Author Archives: Louise6qy
Progressive Groups Are Basically Printing Money After the Health Care Vote
Mother Jones
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Progressives got a hard lesson in math on Thursday when the Obamacare repeal bill narrowly passed the House with 217 votes despite uniform Democratic opposition. But while the bill’s effect will be far-reaching if it eventually becomes law, in the short term it has become an almost unprecedented fundraising magnet for left-leaning grassroots groups.
In the 24 hours since the House vote, Daily Kos, the 15-year-old Netroots stalwart that has experienced a renaissance in the Trump era, raised $800,000 from 17,200 readers. That money will be split evenly among 24 Democratic candidates. (Daily Kos is specifically targeting the 24 Republican congressmen who voted for the bill but represent districts where President Donald Trump received less than 50 percent of the vote.) The group’s political director, David Nir, says the group previously raised $400,000 in one day for Jon Ossoff, the Democratic candidate in the special election in Georgia’s 6th Congressional District, and the same amount for Elizabeth Warren over the course of a year. But he couldn’t recall a $1 million haul.
Swing Left, which grew out of the postelection “resistance,” has only been around for a few months and has a much shorter track record of big fundraising hauls. But it has raised $850,000 from more than 20,000 donations since the vote, for the purposes of boosting candidates challenging its target list of 35 Republicans who voted for the bill (there is some overlap between the two lists). Swing Left got a signal boost from Crooked Media, the podcast empire launched by a group of Obama White House veterans, which partnered with the group to raise money.
Notably, the money raised going to candidates Thursday and Friday won’t end up in the hands of a candidate for a long time. It’ll be held in escrow for the winners of Democratic contests in those House districts next spring and summer. Think of it as a small pot of gold at the end of the primary.
Update: Per a Swing Left spokesperson, the organization had raised $200,000 for those 35 districts since they launched the fundraising page April 13—so to put the haul in perspective, in one day the group raised more than four times what it had raised in the previous 20.
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Progressive Groups Are Basically Printing Money After the Health Care Vote
New Drugs and Vaccines Can’t Stop This Ebola Outbreak
Mother Jones
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With the death toll in the worst Ebola outbreak in history exceeding 1,000, pharmaceutical companies and health authorities are sprinting to develop new drugs and vaccines. On Monday, drug maker GlaxoSmithKline announced that it would start clinical trials of an Ebola vaccine ahead of schedule. And on Tuesday, the World Health Organization ruled that the use of experimental drugs to treat Ebola patients is ethical so long as the patients give their consent. But for now, there are no proven drugs to treat Ebola, and experts doubt that any new drug or vaccine could beat back the current outbreak in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea.
“The drugs are not going to stop the outbreak, period,” says Robert Garry, a virology researcher at Tulane University. One problem, he says, is the meager supply of drugs and vaccines. ZMapp, an experimental drug, has already begun human trials. But Mapp Biopharmaceutical, the company developing ZMapp with the help of the US Army, did not expect to start human tests this early, and it has only about a dozen doses. It has already sent two of those doses to Liberia.
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You’ll Be Shocked to Learn That Rupert Murdoch Is Wrong About Climate Change
Mother Jones
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This story originally appeared in Huffington Post and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Rupert Murdoch shrugged off the notion that climate change is a big deal in an interview on Sunday.
Speaking to Sky News Australia (which he partially owns), Murdoch dismissed the alarming reports coming from scientists about the devastating impact that climate change is causing to the planet.
“We should approach climate change with great skepticism,” he said. “Climate change has been going on as long as the planet is here. There will always be a little bit of it.”
Murdoch acknowledged that the changing planet could wipe out small countries like the Maldives, but he had a quick fix for that.
“We can’t stop it, we’ve just got to stop building vast houses on seashores,” he added. “The world has been changing for thousands and thousands of years, it’s just a lot more complicated today because we are more advanced.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Murdoch’s Fox News has been found to give its viewers the most inaccurate information on climate change of any American network.
(h/t Guardian)
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You’ll Be Shocked to Learn That Rupert Murdoch Is Wrong About Climate Change
Surprise! Lots of People Are Saving Money Thanks to Obamacare.
Mother Jones
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Today brings ever more stories of rate shock from people signing up for Obamacare:
Sue Spanke of Missoula, Mont., was highly displeased this fall when she learned her health insurance had been canceled….After angrily calling her state auditor’s office, Spanke, a self-employed artist in her 50s, found she was eligible for a federal subsidy. Her new insurance will cover her for a mere $30 to $40 a month with a deductible of only $500. She had been paying $350 a month for a Blue Cross policy with a $5,000 deductible. “I went from a horrible policy that didn’t cover anything, that was breaking me, to the best policy at the best price I’ve had since I was in my 20s,” she said.
….In Lancaster, Pa., Lori Lapman, 58, learned her health plan was being canceled in September—by October things were looking up. Per The Sunday News: “Sitting at a laptop with a certified health law helper, Lapman went to HealthCare.gov, found it running smoothly, and bought a subsidized Highmark plan that allows her to keep her doctors while saving her money. Her canceled plan cost her $520 a month. Her new coverage? Only $111.73.”
….In a letter to the editor in The Santa Maria Times, Allan Pacela told the story of how after his wife lost her insurance this fall, she found much better coverage under Obamacare. The couple is now saving $8,000 per year for a “much better plan.”
There’s more at the link, and all from doing a quick Nexis search of newspapers across the country. Just imagine what we might find out with a little bit of old-school shoe-leather reporting.
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Surprise! Lots of People Are Saving Money Thanks to Obamacare.
President Obama Has Had Enough
Mother Jones
I like this Ezra Klein analysis of where we are in the budget/debt ceiling crisis. It picks up after the White House spent several fruitless months trying to negotiate with Republicans and eventually giving in completely to their spending demands. But even that didn’t do any good:
As the White House sees it, Speaker John Boehner has begun playing politics as game of Calvinball, in which Republicans invent new rules on the fly and then demand the media and the Democrats accept them as reality and find a way to work around them.
….The White House has decided that they can’t govern effectively if the House Republicans can keep playing Calvinball. The rules and promises Boehner makes are not their problem, they’ve decided. They’re not going to save him. And that also rules out unusual solutions like minting a platinum coin or declaring the debt limit unconstitutional. The White House doesn’t want to break the law (and possibly spark a financial crisis) in order to save Boehner from breaking a promise he never should have made.
Top administration officials say that President Obama feels as strongly about this fight as he has about anything in his presidency. He believes that he will be handing his successor a fatally weakened office, and handing the American people an unacceptable risk of future financial crises, if he breaks, or even bends, in the face of Republican demands. And so the White House says that their position is simple, and it will not change: They will not negotiate over substantive policy issues until Republicans end the shutdown and raise the debt ceiling.
I think Obama is right. Conservatives are basically trying to invent a new Constitution because they don’t like the way the current one works, and they’re doing it by threatening the equivalent of nuclear war if they don’t get their way. There’s simply no way that any president can give in to that.
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Test Scores in New York City Are Nothing to Write Home About
Mother Jones
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New York City is about to introduce new, more difficult school testing based on the Common Core curriculum, and that means average scores are likely to go down. Mayor Michael Bloomberg is getting ready to take some heat:
The mayor’s telling of history is poised to receive one of its most vigorous challenges yet on Wednesday, when New York State is expected to report drastic drops in student performance across the state because of a new set of tougher exams.
In New York City, the proportion of students deemed proficient in math and reading could decrease by as many as 30 percentage points, city officials said, threatening to hand Mr. Bloomberg a public relations problem five months before he is set to leave office.
….As his mayoralty winds down, Mr. Bloomberg has sought to burnish an image as a savior of a school system rife with racial and socioeconomic disparities. But several of the Democratic candidates for mayor have rejected that portrayal, seizing on anger among some parents rankled by what they say is his unilateral approach to governing.
Politics is politics, but the rest of us don’t really need to pay any attention to this. Nor do we have to pay attention to New York’s own testing, which may or may not be afflicted by dumbed-down tests that are about to get dumbed back up. Nor do we have to guess. Instead, we can just look at TUDA, the subset of the national NAEP test aimed at urban districts. New York City has participated in TUDA for Bloomberg’s entire mayoralty, and the basic results are below:
New York City’s test scores have increased over the past decade, but they’ve increased less than in most other big cities (2 points vs. 6 in reading, 6 points vs. 12 in math). On the 4th grade test, New York City has done about the same as other big cities. This isn’t a massive failure, but it doesn’t look like any kind of outsized success either.
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Test Scores in New York City Are Nothing to Write Home About
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Economy Adds 195,000 Jobs, But Experts Say Fed Shouldn’t Curb Stimulus Yet
Mother Jones
The economy added 195,000 jobs in June, according to jobs numbers released Friday by the Labor Department, and the unemployment rate held at 7.6 percent. The news was better than expected, and continues several months of generally positive employment news. But economists say that the joblessness situation in the country is not nearly sunny enough to justify the Federal Reserve reigning in the stimulus measures it has deployed since the recession, a move the Fed has hinted it may make in the coming months.
Employment growth in June was in line with the average monthly gain in jobs over the past year, and numbers for the past few months have been revised upwards—in April from 149,000 to 199,000, and in May from 175,000 to 195,000. More than 62 percent of the job increases last month were in leisure and hospitality, which picked up 75,000 jobs; retail, which gained 37,000; and temp services, which added 10,000. Low-wage service sector jobs have been a hallmark of this recovery; occupations paying less than $13.83 have accounted for 58 percent of the job gains since 2010. This follows a longer-term pattern of middle-income jobs being hollowed out by low- and high-wage jobs after recessions. Here’s what that has looked like since the 2001 recession, via the National Employment Law Project:
And here’s more grim news in June’s report: The number of people working part-time because their hours had been cut back or were unable to find full-time work increased by 322,000 people to 8.2 million between May and June. Last month, there were 1 million discouraged workers—meaning people not looking for work because they believe there are no jobs available for them. That’s an increase of 206,000 from a year ago. When you include these workers, you get an alternative June unemployment rate (which the Labor Department terms the U6 unemployment rate) of 14.3 percent. That’s a significant uptick from May (13.8 percent), and the highest level since February.
In other bad news, the unemployment rate for adult women edged up to 6.8 percent, and the ongoing sequester accounted for a loss of 7,000 government jobs.
A total of 11.8 million Americans remain unemployed, and the proportion of people in the workforce remains at its lowest level since 1979.
For these reasons, economists are saying this is no time for the Federal Reserve to cut back on stimulus measures. In May, Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke hinted the Fed may begin increasing interest rates from their current near-zero levels, and cut back on its purchasing of tens of billions of dollars per month in government bonds. Dean Baker, director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, says that the proportion of people in the workforce should drive the Fed’s stimulus policies, not the unemployment rate. Here’s Baker:
Ironically Bernanke made this exact point about declining employment-to-population ratio (EPOPs) back in January 2004 when he was justifying the Fed’s decision to keep the interest rate at what was then considered an extraordinarily low 1.0 percent. Bernanke noted that the unemployment rate at the time was not terribly high, but pointed to a sharp decline in the EPOP from the pre-recession level. Since it was implausible that so many people had suddenly lost the desire or ability to work, Bernanke argued that the falling EPOP was strong evidence of continuing slack in the labor market.
Apparently Bernanke views the recent fall in the EPOP differently than the drop following the last recession.
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Economy Adds 195,000 Jobs, But Experts Say Fed Shouldn’t Curb Stimulus Yet
Republicans Are Missing the Point on Immigration Reform
Mother Jones
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A couple of weeks ago I speculated about the conventional wisdom that the Republican Party badly needs immigration reform to pass:
I wonder just how many House leaders are truly convinced that the party is doomed without the Hispanic vote anyway? I have a sense that a lot of them are in the process of convincing themselves that this is just a bunch of elite Beltway hooey.
Today, Benjy Sarlin puts some meat on this speculation, reporting that a growing number of mainstream conservatives are starting to move away from the belief that Republicans are in a demographic death spiral if they can’t win more Hispanic votes. Instead, they want to focus on winning a bigger and bigger share of the white vote:
At the moment, the anti-immigration argument appears to be gaining converts fast. On election night, Fox News anchor Brit Hume called the “demographic” threat posed by Latino voters “absolutely real” and suggested Mitt Romney’s “hardline position on immigration” may be to blame for election losses. On Monday, Hume declared that argument “baloney.” The Hispanic vote, he said, “is not nearly as important, still, as the white vote.”
Sean Hannity, a reliable bellwether on the right, has been on a similar journey since the fall. He announced days after President Obama’s re-election that he had “evolved” on immigration reform and now supported a “path to citizenship” in order to improve relations with Hispanic voters. Hannity has now flipped hard against the Senate’s bill.
….A new view on the right is taking hold: Romney lost because he didn’t go after whites hard enough…. Conservative commentators are convincing themselves they can find a few million more whites tucked between the couch cushions—at least enough for one more election. Two columnists have been particularly influential in this regard. Sean Trende at Real Clear Politics has argued that census data shows about 5 million mostly poor and rural white voters were “projected” to vote in 2012 based on population growth and past turnout but didn’t show up to the polls. Byron York, a columnist at the Washington Examiner, published a related piece noting that Romney would have lost even if he had racked up a majority of Latino voters.
Is this plausible? I doubt it. Sure, Republicans can reduce the non-white vote a bit by doubling down on their voter suppression strategy, and it might even work for a while. They might also be able to find some issues that directly boost the white vote by a percentage point or two. But look: Barack Obama almost certainly lost at least a few percentage points of the white vote because he’s black. In 2016, Democrats will have a white candidate, and that will give them a small leg up with the white vote right off the bat. It really seems unlikely that any kind of white outreach program can be so fabulously successful that it will make up for that.
But in a way, this doesn’t matter, because I think Republicans are missing the point. Conn Carroll, for example, tweets this response to Sarlin’s story:
there is no “growing” argument that “GOP should give up on Latino voters.” only the realization that pandering through amnesty won’t work.
In a narrow sense, it’s probably true that Republicans won’t get much credit if immigration reform passes. But that’s not what matters. What matters is that it eliminates immigration as an issue for Democrats. Democrats get tremendous mileage by demonizing Republicans and winning ever greater shares of the Hispanic vote. Once immigration reform passes, they can’t do that. There will always be smaller issues out there, but they just won’t have the same impact as immigration reform. Taking that off the table sucks the air out of the Dem balloon and gives Republicans a better chance of setting the terms of the political debate, both within and without the Hispanic community. That’s why it’s a net winner for them, not because they’ll get “credit” for allowing it to pass.
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The Surveillance-Marketing Complex, Coming Soon to a Computer Near You
Mother Jones
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Here’s a quote that should probably scare you:
“We are all in these Big Data business models.”
Why scary? Because the “we” in this case is Silicon Valley and the American intelligence community. As James Risen and Nick Wingfield reported yesterday in the New York Times, the interests of tech companies and the NSA have been converging over the past decade in two ways. The first way is fairly prosaic: Lots of Silicon Valley companies are in the business of selling stuff to the NSA: storage hardware, sophisticated communications equipment, data analytics software, and more. But while this may have increased recently, it’s not fundamentally new. It’s just the latest high-tech twist on the good old military-industrial complex.
But there’s a second way that the interests of Fort Meade and Santa Clara County have converged: These days, they’re fundamentally in the same business. The NSA calls it surveillance, and all the rest of us just call it spying. Silicon Valley, conversely, wouldn’t be caught dead calling it that. They call it “targeted advertising” or “monetizing the social network.” But it’s pretty much the same thing.
When your local grocery chain gives you a loyalty card, do you think they’re doing it in order to make you a loyal customer? Of course not. After all, every other supermarket offers loyalty cards too. So why are they willing to offer such eye-watering discounts if you use one? Because it allows them to track every single purchase you make and dump the information into a gigantic database. That’s useful to them, and, more importantly, it’s valuable data to sell to others. That’s why they want it so badly.
Online, of course, similar things are happening. High-tech marketing firms are busily figuring out ways to merge data from lots of different sources to build a profile of you that would probably put your own mother to shame. Why? Because it’s worth a lot of money. Advertisers are willing to pay huge amounts of money to be able to target the 1 percent of prospects who are actually likely to buy their wares, instead of simply blasting their message out to everyone. Target, for example, figured out the shopping habits of pregnant women and used that to create highly effective marketing campaigns aimed at expectant mothers. That’s a lucrative market.
Combine that with Facebook likes, Google searches, phone records, pharmacy records, and every other digital trail that all of us leave behind us, and what can’t you predict? We don’t know yet, but there are sure plenty of people beavering away to find out.
Needless to say, spy agencies have exactly the same goals. They might not be interested in whether you’re pregnant—though, then again, they might be—but they’re keenly interested in trying to predict future actions based on past events. So when Risen and Wingfield report that Facebook’s chief security officer decamped for a job with the NSA a couple of years ago, should we be surprised? Not a bit. They’re both in the same business, after all.
We can all decide for ourselves whether we think the NSA should have access to all our phone records. But the surveillance state doesn’t end there. Keep in mind that DARPA’s first crack at this stuff in the wake of 9/11 was called Total Information Awareness, and its goal was precisely what the name implied: a wide-ranging database that included personal emails, social networks, credit card records, phone calls, medical records, shopping records, travel data, and anything else that the marriage of high tech and modern marketing made possible. TIA got killed after public outcry, but it never really went away. How could it? The merger of public and private spying is just too powerful to ignore.
So even if you’re not too worried about NSA’s collection of phone records, you’d do well to think about where this is likely to go. There will be other terrorist attacks, and in their aftermath the public will be less likely to object to things like TIA than they were the first time around. After all, we’re all used to Facebook spying on us these days. (There’s no need to mince words about what they do, is there?) So as scary as a surveillance state may be, it’s not the worst thing that could happen. That’s because the private sector spies on us too, and they do it so charmingly that not only don’t we object, we practically beg them to do more. Instead of a military-industrial complex, we’re rapidly moving toward a marriage so perfect that eHarmony could only dream of it: the surveillance-marketing complex.
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The Surveillance-Marketing Complex, Coming Soon to a Computer Near You
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Tagged civil liberties, crime and justice, kevin drum, media, Ona, pur, top stories, venta
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