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Opinion | How Joe Biden - yes, Joe Biden - could revolutionize American politics - The ... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...b-8074-0e943a91bf08_story.html biden progressive labor libera left politics
shared by Javier E on 15 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • Joe Biden may be running a safe and centrist campaign, but beneath the methodical calm is a genuinely innovative ideological appeal
  • The former vice president is updating and bringing back the long-dormant Democratic tradition of labor liberalism.
  • By addressing the climate crisis through investments in efficiency and new energy sources, Biden turns actions to try to avert environmental catastrophe into an engine of job creation.
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  • And he is creating the sort of multiracial electoral coalition that has always been the only workable path to progressive governance.
  • Understanding how the pieces of Biden’s strategy interact is the best way to square two seemingly contradictory facts: That Biden is running as a moderate, and that he has put forward the most progressive platform a Democrat has offered in years.
  • he and his advisers recognize that rising economic inequality, the decline in well-paying manufacturing jobs, the weakening of unions and growing regional disparities require robust government intervention to create a more just form of capitalism. They also see how economic and racial injustices aggravate each other.
  • What allows Biden to be both a moderate and an economic reformer is that it is no longer radical to acknowledge the high costs of inequality, and Biden’s objectives are thoroughly mainstream.
  • He is doing so rhetorically and with union hall visits, but also through an agenda that seeks to spark economic growth through substantial public investments.
  • With Trump’s behavior and record serving as wedges to divide the center-right coalition, Biden has been left free to pursue bridge politics on his own side.
  • “A lot of White working-class Democrats thought we forgot them and didn’t pay attention,” Biden told reporters during a visit to Pennsylvania this month. “I want them to know . . . I get it. I get their sense of being left behind.”
  • Steve Rosenthal, a union strategist with access to labor polling, said Biden was “running a solid 10 points ahead of where Hillary Clinton was in union households nationally,” and even better in swing states.
  • precisely because Trump won the key states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin due to defections among disgruntled blue-collar voters, he brought home — even to Democrats who are middle-of-the-road on economic questions — the need for a more populist appeal and more thoroughgoing economic change.
  • A second irony: Because labor Democrats are often seen as old school, Biden’s arguments are inherently reassuring and carry moderate resonances
  • But creating a labor liberalism for the 21st century would be no small achievement. In his benign and prudent way, Joe Biden is in the business of fundamentally restructuring American politics.
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How Trump Sealed the GOP's Suicide - The Bulwark - 0 views

thebulwark.com/-trump-sealed-the-gops-suicide gop suicide politics history culture trump crisis authoritarian personality cult
shared by Javier E on 15 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • How did the GOP find itself in this desperate, seamy dilemma? The short answer is four years of subservience to Trump
  • But it is nonetheless instructive to consider what the party had become before his advent—
  • By 2012, the GOP had come to rely on a partially overlapping base of evangelicals; whites without college degrees threatened by economic dislocation; and malcontents whose distrust of government partook of paranoia
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  • These folks were not natural allies of the party of business or its wealthy donors. In exchange for pursuing the economic agenda of the wealthy, the GOP increasingly offered up a primal vision rooted in culture wars, contempt for government, and scapegoating blacks, immigrants, Muslims and other minorities.
  • The real causes of blue-collar woes were globalization, the Great Recession, the housing crisis, and an information society which marginalized the undereducated. About this, the GOP elite did nothing—not about student debt, stagnant wages, dwindling benefits, diminishing job security, retraining for the new economy, or the widespread unaffordability of quality medical care.
  • the new book Authoritarian Nightmare by Bob Altemeyer and John Dean presents “data from a previously unpublished nationwide survey showing a striking desire for strong authoritarian leadership among Republican voters.”
  • As president, Trump has pushed the boundaries of our constitutional democracy to achieve unprecedented executive power. Not only do his followers support this, but elected Republicans have done nothing to stop him.
  • In the Altemeyer-Dean survey, roughly half of Trump supporters agreed with this statement: “Once our government leaders and the authorities condemn the dangerous elements in our society, it will be the duty of every patriotic citizen to help stomp out the rot that is poisoning our country from within.”
  • This squares with findings by Vanderbilt political scientist Larry Bartels summarized by the Post: “Many Republican voters hold strong authoritarian and anti-democratic beliefs, with racism being a key driver of those attitudes.”
  • The GOP is no longer about ideas like limited government, or the higher ideals of inclusiveness and an American Dream open to all. Its toxic compound of raw anger and nativist passion is, at bottom, about subjugating the demographic “other.”
  • It is barely possible now to imagine the GOP had Trump been different. He came without ideology, propelled by a gift for embodying a potent but undefined populism
  • He might have become an agent of constructive reinvention, eschewing racism and xenophobia in favor of offering embattled middle-class and blue-collar workers genuine economic uplift. He could have reinstated fiscal responsibility by disdaining tax cuts for the wealthy. He might even have taken steps—if not to drain the swamp—at least to reform it.
  • But that would have required real talent, sustained attention, and a genuine interest in governance. Instead this irredeemably vicious, vacant, and narcissistic demagogue unleashed white identity politics and the endless overreach of Republican donors. This leads inexorably to the deadest of ends—a demographic death knell for his party and, for our democracy, the most grievous of wounds
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Opinion: Whoever wins in November is going to have to solve the Covid-19 crisis - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html election
shared by katherineharron on 26 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • Despite the deep divisions ravaging our country ahead of the presidential elections, many Americans are looking for answers to a common threat -- the coronavirus. As the daily number of cases and deaths have risen, we remain in the throes of a pandemic that has killed more than 225,000 of our fellow citizens and torpedoed our economy. Indeed, the US is averaging more than 68,000 new cases a day.
  • the next president will confront a dual challenge: managing the current pandemic and ensuring that the country and the world are better prepared when the next plague strikes -- as it inevitably will.
  • Nothing has undercut the US response to Covid-19 more than the failure to develop -- to this day -- a comprehensive nationwide system of testing and tracing that allows public health authorities to rapidly identify infected individuals and their contacts in order to isolate the sick from healthy populations.
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  • It is past time for the nation to make the investments we need to prevent, detect and respond quickly to emerging infectious diseases, like the coronavirus, before they sicken Americans and force catastrophic economic shutdowns.
  • authorities are too often flying blind, uncertain of the trajectory of the disease, slow to identify hot spots and unable to stop the spread of the virus through targeted measures that do not require shutting down entire communities and economies.
  • The success of public health measures like contact tracing, mask-wearing, and social distancing depends on individuals and communities trusting and adhering to advice from medical professionals and scientists, sometimes delivered by elected and other officials
  • That public trust must be earned and sustained.
  • Elected US officials, including the President, often have fallen short as communicators in this pandemic.
  • The pandemic has taken a grievous toll on the elderly and nursing home residents specifically. It has also hit essential workers hard, and Black, Latino, Native and low-income Americans suffer disproportionately. As of the end of September, according to the Atlantic, Black Americans have died from Covid-19 at 2.3 times the rate of White Americans, comprising 21% of all US deaths from the disease
  • US government authorities at all levels should target public health investments to increase the resilience of these communities, including universal paid sick leave in declared pandemics, accessible and free testing, and workplace protections and personal protective equipment for essential workers. Social justice and equity in our existing health care system is not just a moral mandate -- it is a matter of basic pandemic preparedness.
  • The smarter choice is to reform and strengthen the WHO as an essential cornerstone of global pandemic preparedness
  • The coronavirus demonstrates that an international framework for pandemic detection and response that relies so heavily on the transparency, judgment and discretion of individual national governments leaves too many opportunities for failure.
  • Alerts from that network should, in turn, notify national public health agencies and the WHO -- and trigger an international response.
  • Finally, the next president must resist the siren song of vaccine nationalism
  • So far, the US has chosen not to join COVAX, a groundbreaking consortium of more than 150 countries created not only to develop a vaccine but to ensure that when one emerges it is shared equitably, rather than hoarded by individual countries. We hope that the next president -- whoever he may be -- will reconsider this decision.
  • When it comes to pandemics, we all sink or swim together,
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Opinion | The Coronavirus Has Laid Bare the Inequality of America's Health Care - The N... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...id-inequality-health-care.html crisis politics pandemic
shared by anonymous on 25 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • The notion of price control is anathema to health care companies. It threatens their basic business model, in which the government grants them approvals and patents, pays whatever they ask, and works hand in hand with them as they deliver the worst health outcomes at the highest costs in the rich world.
  • The American health care industry is not good at promoting health, but it excels at taking money from all of us for its benefit. It is an engine of inequality.
  • the virus also provides an opportunity for systemic change. The United States spends more than any other nation on health care, and yet we have the lowest life expectancy among rich countries. And although perhaps no system can prepare for such an event, we were no better prepared for the pandemic than countries that spend far less.
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  • One way or another, everyone pays for health care. It accounts for about 18 percent of G.D.P. — nearly $11,000 per person. Individuals directly pay about a quarter, the federal and state governments pay nearly half, and most of the rest is paid by employers.
  • Many Americans think their health insurance is a gift from their employers — a “benefit” bestowed on lucky workers by benevolent corporations. It would be more accurate to think of employer-provided health insurance as a tax.
  • Rising health care costs account for much of the half-century decline in the earnings of men without a college degree, and contribute to the decline in the number of less-skilled jobs.
  • Employer-based health insurance is a wrecking ball, destroying the labor market for less-educated workers and contributing to the rise in “deaths of despair.”
  • We face a looming trillion-dollar federal deficit caused almost entirely by the rising costs of Medicaid and Medicare, even without the recent coronavirus relief bill.
  • Rising costs are an untenable burden on our government, too. States’ payments for Medicaid have risen from 20.5 percent of their spending in 2008 to 28.9 percent in 2019. To meet those rising costs, states have cut their financing for roads, bridges and state universities. Without those crucial investments, the path to success for many Americans is cut off
  • Every year, the United States spends $1 trillion more than is needed for high quality care.
  • executives at hospitals, medical device makers and pharmaceutical companies, and some physicians, are very well paid.
  • American doctors control access to their profession through a system that limits medical school admissions and the entry of doctors trained abroad — an imbalance that was clear even before the pandemic
  • Hospitals, many of them classified as nonprofits, have consolidated, with monopolies over health care in many cities, and they have used that monopoly power to raise prices
  • These are all strategies that lawmakers and regulators could put a stop to, if they choose.
  • The health care industry has armored itself, employing five lobbyists for each elected member of Congress. But public anger has been building — over drug prices, co-payments, surprise medical bills — and now, over the fragility of our health care system, which has been laid bare by the pandemic
  • A single-payer system is just one possibility. There are many systems in wealthy countries to choose from, with and without insurance companies, with and without government-run hospitals. But all have two key characteristics: universal coverage — ideally from birth — and cost control.
  • In the United States, public funding is likely to play a significant role in any treatments or vaccines that are eventually developed for Covid-19. Americans should demand that they be available at a reasonable price to everyone — not in the sole interest of drug companies.
  • We are believers in free-market capitalism, but health care is not something it can deliver in a socially tolerable way.
  • They choose not to. And so we Americans have too few doctors, too few beds and too few ventilators — but lots of income for providers
  • America is a rich country that can afford a world-class health care system. We should be spending a lot of money on care and on new drugs. But we need to spend to save lives and reduce sickness, not on expensive, income-generating procedures that do little to improve health. Or worst of all, on enriching pharma companies that feed the opioid epidemic.
  • Medical device manufacturers have also consolidated, in some cases using a “catch and kill” strategy to swallow up nimbler start-ups and keep the prices of their products high.
  • Ambulance services and emergency departments that don’t accept insurance have become favorites of private equity investors because of their high profits
  • Britain, for example, has the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, which vets drugs, devices and procedures for their benefit relative to cost
  • At the very least, America must stop financing health care through employer-based insurance, which encourages some people to work but it eliminates jobs for less-skilled workers
  • Our system takes from the poor and working class to generate wealth for the already wealthy.
  • passed a coronavirus bill including $3.1 billion to develop and produce drugs and vaccines.
  • The industry might emerge as a superhero of the war against Covid-19, like the Royal Air Force in the Battle of Britain during World War II.
  • illions have lost their paychecks and their insurance
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A Biden Win Could Renew a Democratic Split on Trade - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...democrats-biden-trade.html US Politics Trump biden trade economy China
shared by tsainten on 29 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • Joseph R. Biden’s presidential campaign has unified the Democratic Party around a shared goal of ousting President Trump from office.
  • the progressive wing of the party is pushing for appointees with deep ties to labor unions and congressional Democrats. And they are battling against appointees that they say would seek to restore a “status quo” on trade, including those with ties to corporate lobbyists, trade associations and Washington think tanks that advocate more typical trade deals.
  • who see trade agreements as key to American peace and prosperity — and left-wing Democrats, who blame trade deals for hurting American workers in favor of corporate interests.
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  • For Mr. Obama, that split spilled into a fight over the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a multicountry trade pact that became so politically toxic that Hillary Clinton disavowed it during her 2016 presidential campaign.
  • Mr. Biden has bridged these divisions so far in the campaign by focusing on criticizing Mr. Trump for his costly and erratic trade policy, which he says has alienated allies like Canada and Europe and failed to convince China to make significant economic reforms.
  • Mr. Biden criticized Mr. Trump for embracing “thugs” in North Korea, China and Russia, and he said the president “pokes his finger in the eye of all of our friends, all of our allies.”
  • Some progressive Democrats have worried that Mr. Biden — who voted for NAFTA in 1993 and to pave the way to bring China into the World Trade Organization in 2000 — would put America back on the mainstream trade policy path that Mr. Obama and Mr. Clinton pursued. Many of Mr. Biden’s closest advisers are holdovers from the Obama administration, who, like Mr. Biden, believe deeply in the benefits of global economic integration.
  • To help quiet any trade fights within the party, Mr. Biden has promised to first focus on domestic priorities like curbing the coronavirus pandemic, addressing climate change and investing in infrastructure and health care before writing new trade deals, signaling that the blistering pace of trade talks seen under President Trump is likely to slow.
  • Mr. Biden’s advisers tend to be more unified on China, but there is still a split, people familiar with the conversations say. Some see China as a challenge, but still believe in trying to integrate the country into the global system and work with the Chinese on issues like climate change and nuclear proliferation. Others see a clash between the two systems as more inevitable, and say China’s increasingly authoritarian behavior is likely to preclude much cooperation.
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Opinion | The Venezuelan-American Vote, From a First-Timer - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...venezuelan-american-vote.html us history trump Culture
shared by saberal on 29 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • In the years since, over four million Venezuelans have fled their country amid the economic and humanitarian crisis wrought by Mr. Maduro’s policies.
  • While the Obama-Biden administration was largely inattentive to the deteriorating situation in Venezuela, Mr. Trump has the support of many Venezuelan-Americans in part because of the economic embargo his administration imposed. He sealed the deal when he formally recognized the opposition leader Juan Guaidó as the interim president of Venezuela, and invited him to the State of the Union address.
  • Mr. Biden visited Florida for the first time as Democratic nominee in September. He made the case that would be a better president for Latinos, highlighting his commitment to immigration reform and a new plan to support Puerto Rico’s economy. He has also poured $23 million into local TV ads.
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  • But the push may have come too late to regain lost ground.
  • From last October to March nearly half of asylum claims made by Venezuelans were denied, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.
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Japan's New Leader Sets Goal of Being Carbon Neutral by 2050 - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...japan-carbon-neutral.html japan climate emissions
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    • hannahcarter11
      hannahcarter11 on 26 Oct 20
       
      Even if they're just doing this in competition, whatever it takes to clean up the planet!
  • Achieving that goal will be good not only for the world, he said, but also for Japan’s economy and global standing
  • Taking an aggressive approach to global warming will bring about a transformation in our industrial structure and economic system that will lead to big growth
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  • major upgrade of its previous commitment to reducing greenhouse gases, and necessary if the world hopes to keep a global temperature rise well below 2 degrees
  • Japan is the world’s fifth-largest emitter of greenhouse gases. It had previously said it would go carbon neutral “at the earliest possible date,” vowing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent by 205
  • Joseph R. Biden Jr., his challenger in the presidential election, has vowed to restore the United States’ participation in the accord.
  • reinforced just how much of an outlier the United States, the world’s second-largest carbon emitter
  • decision was most likely driven by a combination of domestic and external political pressures
  • As a developed nation, Mr. Kuramochi said, it would be “somewhat embarrassing for Japan to have a net zero emissions timeline later than China.”
  • he would harness the power of “innovation” and “regulatory reform” to transform the country’s energy production and usage
  • The country has made steady progress in reducing its emissions, but still generated 1.06 billion tons of the gas in the one-year period that ended in March 2019, placing it among the top 10 per capita emitters
  • By the early 2000s, Japan had made substantial progress in curbing carbon dioxide emissions through the use of nuclear power. But the meltdown of a nuclear power plant in Fukushima after a devastating earthquake and tsunami in 2011 led to a widespread shutdown of the country’s energy-producing reactors, which had generated roughly a third of Japan’s total power supply. Only a handful of the plants have since restarted.
  • Short on energy sources, Japan decided to reinvest in coal.
  • Japan currently plans to reduce — but not eliminate — its dependence on coa
  • The country has also vowed to end contentious government subsidies for the export of coal-fired power technology to developing nations, where the use of coal for electricity continues to rise
  • Further efforts to decrease Japan’s domestic commitment to coal will likely meet powerful resistance from Japanese industry, which is still heavily dependent on the fuel
  • Japan is already considering a substantial increase in its supply of wind and solar power, and it is also looking at newer, less-established technologies, such as plants that burn ammonia or hydrogen.
  • Mr. Suga said that Japan would continue to develop nuclear power with “maximum priority on safety,”
  • Movement toward the new goal had already started on the local level, where 150 municipal governments have pledged to be carbon neutral by midcentury.
  • But even if Japan achieves its goal, it will not by itself be enough to halt or even slow the current trend of global warming, a goal that requires a global effort
  • Preventing a climate catastrophe will require “a transformation of the energy system that has underwritten modern society,”
  • Japan will be carbon neutral by 2050, its prime minister said on Monday
  • The announcement came just weeks after China, Japan’s regional rival, said it would reduce its net carbon emissions to zero by 2060.
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Black Voters in Wisconsin Could Be Key to a Joe Biden Win | Time - 0 views

time.com/...sconsin-swing-state-black-vote US trump election politics gop
shared by clairemann on 30 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • . It was designed to reignite Democratic activism in a city that is solidly blue but whose residents four years earlier were, at best, ambivalent about Hillary Clinton’s candidacy.
  • taking away a chance for Democrats to regain their organizing footing in Wisconsin and help build a political machine that could run up the score in a city every bit as great as its neighbor 90 minutes to the south, Chicago.
  • The battle for Wisconsin — a state Donald Trump won four years ago by fewer than 23,000 votes, or 1.7 percentage points — has clearly captured the attention of both national parties in 2020.
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  • Not since Ronald Reagan’s 1984 run had the state gone for the GOP nominee.
  • Republican Gov. Scott Walker, after all, had a lock on the state for years, and proved that the GOP could prevail there with the right mix of muscle, moxie and money.
  • His message to white, working-class voters plainly resonated. Clinton, notably, never visited the state as the nominee. Black voters’ enthusiasm for the Democratic nominee sank through the basement.
  • “But Wisconsin!” was only second to “But her emails!” in the annoying outbursts political reporters have been using as shorthand for the last four years.
  • Heading into 2020, Democrats knew they needed to offset the Republican suburban counties northwest of Milwaukee, but not by much. Trump in 2016 underperformed Mitt Romney’s numbers in those suburbs by 7 percentage points.
  • Biden appears on better footing than Clinton — in no small part due to his running mate Kamala Harris whose historic run is expected to energize Black voters.
  • Clinton at this point four years ago was up 6.5 percentage points, according to the Real Clear Politics polling averages. Biden is up 6.4 percentage points in the same meta-analysis. A Washington Post/ ABC News poll released yesterday suggested Biden’s lead to be an actual 17 percentage points.
  • Very, very few political pros believe this to be the case, citing the fact no other polls show it to be that much of a runaway for the former VP. The most plausible reason Republicans aren’t despondent about Wisconsin comes down to who is expected to show up: While Democrats have almost doubled their early voting numbers from 2016, Republicans are up four-fold.
  • That year, they had a three-point increase in their support of Obama over 2008. But, according to one study, Black voter participation in Wisconsin fell 20 percent between 2012 and 2016.
  • In August, police responding to reports of a domestic incident shot Jacob Blake, a Black man, in the back four times, leaving him paralyzed. Deep unrest followed in Kenosha, about 45 minutes south of Milwaukee. Protestors took to the streets, demanding justice for Blake.
  • Both Trump and Biden visited the state after the shooting, giving Black voters a clear view of what their choices were come November. Trump stood with the police, who say they were responding to a call about someone with an outstanding arrest warrant and, they say, had a knife. Biden called for compassion and police reform.
  • “Everybody says your vote is your voice, so I feel like if you don’t vote, you are comfortable being silenced.”
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Opinion | Republicans, Not Biden, Are About to Raise Your Taxes - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...republicans-biden-taxes.html
shared by rerobinson03 on 31 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • The Trump administration has a dirty little secret: It’s not just planning to increase taxes on most Americans. The increase has already been signed, sealed and delivered, buried in the pages of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.
  • 65 percent of taxpayers — will face a higher tax rate in 2027 than in 2019.
  • it’s a delayed tax increase dressed up as a tax cut.
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  • The current poverty line for a family of four is $26,200: People with incomes between $10,000 and $30,000 — nearly one-quarter of Americans — are among those scheduled to pay a higher average tax rate in 2021 than in years before the tax “cut” was passed.
  • The C.B.O. and Joint Committee estimated that those with an income of $20,000 to $30,000 would owe an extra $365 next year — these are people who are struggling just to pay rent and put food on the table.
  • those on the edge of poverty have been particularly hard hit by the pandemic and the recession its caused, so Trump’s planned tax increases seem especially heartless, and impractical, when you consider that their higher tax payments, while a huge burden for them, will add little to the budget.
  • At the same time, Trump has given his peers, people with annual incomes in excess of $1 million dollars, or the top 0.3 percent in the country, a huge gift:
  • saving the average taxpayer in this group over $64,000 — more than the average American family makes in a year.
  • This analysis makes clear that the vast majority of Americans will be better off with the likely tax reforms that will emerge from a Biden administration than they would be by sticking with Mr. Trump’s ill-conceived tax bill.
  • Elections matter. Elections gave Republicans the power to enact these tax shenanigans. Neither conscience nor principles stopped them.
  • The increases, unfairly aimed at the vast majority of Americans who are disproportionately suffering in the pandemic, will cause even more hardship.
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Laugh? We nearly all died - why my US failed state Twitter thread went viral | US elect... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ction-joe-biden-twitter-thread US 2020 international perspective failed election satire
shared by Javier E on 15 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • In 2016, the Republican candidate for president, Donald Trump, may have exaggerated somewhat when he declared: “The world is laughing at us. They’re laughing at us, at our stupidity.” No longer. As counting in the crisis-wracked North American state entered its 10th day, around the world it had become the butt of many jokes. After decades of enduring its hubris and condescension, many are happy to see the self-anointed “shining city on a hill” and self-proclaimed “greatest country in the history of the world” knocked down a peg or two.
  • For a long time, America has been to the world what Trump has been to America – a bull in a china shop. Rich, entitled, brash, over-confident and often downright stupid, since the end of the cold war the country has traipsed around the world, breaking stuff as it went, throwing its weight around, and playing fast and loose with cherished global norms. Its journalists and moviemakers (and president) rarely missed the opportunity to stress just what an uncivilized “shithole” the rest of the globe was and how much we needed the enlightenment offered by the Peace Corps.
  • Inevitably perhaps, America’s excesses inspired a rival. Today, America finds itself as a bull in China’s shop. It has slowly been eclipsed in many areas where it was once dominant, especially in trade and lately in technology. And America has reacted much like Trump to the loss of its position as top dog – it is throwing a tantrum. From inciting a trade war to trying to wreck global alliances and treaties, to undermining the multilateral system, the US is showing that it will not go quietly into the sunset.
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  • Like Trump, America’s successes were primarily economic and its monumental failures, in places like Vietnam and Iraq, cost hundreds and thousands of lives. It had a complicated relationship with the truth as exemplified by Colin Powell’s speech to the United Nations, laying out the Bush administration’s rationale for war in Iraq. Like Trump it cozied up to dictators in Africa and gave a wink and a nudge to the apartheid regimes in South Africa and in the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel.
  • The election and four years of Trump have shown that far from being a paragon of democracy, the US has not only neglected its decaying democratic institutions at home, but has also incubated a dangerous authoritarianism. As the US fixes itself, the rest of us too need to reform the international system which for too long has operated on the mistaken belief that the US is what it claimed to be. The Trump presidency should be the wake up call we all need to build a better world
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Opinion | How Progressive States Can Respond to Conservative Courts - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ssive-conservative-courts.html US culture history Policy
shared by cartergramiak on 16 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Trump made explicit that he wants “his” judges, and the 6-to-3 conservative majority on the court, to achieve what he could not through Congress, including eliminating health care for millions and undermining what remains of the Voting Rights Act.
  • But if progressives are going to have fewer victories in federal courts, then we need to think about what that means for states, too.
  • First, state elected officials must be ready to respond quickly to, or act in advance of, rulings from the Supreme Court. If, for example, the Affordable Care Act is weakened or struck down, Democratic state legislatures should have bills drafted to introduce that day to protect people who will lose coverage.
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  • The new court may also make it easier for companies to degrade the environment, and harder for government agencies to address racism. Here too, states can step in with policies and laws to patch holes ripped open by the court. They can take aggressive action when it comes to protecting our air, reforming policing, expanding civil rights and more.
  • Second, state officials, especially attorneys general, must enforce those newly enacted laws and existing protections in state courts. Because federal enforcement actions will face hostility from the federal bench, states will need to be vigilant and aggressive.
  • For example, if the Supreme Court further constrains the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, states can go after corporations for violations of state securities and consumer protection statutes.
  • The third prong of the plan rests on progressive advocacy groups and lawyers outside government to litigate rights enshrined in state constitutions. This will be particularly important in states where leaders hew to a conservative agenda.
  • The final part of this plan applies to all progressives: In a conservative legal environment, we need to rethink the arguments we make and the language we use. The positions that conservatives have been taking for years can sometimes serve progressive aims.
  • Of course, Washington will have a key role to play, and our proposals will work best in the states that already have strong progressive traditions; it will take time for state-level victories to catch on elsewhere.
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Biden-Harris administration: Here's who could serve in top roles - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html biden
shared by katherineharron on 17 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • President-elect Joe Biden is set to announce who will serve in top roles in his administration in the coming days and weeks.
  • Ron Klain, one of his most trusted campaign advisers, will serve as his incoming chief of staff. And Jen O'Malley Dillon, Biden's campaign manager, and Rep. Cedric Richmond of Louisiana, a co-chair of Biden's transition team and presidential campaign, will serve in top roles in the White House.
  • Each of Biden's Cabinet nominees will need to be confirmed by the US Senate, which is currently controlled by Republicans. Two runoff elections in Georgia on January 5 could determine which party controls the chamber and impact the Cabinet confirmation process.
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  • The Cabinet includes the vice president and the heads of 15 executive departments
  • Klain served as Biden's chief of staff in the Obama White House and was also a senior aide to the President.
  • Klain has been a top debate preparation adviser to Biden, Obama, Bill Clinton, Gore, John Kerry and Hillary Clinton.
  • O'Malley Dillon will join Biden's incoming administration as a deputy White House chief of staff. O'Malley Dillon was Biden's presidential campaign manager and has served numerous other political campaigns -- including former Rep. Beto O'Rourke's failed 2020 presidential primary campaign and both of Barack Obama's presidential campaigns.
  • Richmond is expected to leave Congress to join Biden's White House staff in a senior role.
  • Rice served in the Obama administration as UN ambassador and national security adviser.
  • A longtime Biden ally, Coons was one of the first members of Congress to endorse the former vice president when he declared his 2020 presidential candidacy.
  • Rice at one point was thought to be the clear choice to succeed Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, but in 2012 withdrew her name from consideration to avoid a bitter Senate confirmation battle.
  • Blinken served in the Obama administration as the deputy secretary of state, assistant to the president and principal deputy national security adviser.
  • During the Clinton administration, Blinken served as a member of the National Security Council staff at the White House, and held roles as the special assistant to the president, senior director for European affairs, and senior director for speechwriting and then strategic planning. He was Clinton's chief foreign policy speechwriter
  • Yates was fired by Trump from her role as acting attorney general.
  • Throughout his Senate career, Coons has been known for working across the aisle and forging strong relationships with high-profile Republicans who shared common interests.
  • Brainard currently serves as a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System
  • Brainard was the US representative to the G-20 Finance Deputies and G-7 Deputies and was a member of the Financial Stability Board. During the Clinton administration, Brainard served as the deputy national economic adviser and deputy assistant to the President.
  • Raskin was the deputy secretary of the US Department of the Treasury during the Obama administration. She was previously a governor of the Federal Reserve Board.
  • Outside of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Raskin, a former deputy secretary at the department, would be the top choice for most progressives.
  • Rice was one of a handful of women on Biden's shortlist for a running mate.
  • During the mid-1990's, she served as principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and threat reduction, as well as deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy
  • Mayorkas was deputy secretary of Homeland Security during the Obama administration, and served as the director of the Department of Homeland Security's United States Citizenship and Immigration Services
  • Monaco played a critical role in Biden's vice presidential selection committee, and served as Homeland Security and counterterrorism advisor to Obama.
  • Jones is the junior United States Senator from Alabama. He lost his reelection bid earlier this month to Republican Tommy Tuberville.
  • Jones was also involved in the prosecution of Eric Rudolph, whose 1998 attack on a Birmingham abortion clinic killed an off-duty police officer.
  • If chosen and confirmed, Flournoy would be the first female secretary of defense.
  • Yates had been appointed by Obama and was set to serve until Trump's nominee for attorney general was confirmed.
  • Haaland is a congresswoman from New Mexico, and is one of the first Native American women to serve in Congress. Biden has said he wants an administration that looks like the country. Haaland, the vice chair of the House Natural Resources Committee, would be the first Native American Cabinet secretary if she were to get an offer and accept it.
  • Yang is an entrepreneur and former 2020 Democratic presidential candidate. He rose from obscurity to become a highly-visible candidate, and his supporters are sometimes referred to as the "Yang Gang." His presidential campaign was centered around the idea of universal basic income, and providing every US citizen with $1,000 a month, or $12,000 a year.
  • Nelson is the international president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA. She cemented her image as a rising star of the labor movement during a prolonged government shutdown that stretched from December 2018 to January 2019.
  • Sanders is reaching out to potential supporters in labor to ask for their support as he mounts a campaign for the job. But he is viewed as a long shot and so far has received mix reactions from labor leaders.
  • Walsh is AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka's pick for the job, a big endorsement in what could soon turn into a contentious debate between moderate Democrats and progressives, who will favor Sen. Bernie Sanders or Michigan Rep. Andy Levin
  • Levin is a popular progressive who is also growing his base of support with labor leaders, including at the Communications Workers of America.
  • But he also has credibility with climate activists for having helped create Michigan's Green Jobs Initiative.
  • Murthy, a doctor of internal medicine, is the co-chair of Biden's coronavirus advisory board
  • Bottoms is the mayor of Atlanta and is a rising star of the Democratic Party. Bottoms stepped into the national spotlight when she denounced vandalism in her city as "chaos" after demonstrations over the death of George Floyd, a Black man who was killed by police in Minneapolis. Bottoms is a former judge and city council member.
  • Weingarten is the president of the American Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO and has long pushed for education reform
  • Inslee is the governor of Washington state, and previously served in the US House of Representatives.
  • Buttigieg is the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and a former 2020 Democratic presidential candidate. Buttigieg's presidential bid was historic -- he was the first out gay man to launch a competitive campaign for president, and he broke barriers by becoming the first gay candidate to earn primary delegates for a major party's presidential nomination.
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FC95: The Age of Louis XIV, the "Sun King" (1643-1715) - The Flow of History - 2 views

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  • Introduction From 1643 to 1815 France dominated much of Europe's political history and culture.  Foreigners came to France, preferring it to the charms of their own homeland.  Even today, many still consider it the place to visit in Europe and the world.  In the 1600's and 1700's there was a good reason for this dominance: population.  France had 23,000,000 people in a strongly unified state compared to 5,000,000 in Spain and England, and 2,000,000 in the Dutch Republic and the largest of the German states.  This reservoir of humanity first reached for and nearly attained the dominance of Europe under Louis XIV, the "Sun King".
  • Louis' early life and reign (1643-61) Louis was born in 1638 and succeeded his father, Louis XIII, as king in 1643 at the age of five.  Luckily, another able minister and Richelieu's successor, Cardinal Mazarin, continued to run the government.  In 1648, encroachment by the government on the nobles' power, poor harvests, high taxes, and unemployed mercenaries plundering the countryside after the Thirty Years War led to a serious revolt known as the Fronde, named after the slingshot used by French boys.  Louis and the court barely escaped from Paris with their lives.  Although Mazarin and his allies crushed the rebels after five hard years of fighting (1648-53), Louis never forgot the fear and humiliation of having to run from the Parisian mob and fight for his life and throne against the nobles.  This bitter experience would heavily influence Louis' policies when he ruled on his own.
  • Louis XIV may not have said, "I am the state", but he ruled as if he had said it.  Louis was the supreme example of the absolute monarch, and other rulers in Europe could do no better than follow his example.  Although Louis wished to be remembered as a great conqueror, his first decade of active rule was largely taken up with building France's internal strength.  There are two main areas of Louis' rule we will look at here: finances and the army. Louis' finance minister, Jean Baptiste Colbert, was an astute businessman of modest lineage, being the son of a draper.  Colbert's goal was to build France's industries and reduce foreign imports.  This seventeenth century policy where a country tried to export more goods and import more gold and silver was known as mercantilism.  While its purpose was to generate revenue for the king, it also showed the growing power of the emerging nation state.  Colbert declared his intention to reform the whole financial structure of the French state, and he did succeed in reducing the royal debt by cutting down on the number of tax farms he sold and freeing royal lands from mortgage.  Colbert especially concentrated on developing France's economy in three ways.
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  • Versailles Louis' religious faith was largely a superficial one attached to the elaborate ritual of the Catholic mass.  This love of ritual also showed itself in how Louis ran his court at his magnificent palace of Versailles, several miles outside of Paris.  Much of the reason for building Versailles goes back to the Fronde that had driven Louis from Paris as a young boy.  Ever since then, Louis had distrusted the volatile Paris mob and was determined to move the court away from the influence of that city.  Versailles was also the showpiece of Louis' reign, glorifying him as the Sun King with its magnificent halls and gardens.
  • Religion was one aspect of Louis' reign that illustrated the absolute nature of his monarchy quite well.  Louis himself was quite a pious Catholic, learning that trait from his mother.  However, in the spirit of the day, he saw religion as a department of state subordinate to the will of the king.  By the same token, not adhering to the Catholic faith was seen as treason. As a result, Louis gradually restricted the rights of the French Huguenots and finally, in 1685, revoked the Edict of Nantes, which had given them religious freedom since the end of the French Wars of Religion in 1598.  This drove 200,000 Huguenots out of France, depriving it of some of its most skilled labor.  Thus Louis let his political and religious biases ruin a large sector of France's economy.
  • Results of Louis' reign The age of Louis XIV was important to European history for several reasons.  First of all, it saw the triumph of absolutism in France and continental Europe.  Versailles was a glittering symbol and example for other European rulers to follow.  Any number of German and East European monarchs modeled their states and courts after Louis XIV, sometimes to the point of financial ruin.  Second, Louis' wars showed the system of Balance of Power politics working better than ever.  French aggression was contained and the status quo was maintained.  All this had its price, since the larger sizes of the armies and the final replacement of the pike with the musket took European warfare to a new level of destruction.  Finally, Louis' reign definitely established France as the dominant power in Europe.  However, the cost was immense and left his successors a huge debt.  Ironically, the problems caused by Louis XIV's reign would help lead to the French Revolution in 1789 and the spread of democratic principles across Europe and eventually the world.
  • Louis' main goals were to expand France to its "natural borders": the Rhine, the Alps, and the Pyrenees.  This, of course, would make him enemies among the Dutch, Germans, Austrians, Spanish, and English.  Therefore, Louis' diplomacy had to clear the way to make sure he did not fight everyone at once.  For this purpose he skillfully used money to neutralize potential enemies (such as Charles II of England in the Secret Treaty of Dover) and extracted favorable terms from stalemate or losing situations.  But Louis could also make some fateful blunders to hurt his cause.  His obsessive hatred of the Dutch dominated his policy too much, as did his own self-confidence and arrogance in trying to publicly humiliate his enemies.  However, this just alarmed Louis' enemies more, especially the Dutch, Austrians, and English, who allied against Louis to preserve the balance of power.
  • Exhaustion on both sides finally led to the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713.  Louis' grandson took the throne of Spain and its American empire, but the French and Spanish thrones could not be united under one ruler.  Austria got the Spanish Netherlands to contain French aggression to the north.  Just as the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 had contained Hapsburg aggression, the Treaty of Utrecht contained French expansion.  Two years later Louis XIV was dead, with little to show for his vaunted ambitions as a conqueror except an exhausted economy and dissatisfied populace.
  • Just as Louis's palace at Versailles dominated European culture during the late 1600's and early 1700's, his diplomacy and wars dominated Europeans political history.  As Louis himself put it: "The character of a conqueror is regarded as the noblest and highest of titles."  Interestingly enough, he never led his troops in battle except for overseeing a few sieges from a safe distance.
  • I am the state. — Voltaire, incorrectly quoting Louis XIV
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Democrats want Pete Buttigieg to land a Cabinet post. Which one remains the question. -... - 0 views

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  • Democrats want Pete Buttigieg to get a post in President-elect Joe Biden's incoming administration.
  • Where the former South Bend, Indiana, mayor and 2020 Democratic primary candidate could land in a Biden administration has been cause for informed speculation for weeks among top Democrats. And the number of jobs Buttigieg has been mentioned for is sizable.
  • Buttigieg had been mentioned as a possible pick to be Biden's ambassador to the United Nations, before the President-elect nominated veteran diplomat Linda Thomas-Greenfield.
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  • Buttigieg's name has also been tossed around for two other Cabinet posts: secretary of transportation and secretary of commerce, positions that would likely put the former mayor in the center of an expected push for a sweeping infrastructure reform bill.
  • And then there is the talk about a high-profile ambassadorship, a position that would help the aspiring politician gain foreign policy experience but take him away from elected politics for as long as he served as an ambassador.
  • "They want to find a place for him," said a source familiar with the transition's deliberations. "It is a puzzle, and they are trying to figure out where he fits into that."
  • Buttigieg mounted an unexpectedly resilient presidential primary campaign in 2019 and 2020, narrowly winning the Iowa caucuses after starting as a relative unknown in the state and becoming the first gay presidential candidate in American history to win primary delegates from a major party. He ended his campaign shortly before Super Tuesday in March and endorsed Biden as much of the party coalesced around the would-be President-elect.
  • It took very little time after he officially ended his presidential campaign, however, for speculation about his future to ramp up. As Buttigieg headlined events for Biden during the general election -- including a number of fundraisers -- many in Democratic circles saw the legwork as a clear indication that Buttigieg wanted an administrative post in a would-be Biden administration.
  • And much like his historic presidential campaign, if Buttigieg were selected for a Cabinet post and confirmed, he would be the first gay person to serve as a Cabinet secretary that was confirmed by the Senate.
  • Buttigieg is also thinking about his future career and those same people say he is eager for a job where he can have an impact on some of the same issues he talked about during his presidential campaign.
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Review of new Putnam and Garrett book, "The Upswing," by Idrees Kahloon | Harvard Magazine - 0 views

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  • To prove this somewhat quantitatively, Putnam and Garrett simplify the complex trajectory of American society since 1900 to four curves: economic inequality, political partisanship, social capital, and cultural narcissism
  • it is possible to get all the disparate trends to superimpose neatly on one another. Their observation of “an unexpected and remarkable synchronicity in trends in four very different spheres over the last 125 years” is the essence of the book. All of the indicators begin in the doldrums at the start of the twentieth century, before the titular upswing takes place. This happy trend extends until the 1960s, after which these indicators pivot and slowly trace a bell curve as they collapse back to their original nadirs: rancorous partisanship, deep inequality, and anomie.
  • For the authors, the synchronicity cannot be accidental. To the lay reader, this logic is compelling. To the social scientist forever spouting about the distinction between correlation and causation, however, it is merely suggestive
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  • Capital and Ideology, Thomas Piketty’s recent entry into the genre, places inequality as the ultimate driving force of politics, society, and religion
  • The Upswing proposes another, similar arc
  • this one is “a long arc of increasing solidarity and then increasing individualism” which “had implications for equality, for politics, for social capital, and for culture. It led to an increasingly zero-sum, tribal view of society, and, eventually, to Trumpism.”
  • The evidence justifying the thesis, intriguing as it is, is not nearly so strong.
  • The authors assign ultimate importance to the route from individualism to communitarianism and back again, called the “I-we-I” curve in their shorthand.
  • Was it possible for America to become a society of solidarity, a “we” society (as Putnam and Garrett term it), only because it was a Mad Men one, undergirded by the exclusion of blacks and women?
  • Many concurrent transformations, of course, could also have driven these trends
  • What evidence is there that, in the midst of all of these bewildering changes, it was really “most fundamentally the self-centeredness” that accounted for present-day malaise?
  • Google’s ambition to digitize millions of books has yielded a database that the curious can use to check trends in English usage over decades with only a few keystrokes. Putnam and Garrett rely on this tool to track the rate of usage of “we” compared to “I”—and find that the resulting curve traces the familiar U-turn that recurs everywhere else in the book.
  • Similar accounts of increasing selfishness fossilized in Google Books data have been offered before, most notably by the psychologist Jean Twenge, but they do not seem to be taken that seriously by many linguists.
  • My brief experimentation also showed that writers also discuss “you” more than “I” these days. From these analogies, one could conclude the exact opposite: a resurrected communitarianism after all.
  • Other attempts at constructing a meta-narrative for American history, like the recent These Truths by Kemper professor of American history Jill Lepore, place at their center the crisis of race and the centuries-long inability of whites to accept blacks as equal.
  • Putnam and Garrett nonetheless present a clear story. They propose that the communitarian ethos of the Progressive Era—of muckrakers like Ida B. Wells and Jacob Riis and social reformers like the suffragette Jane Addams and education evangelist John Dewey—is the generating impulse of the upswing. And the various traumas of the 1960s—assassinations, campus violence, the civil-rights struggle, urban riots, the Vietnamese debacle—are proposed as the instigators for the downswing.
  • the argument is that “America took its foot off the gas”—so the drive toward equality decelerated and stalled. “As that ‘we’ came apart, racial progress in many important realms came to a halt,” they claim
  • This is certainly true in some respects. But it does feel like a disservice to give the overriding impression that to be black in 2020 is only marginally better than it was in 197
  • In fact, there has been substantial convergence in life expectancy, high-school graduation rates, and voter turnout between black and white Americans, for example. And the notion that the communitarian ethos of the “we” society reinforces the drive toward equality for the disadvantaged is difficult to square with the continuous progress of women,
  • By reaching further back in time than most academics ever venture (because data are scant and require more care to interpret), he and Garrett are able to focus on a more positive period in which the United States was broadly improving, when children could expect almost surely to earn more than their parents, and Congress was not wrecked by partisanship. It cannot be wrong to yearn for a time when progress was palpable, when projects like the Great Society were being proposed and enacted. Even if we do not precisely know the reasons for the upswing all those years ago, one happened all the same.
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A Catholic Tribute to Lord Sacks | Sohrab Ahmari | First Things - 0 views

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  • The West, according to an account beloved by Catholics, rose out of a providential encounter between reason and revelation in antiquity. Though occasioned by conquest, the encounter yielded an authentic synthesis: between a Greek rationality in search of the deepest origin of reality and a Jewish God professed to be just that, the very ground of being (cf. Ex 3:14). Later, that same God identified himself even more starkly and intimately with reason (cf. Jn 1:1).
  • Tragically, the story goes on, this synthesis eventually lost its supremacy in the West, owing foremost to opponents inside the Church determined to distill a “purer” faith, unmottled by “worldly” philosophy. The result was a stingy account of reason that excluded things divine and paved the way for a narrowly scientistic rationality
  • Today, we are the victims of this dis-integration, a process of Christian de-Hellenization centuries in the making.
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  • The late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, who died last month, utterly rejected this account of faith and reason. 
  • The God of the Hebrew Bible, he believed, was never the God of the Academy to begin with. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is neither the unmoved mover nor the ground of being, but a historical God, who has put himself in dialogue and relationship with one people, the Jews.
  • little about him could be deduced by processes of reason. He is best known, rather, through the moral revolution heralded by Abrahamic faith: Judaism first, followed by Christianity and Islam.
  • De-Hellenization was thus no skin off the back of biblical faith, rightly understood. For, in this telling, the faith of the Jews, including Jesus, had always sat uneasily with the “faith” of Plato and Aristotle.
  • The synthesis between the two collapsed once its Greek metaphysical structure gave way to the battering ram of modern science.
  • The God of the Bible, Sacks contended, was lost in the bargain of Saint Paul’s ambition to spread his newfound faith to the Greco-Roman sphere. More to the point, God was lost in translation. The Greek language, with its left-to-right script, per Sacks, tends toward abstraction and universalization, whereas Hebrew is fundamentally a “right-brained” language, tending toward narrative and particularity.
  • The result was that the West received an abstract, theoretical version of a supremely narrativistic deity.
  • The Hebrew Bible, Sacks believed, has no “theory” of being itself, of natural law or of political regimes.
  • Sacks was, in truth, a pure anti-metaphysicist. In his 2011 book, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion and the Search for Meaning, he declared: “We cannot prove that life is meaningful and that God exists.”
  • he was thrilled by his atheist teachers’ demolition of the classical proofs for God, which he’d always considered a kind of cheap sleight of hand.
  • “Neither can we prove that love is better than hate, altruism than selfishness, forgiveness than the desire for revenge.” All of these statements are a matter of “interpretation,” rather than of “explanation,” and all interpretations are beyond proof or falsification.
  • The quest for ultimate meaning, he argued, falls into the same territory as “ethics, aesthetics and metaphysics”—and “in none of these three disciplines can anything of consequence be proved.”
  • Ethics, aesthetics, and metaphysics are great “repositories of human wisdom,” to be sure, but they simply don’t belong in “the same universe of discourse” as science.
  • If we distinguish the two discourses, neither need threaten the other: The one (science) explains the world by “taking things apart,” as Sacks put it; the other (religion) puts them back together via interpretation and moral formation.
  • For many Catholic intellectuals, not least Benedict XVI, restoring religion to its rightful place in human affairs involves undoing the philosophical mistakes of nominalism and of the Reformation, which the pope emeritus singled out for criticism in his much-misunderstood 2006 Regensburg Lecture.
  • We must dilate reason’s scope, Benedict thought, so that “reasoning” might again include more than merely observing phenomena and identifying their efficient material causes. Sacks did not think faith and reason could be reunited in this way.
  • But shouldn't we try? I seek ultimate meaning, yes, but I want that meaning to be true in a way that satisfies reason’s demands. And there lies the disagreement, I think, between “Regensburg Catholics,” if you will, and the various de-Hellenizing strands of contemporary religious thought.
  • despite rejecting almost in toto the Church’s account of faith and reason, Sacks nevertheless credited it for the fundamental humaneness of Western civilization.
  • More than that, the rabbi blamed the mass horrors of modernity on the narrow and arrogant rationalism that supplanted the old synthesis.
  • “Outside religion,” he wrote, there is no secure base for the unconditional source of worth that in the West has come from the idea that we are each in God’s image.
  • Though many have tried to create a secular substitute, none has ultimately succeeded. None has stood firm under pressure. That has been demonstrated four times in the modern world, when an attempt was made to create a social order on secular lines: the French Revolution, Stalinist Russia, Nazi Germany and Communist China. When there is a bonfire of sanctities, lives are lost.
  • As a student of Jewish history, Sacks knew well that the old synthesis of faith and reason wasn’t always a guarantee against unreason when it came to the treatment of Jews within Christendom. Nevertheless, he was far more wary of the merciless abstractions of the post-Enlightenment era
  • Sacks, to be clear, was no counter-Enlightenment thinker. And he paid gracious tribute to the modern scientific enterprise as an almost-miraculous instance of human cooperation with divine creativity.
  • Nevertheless, he insisted, the Enlightenment ideology, with its tendency to apply the methods of scientific inquiry to all of life, “dehumanize[d] human beings.” Its universalist “reason” detested particularity, not least the stubborn particularity of the Jewish people
  • Moreover, it targeted for demolition, in the name of humanity and reason, “the local, the church, the neighborhood, the community, even the family, the things that make us different, attached.”
  • Sacks saw similar dangers at work in today’s market liberalism: “a loss of belief in the dignity and sanctity of life”; “the loss of the politics of covenant, the idea that society is a place where we undertake collective responsibility for the common good”; “a loss of morality”; “the loss of marriage”; and the loss of “the possibility of a meaningful life.” In short, the technocratic dystopia we are stumbling into.
  • Except, Sacks rightly insisted, we don’t have to, provided we can make room in our lives and societies for “the still-small voice that the Bible tells us is the voice of God”:
  • Sacks felt that divine voice couldn’t be definitively reasoned about, certainly not in the way that, say, Benedict XVI called for. Yet the rabbi’s own public presence—supremely learned yet humble and unfailingly charitable, even to his most vicious secularist opponents—was and will remain an enduring testament to the reasonableness of faith. 
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Can History Predict the Future? - The Atlantic - 0 views

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  • Cities on fire, elected leaders endorsing violence, homicides surging—­­to a normal American, these are apocalyptic signs. To Turchin, they indicate that his models, which incorporate thousands of years of data about human history, are working. (“Not all of human history,” he corrected me once. “Just the last 10,000 years.”)
  • He has been warning for a decade that a few key social and political trends portend an “age of discord,” civil unrest and carnage worse than most Americans have experienced. In 2010, he predicted that the unrest would get serious around 2020, and that it wouldn’t let up until those social and political trends reversed. Havoc at the level of the late 1960s and early ’70s is the best-case scenario; all-out civil war is the worst.
  • The fundamental problems, he says, are a dark triad of social maladies: a bloated elite class, with too few elite jobs to go around; declining living standards among the general population; and a government that can’t cover its financial positions.
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  • In War and Peace and War (2006), his most accessible book, he likens himself to Hari Seldon, the “maverick mathematician” of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, who can foretell the rise and fall of empires. In those 10,000 years’ worth of data, Turchin believes he has found iron laws that dictate the fates of human societies.
  • The fate of our own society, he says, is not going to be pretty, at least in the near term. “It’s too late,”
  • The problems are deep and structural—not the type that the tedious process of demo­cratic change can fix in time to forestall mayhem.
  • Turchin likens America to a huge ship headed directly for an iceberg: “If you have a discussion among the crew about which way to turn, you will not turn in time, and you hit the iceberg directly.” The past 10 years or so have been discussion. That sickening crunch you now hear—steel twisting, rivets popping—­­is the sound of the ship hitting the iceberg.
  • Of the three factors driving social violence, Turchin stresses most heavily “elite overproduction”—­the tendency of a society’s ruling classes to grow faster than the number of positions for their members to fill.
  • Don’t we want everyone to be rich and educated? The problems begin when money and Harvard degrees become like royal titles in Saudi Arabia. If lots of people have them, but only some have real power, the ones who don’t have power eventually turn on the ones who do.
  • “You have a situation now where there are many more elites fighting for the same position, and some portion of them will convert to counter-elites,” Turchin said.
  • Elite jobs do not multiply as fast as elites do. There are still only 100 Senate seats, but more people than ever have enough money or degrees to think they should be running the country
  • Turchin noted that a person can be part of an ideological elite rather than an economic one.
  • Elite overproduction creates counter-elites, and counter-elites look for allies among the commoners. If commoners’ living standards slip—not relative to the elites, but relative to what they had before—they accept the overtures of the counter-elites and start oiling the axles of their tumbrels
  • Commoners’ lives grow worse, and the few who try to pull themselves onto the elite lifeboat are pushed back into the water by those already aboard.
  • The final trigger of impending collapse, Turchin says, tends to be state insolvency. At some point rising in­security becomes expensive. The elites have to pacify unhappy citizens with handouts and freebies—and when these run out, they have to police dissent and oppress people.
  • Eventually the state exhausts all short-term solutions, and what was heretofore a coherent civilization disintegrates.
  • “I gave up because I solved the problem.” Turchin published one final monograph, Complex Population Dynamics: A Theoretical / Empirical Synthesis (2003), then broke the news to his UConn colleagues that he would be saying a permanent sayonara to the field
  • “Does population ecology have general laws?” Turchin asked. Most ecologists said no: Populations have their own dynamics, and each situation is different.
  • All sciences go through this transition to mathematization,” Turchin told me. “When I had my midlife crisis, I was looking for a subject where I could help with this transition to a mathematized science. There was only one left, and that was history.”
  • After its long adolescence of collecting and cataloging, ecology had enough data to describe these universal laws—and to stop pretending that every species had its own idiosyncrasies. “Ecologists know these laws and should call them laws,” he said.
  • The laws Turchin applied to ecology—and his insistence on calling them laws—­generated respectful controversy at the time. Now they are cited in textbooks.
  • Having left ecology, Turchin began similar research that attempted to formulate general laws for a different animal species: human beings.
  • Turchin suggested that “there are several very general law-like propositions” that could be applied to ecology.
  • If the historians weren’t going to usher in a mathematical revolution themselves, he would storm their departments and do it for them.
  • “There is a longstanding debate among scientists and philosophers as to whether history has general laws,” he and a co-author wrote in Secular Cycles (2009). “A basic premise of our study is that historical societies can be studied with the same methods physicists and biologists used to study natural systems.”
  • he likened historians reluctant to build general principles to his colleagues in biology “who care most for the private life of warblers.” “Let history continue to focus on the particular,” he wrote. Cliodynamics would be a new science
  • To seed the journal’s research, Turchin masterminded a digital archive of historical and archaeological data.
  • The coding of its records requires finesse, he told me, because (for example) the method of determining the size of the elite-aspirant class of medieval France might differ from the measure of the same class in the present-day United States. (For medieval France, a proxy is the membership in its noble class, which became glutted with second and third sons who had no castles or manors to rule over. One American proxy, Turchin says, is the number of lawyers.)
  • Historians of religion have long pondered the relationship between the rise of complex civilization and the belief in gods—especially “moralizing gods,” the kind who scold you for sinning. Last year, Turchin and a dozen co-authors mined the database (“records from 414 societies that span the past 10,000 years from 30 regions around the world, using 51 measures of social complexity and 4 measures of supernatural enforcement of morality”) to answer the question conclusively. They found that complex societies are more likely to have moralizing gods, but the gods tend to start their scolding after the societies get complex, not before
  • One of Turchin’s most unwelcome conclusions is that complex societies arise through war. The effect of war is to reward communities that organize themselves to fight and survive, and it tends to wipe out ones that are simple and small-scale
  • the data are clear: Darwinian processes select for complex socie­ties because they kill off simpler ones.
  • Certain aspects of this cyclical view require relearning portions of American history, with special attention paid to the numbers of elites. The industrialization of the North, starting in the mid-19th century, Turchin says, made huge numbers of people rich. The elite herd was culled during the Civil War, which killed off or impoverished the southern slaveholding class, and during Reconstruction, when America experienced a wave of assassinations of Republican politicians.
  • “There is a very close correlation between adopting democratic institutions and having to fight a war for survival.”
  • Also unwelcome: the conclusion that civil unrest might soon be upon us, and might reach the point of shattering the country. In 2012, Turchin published an analysis of political violence in the United States, again starting with a database. He classified 1,590 incidents—riots, lynchings, any political event that killed at least one person—from 1780 to 2010. Some periods were placid and others bloody, with peaks of brutality in 1870, 1920, and 1970, a 50-year cycle.
  • In 2010, when Nature surveyed scientists about their predictions for the coming decade, most took the survey as an invitation to self-promote and rhapsodize, dreamily, about coming advances in their fields. Turchin retorted with his prophecy of doom and said that nothing short of fundamental change would stop another violent turn.
  • It wasn’t until the Progressive reforms of the 1920s, and later the New Deal, that elite overproduction actually slowed, at least for a time.
  • This oscillation between violence and peace, with elite over­production as the first horseman of the recurring American apocalypse, inspired Turchin’s 2020 prediction
  • The notion that democracy finds its strength in its essential goodness and moral improvement over its rival systems is likewise fanciful. Instead, democratic societies flourish because they have a memory of being nearly obliterated by an external enemy. They avoided extinction only through collective action, and the memory of that collective action makes democratic politics easier to conduct in the present,
  • Some sound like ideas that might have come from Senator Elizabeth Warren—tax the elites until there are fewer of them
  • others, such as a call to reduce immigration to keep wages high for American workers, resemble Trumpian protectionism.
  • He opposes credential-­oriented higher education, for example, which he says is a way of mass-producing elites without also mass-­producing elite jobs for them to occupy. Architects of such policies, he told me, are “creating surplus elites, and some become counter-elites.” A smarter approach would be to keep the elite numbers small, and the real wages of the general population on a constant rise.
  • We need to stop the runaway process of elite overproduction, but I don’t know what will work to do that, and nobody else does. Do you increase taxation? Raise the minimum wage? Universal basic income?” He conceded that each of these possibilities would have unpredictable effects
  • practice “adaptive management,” changing and modulating your approach as you go.
  • Eventually, Turchin hopes, our understanding of historical dynamics will mature to the point that no government will make policy without reflecting on whether it is hurtling toward a mathematically pre­ordained disaster.
  • He says he could imagine an Asimovian agency that keeps tabs on leading indicators and advises accordingly. It would be like the Federal Reserve, but instead of monitoring inflation and controlling monetary supply, it would be tasked with averting total civilizational collapse.
  • Since at least the 19th century, the discipline has embraced the idea that history is irreducibly complex, and by now most historians believe that the diversity of human activity will foil any attempt to come up with general laws, especially predictive ones.
  • The idea that one thing causes another, and that the causal pattern can tell you about sequences of events in another place or century, is foreign territory.
  • Turchin counters that he has heard claims of irreducible complexity before, and that steady application of the scientific method has succeeded in managing that complexity.
  • One social scientist who can speak to Turchin in his own mathematical argot is Dingxin Zhao, a sociology professor at the University of Chicago who is—incredibly—­also a former mathematical ecologist.
  • in a way I am sympathetic to Turchin. If you come to social science from natural sciences, you have a powerful way of looking at the world. But you may also make big mistakes.”
  • Turchin is nonetheless filling a historiographical niche left empty by academic historians with allergies not just to science but to a wide-angle view of the past.
  • humans are much wilier social creatures, Zhao said. A woodpecker will eat a termite, but it “will not explain that he is doing so because it is his divine right.” Humans pull ideological power moves like this all the time, Zhao said, and to understand “the decisions of a Donald Trump, or a Xi Jinping,” a natural scientist has to incorporate the myriad complexities of human strategy, emotion, and belief. “I made that change,” Zhao told me, “and Peter Turchin has not.”
  • Zhao said that human beings are just much more complicated than bugs.
  • He places himself in a Russian tradition prone to thinking sweeping, Tolstoyan thoughts about the path of history. By comparison, American historians mostly look like micro-historians.
  • Rather than bending toward progress, the arc in his view bends all the way back on itself, in a never-­ending loop of boom and bust. This puts him at odds with American historians, many of whom harbor an unspoken faith that liberal democracy is the end state of all history.
  • Writing history in this sweeping, cyclical way is easier if you are trained outside the field. “If you look at who is doing these megahistories, more often than not, it’s not actual historians,”
  • The genre’s most famous book, Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), beheld 13,000 years of human history in a single volume. Its author, Jared Diamond, spent the first half of his career as one of the world’s foremost experts on the physiology of the gall­bladder.
  • Steven Pinker, a cognitive psychologist who studies how children acquire parts of speech, has written a megahistory about the decline of violence across thousands of years, and about human flourishing since the Enlightenment
  • Most historians I asked about these men—and for some reason megahistory is nearly always a male pursuit—used terms like laughingstock and patently tendentious to describe them.
  • Pinker retorts that historians are resentful of the attention “disciplinary carpet­baggers” like himself have received for applying scientific methods to the humanities and coming up with conclusions that had eluded the old methods.
  • “Given the noisiness of human behavior and the prevalence of cognitive biases, it’s easy to delude oneself about a historical period or trend by picking whichever event suits one’s narrative,” he says. The only answer is to use large data sets.
  • “There’s no reason that traditional history and data science can’t merge into a cooperative enterprise,” Pinker wrote. “Knowing stuff is hard; we need to use every available tool.”
  • Turchin’s conclusions are only as good as his databases, she told me, and any database that tries to code something as complex as who constitutes a society’s elites—then tries to make like-to-like comparisons across millennia and oceans—will meet with skepticism from traditional historians
  • Turchin’s data are also limited to big-­picture characteristics observed over 10,000 years, or about 200 lifetimes. By scientific standards, a sample size of 200 is small, even if it is all humanity has.
  • Privately, some historians have told me they consider the tools he uses powerful, if a little crude. Clio­dynamics is now on a long list of methods that arrived on the scene promising to revolutionize history. Many were fads, but some survived that stage to take their rightful place in an expanding historiographical tool kit
  • Turchin’s methods have already shown their power. Cliodynamics offers scientific hypotheses, and human history will give us more and more opportunities to check its predictions—­revealing whether Peter Turchin is a Hari Seldon or a mere Nostradamus.
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House Democrats Outline Tax Increases for Wealthy Businesses and Individuals - The New ... - 0 views

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shared by clairemann on 13 Sep 21 - No Cached
  • WASHINGTON — Senior House Democrats are coalescing around a draft proposal that could raise as much as $2.9 trillion to pay for most of President Biden’s sweeping expansion of the social safety net by increasing taxes on the wealthiest corporations and individuals.
  • The preliminary proposal, which circulated on and off Capitol Hill on Sunday, would raise the corporate tax rate to 26.5 percent for the richest businesses and impose an additional surtax on individuals who make more than $5 million.
  • fall short of fully financing the entire package Democrats are cobbling together, despite promises by Mr. Biden and Democratic leaders that it would be fully paid for in order to assuage concerns from moderates in their caucus.
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  • “makes significant progress toward ensuring our economy rewards work and not just wealth by cutting taxes for middle-class families, reforming the tax code to prevent the offshoring of American jobs and making sure the wealthiest Americans and big corporations pay their fair share,” said Andrew Bates, a White House spokesman.
  • The full committee still needs to release and advance text of the legislation, and it is unclear if enough Democrats will embrace the package in the House and the Senate. In order to protect the economic package from a Republican filibuster and pass it with a simple majority, Democrats can spare only three votes in the House and must remain united in the Senate.
  • In part because of the deep divisions in the Democratic caucus over the scope and structure of the package, Representative Richard E. Neal of Massachusetts, the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, had remained remarkably enigmatic about his own preferences for the legislation. Before hearings this week, the committee has been releasing key components of the package, including an extension of monthly payments to families with children through 2025 and tax incentives for cleaner energy.
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The mess Merkel leaves behind | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...the-mess-merkel-leaves-behind politics policy economics
shared by woodlu on 23 Sep 21 - No Cached
  • Mrs Merkel’s achievements are more modest. In her 16 years in the chancellery she has weathered a string of crises, from economic to pandemic. Her abilities as a consensus-forger have served her country and Europe well.
  • But her government has neglected too much, nationally and internationally.
  • when a new government forms after an election this weekend, admiration for her steady leadership should be mixed with frustration at the complacency she has bred.
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  • The public sector has failed to invest adequately or wisely, falling behind its peers in building infrastructure, especially the digital sort.
  • Penny-pinching is hard-wired into the state. In 2009, on Mrs Merkel’s watch, Germany hobbled itself with a constitutional amendment that makes it illegal to run more than a minute deficit. With interest rates so low, sensible governments ought to have been borrowing for investment, not fainting at the first spot of red ink.
  • Germany’s most severe domestic problem is a failure to reform its pension system. Germans are ageing fast, and the baby-boomers will place an even heavier burden on the budget later this decade as they retire
  • Germany has also been sluggish, and still emits more carbon per head than any other big EU country, not helped by Mrs Merkel’s shutdown of Germany’s nuclear industry after the Fukushima disaster in Japan in 2011.
  • The EU has not grappled sufficiently with the weakness of its indebted southern members. Only during the pandemic did it create a financial instrument that lets the EU issue jointly guaranteed debt, and dispense some of the cash as grants, rather than yet more loans.
  • Despite recent increases, it spends too little on defence. It cosies up to Beijing in the hope of better trading terms. It is giving Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, a chokehold over European energy supplies by backing the new Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline which, as it happens, makes landfall in Mrs Merkel’s own constituency.
  • China is an increasingly challenging economic and strategic rival, Russia an unpredictable threat and America a distracted and uncertain ally.
  • Worse, the “stability” rules that will force countries back into austerity to shrink their stocks of debt are ready to revive, unless amended.
  • The polls suggest that Germany is set for a messy new parliament, with no single party, or even two, able to form a government. Instead, some sort of ideologically incoherent three-way coalition is on the cards—one that, by combining high-spending greens and pro-business liberals, may struggle to agree on anything ambitious.
  • Comfortable, cautious Germans seem uninterested in serious debate about the future. Crisis-management has become a substitute for initiative. Candidates have no incentive to highlight their country’s looming problems.
  • One is a coalition headed by Mrs Merkel’s party, the Christian Democrats and their Bavarian sister-party (the CDU/CSU), led by Armin Laschet. The other is a coalition led by Olaf Scholz, of the Social Democrats (SPD), who is Germany’s finance minister. In either case, the coalition would be joined by the Greens and by the pro-business Free Democrats.
  • Sixteen years in power has been enough. The party has run out of ideas and drive, as its decision to choose the gaffe-prone and uninspiring Mr Laschet for chancellor makes clear. An affable lightweight, he has run a dismal campaign, and is predicted to lead his team to its worst result since the second world war. The polls say that Mr Scholz is preferred by twice as many voters.
  • The problem is that although he belongs to the business-friendly wing of his party, the SPD is stuffed with left-wingers.
  • They may try to drag him further in their direction than the Free Democrats will wear and enterprise can comfortably bear.
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Facebook flounders in the court of public opinion | The Economist - 2 views

www.economist.com/...21805344 politics history Culture policy
shared by woodlu on 07 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • “YOU ARE a 21st-century American hero,” gushed Ed Markey, a Democratic senator from Massachusetts. He was not addressing the founder of one of the country’s largest companies, Facebook, but the woman who found fault with it
  • Frances Haugen, who had worked at the social-media giant before becoming a whistleblower, testified in front of a Senate subcommittee for over three hours on October 5th, highlighting Facebook’s “moral bankruptcy” and the firm’s downplaying of its harmful impact, including fanning teenage depression and ethnic violence.
  • Facebook’s own private research, for example, found that its photo-sharing site, Instagram, worsened teens’ suicidal thoughts and eating disorders. Yet it still made a point of sending young users engaging content that stoked their anxiety—while proceeding to develop a version of its site for those under the age of 13.
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  • In 2018 a different whistleblower outed Facebook for its sketchy collaboration with Cambridge Analytica, a research organisation that allowed users’ data to be collected without their consent and used for political profiling by Donald Trump’s campaign. Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, went to Washington, DC to apologise, and in 2019 America’s consumer-protection agency, the Federal Trade Commission, agreed to a $5bn settlement with Facebook. That is the largest fine ever levied against a tech firm.
  • Congress has repeatedly called in tech bosses for angry questioning and public shaming without taking direct action afterwards.
  • Senators, who cannot agree on such uncontroversial things as paying for the government’s expenses, united against a common enemy and promised Ms Haugen that they would hold Facebook to account.
  • Congress could update and strengthen the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), which was passed in 1998 and bars the collection of data from children under the age of 13.
  • If Congress does follow through with legislation, it is likely to focus narrowly on protecting children online, as opposed to broader reforms, for which there is still no political consensus.
  • Social media’s harmful effects on children and teenagers is a concern that transcends partisanship and is easier to understand than sneaky data-gathering, viral misinformation and other social-networking sins.
  • Other legislative proposals take aim at manipulative marketing and design features that make social media so addictive for the young.
  • However, Ms Haugen’s most significant impact on big tech may be inspiring others to come forward and blow the whistle on their employers’ malfeasance.
  • “A case like this one opens the floodgates and will trigger hundreds more cases,” predicts Steve Kohn, a lawyer who has represented several high-profile whistleblowers.
  • One is the industry’s culture of flouting rules and a history of non-compliance. Another is a legal framework that makes whistleblowing less threatening and more attractive than it used to be.
  • The Dodd-Frank Act, which was enacted in 2010, gives greater protections to whistleblowers by preventing retaliation from employers and by offering rewards to successful cases of up to 10-30% of the money collected from sanctions against a firm.
  • If the threat of public shaming encourages corporate accountability, that is a good thing. But it could also make tech firms less inclusive and transparent, predicts Matt Perault, a former Facebook executive who is director of the Centre for Technology Policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
  • People may become less willing to share off-the-wall ideas if they worry about public leaks; companies may become less open with their staff; and executives could start including only a handful of trusted senior staff in meetings that might have otherwise been less restricted.
  • Facebook and other big tech firms, which have been criticised for violating people’s privacy online, can no longer count on any privacy either.
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