Saturday Soother – February 25, 2023

The Daily Escape:

Death Valley sunset, Death Valley NP, CA and NV – February 2023 photo by Leila Shehab Photography

From the NYT:

“To Democrats, the train derailment and chemical leak in the hamlet of East Palestine, Ohio, is a story of logic, action, and consequences: Rail safety regulations put in place by the Obama administration were intended to prevent just such accidents. The Trump administration gutted them.

To Republicans, East Palestine is a symbol of something…more emotional: a forgotten town in a conservative state, like so many others in Middle America, struggling for survival against an uncaring mega-corporation and an unseeing government…”

If you follow FOX news you can be forgiven for thinking that the federal disaster relief teams just got around to dealing with the hazardous materials spill in East Palestine, Ohio.

Actually, those federal teams have been on the scene since it happened.

Republicans are trying to make a political meatloaf out of Biden’s visiting Ukraine rather than visiting Ohio. Or why it took Pete Buttigieg three weeks to visit the site. Even the East Palestine mayor Trent Conaway said Biden’s trip to Eastern Europe was “a slap in the face.” But if Biden had visited, you know the mayor would say he had better things to do than shepherd around a bigwig.

Their message is that Democrats are indifferent to working-class voters.

But maybe there’s something under the surface of these politics-as-usual arguments. The derailment presents issues that Republicans rarely like to grapple with: Corporate power and a clear need for government regulation.

What may be brewing is a new and different message by the GOP’s populist wing, one that breaks with Party orthodoxy and targets corporate America. And Norfolk Southern, owner of the derailed train and also behind a clear lobbying effort to keep the government from improving rail safety, is a big and very easy target.

Vox quotes Saurabh Sharma, the president of American Moment, a public policy organization that aims to influence young conservatives to become more populist:

“I think that this tragedy that happened in East Palestine is an opportunity for Republicans that have been looking for opportunities to distinguish themselves from the neoliberal set in the party to do so.”

The execrable JD Vance was in East Palestine with Trump, and told Axios afterwards that figures like Trump, Tucker Carlson and himself recognize that East Palestine residents and those like them were the GOP’s voters:

“The three of us, in our own ways, recognized instantly: This is fundamentally our voters, right? These are sort of our people. It’s a reasonably rural community. It’s been affected by industrialization,” Vance said. “These are the people who really lost when we lost our manufacturing base to China, And these are the people who are going to be forgotten by the media unless certain voices make sure that their interests are at the forefront.”

Wow, Yale grad Vance, trying to speak mid-western English says: “This is fundamentally our voters, right?”

The question is: Can Republicans build an economic populist base within their Party? It’s clear that Trump deserves criticism from the Democrats over the accident, since it’s easy to connect the derailment to Trump’s deregulation of ineffective train braking systems, the cause of the accident. That means Trump wouldn’t be exempt from political attacks by economic populist Republicans.

Conservatives like Jon Schweppe, the director at the American Principles Project, a conservative think tank, tried to link a few ideas together:

“There is a growing sense that all of these corporations are against us — not only are they trying to screw us over on the woke stuff, but generally, they just don’t care about ordinary people.”

The American Principles Project is virulently anti-woke, anti-trans and anti-voting rights. Can they also be anti-corporations? And how close are they to mainstream Republicans?

Can the East Palestine accident cause Republicans to embrace truly populist issues? Would the GOP tie corporate graft and greed to bureaucratic incompetence and Democratic indifference? They seem to fit easily within existing Tucker Carlson messaging.

BTW: All of it also fits very easily into Democratic messaging.

But let’s forget about who’s woke or, how will the second year of the Ukraine war go? It’s time for our Saturday Soother, when we disengage from the world as completely as possible and focus on finding a calm state to prepare us for the week to come.

Here in the Mansion of Wrong, we spent time upgrading our internet service to fiber optic. That wasn’t the promised slick changeover touted by the provider, but it’s finally working.

To get soothed, settle in a big chair by a south-facing window and watch Lang Lang play Debussy’s “Suite Bergamasque, or Clair de lune”. This performance was part of an album launched in Paris on Valentine’s Day, 2019. Listen as Lang Lang performs on a boat cruising along the Seine while you enjoy Paris at night:

 

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Saturday Soother – November 20, 2021

The Daily Escape:

Floyd Lamb Park, Las Vegas NY- November 2021 photo by Marcia Steen

The biggest, baddest news of the week was that Kyle Rittenhouse was found innocent on all charges in the Kenosha murders.

As bad as that is, there’s some good news to start the weekend. First, the House succeeded on Friday in their months-long quest to pass Biden’s social spending bill. It still faces a serious challenge in the Senate before it can become law.

Second, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) reported that the US is the only G7 country to surpass its pre-pandemic economic growth. Employment is up. Wages are up. Goldman Sachs predicts by the end of next year the US unemployment rate will drop to a 50-year low, thanks to continuing red-hot demand for workers. Retail sales surged 1.7% in the month of October. American consumers spent $638 billion in October, a 16% increase from last year.

Meanwhile, slowly but surely, the supply chain bottlenecks that have plagued our economy for over a year appear to be easing. Imports through the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are up 16% from 2018, and in the first two weeks of November, those two ports cleared about a third of the containers sitting on their docks.

The Baltic Dry Index (BDI), a measure of global shipping rates and an inflation indicator, has plummeted 50% since peaking Oct. 7, another good sign for consumers. And the global chip shortage that was crippling the auto industry? GM said that the week of Nov. 1 was the first time since February that none of its North American assembly plants were offline due to a lack of chips.

All of this good news is going to waste because of the media’s hot takes on how bad Biden is doing. From Eric Boehlert:

“For weeks this fall, the Beltway press joined forces with the GOP to tell a hysterical tale about the state of the US economy. It was an alternate version of reality, where the stagnant, faltering economy was being driven to the precipice by runaway inflation, which stood poised to demolish middle-class savings across the board. All while an ineffective president stood by and watched cash-strapped households suffer.”

Boehlert says that recent press coverage suggests the economy is an albatross around Biden’s political neck, while in reality, it’s booming.

Biden got elected to bring a return to normalcy. Since there’s no normalcy in sight, his poll numbers (along with Democrats generally) have plummeted. David Brooks in the NYT addresses Joe Biden’s efforts at meeting the needs of people in “left behind” places of the country that did not vote for him: (parenthesis by Wrongo)

“If (noted economist) Larry Summers thinks lifting wages at the bottom will cause inflation…so be it. The trade-off is worth it to prevent a national rupture.”

Democrats have to get beyond the victory laps when they pass a bill, and let America know what the bills are for. Propaganda is a tool that shouldn’t be used to yammer on about defunding the police. Here’s Wrongo’s list of what Dems should say they’re for:

  • The Bill of Rights
  • One person, one vote
  • A world-class ideology-free education for all American kids
  • Jobs for more Americans
  • Universal health insurance
  • No more foreign interventions
  • More police funding and more police accountability
  • Reduce carbon emissions
  • Zero potholes

That last one is facetious, but it’s political gold in Wrongo’s town, and is funded in the recent infrastructure bill.

The Democrats’ gamble is whether their efforts and their successes will be rewarded politically less than a year from now, in November 2022. Remember that despite what the pundits say, passing the items on Biden’s platform shouldn’t be primarily to woo swing voters. They’re to shore up enthusiasm among your base, something that Dems didn’t have in the recent elections in Virginia and New Jersey.

Right now, things look grim. If you let your mind wander to what might happen if there’s a Republican House and Senate in January 2023, you should be happy not sad, that the Dems aren’t repealing the filibuster.

Let’s take a break and try for some normalcy in our weekend. Wrongo recommends that you start by not watching the Sunday pundit shows. Here on the fields of Wrong, we’re still engaging in our fall clean-up, trying to take advantage of the few warmer days to work outside. Also, there’s some menu planning for Thanksgiving underway.

So, settle into your Saturday Soother, where we leave the chaos behind for a few moments. Let’s start by grabbing a chair near a large window, and listening to the Prague Cello Quartet play an atmospheric version of the theme from “The Phantom of the Opera”:

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Monday Wake Up Call – May 10, 2021

The Daily Escape:

Lone Juniper, Black Canyon, Gunnison NP, CO – 2020 photo by Mattbnet

Isn’t it time that corporations paid decent wages?

After the Labor Department released its April jobs report, the US Chamber of Commerce blamed last month’s weak employment growth on the $300 weekly supplemental jobless benefit. They then urged lawmakers to eliminate the enhanced unemployment payments that were extended through early September by Biden’s American Rescue Plan.

This, from the dudes who willingly spend $300 on a lunch.

According to the US Chamber’s analysis, the extra $300 unemployment insurance (UI) benefit results in roughly one in four recipients taking home more pay than they earned working. But, if one in four recipients are making more not working than they did working, that’s not an indictment of $300 a week in UI benefits. It’s an indictment of corporations who pay less-than-living wages.

We could blame Asia for this, or we can blame our managerial and ownership class who engineered the outsourcing deals that made it possible. They built factories in Asia as an economic-production-economic-aggression platform to disintermediate American workers by sending higher wage jobs to lower wage locations in the Far East. And in many cases, the same companies who closed the American plants owned the Asian factories.

It’s sickening to hear these big business types complain that raising wages will destroy the economy! That’s the same argument which was used in the South against ending slavery (it would hurt the economy).

The US Chamber isn’t alone. South Carolina is cutting off extended unemployment benefits starting on June 30. From the SC governor:

“South Carolina’s businesses have borne the brunt of the financial impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Those businesses that have survived — both large and small, and including those in the hospitality, tourism, manufacturing, and healthcare sectors — now face an unprecedented labor shortage,”

South Carolina’s unemployment rate was 12.8% in April of last year. But this March, it was down to 5.1%, significantly below the 6.1% national rate. Still, these Governors (Montana has done this too) are simply acting as shills on behalf of corporations to force workers back into low wage jobs.

Many studies have shown that the employees of big box stores like Walmart and Target cannot meet their basic economic needs on the money they make at their minimum wage job. Many turn to community social services just to feed their families.

It’s not China (or other Asian countries) that are to blame. We demand ever-lower prices, so something had to give. That something was middle-class American jobs. The American public was never part of the discussion about the pros and cons of offshoring manufacturing to lower wage countries, or how that would both lower costs for goods, but also destroy American jobs.

A lot of the people who now shop at Walmart and Target lost their jobs to Mexico, China, or Bangladesh. At which point, they needed some form of welfare, and/or another part time job at Walmart-type wages. And now that they’re on Walmart wages, Walmart prices are all they can afford.

Time to wake up America! We should be asking how can it be that food banks are overwhelmed while the Dow Jones Industrial Average hits an all-time high? Simply, the stock market isn’t the whole economy. The stock market is about corporate profits, while food banks are about minimum wage jobs and unemployment.

We should be asking: Why do these corporations (the small as well as the large) persist with business models that don’t allow them to pay living wages?

We could also ask whether more red states will try to “solve” the employment problem by hurting the unemployed rather than treating the root cause: paying living wages.

To help you wake up, listen to Rag’n’Bone Man and P!nk on Rag’n’Bone Man’s new release, “Anywhere Away from Here”. We often feature music to have fun with, or to dance to. And then there are tunes like this, music for the heart and soul:

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Can America Avoid Becoming a Failed State?

The Daily Escape:

Fall sunset, Shenandoah NP, VA – photo by juliend73

Sorry, but this column is going to be a downer.

We’ve been talking for the past few days about how hard it is to get politicians to focus on fixing what’s wrong in America. Wrongo originally started down this path in 2009. His plan was to lay out the problems, and to suggest ways in which America might fix them.

But 11 years later, little of what has been suggested here has occurred. Explaining what’s wrong has made very little difference.

Our really big problems now seem to be locked in: Climate change will happen. We can’t (or won’t) deal with the burgeoning disinformation platforms that threaten civil society. It’s difficult to see what will change our growing income inequality. As always, politicians are itching for a fight with some country. Today, the villain is China. Globalization has won, our supply chains now hold us hostage, and our economic future is increasingly controlled by Asia.

America is fast becoming a failed state: Our president tells people to drink bleach. There are more than 100,000 dead in the pandemic, and a significant percentage of them probably were needless deaths.

We have the ability to deal with the crises,but we’re choosing not to. Trump and McConnell, along with Biden, Pelosi and Schumer, all have access to the same, or more likely better information than we do.

They are choosing to ignore that the country is going to hell. Instead, they use each individual crisis for their own political benefit, and for their patrons’ financial benefit. They choose to ignore the near-certainty of a second wave of infections in the fall of 2020, bringing with it the possibility of a second economic collapse, along with more deaths.

We no longer provide the basics for our citizens. We live in a nation where income, savings, happiness, trust in government, and social cohesion are all in free-fall.

This is a recipe for social collapse.

In America most infrastructure is decrepit, from airports, to schools, to roads, because there hasn’t been much public investment. That’s because Americans don’t want to pay higher taxes like the Europeans do. Politicians on both sides still believe the evidence-free ideology of neoliberalism: We’ll all be rich if we invest in nothing, and wait for Mr. Market to correctly allocate resources.

No one cares about anyone else. Nobody will support any group’s pursuit of any goal unless it is also their goal. American life is becoming purely individualistic, adversarial, and acquisitive.

We haven’t invested in the systems that provide healthcare, education, retirement, and childcare. As a result, the average American family now goes without many of these things, since they’re priced out unless they have high paying jobs.

We pay absurd prices for health care. Having a child? That’ll be $50K. An operation? It will cost about what you would pay for a starter home. If she didn’t have health insurance, Wrongo’s daughter’s medication would cost $10,250/month. These basics of life are affordable in the rest of the rich world, but in America, they cost more than the average person can pay.

The average American now dies with $62k in debt. Life has become a sequence of unrepayable loans. Student debt becomes credit card debt and a mortgage, which leads to medical debt. These forms of debt define life in America. The average American is now a poor person, in the sense that they barely make enough to pay for the basics of life. Today, 80% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, struggle to pay their basic bills, and 63% can’t raise $500 for an emergency.

These are the statistics of a nation that is descending into poverty.

Can it be fixed? Sure, but who’s going to pay for it? If taxes can’t be raised, if deficits can’t grow, what will happen? Nothing.

Except that we will move closer to a collapse. Our leaders say it’s because there isn’t an alternative. They say that we don’t have the money to pay for the changes we want. 70% of Americans say they want decent healthcare, retirement, and education, but they never vote for it.

Not even when it is offered during the primaries.

And it’s never offered in the general election, because nobody will vote for higher taxes to fund a functioning society. The idea simply isn’t acceptable to either of our political parties.

Wrongo’s decade of writing about what’s wrong hasn’t changed anything. Change requires a commitment to taking political risks, and massive voter turnout.

Otherwise, same old, same old is the path to our society’s destruction.

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College Admissions Fraud: A Teachable Moment About Capitalism

The Daily Escape:

Eagle pair on nest, Litchfield County CT – 2015 photo by JH Clery

With the college admissions fraud, wealthy Americans are now bribing people to get their kids into college. It’s just another way that the wealthy are rigging the game. Robert Reich enumerates:

We’ve become a nation where any number of greased poles stop your ascent. People with wealth seem unwilling to compete fairly. It turns out that executives from Pimco, Hercules Capital, and the co-chairman of the law firm, Willkie Farr & Gallagher, were named in the buy your way into Yale scam, along with a few Hollywood types.

It’s become very difficult to differentiate between applicants for the prestige colleges. Good grades and test scores and life experiences are no longer enough to help a kid to stand out the way they might have a few years ago. So some are bribing their way to the head of the line.

It’s just another cost of doing business in America. The truly wealthy can just pay for a new building and see their children get into the best universities. But, the merely rich can’t do that. OTOH, they can’t be expected to simply earn their way in.

As for the kids: They all knew whether what was on their applications was true or not. They had to be in on the scam. This is what passes for the charmed life of the rich in the USA: Kids knowingly cheat right along with their cheating, entitled parents, because they believe they deserve to go to Georgetown.

Robert Reich is correct, this is the rot that concentration of wealth has brought to our country.

Randall Lane has a long read at Forbes about “Reimagining Capitalism” in which he summarizes his one-on-one discussions with two dozen billionaires, including face-to-face meetings with the three richest people in the world, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Warren Buffett, about capitalism’s future. Lane says:

“Virtually every billionaire I spoke with acknowledged that higher taxes on the billionaire set are inevitable; most even saw them as beneficial, if correctly applied. According to Gates, Buffett, Khosla and others, the correct way to levy taxes on the superrich is….Either an estate tax without the loopholes that currently render it useless or a higher capital gains tax applied only on extreme fortunes…”

He quotes Buffett about the disparity of earnings between the top 1% and the bottom 50%:

“The market system as it gets more specialized pushes more money to the top….The natural function of a more specialized market economy is to divert more and more of the rewards to the top. That’s something I don’t think we’ve fully addressed in this country.”

Lane points out that Bill and Melinda Gates even went on Steven Colbert and called for higher taxes on the super-rich.

Younger Americans know that the deck is stacked. That may be in part why some kids play along with their parents and cheat to get into Harvard.

An often-cited 2016 Harvard University survey found that 51% of American youth aged 18 to 29 no longer support capitalism. Only 42% said they back it, while just 19% were willing to call themselves “capitalists.” A follow-up focus group study concluded that most felt that:

“Capitalism was unfair and left people out despite their hard work.”

Gene Sperling, Obama’s Director of the National Economic Council, has an interesting take on redefining our overall economic goal. He says we should strive for “Economic Dignity”. His conclusion is that the Fed and the Congress should implement a full employment monetary and fiscal policy that fosters tight labor markets.

Sperling says that would be a triple win for economic dignity, because it would lead to higher wages, and it would give companies greater incentive to provide advanced training to their employees. Meanwhile, high labor demand gives more workers some “take this job and shove it” leverage that they lack today.

Taken together, it would allow people to care for and provide opportunity to their families, something that is at the core of America’s beliefs.

Young Americans know that capitalism in its current form creates inequality, oppression, and exploitation. It could be made to work for all if it were more responsive to society’s needs, and yes, if it provided economic dignity for all.

Those who have been rewarded by capitalism shouldn’t be able to use their bounty to make the lives of others worse than they are. This isn’t just about the Koch brothers. It’s also about the merely wealthy who scam the college admissions system to get their kids into better schools.

We should be showing the young that there’s a better form of capitalism.

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