Someone should alert Trump and Republicans in Congress that America is a hotbed of socialism. But it’s socialism for the rich. Everyone else is treated to harsh capitalism.
Someone should alert Trump and Republicans in Congress that America is a hotbed of socialism. But it’s socialism for the rich. Everyone else is treated to harsh capitalism.
The devastating historic flooding from the Bomb Cyclone have left Nebraska’s farmers wondering how they’ll recover as storms become increasingly frequent under climate change.
By the end of this episode, you’re going to feel 10% less crazy about the world. Ian makes his case and then sits down with a man who’s worked everywhere from Moscow to Mumbai, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Tom Pickering. And on Puppet Regime the SPACE FORCE saga continues as Captain Trump and crew find themselves marooned in a strange new land.
By the end of this episode, you're going to feel 10% less crazy about the world. Ian makes his case and then sits down with a man who’s worked everywhere from Moscow to Mumbai, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Tom Pickering. And on Puppet Regime the SPACE FORCE saga continues as Captain Trump and crew find themselves marooned in a strange new land.
“We need to make this move because we’re in the midst of the greatest economic and technological transformation in the history of our country,” Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang says, arguing for a universal basic income of $1,000 per month for every American. “It helps give tens of millions of Americans a real path forward… it would improve people’s health, nutrition, it would elevate graduation rates, it would improve people’s mental health,” he adds. https://cnn.it/2WVzwl9
"We need to make this move because we're in the midst of the greatest economic and technological transformation in the history of our country," Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang says, arguing for a universal basic income of $1,000 per month for every American. "It helps give tens of millions of Americans a real path forward… it would improve people's health, nutrition, it would elevate graduation rates, it would improve people's mental health," he adds. https://cnn.it/2WVzwl9
It could take 10 million years to recover from what we are doing to the planet, scientists warn
Rob Waugh, Yahoo News UK April 8, 2019
It could take our planet a long time to get better (Getty)
There is only one event in the history of our planet which has brought about global change more rapidly than today’s human-driven extinctions – the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs.
Scientists studied fossils from just after the cataclysmic impact in order to understand how quickly our planet can recover from disaster (and why there seems to be a limit to it).
Scientists say that the 10 million years it took our planet to recover from the mass extinction which wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago could have important parallels now.
The researchers say that there appears to be a ‘speed limit’ on how fast the planet can recover from such events – capped at about 10 million years.
The researchers looked at the link between recovery and evolution because of earlier research that found recovery took millions of years despite many areas being habitable soon after Earth’s most recent mass extinction.
The team tracked recovery over time using fossils from a type of plankton called, foraminifera, or forams.
They found that a certain amount of ecological complexity seems to be required before life can really kick back into gear.
The speed limit is related to the time it takes to build up a new inventory of traits that can produce new species at a rate comparable to before the extinction event.
Lead author Christopher Lowery, a research associate at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics (UTIG) said, ‘The implication should be that these same processes would be active in all other extinctions.
‘I think this is the likely explanation for the speed limit of recovery for everything.’
Take it from an economist, Medicare for All is the most sensible way to fix health care
Gerald Friedman, USA Today April 8, 2019
There is an instinct among political pundits to confuse caution for practicality — an assumption that those who advocate for incremental change are being reasonable, while those pushing for bold reforms aren’t. This is seen most starkly in the debate around health care reform, despite the fact that the “practical” pushers of limited reform fail to address the real problems in our health care system.
Where we disagree is the solution. The favorite new “reasonable” plan is “Medicare for America,” a bill from Reps. Jan Schakowsky and Rosa DeLauro that has won the support of big names like Texas presidential hopeful Beto O’Rourke and the Center for American Progress, the left-of-center think tank where the plan originated as “Medicare Extra for All.” It has been extolled in opinion pieces for some of America’s largest newspapers as a “realistic” plan to fix what’s broken in our health care system.
On the other side, if punditry is to be believed, there are the Medicare for All “hard-liners” who believe in expanding a significantly improved Medicare system to every American, with coverage that includes dental, vision and long-term care. This is portrayed as radical or even unreasonable.
Time to get real. As an economist who has spent decades studying our health care system, I can tell you that Medicare for All advocates are the only ones who are being reasonable, because theirs is the only plan that will control health care costs while finally achieving universal coverage.
Insurance companies are middle men
The problem with incremental plans, whether they are public options, buy-ins to Medicare or Medicaid, or pumping more money into subsidies in the Affordable Care Act’s individual marketplace, is that they preserve the private health insurance system weighing down our health care.
This may be why pundits and centrist politicians view those plans as “reasonable,” but it means that they are leaving the main reason for our system’s dysfunction in place: the multipayer, for-profit financing model.
Commercial insurance companies are nothing more than middle men. They add no value to our system, but they do drive up costs with their bloated claims departments, marketing and advertising budgets and executive salaries. We pay for all of these things before a single dollar is spent on the delivery of care.
They also create extra costs for providers who need large administrative staffs to deal with billing systems, accounting for as much as $100,000 per physician.
Any plans short of Medicare for All leaves these costs in place. In other words, they leave hundreds of billions of dollars a year in savings on the table.
Medicare for All attacks costs
The waste goes beyond administrative savings. While pharmaceutical companies and hospital groups are consolidating and forming regional monopolies, our fragmented, multipayer system leaves no one insurance plan with a large enough share of the market to negotiate effectively. That allows these companies to essentially set their own inflated prices and bilk the public for hundreds of billions of dollars.
Is it any wonder that they oppose Medicare for All?
If we’re talking about which health care reform plans are serious about attacking cost, providing universal coverage and making sure everyone has access to health care, Medicare for All is the only reasonable answer. No other plan does this effectively, which is why I suspect that the Center for American Progress has not come out with spending estimates. Basic economic tenets tell us that their plan will not reduce health care spending as effectively.
Is Medicare for All bold? Absolutely. Is it reasonable? You bet. It is time to accept that Medicare for All is the practical alternative.
Gerald Friedman, a health care and labor economist, is an economics professor at University of Massachusetts Amherst and the director of The Hopbrook Institute.
Yes, Donald Trump has debased and defiled the presidency. He has launched blistering attacks on Democrats, on judges he disagrees with, journalists who criticize him and the intelligence community.
But McConnell is actively and willfully destroying the Senate.
Last Wednesday he used his Republican majority to cut the time for debating Trump’s court appointees from 30 hours to two– thereby enabling Republicans to ram through even more Trump judges.
McConnell doesn’t give a fig about the Senate, or about democracy. He cares only about winning. On the eve of the 2010 midterm elections he famously declared that his top priority was for Barack Obama “to be a one-term president”.
Between 2009 and 2013, McConnell’s Senate Republicans blocked 79 Obama nominees. In the entire history of the United States until that point, only 68 presidential nominees had been blocked.
McConnell’s long game is destroying what was once known as the world’s greatest deliberative body
This unprecedented use of the filibuster finally led Senate Democrats in 2013 to change the rules on some presidential nominees (but not the supreme court), to require simple majorities.
In response, McConnell fumed that “breaking the rules to change the rules is un-American”. If so, McConnell is about as un-American as they come. Once back in control of the Senate he buried Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland for the supreme court by refusing even to hold hearings.
Then, in 2017, McConnell and his Republicans changed the rules again, ending the use of the filibuster even for supreme court nominees and clearing the way for Senate confirmation of Trump’s Neil Gorsuch.
Step by step, McConnell has sacrificed the Senate as an institution to partisan political victories.
There is a vast difference between winning at politics by playing according to the norms of our democracy, and winning by subverting those norms.
To Abraham Lincoln, democracy was a covenant linking past and future. Political institutions, in his view, were “the legacy bequeathed to us”.
On the eve of the Senate’s final vote on repealing the Affordable Care Act in July 2017, the late John McCain returned to Washington from his home in Arizona, where he was being treated for brain cancer, to cast the deciding vote against repeal.
In a small town where people don’t lock their doors or windows, the first thief can effortlessly get into anyone’s house
Knowing he would be criticized by other Republicans, McCain noted that over his career he had known senators who seriously disagreed with each other but nonetheless knew “they had an obligation to work collaboratively to ensure the Senate discharged its constitutional responsibilities effectively”.
In words that have even greater relevance today, McCain added that “it is our responsibility to preserve that, even when it requires us to do something less satisfying than ‘winning’.”
Political success should never be measured solely by partisan victories. It must also be judged by the institutional legacy passed onward. The purpose of political leadership is not merely to win. It is to serve.
In any social or political system it’s always possible to extract benefits by being among the first to break widely accepted norms. In a small town where people don’t lock their doors or windows, the first thief can effortlessly get into anyone’s house. But once broken, the system is never the same. Everyone has to buy locks. Trust deteriorates.
Those, like Mitch McConnell, who break institutional norms for selfish or partisan gains are bequeathing future generations a weakened democracy.
The difference between winning at politics by playing according to the norms and rules of our democracy, and winning by subverting them, could not be greater. Political victories that undermine the integrity of our system are net losses for society.
Great athletes play by the rules because the rules make the game. Unprincipled athletes cheat or change the rules in order to win. Their victories ultimately destroy the game.
In terms of shaping the federal courts, McConnell has played “the long game”, which, incidentally, is the title of his 2016 memoir. Decades from now, McConnell will still be shaping the nation through judges he rammed through the Senate.
But McConnell’s long game is destroying what was once known as the world’s greatest deliberative body.
He is longest-serving leader of Senate Republicans in history but Mitch McConnell is no leader. He is the epitome of unprincipled power. History will not treat him kindly.
Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. He is also a columnist for Guardian US
Trump’s ‘pattern of cognitive decline’ alarms psychiatrists
Jerry Adler April 6, 2019
Donald Trump with a map marking New York City and Germany. Background: Fred Trump. (Photo illustration: Yahoo News; photos: AP (3), Getty Images)
Call him “Patient 1”: An individual in Washington, D.C., who presents with symptoms of mental decline, including a bizarre inability to remember where his own father was born.
Bandy Lee, a psychiatrist on the faculty at the Yale School of Medicine, has some insights to share, which we will get to in a moment.
On Tuesday, at a meeting with the secretary-general of NATO, President Trump launched into an impromptu riff on one of his favorite topics, the reluctance of America’s wealthy European allies to pay more toward their own defense. Then, in what might have been a clumsy effort to show no hard feelings, he expressed his love for Germany, the ancestral home of the Trump (or, originally, Drumpf) family:
“My father is German, right? Was German. And born in a very wonderful place in Germany, so I have a great feeling for Germany.”
Trump’s father, Frederick, was born in 1905 in the Bronx, approximately 4,000 miles from Germany, as the accompanying map shows. Trump’s grandfather was born in Germany, but was living in the United States with his wife when Frederick was born.
Frederick Trump’s birth certificate from the state of New York, borough of the Bronx.
Of all Trump’s many misstatements, exaggerations, empty boasts and slips of the tongue, this one — which Trump has made at least twice before — stands out for its sheer inexplicability. Ordinarily, when Trump says something ridiculous, it’s for an obvious purpose. He has been on an unhinged rant recently about windmills, whose function in the electrical grid he misunderstands and whose sound he says causes cancer. That is an assertion for which the White House was unable to provide any support, because he unquestionably made it up. But at least it’s consistent with his general disdain for environmentalism, and explainable by his self-interest in fighting to stop an offshore wind farm that he believes will ruin the views from one of his golf resortsin Scotland. And it is, strictly speaking, unfalsifiable; the carcinogenic effect of windmill noise, like a lot of other nonsensical beliefs, hasn’t been scientifically studied, so all you can say is that there’s no evidence for it.
But there’s a New York birth certificate that contradicts Trump’s claim about his father, and no obvious advantage for him to make up a story about it. To the contrary, Trump early in his career disguised his German ancestry, claiming his family was actually from Sweden, a lie that apparently was intended to make it easier to do business in a city with the largest Jewish population in the world. And in his first memoir, “The Art of the Deal,” he wrote that his father’s “classic Horatio Alger” story began with his birth “in New Jersey in 1905.” The Bronx is only just across the Hudson River from New Jersey, but it is in a whole different state.
Trump is disdainful of psychiatry, but one can imagine Freudian explanations for this peculiar assertion, or at least I can. Mistakes, Sigmund Freud theorized, are often the key to hidden feelings and memories. Is it just a coincidence that Trump, who got his start in national politics by peddling a conspiracy theory about his predecessor’s family and birthplace, and who constantly measures himself against him, repeatedly makes the same bizarre gaffe about where his own father was born? Is it resentment toward his overbearing father, who made a fortune building apartment houses in the outer boroughs, and reportedly never quite trusted his son’s foray into glamorous Manhattan real estate? Someone I know who worked closely with Trump in the early 1990’s, when his casino empire was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, recalls him saying dolefully at the time, “I should have listened to my father and stuck with Brooklyn. My father is going to say, ‘I told you so.’”
Of course, I’m no psychiatrist. But that holds the advantage that I am not bound by the American Psychiatric Association’s “Goldwater Rule,” which forbids members to offer opinions at a distance on the mental health of public figures. The provision was added to the profession’s code of ethics after a number of psychiatrists publicly speculated on the fitness and stability of 1964 Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater. He, of course, never became president, but Trump’s ascendance has prompted a number of prominent psychiatrists to declare an overriding emergency. Organized as the World Mental Health Coalition, they held a conference in Washington last month on “The Dangerous State of the World and the Need for Fit Leadership.”
“We are talking about the profound danger of the mentally unstable individual who holds the highest office in this country, and most powerful single office in the entire world,” said one of the speakers, Jeffrey Sachs, a Columbia University economist.
“He is rapidly declining,” Lee, the group’s president, said of Trump in an interview. “His rallies have been increasingly less coherent, with greater signs of paranoid responses, increasing attraction to violence, increasing espousal of conspiracy theories. A few weeks ago, there was the ‘Tim Apple’ episode, and the other day he referred to Venezuela as a company, while recently he confused his father’s birthplace with his grandfather’s.
“His mistakes are growing more and more bizarre,” Lee said. “If we match the pattern of his deterioration against pathology, what disease states look like, we can say he is not well.
“Continually we have been seeing that his erratic thoughts and behavior are more consistent with mental pathology than strategy. Now we are seeing a pattern of cognitive decline.”
Shortly after Trump took office, Lee edited a book called “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump,” a collection of essays by mental health professionals, which recently appeared in a second edition. “What we said then was that he was worse than he appeared in public and would grow more dangerous over time. That his mental pathology would spread into his administration and the population.” She referenced a phenomenon called “shared psychosis,” in which delusions spread from one family member to his or her relatives.
“In terms of the presidency,” she said, “the nation is the family. That is what we’re seeing now. One of the first things you lose is the ability to recognize that something is not right and to get help. An increasing proportion of the population is unable to recognize that something is not right. What you do in such a situation is contain the person, remove them from access to weapons and do an urgent evaluation. Then you manage the person in the least restrictive manner according to the results of the evaluation.”
Lee said her organization was “in the process of forming an expert panel that can test fitness for duty” by presidential candidates, pointing out that military officers in control of nuclear weapons undergo regular psychological evaluations. The exam she has in mind tests for such things as the ability to consider the consequences of decisions, to follow a logical train of thought, and to understand and explain back a story or scenario.
I think that would be a good thing to do for Trump, and for any of his would-be successors.
But if I were administering the test, I’d start with one simple question:
