Tuesday, January 22, 2019
No one said rich people were very sharp: Davos tries to combat populism
https://rwer.wordpress.com/2019/01/22/no-one-said-rich-people-were-very-sharp-davos-tries-to-combat-populism/
January 22, 2019
from Dean Baker
Let’s see, cattle ranchers are against vegetarianism, coal companies are against restricting CO2 emissions, and the Davos crew is trying to combat populism, according to The Washington Post. It is kind of amazing that the rich people at Davos would not understand how absurd this is.
Yeah, we get that rich people don’t like the idea of movements that would leave them much less rich, but is it helpful to their cause to tell us that they are devoting their rich people’s conference to combating them? The real incredible aspect of Davos is that so many political leaders and news organizations would go to a meeting that is quite explicitly about rich people trying to set an agenda for the world.
It is important to remember, the World Economic Forum is not some sort of international organization like the United Nations, the OECD, or even the International Monetary Fund. It is a for-profit organization that makes money by entertaining extremely rich people. The real outrage of the story is that top political leaders, academics, and new outlets feel obligated to entertain them.
Kamala Harris Assembles Campaign Staff Of Unpaid California Prison Laborers
https://politics.theonion.com/kamala-harris-assembles-campaign-staff-of-unpaid-califo-1831958905
WASHINGTON—On the heels of yesterday’s announcement that she would be running for president, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) reportedly began staffing her campaign Tuesday with unpaid inmates from California correctional facilities.
“I’m so grateful to have such an incredible and devoted team headed up by my new campaign manager, Spider, as we work together to fight for American values,” said Harris of the two dozen non-violent criminal offenders who would reportedly work shifts of up to 72 hours out of her campaign office in exchange for three square meals a day and all the “Kamala Harris 2020” merchandise they could carry.
“Whether it’s knocking on doors, leading focus groups, making phone calls, or helping prep me for upcoming media appearances, my entire staff will be comprised of unpaid prison laborers. Not only will this cut campaign-related expenses by up to $20 million, it will also allow inmates to spend time in the community and provide them with valuable work-related opportunities.”
Harris added that due to a quirk in California state law, most inmates would be ineligible to work for other political campaigns once they’d been released from prison.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Crusher of Sacred Cows
With its silly swipes at AOC,
the American political establishment is once again revealing its blindness to
its own unpopularity
By MATT TAIBBI
One of the first things you
learn covering American politicians is that they’re not terribly bright.
The notion that Hill denizens
are brilliant 4-D chess players is pure myth, the product of too many press
hagiographies of the Game Change variety and too many Hollywood
fantasies like House of Cards and West Wing.
The average American
politician would lose at checkers to a zoo gorilla. They’re usually in office
for one reason: someone with money sent them there, often to vote yes on a key
appropriation bill or two. On the other 364 days of the year, their job is to
shut their yaps and approximate gravitas anytime they’re in range of C-SPAN
cameras.
Too many hacks float to the
capital on beds of national committee money and other donor largesse, but then
— once they get behind that desk and sit between those big flags — start
thinking they’re actually beloved tribunes of the people, whose opinions on all
things are eagerly desired.
So they talk. What do they
talk about? To the consternation of donors, all kinds of stuff. Remember Ted
Stevens explaining that the Internet “is
not a big truck”? How about Hank Johnson worrying that Guam would become so
overpopulated it would “tip over and capsize”? How about Oklahoma Republican Jim
Bridenstine noting that just because the Supreme Court rules on something, that
“doesn’t necessarily mean that that’s constitutional”?
There’s a reason aides try to
keep their bosses away from microphones, particularly when there’s a potential
for a question of SAT-or-higher level difficulty in the interview. But the
subject elected officials have the most trouble staying away from is each
other.
We’ve seen this a lot in
recent weeks with the ongoing freakout over newcomer Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez. Lest anyone think any of the above applies to “AOC,” who’s
also had a lot to say since arriving in Washington, remember: she won in spite of
the party and big donors, not because of them.
That doesn’t make anything she
says inherently more or less correct. But it changes the dynamic a bit. All of
AOC’s supporters sent her to Washington precisely to make noise. There isn’t a
cabal of key donors standing behind her, cringing every time she talks about
the Pentagon budget. She is there to be a pain in the ass, and it’s working.
Virtually the entire spectrum
of Washington officialdom has responded to her with horror and anguish.
The mortification on the
Republican side has come more from media figures than actual elected officials.
Still, there are plenty of people like Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) doing things
like denouncing “this girl, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,
whatever she is” for preaching “socialism wrapped in ignorance.” A group of GOP
House members booed her on the floor, to which she replied, “Don’t hate me cause you ain’t me, fellas.”
The Beltway press mostly can’t
stand her. A common theme is that, as a self-proclaimed socialist, she should
be roaming the halls of Rayburn and Cannon in rags or a barrel. Washington
Examiner reporter Eddie Scarry tweeted a photo of her in a suit, saying
she didn’t look like “a girl who struggles.”
High priest of conventional
wisdom Chris Cillizza, with breathtaking predictability, penned a column comparing her to Donald Trump. He noted the social media
profiles of both allow them to “end-run the so-called ‘media filter’ and
deliver their preferred message… directly to supporters.”
The latter issue, of course,
is the real problem most of Washington has with “AOC”: her self-generated
popularity and large social media presence means she doesn’t need to ask
anyone’s permission to say anything.
She doesn’t have to run things
by donors and she doesn’t need the assent of thinkfluencers like Cillizza or
Max Boot (who similarly compared her to both Trump and Sarah Palin), because she almost certainly
gains popularity every time one of those nitwits takes a swipe at her.
Which brings us to elected
Democrats, who if anything have been most demonstrative in their AOC freakout.
We had Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO) saying, “We don’t need your sniping in our Democratic
caucus.” Recently ousted Sen. Claire McCaskill expressed alarm that she’s “the thing” and a “bright
shiny new object.”
This is in addition to the
litany of anonymous complaints from fellow caucus members, some of whom felt
she jumped the line in an attempt to get a Ways and Means committee assignment.
There were whispers she did this through some online-pressure sorcery she alone
could avail herself of thanks to her massive Twitter following (nearly every
news story about Ocasio-Cortez mentions her 2.47 million Twitter followers).
“It totally pissed off
everyone,” one senior House Democrat said about the Ways and Means campaign. “You don’t get
picked for committees by who your grass-roots [supporters] are.”
“She needs to decide: Does she
want to be an effective legislator or just continue being a Twitter star?” said
another Democrat, whom Politico described as being “in lockstep” with
AOC’s ideology.
All of which brings us back to
the issue of Washington’s would-be 4-D chess players. Time and again, they
reveal how little they understand about the extent of their own influence, or
anti-influence, as it were.
They all think the
pronouncements of their own party leaders, and donors, and high-profile commentators
at the Times and the Post or CNN, have extraordinary
importance. They think this for the obvious reason that most of them owe
their political careers to such people.
Ocasio-Cortez does not. In
this one narrow sense, her story does indeed have something in common with the
story of Trump. As did Trump, Ocasio-Cortez probably picks up a dozen future
votes every time a party hack or hurrumphing pundit or ossifying ex-officeholder
like McCaskill or Scott Walker or Joe Lieberman throws a tantrum over her.
Somehow, three years after the
2016 election, which was as graphic a demonstration of the public’s
well-documented disgust
with Washington as we’ve ever seen, these waxen functionaries of the
political class still don’t understand that their disapproval more often than
not counts as an endorsement to most voters.
The Lieberman example is the
most amazing. Here’s a person who was explicitly rejected by his own party in
2006 and had to run as an Independent against the Democratic nominee to keep
his seat. Yet he somehow still has the stones to opine that if Ocasio-Cortez is
the “new face” of the Democrats, the party does not have a “bright future.”
How many Democrats, do you
think, heard that and immediately thought the opposite – that if Joe Lieberman
disapproves, Ocasio-Cortez must be on the right track? Sixty percent? Seventy?
I have no idea if
Ocasio-Cortez will or will not end up being a great politician. But it’s
abundantly clear that her mere presence is unmasking many, if not most, of the
worst and most tired Shibboleths of the capital.
Moreover, she’s laying bare
the long-concealed fact that many of their core policies are wildly unpopular,
and would be overturned in a heartbeat if we could somehow put them all to
direct national referendum.
Take the tax proposal offered
by Ocasio-Cortez, which would ding the top bracket for 70 percent taxes on all
income above $10 million.
The idea inspired howls of
outrage, with wrongest-human-in-history Alan Greenspan peeking out of his crypt to call it a
“terrible idea,” Wisconsin’s ex-somebody Walker saying a 5th grader would
know it was “unfair,” and human anti-weathervane Harry Reid saying “you have to
be careful” because voters don’t want “radical change quickly.”
Except polls show the exact
opposite. Almost everyone wants to soak the rich. A joint survey by The
Hill and Harris X showed 71 percent of Democrats, 60 percent of
Independents, and even 45 percent of Republicans endorse the Ocasio-Cortez
plan.
Is it feasible? It turns out
it might very well be, as even Paul Krugman, who admits AOC’s rise makes him “uneasy,” said in a recent column. He noted the head of Barack Obama’s Council
of Economic Advisers estimated the top rate should be even higher, perhaps
even 80 percent.
We’ve been living for decades
in a universe where the basic tenets of supply-side economics — that there’s a
massive and obvious benefit for all in dumping piles of money in the hands of
very rich people — have gone more or less unquestioned.
Now we see: once a popular,
media-savvy politician who doesn’t owe rich donors starts asking such
questions, the Potemkin justifications for these policies can tumble quickly.
There is a whole range
of popular policy ideas the Washington political
consensus has been beating back for decades with smoke and mirrors, from
universal health care to legalized weed to free tuition to expanded Social
Security to those higher taxes on the rich.
As we’ve seen over and over
with these swipes on Ocasio-Cortez, the people defending those ideas don’t
realize how powerful a stimulant for change is their own negative attention. If
they were smart, they’d ignore her.
Then again, if politicians
were smart, they’d also already be representing people, not donors. And they
wouldn’t have this problem.
Kamala Harris, Opportunist to the Core
Posted on January
22, 2019 by Yves
Smith
Kamala Harris’ presidential
campaign has barely made its official start, and she’s continuing to show her
unfitness for the job. Martin Luther King would be rolling in his grave if he
were to learn that a former big city and then state prosecutor, with no known
history of protesting but an anti-minorities rap sheet that includes
criminalizing truancy, enthusiastically prosecuting drug-related activity, and
pushed to keep nonviolent “second-strike” convicts in prison to assure
California a continued supply of cheap labor, was misusing his name to try to
burnish her sorry record.
If you missed them, these
reviews of Harris’ record as a prosecutor should disabuse you of the notion
that she’s a friend of the downtrodden:
Kamala Harris Was Not a ‘Progressive Prosecutor’ Lara
Bazelon, New York Times
A Problem for Kamala Harris: Can a Prosecutor Become President
in the Age of Black Lives Matter?Intercept
The Two Faces of Kamala Harris Jacobin
Readers may recall that last
week, we addressed one Harris Big Lie about her record, that she was a big
defender of abused homeowners by virtue of having gotten a less terrible deal
than 48 other states in the 2012 National Mortgage Settlement, which we’ve
regularly described as a “get out of liability almost free card” for the big
mortgage servicers. Her lack of a commitment to homeowners, and her pliancy to
big money interests, was confirmed by her failure to investigate One West Bank,
ignoring a 2013 memo from attorneys in her office flagging the appearance of
“widespread misconduct.” Her complacency was rewarded via One West’s former
CEO, Steve Mnuchin, making Harris the recipient of his lone donation to a
Democratic party Senate candidate.
Needless to say, if Harris had
prosecuted Mnuchin, it’s hard to imagine he’d be Treasury Secretary now.
Harris’ book, The Truths We
Hold, published earlier this month to help grease campaign skids, shows Harris
applying lots of porcine maquillage to her record. It doesn’t work
very well. As Teodrose Fikre writes in Black Agenda Report on one of the more
measured reviews, by Hannah Giorgis in the Atlantic:
Kamala Harris’s memoir reads
nothing like her actual record of locking up the poor and giving impunity to
the rich…
Checking off identity boxes
and getting jiggy with it is not enough, we must demand more from politicians
than soundbites and feigned indignation. Instead of addressing income
inequalities and systematic imbalances that are the sources of most social
ills, Harris tries to hide behind anecdotes and outlier stories in an attempt
to minimize the disproportionate impact her decisions had on the poor and
working class. After making a name for herself by aggressively locking up
Californians and enhancing the inmate supply for the prison-industrial complex,
she is now attempting an image makeover by using social justice and diversity
hustles as launching pads….
Harris’s take every prisoner
temperament was nowhere to be found when the time came for her to take on
robber barons. She famously chose to look the other way when she had the chance
to prosecute Steve Mnuchin and make an example of unscrupulous bankers.Her
“progressive prosecution” reserved progress for the rich and doled out
draconian measures for the poor and marginalized. It is worth repeating,
Harris’s administration effectively argued for slave labor in order to enrich
penal plantations.
Kamala Harris is no activist,
she is Hillary Clinton in a black face.This is precisely the reason why the
corporate donor class are licking their chops and pushing Harris as a viable
presidential candidate. She has proven her loyalty to Wall Street; when push
comes to shove, CEOs know that they have an ally in Kamala. What Harris is
banking on is an electorate that is so deranged by Trump’s puerility that we
don’t inspect her positions and just accept her optics and rhetoric as a
suitable alternative to the incumbent president.
The one bit of good news is
that Harris’ campaign is so hopelessly tone deaf and narcissistic that Harris
will do herself in as a serious contender in no time fast on current
trajectories. A reader sent a copy of the “Day 1” fundraiser, which if done
properly, should set the tone for the campaign.
What do we learn from this
sorry missive? That Harris apparently regards herself as such an Oprah-level
celebrity that her mere presence is enough to get citizens to want to vote for
her. However, she can’t resist remind us of her top 10% bona fides, that she is
able to find a “healthy snack” in Penn Station vending machines. God forbid we
catch a Ruler of the Free World wannabe enjoying some potato chips. Might be
mistaken for Trump!
Another
revealing-in-not-a-good-way bit is the last photo, of Harris supposedly getting
down to “hard work”. As you can see from the image, “hard work” is standing up
while staff applauds. It’s bad enough to see this sort of thing at CalPERS; we
need to keep that pathology from going national.
So Harris presents absolutely
nothing in the way of policy stances. Apparently the reasons to want her as
President is that she’s photogenic by the not-too-high standards of politics
and she gets bonus points for not being a white man.
And this sorry e-mail really
is representative of her campaign pitch. Her site is every bit as narcissistic
as the fundraising appeal. It admittedly has a centrist dog-whistle in the form
of a
long-ish bio which is an attempt to position Harris on policy while
punting on taking any positions. But otherwise, it’s long on pretty pix and
thin on much else.
It’s stating the obvious that
Harris is yet another variant on the Obama formula: take an attractive,
well-educated, mixed-race centrist and encourage the press and public to
project that their “minority” background means that they’ll be staunch
defenders of the downtrodden.
But the public isn’t so easily
fooled. 9 million foreclosures, many of which could have been prevented,
bailouts for banksters, a two-tier recovery with smug elites preaching “Let
them eat training” to people stuck outside big cities or too old to be
employable, and sky-high Obamacare deductibles mean a lot of voters are not
going to fall for idpol packaging as easily a second time. Plus Obama had so
little in the way of a political track record that it was easy for him to be a
shape-shifter; he made his stint as a community organizer go a long way. Even
now, hardly anyone knows that Obama, along with his wife Michelle and Valerie
Jarret, as
described by Robert Fitch, built their early career success by lending an
appearance of legitimacy to moving black South Chicago further south on behalf
of local real estate and finance interests.
Further complicating the
foolhardy effort to cast Harris in the Obama mold is that she’s got way too
much political baggage to fool all that many people as to what she is really
about.
So it’s telling that
self-absorbed Harris campaign imagery clashes with her slogan, “For the
people”. Even more so than for most politicians, Harris’ team has to stick with
the surface because that’s all they have to sell
Greenland Melting 4x Faster Than in 2003, and From an Unexpected Source
Greenland is
melting about four times faster than it was in 2003, a new study published
Monday in the Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences found, a discovery with
frightening implications for the pace and extent of future sea level rise.
"We're going to see
faster and faster sea level rise for the foreseeable future," study lead
author and Ohio State University geodynamics professor Dr. Michael Bevis said
in a press release. "Once you hit that tipping point, the
only question is: How severe does it get?"
The study comes a week
after another study found that ice melt in Antarctica had
increased sixfold in the past 40 years and included consistent loss from East
Antarctica, a region previously believed to be more stable.
The Greenland study also found
that ice melt was coming from an unexpected place: Greenland's southwest
region, which is not home to iceberg-calving glaciers like the more studied
southeast and northwest. But the most consistent ice loss between 2003 and 2012
came from ice melting directly from this understudied region into the ocean.
"We knew we had one big
problem with increasing rates of ice discharge by some large outlet
glaciers," Bevis said. "But now we recognize a second serious
problem: Increasingly, large amounts of ice mass are going to leave as
meltwater, as rivers that flow into the sea."
The paper found that the
region "will become a major contributor to sea level rise" within two
decades, The New York Times reported.
The researchers used data from
Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE), twin satellites launched by
Germany and NASA in 2002 to monitor ice loss from Greenland, as well as from
GPS stations. They found that between 2002 and 2016, Greenland lost 280
gigatons of ice each year, adding 0.03 inches of water to the world's oceans annually.
Researchers did note a pause
in melting around 2013, which coincided with a reversal in the North Atlantic
Oscillation, which brings warmer air to Greenland periodically. However, Bevis
told The New York Times that the pause is actually a reason for concern.
Cyclical patterns of warmer and cooler temperatures did not usually impact
Greenland so dramatically. If the base-level temperature is now so warm that
natural warm cycles accelerate melting, but natural cool cycles only pause it,
then the ice sheet could be close to a "tipping point."
"One degree of warming in
the future will have way more impact than one degree of warming in the last
century," Bevis said.
But the authors of another study published in December 2018, which found
Greenland was melting at its fastest rate in 350 years, cautioned The New York
Times about the tipping point language.
"I take issue with using
'tipping point' to describe the accelerating mass loss Greenland is
experiencing," Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute scientist Dr. Sarah B.
Das said. "it makes it appear as if we have passed, or soon will pass, the
point of no return."
Her co-author Rowan University
glaciologist Dr. Luke D. Trusel agreed that there were still meaningful actions
humans could take to mitigate the loss.
"By limiting greenhouse
gas emissions we limit warming, and thus also limit how rapidly and intensely
Greenland affects our livelihoods through sea-level rise," he added.
"That, it seems, is our call to make."
Monday, January 21, 2019
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