Author Archives: AlexanderGladne

The BREATHE Act would defund police — and fund environmental justice

by AlexanderGladne Posted on July 10, 2020

As the U.S. enters another month of sustained protests against anti-Black racism and police brutality, organizers are working to turn the protests’ energy into legislative action. This week the Movement for Black Lives, a nationwide coalition of Black organizations formed in December 2014, released a summary of a new legislative proposal that aims to defund police police forces around the country and give funding and support to Black communities looking to create their own models of public safety. They’re calling it the BREATHE Act.

“We crafted this bill to be big,” said Gina Clayton Johnson, the executive director of Essie Justice Group and one of the act’s creators, during a virtual announcement event reported by New York Magazine’s The Cut. “We know the solution has to be as big as the 400-year-old problem itself.”

The proposal is divided into four sections that each address different approaches to sustainable public safety: The first two sections call for the divestment of federal resources from policing and incarceration, as well as federal grant programs for alternative community-led approaches to non-punitive public safety.

The proposal’s third section, however, demonstrates that environmental justice is central to the proposal’s vision. It calls for the creation of a grant that will fund solutions for environmental justice issues that affect Black communities around the country. The grant would fund “clear, time-bound plans” for states to ensure universal access to clean water and air that satisfies Environmental Protection Agency guidelines. The section also calls for for the creation of clear state plans to meet 100 percent of their electricity demand with “clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources.” Funding for community-owned sustainable energy projects would be subsidized by the grant. Disaster preparedness would also be prioritized.

Environmental justice often intersects with other public health issues for Black and brown communities. In recent months, for example, it’s become clear that Black and Latino communities in the U.S. suffer higher mortality and hospitalization rates from the novel coronavirus. This May, Democrats in Congress introduced the Environmental Justice COVID-19 Act to look at the connection between air pollution and disproportionate COVID-19 outcomes for these communities.

The BREATHE Act has not yet been translated into actionable congressional legislation, but Democratic Representatives Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley both expressed their support for the proposal during a virtual meeting this week.

“The BREATHE Act is bold…. It pushes us to reimagine power structures and what community investment really looks like,” Tlaib said during a recent call with activists. “We can start to envision through this bill a new vision for public safety. One that protects and affirms Black lives.”

Source: 

The BREATHE Act would defund police — and fund environmental justice

Posted in Accent, alo, FF, GE, LAI, ONA, sustainable energy, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The BREATHE Act would defund police — and fund environmental justice

What’s So Great About 401(k)s, Anyway?

by AlexanderGladne Posted on May 22, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

After I wrote my Thursday post on 401(k) plans, I got a fair amount of pushback. Essentially it boiled down to “What’s so good about them compared to old-style pensions? Why not just get rid of them and expand Social Security instead?”

The answer to the second question is simple: 401(k)s are meant as supplements to Social Security. If we want to expand Social Security, that’s fine. But that’s no reason not have additional options to save privately for retirement.

Fine. But why 401(k)s? What is so good about them? The basic answer, of course, is that they’re set up to encourage monthly contributions in a hassle-free way and the money you contribute is tax-deferred. Beyond that, though, there are several advantages that a 401(k) plan has over a traditional pension. Here are five:

401(k) plans are portable. They begin accumulating immediately (or close to immediately) when you start a new job, and if you leave your job your 401(k) comes with you. This isn’t true of old-style pensions.

If you want, you can withdraw your 401(k) as a lump sum when you retire. This can be handy if you want to use a portion of your retirement savings for a single large purchase, like a house or a motor home.

If you die early, your kids will inherit your 401(k). They won’t get a dime from Social Security or an old-style pension. This may or may not be something you personally care about, but a lot of people do.

The main drawback of a 401(k) is that it’s risky: since you don’t know how long you’ll live, you can never be sure how much you can safely withdraw each year. But in 2014 the Treasury issued guidance that made it easier for 401(k) owners to allocate all or part of their contributions into an annuity fund that pays out steadily upon retirement.

Annuities are getting better, but it’s still true that you have to be pretty careful selecting one. Some are bad deals. But there’s another way to effectively annuitize your 401(k) without paying a dime: delay your Social Security retirement age. Here’s how it works.

More and more people are retiring at age 62, but this reduces your Social Security payment by about 20 percent compared to retiring at age 65. For example, a $2,000 monthly Social Security payment would be reduced to $1,600 if you retire at 62.

Instead, use your 401(k) to fund your retirement from 62 to 65. In this example, it would require a final 401(k) balance of about $72,000 or a little less. You’d draw out $2,000 per month and then, at age 65, switch over to your Social Security payout. You’ve basically guaranteed yourself a lifetime income of $24,000 per year instead of $19,200 without any worries about whether your 401(k) will last forever.

Nothing in life is perfect. There are also advantages to old-style defined-benefit pensions, as well as to a simple expansion of Social Security. And 401(k)s require workers to shoulder more responsibility for figuring out how to invest their savings. They also have to shoulder more of the risk of market downturns.

Nonetheless, 401(k)s aren’t bad. The 2006 Pension Protection Act improved them by allowing employers to sign up workers automatically (they can opt out if they want), and this has significantly increased the number of workers who participate. It’s especially raised the number of low-income workers who participate. The PPA also allowed employers to automatically increase the contribution rate over time (again, workers can opt out), which promises to make 401(k)s more substantial retirement vehicles. It also encouraged the use of low-fee lifecycle funds that make riskier investments when you’re young and slowly switch to safer investments as you get closer to retirement.

All of these things have improved the 401(k) landscape. The economic recovery has too: a lot of the scare stories about 401(k) plans were based on using data through 2011 or 2012, which meant choosing an end date literally in the middle of the worst recession since World War II. That’s cherry picking of the worst kind. 401(k) plans were bound to recover within a couple of years, and they did. If you look at data through 2014 or 2015, average 401(k) returns look pretty good. When it comes to retirement funds, you have to look at the long term, not just the best or worst years.

View original:

What’s So Great About 401(k)s, Anyway?

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, PUR, Safer, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on What’s So Great About 401(k)s, Anyway?

Is There an Untapped Market for Democratic Anger?

by AlexanderGladne Posted on April 4, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Matt Yglesias draws my attention to a paper written after the 2014 elections that looks at the number of ideologically based primary challenges in House elections since 1970. It turns out that there have always been plenty of primary challenges, but most of them are mundane affairs based on local issues. Until recently, very few have been about insufficient liberal or conservative purity. Here’s the nut of it:

The majority of congressional primary challenges are motivated by idiosyncratic failings of the incumbent — factors such as scandals, the incumbent’s age, or the incumbent’s alleged incompetence. Ideological challenges…constitute an average of just under 14 percent of primary challenges.

….The number of ideological challenges, however, has increased steadily over the past five election cycles, and was at an historic high in 2014. This is entirely due to challenges within the Republican Party; not a single Democratic primary challenger based his or her campaign on the claim that the incumbent was insufficiently liberal….This is noteworthy not only for what it says about conflict within the Republican Party, but for what it says about the lack of conflict among Democrats.

Even in the post-Watergate elections, Democrats never mounted more than a handful of ideological primary challenges. The Gingrich revolution in the mid-90s was similar on the Republican side. It’s only starting in 2010—the Obama era—that ideological primary challenges suddenly skyrocketed in the Republican Party.

Yglesias writes that “the Bernie Sanders campaign appears to suggest the existence of substantial untapped demand for left-wing ideological primary challenges in the Democratic Party.” Maybe. More likely, given the 40-year history of neither party mounting many ideological primary challenges, something very unusual happened among conservatives in 2010. As much as they hated Bill Clinton, he never prompted a tidal wave of right-wing challenges to Republican incumbents. But something about Obama was different. Suddenly an awful lot of Republicans decided that their party needed to get a lot more conservative.

What was it about Obama that was so different? I think we can all take a guess. But whatever the answer, I’ve seen no indication of anything similar happening among Democrats. And Bernie’s millennial supporters, as usual, show very little interest in any election less important than the presidency. So my money is on Democrats never having more than a few ideological challenges per election cycle. Bernie is Bernie, not a harbinger of deep discontent among liberals.

But I can be proven wrong pretty easily. All it takes is a dozen or two primary challenges. Let’s see ’em.

Link: 

Is There an Untapped Market for Democratic Anger?

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on Is There an Untapped Market for Democratic Anger?

The American Egg Board Is Tired of Playing Softball With You People

by AlexanderGladne Posted on September 7, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Here’s something trivial and yet somehow sort of fascinating at the same time. The Guardian has an article today about the American Egg Board, which, as you might guess, is in the business of promoting the use of eggs. For example: “This year the politically connected AEB provided 14,000 eggs for the White House’s annual Easter egg roll and Ivy1 was photographed with President Barack Obama.”

That’s some mighty tasty PR—and perfectly legal. But although AEB is funded by the egg industry, its board members are appointed by the Department of Agriculture. This means it’s limited to promoting the awesomeness of eggs. Attacking other foods is forbidden, a restriction that specifically includes “any advertising (including press releases) deemed disparaging to another commodity.” The Department of Agriculture does not want to be in the business of sponsoring internecine wars between American producers of food (and foodlike) products.

But it turns out that the egg people have been concerned for a while about Hampton Creek, a Silicon Valley darling that makes egg-free products. You may have seen them in the news recently, when the FDA sent out a letter telling Hampton Creek to change the name of Just Mayo, their vegan mayonnaise alternative2—since, by definition, mayonnaise contains eggs. If there are no eggs, it’s not mayonnaise. The AEB lobbied for this, and they also tried to sign up bloggers and cooking celebrities to promote eggs. But did they actually engage in advertising that disparaged non-eggs? That’s harder to say. The smoking gun appears to be a section called “Beyond Eggs Consumer Research” in AEB’s contract with their PR company. Here’s the key sentence:

For example, research will, ideally, provide actionable intelligence on what attacks are gaining traction with consumers and which are not so as to help industry calibrate level of communications response (if any) to ensure a consistent response strategy moving forward.

This is….award-worthy biz-gibberish! I’m suffering twinges of professional jealousy just reading it. Big picture-wise, it gets everything right: it’s all but impossible to even parse this, let alone use it to prove that AEB was asking for attack ads against non-egg products. It’s a masterpiece of the genre.

So is anyone going to be able to prove that AEB has been illegally targeting Hampton Creek for destruction? Unless there’s more than this, I doubt it. They’ll just say that their “response strategy” was to fight back against egg-related misconceptions and highlight all the goodness that real eggs can deliver to the dining tables of hardworking Americans. And who will be able to say otherwise?

1That’s Joanne Ivy, AEB’s CEO and its 2015 Egg Person of the Year.

2It’s vegan, but don’t let that mislead you into thinking it’s necessarily healthy. As the FDA also pointed out, Just Mayo contains too much fat to be labeled “heart healthy.” It’s not much different from ordinary mayonnaise:

More:

The American Egg Board Is Tired of Playing Softball With You People

Posted in alo, Citizen, FF, G & F, GE, LG, Mop, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The American Egg Board Is Tired of Playing Softball With You People

Lana Del Rey Cares Way More About “Intergalactic Possibilities” Than Boring, Old Feminism

by AlexanderGladne Posted on June 4, 2014

Mother Jones

Famous singer-songwriter Lana Del Rey has a weird quote about “feminism” (and space exploration, I think) in the latest Fader cover story. Digest it here:

For me, the issue of feminism is just not an interesting concept. I’m more interested in, you know, SpaceX and Tesla, what’s going to happen with our intergalactic possibilities. Whenever people bring up feminism, I’m like, god. I’m just not really that interested…My idea of a true feminist is a woman who feels free enough to do whatever she wants.

Okay.

The 27-year-old singer joins a chorus of female celebrities, including actress Shailene Woodley, who distance themselves from feminism, or from describing themselves as feminists. This is strange to hear (whether the famous person is female or male), simply because your average dictionary is very straightforward about the definition of the term “feminism.” It is as follows:

The belief that men and women should have equal rights and opportunities.

It’s really that simple: Words have meanings. Maybe too many of us have, over the years, conflated the word “feminist” with “extreme, radical, militant, War-On-Men-waging individual?” I dunno. Anyway, Ann Friedman explains this general topic better than I ever could, and you should read her piece here.

(H/t Matt Zeitlin)

Jump to original: 

Lana Del Rey Cares Way More About “Intergalactic Possibilities” Than Boring, Old Feminism

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Lana Del Rey Cares Way More About “Intergalactic Possibilities” Than Boring, Old Feminism