, Deng used a tour of southern China to wrestle the party back to “reform and opening up” once more. Many who had left the government, like Mr. Feng, suddenly found themselves leading the nation’s transformation from the outside, as its first generation of private entrepreneurs.
  • The fear is that Mr. Xi is attempting to rewrite the recipe behind China’s rise, replacing selective repression with something more severe.
  • The internet is an example of how it has benefited by striking a balance. The party let the nation go online with barely an inkling of what that might mean, then reaped the economic benefits while controlling the spread of information that could hurt it.
  • “The basic problem is, who is growth for?” said Mr. Xu, the retired official who wrote the Moganshan report. “We haven’t solved this problem.”
  • “The cost of censorship is quite limited compared to the great value created by the internet,” said Chen Tong, an industry pioneer. “We still get the information we need for economic progress.”
  • China is not the only country that has squared the demands of authoritarian rule with the needs of free markets. But it has done so for longer, at greater scale and with more convincing results than any other.
  • Washington is maneuvering to counter Beijing’s growing influence around the world, warning that a Chinese spending spree on global infrastructure comes with strings attached.
  • both left and right in America have portrayed China as the champion of an alternative global order, one that embraces autocratic values and undermines fair competition. It is a rare consensus for the United States, which is deeply divided about so much else, including how it has wielded power abroad in recent decades — and how it should do so now.
  • Mr. Xi, on the other hand, has shown no sign of abandoning what he calls “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” Some in his corner have been itching to take on the United States since the 2008 financial crisis and see the Trump administration’s policies as proof of what they have always suspected — that America is determined to keep China down.
  • there is also widespread anxiety over the new acrimony, because the United States has long inspired admiration and envy in China, and because of a gnawing sense that the party’s formula for success may be faltering.
  • Prosperity has brought rising expectations in China; the public wants more than just economic growth. It wants cleaner air, safer food and medicine, better health care and schools, less corruption and greater equality. The party is struggling to deliver, and tweaks to the report cards it uses to measure the performance of officials hardly seem enough.
  • Now, many companies assign hundreds of employees to censorship duties — and China has become a giant on the global internet landscape.
  • Mr. Xi himself has acknowledged that the party must adapt, declaring that the nation is entering a “new era” requiring new methods. But his prescription has largely been a throwback to repression, including vast internment camps targeting Muslim ethnic minorities. “Opening up” has been replaced by an outward push, with huge loans that critics describe as predatory and other efforts to gain influence — or interfere — in the politics of other countries. At home, experimentation is out while political orthodoxy and discipline are in.
  • n effect, Mr. Xi seems to believe that China has been so successful that the party can return to a more conventional authoritarian posture — and that to survive and surpass the United States it must
  • Certainly, the momentum is still with the party. Over the past four decades, economic growth in China has been 10 times faster than in the United States, and it is still more than twice as fast. The party appears to enjoy broad public support, and many around the world are convinced that Mr. Trump’s America is in retreat while China’s moment is just beginning
  • The world thought it could change China, and in many ways it has. But China’s success has been so spectacular that it has just as often changed the world — and the American understanding of how the world works.
  • There is no simple explanation for how China’s leaders pulled this off. There was foresight and luck, skill and violent resolve, but perhaps most important was the fear — a sense of crisis among Mao’s successors that they never shook, and that intensified after the Tiananmen Square massacre and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
  • But China had a strange advantage in battling bureaucratic resistance. The nation’s long economic boom followed one of the darkest chapters of its history, the Cultural Revolution, which decimated the party apparatus and left it in shambles. In effect, autocratic excess set the stage for Mao’s eventual successor, Deng Xiaoping, to lead the party in a radically more open direction.
  • In other words, he appears to have less use for the “opening up” part of Deng’s slogan.
  • Now Mr. Xi is steering the party toward repression again, tightening its grip on society, concentrating power in his own hands and setting himself up to rule for life by abolishing the presidential term limit. Will the party loosen up again, as it did a few years after Tiananmen, or is this a more permanent shift? If it is, what will it mean for the Chinese economic miracle?
  • The question now is whether it can sustain this model with the United States as an adversary rather than a partner.
  • kaylynfreeman on 08 Feb 21
     
    "In effect, Mr. Xi seems to believe that China has been so successful that the party can return to a more conventional authoritarian posture - and that to survive and surpass the United States it must. Certainly, the momentum is still with the party. Over the past four decades, economic growth in China has been 10 times faster than in the United States, and it is still more than twice as fast. The party appears to enjoy broad public support, and many around the world are convinced that Mr. Trump's America is in retreat while China's moment is just beginning"
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Andrew Sullivan: You Say You Want A Revolution? - 0 views

nymag.com/...say-you-want-a-revolution.html revolution iconoclasm woke Cultural Revolution Mao Jacobin cultural repression illiberal orwell extremism
shared by Javier E on 20 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • One of the things you know if you were brought up as a Catholic in a Protestant country, as I was, is how the attempted extirpation of England’s historic Catholic faith was enforced not just by executions, imprisonments, and public burnings but also by the destruction of monuments, statues, artifacts, paintings, buildings, and sacred sculptures. The shift in consciousness that the religious revolution required could not be sustained by words or terror alone. The new regime — an early pre-totalitarian revolution imposed from the top down — had to remove all signs of what had come before.
  • The impulse for wiping the slate clean is universal. Injustices mount; moderation seems inappropriate; radicalism wins and then tries to destroy the legacy of the past as a whole.
  • for true revolutionary potential, it’s helpful if these monuments are torn down by popular uprisings. That adds to the symbolism of a new era, even if it also adds to the chaos. That was the case in Mao’s Cultural Revolution, when the younger generation, egged on by the regime, went to work on any public symbols or statues they deemed problematically counterrevolutionary, creating a reign of terror that even surpassed France’s.
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  • Mao’s model is instructive in another way. It shows you what happens when a mob is actually quietly supported by elites, who use it to advance their own goals. The Red Guards did what they did — to their friends, and parents, and teachers — in the spirit of the Communist regime itself.
  • bram X. Kendi, the New York Times best seller who insists that everyone is either racist or anti-racist, now has a children’s book to indoctrinate toddlers on one side of this crude binary
  • Revolutionary moments also require public confessions of iniquity by those complicit in oppression.
  • These now seem to come almost daily. I’m still marveling this week at the apology the actress Jenny Slate gave for voicing a biracial cartoon character. It’s a classic confession of counterrevolutionary error: “I acknowledge how my original reasoning was flawed and that it existed as an example of white privilege and unjust allowances made within a system of societal white supremacy … Ending my portrayal of ‘Missy’ is one step in a life-long process of uncovering the racism in my actions.” For Slate to survive in her career, she had to go full Cersei in her walk of shame.
  • They murdered and tortured, and subjected opponents to public humiliations — accompanied by the gleeful ransacking of religious and cultural sites. In their attack on the Temple of Confucius, almost 7,000 priceless artifacts were destroyed. By the end of the revolution, almost two-thirds of Beijing’s historical sites had been destroyed in a frenzy of destruction against “the four olds: old customs, old habits, old culture, and old ideas.” Mao first blessed, then reined in these vandals.
  • take this position voiced on Twitter by a chemistry professor at Queen’s University in Canada this week: “Here’s the thing: If whatever institution you are a part of is not COMPLETELY representative of the population you can draw from, you can draw only two conclusions. 1) Bias against the underrepresented groups exists or 2) the underrepresented groups are inherently less qualified.”
  • Other factors — such as economics or culture or individual choice or group preference — are banished from consideration.
  • Revolutions also encourage individuals to take matters in their own hands. The distinguished liberal philosopher Michael Walzer recently noted how mutual social policing has a long and not-so-lovely history — particularly in post–Reformation Europe, in what he has called “the revolution of the saints.”
  • Revolutionaries also create new forms of language to dismantle the existing order. Under Mao, “linguistic engineering” was integral to identifying counterrevolutionaries, and so it is today.
  • The use of the term “white supremacy” to mean not the KKK or the antebellum South but American society as a whole in the 21st century has become routine on the left, as if it were now beyond dispute.
  • The word “women,” J.K. Rowling had the temerity to point out, is now being replaced by “people who menstruate.”
  • The word “oppression” now includes not only being herded into Uighur reeducation camps but also feeling awkward as a sophomore in an Ivy League school.
  • The word “racist,” which was widely understood quite recently to be prejudicial treatment of an individual based on the color of their skin, now requires no intent to be racist in the former sense, just acquiescence in something called “structural racism,” which can mean any difference in outcomes among racial groupings. Being color-blind is therefore now being racist.
  • And there is no escaping this. The woke shift their language all the time, so that words that were one day fine are now utterly reprehensible.
  • You can’t keep up — which is the point. (A good resource for understanding this new constantly changing language of ideology is “Translations From the Wokish.”) The result is an exercise of cultural power through linguistic distortion.
  • So, yes, this is an Orwellian moment
  • It’s not a moment of reform but of a revolutionary break, sustained in part by much of the liberal Establishment.
  • Even good and important causes, like exposing and stopping police brutality, can morph very easily from an exercise in overdue reform into a revolutionary spasm. There has been much good done by the demonstrations forcing us all to understand better how our fellow citizens are mistreated by the agents of the state or worn down by the residue of past and present inequality.
  • But the zeal and certainty of its more revolutionary features threaten to undo a great deal of that goodwill.
  • The movement’s destruction of even abolitionist statues, its vandalism of monuments to even George Washington, its crude demonization of figures like Jefferson, its coerced public confessions, its pitiless wreckage of people’s lives and livelihoods, its crude ideological Manichaeanism, its struggle sessions and mandated anti-racism courses, its purging of cultural institutions of dissidents, its abandonment of objective tests in higher education (replacing them with quotas and a commitment to ideology), and its desire to upend a country’s sustained meaning and practices are deeply reminiscent of some very ugly predecessors.
  • But the erasure of the past means a tyranny of the present. In the words of Orwell, a truly successful ideological revolution means that “every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
  • We are not there yet. But unless we recognize the illiberal malignancy of some of what we face, and stand up to it with courage and candor, we soon will be.
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U.S. prosecutor says UAW takeover remains option after ex-president pleads guilty - Reu... - 0 views

www.reuters.com/...nt-pleads-guilty-idUSKBN23A34R
shared by nrashkind on 04 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • The United Auto Workers still needs to reform and a federal takeover remains an option, the U.S. prosecutor leading the investigation of corruption within the union told Reuters on Wednesday after the UAW’s former president pleaded guilty to embezzlement.
  • The union needs to change quite simply,” Matthew Schneider, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, said in an interview, adding a possible takeover of the UAW “absolutely” remained an option.
  • “There’s a more urgent need to reform the union and fix it,” Schneider said. “I’m pretty much at the end of my patience.”
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  • Former UAW president Gary Jones pleaded guilty Wednesday to charges he embezzled more than $1 million of union funds.
  • UAW spokesman Brian Rothenberg said Gamble looks forward to meeting with Schneider.
  • “The UAW has made significant changes since Mr. Jones resigned and continues to look at ways to reform,” Rothenberg said.
  • One option Schneider said he would like the UAW to explore is the direct election of officers to make them more accountable. UAW officers are currently elected through delegates.
  • Jones, 63, entered his guilty plea during a videoconference hearing held by the U.S. District Court in Detroit.
  • Jones, a certified public accountant, was charged with conspiracy to embezzle funds from the UAW from 2010 through September 2019, and with conspiracy to defraud the United States by failing to pay taxes on the money prosecutors charge he stole. He resigned from the union last November.
  • The sides agreed to a sentencing guideline range of 46 to 57 months for Jones.
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Why Democrats' tax plans are such a mess | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...rats-tax-plans-are-such-a-mess politics policy economics
shared by woodlu on 29 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • 0E BIDEN promised to pay for his big social-spending proposals by raising taxes on the rich and nobody else.
  • Now Democrats are rushing to find a big pot of money without raising headline rates of tax at all.
  • predicting that they would soon reach a compromise on a social-spending bill that would pass in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, where they cannot afford a single dissenting vote in their ranks.
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  • Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona,
  • satisfy two centrists:
  • Joe Manchin of West Virginia
  • desire for higher tax revenues without higher tax rates has left Democrats scrambling to make deep changes to how some levies work
  • new minimum tax on the biggest corporations’ accounting profits, which can exceed those declared to the tax authorities.
  • is a levy on
  • firms that buy back their own stock, a longtime bugbear on the left
  • a reform to the federal capital-gains tax that is designed to ensnare the ultra-rich. It would tax them annually on the paper gains of their investment portfolios, rather than when assets are sold, as under the current system
  • A tax on the book profits of companies would outsource tax rules to unaccountable accounting bodies, reduce the efficacy of desirable tax deductions for investment and, by interfering with the ability to carry forward losses, play havoc with firms whose profits are volatile.
  • no sound economic reason for penalising share buy-backs
  • firms could avoid the tax attached to them by paying dividends instead.
  • The “mark-to-market” capital gains tax is a messy attempt to rapidly extract enormous amounts from a tiny number of the very rich
  • this tax would apply only to securities traded on public markets, with different rules for stakes in privately held firms, it would deter entrepreneurs from floating their companies on the stock exchange.
  • That would ultimately be bad for investment and the incentive to innovate, and would get in the way of the widespread ownership of equities.
  • straightforward result of their fragile control of Congress and the idiosyncrasies of two of their senators
  • failed to bring in straightforward reforms that raise revenue by enlarging the tax base
  • abolishing the egregious exemption that resets accrued capital gains to zero when owners die and pass on their estates.
  • Taxing capital gains at death, as Mr Biden first proposed, would raise more than $200bn over a decade—not far off the “several hundred billion” Democrats say the tax on investment portfolios would yield
  • lobbyists defeated the idea
  • also preserved the carried-interest loophole, which lets investment managers class their fees as lightly taxed capital gains, not income.
  • lifting the cap on an exemption from federally taxable income of money used to pay state and local taxes. Doing that would benefit the wealthy, narrow the tax base and subsidise high-tax states.
  • Mr Biden ignored the example of Europe. Its social spending is funded using broad-based and efficient taxes, most notably value-added tax, a levy on consumption
  • unfriendly to economic growth to begin with. Narrowing the target further—the capital-gains reform would apply only to billionaires and those with more than $100m in annual income sustained over three years
  • proposal which is even more poorly designed, and which Mr Manchin is right to oppose
  • Democrats have pretended that raising taxes on businesses would have no negative effect on wages, contrary to the overwhelming consensus among economists.
  • The failure to agree on a tax plan carries echoes of doomed Republican attempts, under Donald Trump, to “repeal and replace” the Obamacare health-insurance system.
  • Democrats will have to confront the fact that permanently expanding the welfare state without damaging the economy means winning an argument for higher taxes, rather than always telling voters that some rich person will pay.
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Opinion | Why Wokeness Will Fail - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...social-justice-america.html woke progressive leftist ideology CRT BLM history Culture politics US reform
shared by Javier E on 10 Nov 21 - No Cached
  • American history is, in many ways, a story of grand protests. They generally come in two types.
  • There are protest movements that, even in ferocious dissent, believe that the American system is ultimately geared to fulfill its inner promises — of equality, unalienable rights, the pursuit of happiness, e pluribus unum, a more perfect union
  • And there are protest movements that have turned against the system, either because they don’t think the system can meet its promises, or because they never agreed with the promises in the first place.
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  • The experience of nearly 250 years is that the first type of movement generally succeeds: emancipation, suffrage, civil rights, marriage equality. They have aimed to build the country up, and bring Americans more closely together, on foundations already in place.
  • The second type — from the Confederacy to the white supremacy of the Jim Crow era to militant Black nationalism in the 1960s — always fails. These movements want to tear things down, divide Americans, reject and replace our national foundations.
  • What’s wrong with a movement that, on its narrowest terms, aims to make Americans more aware of racial injustices, past and present? Nothing. In cases like those of Eric Garner, George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery, non-Black America has had a long-overdue education about the fact that Black lives can still be subject to the same casual cruelties of a century ago.
  • like many movements that overspill their initial causes of action, Wokeness now connotes much more than an effort to reform the police or denounce racial injustice when it occurs. It is, instead, an allegation that racism is a defining feature, not a flaw, of nearly every aspect of American life, from its inception to its present, in the books we read, the language we speak, the heroes we venerate, the roads we drive, the way we do business, the way we select for merit and so on.
  • The insult turns to injury when it comes to the solutions Wokeness prescribes, and in the way that it prescribes them.
  • The problem with the allegation isn’t that it’s flatly wrong: America’s past is shot through with racism and, as Faulkner put it, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” But the allegation is also incomplete, distorted, ungenerous to former generations that advanced America’s promise, and untrue to the country most Americans know today.
  • it is a prescription, not for genuine dialogue and reform, but for indoctrination and extirpation, based on a relentless form of race consciousness
  • It operates as if, in city after city, American police forces aren’t led by Black police chiefs and staffed by officers of diverse backgrounds. It operates as if white supremacy is still being systemically enforced, while ignoring the fact that a previously marginalized ethnic minority, namely Asian Americans, enjoys higher income levels than white Americans.
  • Above all, Wokeness pretends that incidents such as George Floyd’s murder, which are national scandals, are actually national norms
  • Most Americans, I suspect, not only sense the falseness of the allegation. They are, increasingly, insulted by it.
  • Wokeness operates as if there had been no civil rights movement, and that white Americans hadn’t been an integral part of it. It operates as if 60 years of affirmative action never happened, and that an ever-growing percentage of Black Americans don’t belong to the middle and upper class (and that they are, incidentally, concentrated in the American South). It operates as if we didn’t twice elect a Black president and recently bury a Black general as an American icon.
  • A typical example: The American Medical Association recently published its “Guide to Language, Narrative and Concepts,” which includes such recommendations as replacing the term “disadvantaged” with “historically and intentionally excluded,” “social problem” with “social injustice,” “vulnerable” with “oppressed,” and “blacklist” and “blackmail” with words that don’t suggest an association between the word “black” and “suspicion or disapproval.”
  • This isn’t silly. It’s Orwellian. It’s a blunt attempt to turn everyday speech into a perpetual, politicized and nearly unconscious indictment of “the system.” Anyone who has spent time analyzing how the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century operated will note the similarities.
  • Ultimately, though, Americans are still free to reject the Woke ethos, even if they sometimes have to leave their institutions as a result.
  • This is why Wokeness will fail. For every attempt to cancel certain writers, others will publish them. For every diktat to fix language by replacing some words with others, people will merely find more subversive ways to say the same thing.
  • In the long run, Americans have always gotten behind protest movements that make the country more open, more decent, less divided. What today is called Woke does none of those things. It has no future in the home of the free.
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Supreme Court Term Limits Are Not Going to Cut It | Balls and Strikes - 0 views

ballsandstrikes.org/...urt-term-limits-commission-lol us politics SCOTUS gop
shared by clairemann on 21 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • Last week, the Biden presidential commission on Supreme Court reform published a set of “discussion materials” in advance of its final, official report on the subject. Over the course of the 200-plus pages of non-searchable PDF files —a decision that should be punishable under the Geneva Conventions—the commission aimed to “set forth the broad range of arguments that have been made in the course of the public debate over reform of the Supreme Court.”
  • a task force composed primarily of law professors, appellate lawyers, and former federal judges with a vested interest in the Court’s institutional legitimacy: a collection of milquetoast platitudes about the importance of maintaining public trust in a principled, nonpartisan judiciary, no matter how unprincipled or partisan the judiciary’s work actually becomes.
  • “the belief that the judiciary is independent can be undermined if judges are perceived to be ‘playing on the team’ of one party or another,”
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • the one of which the commission is most skeptical is adding seats to the Court. The risks of expansion are “considerable,” the document says, and could “undermine the very goal of some of its proponents of restoring the court’s legitimacy.”
  • Term limits are presented not as a tired manifestation of cynical partisan maneuvering, but as an opportunity to advance “our Constitution’s commitments to checks and balances and popular sovereignty.”
  • But for voters of color in Arizona who just watched six Republican-appointed justices hollow out the Voting Rights Act at the Republican Party’s request, for example, expansion would not “politicize” the Court, because the Court’s relentless assault on the right to participate in democracy has been going on for decades. As usual, the people wringing their hands over the Court’s political nature are those who are less likely to be meaningfully affected by the Court’s political choices.
  • because capping the length of judicial service at some point in the future does nothing to address the crisis that this 6-3 conservative supermajority faces right now.
  • The commission took care to note its skepticism that Congress can institute term limits by statute, as opposed to the herculean task of enacting them via constitutional amendment
  • this public trepidation paves the way for savvy Republicans to frame term limits proposals—again, the option that supposedly enjoys “widespread and bipartisan support”—as just another illegitimate Democratic power grab.
  • which increased significantly in the aftermath of Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s warp-speed pre-election confirmation. Delegating that task to an ad hoc collection of law review enthusiasts who met over Zoom every few weeks was perhaps the least efficacious method of accomplishing that result, short of doing literally nothing.
  • tasked with writing down lots of big words about this country’s broken legal system while simultaneously saying nothing of consequence.
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How Public Health Took Part in Its Own Downfall - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...620457 public health history Culture politics economics policy
shared by Javier E on 24 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • when the coronavirus pandemic reached the United States, it found a public-health system in disrepair. That system, with its overstretched staff, meager budgets, crumbling buildings, and archaic equipment, could barely cope with sickness as usual, let alone with a new, fast-spreading virus.
  • By one telling, public health was a victim of its own success, its value shrouded by the complacency of good health
  • By a different account, the competing field of medicine actively suppressed public health, which threatened the financial model of treating illness in (insured) individuals
  • ...27 more annotations...
  • In fact, “public health has actively participated in its own marginalization,” Daniel Goldberg, a historian of medicine at the University of Colorado, told me. As the 20th century progressed, the field moved away from the idea that social reforms were a necessary part of preventing disease and willingly silenced its own political voice. By swimming along with the changing currents of American ideology, it drowned many of the qualities that made it most effective.
  • Germ theory offered a seductive new vision for defeating disease: Although the old public health “sought the sources of infectious disease in the surroundings of man; the new finds them in man himself,” wrote Hibbert Hill in The New Public Health in 1913
  • “They didn’t have to think of themselves as activists,” Rosner said. “It was so much easier to identify individual victims of disease and cure them than it was to rebuild a city.”
  • As public health moved into the laboratory, a narrow set of professionals associated with new academic schools began to dominate the once-broad field. “It was a way of consolidating power: If you don’t have a degree in public health, you’re not public health,”
  • Mastering the new science of bacteriology “became an ideological marker,” sharply differentiating an old generation of amateurs from a new one of scientifically minded professionals,
  • Hospitals, meanwhile, were becoming the centerpieces of American health care, and medicine was quickly amassing money and prestige by reorienting toward biomedical research
  • Public health began to self-identify as a field of objective, outside observers of society instead of agents of social change. It assumed a narrower set of responsibilities that included data collection, diagnostic services for clinicians, disease tracing, and health education.
  • Assuming that its science could speak for itself, the field pulled away from allies such as labor unions, housing reformers, and social-welfare organizations that had supported city-scale sanitation projects, workplace reforms, and other ambitious public-health projects.
  • That left public health in a precarious position—still in medicine’s shadow, but without the political base “that had been the source of its power,”
  • After World War II, biomedicine lived up to its promise, and American ideology turned strongly toward individualism.
  • Seeing poor health as a matter of personal irresponsibility rather than of societal rot became natural.
  • Even public health began to treat people as if they lived in a social vacuum. Epidemiologists now searched for “risk factors,” such as inactivity and alcohol consumption, that made individuals more vulnerable to disease and designed health-promotion campaigns that exhorted people to change their behaviors, tying health to willpower in a way that persists today.
  • This approach appealed, too, to powerful industries with an interest in highlighting individual failings rather than the dangers of their products.
  • “epidemiology isn’t a field of activists saying, ‘God, asbestos is terrible,’ but of scientists calculating the statistical probability of someone’s death being due to this exposure or that one.”
  • In 1971, Paul Cornely, then the president of the APHA and the first Black American to earn a Ph.D. in public health, said that “if the health organizations of this country have any concern about the quality of life of its citizens, they would come out of their sterile and scientific atmosphere and jump in the polluted waters of the real world where action is the basis for survival.”
  • a new wave of “social epidemiologists” once again turned their attention to racism, poverty, and other structural problems.
  • The biomedical view of health still dominates, as evidenced by the Biden administration’s focus on vaccines at the expense of masks, rapid tests, and other “nonpharmaceutical interventions.”
  • Public health has often been represented by leaders with backgrounds primarily in clinical medicine, who have repeatedly cast the pandemic in individualist terms: “Your health is in your own hands,” said the CDC’s director, Rochelle Walensky, in May
  • the pandemic has proved what public health’s practitioners understood well in the late 19th and early 20th century: how important the social side of health is. People can’t isolate themselves if they work low-income jobs with no paid sick leave, or if they live in crowded housing or prisons.
  • Public health is now trapped in an unenviable bind. “If it conceives of itself too narrowly, it will be accused of lacking vision … If it conceives of itself too expansively, it will be accused of overreaching,
  • “Public health gains credibility from its adherence to science, and if it strays too far into political advocacy, it may lose the appearance of objectivity,”
  • In truth, public health is inescapably political, not least because it “has to make decisions in the face of rapidly evolving and contested evidence,” Fairchild told me. That evidence almost never speaks for itself, which means the decisions that arise from it must be grounded in values.
  • Those values, Fairchild said, should include equity and the prevention of harm to others, “but in our history, we lost the ability to claim these ethical principles.”
  • “Sick-leave policies, health-insurance coverage, the importance of housing … these things are outside the ability of public health to implement, but we should raise our voices about them,” said Mary Bassett, of Harvard, who was recently appointed as New York’s health commissioner. “I think we can get explicit.”
  • The future might lie in reviving the past, and reopening the umbrella of public health to encompass people without a formal degree or a job at a health department.
  • What if, instead, we thought of the Black Lives Matter movement as a public-health movement, the American Rescue Plan as a public-health bill, or decarceration, as the APHA recently stated, as a public-health goal? In this way of thinking, too, employers who institute policies that protect the health of their workers are themselves public-health advocates.
  • “We need to re-create alliances with others and help them to understand that what they are doing is public health,
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Ten years into Kim Jong Un's rule, North Korea is more North Korean than ever | The Eco... - 0 views

www.economist.com/...21806770 politics economics crisis history
shared by woodlu on 13 Dec 21 - No Cached
  • Less than a mile from the observatory, North Koreans can be seen tending to fields, driving lorries along the road to a small quarry and riding bicycles past a cluster of low-rise blocks of flats not far from the river bank.
  • If any of them took a moment to peer back the other way, they could see gaggles of South Korean school children trying to get a closer look at their village through the row of binoculars erected at the viewpoint.
  • ten years into the rule of Kim Jong Un, the North’s millennial dictator. The latest hope for opening and reform was dashed when Mr Kim and Donald Trump, then America’s president, failed to come to an agreement to exchange relief from sanctions for arms control at their final meeting in Vietnam in 2019.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • ever more of the few remaining links between North Korea and the outside world have been severed as Mr Kim has instituted one of the world’s strictest border closures in response to the coronavirus pandemic.
  • there are reports of severe food shortages and political purges, even as North Korea’s state media rebuff any diplomatic overtures from America or the South.
  • from a low level and mostly in the capital, where those with spare cash could enjoy new coffee shops, foreign restaurants and well-stocked supermarkets.
  • Others, such as this newspaper, doubted that Mr Kim would develop an appetite for serious reform but still assumed that he would not be able to resist pressure for change entirely.
  • He reformed laws governing agriculture and state-owned enterprises to allow a degree of private enterprise in the economy, invited outside experts to advise him on the establishment of new special economic zones, awarded official status to hundreds of informal markets and largely turned a blind eye to petty wheeling and dealing.
  • binge of “socialist construction”, filling Pyongyang with futuristic skyscrapers, water parks and a dolphinarium. He also set to work on new tourist infrastructure elsewhere in the country, notably at his summer retreat in Wonsan on the east coast. Trade with China picked up, driven largely by a new class of quasi-entrepreneurs operating from within state enterprises.
  • Some observers at the time expected the regime to collapse within weeks or months, to be followed by economic opening under Chinese supervision.
  • things visibly improved
  • suggesting both economic improvements in parts of North Korea beyond Pyongyang and a growing awareness of what life was like in the outside world. “In earlier years people would say they were fleeing to survive; now most say they fled for freedom,”
  • the boundaries of that “better life” have been gradually curtailed in the more recent years of Mr Kim’s reign.
  • The point of building a “prosperous state” was to make his rule more stable. It did not extend to allowing a proper market economy or granting more political freedoms to ordinary people.
  • accompanied by heightened repression inside the country, more control at the borders and the acceleration of the nuclear programme
  • Aid organisations have not had access for nearly two years, making it especially hard to discern what is going on in the country.
  • hints of increasing distress, with food running low and even the privileged in Pyongyang suffering shortages.
  • Mr Kim himself has admitted that the food situation is “tense” and urged his people to prepare for hardship.
  • increased penalties for smuggling and for watching foreign entertainment, such as South Korean dramas.
  • Mr Kim continues to rebuff offers of aid and even covid vaccines. Attempts by South Korea and America to revive a spirit of detente, for instance by negotiating a formal end to the Korean war, have gone unanswered.
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