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The Corrosive Effect of Apple's Tax Avoidance - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-pay-taxes-the-mccain-way.html apple taxes policy fairness avoidance
shared by Javier E on 24 May 13 - No Cached
  • In fact, as Apple executives tried to point out at the Senate hearing at which their tax strategies were detailed, they could have chosen to pay much less in American taxes than they did.
  • “Apple’s basic structure and planning described in the memorandum appears to be appropriate corporate tax planning in today’s environment
  • It had been common knowledge that private equity firms had found ways to have most of the money earned by partners taxed at low capital gains tax rates, through what is known as carried interest. What came out last year was that some had found a way to treat all of their compensation that way.
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  • “The general American public should not have to make up the balance as corporations avoid paying billions in U.S. taxes,” Senator McCain said.
  • As Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, testified, there is a whole range of tactics Apple has chosen not to use.
  • The news in the Senate report about Apple was not that the company had found ways to shift income to low-tax jurisdictions. Lots of multinational companies do that. The news was that Apple had found a way to move a large part of its income to subsidiaries that claimed to not exist anywhere, at least when it came to paying taxes.
  • If you look at taxes as Senator McCain seems to do, one person finding a way around taxes means the rest of us have to pay more. After all, the government must raise enough money to meet its obligations. But that is not the way a lot of Republicans look at it now. They have denounced taxes for so long that some of them seem to view those who manage to legally avoid paying taxes as heroes. Some of them also seem to think that the government they help to run is evil and that depriving it of revenue is therefore a good thing.
  • In theory, under the current law, American multinationals will pay American taxes on all profits — less whatever foreign taxes they paid — when they bring the profits home. That is known as “deferred” taxation. But they try to avoid doing that, and hope they can persuade the government to let them pay a minimal tax on such repatriated profits, rather than the full rate.
  • Multinational corporations have been campaigning for a “territorial” tax system, in which the United States would tax only profits generated in this country. Doing that without finding a way to close down the loopholes that allow companies to move taxes around would simply ratify the current situation, with the difference that companies would no longer face the possibility of paying American taxes when they brought the money home.
  • closing those loopholes may be impossible under the current system. Companies can have one subsidiary pay any price they want to another subsidiary, so long as it is reasonably close to what an arm’s-length negotiation would produce. The I.R.S. is overmatched when it tries to challenge such pricing, particularly because there are often no comparable deals
  • To get anything done, Congress will have to agree that Senator McCain’s way of looking at taxes is correct, and accept that giving a tax break to one person or company must mean forcing others to pay more than they otherwise would.
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Is Growth Over? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...krugman-is-growth-over.html growth inequality industrial revolution benefits work prediction
shared by Javier E on 28 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • What do we know about the prospects for long-run prosperity?
  • The answer is: less than we think.
  • long-term projections produced by official agencies, like the Congressional Budget Office, generally make two big assumptions.
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  • Robert Gordon of Northwestern University created a stir by arguing that economic growth is likely to slow sharply — indeed, that the age of growth that began in the 18th century may well be drawing to an end.
  • On the other side, however, these projections generally assume that income inequality, which soared over the past three decades, will increase only modestly looking forward.
  • One is that economic growth over the next few decades will resemble growth over the past few decades. In particular, productivity — the key driver of growth — is projected to rise at a rate not too different from its average growth since the 1970s.
  • long-term economic growth hasn’t been a steady process; it has been driven by several discrete “industrial revolutions,” each based on a particular set of technologies. The first industrial revolution, based largely on the steam engine, drove growth in the late-18th and early-19th centuries. The second, made possible, in large part, by the application of science to technologies such as electrification, internal combustion and chemical engineering, began circa 1870 and drove growth into the 1960s.
  • The third, centered around information technology, defines our current era. And, as Mr. Gordon correctly notes, the payoffs so far to the third industrial revolution, while real, have been far smaller than those to the second. Electrification, for example, was a much bigger deal than the Internet.
  • the case against Mr. Gordon’s techno-pessimism rests largely on the assertion that the big payoff to information technology, which is just getting started, will come from the rise of smart machines.
  • machines may soon be ready to perform many tasks that currently require large amounts of human labor. This will mean rapid productivity growth and, therefore, high overall economic growth.
  • who will benefit from that growth? Unfortunately, it’s all too easy to make the case that most Americans will be left behind, because smart machines will end up devaluing the contribution of workers, including highly skilled workers whose skills suddenly become redundant
  • there’s good reason to believe that the conventional wisdom embodied in long-run budget projections — projections that shape almost every aspect of current policy discussion — is all wrong.
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What if We're Looking at Inequality the Wrong Way? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...ng-at-inequality-the-wrong-way inequality research economics income
shared by Javier E on 27 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • By defining income as “post-tax, post-transfer, size-adjusted household income including the ex-ante value of in-kind health insurance benefits,” Burkhauser and his co-authors achieved two things: a diminished degree of inequality and, perhaps more important, a conclusion that the condition of the poor and middle class was improving
  • Burkhauser has come up with statistical findings that not only wipe out inequality trends altogether but also purport to show that over the past 18 years, the poor and middle classes have done better, on a percentage basis, than the rich.
  • You get different answers depending on whether you measure income before or after taxes and transfers, whether you count fringe benefits (mainly health insurance), and whether you look at families or households, and whether you count the big hitters as the top 20% or the top 1 percent. Counting health care mutes the increase in inequality, but that really means that most of the increase in working class incomes has been siphoned off to medical providers. Looking at households has the same effect.
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  • In his 2013 paper, Burkhauser and his two co-authors have completely upended the thrust of Figures 1 and 2.
  • Burkhauser’s 2011 methodology worked to make the pattern appear far less extreme, as illustrated by Figure 2:
  • First, take a look at Figure 1, a 2011 Congressional Budget Office chart showing significant inequality in the distribution of income gains from 1979 to 2007. Many on the left consider work done by the C.B.O. to be the gold standard of inequality measurement:
  • If — a virtually impossible if — the economic and policy-making community were to reach even a rough consensus in support of Burkhauser’s 2013 analysis, the victory for the right would be hard to overestimate.
  • If Burkhauser’s approach was accepted, it would render moot the basic political and philosophical tenets of the Obama presidency
  • Not only would Burkhauser lay waste to a core liberal argument — inequality is worsening — but his claim that a declining share of income is going to the wealthy could be used to justify further tax cuts for the affluent in order to foster top-down investment and growt
  • Burkhauser et al. achieve their reversal of past income distribution data by amending the definition of income developed in their 2012 paper — “post-tax, post-transfer, size-adjusted household income including the ex-ante value of in-kind health insurance benefits” — to incorporate another accounting tool: “yearly-accrued capital gains to measure yearly changes in wealth.”
  • it is a game changer.
  • Burkhauser attempts to measure the year-to-year increase in taxpayers’ assets — stocks and bonds, housing and privately held businesses – and to count those annual increases as income. Increases in the value of such assets do not show up in tax data because they are taxed by the federal government only when the asset in question is sold and the increased value is realized as taxable gains.
  • The Burkhauser approach does a number of things. First, it spreads and flattens income from capital gains over the duration of ownership. For a wealthy individual who makes a huge killing selling stock or a businesses, his or her income does not spike in the year of the sale, but emerges instead as a series of yearly incremental gains.
  • For assets that have been held for a long time, the Burkhauser system effectively backdates much of currently realized capital gains onto earlier years. This is especially significant in calculating income gains from the current sale of assets purchased in the 1980s and 1990s, since much of the added value was acquired in those earlier decades.
  • I raised the following question: Is it a fair measure of a person’s well-being to include unrealized capital gains? Their house or other assets may have increased in value, but their standard of living has not changed.
  • The unfairness of Burkhauser’s approach is clearly acute at the bottom and middle of income distribution. The most common large asset for those on the bottom rungs is a house. Burkhauser would increase the income of those below the median lucky enough to own a home by the annual appreciation in the value of the home through 2007. For many of these families, however, selling their home is not an option. In Burkhauser’s view, their income goes up even if their living conditions remain unchanged.
  • Burkhauser is respected by his peers; his critics, including some friends, do not accuse him of ideological bias. In addition to A.E.I, he has received support from such center-left institutions as the Pew Foundation, Brookings Institution and the Russell Sage Foundation.
  • the “problem is that in such things, especially when it is a difficult task based on lots of new data sources, the devil is in the details. It’s pretty hard to judge those details without doing a substantial amount of work.” Acemoglu’s conclusion: “Bottom line: conceptually there is a valid point here, and this is a serious paper. The rest is to be determined.”
  • “Rich Burkhauser’s work is really the state of the art — the most important research on inequality being done, in my view,” Scott Winship, of the Brookings Institution, e-mailed me. Winship voiced some concern over the reliability of the statistical data used by Burkhauser, but concluded:All that said, I think Rich’s paper is incredibly disruptive for many fields of research in labor economics and other social sciences, and potentially it could change our entire view about rising inequality over the past few decades.
  • Burtless continued:The problem with the authors’ estimates of accruing capital gains is that those numbers are wholly made up based on a prediction that everyone is equally successful in finding homes, stocks, bonds and other assets to invest in.  But they’re not:  Some people are wildly successful, and get into the 1%; others are horribly unsuccessful and become paupers (or receive foreclosure papers); and most earn mediocre returns that are — surprise! — a bit lower than the economy-wide average.
  • Burkhauser et al. measure the period from 1989 to 2007 because those are both peak years in the business cycle. This timing results in a failure to account for the consequences of the 2008-9 financial crisis and the subsequent struggle toward recovery accompanied by persistent high levels of unemployment.
  • During the post-crisis years 2009-11, according to the Pew Center, the wealthiest mean of the nation saw the value of their assets grow by 28 percent, to $3.17 million from $2.48 million, while the bottom 93 percent saw their net worth drop by 4 percent, to $133,816 from $139,896.
  • Wealth trends since the 2008 crash, shown in Figure 5, demonstrate an extraordinary growth in inequality, suggesting that Burkhauser’s findings — restricted to his carefully tailored definition of income — are fatally flawed as an instrument to assess the current real-world position of the poor and middle class compared with the very rich:
  • A key purpose in measuring both wealth and income is to determine what kind of standard of living is possible for those at the top, the middle and the bottom. Do individuals, families and households have enough to provide for themselves, perhaps most importantly for their children? Do they have the financial resources to enter the highly competitive global marketplace?On that score, Burkhauser’s use of “yearly accrued capital gains” fails the test of measuring what is most significant to know in policy making and in assessing the true quality of life in America.
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What is really motivating the runaway train of Donald Trump? - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...6-831d-0324760ca856_story.html trump narcissism gop psychology
shared by Javier E on 05 Aug 16 - No Cached
  • In Trump’s case, we are not dealing with criminality but with temperament, which is not less important. To quote myself from a January column: “We are witnessing what happens when a narcissist who thinks he is at the center of the universe is actually placed at the center of the universe.”
  • Trump’s political judgments seem mostly based on how others view him, making Vladimir Putin a friend and Paul Ryan an enemy. On policy, Trump claims to know more than experts while displaying stunning ignorance. He lies with disturbing ease. He seems to lack the gene for empathy.
  • Trump, however, is not the only one being tested. We have seen that Trump is a sadist; now we determine whether Republicans are masochists. On the current course, Reince Priebus will be judged the worst GOP party chairman in history. On the current course, Ryan will be discredited as a political and moral leader. On the current course, our children will look back in confusion and contempt, asking: How did you allow such a man to get so close to such an office?
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Could a Republican Health Care Reform Ever Happen? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/...health-care-reform-ever-happen obamacare republicans health health care
shared by Javier E on 27 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • a lot of Congressional Republicans are resistant to the more plausible conservative proposals  on health care precisely because they don’t want to find the money required to make any of them work — in some cases because they prefer the comforting illusion that the current system represents some sort of free market ideal that would be wrecked if we started providing tax credits to the currently-uninsured, and in other cases because they’re all-too-aware that some of that money would have to come from caps and cuts that affect groups that currently vote Republican.
  • right now, with the new health care law as-yet-unimplemented, we’re still in a world where the G.O.P.’s politicians and activists and interest groups think of themselves as working from a pre-Obamacare policy baseline. And this, in in turn, creates a strong political reluctance to propose alternatives that deviate from that baseline in ways that might negatively impact the groups — including, as Barro says, “the overwhelmingly insured Republican electorate” — that the party has tried to rally against the health care law from the beginning.
  • But the first moment when a Republican Congress might actually be able to pass a health care overhaul won’t arrive until February of 2017, at which point Obamacare will have been the baseline for two years
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  • r premiums, the Medicare cuts, the Medicaid expansion, all of it. And at that point, the plausible right-of-center alternatives to Obamacare will no longer look risky and disruptive relative to the status quo, because that status quo will no longer be one that Republican interests and voters are deeply invested in defending. Instead, those interests and voters will be looking for ways to limit the health care law’s impact, and the conservative alternatives will look more like what they actually are — proposals that spend less, regulate less, and reflect a greater confidence in markets than the president’s new law, and that would change the underlying health care system in ways that a sensible G.O.P. should support.
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How John Kerry Could End Up Outdoing Hillary Clinton - David Rohde - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...354688 kerry clinton politics policy obama US
shared by Ellie McGinnis on 21 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Kerry’s first foreign-policy speech as secretary, an hour-long defense of diplomacy and foreign aid, was a flop.
  • The nearly universal expectation was that Kerry’s tenure would be overshadowed by his predecessor’s, for a long list of reasons.
  • arriving in Foggy Bottom when the country seemed to be withdrawing from the world. Exhausted by two long wars, Americans were wary of ambitious new foreign engagements—certainly of military ones, but of entangling diplomatic ones, too
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  • Barack Obama’s administration, accelerating a process that had begun in the early 1960s under President Kennedy, was centralizing foreign-policy decision making in the White House’s National Security Council, marginalizing the State Department.
  • Finally, Kerry, a defeated presidential candidate, was devoid of the sexiness that automatically attaches to a figure, like Hillary Clinton, who remains a legitimate presidential prospect
  • The consensus in Washington was that Kerry was a boring if not irrelevant man stepping into what was becoming a boring, irrelevant job.
  • Nearly a year into his tenure, Kerry is the driving force behind a flurry of Mideast diplomacy the scope of which has not been seen in years. In the face of widespread skepticism, he has revived the Israeli-Palestinian peace process; brokered a deal with Russia to remove chemical weapons from Syria; embarked on a new round of nuclear talks with Iran, holding the highest-level face-to-face talks with Iranian diplomats in years; and started hammering out a new post-withdrawal security agreement with Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
  • it will be Kerry who is credited with making the State Department relevant again.
  • “He’s front and center on all these issues. That clearly represents a very ambitious first year for any secretary of state.”
  • Kerry has a bad habit of wandering off script. On a trip to Pakistan in August, he created two diplomatic incidents in a single interview. First he said that the Egyptian army was “restoring democracy” when it toppled the country’s democratically elected president.
  • President Obama had “a timeline” for ending U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan.
  • he overshot in the opposite direction, promising that any American strike against Syria would be “unbelievably small”—a bit of impressively self-defeating rhetoric that undermined days of administration efforts to argue that a few dozen Tomahawk cruise-missile strikes would be more than what hawkish critics were calling a pointless “pinprick.”
  • a word that comes up frequently in conversations about Kerry is gasbag. He had few close friends in the Senate, where he served for nearly 30 years. A former diplomat says Kerry’s recent foreign-policy successes have made him more insufferable than ever.
  • his gaffes are caused by arrogance and indiscipline. They say that even in a city swollen with egotism and pomposity, Kerry stands out.
  • “Nobody would challenge the notion that he’s been very much a team player and willing to take on really hard assignments from the president and go to the toughest places.”
  • (In one late-night press conference in Moscow last May, he uttered a staggering 95-word sentence.
  • “Even as a junior or senior, he was a pompous blowhard,” says someone who attended Yale with Kerry in the 1960s and asked not to be named.
  • he is not so much arrogant as awkward.
  • Liberal Democrats call his hawkish views on Syria a betrayal of his antiwar past. Republicans say he is a perennial flip-flopper: he fought in the Vietnam War and then protested against it; he supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq and then opposed it; he tried to negotiate with Bashar al‑Assad in 2009, then compared him to Adolf Hitler—and then reopened the door to negotiating with him again.
  • Kerry “just can’t dance.”
  • Washington mandarins dismiss Kerry’s foreign-policy ambitions as grandiose and overweening, especially relative to what America’s diminishing power can achieve after Iraq and Afghanistan
  • old foreign-policy hands say that instead of acknowledging the limits of American power in the post–Arab Spring Middle East, Kerry looks for misguided ways to apply power the country no longer has.
  • Current aides argue that Kerry’s recent successes belie the caricatures of him. “Show me where he hasn’t done this job well,” one demanded when I interviewed him in mid-October.
  • “I would ask John Kerry, ‘How can you ask a man to be the first one to die for a mistake?’ ”
  • Kerry seem “pompous” is that “oftentimes he tries too hard.” According to Manley and others, Kerry had a knack for walking up to fellow members on the Senate floor at precisely the wrong time.
  • His enormous ambition motivates him to aim for major breakthroughs despite daunting odds. And his healthy self-confidence allows him to believe that he can convince anyone of virtually anything.
  • Kerry also has bottomless reserves of patience that allow him to engage for hours in seemingly fruitless negotiations; he persists long past the time others would have given up in exhaustion.
  • The amount of time he’s spent negotiating with Afghanistan’s Hamid Karzai and Russia’s Sergey Lavrov alone should qualify him for some kind of diplomatic medal of honor.
  • an indifference to his own political standing.
  • Political calculations may have constrained the risks Hillary Clinton was willing to take. Kerry, in contrast, no longer needs to heed political consultants. Nor does he need to worry too much about what his detractors say.
  • “I don’t care at all,” he said. “I could care less about it. You know, David, I ran for president, so I’m not scared of failure.”
  • secretary of state is the job for which Kerry was born and bred
  • “I’m not worried about the politics,” Lowenstein recalls Kerry telling him. “I want to get things done.”
  • Obama, too, no longer has to worry about reelection; concerns about the 2012 election may have limited the president’s own appetite for diplomatic risk taking in the Mideast during his first term.
  • But his enthusiasm for his current job is unquestionable; one aide told me that he will have to be dragged from the office—fingernails scraping against the floor—at the end of his term.
  • As a presidential candidate, he had to downplay his obsession with foreign policy and his fluency in foreign languages, for fear that such things would play badly with voters; as secretary of state, he can freely leverage those qualities.
  • if there is no breakthrough with Iran, or if his efforts to broker peace in Syria fall short, or if the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks founder, history will likely view Kerry as the tragicomic figure his detractors already judge him to be.
  • “After you lose the presidency, you don’t have much else to lose.”
  • Following stints as an assistant district attorney and the lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, Kerry would, after his election to the Senate in 1984, go on to serve for 28 years on the same committee he had stood before in 1971, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
  • (But for Ohio, where he lost to Bush by 119,000 votes, Kerry would have been president.
  • But Kerry stepped into the role at a singularly weak moment for the position. For one thing, America, weary after a decade of conflict, is turning inward; activist diplomacy is out of favor. For another, State Department employees I interviewed told me that morale is low.
  • the department is too hierarchical, inflexible, and risk-averse—and is in danger of becoming even more so in the aftermath of Benghazi.
  • the intensely controlling Obama administration has centralized foreign-policy decision making in the National Security Council, weakening the State Department.
  • Just a day after Kerry delivered one of the most impassioned speeches of his career, assailing Assad’s use of chemical weapons on civilians as a “crime against conscience” and sending a clear signal that U.S. air strikes on Syria were imminent, the president announced that missile strikes might in fact not be imminent, and that he would be seeking congressional authorization to attack Syria.
  • the president risked causing foreign leaders and negotiators to doubt whether any future warnings or statements issued by Kerry were backed by the White House.
  • Kerry conducted long interviews with every living former secretary of state—Kissinger, George Shultz, Baker, Madeleine Albright, Powell, Condoleezza Rice, and Clinton—and set out to model himself after Shultz, who, in six and a half years serving under Ronald Reagan, was seen as a combination of the two prototypes, both a great diplomat and a good manager.
  • “I don’t care about risk, honestly,” he said, leaning forward in his chair, spoiling for a fight. “The riskiest thing to do is to not act. I would far rather try and fail than fail not trying.”
  • When off the record, in relaxed settings, he is refreshingly direct, profane, and insightful, speaking bluntly about the limits of American power and caustically lamenting Washington’s growing paralysis and partisanship
  • He finishes sentences with phrases such as something like that or that’s about it or thanks, man. Toes tapping, head bobbing back and forth, he speaks with fervor and candor. His tenacity is palpable.
  • Recent secretaries of state have had different strengths. Henry Kissinger and James Baker, two secretaries who had close relationships with their presidents (Nixon in Kissinger’s case, George H. W. Bush in Baker’s), were powerful bureaucratic players.
  • But isn’t staking America’s credibility, and his own reputation, on long-odds breakthrough agreements with Tehran or Moscow, or on Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, a dubious exercise, as Obama’s failed first-term efforts at Mideast peace demonstrated?
  • Colin Powell lost a crucial internal administration battle in failing to halt the Bush White House’s march to war in Iraq—but was adored at the State Department for implementing sweeping administrative reforms.
  • Clinton embraced a new, Google Hangout era of town-hall diplomacy, and she elevated economic development and women’s issues. She was an architect of the administration’s “pivot to Asia,” and she took risks in supporting the Afghanistan troop surge and the intervention in Libya.
  • steered clear of the Middle East, delegating special envoys like Richard Holbrooke and George Mitchell to grapple with the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, peace talks with the Taliban
  • Clinton was much more prudent and careful than Kerry, whom one former State Department official describes as more of a “high-risk, high-reward”
  • “My view is that she was pretty sheltered,” he told me. “They were not interpersonally pleasant, and they were very protective of her. You can get into a cocoon.”
  • “My assessment was that she made a calculated political choice not to hang her hat on that thankless task,” Kim Ghattas,
  • the former secretary would have taken bolder risks but was reined in by the White House—especially during her first couple of years in office, when hostility from the bitter 2008 primary campaign still lingered between the Obama and Clinton staffs.
  • she actively engaged in Middle East talks, at one point meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for seven hours in New York.
  • Kennan warned Powell about the dangers of traveling too much—of prioritizing activist diplomacy over providing the White House with solid foreign-policy analysis.
  • Powell gave a copy of Kennan’s letter to Kerry. So far, Kerry is not following the advice. As October came to a close, Kerry had already flown more than 213,000 miles and spent more than 100 days—roughly 40 percent of his time—outside the United States. In his first nine months, he’d traveled more miles than Clinton had in her entire first year in office.
  • In 2009, he convinced Afghan President Hamid Karzai to consent to a runoff in his country’s disputed presidential election.
  • 2011, he was dispatched to Pakistan after the killing of Osama bin Laden to persuade local officials to return the tail of an American helicopter that had crashed at the site.
  • cemented Kerry’s bond with Obama was less his diplomatic achievements than his ability to impersonate another tall, wealthy Massachusetts politician with good hair: Kerry served as Mitt Romney’s surrogate during weeks of preparation for the 2012 presidential debates.
  • Kerry channeled Romney so effectively that, aides to both men say, he got under Obama’s skin.
  • Kerry agreed that the U.S. should try to revive Middle East negotiations before the Palestinians again pushed for statehood, at the United Nations General Assembly in September 2013.
  • In private meetings with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Obama pushed for a resumption of negotiations. At a final press conference before returning to Washington, Obama announced that he was handing the pursuit of talks over to Kerry.
  • “What I can guarantee is that Secretary Kerry is going to be spending a good deal of time in discussions with the parties.”
  • He met alone with Abbas for two hours in Amman and then flew to Jerusalem to meet with Netanyahu and three of his aides.
  • Kerry pressed on, returning in April to Jerusalem and Ramallah, the de facto Palestinian capital in the West Bank. After 24 hours of talks with both sides, Kerry held a press conference at the airport in Tel Aviv.
  • Kerry held three meetings with Netanyahu and Abbas in three days, including one meeting with the Israeli prime minister that lasted six hours, until 3 a.m. On June 29, he canceled a trip to the United Arab Emirates so he could keep talking with Netanyahu and Abbas, raising expectations of a breakthrough. On June 30, he held another press conference at the Tel Aviv airport.
  • “We started out with very wide gaps, and we have narrowed those considerably.”
  • Five months into the job, Kerry was off to an ominous start. His wife was in the hospital. Syria was convulsing. Progress toward Israeli-Palestinian talks was stalled. Egypt was burning. And Republican attack ads were making it appear as though the secretary of state had spent the weekend yachting.
  • Kerry said, according to the aide. “The only thing I’m interested in is a serious negotiation that can lead to a final-status agreement.”
  • “On behalf of President Obama, I am pleased to announce that we have reached an agreement that establishes a basis for resuming direct final-status negotiations between the Palestinians and the Israelis,” Kerry said, calmly and deliberately. “This is a significant and welcome step forward.” He declined to take questions.
  • Nine days later, the Israeli cabinet approved the release of the 104 Palestinian prisoners. The next day, Israeli and Palestinian officials arrived in Washington to begin peace talks.
  • The smallness of his circle of aides, which had been seen early on as a detriment to his management of the State Department, now made it easier to keep information contained.
  • Working with consultants from McKinsey, diplomats estimated that $4 billion in long-term private investment would flow to the Palestinians in the wake of an agreement.
  • Palestinian officials appear to have compromised on their demand for a settlement freeze.
  • From the beginning, Kerry had insisted that the Obama administration not allow a halt in Israeli settlement construction to become a public precondition.
  • Kerry also reiterated a core argument: the security that Israel currently enjoys is temporary, if not illusory. Without a two-state solution, Israel will face a European-led campaign of delegitimization, a new intifada, and a Palestinian leader far more radical than Abbas.
  • The crucial concession—the release of the 104 prisoners—came from the Israeli side
  • “It takes time to listen, it takes time to persuade,” Frank Lowenstein told me. “This is where Kerry’s willingness to stay up all night pays off.”
  • The U.S. provided nonlethal aid to the opposition, but White House officials were so fearful of American assistance inadvertently falling into the hands of jihadists that the National Security Council Deputies Committee monitored the distribution of the aid in granular detail. Qatar and Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, were funneling cash and weapons to hard-line militants, including Al Nusra Front, an al-Qaeda affiliate.
  • Russia continued providing Syria with arms and blocking any action by the UN Security Council.
  • When Putin finally received Kerry, after a three-hour delay, Putin reportedly fiddled continuously with his pen and “more resembled a man indulging a long-ago scheduled visit from the cultural attaché of Papua New Guinea than participating in an urgent summit with America’s top diplomat,”
  • At a late-night press conference, a beaming Kerry announced that he and Lavrov would co-host a peace conference in Geneva.
  • “They were great efforts, and again, I reiterate my gratitude to President Putin for a very generous welcome here.”
  • Earlier, in April, after American intelligence officials had confirmed that Assad had carried out several small-scale chemical-weapons attacks, Obama had reluctantly agreed to mount a covert CIA effort to arm and train moderate rebels.
  • if the United States did not “impose consequences” for Assad’s use of chemical weapons, the Syrian leader would see it as “a green light for continued CW use.” But the White House did not alter course.
  • Both Obama and Kerry favored a military response—air strikes—according to a senior administration official. As American intelligence agencies accumulated evidence suggesting that Assad was responsible, Kerry offered to make the public case for strikes. White House officials welcomed the idea and vetted his speeches.
  • “My vision is that, if you can make peace, if you can get Israel and Palestine resolved and can get the Iranian threat of a nuclear weapon put to bed appropriately—even if Syria didn’t calm down—if you get those two pieces or one piece of that, you’ve got a hugely changed dynamic in a region that is in turmoil. And if you take just the Palestinian-Israeli situation, you have the potential to make peace with 57 nations—35 Muslim nations and 22 Arab nations. If the issue is resolved, they will recognize Israel.”
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Russell Brand on revolution: "We no longer have the luxury of tradition" - 0 views

www.newstatesman.com/...russell-brand-on-revolution revolution activism conservativism crisis politics spiritual
shared by Javier E on 29 Nov 13 - No Cached
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  • The right has all the advantages, just as the devil has all the best tunes. Conservatism appeals to our selfishness and fear, our desire and self-interest; they neatly nurture and then harvest the inherent and incubating individualism. I imagine that neurologically the pathway travelled by a fearful or selfish impulse is more expedient and well travelled than the route of the altruistic pang. In simple terms of circuitry I suspect it is easier to connect these selfish inclinations.
  • This natural, neurological tendency has been overstimulated and acculturated. Materialism and individualism do in moderation make sense.
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  • Biomechanically we are individuals, clearly. On the most obvious frequency of our known sensorial reality we are independent anatomical units. So we must take care of ourselves. But with our individual survival ensured there is little satisfaction to be gained by enthroning and enshrining ourselves as individuals.
  • For me the solution has to be primarily spiritual and secondarily political.
  • By spiritual I mean the acknowledgement that our connection to one another and the planet must be prioritised. Buckminster Fuller outlines what ought be our collective objectives succinctly: “to make the world work for 100 per cent of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous co-operation without ecological offence or the disadvantage of anyone”. This maxim is the very essence of “easier said than done” as it implies the dismantling of our entire socio-economic machinery. By teatime.
  • The price of privilege is poverty. David Cameron said in his conference speech that profit is “not a dirty word”. Profit is the most profane word we have. In its pursuit we have forgotten that while individual interests are being met, we as a whole are being annihilated. The reality, when not fragmented through the corrupting lens of elitism, is we are all on one planet.
  • Suffering of this magnitude affects us all. We have become prisoners of comfort in the absence of meaning. A people without a unifying myth. Joseph Campbell, the comparative mythologist, says our global problems are all due to the lack of relevant myths.
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How to Secede From the Union, One Judicial Vacancy at a Time - Andrew Cohen - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...360207 judicial politics partisan secession nomination judge
shared by Javier E on 09 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • Some Republican senators and a few Democrats as well are starving the federal courts of the trial judges they need to serve the basic legal need
  • One federal-trial seat in Texas has been vacant for 1,951 days, to give just one example. The absence of these judges, in one district after another around the country, has created a continuing vacuum of federal authority that is a kind of secession, because federal law without judges to impose it in a timely way is no federal law at all.
  • A recent study from the Center for American Progress identified a backlog of more than 12,000 federal cases exists in Texas alone because the two current senators there, both conservative Republicans and ardent foes of the Obama Administration's legal views, have slow-walked trial judge nominations.
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  • The reason there are so many vacancies without nominees is that certain senators are making strategic choices not to recommend federal trial-court nominees to the White House. These lawmakers are saying that they would rather have no one interpreting federal law in their states than to have more Obama-appointed judges interpreting the law.
  • The easy response, offered up recently by the Texas delegation, is that it's the White House's fault, too. But it's not.
  • It's an intentional act by the legislative branch to keep the judicial branch from effectively performing its constitutionally mandated functions. And it's a neutering of a co-equal branch achieved without a constitutional amendment or statute, or even much public debate, about expressly limiting judicial power.
  • What's happening here is part of a blunt political and ideological strategy: These particular senators have maneuvered so that the citizens of red states have less federal judicial oversight than citizens of blue states and purple states. This is great news if you are a secessionist or hate the idea of federal power exercised through the judiciary.
  • There are currently 59 federal court vacancies for which there are no pending nominees. This number represents more than half the number of current vacancies in total
  • By subverting this goal, by seceding from federal judicial authority by attrition, these senators are dooming their constituents to a third-world legal system.
  • The facts behind these statistics are just some of the newest arguments against one of the worst and most self-defeating Senate "traditions": the granting to local senators of what amounts to veto power over federal judicial nominees.
  • The reason this important story isn't covered well on television is because there are no dramatic images attached to it. The reason the White House doesn't highlight the problem more often is because it still needs to work with these intransigent senators on future nominations.
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Destined for War: Can China and the United States Escape Thucydides's Trap? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...406756 China US foreign policy international relations hegemony dominance
shared by Javier E on 26 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • The defining question about global order for this generation is whether China and the United States can escape Thucydides’s Trap. The Greek historian’s metaphor reminds us of the attendant dangers when a rising power rivals a ruling power—as Athens challenged Sparta in ancient Greece, or as Germany did Britain a century ago.
  • Most such contests have ended badly, often for both nations, a team of mine at the Harvard Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs has concluded after analyzing the historical record. In 12 of 16 cases over the past 500 years, the result was war.
  • When the parties avoided war, it required huge, painful adjustments in attitudes and actions on the part not just of the challenger but also the challenged.
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  • Based on the current trajectory, war between the United States and China in the decades ahead is not just possible, but much more likely than recognized at the moment. Indeed, judging by the historical record, war is more likely than not.
  • A risk associated with Thucydides’s Trap is that business as usual—not just an unexpected, extraordinary event—can trigger large-scale conflict. When a rising power is threatening to displace a ruling power, standard crises that would otherwise be contained, like the assassination of an archduke in 1914, can initiate a cascade of reactions that, in turn, produce outcomes none of the parties would otherwise have chosen.
  • The preeminent geostrategic challenge of this era is not violent Islamic extremists or a resurgent Russia. It is the impact that China’s ascendance will have on the U.S.-led international order, which has provided unprecedented great-power peace and prosperity for the past 70 years. As Singapore’s late leader, Lee Kuan Yew, observed, “the size of China’s displacement of the world balance is such that the world must find a new balance. It is not possible to pretend that this is just another big player. This is the biggest player in the history of the world.”
  • More than 2,400 years ago, the Athenian historian Thucydides offered a powerful insight: “It was the rise of Athens, and the fear that this inspired in Sparta, that made war inevitable.
  • Note that Thucydides identified two key drivers of this dynamic: the rising power’s growing entitlement, sense of its importance, and demand for greater say and sway, on the one hand, and the fear, insecurity, and determination to defend the status quo this engenders in the established power, on the other.
  • However unimaginable conflict seems, however catastrophic the potential consequences for all actors, however deep the cultural empathy among leaders, even blood relatives, and however economically interdependent states may be—none of these factors is sufficient to prevent war, in 1914 or today.
  • Four of the 16 cases in our review did not end in bloodshed. Those successes, as well as the failures, offer pertinent lessons for today’s world leaders. Escaping the Trap requires tremendous effort
  • In 1980, China had 10 percent of America’s GDP as measured by purchasing power parity; 7 percent of its GDP at current U.S.-dollar exchange rates; and 6 percent of its exports. The foreign currency held by China, meanwhile, was just one-sixth the size of America’s reserves. The answers for the second column: By 2014, those figures were 101 percent of GDP; 60 percent at U.S.-dollar exchange rates; and 106 percent of exports. China’s reserves today are 28 times larger than America’s.
  • Could China become #1? In what year could China overtake the United States to become, say, the largest economy in the world, or primary engine of global growth, or biggest market for luxury goods?
  • Could China Become #1? Manufacturer: Exporter: Trading nation: Saver: Holder of U.S. debt: Foreign-direct-investment destination: Energy consumer: Oil importer: Carbon emitter: Steel producer: Auto market: Smartphone market: E-commerce market: Luxury-goods market:   Internet user: Fastest supercomputer: Holder of foreign reserves: Source of initial public offerings: Primary engine of global growth: Economy: Most are stunned to learn that on each of these 20 indicators, China has already surpassed the U.S.
  • Lee Kuan Yew, the world’s premier China watcher and a mentor to Chinese leaders since Deng Xiaoping. Before his death in March, the founder of Singapore put the odds of China continuing to grow at several times U.S. rates for the next decade and beyond as “four chances in five.
  • On whether China’s leaders are serious about displacing the United States as the top power in Asia in the foreseeable future, Lee answered directly: “Of course. Why not … how could they not aspire to be number one in Asia and in time the world?” And about accepting its place in an international order designed and led by America, he said absolutely not: “China wants to be China and accepted as such—not as an honorary member of the West.”
  • As the United States emerged as the dominant power in the Western hemisphere in the 1890s, how did it behave? Future President Theodore Roosevelt personified a nation supremely confident that the 100 years ahead would be an American century. Over a decade that began in 1895 with the U.S. secretary of state declaring the United States “sovereign on this continent,” America liberated Cuba; threatened Britain and Germany with war to force them to accept American positions on disputes in Venezuela and Canada; backed an insurrection that split Colombia to create a new state of Panama (which immediately gave the U.S. concessions to build the Panama Canal); and attempted to overthrow the government of Mexico, which was supported by the United Kingdom and financed by London bankers. In the half century that followed, U.S. military forces intervened in “our hemisphere” on more than 30 separate occasions to settle economic or territorial disputes in terms favorable to Americans, or oust leaders they judged unacceptable
  • When Deng Xiaoping initiated China’s fast march to the market in 1978, he announced a policy known as “hide and bide.” What China needed most abroad was stability and access to markets. The Chinese would thus “bide our time and hide our capabilities,” which Chinese military officers sometimes paraphrased as getting strong before getting even.
  • With the arrival of China’s new paramount leader, Xi Jinping, the era of “hide and bide” is over
  • Many observers outside China have missed the great divergence between China’s economic performance and that of its competitors over the seven years since the financial crisis of 2008 and Great Recession. That shock caused virtually all other major economies to falter and decline. China never missed a year of growth, sustaining an average growth rate exceeding 8 percent. Indeed, since the financial crisis, nearly 40 percent of all growth in the global economy has occurred in just one country: China
  • What Xi Jinping calls the “China Dream” expresses the deepest aspirations of hundreds of millions of Chinese, who wish to be not only rich but also powerful. At the core of China’s civilizational creed is the belief—or conceit—that China is the center of the universe. In the oft-repeated narrative, a century of Chinese weakness led to exploitation and national humiliation by Western colonialists and Japan. In Beijing’s view, China is now being restored to its rightful place, where its power commands recognition of and respect for China’s core interests.
  • Last November, in a seminal meeting of the entire Chinese political and foreign-policy establishment, including the leadership of the People’s Liberation Army, Xi provided a comprehensive overview of his vision of China’s role in the world. The display of self-confidence bordered on hubris. Xi began by offering an essentially Hegelian conception of the major historical trends toward multipolarity (i.e. not U.S. unipolarity) and the transformation of the international system (i.e. not the current U.S.-led system). In his words, a rejuvenated Chinese nation will build a “new type of international relations” through a “protracted” struggle over the nature of the international order. In the end, he assured his audience that “the growing trend toward a multipolar world will not change.”
  • Given objective trends, realists see an irresistible force approaching an immovable object. They ask which is less likely: China demanding a lesser role in the East and South China Seas than the United States did in the Caribbean or Atlantic in the early 20th century, or the U.S. sharing with China the predominance in the Western Pacific that America has enjoyed since World War II?
  • At this point, the established script for discussion of policy challenges calls for a pivot to a new strategy (or at least slogan), with a short to-do list that promises peaceful and prosperous relations with China. Shoehorning this challenge into that template would demonstrate only one thing: a failure to understand the central point I’m trying to make
  • What strategists need most at the moment is not a new strategy, but a long pause for reflection. If the tectonic shift caused by China’s rise poses a challenge of genuinely Thucydidean proportions, declarations about “rebalancing,” or revitalizing “engage and hedge,” or presidential hopefuls’ calls for more “muscular” or “robust” variants of the same, amount to little more than aspirin treating cancer. Future historians will compare such assertions to the reveries of British, German, and Russian leaders as they sleepwalked into 1914
  • The rise of a 5,000-year-old civilization with 1.3 billion people is not a problem to be fixed. It is a condition—a chronic condition that will have to be managed over a generation
  • Success will require not just a new slogan, more frequent summits of presidents, and additional meetings of departmental working groups. Managing this relationship without war will demand sustained attention, week by week, at the highest level in both countries. It will entail a depth of mutual understanding not seen since the Henry Kissinger-Zhou Enlai conversations in the 1970s. Most significantly, it will mean more radical changes in attitudes and actions, by leaders and publics alike, than anyone has yet imagined.
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The Earth Is Full - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...08friedman.html environment crisis cultural sustainability
shared by Javier E on 08 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • When you are surrounded by something so big that requires you to change everything about the way you think and see the world, then denial is the natural response. But the longer we wait, the bigger the response required.
  • we are currently growing at a rate that is using up the Earth’s resources far faster than they can be sustainably replenished, so we are eating into the future. Right now, global growth is using about 1.5 Earths. “Having only one planet makes this a rather significant problem
  • the Earth is full. We are now using so many resources and putting out so much waste into the Earth that we have reached some kind of limit, given current technologies. The economy is going to have to get smaller in terms of physical impact.
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  • We’re currently caught in two loops: One is that more population growth and more global warming together are pushing up food prices; rising food prices cause political instability in the Middle East, which leads to higher oil prices, which leads to higher food prices, which leads to more instability. At the same time, improved productivity means fewer people are needed in every factory to produce more stuff. So if we want to have more jobs, we need more factories. More factories making more stuff make more global warming, and that is where the two loops meet.
  • We will realize, he predicts, that the consumer-driven growth model is broken and we have to move to a more happiness-driven growth model, based on people working less and owning less.
  • “We are heading for a crisis-driven choice,” he says. “We either allow collapse to overtake us or develop a new sustainable economic model. We will choose the latter. We may be slow, but we’re not stupid.”
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News from The Associated Press - 0 views

hosted.ap.org/...CLIMATE_COUNTDOWN news associated press politics environmental crisis US conference obama paris
shared by katyshannon on 30 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • The largest group of world leaders ever to stand together kicked off two weeks of high-stakes climate talks outside Paris on Monday, saying that striking an ambitious deal to curb global warming can show terrorists what countries can achieve when they are united.
  • The U.N.-organized gathering of 151 heads of state and government comes at a somber time for France, two weeks after militants linked to the Islamic State group killed 130 people around Paris. Fears of more attacks prompted extra-high security and a crackdown on environmental protests.
  • The conference is aimed at the most far-reaching deal ever to tackle global warming. The last major agreement, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, required only rich countries to cut carbon dioxide emissions, and the U.S. never signed on. Since then, global temperatures and sea levels have continued to rise, and the Earth has seen an extraordinary run of extreme weather.
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  • More than 180 countries have already submitted individual national plans, but a climate deal is by no means guaranteed.
  • Among several sticking points is money - how much rich countries should invest to help poor countries cope with climate change, how much should be invested in renewable energy, and how much traditional oil, gas and coal producers stand to lose if countries agree to forever reduce emissions.
  • Reviving the rich-poor differences that caused earlier climate talks to fail, Chinese President Xi Jinping said an eventual global deal must include aid for poor countries and acknowledge differences between developing and established economies.
  • Many of the leaders said the world must keep the average temperature within 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) of current levels - and if possible to half that, to spare island nations threatened by rising seas.
  • The world has already warmed nearly 1 degree Celsius since the beginning of the industrial age, and factories and cars continue to belch pollution around the world.
  • Many of the leaders framed the problem as a generational issue, where current leaders owe future generations a livable Earth.
  • Leaders called their attendance in Paris an act of defiance after the Nov. 13 attacks, some of which occurred near the airfield north of the city where the conference is taking place.
  • Many of the leaders paid their respects at sites linked to the attacks. Obama, in a late-night visit, placed a single flower outside the concert hall where dozens were killed, and bowed his head in silence.
  • To that end, at least 19 governments and 28 leading world investors were announcing billions of dollars in investments to research and develop clean energy technology, with the goal of making it cheaper. Backers include Obama, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, billionaires George Soros and Saudi Prince Alaweed bin Talal, and Jack Ma of China's Alibaba.
  • Under the initiative, 19 countries pledge to double their spending on low- or no-carbon energy over the next five years. They currently spend about $10 billion a year, about half of that from the U.S.
  • Gates said he and other investors, including the University of California, are pitching in $7 billion so far and hope to raise more this week.
  • In another announcement, the United States, Canada and nine European countries pledged nearly $250 million to help the most vulnerable countries adapt to rising seas, droughts and other consequences of climate change. Germany pledged $53 million, the U.S. $51 million and Britain $45 million.
  • The money will be made available to a fund for the least developed countries. Other countries that contributed include Denmark, Finland, France, Ireland, Italy, Sweden and Switzerland.
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Why Germany's current-account surplus is bad for the world economy - 0 views

www.economist.com/...ys-current-account-surplus-bad Germeny politics US trump policy economics economic
shared by krystalxu on 10 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • the stage is set for a clash between a protectionist America and a free-trading Germany.
  • demanded the renegotiation of another, the North American Free-Trade Agreement.
  • He is weighing whether to impose tariffs on steel imports into America, a move that would almost certainly provoke retaliation.
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  • An imminent free-trade deal between Japan and the European Union will add substance to her rhetoric (see article).
  • Mr Trump has grasped an inconvenient truth. He has admonished Germany for its trade surplus, which stood at almost $300bn last year, the world’s largest (China’s hoard was a mere $200bn).
  • put a stop to sales of German cars—may be self-defeating, but the fact is that Germany saves too much and spends too little.
  • this is not the result of a mercantilist government policy, as some foreigners complain.
  • the increase in national saving has come from firms and the government.
  • It is an instinct that helps explain Germany’s transformation since the late 1990s from Europe’s sick man to today’s muscle-bound champion.
  • There is much to envy in Germany’s model. Harmony between firms and workers has been one of the main reasons for the economy’s outperformance.
  • This is one reason why the populist AfD party remains on the fringes of German politics.
  • Exporters do not invest their windfall profits at home. And Germany is not alone; Sweden, Switzerland, Denmark and the Netherlands have been piling up big surpluses, too.
  • For a large economy at full employment to run a current-account surplus in excess of 8% of GDP puts unreasonable strain on the global trading system.
  • Perhaps Germany’s bumper trade surplus will be eroded as China’s was, by a surge in wages.
  • the German instinct for caution is deeply rooted.
  • Germany’s structural budget balance has gone from a deficit of over 3% of GDP in 2010 to a small surplus.
  • The economy lags behind in its readiness for digitalisation, ranking 25th in the world in average download speeds.
  • Above all, it is long past time for Germany to recognise that its excessive saving is a weakness.
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The Churchill row is part of the glib approach to history that gave us Brexit | Simon J... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-history-brexit-john-mcdonnell history culture lessons blame judge moral judgment
shared by Javier E on 15 Feb 19 - No Cached
  • As history is raided, indeed raped, by identitarians and populists, glib judgments on the past become fodder for every tribal grievance.
  • I have come away from working on a history of Europe convinced that it is senseless to pass moral judgment on men and women of past times and past cultures.
  • Fake history may be a clever way to engage the empathy of the young with otherwise difficult material. But if the purpose of history is to offer lessons for the future, distorting it is fraught with danger.
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  • The current cult of identity politics is to rifle through the past careers of great men and women, not to ascertain accuracy but to sort them into friends or foes.
  • The idea of history as composed of heroes and villains is infantile. Inside every hero lurks an opposite. The best answer to a stupid question is no answer
  • Awarding long-dead people berths in some transient heaven or hell is merely to conscript them to some current grievance.
  • I am convinced a historic British aversion to the Germans, rehearsed annually on Remembrance Day and in movies and bestseller lists, underpins much current Brexit sentiment. So does ancient antagonism towards the French.
  • Fake history is worse than no history. It is better to forget than partially to remember. We should live for today and move on.
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Washington Monthly | Rage Against the Machines - 0 views

washingtonmonthly.com/...rage-against-the-machines parties politics history ideology
shared by Javier E on 31 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • hat hyper-partisanship is wrecking American democracy is a truism of our times. But there is a lack of consensus about what to do about it. One challenge is that many pundits and would-be reformers lack historical understanding of the problem
  • reformers should read Sam Rosenfeld’s new book, The Polarizers, a timely and valuable guide explaining how our current political divisions came to be
  • Rosenfeld, a Colgate University political scientist trained as a historian, goes through the historical record to recreate two parallel stories—the intellectual debate over whether to have two distinct political parties, and the on-the-ground intraparty battles in which activists triumphed over insiders in restructuring party organizations and coalitions. Told together, these stories add important context to our present dilemma, reminding us that party politics are so different today from the 1950s
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  • At midcentury, the common critique was not of too little bipartisanship, but of too much
  • Two currents, one intellectual and one cultural, helped to undermine this model and presage the marriage of party and ideology we have today.
  • The intellectual current was the rise of the “responsible party” theory of government, advocated by political scientists who argued that the lack of clarity between parties “stifled progress while blurring accountability to the voters,”
  • The cultural trend was that as voters became better educated and more economically stable, they wanted something more out of politics than the patronage provided by the old political machines
  • This led a new generation of solidly middle-class and young activists in both parties to turn away from the pragmatic politics of backroom bargaining and technocratic tinkering of their elders and toward a new front of ideological battle, beginning with civil rights.
  • The Goldwaterites, for example, rightly believed that they could appeal to southern conservative Democrats over their shared distaste for civil rights legislation and defeat the far less organized urban-oriented liberal moderates, who Rosenfeld importantly notes were too top heavy with elected officials and intellectuals and “devoid of grassroots strength.”
  • Among Democrats, the energy for aligning party with principle came from “young, educated New Deal liberals, motivated largely by national issues, [who] forged alliances with organized labor and racial minorities to square off against sclerotic, generally non-ideological Democratic organizations.” Civil rights was their cri de coeur
  • With the arrival of the “Watergate Babies” after the 1974 election, congressional Democrats enacted new rules to give both the caucus and the speaker more power to overcome the conservatives. These rules were pushed by liberal outside groups, most prominently Common Cause. Later, Newt Gingrich would further centralize power when he became speaker, bringing American politics a step even closer to the responsible-party vision.
  • Richard Nixon opined in 1959, “It would be a great tragedy if we had our two major political parties divided on what we would call a conservative-liberal line. . . . [O]ne of the attributes of our political system has been that we have avoided generally violent swings in administrations from one extreme to the other.”
  • As a mode of governing, non-ideological politics worked well with the technocratic solutionism of President John F. Kennedy, who proudly told Yale graduates in 1962, “The central domestic issues of our time relate not to basic clashes of philosophy or ideology but to ways and means of reaching common goals.”
  • Consensus politics could work when the substance of party politics was thick with issues of consensus, in which debates over means dominated debates over ends. Once ends came to be more important than means, politics changed. Pragmatic incrementalism was no match for moral urgency.
  • Since the 1980s, the ideological activists have remained dominant in both parties, steadily weeding out dissenting holdovers from an earlier era while enforcing more and more programmatic unity, an iterative and ultimately generational project. Even the “New Democrats” of the 1990s “pitched moderate programmatic initiatives in explicitly partisan terms.”
  • Rosenfeld’s history lesson gives us two key takeaways.
  • modern advocates of “bipartisanship” remember that bipartisanship was not all lollipops and roses. It fostered a political system in which voters lacked meaningful choices, and it stymied civil rights.
  • it’s not clear how we could simply reverse six decades of organizational and coalitional transformation. The party organizations of the 1950s reflected a very different world, in which most politics was local and there were few highly educated, activist voters
  • an optimistic takeaway from the book is that change is possible through deliberate action. Just as activists half a century ago set in motion a new vision for a party system, so too might today’s activists set in motion their own vision for a new party politics.
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Moody's Analytics says climate change could cost $69 trillion by 2100 - The Washington ... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...9-916d-9c61607d8190_story.html climate change cost crisis
shared by Javier E on 03 Jul 19 - No Cached
  • warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, increasingly seen by scientists as a climate-stabilizing limit, would still cause $54 trillion in damages by the end of the century.
  • rising temperatures will “universally hurt worker health and productivity” and that more frequent extreme weather events “will increasingly disrupt and damage critical infrastructure and property.”
  • Climate change, Zandi said, is “not a cliff event. It’s not a shock to the economy. It’s more like a corrosive.” But, he added, it’s one that is “getting weightier with each passing year.
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  • Moody’s Investors Service, a major credit ratings agency, has already said that it wants to take climate into account when weighing the financial health of companies and municipalities.
  • t says that “water- and vector-borne diseases such as malaria and dengue fever will likely be the largest direct effect of changes in human health and the associated productivity loss.”
  • The hardest-hit economies will be some of the fastest-growing ones — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, the report says.
  • report also forecasts lower oil and natural gas demand, dealing a blow to oil-exporting countries, especially in the Middle East. It forecasts that Saudi GDP will drop more than 10 percent by 2048; the kingdom would be the country harmed the most by climate change, hurting government revenue
  • Of the 12 largest economies, India will be the worst hit, the report says, with GDP growing 2.5 percentage points more slowly than it would without the effects of climate change
  • The country’s service industry will be hit by heat stress, agricultural productivity will fall, and health-care costs will climb
  • the scenarios only go through 2048. The Moody’s report says “the distress compounds over time and is far more severe in the second half of the century.”
  • He added: “Most of the models go out 30 years, but, really, the damage to the economy is in the next half-century, and we haven’t developed the tools to look out that far.”
  • That’s why it is so hard to get people focused on this issue and get a comprehensive policy response,” Zandi said. “Business is focused on the next year, or five years out.”
  • Chubb, one of the biggest insurance firms in the United States, on Monday said it would no longer sell insurance to new coal-fired power plants or sell new policies to companies that derive more than 30 percent of their revenue from the mining of coal used in power plants.
  • Hammond said that the company still needs to stop insuring new coal mines and the oil sands, or tar sands, in northern Alberta.
  • “new coal projects cannot be built without insurance, and Chubb just dealt a blow to the dozens of companies that are still betting on the expansion of coal globally.”
  • the chief economist of Equinor, the Norwegian oil company previously known as Statoil, has written a report that looks at three scenarios for climate change and its impact on global economies, especially on energy. Only one of those, the report said, would lead to a sustainable path, but that path comes with enormous challenges. To reach that set of targets by 2050, “almost all use of coal must be eradicated
  • oil demand would need to be halved, and natural gas demand trimmed by more than 10 percent.
  • more than half of new cars would have to be electric vehicles by 2030
  • Electricity demand will double, yet wind and solar would equal the entire current electricity output, a leap from current levels
  • Waerness also said that the company currently assumes a carbon price of $55 a ton when considering whether to finance new energy projects
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Germany coronavirus: Why is the Covid-19 death rate so low? (opinion) - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html COVID-19 crisis
shared by brickol on 25 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • As of this past weekend, nine countries had diagnosed more than 9,000 cases, and three -- South Korea, Switzerland, and Germany -- had deaths rates well below the others. For South Korea, this in part is due to the cases occurring in much younger people, while the information in Switzerland is only now emerging. But for Germany, Covid-19 is being diagnosed in the same middle-aged people as other countries. The deaths in Germany also fit the seemingly established pattern of also occurring among the very old.
  • Recent articles have raised this issue with several theories put forth by local experts. Some feel that it is a temporary situation, since Germany, like South Korea, has been aggressively testing its population from the outset. Aggressive testing likely will identify persons otherwise too well to come to medical attention, thereby diluting the tested pool with a large set of infected but otherwise well people who are likely to remain so.
  • Others have speculated that the first cases in Germany were older adults who had used an early spring vacation to go skiing in countries that turned out to have high rates of Covid-19. So yes, goes this thinking: the German cases are in older persons, but all were well enough to ski, that is, they were people without the various other medical conditions that increase risk of death.
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  • There might be other explanations. With any infection, there are four basic questions to ask when looking at broad differences in death rates. Is the virus different here versus there? NO. Right now, there is no evidence that the virus is mutating toward a more potent strain in the US.Is one country diagnosing the virus sooner than another? YES. As above, this may be skewing German and South Korean results by identifying asymptomatic and mildly symptomatic persons unlikely to require medical care. Hospitalization rates by country, currently not tracked, would help sort out the contribution of aggressive testing to survival rates. Is the infected patient different here versus there? YES. South Korea (young patients) and Italy (old patients) are unique in the outbreak, and the characteristics in Iran are not well known. All other countries with specific information, from China to even the US epicenter of New York City, have shown the same basic distribution with respect to age, sex (more men than women) and smoking. Is the health care system different here versus there? OH YES. Health care system differences at the country level are hard to examine: information is sparse and, given the 50,000-foot view, possibly misleading. However, health care experts typically can rely on "structural measures" to determine the quality of a hospital or a state or a country.
  • The World Bank tracks health care information by country on three relevant structural measures (though recentness of information varies country to country), each measured per 1,000 general population: doctors, nurses and hospital beds. They and other sources also track two other relevant variables: lifespan per country and health care spending per individual. Neither of these demonstrate differences in affected Western European countries that might explain a difference in Covid-19 survival.
  • Among the nine countries with the highest number of Covid-19 cases, the country that has the highest nurse rate also has the lowest death rate from the disease. Germany has 13.2 nurses per 1,000 (echoing a trend for high nurse numbers throughout Northern Europe) far above the other heavily Covid-19 affected countries. This may be just another armchair epidemiologist observation of course. But higher numbers of nurses may reflect one of two beneficial factors (or both): first, that nurses, the backbone of hospital (and especially ICU) care, are essential to patient management and, ultimately, survival.
  • Either way, it is a reminder that Covid-19 will continue to reveal the strengths and weaknesses of health care systems across the world. The current observed differences also mandate that, when we finally are out from underneath the weight of the current crisis, we must work to determine how we can deliver better health care to large populations across the world.
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Can Our Democracy Survive Tribalism? - 0 views

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shared by Javier E on 27 Sep 17 - No Cached
  • we don’t really have to wonder what it’s like to live in a tribal society anymore, do we? Because we already do. Over the past couple of decades in America, the enduring, complicated divides of ideology, geography, party, class, religion, and race have mutated into something deeper, simpler to map, and therefore much more ominous. I don’t just mean the rise of political polarization (although that’s how it often expresses itself), nor the rise of political violence (the domestic terrorism of the late 1960s and ’70s was far worse), nor even this country’s ancient black-white racial conflict (though its potency endures).
  • I mean a new and compounding combination of all these differences into two coherent tribes, eerily balanced in political power, fighting not just to advance their own side but to provoke, condemn, and defeat the other.
  • I mean two tribes whose mutual incomprehension and loathing can drown out their love of country, each of whom scans current events almost entirely to see if they advance not so much their country’s interests but their own. I mean two tribes where one contains most racial minorities and the other is disproportionately white; where one tribe lives on the coasts and in the cities and the other is scattered across a rural and exurban expanse; where one tribe holds on to traditional faith and the other is increasingly contemptuous of religion altogether; where one is viscerally nationalist and the other’s outlook is increasingly global; where each dominates a major political party; and, most dangerously, where both are growing in intensity as they move further apart.
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  • The project of American democracy — to live beyond such tribal identities, to construct a society based on the individual, to see ourselves as citizens of a people’s republic, to place religion off-limits, and even in recent years to embrace a multiracial and post-religious society — was always an extremely precarious endeavor. It rested, from the beginning, on an 18th-century hope that deep divides can be bridged by a culture of compromise, and that emotion can be defeated by reason.
  • Tribalism, it’s always worth remembering, is not one aspect of human experience. It’s the default human experience. It comes more naturally to us than any other way of life. For the overwhelming majority of our time on this planet, the tribe was the only form of human society. We lived for tens of thousands of years in compact, largely egalitarian groups of around 50 people or more, connected to each other by genetics and language, usually unwritten.
  • Tribal cohesion was essential to survival, and our first religions emerged for precisely this purpose.
  • Religion therefore fused with communal identity and purpose, it was integral to keeping the enterprise afloat, and the idea of people within a tribe believing in different gods was incomprehensible. Such heretics would be killed.
  • we became a deeply cooperative species — but primarily with our own kind. The notion of living alongside people who do not look like us and treating them as our fellows was meaningless for most of human history.
  • Successful modern democracies do not abolish this feeling; they co-opt it. Healthy tribalism endures in civil society in benign and overlapping ways.
  • in our neighborhood and community; in our ethnic and social identities and their rituals; among our fellow enthusiasts
  • most critically, there is the Über-tribe that constitutes the nation-state, a megatribe that unites a country around shared national rituals, symbols, music, history, mythology, and events, that forms the core unit of belonging that makes a national democracy possible.
  • Tribalism only destabilizes a democracy when it calcifies into something bigger and more intense than our smaller, multiple loyalties; when it rivals our attachment to the nation as a whole; and when it turns rival tribes into enemies. And the most significant fact about American tribalism today is that all three of these characteristics now apply to our political parties, corrupting and even threatening our system of government.
  • If I were to identify one profound flaw in the founding of America, it would be its avoidance of our tribal nature
  • The founders were suspicious of political parties altogether — but parties defined by race and religion and class and geography? I doubt they’d believe a republic could survive that, and they couldn’t and didn’t foresee it. In fact, as they conceived of a new society that would protect the individual rights of all humanity, they explicitly excluded a second tribe among them: African-American slaves
  • But it did happen here, on a fault line that closely resembles today’s tribal boundary.
  • in the first half of the 20th century, with immigration sharply curtailed after 1924, the world wars acted as great unifiers and integrators. Our political parties became less polarized by race, as the FDR Democrats managed to attract more black voters as well as ethnic and southern whites. By 1956, nearly 40 percent of black voters still backed the GOP.
  • The re-racialization of our parties began with Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign in 1964, when the GOP lost almost all of the black vote. It accelerated under Nixon’s “southern strategy” in the wake of the civil-rights revolution. By Reagan’s reelection, the two parties began to cohere again into the Civil War pattern, and had simply swapped places.
  • The greatest threat to a politician today therefore is less a candidate from the opposing party than a more ideologically extreme primary opponent. The incentives for cross-tribal compromise have been eviscerated, and those for tribal extremism reinforced.
  • When it actually came to undoing the reform earlier this year, the GOP had precious little intellectual capital to fall back on, no alternative way to keep millions insured, no history of explaining to voters outside their own tribe what principles they were even trying to apply.
  • Add to this the great intellectual sorting of America, in which, for generations, mass college education sifted countless gifted young people from the heartland and deposited them in increasingly left-liberal universities and thereafter the major cities, from which they never returned, and then the shifting of our economy to favor the college-educated, which only deepened the urban-rural divide.
  • The myths that helped us unite as a nation began to fray. We once had a widely accepted narrative of our origins, shared icons that defined us, and a common pseudo-ethnicity — “whiteness” — into which new immigrants were encouraged to assimilate.
  • we should be clear-eyed about the consequence. We can no longer think of the Puritans without acknowledging the genocide that followed them; we cannot celebrate our Founding Fathers without seeing that slavery undergirded the society they constructed; we must tear down our Confederate statues and relitigate our oldest rifts. Even the national anthem now divides those who stand from those who kneel. We dismantled many of our myths, but have not yet formed new ones to replace them.
  • The result of all this is that a lopsided 69 percent of white Christians now vote Republican, while the Democrats get only 31. In the last decade, the gap in Christian identification between Democrats and Republicans has increased by 50 percent. In 2004, 44 percent of Latinos voted Republican for president; in 2016, 29 percent did. Forty-three percent of Asian-Americans voted Republican in 2004; in 2016, 29 percent did. Since 2004, the most populous urban counties have also swung decisively toward the Democrats, in both blue and red states, while rural counties have shifted sharply to the GOP
  • When three core components of a tribal identity — race, religion, and geography — define your political parties, you’re in serious trouble.
  • Some countries where tribal cleavages spawned by ethnic and linguistic differences have long existed understand this and have constructed systems of government designed to ameliorate the consequences
  • There is no neutral presidency here, and so when a rank tribalist wins the office and governs almost entirely in the interests of the hardest core of his base, half the country understandably feels as if it were under siege. Our two-party, winner-take-all system only works when both parties are trying to appeal to the same constituencies on a variety of issues.
  • Our undemocratic electoral structure exacerbates things. Donald Trump won 46 percent of the vote, attracting 3 million fewer voters than his opponent, but secured 56 percent of the Electoral College. Republicans won 44 percent of the vote in the Senate seats up for reelection last year, but 65 percent of the seats. To have one tribe dominate another is one thing; to have the tribe that gained fewer votes govern the rest — and be the head of state — is testing political stability.
  • Slowly our political culture becomes one in which the two parties see themselves not as participating in a process of moving the country forward, sometimes by tilting to the right and sometimes to the left, as circumstances permit, alternating in power, compromising when in opposition, moderating when in government — but one where the goal is always the obliteration of the other party by securing a permanent majority, in an unending process of construction and demolition.
  • And so by 2017, 41 percent of Republicans and 38 percent of Democrats said they disagreed not just with their opponents’ political views but with their values and goals beyond politics as well.
  • 61 percent of Trump supporters say there’s nothing he could do to make them change their minds about him; 57 percent of his opponents say the same thing. Nothing he could do.
  • When criticized by a member of a rival tribe, a tribalist will not reflect on his own actions or assumptions but instantly point to the same flaw in his enemy.
  • By the 2000 election, we were introduced to the red-blue map, though by then we could already recognize the two tribes it identified as they fought to a national draw. Choosing a president under those circumstances caused a constitutional crisis, one the Supreme Court resolved at the expense of losing much of its nonpartisan, nontribal authority.
  • In America, the intellectual elites, far from being a key rational bloc resisting this, have succumbed. The intellectual right and the academic left have long since dispensed with the idea of a mutual exchange of ideas.
  • Conservatism thrived in America when it was dedicated to criticizing liberalism’s failures, engaging with it empirically, and offering practical alternatives to the same problems. It has since withered into an intellectual movement that does little but talk to itself and guard its ideological boundaries.
  • among tribal conservatives, the Iraq War remained a taboo topic when it wasn’t still regarded as a smashing success, tax cuts were still the solution to every economic woe, free trade was all benefit and no cost, and so on. Health care was perhaps the most obvious example of this intellectual closure. Republican opposition to the Affordable Care Act was immediate and total. Even though the essential contours of the policy had been honed at the Heritage Foundation, even though a Republican governor had pioneered it in Massachusetts, and even though that governor became the Republican nominee in 2012, the anathematization of it defined the GOP for seven years.
  • the now near-ubiquitous trend of “whataboutism,” as any glance at a comments section or a cable slugfest will reveal. The Soviets perfected this in the Cold War, deflecting from their horrific Gulags by pointing, for example, to racial strife in the U.S. It tells you a lot about our time that a tactic once honed in a global power struggle between two nations now occurs within one.
  • George Orwell famously defined this mind-set as identifying yourself with a movement, “placing it beyond good and evil and recognising no other duty than that of advancing its interests.” It’s typified, he noted, by self-contradiction and indifference to reality
  • As for indifference to reality, today’s Republicans cannot accept that human-produced carbon is destroying the planet, and today’s Democrats must believe that different outcomes for men and women in society are entirely a function of sexism. Even now, Democrats cannot say the words illegal immigrants or concede that affirmative action means discriminating against people because of their race. Republicans cannot own the fact that big tax cuts have not trickled down, or that President Bush authorized the brutal torture of prisoners, thereby unequivocally committing war crimes.
  • Orwell again: “There is no crime, absolutely none, that cannot be condoned when ‘our’ side commits it. Even if one does not deny that the crime has happened, even if one knows that it is exactly the same crime as one has condemned in some other case … still one cannot feel that it is wrong.” That is as good a summary of tribalism as you can get, that it substitutes a feeling — a really satisfying one — for an argument.
  • When a party leader in a liberal democracy proposes a shift in direction, there is usually an internal debate. It can go on for years. When a tribal leader does so, the tribe immediately jumps on command. And so the Republicans went from free trade to protectionism, and from internationalism to nationalism, almost overnight
  • And then there is the stance of white Evangelicals, a pillar of the red tribe. Among their persistent concerns has long been the decline of traditional marriage, the coarsening of public discourse, and the centrality of personal virtue to the conduct of public office.
  • In the 1990s, they assailed Bill Clinton as the font of decadence; then they lionized George W. Bush, who promised to return what they often called “dignity” to the Oval Office. And yet when a black Democrat with exemplary personal morality, impeccable public civility, a man devoted to his wife and children and a model for African-American fathers, entered the White House, they treated him as a threat to civilization
  • And when they encountered a foulmouthed pagan who bragged of grabbing women by the pussy, used the tabloids to humiliate his wife, married three times, boasted about the hotness of his own daughter, touted the size of his own dick in a presidential debate, and spoke of avoiding STDs as his personal Vietnam, they gave him more monolithic support than any candidate since Reagan, including born-again Bush and squeaky-clean Romney.
  • In 2011, a poll found that only 30 percent of white Evangelicals believed that private immorality was irrelevant for public life. This month, the same poll found that the number had skyrocketed to 72 percent.
  • Total immersion within one’s tribe also leads to increasingly extreme ideas. The word “hate,” for example, has now become a one-stop replacement for a whole spectrum of varying, milder emotions involved with bias toward others:
  • Or take the current promiscuous use of the term “white supremacist.” We used to know what that meant. It meant advocates and practitioners of slavery, believers in the right of white people to rule over all others, subscribers to a theory of a master race, Jim Crow supporters, George Wallace voters.
  • But it is now routinely used on the left to mean, simply, racism in a multicultural America, in which European-Americans are a fast-evaporating ethnic majority.
  • Liberals should be able to understand this by reading any conservative online journalism and encountering the term “the left.” It represents a large, amorphous blob of malevolent human beings, with no variation among them, no reasonable ideas, nothing identifiably human at all
  • It’s not easy to be optimistic with Trump as president. And given his malignant narcissism, despotic instincts, absence of empathy, and constant incitement of racial and xenophobic hatred, it’s extremely hard not to be tribal in return. There is no divide he doesn’t want to deepen, no conflict he doesn’t want to start or intensify. How on earth can we not “resist”?
  • In 2015, did any of us anticipate that neo-Nazis would be openly parading with torches on a college campus or that antifa activists would be proudly extolling violence as the only serious response to the Trump era?
  • In fact, the person best positioned to get us out of this tribal trap would be … well … bear with me … Trump. The model would be Bill Clinton, the first president to meet our newly configured divide. Clinton leveraged the loyalty of Democrats thrilled to regain the White House in order to triangulate toward centrist compromises with the GOP. You can argue about the merits of the results, but he was able to govern, to move legislation forward, to reform welfare, reduce crime, turn the deficit into a surplus, survive impeachment, and end his term a popular president.
  • The Democrats are now, surprisingly, confronting a choice many thought they would only face in a best-case-scenario midterm election, and their political calculus is suddenly much more complicated than pure resistance. Might the best interest of the country be served by working with Trump? And if they do win the House in 2018, should they seek to destroy Trump’s presidency, much like GOP leaders in Congress chose to do with Obama? Should they try to end it through impeachment, as the GOP attempted with Bill Clinton? Or could they try to moderate the tribal divide?
  • if the Democrats try to impeach a president who has no interest in the stability or integrity of our liberal democracy, and if his base sees it, as they will, as an Establishment attempt at nullifying their vote, are we really prepared to handle the civil unrest and constitutional crisis that would almost certainly follow?
  • Tribalism is not a static force. It feeds on itself. It appeals on a gut level and evokes emotions that are not easily controlled and usually spiral toward real conflict. And there is no sign that the deeper forces that have accelerated this — globalization, social atomization, secularization, media polarization, ever more multiculturalism — will weaken
  • But we should not delude ourselves that this is all a Trump problem.
  • As utopian as it sounds, I truly believe all of us have to at least try to change the culture from the ground up. There are two ideas that might be of help, it seems to me. The first is individuality.
  • I mean valuing the unique human being — distinct from any group identity, quirky, full of character and contradictions, skeptical, rebellious, immune to being labeled or bludgeoned into a broader tribal grouping. This cultural antidote to tribalism, left and right, is still here in America and ready to be rediscovered
  • I may be an extreme case, but we all are nonconformist to some degree. Nurturing your difference or dissent from your own group is difficult; appreciating the individuality of those in other tribes is even harder. It takes effort and imagination, openness to dissent, even an occasional embrace of blasphemy.
  • we also need mutual forgiveness. It doesn’t matter if you believe, as I do, that the right bears the bulk of the historical blame. No tribal conflict has ever been unwound without magnanimity. Yitzhak Rabin had it, but it was not enough. Nelson Mandela had it, and it was
  • But this requires, of course, first recognizing our own tribal thinking. So much of our debates are now an easy either/or rather than a complicated both/and. In our tribal certainties, we often distort what we actually believe in the quiet of our hearts, and fail to see what aspects of truth the other tribe may grasp.
  • Not all resistance to mass immigration or multiculturalism is mere racism or bigotry; and not every complaint about racism and sexism is baseless. Many older white Americans are not so much full of hate as full of fear.
  • The actual solutions to our problems are to be found in the current no-man’s-land that lies between the two tribes. Reentering it with empiricism and moderation to find different compromises for different issues is the only way out of our increasingly dangerous impasse.
  • All of this runs deeply against the grain. It’s counterintuitive. It’s emotionally unpleasant. It fights against our very DNA. Compared with bathing in the affirming balm of a tribe, it’s deeply unsatisfying. But no one ever claimed that living in a republic was going to be easy — if we really want to keep it.
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Robert Peston: 'I'm not saying Britain is finished, but our current problems are not a ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...urrent-problems-are-not-a-blip reform economic politics UK basic income
shared by Javier E on 26 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • I’m just pointing out that there are some very significant structural problems that we need to fix, whether or not we leave the European Union.” The current economic malaise, he adds emphatically, “is not a blip. This is the moment we have to stop pussyfooting around in terms of solutions.”
  • Peston advocates a “wealth tax” – an annual levy of 1% on all net assets greater than £500,000. “Workers have become too powerless,” he goes on, and argues for “new forms of online collectivism” – digital trade union platforms – and the creation of a new ombudsman to regulate the labour market along the lines of the financial services’ Financial Conduct Authority.
  • . His book is full of depressing statistics about the vanishingly small prospect of disadvantaged Britons today climbing the economic or social ladder, but when I ask if he himself shares the worry that his own children will not enjoy a better life than his, he erupts.
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  • The introduction of a universal basic income is, he believes, inevitable. This drastic reinvention of the welfare state would see the government pay every single citizen, irrespective of their wealth or employment status, a regular cash sum calculated to cover all their basic needs
  • “It is fucking mad for middle class people like us to want anything other than a decent life for our children,” he exclaims. “If you’re on shit wages, it’s completely reasonable to want your children to be better off than you are. Completely reasonable. But the notion that we,” and he gestures around his elegant townhouse kitchen, “should want more [for our children] is shocking and appalling. We shouldn’t think in those terms. We’ve actually got to think, maybe we should make some sacrifices and be a bit poorer. Because if we don’t make those sacrifices and become a bit poorer, so that those lower down the scale have better lives, we may end up facing utter chaos.”
  • Is he worried that the country’s economic woes are leading us towards the threat of civil unrest? “Yes – or certainly just to the rise of politicians who don’t believe in our democracy. I think that’s a genuine risk. I am genuinely fearful for the fabric of what we think of as this nation, if we don’t address these problems.” In his lifetime is this threat unprecedented? “Yes, of course it is. This is the most scary time since the second world war.”
  • “We will end up with it. We just have to reconcile ourselves to no growth. The natural tendency of the economy at the moment is to widen income and wealth disparities and in those circumstances, and particularly when you layer on top of that the rise of robots and artificial intelligence, it is very, very difficult to think of any alternative but guaranteeing some kind of universal basic income.” Does he assume this will become Labour party policy in the foreseeable future? “Yeah.”
  • “I think it’s becoming clearer that Labour will end up, as a minimum, signed up to a position where we are a bit like Norway.” In other words, a permanent member of the single market. “But it’s altogether conceivable that they end up being a party that says we have to have another vote on this. They will arrive undoubtedly at one or other of those positions.”
  • Peston is critical of Corbyn’s view that “the state can solve everything”, but isn’t at all surprised by his popularity. “Younger people think, ‘Fuck it, nobody’s running this place for me. And capitalism is shit, it’s doing nothing for me because when am I ever going to get any capital?’ So, it’s not surprising in those circumstances that they then say, ‘We want a public sector, state-based solution of the sort that Jeremy Corbyn is offering’.”
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Justices allow execution of Alfred Bourgeois to proceed - SCOTUSblog - 0 views

www.scotusblog.com/...of-alfred-bourgeois-to-proceed SCOTUS Politics US policy crisis
shared by clairemann on 25 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Alfred Bourgeois became the 10th person to be put to death by the federal government this year, after the Supreme Court on Friday evening denied his application for a delay of the execution. Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor indicated that they would have granted the application.
  • Federal law and Supreme Court precedent ban the execution of someone who is mentally disabled. Through his counsel, Bourgeois told the justices that he met the current psychological standards for intellectual disability, which became the required legal standard after he was sentenced
  • Bourgeois was convicted in 2004 of murdering his two-year old daughter while making a delivery to Corpus Christi Naval Air Station in Texas. Evidence at trial showed that he had beaten his daughter for a month before her death.
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  • As a child, she said, their mother beat him “over and over” due to his intellectual shortcomings.
  • The Supreme Court ruled in 2002 in Atkins v. Virginia that it is unconstitutional to execute someone who is mentally disabled. After receiving his death sentence, Bourgeois sought a ruling from a federal court in Texas that he was intellectually disabled and thus barred from execution. His appeal was unsuccessful.
  • Since then, Bourgeois told the justices, the playing field has changed in two ways.
  • First, Supreme Court decisions in 2017 and 2019 made clear that under federal law, the relevant standards for intellectual disability in capital cases are the current definitions by the American Psychiatric Association and the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities. Bourgeois maintained that he met both.
  • Second, in the summer of 2019, the federal government began scheduling executions for the first time in more than 15 years.
  • “The Court today allows the execution of Alfred Bourgeois to proceed even though Bourgeois, who has an IQ between 70 and 75, argues that he is intellectually disabled under current clinical standards,” Sotomayor wrote. She argued that the court should have ordered a stay and taken up Bourgeois’ appeal in order to resolve whether his execution (and those of similarly situated people on death row) is barred by the Federal Death Penalty Act’s prohibition on executing people with intellectual disabilities.
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Third stimulus relief plan: Here's what we know about the Senate bill - CNNPolitics - 0 views

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  • While the final Senate bill has not been released yet, lawmakers are expected to make two major changes -- narrowing eligibility for the stimulus checks and nixing an increase in the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour.
  • The bulk of the Senate legislation will, however, largely mirror the $1.9 trillion package approved by the House and laid out by President Joe Biden in January.
  • Senate Democratic leaders are facing more hurdles to advancing the legislation since the party can't afford to lose a single member thanks to the 50-50 split in the chamber. Plus, they must adhere to the strict rules of reconciliation, which they are using to approve the bill without any Republican support.
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  • The Senate is expected to amend the House bill on the $1,400-per-person stimulus payments to tighten eligibility.
  • Individuals earning less than $75,000 a year and married couples earning less than $150,000 will receive $1,400 per person, including children. That will get money to about 90% of households.
  • The checks will phase out faster than previous rounds, completely cutting off individuals who earn more than $80,000 a year and married couples earning more than $160,000 -- regardless of how many children they have.
  • Unlike the previous two rounds, adult dependents -- including college students -- are expected to be eligible for the payments
  • In an effort to combat poverty, it would expand the child tax credit to $3,600 for each child under 6 and $3,000 for each child under age 18. Currently, qualifying families can receive a credit of up to $2,000 per child under age 17.
  • Out-of-work Americans will start running out of Pandemic Unemployment Assistance and Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation benefits in mid-March, when provisions in December's $900 billion relief package begin phasing out. The $300 enhancement also ends in mid-March.
  • The parliamentarian ruled in late February that increasing the hourly threshold does not meet a strict set of guidelines needed to move forward in the reconciliation process, which would allow Senate Democrats to pass the relief bill with a simple majority and no Republican votes.The House legislation would increase the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2025 in stages. It would also guarantee that tipped workers, youth workers and workers with disabilities are paid the full federal minimum wage.
  • Some senators were looking to make some changes to the House bill, including reducing the federal boost to unemployment benefits to $300 a week and extending the duration of pandemic jobless programs by another month. But these efforts have not progressed.The House bill calls for extending two key pandemic unemployment programs through August 29. It would also increase the federal weekly boost to $400, from the current $300, and continue it for the same time period.
  • The House plan would extend the 15% increase in food stamp benefits through September, instead of having it expire at the end of June.It also contains $880 million for the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, known as WIC, to help increase participation and temporarily improve benefits, among other measures. Biden called for investing $3 billion in the program.
  • The legislation would send roughly $19.1 billion to state and local governments to help low-income households cover back rent, rent assistance and utility bills. About $10 billion would be authorized to help struggling homeowners pay their mortgages, utilities and property taxes. It would provide another $5 billion to help states and localities assist those at risk of experiencing homelessness.
  • The legislation would provide $350 billion to state and local governments, as well as tribes and territories. States and the District of Columbia would receive $195.3 billion, while local governments would be sent $130.2 billion to be divided evenly between cities and counties. Tribes would get $20 billion and territories $4.5 billion.
  • Unlike Biden's proposal, the House bill would not reinstate mandatory paid family and sick leave approved in a previous Covid relief package. But it does continue to provide tax credits to employers who voluntarily choose to offer the benefit through October 1.
  • The bill would provide nearly $130 billion to K-12 schools to help students return to the classroom. Schools would be allowed to use the money to update their ventilation systems, reduce class sizes to help implement social distancing, buy personal protective equipment and hire support staff. It would require that schools use at least 20% of the money to address learning loss by providing extended days or summer school, for example.
  • The House bill now includes nearly $40 billion for colleges. Institutions would be required to spend at least half the money to provide emergency financial aid grants to students.
  • The bill would also provide $39 billion to child care providers. The amount a provider receives would be based on operating expenses and is available to pay employees and rent, help families struggling to pay the cost, and purchase personal protective equipment and other supplies.
  • Enrollees would pay no more than 8.5% of their income towards coverage, down from nearly 10% now. Also, those earning more than the current cap of 400% of the federal poverty level -- about $51,000 for an individual and $104,800 for a family of four in 2021 -- would become eligible for help.
  • The bill would provide $15 billion to the Emergency Injury Disaster Loan program, which provides long-term, low-interest loans from the Small Business Administration. Severely impacted small businesses with fewer than 10 workers will be given priority for some of the money. It also provides $25 billion for a new grant program specifically for bars and restaurants. Eligible businesses may receive up to $10 million and can use the money for a variety of expenses, including payroll, mortgage and rent, utilities and food and beverages.
  • The House bill provides $14 billion to research, develop, distribute, administer and strengthen confidence in vaccines. It would also put $46 billion towards testing, contact tracing and mitigation, including investing in laboratory capacity, community-based testing sites and mobile testing units, particularly in medically underserved areas.It would also allocate $7.6 billion to hire 100,000 public health workers to support coronavirus response.The legislation also provides $50 billion to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, with some of the funds going toward expanding vaccination efforts.The President's plan called for investing $20 billion in a national vaccination program.
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