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Javier E

Republicans nominate dangerously insane person to lead America, then panic when he prov... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...-proves-hes-dangerously-insane

trump gop election 2016

shared by Javier E on 05 Aug 16 - No Cached
  • Republicans have shifted into a much higher state of Red Alert because Trump’s erratic antics are revealing just how reckless their decision to nominate him really was, and how reckless their continued support for him really is.
  • he’s revealing in inescapably clear terms the real character and qualifications of the person they knowingly nominated to run the country and continue to support for the presidency.
  • There is no question that Trump’s current follies are likely very damaging. But Trump has long harbored a range of traits and qualifications — or lack thereof — that already render him a very compromised candidate, both in a political sense and in the sense that Republicans should not have nominated him because he is a unique menace to the American experiment.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Trump’s pathologically abusive tendencies, his hair-trigger overreaction to criticism and slights both real and imagined, and his mental habit of sorting the world into the strong and the weak — the dominant and the submissive — render him temperamentally unfit for the presidency
  • He lacks basic knowledge of the world and doesn’t appear burdened by any curiosity about the complexities of foreign affairs or domestic policy
  • He is at worst a genuine bigot and at best a charlatan who has actively sought to stoke reactionary hostility to culturally and demographically evolving America.
  • He is indifferent to the inner workings of the American system and instead promises authoritarian glory.
  • Trump’s basic vision of the country as an apocalyptic hellscape — in which we’re existentially threatened by skyrocketing crime, dark hordes flooding up from the south, and refugee-terrorists menacing us from the east — is based on exaggerations, distortions, and lies.
Javier E

Two Nobelists Offer Views of Human-Driven Global Warming - NYTimes.com - 1 views

dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/...of-human-driven-global-warming

global warming

shared by Javier E on 03 Feb 12 - Cached
  • Given the flurry of attention this week around what two batches of scientists of various stripes think of evidence that humans are exerting a growing and disruptive influence on climate, it’s worth checking in with two Nobel laureates who’ve long been focused on the atmosphere and climate.
Javier E

Biker Gangs, Tamir Rice, And The Rise Of White Fragility - 0 views

talkingpointsmemo.com/...the-rise-of-white-fragility

white supremacy white privilege reaction fear racism white inequality conservativism epistemic

shared by Javier E on 24 May 15 - No Cached
  • The most dangerous uprising that's threatening America's stability isn't black protests in places like Ferguson or Baltimore. It's taking place among an aging white majority that is losing its bearing on reality and destroying the gears of government, media and public welfare. At its center is an inexplicable, illogical and dangerous fear that some sociologists are now defining as white fragility.
  • In her 2011 academic pedagogical analysis titled “White Fragility,” DiAngelo goes into a detailed explanation of how white people in North America live in insulated social and media spaces that protect them from any race-based stress. This privileged fragility leaves them unable to tolerate any schism or challenge to a universally accepted belief system. Any shift away from that (like a biracial African-American president) triggers a deep and sustaining panic. Racial segregation, disproportionate representation in the media, and many other factors serve as the columns that support white fragility
  • misunderstanding was caused by misidentification of what white privilege and power means. Privilege doesn’t mean automatic wealth and health. What “white privilege” means is that society is rooting for one particular segment of the population to succeed over all others, and has installed a disproportionately high amount of institutional and psychological helpers every step of the way.
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  • “Part of white fragility is to assume that when we talk about racism, we are calling someone out as being individually a racist,” he said. “So if you say we're going to talk about racism, white people think you're going to call them a name. But for most people of color it's a system. And we're talking about dealing with a structure so the real problem is the system.”
  • When separate groups of people are using the same word with different implied meanings then problems will persist.
  • When it comes to racism and increased segregation, both Wise and DiAngelo noted that there seems to be this rigid unwillingness to address any inequality, because it would upset the very people who are both benefiting from the injustice and refusing to acknowledge its existence.
  • The fear is that if someone seeks to define and fix racism, many white people feel like they’re being directly attacked. So instead of waiting for the attack, white fragility promotes protection by putting punitive restrictions on “the others.”
  • The Obama era has been an interesting petri dish of white fragility. On the heels of a moderate economic recovery, we’ve seen sweeping new state laws aimed at social issues: voting rights restrictions, defunding of Planned Parenthood, anti-gay legislation, Stand Your Ground bills, and restrictive union laws to weaken their bargaining power. These laws have resulted in a rollback of rights for minorities, women, the LGBT movement, and the working class.
  • The strangest thing about white fragility politics is that the detrimental policy results are spread out across race and class. Yet, the political results for the conservative movement priming the pump of white fragility and rage is election victories. And why should they change when they can get large sections of an aging white population to consistently vote for policies proven to statistically hurt their economic chances, personal health, their children’s education, and their very safety?
  • These are not rational decisions. These are fear-based politics that create avoidable disasters in which all suffer. This new wave of segregation fear is surging across the country. In response to the continued white fragility panic of 2008, conservative political movements are set to capitalize on the cycles of manufactured hysteria. “We are watching the repeal of the 20th century,” Wise said.
  • When I asked Wise and DiAngelo to give me something hopeful for the future, they both gave me a bleak picture. When I suggested that more facts and evidence could sway people, they disagreed. “People who are deeply committed to a world view don’t change their opinions when confronted with new facts,” Wise said. “Oddly enough, new facts cause them to dig in more deeply.”
qkirkpatrick

Gunman Panics Canadian Capital, Killing Soldier in Rampage - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...canada-parliament-gunfire.html

canada capital killing rampage politics crisis islam terrorism

shared by qkirkpatrick on 23 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • The heart of the Canadian capital was thrown into panic and placed in lockdown on Wednesday after a gunman armed with a rifle or shotgun fatally wounded a corporal guarding the tomb of the unknown soldier the National War Memorial, entered the nearby Parliament building and fired multiple times before he was shot and killed.
  • It was the second deadly assault on a uniformed member of Canada’s armed forces in three days
  • Law enforcement authorities in Washington said their Canadian counterparts had identified the assailant as Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, who had changed his name from Michael Joseph Hall, and said he had been a convert to Islam
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  • The shootings came amid heightened concern among Canadians about terrorist attacks
  • As the police locked down buildings in downtown Ottawa and asked stores to close, an eerie still, broken only by screaming emergency sirens, descended on the district.
  • The easy access to the grounds of Parliament Hill reflected the general Canadian view that an attack was unlikely. Mr. Harper and other members of his cabinet, however, have frequently warned that terrorist attacks might come to Canada.
  • “If you can kill a disbelieving American or European — especially the spiteful and filthy French — or an Australian, or a Canadian, or any other disbeliever from the disbelievers waging war, including the citizens of the countries that entered into a coalition against the Islamic State, then rely upon Allah, and kill him in any manner or way however it may be
  • qkirkpatrick on 23 Oct 14
     
    A Gunman entered the Canadian Parliament building and opened fire. He killed a Canadian armed forces man before being shot and killed. The attacker appeared to have been motivated by Islamic Extremism, which is also the second deadly event in 3 days in Canada. Many people are becoming panicked over the recent events.
  • mollyharper on 23 Oct 14
     
    http://www.cnn.com/2014/10/22/world/canada-shootings-hero/index.html?hpt=wo_c1 Kevin Vickers is being called a "hero" for taking down the gunman.
sarahbalick

Aleppo fighting intensifies; thousands reported fleeing - CNN.com - 0 views

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

fighting aleppo syria UN

shared by sarahbalick on 08 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • 40,000 fleeing Aleppo as battle for Syrian city intensifies, U.N. group says
  • The battle for Aleppo -- once Syria's commercial heart -- is intensifying, and video has surfaced appearing to show thousands of civilians streaming out of the devastated city
  • Reports said forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's government, crucially aided by Russian air power, have cut the city off from supplies and are advancing.
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  • Increasingly intensive Russian airstrikes are pushing thousands of Syrians north, away from the northern outskirts of the once bustling city, according to the National Coalition of Syrian Revolution and Opposition Forces, the main opposition group.
  • A sense of panic among those fleeingRead More
  • <img alt="Aleppo, once a bustling city, has been reduced to rubble in Syria's civil war." class="media__image" src="http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/151020182337-syria-aleppo-zaidoun-al-zoabi-large-169.jpg">Aleppo, once a bustling city, has been reduced to rubble in Syria's civil war.But the latest video appears to show a sense of panic among the thousands streaming out of the northern outskirts of the city, fleeing for their lives -- bound, most probably, for the Turkish border, 60 miles (97 kilometers) to the north.
  • "Now 10,000 new refugees are waiting in front of the door of Kilis because of air bombardments and attacks against Aleppo,"
  • "Sixty to seventy thousand people in the camps in north Aleppo are moving toward Turkey. My mind is not now in London, but in our border -- how to relocate these new people coming from Syria? Three hundred thousand Aleppo people, living in Aleppo, are ready to move toward Turkey."
  • Innocent civilians 'running for their lives'
  • "We are cut off from Aleppo City," said David Evans, Mercy Corps' regional program director for the Middle East. "It feels like a siege of Aleppo is about to begin."
  • "Right now, we are seeing tens of thousands of people make their way to the border with Turkey."
  • "Innocent civilians are running for their lives," Evans said.
Javier E

When Did America Give Up on the Idea of America? | Foreign Policy - 0 views

foreignpolicy.com/...give-up-on-the-idea-of-america

traub American idea paranoid self

shared by Javier E on 14 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • The towers fell more than 14 years ago; the statute of limitations on post-9/11 panic has expired. Yet Americans have never been more fearful. I’ve increasingly come to feel that I don’t recognize my own country.
Javier E

Facebook, Google, and the Death of the Public Square - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...564506

public sphere' democracy tech efficiency choice algorithms Big data free speech press' subversion manipulation culture

shared by Javier E on 07 Jul 18 - No Cached
  • Beyond the Areopagitica’s condemnation of censorship, Milton was really defending the underlying spiritual and intellectual chaos, and the institutions that nourished it. In his lifetime, the printing press had changed everything.
  • He accorded books religious significance, which was really the highest compliment he could offer, since he took his religion so seriously: “Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye ...
  • At the core, Milton was defending something intensely private—the conscience, the freedom of each citizen to arrive at their own religious conviction. “Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.
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  • But Milton also stirringly articulated  how the formation of private convictions required public spaces, public institutions—what Jürgen Habermas so famously defined as the “public sphere.”
  • By the time, he wrote Areopagitica, it was robust: coffee houses, newspapers, book publishers and bookstores, theatres, and meeting places—the locales that allowed individuals to come together to form a public. These were spaces largely outside the grasp of church and state—and, in fact, many of these institutions emerged with the express purpose of liberating society from the grasp of church and state.
  • Nobody designed the public sphere from a dorm room or a Silicon Valley garage. It just started to organically accrete, as printed volumes began to pile, as liberal ideas gained currency and made space for even more liberal ideas. Institutions grew, and then over the centuries acquired prestige and authority. Newspapers and journals evolved into what we call media. Book publishing emerged from the printing guilds, and eventually became taste-making, discourse-shaping enterprises. What was born in Milton’s lifetime lasted until our own.
  • It took centuries for the public sphere to develop—and the technology companies have eviscerated it in a flash. By radically remaking the advertising business and commandeering news distribution, Google and Facebook have damaged the economics of journalism. Amazon has thrashed the bookselling business in the U.S. They have shredded old ideas about intellectual property—which had provided the economic and philosophical basis for authorship
  • Big tech has made a fetish of efficiency, of data, of the wisdom of the market. These are the underlying principles that explain why Google returns such terrible responses to the God query. Google is merely giving us what’s popular, what’s most clicked upon, not what’s worthy
  • This assault on the public sphere is an assault on free expression. In the West, free expression is a transcendent right only in theory—in practice its survival is contingent and tenuous.
  • We’re witnessing the way in which public conversation is subverted by name-calling and harassment. We can convince ourselves that these are fringe characteristics of social media, but social media has implanted such tendencies at the core of the culture. They are in fact practiced by mainstream journalists, mobs of the well meaning, and the president of the United States. The toxicity of the environment shreds the quality of conversation and deters meaningful participation in it
  • it becomes harder and harder to cling to the idea of the rational individual, formulating opinions on the basis of conscience. And as we lose faith in that principle, the public will lose faith in the necessity of preserving the protections of free speech.
  • The public sphere was always rife with manipulation—political persuasion, after all, involves a healthy dose of emotionalism and the tapping of submerged biases
  • humankind is entering into an era where manipulation has grown simultaneously invisible, terrifyingly precise, and embedded in everyday life.
  • And now, the tech giants are racing to insert themselves more intimately in people’s lives, this time as  personal assistants. The tech companies want us to tie ourselves closely to their machines
  • These machines don’t present us with choices. They aren’t designed to present us with a healthy menu of options. They anticipate our wants and needs, even our informational and cultural wants and needs.
  • What’s so pernicious about these machines is that they weaponize us against ourselves. They take our data—everywhere we have traveled on the web, every query we’ve entered into Google, even the posts we begin to write but never publish—and exploit this knowledge to reduce us to marionettes
  • To state the obvious, these are multinational corporations, with an ultimate interest in their bottom lines. They will never be capable of regulating the public sphere that they control in any name other than their own profit.
  • the Facebook CEO supplied a response that befuddled the senator: “I think the real question, as the internet becomes more important in people's lives, is what is the right regulation, not whether there should be or not.”
  • now that these companies bestride the markets in which they roam, the primary danger they face isn’t meddling regulators or hyperactive legislators. What the behemoths of Silicon Valley truly fear is the possibility that antitrust laws will be deploye
  • tech companies carry a very different sort of cargo—they trade in the commodities of speech. Once we extend the state into this realm, we’re entering danger territory.
  • We don’t need to use our imaginations here. There are examples all over the world—in Russia, in China—where governments have made their peace with social media, by setting the terms that govern it. These regimes permit a cacophony of ideas, except for the ones that truly challenge political power.
  • The present global explosion of anxiety and hate is unlike anything most of us have ever witnessed. People don’t know how to confront these evils
  • In the face of such menace, it’s natural to appeal to a higher power for protection—but in our panic we need to be clear about which threats are genuine and which are merely rhetorical. And panic shouldn’t lead us to seek protection that inadvertently squashes our own liberties.
  • Silicon Valley doesn’t understand truth as a quest or trial, but as an engineering challenge. They believe human behavior and human choices can be predicted by algorithms on the basis of past behavior
  • They believe that our lives can be programmed to be more efficient. By steering and nudging us, by designing the architecture of our decision-making process, they claim to be relieving of us of the burden of choice. Silicon Valley talks endlessly about the virtues of the frictionless life.
  • As we join Zuckerberg’s community, he fantasizes that the sense of connection will cause our differences to melt away—like a digital version of the old Coca Cola commercial, or, as I argue in my book, World Without Mind, a revival of the sixties counterculture and the vision of life on a commune.
  • In other words, preservation of democracy requires preserving this ecosystem of ideas that has miraculously persisted with us since the 17th century. People can’t afford to be seduced by the false prophets of disruption, the charlatans who argue that we abandon old wisdoms in the face of new gadgets
  • We need to shape the culture so that the prestige of engineering doesn’t continue to come at the expense of the humanities. We need to preserve literature as a primary technology for interrogating the meaning of life. We need to resist the tendency to reduce the world to data.
knudsenlu

The hysteria over Russian bots has reached new levels | Thomas Frank | Opinion | The Gu... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...n-bots-us-election-coup-d-etat

russian bots hysteria politics global

shared by knudsenlu on 12 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • he grand total for all political ad spending in the 2016 election cycle, according to Advertising Age, was $9.8bn. The ads allegedly produced by inmates of a Russian troll farm, which have made up this week’s ration of horror and panic in the halls of the American punditburo, cost about $100,000 to place on Facebook.
  • What the Russian trolls allegedly did was “an act of war ... a sneak attack using 21st-century methods”, wrote the columnist Karen Tumulty. “Our democracy is in serious danger,” declared America’s star thought-leader Thomas Friedman on Sunday, raging against the weakling Trump for not getting tough with these trolls and their sponsors. “Protecting our democracy obviously concerns Trump not at all,” agreed columnist Eugene Robinson on Tuesday.
  • Of what, specifically, did this sophistication consist? In what startling insights was this creativity made manifest? “Fallon said it was stunning to realize that the Russians understood how Trump was trying to woo disaffected [Bernie] Sanders supporters ...”
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  • If you’re one of those people who frets about our democracy being in serious danger, I contend that the above passages from the Post’s report should push your panic meter deep into the red. This is the reason why: we have here a former spokesman for Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, one of the best-funded, most consummately professional efforts of all time, and he thinks it was an act of off-the-hook perceptiveness to figure out that Trump was aiming for disgruntled Sanders voters. Even after Trump himself openly said that’s what he was trying to do.
  • Its extremely modest price tag guarantees it, as does the liberals’ determination to exaggerate its giant-slaying powers. This is rightwing populism’s next wave, and in an oligarchic world, every American plutocrat will soon be fielding his or her own perfectly legal troll army. Those of us who believe in democracy need to stop panicking and start thinking bigger: of how rightwing populism can be undone forever.
knudsenlu

Abuse isn't romantic. So why the panic that feminists are killing eros? | Jessica Valen... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...romantic-feminists-eros-me-too

abuse romance panic culture shift

shared by knudsenlu on 12 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • Catherine Deneuve and others have publicly worried that the campaign to end sexual harassment has gone too far but the truth is there is no war on romance
  • The #MeToo backlash is here, and it’s very worried about your love life. Iconic French actress Catherine Deneuve says the movement is puritanical and men should be able to “hit on women”. New York Times writer Daphne Merkin wants to know “whatever happened to flirting?” The Hollywood Reporter bemoans that #MeToo could “kill sexy Hollywood movies” while Cathy Young at the Los Angeles Times believes it will end office romance. Ross Douthat is even worried that the push to end sexual harassment could stunt population growth.
  • Who knew that humankind’s very existence depended on women’s silence in the face of abuse?
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  • somehow we’ve reached a point where any behavior short of violent predation – let’s call it the “not as bad as Weinstein” standard – is characterized as misunderstood seduction.
  • There’s a reason so many people are conflating bad and sometimes criminal behavior with romance: traditional ideas about seduction rely on tropes of women witholding sex and men working hard to get it. It’s a narrow notion of heterosexuality – one that does a good job excusing abusive behavior.
  • When will we have more concern for the women hurt by abuse than the men accused of it? One of Roy Moore’s accusers had her house burnt to the ground – arson is suspected. Harper’s magazine was on the brink of publishing the name of a woman who created the Shitty Media Men list before a feminist Twitter campaign stopped it. Some women won’t see justice for years, some ever. This moment isn’t about romance, it’s about abuse. Perhaps the fact that so many people can’t tell the difference is part of the problem.
Javier E

'Climate of panic': bombings in Brazil reveal growing power of gangs | Jo Griffin | Glo... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-reveal-growing-power-of-gangs

brazil gangs education

shared by Javier E on 16 Jan 19 - No Cached
  • The current crisis is now a perfect storm as gang leaders in overstuffed jails prey on young people with “no exit door from gangs”, says Roseno, while Ceará’s governor, Camilo Santana, from the leftwing Workers’ Party (PT), is “worried about not looking weak”. So far the response of Santana has echoed the tough rhetoric of Bolsonaro, calling for military reinforcements and promising stern action in his Facebook posts.
  • Da Silva, a social worker with young people at risk of joining gangs, says many areas are now too dangerous for him and co-workers to enter. “The authorities cannot step back for fear of looking weak, but this is going to lead to more serious problems,” Da Silva says. “Where is the intelligent response to these problems in Brazil? We have a super-ministry of security but where’s the super-ministry of education?”
  • Roseno says: “The question is: how can we reduce the power of the gangs? How can we not just get rid of the weapons and cut off financial resources but offer young people a different life? These gangs operate by offering a sense of brotherhood, self-esteem, money. They are filling the space where there are no public policies.”
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  • Luiz Fábio Paiva, a sociologist at the federal university of Ceará and researcher with the Laboratory for the Study of Violence (LEV), says the assertions from the state government, which is “preoccupied excessively with manifesting and demonstrating a hyper-masculine show of fighting violence with violence”, are reckless.
  • This has contributed to a sharp rise in Brazil’s prison population to 700,489 – the world’s third largest. Of all inmates nationwide, 34.2% are on remand and Ceará holds the record for most prisoners who have not been convicted of a crime.
  • As well as providing more staff and resources for prisons, judicial practice must change in order to reduce mass incarceration, he says. Despite a law in 2006 decriminalising possession of a small amount of drugs for personal consumption, “they began prosecuting anyone found with drugs, [even] a small quantity at home, as if they were serious traffickers”.
  • Without investment and reform of the prison system, the cycle of violence and crime continues. “It is right for the state to re-engage with command of the prisons but [Albuquerque] made a mistake by saying he would not respect gangs without [having] a plan.”
  • “We haven’t changed the prison policy for 30 years, and we just repeat the same mistakes,” says Roseno, who heads a campaign to stop murders of adolescents. “The government needs a policy of penal reform but it doesn’t have one. A prison should aim to [reintegrate] the criminal into society, but only 5% of inmates are studying and only 7% are working – they need skills and education.”
Javier E

Germany's AfD turns on Greta Thunberg as it embraces climate denial | Environment | The... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-as-it-embraces-climate-denial

germany denial climate change AfD politics

shared by Javier E on 14 May 19 - No Cached
  • While climate change barely got a mention on its social media channels when the AfD was first founded in 2013, it mentioned the topic on its channels about 300 times in 2017-18, and that has tripled over the past year to more than 900, with its main focus on Greta.
  • The party, whose members have been seen handing out climate change denial leaflets at school climate strikes, has ratcheted up its anti-Thunberg rhetoric ahead of the EU parliamentary elections this month. Its candidates have made comparisons between the Swedish teenager and a member of a Nazi youth organisation and called for her to seek treatment for what Maximilian Krah, an AfD candidate for the EU elections, called her “psychosis”.
  • It has also been repeatedly claimed on AfD’s Facebook page that she is the leader of a climate movement cult. Posts on the page make repeated use of terms such as “CO2Kult” (CO2 cult), “Klimawandelpanik” (climate change panic) and “Klimagehirnwäsche” (climate brain washing)
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • “The AfD has been denying human-made climate change on its social media pages since 2016, and while it has not shifted its position it is clear that the party decided to communicate it more frequently.
  • “The fact that many mainstream politicians from across the political divide in Germany supported a 16-year-old female activist who was virtually unknown until a few months ago, allowed the party to present belief in climate change as irrational, hysteria, panic, cult-like or even as a replacement religion. Attacking Greta, at times in fairly vicious ways, including mocking her for her autism, became a way to portray the AfD’s political opponents as irrational.”
  • Promotional materials for the event cite Greta as someone placed on the frontline of climate activism “by PR professionals seeking to bedevil the plant-nutrient carbon dioxide” and describe the AfD as “the only party in Germany not willing to back the supposed climate consensus”.
  • “We are experiencing a shift to the right on social media and in society. In a short period of time, the new right has established its own counter-society on climate issues. With troll armies, agitating magazines and the support of climate sceptics like EIKE, it has created its own sphere that is massively underestimated.”
Javier E

Boomer Bequest Is Millennial Misery - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...-millennial-misery-11557788725

boomers millennials politics economics

shared by Javier E on 14 May 19 - No Cached
  • hopeful signs mask deeper problems that developed out of the 2007-08 financial panic, the Great Recession, the slow-growth recovery, and a string of bad decisions the baby boomers made in that span.
  • the recession accelerated a trend that saw employers replacing younger, less-experienced employees with machines operated by older, more-experienced ones. That’s one reason the wage premium associated with age has ballooned. In 1950 working American men 45 to 54 earned around 4% more on average than men 25 to 34. That gap is now almost 35%.
  • employers required more work experience for many openings they advertised during the recession. Anemic job creation left millennials with fewer opportunities on their way up the career ladder. They stayed in lower-paying positions longer and acquired skills more slowly than earlier generations had
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • By one estimate, each one-point increase in total unemployment during the Great Recession depressed employment and wages for young college grads two to three times as much as in previous recessions.
  • Boomers presented school as an investment in ourselves, worth financing with debt because it would pay off in higher earnings later. To hear them tell it, education is the only sure investment in history. That’s now proving preposterous
  • The long-term problem is federal debt. Including debt owed to the Social Security trust fund, it is now around 105% of gross domestic product. Those are claims that millennials (and their descendants) will eventually have to pay, largely to fund social transfers to the boomers that they weren’t willing to pay themselves.
  • Worse, some 75% of federal spending over the next decade will happen on autopilot, without any intervention from elected lawmakers. Most of that is Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, along with interest on the debt. Unless Congress finds the political will to enact a substantial overhaul of these programs, millennials will have hardly any latitude to act on their own fiscal priorities.
  • the tapestry that emerges depicts an enormous heist, in which boomers stole a decade from their millennial children. The boomers’ combination of naiveté, panic and negligence buried millennials in trouble. Digging our way out will be our primary economic and political challenge
  • Millennials seem to be intuiting that what failed most spectacularly under the boomers was the “third way,” which tried to harness the power of the market to deliver the economic security boomers thought only government could give. It sounded plausible, but the results have been one disaster after another: tech bubbles, resource misallocations that skewed the labor market, the student-loan albatross, an entitlement state that saddles us with debt while failing to deliver economic security for many recipients.
  • As the Democrats drift leftward, Republicans remain mesmerized by Donald Trump. Mr. Trump is a boomer through and through
  • 2020 could become a depressing slugfest between the ne plus ultra boomer and an opponent peddling century-old socialism, neither of whom offers millennials much of a solution to our urgent problems.
Javier E

On the Democrats' strategy, caution is warranted, but panic is not - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...caution-is-warranted-not-panic

strategy Democratic party 2020 moderate coalition

shared by Javier E on 01 Jul 19 - No Cached
  • Yes, there is a point at which Democrats might lose voters newly disposed to vote for them, such as white, college-educated women. (Unbelievably, the busing issue is back from the 1970s and would be just the thing to frighten suburban, professional mothers.)
  • Democrats won in 2018 by jacking up turnout for nonwhites, young voters and college-educated, white women (who voted and volunteered for and donated to, among others, more female candidates than ever). Democrats ran on Obamacare primarily and on a call to defend democracy and decency. They spoke about real American values
  • They didn’t win back the House focusing on immigrant-averse, white, working-class men. With a 2018 coalition, scaled up for a presidential election, Democrats can win in 2020
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • (I’ll stipulate that calling oneself a socialist is a bridge too far. I’ll stipulate that outlawing all private insurance will undermine support among suburban women.)
  • However, we should keep some perspective as the Democrats go through a long and arduous process: What the Democratic candidate projects as her vision of America and how she connects with voters ultimately will be more critical in the general election than ideology
  • returning to the center is a tried-and-true tactic for the general election, and Democrats have plenty of time to refine and defend their positions — which they must do.
  • Democrats’ goal should be to re-create the Obama coalition with a significant change: It’s much more feasible to keep the college-educated, white women (who’d crawl over broken glass to get rid of Trump and who are more progressive than college-educated, white men) than it is to win back the white, working-class Fox viewer
Javier E

Corporate panic about capitalism could be a turning point  - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...9-9986-1fb3e4397be4_story.html

capitalism corporate reform extremism profit shareholder inequality politics culture history

shared by Javier E on 21 Aug 19 - No Cached
  • the Business Roundtable, which represents the chief executives of 192 of the nation’s largest companies. Most of its members signed a statement declaring that making profits for shareholders isn’t a corporation’s sole responsibility. Instead, companies have a broader mission to serve customers, employees, suppliers and communities, too, the statement said.
  • Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase and chairman of the Business Roundtable, led the signers who agreed: “Many Americans are struggling. Too often hard work is not rewarded.” Dimon had warned earlier this year in his annual letter to his company’s shareholders that the American Dream was “fraying for many” because of stagnant wages and income inequality.
  • Corporate America fears the system is failing. As Dalio wrote, this is an “existential” moment. The guardians of capitalism seem to realize that they must respond to right-wing populists and left-wing progressives alike or face a worsening political crisis that is already hobbling the country.
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  • The corporate panic about capitalism could be a turning point, opening the way for a future president to begin fixing the problems of stagnant wages and inequality that are at the core of America’s disarray
  • Dalio has even questioned the profit motive, the capitalist holy of holies, arguing that while “usually an effective motivator and resource allocator . . . it is now producing a self-reinforcing feedback loop that widens the income/wealth/opportunity gap to the point that capitalism and the American dream are in jeopardy.”
  • Today’s corporate reformers share the same concern about saving a broken capitalist system as did President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the New Deal era and President Theodore Roosevelt in the Progressive era. Dalio made the historical analogy in his manifesto: “We are now seeing conflicts between populists of the left and populists of the right increasing around the world in much the same way as they did in the 1930s when the income and wealth gaps were comparably large.”
  • America’s historical experience teaches us that economic reform succeeds when it goes mainstream, and that’s what’s happening now.
  • Calm, reassuring, Roosevelt saved capitalism by reforming it, redeeming his campaign pledge to “the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.” Who in the current Democratic field can claim this role in 2020? The ground is ready. Even the moguls know it’s time for change.
Javier E

How local officials scrambled to protect themselves against the coronavirus - The Washi... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...virus-local-officials-response

officials local pandemic crisis trump policy

shared by Javier E on 30 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • Across the country, state and local officials, frustrated by what they described as a lack of leadership in the White House and an absence of consistent guidance from federal agencies, took steps on their own to prepare for the pandemic and protect their communities. In some cases, these actions preceded federal directives by days or even weeks as local officials sifted through news reports and other sources of information to educate themselves about the risks posed by the coronavirus.
  • With scant information about the virus and no warnings against large gatherings, cities such as New Orleans moved ahead in February with massive celebrations that may have turned them into hotspots for the virus.
  • “The leader in global pandemics and protecting the United States starts at the federal level,” said Nick Crossley, the director of emergency management in Hamilton County, Ohio, and past president of the U.S. Council of International Association of Emergency Managers.
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  • He praised Republican Gov. Mike DeWine for taking bold steps early, including declaring a state of emergency when there were only three reported cases on March 9, four days before the federal government followed suit. Thirty states had declared a state of emergency by the time Trump declared a national emergency on March 13.
  • “They didn’t move fast enough,” said Crossley, of the federal government. “And what you’ve seen is more local and state officials sounding the alarm. “We needed a national response to this event.”
  • With seven reported infections in the United States by the end of the day, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar declared a public health emergency on Jan. 31, and Trump announced strict travel restrictions, barring most foreign visitors coming from China. He also imposed the nation’s first mandatory quarantine in 50 years.
  • Officials spent three hours war-gaming how they would respond. The drill prompted the state to send 300 employees home early to test their remote work capability. That unmasked a serious problem: A quarter of the team could not perform their jobs at home because they needed access to secure computer systems.
  • Then he heard the news: The United States had identified its first case of person-to-person transmission involving someone who had not traveled overseas. Also, the World Health Organization classified the coronavirus as a public health emergency of international concern.
  • Chicago Jan. 31: 9,927 cases worldwide, seven cases in the United States
  • Tallahassee Jan. 30: 8,234 cases worldwide, five cases in the United States
  • Americans who had visited China’s Hubei province would be forced to quarantine for 14 days, and those who visited other parts of China would be screened for symptoms and asked to isolate themselves for two weeks. Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot was caught off guard. The directive came with little guidance. Where were local governments supposed to quarantine the travelers? What would they do if someone refused to quarantine? Who was going to pay for the resources needed to quarantine people?
  • “In the first few sets of conversations, we were not hearing answers to those questions,” Lightfoot, a Democrat, said of her talks with federal officials. “It was kind of like, either silence, or ‘Do the best you can,’ which was obviously not acceptable.”
  • she drafted a letter to Trump on behalf of the mayors from Detroit, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco and Seattle. They insisted on clear, written directions from the federal government, according to the letter, and worried about diverting health-care resources during flu season, when hospitals were already stretched.
  • “We are concerned about our public health system’s capacity to implement these measures, recognizing they may inadvertently distract us from our ongoing tried-and-true efforts to isolate confirmed cases and closely monitor their contacts,” according to a previously unreported Feb. 6 letter. “We also worry about the potential to again overwhelm laboratory capacity, recognizing that national capacity has not been adequate to quickly test our highest-risk individuals.”
  • Mount Kisco, N.Y. Feb. 9: 40,150 cases worldwide, 11 cases in the United States
  • Weeks earlier, Amler had started fitting employees for personal protective equipment and training them on how to use the gear. In January, she watched what was happening in Wuhan with growing concern: “It seemed impossible that it wouldn’t eventually spill out of China into the rest of the world.”
  • San Francisco Feb. 24: 79,561 cases worldwide, 51 cases in the United States
  • Trump continued to reassure the public that there was little to worry about. On Feb. 24, he tweeted, “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA.”
  • But Colfax and his public health staff in San Francisco were seeing something else when they studied the “curves” of the pandemic — graphs showing how many cases were reported in other regions over time.
  • Wuhan’s curve was climbing exponentially, and other countries, such as Italy, were seeing soaring infection rates as well. Colfax noticed that in every infected region, officials were more and more aggressive about restricting their populations
  • “It became apparent that no jurisdiction that was where the virus was being introduced, was sort of, in retrospect, thinking, ‘Oh, we overreacted,’ ” Colfax said.
  • On Feb. 24, Colfax and other health officials assembled their research and met with Mayor London Breed. They made an urgent request: Declare a state of emergency
  • by the end of the meeting, Breed was convinced. They needed to declare a state of emergency so that they could tap into state and federal funds and supplies, and redeploy city employees. The next day, San Francisco became one of the first major cities in the United States to do so, after Santa Clara and San Diego counties did earlier in the month.
  • It would take another 17 days, as the virus infected people in nearly every state, before Trump declared a national emergency.
  • In New Orleans, officials moved ahead with Mardi Gras festivities in late February that packed people into the streets. It was a decision the mayor would later defend as coronavirus cases traced to the celebration piled up.
  • “No red flags were given,” by the federal government, New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell, a Democrat, later said in a CNN interview. “If we were given clear direction, we would not have had Mardi Gras, and I would’ve been the leader to cancel it.
  • On Feb. 27, at a White House reception, Trump predicted that the coronavirus would disappear. “Like a miracle,” he said.
  • San Antonio Feb. 29: 86,011 cases worldwide, 68 cases in the United States
  • The last day of February marked a major turning point for the coronavirus in the United States: The first American who had been diagnosed with the illness died
  • In a Saturday news conference, Trump described the patient from the Seattle area as a “medically high-risk” person who had died overnight. A CDC official said that the man, who was in his 50s, had not traveled recently — another sign that the virus was snaking through local communities.
  • During the announcement, Trump asked the media to avoid inciting panic as there was “no reason to panic at all.”
  • “We’re doing really well,” he said. “Our country is prepared for any circumstance. We hope it’s not going to be a major circumstance, it’ll be a smaller circumstance. But whatever the circumstance is, we’re prepared.”
  • That same afternoon in San Antonio, the CDC mistakenly released a woman from quarantine who was infected. The woman was one of dozens of evacuees from Wuhan whom the federal government had brought to a nearby military base and then isolated at the Texas Center for Infectious Disease.
  • the woman had been dropped off at a Holiday Inn near the San Antonio airport and headed to a mall where she shopped at Dillard’s, Talbots and Swarovski and ate in the food court.
  • As local officials learned details about the infected woman’s movements and how she had been transported at 2 a.m. back to the Texas Center for Infectious Disease, they waited for the CDC to issue a statement. Hours passed, but they heard nothing. “They were like quiet little mouses,” Wolff said. “They were all scared to talk because I think they felt they were going to get in trouble with the president of the United States because he was saying there was not a problem.”
  • The next day, San Antonio officials declared a public health emergency and filed a lawsuit to prevent the CDC from releasing the 120 people in quarantine until they were confirmed negative for the virus or completed a 28-day quarantine. A judge denied the motion, but the CDC agreed that evacuees must have two consecutive negative tests that are 24 hours apart and that no one with a pending test can be released.
  • In Oklahoma City, the coronavirus became a reality for Mayor David Holt, a Republican, when the NBA abruptly canceled a Thunder basketball game after a Utah Jazz player tested positive on March 11. Until then, Holt said, the coronavirus felt “distant on many levels.”
  • Mount Kisco, N.Y. March 3: 92,840 cases worldwide, 118 cases in the United States
  • When he tried to order more masks, none were immediately available. By then the entire country was scrambling for protective gear.
  • Through it all, local officials faced backlash from some community leaders who thought they were overreacting.
  • San Francisco March 5: 97,886 cases worldwide, 217 cases in the United States
  • Days after San Francisco’s emergency declaration, Breed stood in front of news cameras to announce the city’s first two cases of the coronavirus.
  • They were not related, had not traveled to any coronavirus-affected areas and had no contact with known coronavirus patients: It was spreading in the community.
  • By then, Miami Mayor Francis X. Suarez, a Republican, had announced the cancellation of the Ultra Music festival, a three-day celebration that draws about 50,000 people. Miami was the first city to call off a major music festival, and Suarez faced tremendous backlash
  • Within days, state authorities set up an emergency operations center in New Rochelle and created a one-mile containment zone. Inside the perimeter, schools and community centers shuttered and large gatherings were prohibited.
  • Days later, Holt huddled on the phone with other leaders from the United States Conference of Mayors. For about 20 minutes, Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan, a Democrat, detailed the crisis seizing her city
  • “She sounded like the main character in a Stephen King novel,” Holt recalled. “She had hundreds of cases, she had dozens of deaths.”
  • “Any struggles that we’re having, whether it be testing or other issues, or even just convincing our public of the seriousness of the matter, there are some roots back to the time period in January and February, when not all national leadership was expressing how serious this was,” Holt said.
  • While the mayors held their conference call on March 13, Trump declared a national emergency to combat the coronavirus.
  • By then, Suarez had tested positive for the coronavirus and was in quarantine. As of Sunday, he remained in isolation, leading the city by phone calls and video chats. He wanted to stop flights into Miami and the governor to order residents to shelter in place as California and other states had already done.
rerobinson03

Opinion | How Not to Panic About Inflation - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...us-inflation-stimulus.html

shared by rerobinson03 on 23 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • After the 2008 financial crisis plunged America into a deep recession, both the new Obama administration and the Federal Reserve tried to stimulate the economy, spending hundreds of billions on a variety of programs while buying trillions in bonds. There is now consensus among economists that these efforts were helpful, but it’s also widely believed that they were inadequate (as some of us strenuously argued at the time).
  • Reflecting this expectation, companies will mark prices up relative to what they would have been if they didn’t expect future inflation — and by so doing, will feed the very inflation they fear. In other words, once expectations of sustained inflation are embedded in the economy, inflation becomes self-perpetuating — and bringing it down can be extremely difficult. That’s what makes stagflation — inflation despite high unemployment — possible.
  • If they aren’t — and my bet is that they won’t be — then the lesson of 2010-2011 will remain: Don’t panic.Now as then there are people eager to denounce government attempts to help the economy. And it’s certainly possible that the American Rescue Plan will turn out, in retrospect, to have been too much of a good thing. But don’t let the usual suspects seize on a few months’ inflation data as evidence of looming disaster.
Javier E

The Piketty Panic - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...krugman-the-piketty-panic.html

inherited wealth meritocracy rich history economics economic

shared by Javier E on 25 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • what’s really new about “Capital” is the way it demolishes that most cherished of conservative myths, the insistence that we’re living in a meritocracy in which great wealth is earned and deserved.
  • For the past couple of decades, the conservative response to attempts to make soaring incomes at the top into a political issue has involved two lines of defense: first, denial that the rich are actually doing as well and the rest as badly as they are, but when denial fails, claims that those soaring incomes at the top are a justified reward for services rendered. Don’t call them the 1 percent, or the wealthy; call them “job creators.”
  • how do you make that defense if the rich derive much of their income not from the work they do but from the assets they own? And what if great wealth comes increasingly not from enterprise but from inheritance?
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