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maddieireland334

Hillary Clinton: Increase Planned Parenthood Taxpayer Funding - 0 views

www.breitbart.com/...ed-parenthood-taxpayer-funding

shared by maddieireland334 on 16 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Democrat 2016 contender Hillary Clinton tweeted Friday that she would like to see Planned Parenthood obtain an increase in taxpayer funding.
  • In an interview with Fusion, Clinton said that–if elected president–she would urge Congress to give the abortion business a raise in taxpayer funding.
  • “I am not only against defunding Planned Parenthood, but I would like to see Planned Parenthood even get more funding,” Clinton said. “Because, often times, it is both the first and the last resort for healthcare.”
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  • Referring to Planned Parenthood–which was founded by eugenicist Margaret Sanger–as the “go-to place” for abortions for black women, Clinton said that when taxpayer funding for abortion services is blocked by federal law, “the people who are going to suffer the most are going to be low-income women of color, that’s just the fact.”
  • In a much-cited report released early in 2014, New York City’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene found that more black babies were aborted in the city than were born during the year 2012.
  • Planned Parenthood’s recent historic endorsement of Clinton as a primary candidate comes following a series of undercover videos exposing the organization’s apparent practices of selling the body parts of aborted babies on the open market and altering the position of babies during abortions to harvest the most intact organs.
anonymous

Hedge funds bet on oil's 'big comeback' after pandemic hobbles producers | Reuters - 1 views

www.reuters.com/...obbles-producers-idUSKBN2A70IM

oil covid-19

shared by anonymous on 08 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • Hedge funds are turning bullish on oil once again, betting the pandemic and investors’ environmental focus has severely damaged companies’ ability to ramp up production.
  • limitations on supply would push prices to multi-year highs and keep them there for two years or more, several hedge funds said.The view is a reversal for hedge funds, which shorted the oil sector in the lead-up to global shutdowns, landing energy focused hedge funds gains of 26.8% in 2020,
  • Normally, oil producers would ramp up production as prices increase, but a move by environmentally focused investors from fossil fuels to renewables and caution by lenders leaves them hard-pressed to respond, hedge funds and other investors say.
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  • North America’s oilfield services sector, which producers rely on to drill new wells, has been decimated, he said.“They’re decapitated from being able to grow,” Tahmazian said. “The supply side is broken.”
  • The pace of output recovery in the United States, the world’s No. 1 oil producer, is forecast to be slow and will not top its 2019 record of 12.25 million barrels per day (bpd) until 2023.
Javier E

How Emergent BioSolutions Put an 'Extraordinary Burden' on the U.S.'s Troubled Stockpil... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...tions-anthrax-coronavirus.html

government pandemic preparation

shared by Javier E on 07 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Government purchases for the Strategic National Stockpile, the country’s emergency medical reserve where such equipment is kept, have largely been driven by the demands and financial interests of a handful of biotech firms that have specialized in products that address terrorist threats rather than infectious disease.
  • “Today, I think, we would not allow anthrax to take up half the budget for a guaranteed supply of vaccines,” he said, adding, “Surely after such a calamity as the last year, we should take a fresh look at stockpiles and manufacturing and preparing for the next pandemic.”
  • Under normal circumstances, Emergent’s relationship with the federal stockpile would be of little public interest — an obscure contractor in an obscure corner of the federal bureaucracy applying the standard tools of Washington, like well-connected lobbyists and campaign contributions, to create a business heavily dependent on taxpayer dollars.
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  • Security concerns, moreover, keep most information about stockpile purchases under wraps. Details about the contracts and inventory are rarely made public, and even the storage locations are secret.
  • Former Emergent employees, government contractors, members of Congress, biodefense experts and current and former officials from agencies that oversee the stockpile described a deeply dysfunctional system that contributed to the shocking shortages last year.
  • Purchases are supposed to be based on careful assessments by government officials of how best to save lives, but many have also been influenced by Emergent’s bottom line
  • The stockpile has long been the company’s biggest and most reliable customer for its anthrax vaccines, which expire and need to be replaced every few years.
  • In the two decades since the repository was created, Emergent’s aggressive tactics, broad political connections and penchant for undercutting competitors have given it remarkable sway over the government’s purchasing decisions related to the vaccines
  • While national security officials still consider anthrax a threat, it has not received specific mention since 2012 in the intelligence community’s annual public assessment of dangers facing the country, a report that has repeatedly warned of pandemics.
  • Emergent bought the license for the country’s only approved anthrax vaccine in 1998 from the State of Michigan. Over time, the price per dose the government agreed to pay Emergent increased nearly sixfold, accounting for inflation, contributing to record revenues last year that topped $1.5 billion
  • The company, whose board is stocked with former federal officials, has deployed a lobbying budget more typical of some big pharmaceutical companies
  • Competing efforts to develop a better and cheaper anthrax vaccine, for example, collapsed after Emergent outmaneuvered its rivals, the documents and interviews show.
  • preparations for an outbreak like Covid-19 almost always took a back seat to Emergent’s anthrax vaccines
  • the government approved a plan in 2015 to buy tens of millions of N95 respirators — lifesaving equipment for medical workers that has been in short supply because of Covid-19 — but the masks repeatedly lost out in the competition for funding over the years leading up to the pandemic
  • After Dr. Frieden and others in the Obama administration tried but failed to lessen Emergent’s dominance over stockpile purchases, the company’s fortunes rose under Mr. Trump, who appointed a former Emergent consultant with a background in bioterrorism to run the office that now oversees the stockpile
  • “If I could spend less on anthrax replenishment, I could buy more N95s,” Dr. Kadlec said in an interview shortly after leaving office. “I could buy more ventilators. I could buy more of other things that quite frankly I didn’t have the money to buy.”
  • And now, as some members of Congress push for larger reserves of ventilators, masks and other equipment needed in a pandemic, a trade group led in part by a top Emergent lobbyist has warned that the purchases could endanger companies focused on threats like anthrax and smallpox by drawing down limited funds.
  • Last year, as the pandemic raced across the country, the government paid Emergent $626 million for products that included vaccines to fight an entirely different threat: a terrorist attack using anthrax.
  • “I think it’s pretty clear that the benefit of the vaccine is marginal,” he said in an interview
  • “They’re very vicious in their behavior toward anybody they perceive as having a different point of view,” said Dr. Tara O’Toole, a former Homeland Security official who says she ran afoul of Emergent in 2010 after telling Congress that the nation needed a newer and better anthrax vaccine.
  • That year, the company that would become Emergent — then known as BioPort — paid Michigan $25 million to buy the license for a government-developed anthrax vaccine and an aging manufacturing plant.
  • The company opened its doors with one product, called BioThrax, and one customer, the Defense Department, which required the vaccine for service members.
  • Emergent’s anthrax vaccine was not the government’s first choice. It was more than 30 years old and plagued by manufacturing challenges and complaints about side effects. Officials instead backed a company named VaxGen, which was developing a vaccine using newer technology licensed from the military.
  • Emergent’s successful campaign against VaxGen — deploying a battalion of lobbyists, publicly attacking its rival and warning that it might cease production of its own vaccine if the government didn’t buy it — established its formidable reputation. By 2006, VaxGen had lost its contract and the government had turned to Emergent to supply BioThrax.
  • “They were totally feared by everybody,” Dr. Philip Russell, a top health official in the administration of President George W. Bush, said in an interview. He said that he clashed with Emergent when he backed VaxGen, and that his reputation came under attack, which was documented by The Times in 2006. (Dr. Russell died this January.)
  • the group of federal officials who make decisions about the stockpile and other emergency preparations — known as the Phemce, for the Public Health Emergency Medical Countermeasures Enterprise — ordered up a study. It found in 2010 that the government could not afford to devote so much of its budget to a single threat.
  • Instead, the review concluded, the government should invest more in products with multiple applications, like diagnostic tests, ventilators, reusable respirator masks and “plug and play” platforms that can rapidly develop vaccines for a range of outbreaks.
  • from 2010 through 2018, the anthrax vaccine consumed more than 40 percent of the stockpile’s budget, which averaged $560 million during those years.
  • Emergent and the government have withheld details of the stockpile contracts, including how much the company has charged for each dose of BioThrax, but executives have shared some of the missing information with investors.
  • The company in 1998 agreed to charge the government an average of about $3.35 per dose, documents show. By 2010, the price had risen to about $28, according to financial disclosures and statements by Emergent executives, and now it is about $30
  • Over the past 15 years, the company recorded a gross profit margin of about 75 percent for the vaccine, in an arrangement that one Emergent vice president called a “monopoly.”
  • Emergent’s rise is the stuff of lore in biodefense circles — a tale of savvy dealings, fortuitous timing and tough, competitive tactics.
  • One afternoon in October 2010, Wall Street investors gathered at the Millennium Broadway Hotel in Manhattan for a presentation by Mr. Burrows. He shared with them a secret number: 75 million.That was how many BioThrax doses the government had committed to stockpiling, and it was the backbone of Emergent’s thriving business. In pursuit of that goal, the government had already spent more than $900 million, and it continued to buy virtually every dose Emergent could produce. It had even awarded the company more than $100 million to expand its Michigan factory.
  • “The best approach toward anthrax is antimicrobial therapy,” Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the government’s top infectious-disease expert, told Congress as early as 2007.
  • In an analysis published in 2007, the firm determined that giving antibiotics immediately after a large outdoor anthrax attack was likely to reduce serious illnesses by more than 80 percent. Administering the vaccine would then cut serious illnesses only by an additional 4 percent.
  • Dr. Ali S. Khan, who ran the C.D.C. office managing the stockpile until 2014, said bluntly: “We overpaid.”
  • “A bunch of people, including myself, were sitting in a room and asking what kind of attack might happen,” said Dr. Kenneth Bernard, a top biodefense adviser to Mr. Bush, recalling a meeting in the months after the 2001 attacks.
  • “And somebody said, ‘Well, I can’t imagine anyone attacking more than three cities at once,’” he said. “So we took the population of a major U.S. city and multiplied by three.”
  • A team of Homeland Security and health officials began doing just that in 2013. The group determined, in a previously undisclosed analysis, that the government could stockpile less BioThrax and still be prepared for a range of plausible attacks, according to two people involved in the assessment. Separately, government researchers concluded that two doses of BioThrax provided virtually the same protection as three.
  • the National Intelligence Council, which helped draft the assessments during Mr. Obama’s second term, said in an interview that the idea of a three-city attack affecting 25 million people was “straining credulity.”
  • “If you talk to the head of the House Intelligence Committee,” Don Elsey, Emergent’s chief financial officer, told investors in 2011, “and you say, ‘What are you most worried about?’ he’ll say, ‘Let me see: Number one, anthrax; number two, anthrax; number three, anthrax.’”
  • Emergent’s sales strategy was to address that fear by promising the federal government peace of mind with its vaccine.
  • “There’s a political element involved,” Mr. Burrows, the company’s vice president of investor relations, said at an industry conference in 2016. “I don’t have a marketing expense. I have lobbying expense.”
  • Since 2010, the company has spent an average of $3 million a year on lobbying — far outspending similarly sized biotech firms, and roughly matching the outlays of two pharmaceutical companies with annual revenues at least 17 times greater, AstraZeneca and Bristol Myers Squibb
  • In 2015, as stockpile managers questioned the large purchases of BioThrax, the spending topped $4 million
  • “They were pouring it on — how poor they were and how this was going to ruin the company, and they’d have to close down factories, and America was going to be left without anthrax vaccine,”
  • “Their revolving door is moving at 60 miles per hour,” said former Senator Claire McCaskill, a Democrat from Missouri who had questioned spending on the vaccine while in the Senate. “There is really a lot of incestuousness because it’s such a specialized field.”
  • Ms. DeLorenzo, the Emergent spokeswoman, said the lobbying was necessary because government investment “in biodefense and other public health threats has not been as strongly prioritized as it should be.”
  • Over the past 10 years, Emergent’s political action committee has spread almost $1.4 million in campaign contributions among members of both partie
  • The move followed a yearslong pattern of retaining a bipartisan lobbying corps of former agency officials, staff members and congressmen, including Pete Hoekstra of Michigan, Tom Latham of Iowa and Jim Saxton of New Jersey.
  • “You have people coming and saying, ‘There’s no market for this — nobody’s going to produce this unless you buy enough of it to keep the production line open,’” he said. “It’s an absolutely appropriate argument to make.”
  • Emergent’s campaign proved effective. Despite the 2015 recommendation by the stockpile managers, Senate overseers made clear they opposed the reduction, and the government went ahead and bought $300 million worth of BioThrax.
  • Emergent executives, meanwhile, warned that there could be job losses at the factory in Lansing, Mich. — the capital of a swing state at the center of a contentious presidential campaign between Mr. Trump and Hillary Clinton.
  • Because Emergent was the sole manufacturer of a product deemed critical to national security, the company has played what one former executive described to The Times as “the we’re-going-to-go-bankrupt card.”
  • Dr. Hatchett said the idea gave him pause. But, he explained in an interview, “if there’s only one partner that can provide a product and only one customer for that product, the customer needs the partner to survive.”
  • Just a year later, Emergent spent about $200 million in cash, and made other financial commitments, to acquire Sanofi’s smallpox vaccine and GlaxoSmithKline’s anthrax treatment, two products with established pipelines to the stockpile. The purchases expanded Emergent’s hold over the reserve.
  • Ms. DeLorenzo said the acquisitions did not suggest the company was better off than it had claimed, but Dr. Bright said he and others involved in the bailout felt used.
  • a plan five years earlier to create an emergency supply of N95 respirators was simply not funded. A team of experts had proposed buying tens of millions of the masks to fill the gap during an outbreak until domestic manufacturing could ramp up, according to five officials involved in the assessment, which has not been previously disclosed.
  • By the time the novel coronavirus emerged, the stockpile had only 12 million of the respirators. The stockpile has since set a goal of amassing 300 million.
  • Dr. Kadlec, the Trump administration official overseeing the stockpile, said he used the previous administration’s mask recommendation to raise alarms as early as 2018.
  • Dr. Annie De Groot, chief executive of the small vaccine company EpiVax, spoke about the need to break Emergent’s lock on research dollars at a biodefense forum in 2015.
  • “Politicians want to look like they’ve addressed the problem,” she said. “But we need to actually listen to the scientists.”
  • Over the last five years, Emergent has received nearly a half-billion dollars in federal research and development funding, the company said in its financial disclosures.
  • “We know ahead of time when funding opportunities are going to come out,” Barbara Solow, a senior vice president, told investors in 2017. “When we talk to the government, we know how to speak the government’s language around contracting.”
  • The company used federal money to make improvements to BioThrax, and also found a way to earn government money from a competing anthrax vaccine it had excoriated. After the demise of VaxGen in 2006, Emergent bought the company’s unfinished vaccine and in 2010 persuaded the federal government to continue paying for research on it
  • By the time the research contract was canceled in 2016, Emergent had collected about $85 million, records show. The company then shelved the vaccine. “If the U.S. government withdraws funding, we re-evaluate whether there is any business case for continuing,” Ms. DeLorenzo said.
  • For more than 30 years, the government had been encouraging the development of a BioThrax replacement. In 2002, the Institute of Medicine had concluded that an alternative based on more modern technology was “urgently needed.” By 2019, there were three leading candidates, including one made by Emergent, known as AV7909.
  • Emergent’s candidate was hardly the breakthrough the government was seeking, former health officials said. AV7909 was essentially an enhanced version of BioThrax. The competitors were using more modern technology that could produce doses more rapidly and consistently, and were promising significant cost savings for the stockpile.
  • To qualify for emergency authorization, a vaccine must be at an advanced stage of development with no approved alternatives. Emergent acknowledged in its financial disclosures that there was “considerable uncertainty” whether the new vaccine met those requirements.
  • The election of Mr. Trump as president was good news for Emergent.
  • Dr. Lurie, the senior health official in the Obama administration who had tried to scale back BioThrax purchases, was out. Mr. Trump’s pick to replace her was Dr. Kadlec, a career Air Force physician and top biodefense official in the Bush administration who was fixated on bioterrorism threats, especially anthrax, current and former officials said
  • Soon after entering the Trump administration in 2017, Dr. Kadlec took a series of actions that he characterized as streamlining a cumbersome bureaucracy but that had the effect of benefiting Emergent.
  • He assumed greater control of purchasing decisions, diminishing the authority of the Phemce, the oversight group that had proposed buying less BioThrax. And in 2018, he backed a decision to move control of the stockpile to his office in the Department of Health and Human Services and away from the C.D.C., which is based in Atlanta and prides itself on being insulated from the influence of lobbyists.
  • Dr. Frieden, the former C.D.C. director, was strongly opposed. The move, he said, “had almost as an explicit goal to give the lobbyists more say in what got purchased.”
  • That July, the government made the announcement Emergent had been banking on, committing to buying millions of doses. Separately, it said it would stop funding Emergent’s competitors.
  • The decision to side with Emergent did not surprise Dr. Khan, the former C.D.C. official overseeing the stockpile.“Again and again, we seem unable to move past an old technology that’s bankrupting the stockpile,” he said.
  • Last month, as the death toll from Covid-19 neared a half-million, Mr. Kramer, the company’s chief executive, told analysts there had been no “evidence of a slowdown or a delay or a deprioritization,” and echoed a statement he had made in April when asked whether the pandemic might interrupt Emergent’s sales to the stockpile.“It’s pretty much business as usual,” he said then.
anonymous

Biden's Budget Removes A Longstanding Ban On Abortion Funding : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...s-long-ban-on-abortion-funding

shared by anonymous on 31 May 21 - No Cached
  • President Biden's budget proposal fulfills a campaign promise to remove a longstanding ban on federal funding for most abortions known as the Hyde Amendment.
  • Abortion rights advocates have praised the move; a statement from Planned Parenthood President Alexis McGill Johnson called the Hyde Amendment "racist, sexist, deeply unjust" and thanked Biden for working to remove it.
  • Biden reversed his longtime position on Hyde, joining other Democratic hopefuls in saying he would work to overturn it. "If I believe heath care is a right, as I do, I can no longer support an amendment that makes that right dependent on someone's zip code," Biden said in June 2019.
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  • Biden said his position had changed in response to changing circumstances, including increasing efforts by Republican lawmakers to restrict abortion. "It was not under attack," Biden said. "As it is now."
  • At the same time, Republican state lawmakers have continued a nationwide push to limit abortion, introducing hundreds of restrictions this year alone. Anti-abortion rights groups hope one of those laws will invite the U.S. Supreme Court to reconsider the Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion nationwide in 1973.
  • The budget plan, released late last week, would drop the policy which has restricted funding for abortion through federal programs such as Medicaid. The rule, in effect since 1980, includes exceptions in cases of rape, incest, or to save a pregnant woman's life.
  • Biden, a lifelong Catholic, supported Hyde for decades — as did many other Democrats, often as a compromise position with Republicans. It often has been a sticking point in negotiations over healthcare policy, including the debate surrounding the Affordable Care Act and subsequent legislation.
  • Later that month, in a forum on abortion rights hosted by Planned Parenthood in South Carolina, Biden explained his reversal, saying he'd supported Hyde in an effort to expand federally-funded healthcare. But he suggested that for low-income women who rely on federal programs, Hyde had become an obstacle to full healthcare access.
  • Promising to reverse multiple Trump-era abortion restrictions, Biden ultimately marshaled the support of Planned Parenthood and other reproductive rights advocacy groups, who put the weight of their campaign operation behind him in his fight against Trump in 2020.
  • Since taking office, Biden has taken steps toward providing federal funding for abortions for low-income people. Like other Democratic Presidents before him, Biden announced plans soon after taking office to reverse the Mexico City Policy, or what critics describe as the "Global Gag Rule." It forbids international aid groups who receive U.S. funding from providing or referring patients for abortion.
  • Abortion rights groups are asking the administration to take additional steps, including reversing the Helms Amendment, which also restricts the use of U.S. dollars in paying for abortions abroad.
Javier E

What American Healthcare Can Learn From Germany - Olga Khazan - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...360133

germany health-care system us comparative

shared by Javier E on 09 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • Every German resident must belong to a sickness fund, and in turn the funds must insure all comers. They’re also mandated to cover a standard set of benefits, which includes most procedures and medications. Workers pay half the cost of their sickness fund insurance, and employers pay the rest. The German government foots the bill for the unemployed and for children. There are also limits on out-of-pocket expenses, so it’s rare for a German to go into debt because of medical bills.
  • this is very similar to the health-insurance regime that Americans are now living under, now that the Affordable Care Act is four years old and a few days past its first enrollment deadline.
  • There are, of course, a few key differences. Co-pays in the German system are minuscule, about 10 euros per visit. Even those for hospital stays are laughably small by American standards: Sam payed 40 euro for a three-day stay for a minor operation a few years ago
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  • nearly five million Americans fall into what’s called the “Medicaid gap”
  • In Germany, employees' premiums are a percentage of their incomes, so low-wage workers simply pay rock-bottom insurance rates.
  • Germany actually pioneered this type of insurance—it all started when Otto von Bismarck signed his Health Insurance Bill of 1883 into law. (It’s still known as the “Bismarck model” because of his legacy, and other parts of Europe and Asia have adopted it over the years.)
  • You can think of this setup as the Goldilocks option among all of the possible ways governments can insure health. It's not as radical as single-payer models like the U.K.’s, where the government covers everyone. And it's also not as brutal as the less-regulated version of the insurance market we had before the ACA.
  • Since there are no provider networks in Germany, doctors don’t know what other providers patients have seen, so there are few ways to limit repeat procedures.
  • All things considered, it’s good to be a sick German. There are no network limitations, so people can see any doctor they want. There are no deductibles, so Germans have no fear of spending hundreds before their insurance ever kicks in.
  • There’s also no money that changes hands during a medical appointment. Patients show their insurance card at the doctor’s office, and the doctors' association pays the doctor using money from the sickness funds. "You don’t have to sit at home and sort through invoices or wonder if you overlooked fine print,”
  • That insurance card, by the way, is good for hospital visits anywhere in Europe.
  • of all of the countries studied, Germans were the most likely to be able to get a same-day or next-day appointment and to hear back from a doctor quickly if they had a question. They rarely use emergency rooms, and they can access doctors after-hours with ease.
  • And Germany manages to put its health-care dollars to relatively good use: For each $100 it spends on healthcare, it extends life by about four months, according to a recent analysis in the American Journal of Public Health. In the U.S., one of the worst-performing nations in the ranking, each $100 spent on healthcare resulted in only a couple of extra weeks of longevity.
  • those differences aside, it’s fair to say the U.S. is moving in the direction of systems like Germany’s—multi-payer, compulsory, employer-based, highly regulated, and fee-for-service.
  • The German government is similarly trying to push more people into “family physician” programs, in which just one doctor would serve as a gatekeeper.
  • like the U.S., Germany may see a shortage of primary-care doctors in the near future, both because primary-care doctors there don’t get paid as much as specialists, and because entrenched norms have prevented physician assistants from shouldering more responsibility
  • With limitations on how much they can charge, German doctors and hospitals instead try to pump up their earnings by performing as many procedures as possible, just like American providers do.
  • Similarly, “In Germany, it will always be an operation,” Göpffarth said. “Meanwhile, France and the U.K. tend to try drugs first and operations later.”
  • With few resource constraints, healthcare systems like America's and Germany's tend to go with the most expensive treatment option possible. An American might find himself in an MRI machine for a headache that a British doctor would have treated with an aspirin and a smile.
  • Perhaps the biggest difference between our two approaches is the extent to which Germany has managed to rein in the cost of healthcare for consumers. Prices for procedures there are lower and more uniform because doctors’ associations negotiate their fees directly with all of the sickness funds in each state. That's part of the reason why an appendectomy costs $3,093 in Germany, but $13,000 in the U.S.
  • Now, Maryland is going a step further still, having just launched a plan to cap the amount each hospital can spend, total, each year. The state's hospital spending growth will be limited to 3.58 percent for the next five years. “We know that right now, the more [doctors] do, the more they get paid,” John Colmers, executive director of Maryland’s Health Services Cost Review Commission, told me. “We want to say, ‘The better you do, the better you get paid.’”
  • certain U.S. states have tried a more German strategy, attempting to keep costs low by setting prices across the board. Maryland, for example, has been regulating how much all of the state’s hospitals can charge since 1977. A 2009 study published in Health Affairs found that we would have saved $2 trillion if the entire country’s health costs had grown at the same rate as Maryland’s over the past three decades.
  • “In Germany, there is a uniform fee schedule for all physicians that work under the social code,” Schlette said. “There’s a huge catalogue where they determine meticulously how much is billed for each procedure. That’s like the Bible.”
  • “The red states are unlikely to follow their lead. The notion that government may be a big part of the solution, instead of the problem, is anathema, and Republican controlled legislatures, and their governors, would find it too substantial a conflict to pursue with any vigor.”
  • no other state has Maryland’s uniform, German-style payment system in place, “so Maryland starts the race nine paces ahead of the other 46 states,” McDonough said.
  • the unique spirit of each country is what ultimately gets in its way. Germany’s more orderly system can be too rigid for experimentation. And America’s free-for-all, where hospitals and doctors all charge different amounts, is great for innovation but too chaotic to make payment reforms stick.
  • rising health costs will continue to be the main problem for Americans as we launch into our more Bismarckian system. “The main challenge you’ll have is price control,” he said. “You have subsidies in health exchanges now, so for the first time, the federal budget is really involved in health expenditure increases in the commercial market. In order to keep your federal budget under control, you’ll have to control prices.”
Javier E

Opinion | Boeing's Political Ties and the Decision to Ground the 737 Max - The New York... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ng-crash-contractor-trump.html

corporate influence PAC politics

shared by Javier E on 16 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • how do campaign donations that appear to be connected with Boeing manage to avoid violating this law? The answer is a loophole, cemented in the law in the 1970s, that permits government contractors to set up “separate segregated funds,” or political action committees, to make political contributions using money typically pooled from the contractors’ executives and major shareholders. Such funds are legal even if the parent company pays for their operating and fund-raising costs. This exemption — whose ostensible justification is the free-speech rights of contractors’ employees — is why political action committees like Boeing’s can exist.
  • The corporate PAC workaround is “clearly bad, policy-wise,” said Brendan Fischer, the director of federal reform at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan ethics watchdog
  • Boeing’s PAC is a “major player” Mr. Fischer said. The sum of its contributions is three times larger than the sum of any independent individual contributions from its employees
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  • Boeing correctly reports that the company itself does not directly fund super PACs (which are allowed to raise unlimited amounts of money). Doing so would be a violation of the contributor ban. However, it has ways around this
  • The company’s PAC may give up to $5,000 to a candidate’s campaign committee or use its funds for any other “lawful purpose” — which includes unlimited contributions to super PACs or “dark money” nonprofit groups as well. Last cycle, the company’s PAC gave $250,000 to the Mitch McConnell-aligned Senate Leadership Fund; $250,000 to Karl Rove’s dark-money group, One Nation; and $250,000 to the dark-money group American Action Network.
  • There is also, in effect, another even larger loophole for contractors looking to influence national politicians: the inaugural committee for a president-elect. Because inaugural committees are technically not connected to the political campaign, “all bets are off,
  • Boeing gave a million dollars to Mr. Trump’s inaugural committee
Javier E

Start-Ups Hoping to Fight Climate Change Struggle as Other Tech Firms Cash In - The New... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...oval-technology-start-ups.html

climate change investment vc financing

shared by Javier E on 08 May 19 - No Cached
  • The last time venture capitalists invested heavily in environmentally focused technology during the so-called clean-tech boom of the 2000s, they lost a lot of money. Getting one of these companies off the ground can be expensive
  • “Sitting on your pile of money while the oceans are rising may not help you stay dry,”
  • It is common wisdom in the tech industry that it is much easier to raise money for a software company than it is for a start-up that wants to work in biotechnology or energy
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  • Total funding for clean-tech start-ups fell during most of the past decade
  • But there are dozens, if not hundreds, of start-ups developing new technologies that address the issue.
  • Two major scientific organizations said last fall that even if greenhouse-gas emissions were reduced significantly, stopping drastic global warming would require technological breakthroughs that allowed for the removal of billions of tons of carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere.
  • Some promising methods for accomplishing that involve old-fashioned technologies, like planting trees and changing the ways farmers till their fields
  • In 2018, $6.6 billion was invested in clean tech, about 15 percent of what went to software start-ups. Carbon-removal start-ups got a tiny sliver of that.
  • So far, no one has found an obvious way to turn capturing carbon dioxide into a profitable business.
  • Noah Deich, the founder of Carbon180, a nonprofit that sponsored the event, said it was encouraging to see investors there. But he said he had not seen the commitment to investing that he believed was necessary to get the technologies working.
  • “For an internet company, even if you don’t have a real product, you can get money to develop one,” he said. “Here, it’s the opposite.
  • “It is tackling big markets and big challenges, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that those are going to be big businesses,”
  • a broad array of investors, including venture capitalists, will need to get involved. And they will need to wait more than three or four years to cash out
  • Mr. Oros said that his fund had not made an investment in the sector and that he did not see a way for the industry to take off without government policy encouraging it
  • for these businesses to succeed it would probably be necessary for governments to create a carbon tax or other subsidies as incentives for new businesses.
  • Mr. Lackner said investors should assume that governments would be willing at some point to pay for what these companies were doing.
  • “In the end, there is no way for the market to not exist,” he said. “This will be a brand-new industry at a huge scale.”
  • In the time it took Carbon Engineering to raise one round of $68 million, Slack, a messaging company founded the same year, has raised more than 10 times as much and is now preparing for an initial public offering that could value it at nearly $20 billion.
  • Everyone who discusses the difficulties these start-ups face points back to the clean-tech boom, when several venture capital firms put billions of dollars into solar energy and other technologies. While solar power has gained traction, most of the clean-tech funds were viewed as failures.
  • venture capitalists needed their investments to show returns within a few years
  • “There is a fundamental mismatch in time lines,”
  • One of the biggest investors in climate-focused start-ups is Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a $1 billion fund that seeks to support the development of world-saving technology that might not have a quick turnaround. The fund has received money from Bill Gates and several other billionaires.
  • money from major philanthropists would not be enough to get even one start-up up to speed, much less the dozens needed to meet the carbon-reduction goals set by international bodies like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
  • Ocean-Based Climate Solutions, has created a device that stirs up water in the ocean to promote the growth of phytoplankton, which are algae that can take carbon dioxide out of the air and deliver it to the bottom of the sea in solid form.
  • “We don’t need another photo-sharing app or another blockchain start-up,” said Mr. Rogers, who is investing his money through Incite Ventures, a fund he created with his wife, Swati Mylavarapu. “We need to solve the carbon crisis. But a lot of folks are chasing the easy money rather than taking responsibility for what needs to be done.”
Javier E

Silicon Valley Powered American Tech Dominance-Now It Has a Challenger - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...it-has-a-challenger-1523544804

silicon valley china financing vc startup tech

shared by Javier E on 13 Apr 18 - No Cached
  • Asian investors directed nearly as much money into startups last year as American investors did—40% of the record $154 billion in global venture financing versus 44%,
  • Asia’s share is up from less than 5% just 10 years ago.
  • That tidal wave of cash into promising young firms could herald a shift in who controls the world’s technological innovation and its economic fruits, from artificial intelligence to self-driving cars.
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  • The rise of China’s venture market “signifies a shift from a single-epicenter view of the world to a duopoly,” he says.
  • The surge also positions Asia’s investors to win stakes in markets that Western companies covet, or that have national security implications.
  • . “If you think that being the locus of invention gives you a boost to your GDP and so forth, that’s a deterioration of the U.S. competitive advantage.”
  • Although one of the biggest Asian investors is Japan’s SoftBank Group Corp. , which has tapped Middle Eastern money to create the world’s largest tech-investment fund, it is Chinese activity that is having the greatest impact.
  • China is creating unicorns—startups valued at a billion dollars or more—at much the same pace as the U.S., drawing on funding from internet giants like Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Tencent Holdings Ltd. as well as more than a thousand domestic venture-capital firms that have raised billions of dollars a year for the past few year
  • Chinese-led venture funding is about 15 times its size in 2013, outpacing growth in U.S.-led financing, which roughly doubled in that time period
  • Most Chinese-led investment so far has gone to the country’s own firms, the Journal analysis found. Many of them, like the Yelp equivalent Meituan-Dianping, are household names with millions of customers in China, yet virtually unknown elsewhere.
  • Many Chinese tech companies are “at this critical size that the China market alone is not enough to support their business and valuation,
  • Madhur Deora, chief financial officer for Paytm, one of India’s biggest e-payments firms, says the company approached Alibaba affiliate Ant Financial instead of U.S. backers for funding in 2015 because Chinese mobile-internet innovations are “way far ahead of anything that’s happened in the U.S.
  • One reason China’s push into new technologies worries many in the U.S. is that, unlike the hunt for good returns that underpins most Western venture finance, a lot of Chinese investment is driven by strategic interests, some carrying the specter of state influence.
  • China is pushing hard into semiconductors, for which the government has provided billions of dollars in public funding, and artificial intelligence, where Beijing in July set a goal of global leadership by 2030
  • Mr. Lee, the venture investor, predicts that in the next five to 10 years Chinese tech companies will become pacesetters for tech-related development, vying with the likes of Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Facebook for dominance in markets outside the English-speaking world and Western Europe.
  • “All the rest of the world will basically be a land grab between the U.S. and China,
  • “The U.S. approach is: We’ll build a better product and just win over all the countries,” says Mr. Lee. The Chinese approach is “we’ll fund the local partner to beat off the American companies.”
  • Asia’s rise as a startup financier is even starker in the biggest venture investments—those of $100 million or more. These megadeals have become an increasingly important part of venture finance as valuations have ballooned, with their proportion of deal volume growing from around 8% in 2007 to around half of the total last year.
  • In Southeast Asia, a flood of Chinese money into local startups—such as the $1.1 billion Alibaba-led investment into Indonesian online marketplace PT Tokopedia last year—is drawing the region closer to China
  • Chinese money is also playing a big role in India, which, with a population of 1.2 billion, has been described as the next big internet market. Chinese and Japanese investors each led nearly $3 billion in venture finance in India last year, ahead of the nearly $2 billion in deals led by U.S. investors
  • “Think of strategic investments and M&A as playing a game of go,” said Mr. Tsai, the Alibaba executive vice chairman, at the investor conference last year. “In a game of go the strategic objective is to put your pieces on the chessboard and surround your opponent.”
lenaurick

Nations pledge millions - CNN.com - 0 views

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

crisis policy trump us

shared by lenaurick on 06 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • Dozens of governments and private philanthropists have pledged nearly $200 million for family planning services, after US President Donald Trump banned funding for groups linked to abortion.
  • Sweden, Belgium and Finland promised €20 million each (about $21 million) to the the global fundraising initiative, She Decides, launched by Dutch Development Minister Lilianne Ploumen.
  • Ploumen started the initiative after Trump signed an executive order last month reinstating the "global gag rule." The rule, formally known as the Mexico City Policy, strips international non-governmental organizations that perform or promote abortions of US government funding.
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  • "It is a very powerful signal to the rest of the world that the fundamental right of women and girls to decide over their own lives must be respected."
  • Organizers hope to raise $600 million to plug the gap left by Trump's ban on US government funding. According to the Guttmacher Institute, USAID's yearly budget for family planning and reproductive health programs prevents around two million unsafe abortions and over 11,000 deaths
  • "The broad backing of She Decides will uplift millions of girls and women fighting their rights around the world. And this is only the beginning."The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation promised $20 million, joining other private donors that contributed tens of millions in donations.
  • According to the charity, the loss of its services during Trump's first term could result in 6.5 million unintended pregnancies, 2.2 million abortions, 2.1 million unsafe abortions, and 21,700 maternal deaths. The organization also said it will be prevented from reaching 1.5 million women with contraception every year
  • Even during the Obama years, US law banned direct funding for abortion services. But NGOs that performed the procedure were allowed to receive US funding for other programs, including those related to contraception access and post-abortion care.And family planning is not the only thing at risk under Trump's order -- the policy has been expanded to affect "all global health assistance," including funds to fight malaria, AIDS, and tuberculosis, according to a White House statement.
anonymous

'Shameful': UK and US under fire over blocked funds for Haiti cholera victims | Global ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-un-donors-china-france-russia

global development UN UK policy

shared by anonymous on 05 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • Human rights lawyers have accused the UK and other large donors of blocking the release of a multimillion-dollar UN fund to provide relief to victims of a cholera epidemic that has killed 10,000 people in Haiti.
  • The outbreak, which affected hundreds of thousands of Haitians, was caused when infected UN peacekeepers from Nepal brought the disease to the country in 2010.
  • Ban Ki-moon said deadly outbreak that killed up thousands ‘leaves a blemish’ on United Nations’ reputation, ending six years of refusing to claim responsibility
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  • Concannon said it was “shameful” the UN couldn’t come up with even a tenth of the amount originally promised. “The underspend idea wasn’t supposed to be the end result, but low-hanging fruit.
  • A Foreign and Commonwealth Office spokesperson said: “The UK recognises the devastating impact that cholera has had on the Haitian people, and we welcome the crucial role the UN is playing to eradicate it. The UK is the fourth largest donor to the UN trust fund, in addition to other contributions to tackling cholera in Haiti.“It is for each UN member state to decide how to use returned unspent peacekeeping funds. We call on all countries to volunteer contributions to the UN trust fund from whatever source is appropriate for them.”
hannahcarter11

Republicans Release $928B Infrastructure Counteroffer In Response To Biden Plan : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...on-infrastructure-counteroffer

republicans infrastructure biden

shared by hannahcarter11 on 31 May 21 - No Cached
  • A group of Senate Republicans on Thursday unveiled a $928 billion infrastructure proposal to counter President Biden's plan for a nearly $2 trillion bill.
  • The proposal outlines a significant increase from the most recent GOP plan to spend $568 billion. The new version includes additional money for roads, bridges, water, rail and airports, but the majority of the proposed spending is part of an existing baseline plan for investments. The total new money is just $257 billion.
  • Republicans plan to pay for the vast majority of the spending by repurposing funds Congress has already approved for other projects. They are primarily targeting unspent money meant for COVID-19 relief.
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  • In a statement, White House officials called the GOP counteroffer "encouraging" but said they were concerned about the proposal to use COVID-19 relief funding to pay for the plan and that some concerns remained about funding proposals for VA hospitals, rail, transit, lead pipes and climate. Biden said he plans to meet with Republican senators on infrastructure talks next week.
  • Democrats want to increase taxes on corporations and high income earners — a plan that Republicans have flatly rejected.
  • Biden and his allies have also firmly supported plans to pay for the spending by increasing the corporate tax rate to 28%, increasing the top federal income tax rate to 39.6% for those earning more than $400,000, and expanding the capital gains tax.
  • "Of the remaining 5% the largest categories of unobligated balances are in the Heath Care Provider Relief Fund—funding for rural hospitals, health care providers and disaster loans for small businesses," the White House said. Targeting that money risks dragging infrastructure into ongoing political arguments about the coronavirus and the pandemic response.
  • Biden has recently called for $1.7 trillion in spending in a package that broadly redefines the definition of infrastructure as well as expanding federal spending priorities and the role of the federal government in the everyday lives of Americans.
  • Biden's plan expands the term infrastructure to cover virtually every aspect of a worker's relationship to the economy. His plan includes measures to combat climate change and promote green energy, funding for child care and early childhood education, union-friendly measures and worker protections.
brookegoodman

Trump border wall funding plan countered by Democrat's $3.6B reversal bill | Fox News - 0 views

www.foxnews.com/...llion-emergency-funds-military

politics us trump

shared by brookegoodman on 25 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • A senior Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee introduced a bill Thursday seeking to reclaim $3.6 billion in emergency funds the Trump administration reallocated to fund a U.S.-Mexico border wall.
  • Secretary of Defense Mark Esper last month signed off on $3.6 billion in Defense Department construction funds for 175 miles of wall on the border.
  • In August, the Supreme Court cleared the way for the government to use about $2.5 billion in Defense Department funds after that money had been frozen by lower courts while a lawsuit was proceeding. Trump had directed $155 million to be diverted to border facilities from FEMA disaster relief.
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  • Murray acknowledged the bill would likely not pass in the GOP-controlled Senate
anonymous

The 2020 Campaign Is the Most Expensive Ever (By a Lot) - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...2020-race-money.html

Politics Trump

shared by anonymous on 29 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • The 2020 election has blown past previous records to become the most expensive campaign in American history, with the final tally for the battle for the White House and control of the Senate and the House expected to hit nearly $14 billion, according to new projections made by the Center for Responsive Politics.
  • The surge of spending is powered by donations at both ends of the giving spectrum as small donors, particularly online, are playing an increasingly central role in funding campaigns. At the same time, billionaires and multimillionaires are writing enormous checks to super PACs.
  • Mr. Biden’s campaign committee, which had raised $938 million as of Oct. 14, is on track to be the first to surpass $1 billion in fund-raising. The fund-raising hauls by both Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump, when combined with party money, already far exceed that threshold.
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  • Eight of the 10 most expensive Senate races ever are unfolding in 2020
  • Up and down the ballot, Democrats have the financial upper hand this year.
  • Small-dollar donors, who have lifted Democratic Senate candidates and Mr. Biden in particular, are growing in importance, accounting for 22 percent of the total money raised in the 2020 cycle. These donors, who gave less than $200 to a candidate or cause, contributed 15 percent of the funds raised in the 2016 election.
  • So-called dark money continues to flood into American political campaigns through entities like nonprofits that do not fully disclose their donors.
  • More women than ever are giving to federal races, accounting for 44 percent of donors, up from 37 percent in 2016, according to the analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics.
  • Women have favored Democrats in the voting booth
  • The nonprofit Democratic online donation platform, ActBlue, has processed more than $3.3 billion so far this year.
  • The top industry for campaign cash remains Wall Street, totaling more than $255 million from the securities and investment world, according to the center’s research. That money heavily favored Democrats: $161.7 million to $94.5 million.
  • Separately, the role of traditional political action committees, often used by corporations to bundle donations to incumbent politicians, has been shrinking as a share of political cash, hitting a record low of 5 percent, according to the center.
  • The total cost of the races for the White House, the Senate and the House is expected to hit nearly $14 billion.
  • he biggest driver of political spending this year has been — no surprise — the presidential race, as enormous sums have, in particular, poured into supporting Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s bid to oust President Trump.
  • 6.6 billion
  • Editors’ PicksHow the Trump Era
  • That is one of four Senate races to have crossed the $200 million mark this year — the others are in Iowa, South Carolina and Arizona — something that had never before happened in a contest without a self-funding candidate.
  • Democratic candidates and allied groups have spent $5.5 billion this cycle, compared with $3.8 billion in spending by Republicans — the largest advantage ever, according to the analysis by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.
  • Both parties are taking advantage of disclosure loopholes. One dark money Democratic group, the Sixteen Thirty Fund, has reported more than $51 million in giving to a wide array of other federal PACs, federal records show.
andrespardo

Revealed: conservative group fighting to restrict voting tied to powerful dark money ne... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...nservative-voting-restrictions

election republican 2020

shared by andrespardo on 27 May 20 - No Cached
  • Revealed: conservative group fighting to restrict voting tied to powerful dark money network
  • A powerful new conservative organization fighting to restrict voting in the 2020 presidential election is really just a rebranded group that is part of a dark money network already helping Donald Trump’s unprecedented effort to remake the US federal judiciary, the Guardian and OpenSecrets reveal.
  • $250,000 in advertisements in April, warning against voting by mail and accusing Democrats of cheating. It facilitated letters to election officials in Colorado, Florida and Michigan, using misleading data to accuse jurisdictions of having bloated voter rolls and threatening legal action.
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  • Despite appearing to be a free-standing new operation, the Honest Elections Project is just a legal alias for the Judicial Education Project, a well-financed nonprofit connected to a powerful network of dark money conservative groups, according to business records reviewed by the Guardian and OpenSecrets.
  • For nearly a decade, the organization has been almost entirely funded by DonorsTrust, known as a “dark money ATM” backed by the Koch network and other prominent conservative donors, according to data tracked by OpenSecrets. In 2018, more than 99% of the Judicial Education Project’s funding came from a single $7.8m donation from DonorsTrust.
  • The Honest Elections Project is merely a fictitious name – an alias – the fund legally adopted in February. The change was nearly indiscernible because The 85 Fund registered two other legal aliases on the same day, including the Judicial Education Project, its old name. The legal maneuver allows it to operate under four different names with little public disclosure that it is the same group.
  • There is a lot of overlap between the Honest Elections Project and the Judicial Crisis Network. Both groups share personnel, including Carrie Severino, the influential president of the Judicial Crisis Network.
  • The Honest Elections Project has become active as Republicans are scaling up their efforts to fight to keep voting restrictions in place ahead of the election. The Republican National Committee will spend at least $20m on litigation over voting rights and wants to recruit up to 50,000 people to help monitor the polls and other election activities.
  • “It isn’t any surprise to those of us that do work in both of these spaces that our opponents [who] want to constrict access to voting, access to the courts, who are seeking an anti-inclusive, anti-civil rights agenda are one in the same,” she said.
katherineharron

Health care: Here are 7 Trump measures that Biden will likely overturn - CNNPolitics - 0 views

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

biden

shared by katherineharron on 16 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • When it comes to health policy, President Donald Trump made it his mission to undo many measures his predecessor put in place.
  • In their four years in office, the Trump administration made sweeping changes that affected the Affordable Care Act, Medicaid, abortion and transgender rights, in many cases reversing the efforts of the Obama administration.
  • Biden's health officials will likely be active, as well, but it will take time for all their actions to take effect.
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  • "They don't have a massive eraser pen. They've got to go through the rule-making process," said Allison Orris, a former Obama administration official and counsel with Manatt Health, a professional services firm. "They are going to have to think about what comes first, second and third and be realistic about timing."
  • Plus, the Biden administration may opt to keep and continue several Trump administration efforts, including shifting to value-based care, rather than paying doctors for every visit and procedure, and increasing access to telehealth,
  • The two administrations also share common views on some measures to lower drug pricing, including basing Medicare payments on the cost of prescription medications in other countries and importing drugs from abroad. But Trump officials have not actually put these proposals in place.
  • While Trump focused on dismantling the Affordable Care Act, Biden will emphasize expanding the law and access to health coverage.
  • The Trump administration took the historic step in early 2018 of allowing states to require certain Medicaid recipients to work in order to receive benefits. Eight states have received approval, seven have pending requests and four had their waivers set aside in court, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
  • Biden's Health and Human Services secretary would be able to unwind the approvals, but it is a complicated task, said Joan Alker, executive director of the Center for Children and Families at Georgetown University. The secretary would have to determine whether to withdraw permission for the entire waiver or just certain features.
  • Several of these waivers included other provisions that could make it harder for low-income Americans to retain Medicaid coverage, such as lockouts for non-payment of premiums.
  • One executive order Trump repeatedly points to is expanding short-term health plans, which typically have lower premiums, but provide less comprehensive coverage and don't have to adhere to the Affordable Care Act's protections for people with pre-existing conditions.
  • "The short-term plans have important symbolic significance because they restrict coverage to people with pre-existing conditions, which was a prominent political issue in the campaign," said Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation.
  • In its first year in office, the Trump administration slashed funds to promote Obamacare open enrollment and to assist consumers with selecting plans by 90% and 84%, respectively.
  • The Biden administration is expected to reverse all these measures to curtail Obamacare.
  • Biden has promised to revoke the Trump administration rule barring federally funded health care providers in the Title X family planning program from referring patients for abortions.
  • Biden has vowed to reverse the so-called Mexico City Policy, a ban on funding for foreign nonprofits that perform or promote abortions, which Trump reinstated and expanded during his tenure.
  • The Trump administration reinstated the measure -- which had previously impacted only family planning assistance -- in 2017 by presidential memorandum and extended it to all applicable US global health funding under the "Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance."
  • The Biden administration is also expected to reinstitute a directive that states cannot bar Medicaid funds from going to qualified providers that separately provide abortions, such as Planned Parenthood.
  • Trump also signed a bill in 2017 allowing states to withhold federal money from organizations that provide abortion services, including Planned Parenthood.
  • The Trump administration has been particularly hostile toward transgender Americans. Among its most criticized moves was an effort earlier this year to rollback an Obama-era regulation prohibiting discrimination in health care against patients who are transgender.
  • Biden's LGBTQ policy plan also says he will work to expand funding for mental health services for LGBTQ Americans and that his administration plans to automatically enroll low-income LGBTQ people in the public option, once it's created, if they live in rural areas in states that didn't expand Medicaid.
Javier E

Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich | The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...omsday-prep-for-the-super-rich

doomsday Collapse rich prepper history crisis Culture politics

shared by Javier E on 22 Sep 21 - No Cached
  • as the Presidential campaign exposed increasingly toxic divisions in America, Antonio García Martínez, a forty-year-old former Facebook product manager living in San Francisco, bought five wooded acres on an island in the Pacific Northwest and brought in generators, solar panels, and thousands of rounds of ammunition. “When society loses a healthy founding myth, it descends into chaos,” he told me. The author of “Chaos Monkeys,” an acerbic Silicon Valley memoir, García Martínez wanted a refuge that would be far from cities but not entirely isolated. “All these dudes think that one guy alone could somehow withstand the roving mob,” he said. “No, you’re going to need to form a local militia. You just need so many things to actually ride out the apocalypse.” Once he started telling peers in the Bay Area about his “little island project,” they came “out of the woodwork” to describe their own preparations, he said. “I think people who are particularly attuned to the levers by which society actually works understand that we are skating on really thin cultural ice right now.”
  • In private Facebook groups, wealthy survivalists swap tips on gas masks, bunkers, and locations safe from the effects of climate change. One member, the head of an investment firm, told me, “I keep a helicopter gassed up all the time, and I have an underground bunker with an air-filtration system.” He said that his preparations probably put him at the “extreme” end among his peers. But he added, “A lot of my friends do the guns and the motorcycles and the gold coins. That’s not too rare anymore.”
  • Tim Chang, a forty-four-year-old managing director at Mayfield Fund, a venture-capital firm, told me, “There’s a bunch of us in the Valley. We meet up and have these financial-hacking dinners and talk about backup plans people are doing. It runs the gamut from a lot of people stocking up on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, to figuring out how to get second passports if they need it, to having vacation homes in other countries that could be escape havens.” He said, “I’ll be candid: I’m stockpiling now on real estate to generate passive income but also to have havens to go to.” He and his wife, who is in technology, keep a set of bags packed for themselves and their four-year-old daughter. He told me, “I kind of have this terror scenario: ‘Oh, my God, if there is a civil war or a giant earthquake that cleaves off part of California, we want to be ready.’ ”
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  • When Marvin Liao, a former Yahoo executive who is now a partner at 500 Startups, a venture-capital firm, considered his preparations, he decided that his caches of water and food were not enough. “What if someone comes and takes this?” he asked me. To protect his wife and daughter, he said, “I don’t have guns, but I have a lot of other weaponry. I took classes in archery.”
  • Over the years, Huffman has become increasingly concerned about basic American political stability and the risk of large-scale unrest. He said, “Some sort of institutional collapse, then you just lose shipping—that sort of stuff.” (Prepper blogs call such a scenario W.R.O.L., “without rule of law.”) Huffman has come to believe that contemporary life rests on a fragile consensus. “I think, to some degree, we all collectively take it on faith that our country works, that our currency is valuable, the peaceful transfer of power—that all of these things that we hold dear work because we believe they work. While I do believe they’re quite resilient, and we’ve been through a lot, certainly we’re going to go through a lot more.”
  • Justin Kan heard the first inklings of survivalism among his peers. Kan co-founded Twitch, a gaming network that was later sold to Amazon for nearly a billion dollars. “Some of my friends were, like, ‘The breakdown of society is imminent. We should stockpile food,’ ” he said. “I tried to. But then we got a couple of bags of rice and five cans of tomatoes. We would have been dead if there was actually a real problem.” I asked Kan what his prepping friends had in common. “Lots of money and resources,” he said. “What are the other things I can worry about and prepare for? It’s like insurance.”
  • Long before the financial crisis became front-page news, early signs appeared in user comments on Reddit. “People were starting to whisper about mortgages. They were worried about student debt. They were worried about debt in general. There was a lot of, ‘This is too good to be true. This doesn’t smell right.’ ” He added, “There’s probably some false positives in there as well, but, in general, I think we’re a pretty good gauge of public sentiment. When we’re talking about a faith-based collapse, you’re going to start to see the chips in the foundation on social media first.”
  • How did a preoccupation with the apocalypse come to flourish in Silicon Valley, a place known, to the point of cliché, for unstinting confidence in its ability to change the world for the better?Those impulses are not as contradictory as they seem. Technology rewards the ability to imagine wildly different futures,
  • “When you do that, it’s pretty common that you take things ad infinitum, and that leads you to utopias and dystopias,” he said. It can inspire radical optimism—such as the cryonics movement, which calls for freezing bodies at death in the hope that science will one day revive them—or bleak scenarios.
  • In 2012, National Geographic Channel launched “Doomsday Preppers,” a reality show featuring a series of Americans bracing for what they called S.H.T.F. (when the “shit hits the fan”). The première drew more than four million viewers, and, by the end of the first season, it was the most popular show in the channel’s history.
  • A survey commissioned by National Geographic found that forty per cent of Americans believed that stocking up on supplies or building a bomb shelter was a wiser investment than a 401(k).
  • Johnson wishes that the wealthy would adopt a greater “spirit of stewardship,” an openness to policy change that could include, for instance, a more aggressive tax on inheritance. “Twenty-five hedge-fund managers make more money than all of the kindergarten teachers in America combined,” he said. “Being one of those twenty-five doesn’t feel good. I think they’ve developed a heightened sensitivity.”
  • In an e-mail, Wong told me, “Most people just assume improbable events don’t happen, but technical people tend to view risk very mathematically.” He continued, “The tech preppers do not necessarily think a collapse is likely. They consider it a remote event, but one with a very severe downside, so, given how much money they have, spending a fraction of their net worth to hedge against this . . . is a logical thing to do.”
  • I asked Hoffman to estimate what share of fellow Silicon Valley billionaires have acquired some level of “apocalypse insurance,” in the form of a hideaway in the U.S. or abroad. “I would guess fifty-plus per cent,” he said, “but that’s parallel with the decision to buy a vacation home. Human motivation is complex, and I think people can say, ‘I now have a safety blanket for this thing that scares me
  • In building Reddit, a community of thousands of discussion threads, into one of the most frequently visited sites in the world, Huffman has grown aware of the way that technology alters our relations with one another, for better and for worse. He has witnessed how social media can magnify public fear. “It’s easier for people to panic when they’re together,” he said, pointing out that “the Internet has made it easier for people to be together,” yet it also alerts people to emerging risks.
  • “I’ve heard this theme from a bunch of people,” Hoffman said. “Is the country going to turn against the wealthy? Is it going to turn against technological innovation? Is it going to turn into civil disorder?”
  • The C.E.O. of another large tech company told me, “It’s still not at the point where industry insiders would turn to each other with a straight face and ask what their plans are for some apocalyptic event.” He went on, “But, having said that, I actually think it’s logically rational and appropriately conservative.”
  • “Our food supply is dependent on G.P.S., logistics, and weather forecasting,” he said, “and those systems are generally dependent on the Internet, and the Internet is dependent on D.N.S.”—the system that manages domain names. “Go risk factor by risk factor by risk factor, acknowledging that there are many you don’t even know about, and you ask, ‘What’s the chance of this breaking in the next decade?’ Or invert it: ‘What’s the chance that nothing breaks in fifty years?’ ”
  • “Anyone who’s in this community knows people who are worried that America is heading toward something like the Russian Revolution,” he told me recently.
  • “People know the only real answer is, Fix the problem,” he said. “It’s a reason most of them give a lot of money to good causes.” At the same time, though, they invest in the mechanics of escape. He recalled a dinner in New York City after 9/11 and the bursting of the dot-com bubble: “A group of centi-millionaires and a couple of billionaires were working through end-of-America scenarios and talking about what they’d do. Most said they’ll fire up their planes and take their families to Western ranches or homes in other countries.”
  • By January, 2015, Johnson was sounding the alarm: the tensions produced by acute income inequality were becoming so pronounced that some of the world’s wealthiest people were taking steps to protect themselves. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Johnson told the audience, “I know hedge-fund managers all over the world who are buying airstrips and farms in places like New Zealand because they think they need a getaway.”
  • many worry that, as artificial intelligence takes away a growing share of jobs, there will be a backlash against Silicon Valley, America’s second-highest concentration of wealth.
  • The gap is widening further. In December, the National Bureau of Economic Research published a new analysis, by the economists Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman, which found that half of American adults have been “completely shut off from economic growth since the 1970s.” Approximately a hundred and seventeen million people earn, on average, the same income that they did in 1980, while the typical income for the top one per cent has nearly tripled.
  • r the silo and finished construction in December, 2012, at a cost of nearly twenty million dollars. He created twelve private apartments: full-floor units were advertised at three million dollars; a half-floor was half the price. He has sold every unit, except one for himself, he said
  • Johnson said, “If we had a more equal distribution of income, and much more money and energy going into public school systems, parks and recreation, the arts, and health care, it could take an awful lot of sting out of society. We’ve largely dismantled those things.”
  • “Why do people who are envied for being so powerful appear to be so afraid?” Johnson asked. “What does that really tell us about our system?” He added, “It’s a very odd thing. You’re basically seeing that the people who’ve been the best at reading the tea leaves—the ones with the most resources, because that’s how they made their money—are now the ones most preparing to pull the rip cord and jump out of the plane.”
  • The movement received another boost from the George W. Bush Administration’s mishandling of Hurricane Katrina. Neil Strauss, a former Times reporter, who chronicled his turn to prepping in his book “Emergency,” told me, “We see New Orleans, where our government knows a disaster is happening, and is powerless to save its own citizens.”
  • Tyler Allen, a real-estate developer in Lake Mary, Florida, who told me that he paid three million dollars for one of Hall’s condos. Allen said he worries that America faces a future of “social conflict” and government efforts to deceive the public. He suspects that the Ebola virus was allowed to enter the country in order to weaken the population. When I asked how friends usually respond to his ideas, he said, “The natural reaction that you get most of the time is for them to laugh, because it scares them.” But, he added, “my credibility has gone through the roof. Ten years ago, this just seemed crazy that all this was going to happen: the social unrest and the cultural divide in the country, the race-baiting and the hate-mongering.”
  • d G. Mitchell, Jr., a professor emeritus at Oregon State University, who spent twelve years studying survivalism, said, “During the Reagan era, we heard, for the first time in my life, and I’m seventy-four years old, from the highest authorities in the land that government has failed you, the collective institutional ways of solving problems and understanding society are no good. People said, ‘O.K., it’s flawed. What do I do now?’ ”
  • That gap is comparable to the gap between average incomes in the U.S. and the Democratic Republic of Congo,
  • If a silo in Kansas is not remote or private enough, there is another option. In the first seven days after Donald Trump’s election, 13,401 Americans registered with New Zealand’s immigration authorities, the first official step toward seeking residency—more than seventeen times the usual rate. The New Zealand Herald reported the surge beneath the headline “Trump Apocalypse.”
  • In fact, the influx had begun well before Trump’s victory. In the first ten months of 2016, foreigners bought nearly fourteen hundred square miles of land in New Zealand, more than quadruple what they bought in the same period the previous year
  • Much as Switzerland once drew Americans with the promise of secrecy, and Uruguay tempted them with private banks, New Zealand offers security and distance. In the past six years, nearly a thousand foreigners have acquired residency there under programs that mandate certain types of investment of at least a million dollars.
  • The difference between New Zealand and the U.S., to a large extent, is that people who disagree with each other can still talk to each other about it here. It’s a tiny little place, and there’s no anonymity. People have to actually have a degree of civility.”
  • Jack Matthews, an American who is the chairman of MediaWorks, a large New Zealand broadcaster, told me, “I think, in the back of people’s minds, frankly, is that, if the world really goes to shit, New Zealand is a First World country, completely self-sufficient, if necessary—energy, water, food. Life would deteriorate, but it would not collapse.”
  • Top to bottom, the island chain runs roughly the distance between Maine and Florida, with half the population of New York City
  • In a recent World Bank report, New Zealand had supplanted Singapore as the best country in the world to do business.
  • “Kiwis used to talk about the ‘tyranny of distance,’ ” Wall said, as we crossed town in his Mercedes convertible. “Now the tyranny of distance is our greatest asset.”
  • American clients have also sought strategic advice. “They’re asking, ‘Where in New Zealand is not going to be long-term affected by rising sea levels?’ ”
  • In particular, the attention of American survivalists has generated resentment. In a discussion about New Zealand on the Modern Survivalist, a prepper Web site, a commentator wrote, “Yanks, get this in your heads. Aotearoa NZ is not your little last resort safe haven.”
  • An American hedge-fund manager in his forties—tall, tanned, athletic—recently bought two houses in New Zealand and acquired local residency. He agreed to tell me about his thinking, if I would not publish his name. Brought up on the East Coast, he said, over coffee, that he expects America to face at least a decade of political turmoil, including racial tension, polarization, and a rapidly aging population. “The country has turned into the New York area, the California area, and then everyone else is wildly different in the middle,” he said. He worries that the economy will suffer if Washington scrambles to fund Social Security and Medicare for people who need it. “Do you default on that obligation? Or do you print more money to give to them? What does that do to the value of the dollar? It’s not a next-year problem, but it’s not fifty years away, either.”
  • He said, “This is no longer about a handful of freaks worried about the world ending.” He laughed, and added, “Unless I’m one of those freaks.”
  • Fear of disaster is healthy if it spurs action to prevent it. But élite survivalism is not a step toward prevention; it is an act of withdrawal.
  • Philanthropy in America is still three times as large, as a share of G.D.P., as philanthropy in the next closest country, the United Kingdom. But it is now accompanied by a gesture of surrender, a quiet disinvestment by some of America’s most successful and powerful people. Faced with evidence of frailty in the American project, in the institutions and norms from which they have benefitted, some are permitting themselves to imagine failure. It is a gilded despair.
  • As Huffman, of Reddit, observed, our technologies have made us more alert to risk, but have also made us more panicky; they facilitate the tribal temptation to cocoon, to seclude ourselves from opponents, and to fortify ourselves against our fears, instead of attacking the sources of them. Justin Kan, the technology investor who had made a halfhearted effort to stock up on food, recalled a recent phone call from a friend at a hedge fund. “He was telling me we should buy land in New Zealand as a backup. He’s, like, ‘What’s the percentage chance that Trump is actually a fascist dictator? Maybe it’s low, but the expected value of having an escape hatch is pretty high.’ 
  • As Americans withdraw into smaller circles of experience, we jeopardize the “larger circle of empathy,” he said, the search for solutions to shared problems. “The easy question is, How do I protect me and mine? The more interesting question is, What if civilization actually manages continuity as well as it has managed it for the past few centuries? What do we do if it just keeps on chugging?”
Javier E

Germany Gets Honest About What Net Zero Will Cost - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...limate-prices-economy-145430ac

germany climate funding financing budget costs green

shared by Javier E on 02 Dec 23 - No Cached
  • Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s administration is falling apart because it turns out someone will have to pay for decarbonizing the eurozone’s largest economy.
  • This shocking and horrifying revelation is brought to you by Germany’s highest constitutional court, which ruled in mid-November that Berlin’s favorite budget gimmick violates the balanced-budget amendment. The amendment, known as the debt brake, limits the federal general-budget deficit to 0.35% of gross domestic product in any year unless Parliament declares an emergency.
  • German governments devised a workaround even before the amendment forced them to. By establishing special funds—called Sondervermögen—with their own revenue streams and borrowing authority, the government could shift a portion of its expenditures off its balance sheet.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • A big portion. There now are 29 special funds, with the largest among them allowed to borrow and spend over multiyear periods up to €869 billion, all of it backstopped by taxpayers but none of it folded into the general budget, where it would be subject to the debt brake
  • Before the court ruling, special-fund net borrowing in 2023 was expected to reach €147 billion, compared with on-balance-sheet borrowing of €45.6 billion. The constitutional court finally has caught on.
  • At a stroke, €60 billion has vanished from the budget. And that might not be the only disappearing cash. Finance Minister Christian Lindner—never enthusiastic about any of this spending anyway—believes a separate pot of money slated for energy-price subsidies also may run afoul of the newly articulated constitutional requirement. The size of that fund: €200 billion
  • Industry is fleeing Germany. The new green jobs the net-zero left promised require enormous subsidies. And Berlin must offer generous handouts, probably permanent, to individual households to shield them from the crippling energy-price consequences of decades of accumulated policy errors.
  • Ameliorating all of this was meant to be paid for on the sly via borrowing concealed in various Sondervermögen. No longer
  • Germany long ago perfected the art of green virtue signaling. Now it will have to conduct a substantive debate about whether the negligible global benefits of Germany’s slashing carbon emissions are worth the costs, especially if money must be diverted from other policy priorities such as social welfare.
  • Critics on the left will argue this all could be solved easily if only those hidebound Teutons weren’t so neurotic about budget balance. This crowd will note that Berlin could simply borrow more on the general budget, which it still can do relatively cheaply, and use the proceeds to sustain the net-zero transition and much other spending. Politico was quick off the mark, calling this a “make-believe debt crisis.”
  • Mr. Scholz is in political trouble because it was never clear how his center-left Social Democrats could govern in a coalition with Mr. Lindner’s free-market Free Democratic Party and the eco-leftist Greens. The special-budget trick was politically essential because it allowed all three parties to skirt the budget bargaining that would expose their deep ideological differences.
  • Those splits are out in the open now. Berlin is going to have to cut spending (on what?) or raise revenue (from where?) or borrow (how much?) to fill the net-zero funding gap—or, not impossible, conclude Germans don’t care that much about net zero after all
  • The key point is that Berlin’s budget process is no more dysfunctional than any other Western government’s. It’s merely more honest, at least now that the court has stepped in.
lilyrashkind

China faces a nearly $1 trillion funding gap. It will need more debt to fill it. - 0 views

www.cnbc.com/...need-more-debt-to-fill-it.html

funding gap

shared by lilyrashkind on 02 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • The Chinese government faces a growing shortfall of cash, analysts say, as they predict an increase of debt to fill the gap.The analysts did not share specific figures on how much additional debt might be needed. But they pointed to growing pressure on growth that would require more support from deb
  • BEIJING — The Chinese government faces a growing shortfall of cash, analysts say, as they predict an increase of debt to fill the gap.“The latest wave of Omicron and the widespread lockdowns in place since mid-March have resulted in a sharp contraction in government revenue, including land sales revenue,” Ting Lu, chief China economist at Nomura, and a team said in a report last week.
  • “Much of the incoming ‘stimulus measures’, be it special government bonds or incremental lending by policy banks, will be merely used to fill this funding gap,” the Nomura analysts said.
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  • “Many cities without Omicron outbreaks also suffered, as their economies are linked to those currently under lockdown,” Zhang said in an email in mid-May. “The economic costs are not limited to a small number of cities, it is a national problem.”
  • Excluding tax cuts and refunds, the Ministry of Finance said local fiscal revenue grew by 5.4% during the first four months of the year from a year ago. Eight of China’s 31 province-level regions saw a drop in fiscal revenue during that time, the ministry said, without naming them.Incomplete data for the period from Wind Information showed the regions of Qinghai, Shandong, Liaoning, Hebei, Guizhou, Hubei, Hunan and Tianjin posted year-on-year declines in fiscal revenue for the first four months of the year. Tianjin was the worst with a 27% decline.
  • Even before the latest Covid outbreak, land sales, a significant source of local government revenue, have plunged following Beijing’s crackdown on real estate developers’ high reliance on debt. Local governments are also responsible for implementing tax cuts and refunds that Beijing has announced to support growth.
  • Although financial data isn’t readily available for many Chinese cities, the southern tech hub of Shenzhen released figures showing a 44% year-on-year drop in fiscal revenue in April to 25.53 billion yuan. That followed a 7% year-on-year decline in March to 22.95 billion yuan.
  • Beijing in March already announced an increase in transfer of funds from the central to local governments. When asked in May whether that would be expanded, the Ministry of Finance noted some funding for next year would be transferred ahead of time to help local governments with tax refunds and cuts this year.
  • In late April, Chinese President Xi Jinping called for a nationwide push to develop infrastructure ranging from waterways to cloud computing infrastructure. It was not clear at what scale or timeframe the projects would be constructed.
  • “We expect the debt to continue to climb this year as a result of these economic pressures,” Yuan said, noting it remains to be seen how Beijing decides to balance economic growth with debt levels this year.
Javier E

Scandals Republicans Like - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...scandals-republicans-like.html

GOP IRS budget scandal

shared by Javier E on 23 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • what if the truth is more pedestrian: that the I.R.S. is simply not adequately funded to do its job and that Republicans are the ones who have kept the agency underfunded?
  • Republican zeal for reducing the size of government, particularly its tax collecting apparatus, has left the I.R.S. ill-equipped to perform its functions, one of which is to review applications for tax-exempt status from groups claiming to be “social welfare” organizations under section 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code.
  • Was there, Connolly asked, “a triggering event that flooded the I.R.S. with new applications?” Answering his own question, Connolly said “the triggering event is the Supreme Court ruling, Citizens United. The number of applications between 2009 and 2012 for a 501(c)(4) doubled from 1,751 to 3,357.” Citizens United was decided on Jan. 21, 2010.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Under intense pressure to meet I.R.S. production targets, civil servants – including registered Republicans — adopted the practice of flagging phrases like “tea party” to speed identification of applications requiring careful examination.
  • HE I.
  • R.S. appropriation has gone up during periods of Democratic control and down when Republicans have controlled at least one branch of Congress
  • the I.R.S. commissioner, described the effect of these cuts to the Way and Means Committee. “No challenge facing our agency is greater than the significant reduction in funding that has occurred over the last several years,” he said. “I am deeply concerned about the ability of the I.R.S. to continue to fulfill its mission if the agency lacks adequate funding. Our current level of funding is clearly less than what the agency needs.”
  • Koskinen observed that cuts in agency funding have reduced audits of corporations and of wealthy citizens: “Audits of high-income individuals – defined as those with $1 million or more in income – fell 3.7 percent as well last year. The I.R.S. examined approximately 61,000 business returns in FY 2013, down 13 percent from FY 2012.”
  • Republicans are aware of what happens to tax collections from the rich when the I.R.S. budget is cut and seem happy to live with those consequences.
  • imilarly, the House Oversight Committee has been relentless in its efforts to blame the Obama administration for the Sept. 11, 2012 terrorist attack on the American diplomatic mission in Benghazi, when Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three others were killed. Committee Republicans have done so despite their own record of repeatedly voting to cut spending on security for state department personnel.
  • it’s no fun serving on an oversight committee when your own party is running the executive branch. The years when Republicans controlled the House and White House, 2001 to 2007, were a public relations disaster for the Oversight Committee. The panel pointedly avoided taking on the Bush administration despite a plethora of scandals: abuses in the Abu Ghraib prison, evidence that the claim Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction was false, Jack Abramoff’s illicit lobbying, and the failure of the administration to respond to Hurricane Katrina.By the end of 2005, the committee had issued the Bush administration a total of 3 subpoenas, all on relatively noncontroversial matters.
rachelramirez

Bernie Sanders Narrows Fund-Raising Gap With Hillary Clinton - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-gap-with-hillary-clinton.html

bernie hillary new york times economics politics US

shared by rachelramirez on 01 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • Bernie Sanders Narrows Fund-Raising Gap With Hillary Clinton
  • Mrs. Clinton, who has been able to tap into one of the most successful fund-raising networks in American politics, reported raising more than $28 million for her primary campaign since the beginning of July, while Mr. Sanders, who has largely eschewed fund-raising from large donors, reported raising about $26 million.
  • when she brought in a total of $47.5 million, almost all of it for the primary campaign.
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