#(or even below??) mortgage rate as an act of solidarity

[mashkaroom]

https://twitter.com/decoratedshed/status/1532538910546477056

okiee, thinking abt this bc of this tweet: i and my family have been on the whole very lucky with our housing situations BUT discrimination against single mothers, despite being illegal, is SO prevalent even in progressive areas with comparatively progressive tenant protections (Boston area in my case). When my parents divorced, my mother could not move out of the house despite desperately wanting to because literally no one would show her places. She claimed this was due to a law that didn’t allow landlords to evict single mothers. I have literally not been able to find a single trace of such a policy, so whoever she got this from I assume must have either being lying, or else this is a widespread misconception that people use as justification for discrimination despite no such actual protections being in place. But also literally this past year when we were moving, with my brother and i both legal adults, people LITERALLY just stopped responding when she said the lease would be “3, me and my two children”. Should be noted that my father had no such issues. And this was before even asking for income, so this isn’t even a question of income difference. I was talking about how the search for a new house was a dialect tour of russian boston, but this was literally because like 70% of the people willing to show us their houses were either russian landlords or russian real estate agents, bc they saw a fellow russian instead of a single mother. All this to say, community support is so important, but it should NOT be necessary for basic fucking necessities!

[nigeiadigitalmarketingcompany]

2:00PM Water Cooler 7/23/2019

Digital Elixir 2:00PM Water Cooler 7/23/2019

By Lambert Strether of Corrente

Trade

“U.S. farmers look past trade fears to cash in on China’s hog crisis” [Reuters]. “The U.S. trade war with China initially forced U.S. pork exporters to scour the world for new markets but as the swine fever crisis deepens they’re gearing up for new opportunities to supply the Chinese market later this year and next. The catch for U.S. hog farmers is that if they want to take advantage of the surge in Chinese pork demand, they can’t feed their pigs with the growth drug ractopamine which is widely used in the United States but banned in China. In recent years, the European Union has provided roughly two-thirds of China’s pork imports, excluding offal, with Germany, Spain, the Netherlands and Denmark the main suppliers, according to Chinese customs data. Potential demand is so huge, however, that the EU alone can’t satisfy it.” • Chlorinated chicken, pork à la ractopamine…

Politics

“But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?” –James Madison, Federalist 51

“They had one weapon left and both knew it: treachery.” –Frank Herbert, Dune

“2020 Democratic Presidential Nomination” [RealClearPolitics] (average of five polls). As of July 23: Biden still climbing at 28.6% (28.4), Sanders down at 14.8% (15.0%), Warren flat at 14.6% (14.6%), Buttigieg steady at 4.8% (4.8%), Harris flat bump 12.6% (12.6%), others Brownian motion.

* * *

2020

Harris (D)(1): “Kamala Harris once opposed legalizing marijuana. Now she wants to decriminalize it” [Yahoo News]. “The Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement Act, which was written by Harris and co-sponsored in the House by Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., would decriminalize marijuana at the federal level, implement re-sentencing or expungement for prior marijuana-based convictions, and tax revenue generated by the marijuana industry, with 50% of it used to create three trust funds…. he California Democrat, however, hasn’t always supported fully legalizing marijuana. Nine years ago, Harris opposed legislation that would have legalized marijuana in California.” • People do get to change their minds. But it’s always nicer when they do the right thing all along.

Klobuchar (D)(1): “2020 Candidates Delayed Paying Staff to Look Richer on Paper” [Daily Beast]. “For some campaigns, the ability to put off a payroll payment—whether by design or coincidence—made a substantial difference. That’s most true for the Klobuchar campaign, which reported $186,000 in salary expenditures on its last reported pay day, June 15. Federal Election Commission records indicate that the campaign was otherwise paying staffers on the 15th and last day of each month. But no paychecks went out at the end of June, according to its second quarter financial filing…. And at some point, she will either have to make all wage payments or simply not pay her staff. And by kicking the can down the road, she has been able to avoid taking the hit on a campaign finance filing for the time being.” • It’s gonna take an awfully big binder for Klobuchar to keep track of all that. Oh, and collective bargaining in the Sanders campaign is a big, big scandal. Potential wage theft? Not so much.

Warren (D)(1): “The Coming Economic Crash — And How to Stop It” [Elizabeth Warren, Medium]. “The [yield] curve has inverted before each and every recession in the past half century — with only one false signal.” • I’m not sure that’s entirely correct. From the Financial Times: “Prof [Campbell] Harvey’s research indicates only an inversion of at least three months is a reliable recession indicator. The curve briefly inverted in 1998, at the peak of the turmoil caused by Russia’s default and the blow-up of Long-Term Capital Management, but quickly normalised before a subsequent, more durable inversion in 2000 preceded the dotcom bust. The latest inversion only lasted five trading days.” In any case, a recession call at some point in the future is not a hard call. Still, good piece!

Warren (D)(2): “Warren warns of ‘coming economic crash’” [Politico]. How Politico summarizes the article above: “Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Monday predicted an imminent economic crisis unless the Trump administration and Congress quickly pass legislation to regulate the financial sector and significantly reduce middle class household debt.” • That’s shockingly bad and wrong, even for Politico. Warren recommends reducing household debt, monitoring and reducing leveraged corporate lending, strengthening manufacturing, and limiting potential shocks to the economy. Her recommendations are bulleted, ffs.

* * *

“‘She/hers’: In progressive move, 3 presidential hopefuls add pronouns to their bios” [NBC]. “Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s bio on her official presidential campaign Twitter page is touting a new addition: her pronouns. Earlier this month, her bio was updated to “U.S. Senator, former teacher, and candidate for president. Wife, mom … grandmother, and Okie. She/hers. Official campaign account.” She is one of three 2020 presidential hopeful to add pronouns on an official campaign Twitter account, along with Julian Castro and Bill de Blasio. On the surface, it’s just two words. But the inclusion of “she/hers” on a major candidate’s social media profile is no small feat in the eyes of LGBTQ advocates. Among the LGBTQ community and its allies, including pronouns in social media profiles has become increasingly common to avoid misgendering and to indicate solidarity with transgender and nonbinary people.” • Which is great, and one can only hope leads to solidarity with working class people.

RussiaGate

“Mueller testimony could be frustrating for both parties” [The Hill]. “Democrats want Mueller to breathe life into his 448-page report and demonstrate to the American public that Trump is guilty of obstructing his investigation — a verdict Mueller’s team purposely avoided in issuing its findings. Republicans will try to throw Mueller off his game, vowing to focus their questions on whether it was even proper to launch the investigation in the first place.” • I’ve noticed a tendency on the Twitter for liberal Democrats to assign work to others; here is the same tendency with Mueller. Why can’t they “demonstrate to the American public”? Meanwhile, I bet poor old straight-shootin’ Bob Mueller longs for the days when he was only greenlighting fake WMD evidence. Life was simpler, then.

2019

“Rashida Tlaib: Minimum wage should be $20 an hour, not $15” [The Hill]. “‘By the way, when we started [#FightFor15], it should have been $15. Now I think it should be $20. Make sure America Rising hears that. It should be $20 an hour — $18 to $20 an hour at this point,’ Tlaib said.” • And it also shouldn’t take six years to kick in. That’s even longer than ObamaCare took!

Realignment and Legitimacy

“Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – July 20, 2019” [Tony Wikrent, Ian Welsh]. • Interesting wrap-up.

Stats Watch

Richmond Fed Manufacturing Index, July 2019: “Fifth District manufacturing activity unexpectedly fell into contraction in July” [Econoday]. “The surprising weakness of today’s report contrasts with the Philly Fed and Empire State regional reports last week showing manufacturing rebounding in these regions. Despite the reported increase in input and output prices, the marked deterioration in the region’s manufacturing survey to the lowest level in six years is likely to bolster the dovish case for cutting the Fed funds rate at the FOMC meeting next week.”

FHFA House Price Index, May 2019: “FHFA had been holding up better than Case-Shiller but data for May point to less gradual slowing underway in home prices” [Econoday]. “Easing imbalances in housing are probably a plus for the long-term health of the sector but are perhaps unexpected given this year’s still strong job growth and the drop in mortgage rates.

Existing Home Sales, June 2019: “The housing market firmed in the early Spring but has since flattened out” [Econoday]. “Lack of momentum in housing, which is unexpected this year given the strength of the jobs market and the fall in mortgage rates, will be one factor that doves can cite at next week’s FOMC meeting in favor a rate cut.”

Shipping: “Trucking spot market underperforms expectations by 10% in June” [Freight Waves]. “The DAT US National Long Haul Van Freight Rate Index which measures the average long haul spot rate for dry van truckloads in the U.S. excluding fuel and other accessorial charges averaged $1.50/mile in June. This number fell well below expectations according to the freight futures settlement price which started the month over $1.66/mile, meaning futures market participants expected rates to be much higher than they were this June.

Tech: “Industrial robots are proving adept at picking up venture-capital funding. Logistics technology startup Fetch Robotics Inc. is adding to its support with a $46 million funding round…. which the Silicon Valley company will use to expand its range of products for the growing warehouse automation market” [Wall Street Journal]. “Fetch is working in a growing area of industrial automation focused on ‘collaborative robots’ that work alongside humans and can be easily integrated into existing operations. That can boost productivity without adding staff, a potential big plus for logistics companies as warehouse operators compete for workers in a tight jobs market.”

Tech: “How Amazon uses 18-wheelers to transfer heavy data loads to the cloud” [CNBC]. “Moving petabytes of data to a cloud like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure just by sending it out over the internet can take years. Some companies would rather not wait that long. So the cloud providers have come up with special-purpose hardware that can be filled up with data and then mailed to the cloud vendors for much faster migration. Using this equipment can save money, too, because moving data over a network in the usual way can get expensive. One business with big data, DigitalGlobe — a subsidiary of Maxar Technologies, came up with a more radical idea. It had AWS send over a truck over for faster delivery. AWS wound up announcing its Snowmobile 18-wheel truck for this exact purpose in 2016. None of AWS’ cloud competitors have followed suit — yet.” • The cloud turns out to have a pretty heavy footprint.

Manufacturing: “The prolonged grounding of the Boeing Co.’s 737 MAX is starting to ripple through the U.S. economy. The problems with the jet are cutting into U.S. exports and clouding the outlook for airlines and parts suppliers” [Wall Street Journal]. “The impact of the grounding and Boeing’s production cuts highlight the deep reach the aircraft manufacturer has across a range of high-value supply chains that have been all but idled while the company seeks a solution. Economists say Boeing’s production cuts likely weighed on U.S. gross domestic product in the second quarter, and warn the impact could intensify if the plane maker can’t resume deliveries as hoped in the fourth quarter. Companies ranging from engine maker General Electric Co. to smaller parts suppliers have tied the halt in deliveries of the aircraft to financial damage, or suspended profit guidance.”

The Biosphere

“Melting ice sheets, storm-damaged homes: For some, it’s a business opportunity” [Grist]. For example: “Worldwide demand for air conditioning is only going to increase, according to investors and those in the industry. ‘The hotter it gets, the more your business increases,’ John Staples, president and CEO of US Air Conditioning, told the Verge back in 2013. And he was right — by 2050, two-thirds of the world’s households are predicted to own an air conditioner. But it’s a bit of a catch-22: As the planet warms, access to A/C can save lives, but the more we use it, the more the world heats up. And though people are certainly making money off this boon in the HVAC market, they aren’t investing in developing new, greener methods of cooling.” • The capitalists will sell themselves the rope…

“WASTE ONLY: How the Plastics Industry Is Fighting to Keep Polluting the World” [The Intercept]. “China’s decision in 2017 to stop receiving the vast majority of plastic waste from other countries blew the flimsy lid off our dysfunctional recycling system. That year, when the Chinese government announced the National Sword policy, as it’s called, the U.S. sent 931 million kilograms of plastic waste to China and Hong Kong. The U.S. has been offloading vast bundles of scrap this way since at least 1994, when the Environmental Protection Agency began tracking plastics exports. The practice has served to both mask the mounting crisis and absolve U.S. consumers of guilt. But in fact, much of the ‘recycled’ plastic scrap that the U.S. sent to China appears to have been burned or buried instead of being refashioned into new products. Although China’s turnabout made the failure of the plastics recycling system suddenly and undeniably obvious, in truth the plastics problem has been with us as long as plastic has. Over the decades, as production has grown exponentially, we’ve never managed to repurpose even one-tenth of our plastic waste.”

“This Is What America Could Look Like When Our Coasts Are Under Water” [Vice]. “Depending on how we do it, we face very different coastal futures. In one scenario, our coastlines will be dotted with derelict ruins—the haunting remains of communities that weren’t given a chance to get out of harm’s way. Cities will exist behind walls built that protect from the ocean, and there will be no access to the shoreline. In a more egalitarian vision, U.S. shores could be reclaimed as public land. A national shoreline could serve as a natural buffer to the ocean, and if paired with affordable housing, community investment, and employment, moving away from the coasts could promise survival but also, better quality of life. ‘The question isn’t whether we will retreat, it’s how we will retreat,’ said A.R. Siders, an environmental fellow at the Harvard University Center for the Environment. ‘In that, we have a lot of choice and a lot of opportunity.’” • Oh, there will be “access.” For a price.

“Was the Automotive Era a Terrible Mistake?” [The New Yorker]. “When the people of the future look back at our century of auto life, will they regard it as a useful stage of forward motion or as a wrong turn? Is it possible that, a hundred years from now, the age of gassing up and driving will be seen as just a cul-de-sac in transportation history, a trip we never should have taken?” • Um, hysteresis. We can’t just back up and go in another direction. That’s not to say cars will persist in their current form, just that cul-de-sac is the wrong metaphor.

“‘Climate Grief’: Fears About The Planet’s Future Weigh On Americans’ Mental Health [Kaiser Health News]. “Therapist Andrew Bryant says the landmark United Nations climate report last October brought a new mental health concern to his patients. ‘I remember being in sessions with folks the next day. They had never mentioned climate change before, and they were like, ‘I keep hearing about this report,” Bryant said. ‘Some of them expressed anxious feelings, and we kept talking about it over our next sessions.’” • Today is my day to be kind, so I’m going to cancel my curmudgeonly response to this.

“How Airplane Contrails Are Helping Make the Planet Warmer” [Yale Environment 360]. “[T]he condensation trails produced by the exhaust from aircraft engines are creating an often-invisible thermal blanket of cloud across the planet. Though lasting for only a short time, these ‘contrails’ have a daily impact on atmospheric temperatures that is greater than that from the accumulated carbon emissions from all aircraft since the Wright Brothers first took to the skies more than a century ago. More alarming still, researchers warned late last month that efforts by engineers to cut aircraft CO2 emissions by making their engines more fuel-efficient will create more, whiter, and longer-lasting contrails — notably in the tropics, where the biggest increases in flights are expected. In a paper being widely praised by other experts in the field, Lisa Bock and Ulrike Burkhardt of the Institute of Atmospheric Physics in Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany, forecast a near-tripling in the ‘radiative forcing’ from contrails by 2050….. Research in the American South and Midwest has concluded that when contrails are around, they raise night-time temperatures sufficiently to reduce the day-night differences by 3 degrees C.”

“Community Roots – Let’s Plant Some Trees!” [Richmond Tree Stewards]. “Homeowners in the City of Richmond will receive free a limited number of trees (2 or 3 depending on availability) from our gravel beds…. In Richmond we celebrate Arbor Day in October rather than late April because that is a much better time to plant trees in Virginia.” • This sounds like a great program!

Health Care

“A look at people who have persistently high spending on health care” [Peterson-Kaiser Health System Tracker]. “Those with persistently high spending, while few in number, are some of the most expensive users of care – the 1.3% of enrollees with high spending in each of three consecutive years (2015-2017) had an average spending in 2017 of almost $88,000, accounting for 19.5% of overall spending that year. The predictability and extent of their spending suggest that any efforts to reduce the total costs of care and improve health system quality must focus heavily on this group of people.” • Yes, “Peterson” is that Peterson. Ugh.

“Verma touts site-neutral pay policies, blasts hospital consolidation” [Modern Healthcare]. “CMS Administrator Seema Verma on Monday took swings at Medicare’s ‘hospital-centric payment model,’ touting the Trump administration’s recent site-neutral payment policy and decrying provider consolidation. Verma condemned Democratic proposals for a public insurance option at a policy summit for the Better Medicare Alliance, which represents Medicare Advantage plans. … ‘The secret of the public option is that it’s only cheaper because it uses the force of government to strong-arm doctors and hospitals into accepting below-market payment rate,’ she said. ‘But the government cannot wave a wand and impose lower rates on some providers while holding everyone else harmless.’ She touted another policy, hated by hospitals, that determines some Medicare payments: site-neutral payment regulations that cut Medicare dollars for some hospital services that can also be performed in physicians’ offices… From there, Verma doubled down on another topic that makes major health systems nervous: the growth of hospital monopolies and the ‘upward trend in provider consolidation.’ ‘Hospitals are buying up physician practices, and mergers of large health systems and health plans are a common occurrence,’ she said. ‘But without competition in a market, consumers have fewer choices, prices go up, and incentives to improve quality go down.’”

“The great plague of 2019, or how the United States got single payer health-care” [Alice Marshall, Medium]. “A few of Pence’s team went to a book party for a famous conservative commentator. Within a week everyone at the party was dead, but not before they spread the disease to their think tank, law firm, and trade association. Several staffers from AHIP and PhRMA were there. By the end of the month they had to close their DC office as everyone was dead.” • Not entirely implausible, even as wish fulfillmennt.

Class Warfare

“The Most Gullible Man in Cambridge” [New York Magazine]. • Yikes.

“Jeffrey Epstein doled out millions to Harvard and others. Is that cash tainted?” [Miami Herald]. “The multimillionaire hedge fund manager lavished at least $30 million on universities, scientists, politicians, cultural organizations, think tanks — as well as his local police department, according to records of three of his charities. Records for a fourth were not available. That $30 million figure includes at least $2 million doled out following a short stint in the Palm Beach stockade that resulted when a 53-page federal sex trafficking indictment got whittled down to a pair of minor prostitution-related charges late in the last decade. For those organizations that hung onto the money, is there a moral obligation to give it back, or alternatively, pay it forward to organizations that would benefit, for example, young sexual assault victims like those Epstein allegedly victimized?’” • Lol, no.

“Student Debt and Racial Wealth Inequality” (PDF) [Marshall Steinbaum]. “This paper analyzes the effect of cancelling student debt on racial wealth inequality using the 2016 Survey of Consumer Finances. It concludes that cancelling student debt reduces racial wealth gaps as measured by the ratio of white wealth to black wealth at a given wealth quantile, across the wealth distribution. It then discusses why cancelling student debt disproportionately increases the net wealth of black households and thereby reduces racial wealth gaps.” • As surely all universal benefit programs must do?

“Baby born on 7-Eleven Day at 7:11 p.m., weighs 7 lbs., 11 oz., gets 7-Eleven college fund” [USA Today]. • Just another kind of legacy admission….

News of the Wired

“Dream Of Retiring Abroad? The Reality: Medicare Doesn’t Travel Well” [Kaiser Health News]. “After paying into the Medicare system for decades, it’s no wonder some expats are frustrated that they can’t generally use the program outside the United States…. And retirees should honestly consider whether they will spend the rest of their lives overseas.” • And spend the last days of my life drugged and strapped to a bed in a nursing home room with a TV I can’t turn off? I’d rather die in a ditch in the tropics.

“Don’t Put Your Work Email on Your Personal Phone” [OneZero]. “Here’s one reason: Your work account might be spying on you in the background. When you add a work email address to your phone, you’ll likely be asked to install something called a Mobile Device Management (MDM) profile. Chances are, you’ll blindly accept it. (What other choice do you have?) MDM is set up by your company’s IT department to reach inside your phone in the background, allowing them to ensure your device is secure, know where it is, and remotely erase your data if the phone is stolen. From your company’s perspective, there are obvious security reasons for installing an MDM on an employee’s phone. But for employees, it’s difficult to tell what these invisible profiles are collecting behind the scenes, as they provide people at your company with invisible control over your device. That’s why when it comes to your phone, no matter how much you trust your IT department, it’s a good idea to keep work and pleasure separate.”

* * *

Readers, feel free to contact me at lambert [UNDERSCORE] strether [DOT] corrente [AT] yahoo [DOT] com, with (a) links, and even better (b) sources I should curate regularly, (c) how to send me a check if you are allergic to PayPal, and (d) to find out how to send me images of plants. Vegetables are fine! Fungi are deemed to be honorary plants! If you want your handle to appear as a credit, please place it at the start of your mail in parentheses: (thus). Otherwise, I will anonymize by using your initials. See the previous Water Cooler (with plant) here. Today’s plant (JL):

JL writes: “Mystery tree”!

* * *

Readers: Water Cooler is a standalone entity not covered by the annual NC fundraiser. So do feel free to make a contribution today or any day. Here is why: Regular positive feedback both makes me feel good and lets me know I’m on the right track with coverage. When I get no donations for five or ten days I get worried. More tangibly, a constant trickle of small donations helps me with expenses, and I factor in that trickle when setting fundraising goals. So if you see something you especially appreciate, do feel free to click this donate button:

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2:00PM Water Cooler 7/23/2019

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[larrykrakow]

Fight Evictions And Foreclosures

New Post has been published on https://theprogressivemind.org/fight-evictions-and-foreclosures/

Fight Evictions And Foreclosures

Evictions and foreclosures are set to proceed today with impunity as the moratorium at the federal level expires. How we got here is beyond me. Are our politicians really that much in the pockets of bankers that they will put masses out in the streets during a pandemic?

We have to decide if morality matters. Last time I checked, history was not kind to oligarchs that kept the people in poverty. Sadly, we live in a world where our politicians do not give a $@&# about us. The only way to make them do OUR bidding is to scare them. We have to mobilize. We have to do sit ins stopping evictions in their tracks.

Evictions and foreclosures make bankers wealthier.

Do you ever wonder what happens to a house when someone loses it to foreclosure? You guessed it. The banks take ownership of it. These same banks received the money to lend to you to buy the house from the Federal Reserve. They pay almost no interest. In fact, they could decide not to pay back the loan since the interest rate is negligible.

Once evictions and foreclosures start, we must be out in Washington protesting the devastation caused by our useless idiots.

YOU on the other hand WILL get kicked out even with the most minimal of excuses.  You are a commodity to them. You work hard, pay your mortgage or the mortgage of your landlord. If you live in a state where your governor does not want to provide relief, you run the risk of being homeless during a pandemic.

If you are evicted, the next tenant will likely pay a higher rent than you pay. This is a windfall for large management companies particularly in big cities with rent control laws that sunset when a tenant leaves a dwelling.

It is outrageous to see anyone lose their home NOW!

Think about this really hard. Do you believe that people who lost everything during the pandemic are at fault? Evictions and foreclosures are a result of economic failure. Unfortunately, the politicians don’t care about you. They care about their campaign donors. YOU can kick rocks.

Large corporations received hundreds of billions of dollars of bailout money from the CARES Act. They also received trillions in liquidity from the Federal Reserve who did something never seen before. The Federal Reserve started buying up trillions of dollars of commercial paper to keep the market afloat. What does that mean? Any time they thought that the market would crash, they would come in with fresh money and either buy stocks, bonds or other investments. The money used to do this was made out of thin air.

So why can’t they make funds out of thin air for the public?

We are the little guys. We have no sway, The bankers and crooksters  have rigged the game. You and I cannot accept this. I am ranting here, but come on! Tens of millions of jobs have disappeared and tens of millions have lost their healthcare in a pandemic. The funding miraculously showed up to keep the market and the corporations afloat, but they do not show up for US when we need them.

So what should we do?

Start to connect all the groups that want relief.

Create one master hub where we can all start a movement.

March on Washington the very next day after the start of the next Presidential term.

Sustain this.

General strike wherever we can. Try not to hurt the small mom and pop by doing this. Go after the big boys such as Amazon and Walmart.

I wish this was going to be easy, but we need what is called a “VANGUARD” for a movement. This organizes the working class in solidarity. This is not about elections. It is about pressure on power. My candidate will not win this election cycle. This is about organizing the working class to demand healthcare, replacement of wages so that people can stay in their homes and a legitimate share of the wealth of this nation generated on the backs of all of us.

I am going to ask each and every one of you reading this post to do one thing. Below this post is a section for Facebook Comments. Vulture capitalists want to take more of the resources of the society for themselves. They want less for you. As George Carlin said, “It’s a big club and you ain’t in it.”

Tell me your story about how you found this. Keep a conversation going. Use the Facebook comments section to give me ideas how we can come together and organize. We, as working class people who are at risk of such despair ought to come together around our issues.

My demands are simple:

Extend the moratorium on evictions and foreclosures.

Provide universal healthcare.

Bail out the people. Give us $2,000 per month for the duration of the pandemic per person.

Put in a universal mask order so that the spread stops.

I hope you want the same things.

[clubofinfo]

Expert: The New York Times Business Page recently featured a front page article about the annual conference In Jackson Hole, Wyoming hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. It contained this interesting opening: In the decade since the financial crisis economic policymakers, professors and protestors have gathered here every August to argue about the best ways to return to faster economic growth. This year, they gave up…instead focused mostly on making sure things don’t get any worse. Fed chairwoman Janet Yellen spoke about the risk of further deregulation while Mario Draghi, head of the European Central Bank, spoke against protectionism. The tepid tone of the conference, of course, was the opposite of President Trump’s boisterousness tweets about the current economic reality, most prominently on July 2nd when Trump tweeted ‘Stock Market at all-time high, unemployment at lowest level in years (wages will start going up) and our base has never been stronger!’ Not to be undone, July 31st saw Trump tweet ‘Highest Stock Market EVER, best economic numbers in years, unemployment lowest in 17 years, wages rising, border secure, S.C.: No WH chaos’. For certain Trump isn’t the first president to hang his hat on the Dow Jones. Barack Obama for one certainly wasn’t above it. However, as Michelle Styczynski recently explained in Jacobin, a rising stock market has little to no effect on the wages of the hourly workers who make up almost 60 percent of the workforce. Before 1980, real wages grew at an average of two and a half cents ($0.0025) per month while the S&P grew on average 0.53 points per month. After 1980 wages grow by an average rate of 0.7 cents ($0.007) per month – a 71 percent drop. Meanwhile the S&P has risen to an average growth rate of 4 points per month for an increase of 660 percent. In other words it’s been a long time since stock market growth correlated to higher wages for the working class. As for the rest of the ‘base’ as Trump refers to it is plagued by the same longstanding trends Trump incoherently campaigned on. The top 1 percent continues to swallow up the lion’s share of growth. From 2009-2012 the one percent captured over 90 percent of economic gains. That number has declined since but from 2013-2015 the one percent still grabbed about half of growth. Productivity has stalled. The economy has yet to even recover the output it was on pace to produce prior to the Great Recession. In 1967 95 percent of ‘prime age’ men (ages 25-54) worked. Today more than 15 percent aren’t working with some localities having fewer than 70 percent of men without a college education unemployed or out of the workforce entirely. The percentage of underemployed Americans is now at 8.6 percent. Paradoxically 7.6 million people currently work more than one job, the highest in two decades. A study by economists Lawrence F. Katz and Alan B. Krueger showed that nearly 95 percent of jobs created during the Obama Era were temporary, part-time, or contractual (i.e. of the mythical ‘gig’ variety). As has been the case since the mid-1970s Americans continue to make up for stagnant wages by using credit to finance the middle-class life. Just prior to the last recession household debt in the U.S. hit $12.68 trillion. It now stands at $12.7. Given the economy is larger now than it was a decade ago today’s total household debt is equivalent to 67 percent of the economy as opposed to the 85 percent back at the 2008 peak. The nature of the debt has shifted. Americans owe less on their homes and credit cards and more on student and car loans, the latter being a bare necessity in most places in the country, while the former is the declared ticket to prosperity. While this debt may be more sustainable in the short-term it probably has led to a drag on demand. Personal-spending growth has averaged only 2.4 percent since the recession ended, less than previous expansions. Much ink has been spilled in recent times lamenting Americans’ new lack of mobility. According to the Census Bureau about 10 percent of Americans moved in the past year, down from the 1950s through the early 1980s when more than 20 percent of the population moved.  Tyler Cowen laments in his book The Complacent Class: The Self Defeating Quest for the American Dream that the interstate migration rate has fallen 51 percent below the average rate from 1948-1971. Kevin Williamson of National Review surely took the prize for this last year, writing about the plight of the white working class: There is more to life in the 21st century than wallboard and cheap sentimentality about how the Man closed the factories down. The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible…The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul. Trump himself got into the act recently telling the Wall Street Journal “people are going to have to start moving.” Leaving aside questions about family and community, not to mention issues of vastly uneven development, this despair about mobility and labor flexibility seems to run into another longstanding issue. For well over half a century it’s been government policy to favor homeownership over renters, suburban sprawl over cities. Since the 1940s 90 percent of new housing has been in low density areas. If the impetus for this was the severe housing shortage in the aftermath of World War II, the adjoining motivation was the incubating and reinforcement of a conservative status quo. A 1946 Fortune survey, citied by Rosalyn Baxandell and Elizabeth Ewan in In Picture Windows: How the Suburbs Happened, revealed: The U.S. people are strikingly in favor of positive government action to end the severe housing shortage. A majority of those with opinions want the government to embark on a large scale building program, and that more people, particularly the young, veterans, the poor, and those living in large cities, and especially North Atlantic States; i.e. most people preferred renting an apartment to owning a house. Unfortunately such a solution wouldn’t have made big money for the master builders and the bank and loan associations. The automobile industry and highway lobby had same understanding. While the suburbanization of the country largely solved the housing shortage and fulfilled the mythology of ‘homeownership’ (actually mortgage holding) and picket fences, in the long run it has contributed to a less fluid workforce as many are now tied to their mortgages or property. It’s also a fact that the cities where the movers are supposed to head have astronomical housing costs and growing homeless populations. Along with the new lack of mobility, the other despair of working class critics is the state of the family. Obviously the decline of the nuclear family has been red meat for conservatives for decades. However, now the consensus is broader. Political rhetoric may require musings about “the family”, but the true subject of derision is the working class family, most especially the great increase in out of wedlock births. For those with college degrees the years since 1980 haven’t seen such an increase (the divorce rate overall has declined from its 1980 peak with a steeper decline for the college educated. Currently it’s at its lowest level in 40 years). For the other two-thirds of the population the increase has been substantial. According to data from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, 2015 was the eighth straight year 40 percent of births in the U.S. were to unmarried mothers, the great majority of these births to working class children. While acknowledging the causes of this are complex, critics put much of their emphasis on culture. Amy Wax, professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, recently found herself at the center of a storm for an op-ed she coauthored for Philly.com titled “Paying the price for breakdown of the country’s bourgeois culture”. Thirty three of her colleagues at the University signed a letter condemning Wax’s claims. Wax writes of a late 1960s cultural flip that “encouraged an antiauthoritarian, adolescent, wish-fulfillment ideal- sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll- that was unworthy of, and unworkable for, a mature, prosperous adult society”. The op-ed goes on to say: All cultures are not equal. Or at least they are not equal in preparing people to be productive in an advanced economy. The culture of the Plains Indians was designed for nomadic hunters, but is not suited to a First World, 21st-century environment. Nor are the single-parent, antisocial habits, prevalent among some working-class whites; the anti-“acting white” rap culture of inner-city blacks; the anti-assimilation ideas gaining ground among some Hispanic immigrants. These cultural orientations are not only incompatible with what an advanced free-market economy and a viable democracy require, they are also destructive of a sense of solidarity and reciprocity among Americans. If the bourgeois cultural script — which the upper-middle class still largely observes but now hesitates to preach — cannot be widely reinstated, things are likely to get worse for us all…But restoring the hegemony of the bourgeois culture- the academics, media, and Hollywood- to relinquish multicultural grievance polemics and the preening pretense of defending the downtrodden. Instead of bashing the bourgeois culture, they should return to the 1950s posture of celebrating it. Absent that sentiment is any economic analysis of the beloved 1950s, which for all the racism and McCarthyism, was a time of economic growth, rising wages, and strong unions- perhaps what many of those working class voters who fell for the charms of ‘Make America Great Again’ had in mind since these things have been gone for decades. Writing in the New York Times back in 2014, Isabel Sawhill, of the Brookings Institute and author of Generation Unbound: Drifting into Sex and Parenthood without Marriage, acknowledged the need for educational and job opportunities, and correctly pointed to the need for greater access to quality birth control, but says: But government alone can’t solve this problem. Younger people must begin to take greater responsibility for their choices…Well-functioning democracies are built on the premise that government has an obligation to promote the general welfare. But so do citizens. More support for those drifting is in order, but less drifting is also essential. The emphasis on culture leaves one with an obvious question:  if destructive cultural influences, such as Hollywood and academics, are persuasive then why is much of their seductive power only taking hold over certain segments of the population whom it just so happens have been the same segments that have dealt with deindustrialization, stagnant wages, drug abuse epidemics and, in the case of the black working class, taking the brunt of draconian anti-drug laws and crime bills? More than half of all black children born to less educated parents in 1990 experienced parental imprisonment. It calls to mind what Oscar Wilde placed into the mouth of Algeron in The Importance of Being Earnest: “Really, if the lower orders don’t set us a good example, what on earth is the use of them.” One of the sharper points Andrew Cherlin makes in his Labor’s Love Lost: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class Family in America is that the much romanticized period from the late 1940s through the 1960s, the period where still much of our cultural and economic expectations derive from, is a historical anomaly. And as Cherlin points out, the fall in marriages has been seen before: The marriage gap we see in the New Gilded Age today is similar to the gap during the Old Gilded Age of the late 1800s.  Sharp inequalities in income and in marriage characterize both eras. …In both eras, men in professional, managerial, or  technical positions were most likely to marry, and the probability of marriage dropped substantially toward the bottom of the occupational hierarchy. The Great Depression saw the same trends. Birth rates fell sharply in the 1930s. According to a 1940 survey (cited Robert D. Putnam’s Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis), 1.5 million married women were deserted by their husbands and as result more than 200,000 vagrant children were said to be wandering the country. Cultural mores were certainly different 125 years ago but as both the original Gilded Age and the present day show, the saviors of the traditional family, as well as single parents, aren’t pious harangues about moral decline or odes to personal determination but good paying jobs. Good paying jobs are what American capitalism has been unable to provide since the 1970s. For all Trump’s bluster, it’s always been obvious that a working-class populism wasn’t in the works. The Democrats are too weak and in the thrall of big money ‘centrism’ that emphasizes cultural issues above all else, as if things like gun violence and immigration are independent of economics. The beauty of culture for those who wield power is that when an issue becomes ‘cultural’ it also becomes unsolvable The endlessly analyzed “rural-urban” divide becomes a matter of who goes to church, owns guns, or drinks craft beers and not on the overall economic stagnation that affects so many rural and urban areas alike. Without a serious movement against unchained capital one can expect that divide to grow even larger and the underlying economic trends to continue to stir bitterness and conflict. http://clubof.info/