Domestic Policy – Page 17 – The Wrongologist

How Bad Is Inflation?

The Daily Escape:

Chaco Canyon’s Chetro Ketl Great House – January 2022 photo by James C. Wilson

Every media outlet is talking about the latest inflation numbers. The NYT reported that the Consumer Price Index climbed to 7% for the year through December, and 5.5% after volatile prices such as food and fuel were stripped out. Sounds terrible, right?

Nobody likes higher prices. But remember that 12 month inflation rates (called year over year rates) are a look backward in time. And consumer prices increased 0.5% in December, lower than in the past several months. Month-to-month measures are more reflective of current conditions, although they bounce around more than year/year numbers. A half of one percent rise in December annualizes to a 6% inflation rate, less than the headline rate, if it remains at that level going forward.

Also, wholesale prices rose just 0.2% in December, the smallest increase in 13 months. So maybe inflation is starting to level off.

So, maybe this is a case of beware the headlines. Eric Boehlert says that US media can’t (or won’t) give people context for the current inflationary trend:

“Convinced that rising prices are the defining economic issue of the day — not huge job gains, record-setting GDP predictions, or boosted wages — the press continues to portray inflation as a uniquely American problem that’s hounding Democrats.”

Boehlert says that what’s missing from our inflation coverage is information that inflation is a global phenomenon, fueled by the pandemic. He cites the following articles:

Republicans claim that Biden’s agenda is responsible for inflation. The average person can be forgiven if they believe that Biden’s policies are the cause, but Biden didn’t cause inflation to jump in all of these other countries.

The Economist reports that since the pandemic, there has been a total of $10.8 trillion in worldwide fiscal stimulus, equivalent to 10% of global GDP. The result was that developed countries finally moved the needle on inflation, after they added money to their economies for nearly 15 years since the Great Recession.

So, while each item of the Consumer Price Index — cars, homes, energy and so on — has unique factors driving its prices, there’s an overall reality: The economy is recovering far more quickly than it normally does following a severe recession. But that recovery is uneven, showing up in some sectors as high prices. From The Grid’s Matthew Zeitlin:

“What really worries economists is not just inflation per se, but a situation, as in the 1970s, where prices are rising and the economy is otherwise stagnant, with little job growth or overall growth. This condition is called, naturally enough, ‘stagflation’.”

Zeitlin goes on to say:

“There’s clear evidence that stagflation is not the direction in which the economy is headed. The unemployment rate is down to 3.9%, and overall output is easily above its pre-Covid level…..it’s simply not the situation that the labor market is trending in the wrong direction.”

And the Conference Board is forecasting that 2022 GDP growth will be 3.5% and it will be 2.9% in 2023, so no worries about stagflation in our future.

Zeitlin points out that the supply chain is also a culprit. Over the course of the pandemic, Americans shifted their consumption from services to goods, especially durable goods like furniture and cars. While services still amount for the bulk of US consumer spending, shifting the balance between goods and services can have large effects:

These changes in consumer spending have caused major stress at ports, and throughout the logistics system that moves goods around. This has raised the costs of everything that needs to be shipped.

China’s Zero Covid policy is creating severe lockdowns to keep the variant from spreading ahead of the Beijing Olympics next month. This raises the prospect of more disruptions for supply chains that are based there. China remains the largest supplier of goods to the US.

The Zero Covid policy has economic consequences: Delivery times for ocean shipments from China to the US stretched to a record 80 days in December, up 85% from 2019. This also impacts the cost of shipping a 40-foot container from Asia to the US West coast: It currently costs $14,572 this week, down from a peak of more than $20,000 in September. But that’s about a tenfold increase from two years ago.

The major question facing the Federal Reserve, as well as Biden, businesses and everyday consumers who have to make decisions, is how likely is increased inflation to persist? If the inflation problem is largely being driven by how consumers and businesses have had to adjust to Covid, then while it’s severe, it may be temporary.

Nobody likes or wants higher prices. Pent-up demand and abundant cash savings are part of what’s causing inflation. The other part of the problem is labor shortages, which are resulting in large wage increases for certain occupations.

The only way to stop prices from rising is for the Fed to reduce the money supply, raising rates until demand comes down far enough to match supply. The balancing act for the Fed is to tamp down price increases, while not causing a recession.

Whether the Fed can do that remains to be seen.

Biden’s Speeches Are Better, but the Dem’s Messaging Isn’t

The Daily Escape:

Sea Smoke, Willard Beach, Portland, ME – January 2022 photo by Rick Berk Photography

Tom Friedman had a column in the NYT proposing that in 2024, Biden should drop Harris and run instead with Liz Cheney. When Wrongo read that, he poured a big glass of Bushmills 21 single malt.

The thrust of this, and other musings about 2024, is that Biden is a weak candidate who is further dragged down by Harris. That may be true. But assuming Biden is up against Trump again, who are the additional voters who will vote Democrat because of Cheney, and who otherwise would not do so?

We’ve learned in the past weeks that Biden can give good (and tough) speeches, as he did in calling out Trump in the Capitol Rotunda on the anniversary of Jan. 6. And in Atlanta on Tuesday for voting rights, where he said:

“I ask every elected official in America: How do you want to be remembered? Do you want to be on the side of Dr. King or George Wallace? Do you want to be on the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor? Do you want to be on the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis?”

Those words set a great example for how Democrats need to message in order to win.

It’s a good message, but what happens next on voting rights is crucial: Democrats can stick with Senate Majority Leader Schumer’s plan and lose on a vote to consider suspending the filibuster rules to pass voting rights. Everybody knows that Schumer’s plan will produce nothing meaningful. Can they instead find a compromise with Republicans (and Manchin and Sinema) to get some form of a voting bill passed? Wrongo favors getting something done, even if the Party’s left wing isn’t happy with the outcome.

Biden and the Democrats also need to message better on several other dangerous political issues.

First, schools are going to be a big problem for Democrats in the mid-terms and beyond. Politico has an article: “How School Closures Made Me Question My Progressive Politics” where the author says her son’s school was closed when Trump was President. It’s open now under Biden, but she’s still mad at the Dems.

Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot fought with the Chicago teacher’s union about keeping schools open. This exposed divisions between traditional Democratic constituencies, the union, and a majority-Black populace. Keeping schools open has become a nationalized issue. As the NYT noted, it’s a problem for Democrats everywhere:

“Because they have close ties to the unions, Democrats are concerned that additional closures like those in Chicago could lead to a possible replay of the party’s recent loss in Virginia’s governor race.”

The Democrats messaging on schools should echo what CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said: “Schools should be the first places to open and the last places to close.” Biden also needs to side with parents and students. If reopening schools is a top priority, testing needs to be available and free to schools. And he needs to call out the teachers unions: “No one should be keeping schoolhouse doors closed, especially not our friends in the unions.”

Second, crime is also going to be an issue in Biden’s re-election campaign as well as for the Democrats in the mid-terms. We all know that the call to “defund the police” was a political disaster. Democrats need to change the conversation, particularly since they didn’t deliver on a long-promised bipartisan police reform bill last fall.

Dems need to be completely clear that they oppose defunding the police. Biden can lead by saying: “Some folks think that we shouldn’t put criminals in jail or they downplay the dangers of violent crime. They are wrong. We have to protect our families and our neighborhoods.”

The messaging should include: “Continuing the fight for social justice shouldn’t come at the cost of public safety.” Dems could also point to the hypocrisy of Republicans who claim to “Back the Blue,” but then turned a blind eye to the attacks on Capitol police officers on January 6.

Third, immigration isn’t going away as an issue. The Dems should be saying that America benefits from the presence of immigrants. But border security is important, along with an enforceable system that decides fairly who can enter the country, and who should stay.

NYC’s new mayor Eric Adams has announced he supports the idea of letting non-citizens vote in local elections. This would add something like 800,000 voters to the rolls only for city-wide elections. Today, just 15 US cities allow noncitizens to vote in local elections. Eleven are in Maryland, two are in Vermont, plus NYC, and San Francisco.

This will be a huge 2022 talking point for Republicans. They will say it’s proof that Democrats want immigration solely to increase the number of Democratic voters. Biden and Dem mid-term candidates should be saying: “Only American citizens should be allowed to vote.”

It isn’t the media’s job to fight the Dems’ partisan battles, despite Dems wishing that were so. Democrats need to ramp up their messaging game. The Democratic Party doesn’t have a true coordinated effort to counter the right-wing disinformation ecosystem, and are suffering because of that.

As Ron Filipkowski says:

“If the Democratic party had relentless, full-time people working as a team to fight the right-wing disinformation war, it would be more effective than all the traditional media outlets combined.”

Democrats have to get better at politics if they expect to hold the House and Senate in 2022.

Why Isn’t Good Economic News Covered?

The Daily Escape:

Crater Lake, OR – winter 2020 photo by Austin James Jackson photography.

We need to talk about the economy. The underlying economic news is very good, but both the press and the Republicans say it’s bad, while Democrats say very little.

There are three things being discussed. First, inflation is terrible. This is a key Republican talking point about how Biden is failing the country. Second, jobs are going begging in what journalists have dubbed “The Great Resignation”. This is supposedly the fault of giving too much in unemployment benefits, allowing people to stay home rather than work. Third, if the economy is so great, why isn’t employment growing faster?

Starting with the last point, take a look at this graph showing jobs growth since 2008. The blue bars are when a Democrat was president, and the red bars are when a Republican was president:

That last blue bar is the strongest jobs growth in history. During 2021, the US created more than 6 million jobs, the most since records began in 1939.

That means Biden has just managed a year of stunning jobs growth, but consumers were constantly fed headlines about “disappointing” jobs reports, because the initial reports rarely align with skewed “expectations” by economists and pundits. Explaining this should be fairly easy, but the press can’t seem to get it across to the American people.

In addition, wages have been moving up across the board:

In December, average hourly earnings for Production and Non-supervisory Personnel rose $0.12 to $26.61, which is a 5.8% year over year gain. This shows that American workers are finally building some economic power. People have choices right now. After years of worker insecurity in the wake of the financial crisis followed by the pandemic, they have options. Jobs are going unfilled, while virtually no one is getting laid off.

The unemployment rate has now fallen close to a 50 year low, at a level exceeded only by one month in 2000, and during 2018-19. The economic result of this is visible on the graph above.

While employment is continuing to be strong, we’re still lagging in terms of filling job openings created by pandemic losses. America must gain an additional 3.6 million jobs in order to equal the number of employees in February 2020, just before the pandemic hit. At the current average jobs growth rate for the past 6 months, that should take about 7 more months to reach the pre-pandemic employment level.

Economists are tying themselves in knots trying to figure out why more Americans aren’t going back to work. Some of those reasons are understandable: Fears about health, caring for someone who’s sick, and lack of childcare. But there’s a big reason that isn’t talked about. Employment has declined in the last year among workers who were 55 or older at the start of the pandemic. A WaPo analysis found that over 1.5 million more people were retired in November 2021 than would have been expected based on pre-pandemic trends. That would help explain the employment story if the mainstream media would look at the big picture instead of dutifully following Right-wing propaganda.

Turning to inflation, the WaPo says:

“The US economic recovery from the Covid pandemic was the strongest of any of the big Western economies…The Biden stimulus pushed the bank accounts of even the lowest-income Americans to unexpected heights. On average, they had more than twice as much in their savings accounts as they did when the pandemic began.

The Federal Reserve…helped, too. It held rates near zero and pumped hundreds of billions of dollars into the economy. The twin fire hoses of cash — one from Congress, one from the Fed — sent Americans’ spending roaring back.”

Bloomberg reports that manufacturing companies are saying their supply chains are performing a little better. Their message seems to be that things aren’t worsening.

While oil prices get the most attention, the ISM surveys show manufacturers say the cost of more commodities are falling. In December, there were eight commodities that were identified as falling in price. In November, it was four. In October, just one (wood).

Finally, the NY Fed is out with its 2022 inflation expectations survey. It shows that In December, US consumers expected inflation to average 6.0% over the next 12 months and 4.0% over the next three years. Those expectations were unchanged from November 2021.

It also showed that Respondents were more optimistic about their future wage and income growth, as well as their ability to hold a job or find a new one.

One big question for Republicans is what will they pivot to if inflation actually slows down?

A larger question is why the Democrats and the press can’t explain good news when it happens?

Biden’s Economy is Booming

The Daily Escape:

Sunrise with moon, Utah Lake, UT – December 2021 photo by Karen Lund Larsen

Bloomberg reported on Monday that the US economy is outperforming the world by the biggest margin in the 21st century. Surprisingly, they say that there’s a good reason:

“America’s economy improved more in Joe Biden’s first 12 months than any president during the past 50 years…”

They say that the objective economic data are pretty convincing about the Biden Boom of 2021, notwithstanding the contrary media narrative that seems to be driving poor public opinion. Biden is either in first place compared to recent American presidents, or at number 2 on all the big economic indicators, says Bloomberg’s Matt Winkler:

“Exceptional returns…especially the S&P 500 Index in both absolute terms and relative to its global counterparts, can be attributed to record-low debt ratios enabling companies to reap the biggest profit margins since 1950. Corporate America is booming because the Biden administration’s Covid-19 vaccination programs and $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan reduced the jobless rate to 4.2% in November from 6.2% in February, continuing an unprecedented rate of decline during the Covid-19 pandemic.”

Also, inflation-adjusted GDP surged at an average annual rate of 5.03% in each of the first three quarters of 2021 and is poised to hit 5.6% for the year based on the preliminary estimates of more than 80 economists surveyed by Bloomberg. If that forecast holds up, it would be more than 2.8 times the average performance between 2000 and 2019. And double the average since 1976.

The Great Resignation

The Daily Escape

Sunrise, Alpine AZ – November 2021 photo by Ed Kendall. Alpine is at 8,200’ elevation.

From Krugman:

“You’re probably aware that the US is experiencing what many call the Great Resignation — a significant fall in the number of people willing to accept jobs, at least at pre-Covid wages. Four million fewer Americans are employed than were on the eve of the pandemic, yet the rate at which workers are quitting their jobs — usually a good indicator of labor market tightness — has hit a record, and the scramble of employers to find workers has led to rapid wage increases.”

People see the “now hiring” signs everywhere. They assumed that generous unemployment benefits were discouraging workers from accepting jobs. But the enhanced benefits went away with no visible change in the US labor force participation. So, what’s going on?

Back to Krugman: (brackets by Wrongo)

“…[the] Great Resignation, it turns out, is largely an American phenomenon. European nations have been much more successful than we have at getting people back to work. In France, in particular, employment and labor force participation are now well above prepandemic levels.”

Barry Ritholtz says that there’s a massive transformation underway in America’s labor markets. When we look at the total Quits Rate for all Nonfarm payroll workers since the Great Financial Crisis (GFC) ended in 2009, the trend in the “quits rate” has steadily moved higher for all workers and really accelerated this year:

The red trend line shows that the rate that people are quitting has now returned to its level in 2016, and except during the pandemic, it has continued to rise.

If you look at only the Quits Rate for Professional & Business Services, those white-collar workers who did okay during the pandemic, their trend isn’t the same as the overall quits:

There’s been virtually no difference in the rate of professional quits since 2008. That’s telling us that the Great Resignation is taking place in the lower half of the employment wage scale, entry-level jobs, and the tiers just above them.

This has deep ramifications for the American economy.

Companies who rely on cheap labor are having hiring problems. Those companies that pay the minimum wage (or slightly higher) are having a hard time finding workers. Part of this is the failure of the Federal government to raise the minimum wage, which has been the same since 2009. That hasn’t kept up with inflation, or the growth in corporate profits.

Instead of gradually raising the minimum wage over time nationally, putting it on a path towards $15 or higher, we’ve allowed wage pressure to build for years. Then, during the pandemic, we experienced an 18 month period when low-wage workers reconsidered their careers. The dam broke, and we’re seeing both a sudden spike in wages and a shortage of workers.

Along the way, some labor has upskilled, gotten certified, degreed, and found new fields to work in. Now we have millions of people launching small businesses, striving to make it to the middle class, and towards self-determination. From the WSJ:

“The pandemic has unleashed a historic burst in entrepreneurship and self-employment. Hundreds of thousands of Americans are striking out on their own as consultants, retailers and small-business owners.”

The number of unincorporated self-employed workers has risen by 500,000 since the start of the pandemic, to 9.44 million. Except for a few months this summer, that’s the highest total since 2008. It amounts to an increase of 6% in the self-employed, while overall US employment total remains nearly 3% lower than before the pandemic.

So far this year, these entrepreneurs applied for federal tax-identification numbers to register 4.54 million new businesses, up 56% from the same period of 2019. That is the largest number on record since 2004. And two-thirds are for businesses that aren’t expected to hire employees.

Monday Wake Up Call – November 22, 2021

The Daily Escape:

Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge, NV – November 2021 photo by Marcia Steen

Today is the 58^th anniversary of the assassination of President John Kennedy. While it wasn’t the first time Americans dove deep into conspiracy theories, who killed JFK has always been a controversial topic surrounded by conspiracy theories since that November day.

Over the weekend, we passed a sad milestone. The number of US Covid deaths in 2021 surpassed the deaths in 2020 and we still have a month to go. So far, there have been 385,457 deaths this year vs. 385,343 in 2020 according to the WSJ.

Wrongo has a few observations about what our continuing saga with Covid says about America. Almost 200 million of us are fully vaccinated. In addition, we have had 47 million confirmed cases to date. That means 74.8% of us have some level of antibodies to the several variants of Covid that have traveled through our population in the past two years.

But because: 1) Vaccines haven’t made it beyond the rich world (only 6% of the population in Africa is vaccinated) and 2) Americans seem to value the freedom to control their bodies over public health, new variants that may not be controllable by current vaccines could infiltrate the US.

There’s one very concerning new variant, B.1.640. It appears to be from Africa and has only been seen in small numbers. Apparently it’s bad. The Jerusalem Post mentioned it in” New COVID variant found in France: Reason for panic or not quite yet?” after it spread to Europe:

“A new COVID variant identified in a handful of European countries is raising concerns among some health professionals because there are changes to the coronavirus spike protein that have never been seen before.”

The B.1.640 variant has nothing to do with Delta. Researchers have had a really hard time placing it on the known Covid family tree, because it’s so far removed from anything else, that it just sits on a very long branch of its own. They think that it may elude our current vaccines.

If true, this would be another example of viral evolution completely blindsiding us. And if it isn’t this one, we’ll probably see some other variant.

The sad truth is that America is no longer willing to fight Covid. We think its too hard, and we don’t like doing difficult things. Too many of us don’t want to choose between public health and our economy.

Our unofficial policy is to expect that Covid will become a gradually declining annual infection. But that’s based on the assumption that we have a successful vaccine, that the current variant is all we’ll see, and that the virus will lose its potency over time.

Nobody dares say it out loud, but Covid has revealed the US to be a prime risk for a bioweapon attack.

If a terror group, or an adversary country decided to launch a biological attack, there is clearly nothing that we would do to stop it. How do we know that? Because Covid could have been a biological attack, and it was allowed to spread broadly instead of being properly dealt with. Because it was “too hard” to try to stop it.

We’ve spent countless $ trillions over the last 20 years for “national security”, and this is where we’ve gotten to? Wrongo is starting to think that Churchill’s comment that “the US will do the right thing, after we’ve tried everything else” was overly optimistic.

Time to wake up America! We’ve got to toughen up, or face defeat, not only on the battlefield but in ICUs across America. To help you wake up, here’s a throwback song from another era. Listen to “I’d Love to Change the World” by the late Alvin Lee & his group, Ten Years After from their 1971 Album: “A Space In Time.”

The video doesn’t feature the band, just the song from the album. The video is a film student project that Wrongo likes. Overall, the song looks at what were considered the biggest problems in the world in 1971: Overpopulation, economic inequality, pollution, and war. Unsurprisingly, the issues remain the same:

Sample Lyric:

Everywhere is freaks and hairies
Dykes and fairies, tell me where is sanity
Tax the rich, feed the poor
Till there are no rich no more

I’d love to change the world
But I don’t know what to do
So I’ll leave it up to you

Monday Wake Up Call – November 15, 2021

The Daily Escape:

Autumn, Seven Lakes Basin, OR – October 2021 photo by Valledweller33

With Congress’s dancing around (and not passing) Biden’s social welfare bill, we’re now to the point where there are less than 20 days until the government’s funding runs out in early December. There are other issues that must be dealt with as well. The federal debt limit needs to be raised. The National Defense Authorization Act must be passed.

The Democrats and Biden are entering yet another critical time. Wrongo wrote about this two months ago, and since then, just about the only thing that Congress accomplished was passing the infrastructure bill. That wasn’t chump change, but the 2021 legislative calendar has only three weeks left to accomplish a long list of must-pass items.

But this is far from the only concern for Dems. With the 2022 mid-terms looming, they need to take a careful look at their policies on immigration, crime, and inflation. These will all be issues that Republicans use against them at election time. The Dems response is usually to deny that an issue is a problem for them, or for the country.

The Dems start by saying there’s nothing to the problem. They reframe it as a different and more complex issue, and say that the White House is already on top of it. This is what Ruy Texeira calls the Fox News Fallacy.

“This is the idea that if Fox News…criticizes the Democrats for X then there must be absolutely nothing to X and the job of Democrats is to assert that loudly and often. The problem is that an issue is not necessarily completely invalid just because Fox News mentions it. That depends on the issue.”

If there’s something to the issue and persuadable voters have real concerns, Democrats won’t assuage those concerns simply by embracing their Fox News Fallacy of denial and deflection. Texeira offers a few examples including the debate over CRT, border security, and crime:

“Start with crime. Initially dismissed as simply an artifact of the Covid shutdown that was being vastly exaggerated by Fox News and the like for their nefarious purposes, it is now apparent that the spike in violent crime is quite real and that voters are very, very concerned about it.”

Clearly this includes the Democrats’ traditional base of Black and Hispanic voters. A Pew poll found that Black and Hispanic Democrats are significantly more likely than white Democrats to favor more local police funding.

This is more of the disconnect that Wrongo wrote about last week. Democrats need to deal with how their pet issues may play differently to different parts of their coalition. As blog reader D. Price said in comments, we assume that our liberal values and the language we use to frame those values must fall on others’ ears just like it does on ours. He points out that Dems need to listen more and take seriously the different perspectives in the Democratic coalition.

Some Democrats, like NYCs mayor-elect Eric Adams, openly highlight their commitment to cracking down on crime and criminals. Consider a recent NBC poll that shows Republicans are favored over Democrats on the crime issue by 22 points.

And in heavily Black Detroit, a USA Today/Suffolk University//Detroit Free Press poll found that Detroit residents, by an overwhelming 9-1, say they would feel safer with more cops on the street, not fewer. On a list of eight concerns, police reform ranked last, at 4%.

The poll also found a significant racial divide on the question. Black residents ranked crime at the top of their list of concerns: 24% cited public safety, and just 3% named police reform, while White residents were only slightly more concerned about police reform than public safety, 12% compared with 10%.

Democrats have to stop saying that they suck at messaging, as if there’s nothing that can be done about it. They must create messaging that emphasizes what Americans have in common and their right not just to economic prosperity but to public safety, secure borders and a world-class (and maybe) non-ideological education for their children.

That’s much more likely to work than simply denying that these issues are problems.

Time to wake up Democrats! There’s no time to lose. Despite the messaging from DC that all will be fine in the mid-terms if the Dems just pass a few pieces of legislation, their problems are much deeper. To help them wake up, listen and watch Della Mae, an all-woman American bluegrass band perform their 2021 tune, “The Way It Was Before“.

Sample lyric:

I left my home and rolled the dice
Followed the promise of a better life
Now I work at the factory
On the third shift while my kids sleep
They say our job’s a necessity they turn the lock and hide the keys
They call us heroes on the killing floor but a day off is something that I can’t afford

We can’t go back to the way it was before
While some profit off the ones who just endure
We all know what’s broken won’t get fixed by wishin and hopin
We can’t just go back to the way it was before

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – November 14, 2021

The weekend got off to a good start with Bannon indicted and Britany freed. But the final outcome at COP26 is the big news. The final agreement was announced on Saturday. It calls for reductions in coal and fossil fuel use and a transition to renewables. Those are all firsts in the more than 25-year history of UN climate talks.

Still, countries like Saudi Arabia or China were resistant; so the wording had to be significantly watered down. Wednesday’s draft mentioned phasing out coal, but Saturday’s speaks only of accelerating “efforts towards the phase-out of unabated coal power”.

What seems to have happened is a lot of speechifying, including Boris Johnson sounding a lot like Greta Thunberg. But not much happened in terms of concrete political action.

There is some good news: a net-zero pledge from India, a commitment from the US and China to work together, and a toothless but significant global agreement to reduce methane emissions.

One thing that is easy to overlook is that there were no climate deniers among the countries represented at COP26, a first. But a preliminary analysis of the agreement published by Carbon Brief suggests that, all told, the agreements coming out of COP26 may shave only 0.1 degree Celsius off of future warming.

The disconnect between rhetoric and reality has several possible explanations, but Occam’s Razor suggests it can be explained best in three words: Talk is cheap.

As Wrongo has said, not all the climate change news is bad: the probabilities of the worst-case scenarios seem to be falling a bit. The flip side of this is that, at present, the probability of the best-case scenario (holding global warming to 1.5 degrees C. above the pre-industrial baseline) also seems to be fading, and all of the medium-range outcomes look pretty terrible. On to cartoons.

Climate warriors won’t fight:

Infrastructure Week finally arrives:

Not everyone is enthusiastic about Infrastructure week:

GOP is unfriending the infrastructure-positive Republicans:

Ted Cruz is one of the smarmiest politicians ever, so it isn’t a surprise that he tried to score political points by going after Sesame Street’s Big Bird, who tweeted that he had gotten his COVID-19 vaccine. “My wing is feeling a little sore,” he said, “but it’ll give my body an extra protective boost that keeps me and others healthy.” It was a nice thing to tell children now that they can get the vaccine. Cruz didn’t see it as nice, nor did the Right-wing blowhards on Fox News and Newsmax. They were livid about Big Bird’s message:

Republicans turn back the clock:

Democrats Fail

The Daily Escape:

Black Oak trees in Shastice Park, CA with Mount Shasta in background – October 2021 photo via Northern California Hiking Trails

Every political writer thinks that Tuesday’s elections reinforced their preconceived view of what the Democratic Party needs. The Dems spilled gallons of metaphorical blood by blindly walking into a political propeller on Election Day.

Wrongo wants to add his two cents to the story, so he turns to a Republican for perspective. Charlie Sykes says:

“The Republican Party — populated with cranks, crooks, clowns, bigots and deranged conspiracy theorists — has spent five years alienating women, minorities and young voters….So, now, Democrats need to ask themselves this rather urgent question: Why can’t we beat these guys?”

A few words about the Virginia gubernatorial election, won by Republican Glenn Youngkin. All the talk about white suburban women being the new Democratic Party base isn’t true in Virginia. A year ago, Joe Biden won Virginia by 10 points. Four years ago, Democrat Ralph Northan won the governorship by nine. Last night, Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic former governor, lost it by two points.

Youngkin won because he convinced enough Joe Biden voters to switch sides. The Virginia suburbs have a large college-educated population. These voters moved strongly to the Democrats both times Trump ran. This time, Youngkin won enough of them without sacrificing votes from Trump’s base.

Terry McAuliffe is a terrible candidate. He walks into the room dragging the whiff of campaigns by both Clintons, but without any of Bill Clinton’s charm or political skill. McAuliffe tried to nationalize a local campaign, trying to run against Trump instead of Youngkin. Youngkin, by contrast, made a point of sticking strictly to in-state issues. Youngkin also came across as the nicer guy.

Youngkin had been the co-CEO of the Carlyle Group, a huge private equity firm with deep DC political ties. If this had been a real campaign, McAuliffe would have attacked Youngkin as a capitalist who wouldn’t do a thing for the middle class. But since McAuliffe is an investor in a Carlyle fund, he didn’t.

Welcome to today’s Democrats!

The Democratic Party’s basic issue is that it’s out of touch with average people. As an example, we’re in a time of growing pro-labor sentiment, but the leadership of the Democratic Party says little to the working class. The switch has been flipped. Now many Democrats are rich, and blue collar workers are Republicans. Getting them back will take years, if ever.

Also, each time the Democrats have a victory based in political change, they move back to the center, alienating those to whom they gave hope. So why should that part of their base continue to show up and vote?

American politics is polarized by cultural issues. Outside of marginal economic questions, Democrats have taken the big economic issues off the table. They’re at a disadvantage, because Republican cultural issues have broader appeal, while the Democrat cultural issues appeal to mostly the college-educated, who are a minority of voters. That means whenever Dems get in power, they can’t really change the policies that the monied and corporate classes want.

Wrongo thinks that it was good that the Dems lost in Virginia. Virginia, now led by Republicans, will also try to pass the same social warrior cultural programs as other Red states. The meanness and tone-deafness of those programs will horrify suburban Virginians. And they will swing back in 2024.

Still, senior national Democratic leadership needs an overhaul. They’re old and incompetent. How difficult is it to establish whether bringing in the big guns for a local election is going to be positive or negative for a campaign? The power of money in elections means that the first priority for any race is a candidate with the ability to raise money. This is why we see McAuliffe a second time, and not someone better.

That’s corruption, as Elizabeth Warren defined it in 2020. Add the callous way Democrats react:

They speak of the opposition as stupid, or brain-dead. As deplorables, or as clinging to their guns and religion.
Their radicalization of wedge issues like “Defund the Police”, or Supreme Court Packing reveal them to be intellectually lazy.

McAuliffe said about angry parents attending school board meetings: “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” That lost him the election because Dems never came up with a counter message.

The Republican’s success with defining control of education as a wedge issue could turn out to be a winning message in 2022.

When a Party won’t pick charismatic candidates and can’t focus on the issues that people are crying out for them to answer, voters react to both the poor messaging and leadership by going back to slogans, grievances, sports-like dynamics, and elevating trivial issues.

In other words, the Virginia campaign.

Democrats must shake up their leadership if they are to re-take the now-lost inroads they made in suburban (and female) Republican voters in 2020. They’ll need to talk in simple terms.

They’re not telling the story of how white working parents need food stamps to supplement their income. They’re not telling the story of how a family in rural America sends their kids to a school that can’t teach them how to use a computer.

There’s work to be done.

Schumer and Pelosi should report to HR for their new assignments.

Saturday Soother – October 30, 2021

The Daily Escape:

A Halloween prayer – photographer unknown. Fear is everywhere in the world. Is there reason for hope?

In comments on Wrongo’s post, “Climate Change Summit, Part II”, blog reader Gloria R. asked for some suggestions about how older people could help with climate change, given that the outcome will only be clear after the elderly are long gone.

Good question. In some ways, climate despair is a new kind of climate denial, blunting the momentum for action, just when we need it most. Despair can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

But young people aren’t feeling hopeless. The first truly global social movements dedicated to climate action and climate justice have gained in size and strength, beginning with Greta Thunberg’s Fridays for the Future and spreading to the Sunrise Movement in America and to climate justice movements around the world.

First suggestion: These movements are long on enthusiasm and short of money. Maybe geezers could fund them?

Second, capital continues to leave fossil fuel investments. According to a recent study. this shifting of financial assets could potentially stop the fossil fuel companies from giving lip service to climate change, particularly if they lose political power. Maybe geezers could direct their financial advisors to move their investment $$ away from these big emitters?

Third, state and local governments set building codes and local energy-use regulations. They also set zoning and land use rules. So, maybe geezers could get political on a local level and work to make what we tend to call the “living laboratories for democracy” (state and local governments) havens of better climate policies and practices?

Fourth, some of us don’t have funds to back up our ideals. One thing geezers can do that is costless is to send a letter to their kids about what they did to make sure the future isn’t an environmental wasteland. That’s the premise behind DearTomorrow, a project that’s archiving letters about climate change written by people to their future children, selves, or family. The idea is to foster personal engagement with the problems and solutions to climate change. DearTomorrow asks letter writers to focus on positive themes and why they have hope for future generations. Writing a letter to their future self or loved ones makes it personal.

Fifth, join Elders Climate Action, a group of grandparents who mobilize elders to address climate change. They’re trying to protect the well-being of their grandchildren.

There you go, Gloria (and all geezers), five ideas. There are many, many others.

Finally, the response to the Covid pandemic demonstrated how societies and economies can pivot very quickly in response to a global emergency. The response was far from perfect. The rich countries took care of their own citizens first, and then moved in some cases reluctantly, to help the poor nations. But for the medium-term, we now have a blueprint for the globe working together on a global crisis.

Other reasons for hope:

The global economy is growing faster than global emissions. That means energy efficiency is increasing without any erosion in economic growth. The pandemic slowed this down, but the trend is clear.
Energy efficiency is moving from the margins toward a new normal in the products we use. Think how commonplace LED light bulbs are today.
The price of solar and wind power has plunged, and there’s reason to expect that the cost of energy storage, key to an electric power grid reliant on renewable energy, will decline over time.
The supply of clean energy resources is growing faster than new sources of “dirty” energy. Now, the potential for electric power generated from clean, steady sources is becoming a reality.

That’s Wrongo’s brief take on reasons to be hopeful about our climate future. But that’s no reason to stop the effort to hold corporations and politicians accountable for making climate change a top priority. On Thursday at a House Oversight Committee hearing, four fossil fuel CEOs refused to declare climate change an “existential crisis”, using weasel words to avoid reality. They must be stopped.

Enough for today, it’s time for our Saturday Soother, when we take a brief break from whatever is going on in the Virginia governor’s race and spend a few minutes concentrating on the natural world around us. Here in CT, we’ve seen temperatures in the mid-30s. We’ve started leaf blowing. It will go on until at least the first week of December.

Time to bundle up, grab a comfy chair by a window, and listen to Broken Peach perform a live Halloween version of Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love” in zombie makeup. Broken Peach is a cover band from Spain:

The Wrongologist

Geopolitics, Power and Political Economy

Category: Domestic Policy

Biden’s Speeches Are Better, but the Dem’s Messaging Isn’t

Why Isn’t Good Economic News Covered?

The Great Resignation

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – November 14, 2021

Democrats Fail

Saturday Soother – October 30, 2021