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Javier E

Examinations of Health Care Overlook Mergers - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • What is missing from the stampede of policy innovation is something to tackle one of the best-known causes of high costs in the book: excessive market concentration.
  • The share of metropolitan areas with highly concentrated hospital markets, by the standards of antitrust enforcers at the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission, rose to 77 percent from 63 percent over the period.
  • If there is one thing that economists know, it is that market concentration drives prices up — and quality and innovation down.
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  • And consolidation is continuing. Professor Gaynor counts more than 1,000 hospital system mergers since the mid-1990s, often involving dozens of hospitals. In 2002 doctors owned about three in four physician practices. By 2008 more than half were owned by hospitals.
  • hospitals raise prices by about 40 percent after the merger of nearby rivals.
  • recent evidence suggests that health care costs are not being driven by intensive use of high-tech procedures as much as by rising prices for even the most humdrum treatments, which are today among the most expensive in the world.
  • Other studies have found that hospital mergers increase the number of uninsured in the vicinity. Still others even suggest that market concentration may hurt the quality of care.
  • the rising health care spending of Americans under 65 in the last two years has been driven entirely by rising prices; not by more use. The unit price of inpatient care jumped 5.9 percent last year, while the price for outpatient services increased 9.6 percent.
  • Corporate America could help more. Large companies, like Wal-Mart Stores, Lowe’s and PepsiCo, have cut deals with hospitals like the Mayo Clinic or the Cleveland Clinic to provide specialized care, including cardiac care or spinal surgery, for all their workers across the nation. This will allow them to get around the market power of local hospitals. Others could follow their example.
  • The Affordable Care Act could help reduce prices too. Forced to compete on price, plans in the new health insurance exchanges will pressure medical providers to limit costs, much as H.M.O.’s did briefly in the 1990s. The “Cadillac tax” on high-end health plans will also encourage some companies to drop high-priced policies.
  • Merger activity has jumped in anticipation of the law’s coming fully into effect. “Hospitals want to maintain their revenue streams and enhance their bargaining leverage,” said Professor Gaynor. “This is a way to do so.”
Javier E

Boehner, American Hero - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • The Republicans’ current position makes things harder still, because Boehner’s party has much more power in Washington than it has support in the nation as a whole. Republicans are a minority party nationally, but thanks to redistricting they control the House despite Democrats’ 2012 successes. This mismatch leaves the base spoiling for fights that can’t actually be won: House Republicans have just enough real power to raise conservative expectations but not nearly enough to bend a liberal president and a Democratic Senate to their will.
  • You might say that this is no way to run a government. I’d agree. But the nation’s polarization and his party’s dysfunction are beyond a speaker’s ability to undo. As Democrats learned across the 1970s and ’80s, the House is a poor base from which to rebuild a national party. Nobody blames Tip O’Neill or Jim Wright for failing to do what Bill Clinton and Barack Obama ultimately achieved.
  • the way out of our predicament is through the ballot box, not the speaker’s office. Either Democrats need to consolidate their advantages and win back the House or Republicans need to find a way to start winning national elections again, at which point the current impasse will be broken and policy will tilt more clearly toward the left or right.
Javier E

George Washington: The Forgotten Emancipator | History News Network - 0 views

  • Lafayette’s fate played a part in Washington’s decision to abandon plans that he had been formulating to free Mount Vernon’s slaves while he was president. It would have been a huge public statement of his disapproval of slavery. Washington decided American voters could not deal with such an explosive topic when they were already deeply divided between pro- and anti-French parties. But he remained determined to make this statement as soon as he thought it could be done without endangering the American union.
  • During Washington’s retirement years, an English visitor to Mount Vernon discussed slavery with him, off the record. The ex-president told him no man in the nation yearned to see black bondage disappear more than he did. “Not only do I pray for it on the score of human dignity,” he said. “I can clearly foresee that nothing but the rooting out of slavery can perpetuate the existence of our union by consolidating it in a common bond of principle.”
  • The news of Washington’s death fell like a thunderclap from on high across the entire nation. The loss was so huge, so absolute, it seemed to alter everything, from the nation’s politics to its confidence in the future. The fact that Washington had emancipated his slaves dwindled to a blip in the context of these other anxieties. His act of emancipation excited little or no comment.
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  • Part of the reason may have been the fact that the slaves all had to remain at Mount Vernon until Martha’s death. There was no opportunity for newspaper stories of an exodus to freedom. At least as important, Martha Custis Washington made no attempt to publicize the will. She did not agree with her husband’s decision. Even if she had been inclined to free her slaves, she lacked the power. Her first husband’s will had stipulated that all his slaves were to become the property of their surviving Custis descendants -- Martha’s four grandchildren.
  • A year later, Martha freed all Washington’s slaves unilaterally, and allowed them to leave Mount Vernon. She acted on the advice of Bushrod Washington, her husband’s nephew, who had become a Supreme Court justice. Martha had told him the freed blacks were becoming angry over the long delay in their emancipation.
Javier E

Obama as the Liberal Reagan, Revisited - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • There are plenty of reasons to doubt that Obama will get key elements of his second term program through. But a president’s legacy can outlast his legislative accomplishments, and if he succeeds at rehabilitating the big idea binding together his proposals — that collective action via the federal government isn’t fundamentally at odds with American values and identity, but rather is an integral part of the country’s tradition — it could go a long way towards reversing one of the great triumphs of conservative messaging over the last few decades.
  • come what may in 2016 and beyond, Obama is already more like Reagan than he is like any other recent president of either party. His substantive achievements are still open to question, but he really has succeeded in pushing a philosophical reorientation of American domestic politics — tentatively in 2008, explicitly in 2012, and triumphantly in Monday’s address — that neither Bill Clinton nor George W. Bush ever really attempted.
  • Neither Bush or Clinton could or would have given a speech quite like this week’s inaugural, because neither ever really set out to win a debate about the role of government outright. And that is something that Obama seems to have just done.
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  • But I still say “seems” rather than “has” because even philosophical victories have to last to be considered real. Reaganism’s ascendance wasn’t sealed by his re-election, let alone his first inaugural: It took 1988 to consolidate the rightward shift and 1994 to really ratify it. For now, Obama still awaits his George H.W. Bush (hey, Biden!) and his Newt Gingrich — and for that matter, he awaits his Clinton, because there’s a sense in which declarations of victory are less telling than statements of surrender
bodycot

Obama on Trump: 'Don't underestimate the guy, because he's going to be 45th president o... - 0 views

    • bodycot
       
      Obama on the end of his presidency.
  • Thousands of people showed up in freezing temperatures on Sunday in Michigan to hear Sen. Bernie Sanders denounce Republican efforts to repeal President Barack Obama's health care law, one of dozens of rallies Democrats staged across the country to highlight opposition.
  • "I'm going to get really sick and my life will be at risk," said Bible, an online antique dealer.
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  • "This is the wealthiest country in the history of the world. It is time we got our national priorities right," Sanders told the Michigan rally.
  • Britt Waligorski, 31, a health care administrator for a dental practice, said she didn't get health insurance through work but has been covered through the health law for three years. While the premiums have gone up, she said she is concerned that services for women will be taken away if it is repealed.
  • About 2,000 people cheered and held rainbow and American flags and signs that read "Don't Make America Sick Again" and "Health Care For All" at the rally.
  • Republicans want to end the fines that enforce the requirement that many individuals buy coverage and that larger companies provide it to workers.
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      Pro-ACA rally.
  • With eager anticipation, the Kremlin is counting the days to Donald Trump's inauguration and venting its anger at Barack Obama's outgoing administration, no holds barred.
  • At the same time, Russian officials are blasting the outgoing U.S. administration in distinctly undiplomatic language, dropping all decorum after Obama hit Moscow with more sanctions in his final weeks in office.
  • On Sunday, Vice President-elect Mike Pence insisted the Trump presidential campaign had no contacts with Russia and denied that the incoming national security adviser spoke with Russian officials in December about sanctions. He added that such questions were part of an effort to cast doubt on Trump's victory.
  • In an interview Friday with The Wall Street Journal, Trump said he might do away with Obama's sanctions if Russia works with the U.S. on battling terrorists and achieving other goals.
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      Kremlin
  • "We and many analysts believe that the (agreement) is consolidated. The new U.S. administration will not be able to abandon it," Araqchi told a news conference in Tehran, held a year after the deal took effect.
  • Trump, who will take office on Friday, has threatened to either scrap the agreement, which curbs Iran's nuclear programme and lifts sanctions against it, or seek a better deal.
  • "It's quite likely that the U.S. Congress or the next administration will act against Iran and imposes new sanctions."
  • But Iran is still subject to an U.N. arms embargo and other restrictions, which are not technically part of the nuclear agreement.
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      Iran Nuclear Deal.
  • The event was marked by tense exchanges as Trump repeated his refusal to release his tax returns and denounced media outlets that published stories based on unverified allegations about his ties to the Kremlin
  • Trump began his remarks on Tuesday by blaming “inaccurate news” for his decision not to take questions from the press more often.
  • Trump went on to address a pair of reports published Tuesday night that touched on unverified accusations about his relationship with Russia. The first report, which came from CNN, said intelligence officials had presented information to Trump alleging that the Russian government had an ongoing relationship with members of his campaign — and, more sensationally, possessed compromising information about him that could be used for blackmail.
  • “I want to thank a lot of the news organizations … some of whom have not treated me very well over the years. …
  • “It’s all fake news. It’s phony stuff. It didn’t happen, and it was gotten by opponents of ours, as you know, because you reported it and so did many of the other people.
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      Trump press conference.
  • “No, no, no,” Jones said with a sly grin that barely disguised his evident hostility. Sitting back in his barber chair, he shook his head and narrowed his eyes. “That’s not why you are here. You’re here because of the billboards, because of the KKK. That’s why you are here.”
  • When the controversial billboards were ripped down and defaced, they were replaced almost immediately.
  • “While Trump wants to make America great again, we have to ask ourselves, ‘What made America great in the first place?
  • The Trump campaign quickly disavowed the endorsement
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      KKK
davisem

Syrian peace talks: A lot of posturing -- some signs of hope - 0 views

shared by davisem on 25 Jan 17 - No Cached
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    It's the final day of the Syrian peace negotiations, and the latest moves toward ending the bloody, six-year civil war -- or at least consolidating a fragile ceasefire -- are being announced. On one side of the city's main thoroughfare, the Rixos President Hotel bustles with shabby journalists, dapper diplomats and wealthy patrons in mink coats.
draneka

The Latest: US Welcomes Attempt to Reduce Violence in Syria - ABC News - 1 views

  • The U.S. says it has seen the announcement from Russia, Turkey and Iran on their intent to establish a mechanism to enforce a cease-fire in Syria and welcomes actions that de-escalate violence in the country.
  • U.S. calls on the three countries to press the Syrian government and its allies, as well as opposition forces, to abide by the cease-fire in order to create an environment more conductive to political discussions between Syrians.
  • The Russian military says its bombers have struck Islamic State positions in eastern Syria in the third such raid in four days.
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  • The United Nations envoy to Syria says the talks in Kazakhstan have produced a "very important" commitment by Russia, Iran and Turkey to a cease-fire in the war ravaged country.
  • Syria's government says Russia- and Turkey-led talks in Kazakhstan have succeeded in consolidating a nearly month-long cease-fire in the war- ravaged country
  • U.N. agencies are appealing for more than $8 billion in funding this year to help millions of people displaced inside Syria by the war or forced to flee abroad.
  • The rebels have pinned their hopes on Russia and Turkey, which brokered the cease-fire, but Abu Zayd says they "are waiting for something more than statements."
Javier E

The left won the culture war. Will they be merciful? - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • Ideological lines in U.S. politics are shifting and blurring rapidly: The rise of Donald Trump, the popularity of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and the resurgence of libertarianism prove at least that much. It’s reasonable to assume that religious conservatives, too, are rethinking their role in American society and politics.
  • That rethinking probably began in earnest with Richard John Neuhaus’s book “The Naked Public Square” in 1984. Neuhaus, acknowledging pluralism as a hard reality rather than condemning it as a temporary deviation, nonetheless sharply criticized the idea that the public sphere can have nothing to do with religiously informed principles and arguments. In 1990, he founded the influential magazine First Things, in which Catholic, Protestant and Jewish intellectuals reflect on the role of religion in America’s rapidly fragmenting society.
  • Notre Dame historian George Marsden — a self-described “Augustinian Christian” and so something close to an evangelical, whatever that still means — has argued in his book “The Twilight of the American Enlightenment” that religious traditionalists and secularist liberals can avoid a great deal of acrimony by defenestrating the midcentury idea of a “neutral” public sphere and instead adopting what he and others have termed “principled pluralism.
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  • in his new book “The Fractured Republic,” the scholar and journalist Yuval Levin, a Jewish social conservative, has counseled both religious conservatives and secularist liberals that they can repair our dysfunctional politics by comprehending the implications of this one essential truth: that American society is no longer the consolidated unit it once was but a diffuse assortment of subcultures.
  • Many have finally given up on the whole idea of a culture war or are willing to admit they lost it. They are determined only to remain who they are and to live as amiably and productively as they can in a culture that doesn’t look like them and doesn’t belong to them.
proudsa

Five Findings From the State Department Report on Terrorism - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • ongressionally mandated analytical and statistical review of global terroris
  • m. It is important to understand how the U.S. government defines this subjective phenomenon:
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      start with the definition
  • overall decrease in global terrorism
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  • n both the 2014 and 2015 reports, just over half of all attacks took place in five countries
  • The Taliban replaced the self-proclaimed Islamic State as the number-one global perpetrator for terrorism attacks, with 1,093, which represents an alarming increase of 69 percent since 2013.
  • The biggest surprise was the removal of the Somali group al-Shabaab from the top-five list of perpetrators, that outfit having been responsible for the third-most attacks in 2014
  • The most consequential and troubling revelation is the reach and estimated size of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). According to the State Department, “AQAP has since consolidated its control over Al Mukalla and has expanded its reach through large portions of Yemen’s south,
  • owever, this is still fewer than the average number that have tragically been killed each year since 9/11, 27. The location of international attacks on U.S. citizens increased from six countries to 11, with the new countries being Bangladesh, France, Jordan, Jerusalem, Libya, and Mali.
sarahbalick

Turkish PM Davutoğlu resigns as President Erdoğan tightens grip | World news ... - 0 views

  • Turkish PM Davutoğlu resigns as President Erdoğan tightens grip
  • The Turkish prime minister, Ahmet Davutoğlu, has announced his resignation after 20 months in office, consolidating Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s position as Turkey’s unrivalled political leader and highlighting concerns about the country turning increasingly authoritarian.
  • “After consultations with the president I decided that it would be more appropriate for the unity of [the AKP] to change the chairman,”
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  • “I have no sense of failure or regret in taking that decision.”
  • The announcement came one day after intense talks between Erdoğan and Davutoğlu, during which they did not manage to smooth out their differences. Tension had been simmering since shortly after Davutoğlu replaced Erdoğan as prime minister in August 2014 but recently intensified. Analysis Turkey-EU refugees deal may be biggest casualty of Erdoğan supremacy Forced departure of pro-EU PM comes at particularly bad time for Syria and will add to EU unease with strongman president Read more
  • The author, thought to be a journalist with close ties to Erdoğan, accused Davutoğlu of conspiring with Turkey’s enemies and western powers to sideline the president.
  • Erdoğan’s honour is my honour,” he said. “I will not accept any speculation concerning my relationship with President Erdoğan. We have always stood shoulder to shoulder.”
  • “This is a catastrophic situation,” said Levent Gültekin, a writer and columnist. “This is a decisive step towards one-man rule in Turkey. From now on the only Turkey we will be able to see is the Turkey of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.”
  • “Erdoğan does not want anyone in the party who does not fully agree with him, or anyone who would have their own opinion on any topic,” Gültekin explained. “Davutoğlu was one of the last AK party politicians who would make suggestions of change to Erdoğan’s policies.”
Javier E

Donald Trump is making China great again | Isabel Hilton | Opinion | The Guardian - 0 views

  • wo years ago, some European and US experts gathered to discuss China in an elegant English country house. The setting was seductive, but the mood was dark. Two years into Xi Jinping’s presidency, China’s politics were turning away from the liberalising trend of the previous three decades, towards a hard-edged nationalism that was discomfiting China’s immediate neighbours and their western allies.
  • a global conflict between the systems, values and norms of the pluralist, democratic United States and China’s Communist party seemed inevitable. It would be unpleasant, but nobody doubted that US values would prevail.
  • The group discussed whether China could succeed. What might go wrong?
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  • The one scenario not discussed was that the US would tear up its own rules, leaving the field open to China to consolidate its dominance of the Asia Pacific and extend its global influence. Nobody even imagined such a far-fetched possibility.
  • It’s hard to imagine Trump quoting Thucydides, or Stephen Hawkins or Herman Hesse, or cramming references to Pandora’s box, the Peace of Westphalia and the sword of Damocles into a 58-minute plea for peace and international cooperation. Such a carefully crafted speech might have been delivered by previous US presidents, since it paid fulsome homage to the core values the US has promoted since 1945. But this was delivered by the general secretary of the Chinese Communist party and president of the China, to an audience at the United Nations in Geneva in January.
  • China’s proposition to the world, Xi said, was to “build a community of shared future for mankind and achieve shared and win-win development”.
  • Such a claim might previously have encountered polite scepticism. Today, it receives an almost uncritical welcome.
  • Xi reminded his audience of China’s contribution to global economic stability since the financial crisis, of an average of 30% of global growth each year. “In the coming five years,” he predicted, “China will import $8tn of goods, attract $600bn of foreign investment, make $750bn of outbound investment, and Chinese tourists will make 700 million outbound visits.”
  • if Xi’s claim is contestable, it pales in comparison with the exaggerations, false claims and threats by Trump and his circle.
  • Trump’s singular achievement in his short time as president has been to trash US soft power assets and make China’s regime look less objectionable. Before Trump, even as western countries scrambled to access the Chinese market, they regarded Beijing with scepticism. Why should anyone believe the global message of a regime that does not tolerate dissent or domestic challenges?
  • But that is now a question we must begin to ask of the US. China’s official untruths seem modest in comparison with those of a man who can barely get through a sentence without a lie.
Javier E

Israel's Fading Democracy - NYTimes.com - 1 views

  • Israel arose as a secular, social democratic country inspired by Western European democracies. With time, however, its core values have become entirely different. Israel today is a religious, capitalist state. Its religiosity is defined by the most extreme Orthodox interpretations. Its capitalism has erased much of the social solidarity of the past, with the exception of a few remaining vestiges of a welfare state
  • The modern combination between democracy and Judaism was supposed to give birth to a spectacular, pluralistic kaleidoscope. The state would be a great, robust democracy that would protect Jews against persecution and victimhood. Jewish culture, on the other hand, with its uncompromising moral standards, would guard against our becoming persecutors and victimizers of others.
  • The founders believed that democracy was the only way to regulate the interests of many contradictory voices. Jewish culture, consolidated through Halakha, the religious Jewish legal tradition, created a civilization that has devoted itself to an unending conversation among different viewpoints and the coexistence of contradictory attitudes toward the fulfillment of the good.
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  • Israel defines itself as a “Jewish and democratic state.” However, because Israel has never created a system of checks and balances between these two sources of authority, they are closer than ever to a terrible clash. In the early years of statehood, the meaning of the term “Jewish” was national and secular. In the eyes of Israel’s founding fathers, to be a Jew was exactly like being an Italian, Frenchman or American. Over the years, this elusive concept has changed; today, the meaning of “Jewish” in Israel is mainly ethnic and religious. With the elevation of religious solidarity over and above democratic authority, Israel has become more fundamentalist and less modern, more separatist and less open to the outside world.
  • We never gave much thought to the Palestinian Israeli citizens within the Jewish-democratic equation. We also never tried to separate the synagogue and the state. If anything, we did the opposite. Moreover, we never predicted the evil effects of brutally controlling another people against their will. Today, all the things that we neglected have returned and are chasing us like evil spirits.
  • In the absence of a binding constitution, Israel has no real protection for its minorities or for their freedom of worship and expression.
  • the only way for us to agree when we disagree is a true, vigorous democracy. A democracy based on a progressive, civil constitution; a democracy that enforces the distinction between ethnicity and citizenship, between synagogue and state; a democracy that upholds the values of freedom and equality, on the basis of which every single person living under Israel’s legitimate and internationally recognized sovereignty will receive the same rights and protections.
Javier E

When Did Liberals Become So Unreasonable? - 0 views

  • Liberals are dissatisfied with Obama because liberals, on the whole, are incapable of feeling satisfied with a Democratic president. They can be happy with the idea of a Democratic president—indeed, dancing-in-the-streets delirious—but not with the real thing. The various theories of disconsolate liberals all suffer from a failure to compare Obama with any plausible baseline. Instead they compare Obama with an imaginary president—either an imaginary Obama or a fantasy version of a past president.
  • For almost all of the past 60 years, liberals have been in a near-constant emotional state of despair, punctuated only by brief moments of euphoria and occasional rage. When they’re not in charge, things are so bleak they threaten to move to Canada; it’s almost more excruciating when they do win elections, and their presidents fail in essentially the same ways: He is too accommodating, too timid, too unwilling or unable to inspire the populace.
  • Activists measure progress against the standard of perfection, or at least the most perfect possible choice. Historians gauge progress against what came before it. By that standard, Obama’s first term would indeed seem to qualify as gangsta shit.
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  • His single largest policy accomplishment, the Affordable Care Act, combines two sweeping goals—providing coverage to the uninsured and taming runaway medical-cost inflation—that Democrats have tried and failed to achieve for decades. Likewise, the Recovery Act contained both short-term stimulative measures and increased public investment in infrastructure, green energy, and the like. The Dodd-Frank financial reform, while failing to end the financial industry as we know it, is certainly far from toothless, as measured by the almost fanatical determination of Wall Street and Republicans in Congress to roll it back.
  • Beneath these headline measures is a second tier of accomplishments carrying considerable historic weight. A bailout and deep restructuring of the auto industry that is rapidly being repaid, leaving behind a reinvigorated sector in the place of a devastated Midwest. Race to the Top, which leveraged a small amount of federal seed money into a sweeping national wave of education experiments, arguably the most significant reform of public schooling in the history of the United States. A reform of college loans, saving hundreds of billions of dollars by cutting out private middlemen and redirecting some of the savings toward expanded Pell Grants. Historically large new investments in green energy and the beginning of regulation of greenhouse gases. The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act for women. Elimination of several wasteful defense programs, equality for gays in the military, and consumer-friendly regulation of food safety, tobacco, and credit cards.
  • Of the postwar presidents, only Johnson exceeds Obama’s domestic record, and Johnson’s successes must be measured against a crushing defeat in Vietnam. Obama, by contrast, has enjoyed a string of foreign-policy successes
  • liberal melancholy hangs not so much on substantive objections but on something more inchoate and emotional: a general feeling that Obama is not Ronald Reagan.
  • In terms of lasting change, Obama probably has matched Reagan—or, at least, he will if he can win reelection and consolidate health-care reform and financial regulation and tilt the Supreme Court further left than he already has.
Javier E

NFL Concussions Mega-Lawsuit Claims League Hid Brain Injury Links From Players - 0 views

  • NEW YORK — Scores of lawsuits involving thousands of former players touched by concussions and brain injuries have been consolidated into one master complaint, setting up a massive and potentially costly case for the NFL.
  • "The NFL, like the sport of boxing, was aware of the health risks associated with repetitive blows producing sub-concussive and concussive results and the fact that some members of the NFL player population were at significant risk of developing long-term brain damage and cognitive decline as a result," the complaint charges. "Despite its knowledge and controlling role in governing player conduct on and off the field, the NFL turned a blind eye to the risk and failed to warn and/or impose safety regulations governing this well-recognized health and safety problem."
Javier E

Bill Moyers | Henry Giroux: Zombie Politics and Casino Capitalism - 0 views

  • you have a consolidation of power that is so overwhelming, not just in its ability to control resources and drive the economy and redistribute wealth upward, but basically to provide the most fraudulent definition of what a democracy should be. I mean, the notion that profit making is the essence of democracy, the notion that economics is divorced from ethics, the notion that the only obligation of citizenship is consumerism, the notion that the welfare state is a pathology, that any form of dependency basically is disreputable and needs to be attacked, I mean, this is a vicious set of assumptions.
  • The biggest lie of all is that capitalism is democracy. We have no way of understanding democracy outside of the market, just as we have no understanding of how to understand freedom outside of market values.
  • Metaphorically. Two things happened. 1) There was this assumption that the government was evil except when it regulated its power to benefit the rich. So it wasn't a matter of smashing the government as Reagan seemed to suggest, it was a matter of rearranging it and reconfiguring it so it served the wealthy, the elites and the corporate,
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  • Thatcher said something else that's particularly interesting in this discussion. She said there's no such thing as society. There are only individuals and families. And so what we begin to see is the emergence of a kind of ethic, a survival of the fittest ethic that legitimates the most incredible forms of cruelty, that seems to suggest that freedom in this discourse of getting rid of society, getting rid of the social-- that discourse is really only about self-interest, that possessive individualism is now the only virtue that matters. So freedom, which is essential to any notion of democracy, now becomes nothing more than a matter of pursuing your own self interests
  • I want to echo something that FDR once said, When he said that, you know, you not only have to have personal freedoms and political freedoms, the right to vote the right to speak, you have to have social freedom. You have to have the freedom from want, the freedom from poverty, the freedom from-- that comes with a lack of health care.
  • How do you get a discourse governing the country that seems to suggest that anything public, public health, public transportation, public values, you know, public engagement is a pathology?
  • Individualize the social, which means that all problems, if they exist, rest on the shoulders of individuals.
  • that the government-- the larger social order, the society has no responsibility whatsoever so that-- you often hear this, I mean, if there--I mean, if you have an economic crisis caused by the hedge fund crooks, you know and millions of people are put out of work and they're all lining up for unemployment, what do we hear in the national media? We hear that maybe they don't know how to fill out unemployment forms, maybe it's about character.
  • I think that what we haven't seen before is an attack on the social contract, Bill, that is so overwhelming, so dangerous in the way in which its being deconstructed and being disassembled that you now have as a classic example, you have a whole generation of young people who are now seen as disposable.
  • young people can't turn anywhere without in some way being told that the only obligation of citizenship is to shop, is to be a consumer. You can't walk on a college campus today and walk into the student union and not see everybody represented there from the local banks to Disneyland to local shops, all selling things.
  • Where are the public spaces for young people other learn a discourse that's not commodified, to be able to think about non-commodifiable values like trust, justice, honesty, integrity, caring for others, compassion. Those things, they're just simply absent, they're not part of those public spheres because those spheres have been commodified.
  • Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism.” Why that metaphor, zombie politics? HENRY GIROUX: Because it's a politics that's informed by the machinery of social and civil death.
  • It's a death machine. It's a death machine because in my estimation it does everything it can to kill any vestige of a robust democracy. It turns people into zombies, people who basically are so caught up with surviving that they have no-- they become like the walking dead, you know, they lose their sense of agency-
  • This casino capitalism as we talk about it, right, one of the things that it does that hasn't been done before, it doesn't just believe it can control the economy. It believes that it can govern all of social life. That's different. That means it has to have its tentacles into every aspect of everyday life. Everything from the way schools are run to the way prisons are outsourced to the way the financial services are run to the way in which people have access to health care, it's an all-encompassing, it seems to me, political, cultural, educational apparatus.
  • as the social state is crippled, as the social state is in some way robbed, hollowed out and robbed of its potential and its capacities, what takes its place? The punishing state takes its place. You get this notion of incarceration, this, what we call the governing through crime complex where governance now has been ceded to corporations who largely are basically about benefiting the rich, the ultra-rich, the big corporations and allowing the state to exercise its power in enormously destructive and limited ways.
  • we kill the imagination by suggesting that the only kind of rationality that matters, the only kind of learning that matters is utterly instrumental, pragmatist. So what we do is we collapse education into training, and we end up suggesting that not knowing much is somehow a virtue. And I'll and I think what's so disturbing about this is not only do you see it in the popular culture with the lowest common denominator now drives that culture, but you also see it coming from politicians who actually say things that suggest something about the policies they'd like to implement.
  • Rick Santorum is not-- is kind of a, you know, an obvious figure. But when he stands up in front of a body of Republicans and he says, the last thing we need in the Republican party are intellectuals. And I think it's kind of a template for the sort of idiocy that increasingly now dominates our culture.
  • I think intellectuals are-- there are two ways we can describe intellectuals. In the most general sense, we can say, "Intellectuals are people who take pride in ideas. They work with ideas." I mean, they believe that ideas matter. They believe that there's no such thing as common sense, good sense or bad sense, but reflective sense.
  • how we learn what we learn and what we do with the knowledge that we have is not just for ourselves. It's for the way in which we can expand and deepen the very processes of democracy in general, and address those problems and anti-democratic forces that work against it.
  • I think the real issue here is, you know, what would it mean to begin to do at least two things?
  • one is to develop cultural apparatuses that can offer a new vocabulary for people, where questions of freedom and justice and the problems that we're facing can be analyzed in ways that reach mass audiences in accessible language. We have to build a formative culture
  • Secondly, we've got to overcome the fractured nature of these movements. I mean the thing that plagues me about progressives in the left and liberals is they are all sort of ensconced in these fragmented movements
  • here's the contradiction I hear in what you're saying. That if you write about a turning toward despair and cynicism in politics. Can you get movements out of despair and cynicism? Can you get people who will take on the system when they have been told that the system is so powerful and so overwhelming that they've lost their, as you call it, moral and political agency?
  • to be different than it is now, rather than romanticizing hope and turning it into something Disney-like, right, it really has to involve the hard work of A) recognizing the structures of domination that we have to face, B) organizing collectively and somehow to change those, and C) believing it can be done, that it's worth the struggle.
  • I refuse to become complicitous. I refuse to say--I refuse to be alive and to watch institutions being handed over to right wing zealots. I refuse to be alive and watch the planet be destroyed. I mean, when you mentioned-- you talk about the collective imagination, you know, I mean that imagination emerges when people find strength in collective organizations, when they find strength in each other.
Javier E

Tech is killing childhood - Salon.com - 0 views

  • For all the good they can find there, other influences, from screen games and commercial pop-ups to YouTube, social media, and online erotica, introduce them to images and information they are not developmentally equipped to understand. The combination of their innate eagerness to mimic what’s cool, and the R- to X-rated quality of the cool they see, has collapsed childhood to the point that we see second-graders mimicking sexy teens and fourth-graders hanging out with online “friends” and gamers far older and more worldly. Life for six- to ten-year-olds has taken on a pseudosophisticated zeitgeist far beyond the normal developmental readiness of the age.
  • inwardly, many children experience a suffocating squeeze on developmental growth that is essential for these early school years.
  • At a developmental time when children need to be learning how to effectively interact directly, the tech-mediated environment is not an adequate substitute for the human one.
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  • No matter how fierce play may look on the playground or in the social scrimmage of the school day, the more grueling competition is the one your child faces each day to measure up in her peer group. At around age eight, children start to compare themselves to each other in more competitive ways.
  • media and much of life online introduce an adult context for a child’s self-assessment. The behaviors they see there that set the bar for cool, cute, bold, and daring come from the wrong age and life stage. The mix suddenly includes adolescents and adults, media coverage of fame-addled celebrities and jaded politicians, teen magazines, and Victoria’s Secret at the mall and in the mail.
  • As the inner critic grows, parents become indispensable as the voice of the inner ally, the voice that helps balance a child’
  • innermost sense of himself
  • Day by day, kids need time to process their experiences intellectually and emotionally, to integrate new information with their existing body of knowledge and experience. They need time to consolidate it all so that it has meaning and relevance for them. Ideally, they do that with their parents and in the context of family and community.
  • Kids don’t get home from school anymore; they bring school—and an even larger online community—home with them.
  • t in the ways that matter most, speed derails the natural pace of development. Pressure to grow up faster or exposing children to content or influences beyond their developmental ken does not make them smarter or savvier sooner. Instead, it fast-forwards them past critical steps in the developmental process.
  • Developmentally, this is the time children need parents and teachers to help them learn to tame impulsivity—learning to wait their turn, not cut in line, not call out in a class discussion—and for developing the capacity to feel happy and alone, connected to oneself and empathetic toward others.
  • With nature pressing for human interaction and a child’s world of possibility expanding in the new school environment, to trade it all for screen time is a terrible waste of a child’s early school years.
  • Some things in life you just have to do in order to learn, and do a lot of to grow adept at it. Like learning to ride a bike, developing these inner qualities of character and contemplation calls for real-life practice. In the absence of that immersion-style learning, time on screens can undermine a child’s development of these important social skills and the capacity to feel empathy
  • Emotional and social development, like cognitive development, can benefit from “judicious use” of tech
  • “But if it is used in a nonjudicious fashion, it will shape the brain in what I think will actually be a negative way,”
  • “the problem is that judicious thinking is among the frontal-lobe skills that are still developing way past the teenage years. In the meantime, the pull of technology is capturing kids at an ever earlier age, when they are not generally able to step back and decide what’s appropriate or necessary, or how much is too much.”
  • in school, they take their cues from the crowd-sourced conversations they hear among friends and on social media. For girls, even seven-year-olds on the school playground, sexy is the new cute. Thin is still in, but for ever younger girls. In a study of the effects of media images on gender perceptions, one study reported that by age three, children view fatness negatively, and free online computer games for girls trend toward fashion, beauty, and dress-up games, reinforcing messages that your body is your most important asset.
  • prior to Britney Spears, most girls had ten years of running around, riding their bikes, and experiencing their bodies as a source of energy, movement, confidence, and skills. That was before children’s fashions included thong panties for kindergarten girls, stylish bras for girls not much older, lipstick or lip gloss as a top accessory for nearly half of six-to nine-year- old girls, and “Future Pimp” T-shirts for schoolboys.
  • Boys, too, are under pressure. They must measure up to the super-masculine ideal of the day, portrayed and defined by more graphic, sadistic, and sexual violence than the superheroes of yesterday. Homophobia and the slurs used to express it remain a common part of boy culture, but now at an earlier age, as does a derogatory view of all things female and an increasingly sexualized attitude toward girls.
  • Children do best when they are free and flexible to try on and cross over the gender codes—girls who skateboard and play ice hockey, boys who draw or dance, boys and girls who enjoy each other without “dating” overtones.
  • TV viewing helped white boys feel better about themselves, and left white girls, black girls, and black boys feeling worse. White boys saw male media comparisons as having it good: “positions of power, prestigious jobs, high education, glamorous houses, a beautiful wife” all easily attained, as if prepackaged. Girls and women saw female media comparisons in more simplistic and limited roles, “focused on the success they have because of how they look, not what they do, what they think or how they got there.” Black boys also saw their media comparisons in the negative, limited roles of “criminals, hoodlums and buffoons, with no other future options.”
  • there is “a clear link between media violence exposure and aggression” as well as to other damaging consequences including eating disorders, poor body image, and unhealthy practices in an effort to achieve idealized appearances. “Failure to live up to the specific media stereotypes for one’s sex is a blow to a person’s sense of social desirability,”
julia rhodes

Ukraine Moves to Disarm Paramilitary Groups - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Ukraine’s Parliament on Tuesday ordered law enforcement agencies to immediately disarm the country’s unofficial paramilitary groups, signaling growing resolve in the interim government to confront nationalists and other vigilantes who played a key role in the overthrow of Viktor F. Yanukovych, the country’s deposed president.
  • The passage of the bill comes as tensions in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, have grown between nationalist groups who continue to patrol the main squares of the city and Arsen Avakov, the country’s new interior minister.
  • e group’s headquarters at a downtown hotel and began negotiations. Just after dawn on Tuesday morning, members of the group, many in military fatigues and balaclavas, boarded buses and left for a “training ground” outside the city, according to local news and video reports.
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  • As Kiev attempted to further consolidate its control domestically, Moscow delivered yet another blow to the fledgling government on Tuesday as Gazprom, the Russian state gas giant, said it would raise the price of natural gas sold in Ukraine by more than 40 percent.
  • Alexei Miller, the head of Gazprom, said that Russia would revoke a discount on gas prices granted as part of a financial lifeline granted to Mr. Yanukovych in December, raising the price to $385.50 per thousand cubic meters from $268.50 per thousand cubic meters.
Javier E

The Disruption Myth - Justin Fox - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • economists can now track what they call “business dynamism” in ways they couldn’t before. As researchers have dug into these numbers, they’ve found that most metrics of dynamism and upheaval in American business have actually been declining for decades, with the downturn steepening after 2000. Fewer new businesses are being launched in the United States, the average age of businesses is increasing, job creation and job destruction are on the wane, industries are being consolidated, and fast-growth businesses are rarer.
  • There was in fact plenty of upheaval in the top ranks of the business world in the 1980s and ’90s, as newcomers crashed the Fortune 500 list with increasing frequency. And the high tech sector was, as widely perceived, a hotbed of entrepreneurship and growth. All of that activity seems to have peaked, however, a year or two after the stock market did in 2000. Measures of big-business volatility began to drop.High-tech start-up activity and what economists call the skewness of growth—how quickly the fastest-growing companies in a sector are outpacing the median company—declined below the levels of the mid-’90s and stayed there.
  • spectacular rise in living standards that began in Europe and North America just over 200 years ago is thus largely the work of disruptive innovations. Without a new burst of them, we may face “secular stagnation”—an extended period of slow growth.
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  • impetus.The
  • it’s also possible that a decades long accretion of regulation has come to weigh on new-business formation and growth; that for all the tales of Silicon Valley swashbuckling, most Americans have become more cautious and less entrepreneurial; or that—and this argument springs straight from Christensen’s keyboard—the pressures of the financial market and a preoccupation with corporate financial metrics have left most businesses “afraid to pursue what they see as risky innovations” and focused instead on cutting costs.
  • some companies are pursuing risky innovations and disrupting established industries. Business publications are full of stories about them: Google and Uber and Amazon and Salesforce and Workday and many more. They just haven’t had a measurable impact on the overall economy yet. One group of economists says to give it a few years— the adoption of new technologies has always affected productivity in fits and starts, and the rise of smartphones and cloud computing and Big Data will show up in the numbers eventually. The other view is that today’s technological innovations pale in significance beside electricity and the internal combustion engine—they’ll have some positive impact, but growth will be slower than it used to be.
sgardner35

Reports: North Korea publicly executes defense chief - CNN.com - 0 views

  • North Korea has publicly executed the country's defense minister after the regime accused him of treason, according to reports from South Korea.
  • l in front of hundreds of people in Pyongyang, the South Korean Intelligence Agency was reported to have told parliament members in a closed door session
  • expressed discontent towards leader Kim Jong Un, and failed to follow Kim's orders on several occasions, according to Kim Gwang-lim
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  • Hyon was a longtime Kim family loyalist who spent years working under North Korea's former leader Kim Jong Il as a high-ranking military official.
  • A spokesman for South Korea's Unification Ministry said the government considered the execution to be another display of "fear politics" in North Korea.
  • Hyon was seen nodding off during a meeting organized by Kim Jong Un
  • During 2014, Hyon was promoted again to the National Defense Commission (NDC), described as a supreme organ of the state which has authority over the Ministry of People's Armed Forces and Ministry of People's Security.
  • North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has been accused of ordering the executions of as many as 15 top officials so far this year. However, during a rare trip by CNN to Pyongyang last week, a top official dismissed the allegation as "malicious slander."
  • North Korea is one of the most closed and repressive countries on Earth.
  • "Kim Jong Un has shown a ruthless side that we haven't seen since his grandfather consolidated power back in the 50s and 60s -- going after rivals and potential rivals and having them executed."
silveiragu

Clinton's lead over Sanders shrinks as her edge over GOP vanishes - CNNPolitics.com - 0 views

  • Hillary Clinton's lead in the race for the Democratic nomination has fallen to just 10 points, and at the same time, her advantage in hypothetical general election matchups against the t
  • op Republican contenders has vanished
  • READ THE POLL RESULTS
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  • Clinton's advantage among women has disappeared in matchups against Bush and Carso
  • The poll suggests Republican women have consolidated their support around their party's front-runners in the last month, and are now more apt to back both Bush and Trump than they were a month ago
  • The poll also finds Democrats' overall enthusiasm for Clinton has waned
  • Clinton 'pleads guilty' to being a moderate
  • The CNN/ORC Poll was conducted by telephone September 4-8 among a random national sample of 1,012 adults. This sample included 930 interviews with registered voters, 395 of whom were self-identified Democrats or Democratic-leaning independents. For results among all registered voters, the margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3 percentage points. Among Democratic voters, it is plus or minus 5 points.
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