AJ+: Young Swedes React To U.S. Democratic Presidential Debate

C'mon AJ+, surely you could have found a few fascists even in Sverige ?

Wonders...What reason might Al Jazeera's backers have to encourage a Sanders presidency ?...Feel the Bern !

Bernie at Liberty U.

Got round to watching this speech by Bernie Sanders at Liberty University, and it's pretty impressive.  Both as a speech generally, and given the nature of Sanders' audience.  Not all* seem as enthusiastic as the few screamers when the camera pans out, and granted, this is the same school which forced their students to attend Ted Cruz, but this seems a pretty positive reception for what the media would paint as a far-left radical message, in anything but ideologically friendly territory.**

I especially like the willingness to 'go there' on actual New Testament-principles, and to call out, if only implicitly the utter hypocrisy of the political and religious elites.  Most establishment-politicians couldn't pull that off.  Trump could almost, but he's an evident self-serving egomaniac whose every other word is a lie.

And this is the speech almost of a general election-campaign, with the primaries months away, and the party in question being largely ignored by the media, outside of the faux-controversy over Hillary's e-mail-server.  Bernie may or may not actually think he could go all the way (as may not Trump, as may not have Corbyn), but he's evidently embracing the moment, and making the most of the spotlight, to get his economic message out.  I approve.

Now, he just needs to get some non-pasty white folk on side.  I don't see any movement on that front sadly.


* To say the least, skimming a second time over.  Quite Nixon/Kennedy in the dichotomy between audio & video.****

** I almost wonder if some of the current upheaval in Western politics is generational, and if the media tends to underestimate the millennials, given what just happened in the UK.  If I ignorantly attribute the attitudes of my generation and similar to millennials, and assume incorrectly that past experience justifies current cynicism.  Almost.***

*** Evidently no-one knows a damn thing with our current political swings, myself included.

**** And then after I finish writing all this, I hear that they intentionally positioned some of Bernie's supporters up front near the mics.  Well, fer...


Update: Full video here from C-SPAN, including the warm-up, if you give a crap about that, and the post-speech Q&A.

In Case It Wasn't Obvious

How to get rich by running for president

The year 2008 was great for Mike Huckabee—but not as a politician. The former Arkansas governor bailed out of the presidential race in March of that year after losing steam in the early primary elections. But simply running for president elevated Huckabee to the status of celebrity, while helping him build a devoted following among southern and Midwestern evangelicals. Huckabee has since converted the renown that comes with running for national office into a business enterprise that has made him wealthy, with a palatial beachfront home, access to private jets and other perks of the 1%.

Huckabee is running for president again, of course, which makes him one of perhaps 12 or 15 candidates likely to enjoy free media attention and additional publicity funded by donors—even though polls show they have virtually no chance of winning. The presence of so many obscure candidates in the 2016 race—Jim Gilmore, Lincoln Chafee, James Webb, George Pataki, and so on—prompts an obvious question: Why are they running? Huckabee’s experience suggests one answer: Because running for president can be a highly lucrative form of work.

No serious candidate* will admit to running for president purely as a self-promotional stunt. Some may be trying to gain exposure for a more serious run for office in the future. Others may be using a run to promote their companies or personal brands, like Steve Forbes in 1996 and 2000 and Donald Trump now. And many candidates no doubt feel they have a serious message to convey to voters, while perhaps also angling for a Cabinet position, ambassadorship, or other plum job if their party’s nominee ends up winning the White House. “You can emerge from the campaign as a power broker, as somebody influential with the media and with lobbyists,” says Julian Zelizer of Princeton University’s Center for the Study of Democratic Politics. “I’m sure that’s on the mind of some of these candidates.”

Still, savvy candidates can nonetheless parlay the fame that comes from televised debates, a decent showing in a couple of early primaries, and wall-to-wall media coverage into a juicy 7- or 8-figure income. Huckabee serves as a good case study of the business of running for president because his financial disclosures represent an instructive before-and-after story. Huckabee was Arkansas governor for 12 years, from 1996 to 2007, living for most of that time on a modest salary of around $70,000. He announced his first run for president almost immediately after leaving the governor’s office, in January 2007, when he also started giving paid speeches and accepting other business offers fitting an ex-governor.

At the time, Huckabee was comfortable but far from rich. On the 2007 disclosure form he filed (required for all presidential candidates), Huckabee listed business income of about $325,000, including his governor’s salary, book royalties and a one-time consulting fee of $40,000. He also earned speaking fees of nearly $140,000 during the 15 months prior to filing the 2007 disclosure form, most of it in the first quarter of 2007. Overall, his annual income back then was close to  $400,000.

That was pretty good, but life was about to get much better for "Huck," as he's known. After dropping out of the 2008 race, he scored a Fox News TV show and a national radio program. Huckabee had written several books before running for president, but the books he’s written since then have sold much better, including his 2015 bestseller "God, Guns, Grits & Gravy."Huckabee now earns two to three times as much for giving a speech -- and he gives a lot more of them. He also runs a group of companies called Blue Diamond that handle his travel, publishing ventures and other lines of business, with his wife Janet on the payroll of at least one of them....

I just love how Yahoo! states that Huckabee was 'far from rich' whilst earning $400,000 a year.  Which is about 1400% more than the US' individual median.  But evidently...still...not enough.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with cashing in on fame, as countless other Americans have done in just about every industry. Huckabee, for his part, is an entrepreneurial character with a folksy personality that makes him popular in broad patches of middle America. Santorum has gravitated away from a traditional revolving-door career and found a way to make a living that's more in line with the conservative social values he espouses as a candidate. Both are capitalizing on opportunity in ways many other Americans would if they could.

Besides, Huckabee and Santorum are serfs compared with some other prominent candidates. Democrat Hillary Clinton typically earns at least $225,000 per paid speech, and she pulled in nearly $12 million in speaking fees in the 15 months ended March 31 of this year. Her husband Bill, the former president, earns even more....

The best thing about the business of running for president is that other people typically pay for it. A few superrich candidates fund their own campaigns—as Donald Trump is doing, and Steve Forbes and Ross Perot did before him—but most candidates spend only what they’re able to raise from donors. Huckabee raised about $16 million when he ran in 2008. All of it came from donors, meaning none of his campaign spending was self-financed. But Huckabee’s haul was a tiny fraction of what party nominees John McCain and Barack Obama raised, which limited his staying power in the primary races.

...

Huckabee, who now resides in Florida, has reportedly developed a taste for the good life, prompting controversy over whether he’s duping donors into funding what is basically a private venture that principally benefits himself and his family. But Zelizer of Princeton says most donors know what they’re paying for when they help fund a low-probability candidate. “Some of these donors may be gullible, but I think they’re making other bets,” says Zelizer. “Maybe they’re able to walk into the room with a power broker.” There are worse ways to spend money, if you've got a lot to spend.

There's the problem, right there.  We're talking about someone making a high six-figure income as if he were working poor, and the same person making millions as a relative 'serf'.  And the billionaires above that level, well of course it's all monopoly-money, play-money if you will.  And inevitably, someone with that much spare cash, will play with it.  Why the fuck not ?  You could never spend it it in your lifetime, you've already got trusts set up for your children & grandchildren; What else are you going to do with the excess cash ?  Burn it in a giant bonfire for kicks & giggles ?

The best economic arguments for more progressive taxation are fiscal ones, but above and beyond that, closer and closer concentration of wealth, is inherently toxic to democracy.**  The US has at this point passed the boundary from 'nominal democracy' to outright plutocracy.  And the tone of this article suggests that the media at any rate, are still in total denial about that fact, so removed from ordinary economic realities as they would seem to be.  Eight decades ago, even the more radical right-wing American politicians saw the dangers of continuing inequality, the threat of outright revolution if they couldn't contain the rot.  Today, we're leaving the former gilded age behind, and entering uncharted territory.  Whatever happens next, like as not, won't be pretty.


* Huckabee is a serious candidate ?

** Especially when idiots in the Supreme Court decide, à la Citizens United, that somehow money and free speech are one and the same, and that there should be no upper limits or restrictions on expenditure to buy elections.

Feel the Bern ! Or Not

Somehow this video just sums up perfectly for me the Bernie Sanders campaign.  And is a complete 180 from the slickly produced and carefully scripted videos Hillary puts out.

Here we have the guy speaking, not in a packed stadium to thousands of supporters, but in someone's living room*, surrounded largely by overweight pasty white folk, as he dishes on the evil Koch brothers, whilst the guy to his right yawns and picks his teeth.  And in which he manages to both shush his supporters, and tell them 'you should know that'.

The old guy's got a good message, can't deny.  I predict he'll make an excellent mayor of Burlington, VT.

From a page on C&L entitled ironically enough, 'Bernie Electrifies Crowds In Louisiana With Climate Change Message'.


* Just imagine Hillary doing this.  No, no, just try.

Washington Post: The remarkably high odds you’ll be poor at some point in your life

The remarkably high odds you’ll be poor at some point in your life

The poor in America are not a permanent class of people. Who's poor in any given year is different from who's poor a few years later.

Census data on who participates in assistance programs suggests as much. But Mark Rank, a sociologist at Washington University, has for several years been compiling far more comprehensive evidence of this pattern. He and colleagues have been studying the economic fortunes of several thousand families in the longest running longitudinal survey in America, going all the way back to 1968. Follow people over a really long period of time, they've found, and an incredible number of them experience economic insecurity at some point.

In fact, a vast majority do.

By the time they're 60 years old, Rank has found, nearly four in five people experience some kind of economic hardship: They've gone through a spell of unemployment, or spent time relying on a government program for the poor like food stamps, or lived at least one year in poverty or very close to it.

...

"Rather than an uncommon event," Rank says, "poverty was much more common than many people had assumed once you looked over a long period of time."

...

"The story of the American life course is marked by a surprising degree of economic movement and volatility," Rank says.

That means that the poor (or even the wealthy) are not some abstract other. The poor are, well, us — or us 10 or 15 years from now. If more people recognized this, Rank suggests, it's reasonable to think there'd be greater public support for programs that aid the poor. If you don't like food stamps because you think you'll never need them, maybe these probabilities would change your mind.

Here's the fucked-up thing though, regardless how how high someone may score on those EQ tests, their empathy tends to drop away to zero when it's someone they've never met.  (Understandably in part, as we'd go mad if we had to face up to all the suffering in this world)  And people, especially religious people, tend to have a rather distorted sense of what they face in their life/what they are likely to experience, and what is the norm. for others.

Hence: Others suffer economically, and need assistance, and they're all lazy moochers who deserve it because of their poor life-choices and sinful lifestyle.  I succeed in life, and it's just a result purely of my hard work and a reward of my inherent virtues, no luck involved, no external factors acknowledged.  I fall on hard times, and it's all a result of external factors that conspired against me, despite my hard work, and I deserve to be helped dammit 'cos I paid into the system with my hard-earned tax-dollars.

Most of those who never have fallen on hard times will likely simply assume it will never happen, and that those to whom it does happen deserve it somehow.  And many of those who have, still manage to look down on the economically less privileged, once they personally are back on their feet.

Basically, we're all delusional selfish assholes, who see ourselves as somehow inherently more moral and deserving than we really are.  We're kinda designed that way.  And if we weren't, how else to explain our elections ?

So, to answer the WaPo's question in that last sentence, no, it won't change people's minds.  Not a bit.



PS, if you were wondering about how this breaks down by 'racial privilege' as it were, well here you go:

Guess whites just work that much harder than everyone else, right ?

Daily Kos on Trump's Inconsistencies

When he last ran for president, Trump proposed a massive tax on billionaires

What were his beliefs? At the time, Trump said he was “very pro-choice,” endorsed single-payer as solution to our healthcare crisis—and told Meet the Press he was open-minded to supporting gay marriage.

But on one issue that would affect billionaires like him personally, Donald Trump could not have been more liberal. According to this CNN article from 1999, Trump proposed erasing the national debt—with a one-time “wealth tax” on the mega-rich.

Trump, a prospective candidate for the Reform Party presidential nomination, is proposing a one-time "net worth tax" on individuals and trusts worth $10 million or more.

And he even used language that would later become slogans for the Occupy movement to sell his proposal.

“By my calculations, 1 percent of Americans, who control 90 percent of the wealth in this country, would be affected by my plan,” Trump said. “The other 99 percent of the people would get deep reductions in their federal income taxes … Personally this plan would cost me hundreds of millions of dollars, but in all honesty, it’s worth it.”

It really is all a game.  A performance.  And the media just laps it up unquestioningly.

Jeb Bush is a Dick Part MMDCCLXI

The 'smarter Bush':

“My aspiration for the country and I believe we can achieve it, is 4 percent growth as far as the eye can see. Which means we have to be a lot more productive, workforce participation has to rise from its all-time modern lows. It means that people need to work longer hours” and, through their productivity, gain more income for their families. That's the only way we're going to get out of this rut that we're in.”

There isn't enough work for the existing population, so those in work, should work even longer hours.  We need an even more productive & even more-overworked workforce, than that which ensures not enough jobs currently.  Makes perfect sense.

Asshole.

Jeb Bush says Americans should work more hours. but they already are working more than ever before for stagnant pay pic.twitter.com/WpsGUqvszI

— Political Line (@PoliticalLine) July 8, 2015

Well Played Gideon, Well Played

Hopes that people will fall for it, rather.  And no doubt...they will.

George Osborne sought to outflank Labour and soften the blow from a £12bn cut to Britain’s welfare bill when he made a big rise in the minimum wage the centrepiece of the first Conservative budget in almost two decades.

In a move that went further than Labour was planning at the general election, the chancellor said employers would be forced to pay staff a minimum of £7.20 an hour from next April and raise wages by 6% a year on average to around £9 an hour by the end of the parliament.

And oh how the right-wing press would have savaged Labour for going through with even a £8 minimum'living wage' as anti-business radical extremists.

Relishing the freedom to deliver his latest budget unfettered by coalition, the chancellor eased up on the pace of deficit reduction and reduced the size of the cuts that Whitehall departments will face in the coming years.

What, suddenly, reducing the deficit isn't so critical any more ?  But still going to do your damnedest to defund and destroy the BBC, aren't you ?

On the assumption that the economy grows steadily at around 2.5% a year, the Treasury is now expecting a £10bn surplus in the final year of the parliament – a sizeable war chest for the 2020 election. The improvement in public finances will come partly through a tougher tax regime for buy-to-let landlords, restricting non-dom tax status and by increased dividend taxation.

'Non-dom', 'non-dom'...Sounds familiar.  Wasn't there some politician banging on about that in the last election ?

Declaring “Britain needs a pay rise” – once the campaign slogan of the TUC – Osborne said he was directly boosting the national minimum wage of 2.7 million workers aged over 25. The increase, accompanied by substantial welfare cuts over three years, was designed to engineer a rebalancing between the individual and the state – a political intervention to shift responsibility for low incomes from the state to employers.

...

The announcement was greeted by the work and pensions secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, punching the air in triumph, but the shadow chancellor, Chris Leslie, said: “This minimum wage increase is just a rebrand of the minimum wage – trying to call it something different. It doesn’t actually compensate in any way for this massive take away from tax credits. The changes amount to a work penalty that he has introduced into the tax credit system. It hit very, very hard.”

The whole thing was brilliantly well-played, really*.  Theresa and Boris will no doubt be standing beside him in the wings with knives out come 2020-ish, but underestimate this man at your peril.  As a ruthless politician that is.  As an economist or as a human, he's shit.


* Well, other than Iain Duncan Smith's buffoonery.

Because CEO's in '78 Were Living On Food Stamps and Ramen

This, from the Economic Policy Institute in the US, is disgusting.

And most people's reaction ?  <Shrug>  Whaddya gonna do ?

No. 1, No. 1 !

The UK is the most unequal country in the EU, according to a new report.

The Dublin foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions, the EU’s agency for life at work, found that the UK had the worst Gini coefficient of any EU member state.

The Gini is one of the most widely used measures of inequality and calculates how income is distributed among a nation’s residents.

According to the results, the UK’s GINI rating is 0.404, a rate that has soared since the financial crisis in 2008. The result is well in excess of the EU average which is 0.346 and even exceeds the United States’ rating of 0.4.

Well sure.  Keeping in mind of course that the UK is really made up of at least five different countries, one of which, 'The City,' is to the British economy what California is to the US economy, were California several times wealthier, exponentially more plutocratic, almost completely devoid of any actual human residents, and the size of my toilet.*

*These comparisons are of course completely made-up, and any seeming resemblance to actual reality is purely a product of your imagination.

The Arquettegate Intersectionality

So, Patricia Arquette made some comments backstage at the Oscars, à propos of her call for pay-equality for women, that were perhaps not best calculated, and apparently people took it badly, and argued about it on Twitter, as people will.  Whatever, don't care, move on.  Having read a transcript of Arquette's comments, and not following Twitter, I naively assumed that the cause of offence was the implication that somehow the fights for equality for racial minorities and the 'gay community' were already and fully won, and that now it was the time to focus on women.  But, no.

Being fool enough to listen to a certain podcast (rhymes with rib lime), I am reliably informed that the problem was 'Intersectionality'.  Okay, let's take a look-see on the old wiki, and ah, fuck me.  Scroll, scroll, scroll...'a Marxist-feminist critical theory'...ugh.  I'm remembering now why I never liked liberals when I was younger.  Yeah, I get it, the experience of a black lesbian is different from that of say a black man or a white woman, and people can be oppressed along multiple axes of identity.  Yeah, no shit.

Apologies to Ukraine

My apologies to the people of Ukraine.  Our leaders continue to rant and rave as if they are going to risk military confrontation with Russia over the conflict in Donetsk and Luhansk, as if Russia can be forced to hand back Crimea.  It's cruel, the false hopes they persist in encouraging.  They're liars, and they can't admit the truth.

Sorry to have to say it, but the Ukraine you knew is gone...forever, and no amount of bluster or outrage will bring it back.  No, it isn't fair, but as parents say to their children, life isn't either.  And we tolerate plenty of unfairness we could do something about, never mind the things we can't.  Men earning more than women isn't fair, or whites earning more than minorities, or CEO's earning multiples in the hundreds of what their lowest paid employees get.  We tolerate income inequality, just as we tolerate homelessness, poor families going hungry, disproportionate incarceration of minorities, businesses colluding against consumers, politicians selling their office to the highest bidder.  We imprison whistleblowers pointing out the crimes of our governments, whilst war criminals go free.  We have an exceptionally high tolerance for unfairness generally.

And as for unfair territorial disputes or questions of sovereignty ?  We allow our greatest trading partner to bully its neighbours, and persistently threaten one of them (a peaceful democratic ally of ours) with use of military force up to and including nuclear weapons.  We've allowed an entire population in the West Bank and Gaza to be held hostage as political pawns, to be kept in amber as a perpetual 'refugee' population, decades after the wars that made them refugees.  We allow a population of twenty-five million in North Korea to be imprisoned under an insane radical dictatorship that threatens us with nuclear war because it suits the People's Republic of China to have it there between them and US-ally South Korea as a buffer state.  We won't be waging any 'wars of liberation' in North Korea anytime soon, will we ?  An entire state sacrificed for the realpolitik concerns of China, and we won't do anything about it...because we can't.

David Bowie: Panic in Detroit

Historically, geographically, the wholesale abandonment of Detroit by non- 'African-American' populations makes no sense.  And what other similar territory in the US would not, decades later, have been gentrified by now ?  What is it about this particular piece of real estate, with wealthy white suburbs ringing it all about, with nearby Arab-heavy suburban communities, and with so many auto factories relocated just north of the border into Canada ?  Where else in the US is the line between populations so explicitly marked along stark white and black lines ?  For what reason, and to what end ?  By rights, Detroit could have been/should be one of the jewels of America's crown.  Instead, it's a perpetual embarrassment, and a racial case-history upon which no race seems hugely inclined to dwell.  I could go into the current right-wing 'emergency measures' being put forward for the 'reform' of Detroit, but I don't think my heart could stand it.  Detroit deserved/deserves better.

Of course Detroit is merely practice.  YourTown, USA is next on the Billionaire agenda.  Your time will come, and sooner than you think...