Click to watch (2:43)
Today in Youngstown, OH, a woman asked: "This is an area that, across all demographics, has been depressed because of the loss of industry and the opioid crisis. What do you have to say to people in this area about so-called white privilege?"
Here's what I answered: pic.twitter.com/M8Ld5yjVE6
— Kirsten Gillibrand (@SenGillibrand) July 12, 2019
Trump’s Electoral College Edge Could Grow in 2020, Rewarding Polarizing Campaign
Re-election looks plausible even with a bigger loss in the national popular vote.
Very clear, important history.
The Myth That Busing Failed, The Daily 29-minute podcast interview with Nikole Hannah-Jones (see It Was Never About Busing, Nikole Hannah-Jones).
Discusses his THE DOUGLASS PLAN: A Comprehensive Investment in the Empowerment of Black America and his critique of the “left-right spectrum.”
Opinion
The New York Times
How Narendra Modi Seduced India With Envy and Hate
The prime minister has won re-election on a tide of violence, fake news and resentment.
By Pankaj Mishra
May 23, 2019
Before dawn on Feb. 26, Narendra Modi, the Hindu nationalist prime minister of India, ordered an aerial attack on the country’s nuclear-armed neighbor, Pakistan. There were thick clouds that morning over the border. But Mr. Modi claimed earlier this month, during his successful campaign for re-election, that he had overruled advisers who worried about them. He is ignorant of science, he admitted, but nevertheless trusted his “raw wisdom,” which told him that the cloud cover would prevent Pakistani radar from detecting Indian fighter jets.
Over five years of Mr. Modi’s rule, India has suffered variously from his raw wisdom, most gratuitously in November 2016, when his government abruptly withdrew nearly 90 percent of currency notes from circulation. From devastating the Indian economy to risking nuclear Armageddon in South Asia, Mr. Modi has confirmed that the leader of the world’s largest democracy is dangerously incompetent. During this spring’s campaign, he also clarified that he is an unreconstructed ethnic-religious supremacist, with fear and loathing as his main political means.
India under Mr. Modi’s rule has been marked by continuous explosions of violence in both virtual and real worlds. As pro-Modi television anchors hunted for “anti-nationals” and troll armies rampaged through social media, threatening women with rape, lynch mobs slaughtered Muslims and low-caste Hindus. Hindu supremacists have captured or infiltrated institutions from the military and the judiciary to the news media and universities, while dissenting scholars and journalists have found themselves exposed to the risk of assassination and arbitrary detention. Stridently advancing bogus claims that ancient Hindus invented genetic engineering and airplanes, Mr. Modi and his Hindu nationalist supporters seemed to plunge an entire country into a moronic inferno. Last month the Indian army’s official twitter account excitedly broadcast its discovery of the Yeti’s footprints.
Yet in the election that began last month, voters chose overwhelmingly to prolong this nightmare. The sources of Mr. Modi’s impregnable charisma seem more mysterious when you consider that he failed completely to realize his central promises of the 2014 election: jobs and national security. He presided over an enormous rise in unemployment and a spike in militancy in India-ruled Kashmir. His much-sensationalized punitive assault on Pakistan in February damaged nothing more than a few trees across the border, while killing seven Indian civilians in an instance of friendly fire.
Modi has infused India’s public sphere with a riotously popular loathing of the country’s old urban elites.
Mr. Modi did indeed benefit electorally this time from his garishly advertised schemes to provide toilets, bank accounts, cheap loans, housing, electricity and cooking-gas cylinders to some of the poorest Indians. Lavish donations from India’s biggest companies allowed his party to outspend all others on its re-election campaign. A corporate-owned media fervently built up Mr. Modi as India’s savior, and opposition parties are right to suggest that the Election Commission, once one of India’s few unimpeachable bodies, was also shamelessly partisan.
None of these factors, however, can explain the spell Modi has cast on an overwhelmingly young Indian population. “Now and then,” Lionel Trilling once wrote, “it is possible to observe the moral life in process of revising itself.” Mr. Modi has created that process in India by drastically refashioning, with the help of technology, how many Indians see themselves and their world, and by infusing India’s public sphere with a riotously popular loathing of the country’s old urban elites.
Rived by caste as well as class divisions, and dominated in Bollywood as well as politics by dynasties, India is a grotesquely unequal society. Its constitution, and much political rhetoric, upholds the notion that all individuals are equal and possess the same right to education and job opportunities; but the everyday experience of most Indians testify to appalling violations of this principle. A great majority of Indians, forced to inhabit the vast gap between a glossy democratic ideal and a squalid undemocratic reality, have long stored up deep feelings of injury, weakness, inferiority, degradation, inadequacy and envy; these stem from defeats or humiliation suffered at the hands of those of higher status than themselves in a rigid hierarchy.
I both witnessed and experienced these explosive tensions in the late 1980s, when I was a student at a dead-end provincial university, one of many there confronting a near-impossible task: not only sustained academic excellence, but also a wrenching cultural and psychological makeover in the image of the self-assured, English-speaking metropolitan. One common object of our ressentiment — an impotent mix of envy and hatred — was Rajiv Gandhi, the deceased father of main opposition leader Rahul Gandhi, whom Mr. Modi indecorously but cunningly chose to denounce in his election campaign. An airline pilot who became prime minister largely because his mother and grandfather had held the same post, and who allegedly received kickbacks from a Swedish arms manufacturer into Swiss bank accounts, Mr. Gandhi appeared to perfectly embody a pseudo-socialist elite that claimed to supervise post-colonial India’s attempt to catch up with the modern West but that in reality single-mindedly pursued its own interests.
There seemed no possibility of dialogue with a metropolitan ruling class of such Godlike aloofness, which had cruelly stranded us in history while itself moving serenely toward convergence with the prosperous West. This sense of abandonment became more wounding as India began in the 1990s to embrace global capitalism together with a quasi-American ethic of individualism amid a colossal population shift from rural to urban areas. Satellite television and the internet spawned previously inconceivable fantasies of private wealth and consumption, even as inequality, corruption and nepotism grew and India’s social hierarchies appeared as entrenched as ever.
No politician, however, sought to exploit the long dormant rage against India’s self-perpetuating post-colonial rulers, or to channel the boiling frustration over blocked social mobility, until Mr. Modi emerged from political disgrace in the early 2010s with his rhetoric of meritocracy and lusty assaults on hereditary privilege.
India’s former Anglophone establishment and Western governments had stigmatized Mr. Modi for his suspected role — ranging from malign indifference to complicity and direct supervision — in the murder of hundreds of Muslims in his home state of Gujarat in 2002. But Mr. Modi, backed by some of India’s richest people, managed to return to the political mainstream, and, ahead of the 2014 election, he mesmerized aspiring Indians with a flamboyant narrative about his hardscrabble past, and their glorious future. From the beginning, he was careful to present himself to his primary audience of stragglers as one of them: a self-made individual who had to overcome hurdles thrown in his way by an arrogant and venal elite that indulged treasonous Muslims while pouring contempt on salt-of-the-earth Hindus like himself. Boasting of his 56-inch chest, he promised to transform India into an international superpower and to reinsert Hindus into the grand march of history.
Since 2014, Mr. Modi’s near-novelistic ability to create irresistible fictions has been steadily enhanced by India’s troll-dominated social media as well as cravenly sycophantic newspapers and television channels. India’s online population doubled in the five years of Mr. Modi’s rule. With cheap smartphones in the hands of the poorest of Indians, a large part of the world’s population was exposed to fake news on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and WhatsApp. Indeed, Mr. Modi received one of his biggest electoral boosts from false accounts claiming that his airstrikes exterminated hundreds of Pakistanis, and that he frightened Pakistan into returning the Indian pilot it had captured.
Mr. Modi is preternaturally alert to the fact that the smartphone’s screen is pulling hundreds of millions of Indians, who have barely emerged from illiteracy, into a wonderland of fantasy and myth. An early adopter of Twitter, like Donald Trump, he performs unceasingly for the camera, often dressed in outlandish costumes. After decades of Western-educated and emotionally constricted Indian leaders, Mr. Modi uninhibitedly participates — whether speaking tearfully of his poverty-stricken past or boasting of his bromance with Barack Obama — in digital media’s quasi-egalitarian culture of exhibitionism.
India has witnessed a savage assault on not just democratic institutions and rational discourse but also ordinary human decency.
Posing last weekend as a saffron-robed monk in a cave at a Hindu pilgrimage site, Mr. Modi provoked much mockery among India’s English-speaking intelligentsia. But to many Indians who felt scorned and marginalized by a westernized establishment, an unabashedly Hindu politician with thickly-accented English has appeared, as the novelist Aatish Taseer claimed in 2014, “a rare instance of India trusting to herself, throwing up one of her own, one who did not have the blessings of the West at all.”
He was certainly fortunate to have in Rahul Gandhi a live mascot of India’s defunct dynastic politics and insolvent ideological centrism. However, contrary to what many neoliberal commentators in India and the West hoped for, Mr. Modi is far from alchemizing the passions of left-behind Indians into spectacular economic growth. Rather, he has opened up what Friedrich Nietzsche, speaking of the “men of ressentiment,” called “a whole tremulous realm of subterranean revenge, inexhaustible and insatiable in outbursts.”
Mr. Modi’s appointed task in India is the same as that of many far-right demagogues: to titillate a fearful and angry population with the scapegoating of minorities, refugees, leftists, liberals and others while accelerating predatory forms of capitalism. He may have failed to create job opportunities for disadvantaged Indians. But he has sanctioned them, with his own vengeful contempt for English-speaking elites, to raucously talk back to, and shout down, the already privileged. In lieu of any liberation from injustice, he has emancipated the darkest of emotions; he has licensed his supporters to explicitly hate a range of people from perfidious Pakistanis and Indian Muslims to their “anti-national” Indian appeasers.
As Mr. Modi allowed long-simmering ressentiment to erupt volcanically, India witnessed a savage assault on not just democratic institutions and rational discourse but also ordinary human decency. The India that Mr. Modi has made was never more accurately summed up than both in the demonstrations last year, led by women, and the justifications offered by politicians, police officials and lawyers in support of eight Hindu men accused of raping and murdering an eight-year-old Muslim girl.
Intoxicating voters with the seductive passion of vengeance, and grandiose fantasies of power and domination, Mr. Modi has deftly escaped public scrutiny of his record of raw wisdom — one that would have ruined any other politician. Back in 2014, the Hindu supremacist pioneered the politics of enmity that corrodes many democracies today. This week, he triumphantly reaped one of the biggest electoral harvests of the post-truth age, giving us more reason to fear the future.
Pankaj Mishra is the author, most recently, of “Age of Anger: A History of the Present.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/23/opinion/modi-india-election.html
By Wesley Morris
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/23/arts/green-book-interracial-friendship.html
In many Oscar bait movies, interracial friendships come with a paycheck, and follow the white character’s journey to enlightenment.
…We’d all been reared on racial-reconciliation fantasies. Why can’t Mookie and Sal be friends? The answer’s too long and too raw. Sal can pay Mookie to deliver pizzas ‘til kingdom come. But he could never pay him enough to be his friend.
Representative Will Hurd’s district runs along the southwestern border. His vision for border security is starkly different from the president’s.
The Daily podcast: click here.
December 14, 2013The Volcker Rule has landed. Will the United States financial system be safer and sounder as a result?
That’s the goal, after all, of the almost 1,000-page document approved by banking, securities and commodities regulators last week. Years in the making, the rule is supposed to reduce the risks that a major bank will have to be rescued by taxpayers if some of its bets go bad.
The rule, named for Paul A. Volcker, the former Federal Reserve Board chairman, was supposed to be the 21st century’s answer to theGlass-Steagall Act, the Depression-era law that separated investment banks from their commercial brethren. To at least one financial historian, the emergence of the new rule last week was momentous.
“The passage of the Volcker Rule represents a step partway back to the Glass-Steagall regime that has historical significance for helping to give us four to five decades of relative financial stability from the 1930s to the 1980s,” said Richard E. Sylla, the Henry Kaufman professor of the history of financial institutions and markets at New York University. “Even if we don’t see a lot of actions against violators, the mere fact that the rule is on the books will make banks think twice before engaging in activities that might result in actionable violations.”
As a result, Professor Sylla said, “the financial system should become more responsible and safer.”
Let’s hope so.
Still, Mr. Sylla’s point about actions against violators raises perhaps the most crucial question surrounding this new rule. How assiduously will the regulators charged with enforcing it do their jobs?
We learned all too well during the lead-up to the recent financial crisis what happens when bank watchdogs snooze. There were plenty of regulations on the books that could have been enforced to rein in reckless lenders. But the police force was disengaged, or worse, protecting the institutions it was supposed to oversee.
Put simply, the success or failure of the Volcker Rule will depend upon the appetite of financial regulators to regulate. This is always the case, of course, with regulation. But it is particularly so with the Volcker Rule because some of its most important measures are open to interpretation.
Consider the exceptions to the rule’s ban on proprietary trading — the bets that a bank can make using its own money. Proprietary trading was what hammered JPMorgan Chase in the incident known as the London whale; curbing these types of transactions was central to the new rule and to protecting taxpayers from future bank bailouts.
But there are always exceptions to any rule. And in proprietary trading, the Volcker Rule makes an exception that relates to a bank’s liquidity management.
Liquidity represents a bank’s ready cash needed to meet its obligations. If an institution can meet these obligations without generating a loss, it’s considered to have sufficient liquidity.
Reading the rule is a tough slog through legal jargon. The bar on proprietary trading, for example, does not include “any purchase or sale of a security by a banking entity for the purpose of liquidity management in accordance with a documented liquidity management plan of the banking entity.”
If that’s not enough, the rule goes on to warn that these exempted transactions should exclude purchases “for the purpose of short-term resale, benefiting from actual or expected short-term price movements, realizing short-term arbitrage profits, or hedging a position taken for such short-term purposes.”
Are these exceptions big enough for the London whale to swim through? We don’t really know: It would be up to regulators to ensure that proprietary bets aren’t being improperly labeled liquidity management.
A second aspect of the rule granting financial institutions loads of leeway relates to their so-called market-making activities. These transactions are entered into by a bank but are ultimately for the benefit of its customers.
In this area, sayeth the rule: “The amount, types and risks of the financial instruments in the trading desk’s market maker inventory are designed not to exceed, on an ongoing basis, the reasonably expected near-term demands of clients, customers or counterparties.”
Someone will have to police whether a bank puts on a trade that it says is for market-making activities but in reality is a proprietary bet.
“You can drive a pretty large truck through that exception,” said David A. Skeel, a law professor and an expert in bankruptcy at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. As a result, he said: “The success or failure of the rule is really going to come down to what the bank regulators will do to enforce it. It can’t work unless it’s aggressively enforced, but it’s hard to imagine it’s going to be aggressively enforced.”
That’s hard to imagine because banking regulators are going to be the main enforcers of the Volcker Rule. For the most part (excepting the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation), these are the very people who didn’t see the mortgage crisis bearing down on them. One reason: Where the big banks are concerned, the overseers often favor the overseen.
And yet regulators for the most part have not been held accountable for their woeful performance in the years leading up to the financial debacle. Instead, they have received even greater powers.
That no penalties have been exacted for the recent regulatory lapses means they are more likely to continue, Mr. Skeel said.
“If there were some sort of penalty for regulators who cross a boundary in failing to enforce the Volcker Rule, that would be interesting,” he said. “Even if there aren’t immediate obvious abuses, it would give you an opportunity to ask if there is any regulator whose job or pay ought to be in jeopardy because the rules aren’t being enforced.”
An intriguing idea. Just as the Volcker Rule is an opportunity to reduce the risks that big banks pose to taxpayers, it could also begin a discussion about regulatory accountability. That’s long overdue.
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Published by The New York Times at
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/15/business/wake-up-the-banking-police.html
A tweet by Claudia Horwitz prompted me to watch this 19-minute video.
Obama can still give a great speech. This one starts off slow but builds. I especially appreciated his calls for a commitment to self-reflection and self-improvement.
Big Pharma: Medicating Our Nation’s Capitol With Big Money
By Sanderson
…The amount pharmaceutical companies spent lobbying in 2012 was 2.6 billion dollars. This was more than was spent by combining the all of the amounts spent on lobbying activities by Big Oil, Gas, Defense, and Aerospace industries and all of their associates!…
As a direct influence of their lobbying Congress, laws have been passed which have allowed big pharmaceutical companies to monopolize the drug market on new prescription drugs for terms of up to 20 years or more….
Most of the new medications being researched and developed are occurring at the university level and being funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH)…. So as we, the tax payers, pay for the R&D of new medication out of our own pockets, Big Pharm claims to have suffered the costs of R&D themselves, and then turns around and recharges those” ghost” costs to the consumer by way of charging exorbitant prices for the medication!…
In 2006, the United States Congress expanded our Medicare System to include a prescription drug benefit (Medicare Part D)…. So, not only did big pharmacy get a “huge new revenue stream from taxpayers,” but they could charge this new group whatever they wished for their brand-name drugs….
As a result of this symbiotic relationship between Big Pharma and the FDA, the common consumer is often blocked from hearing about natural food or supplements which can treat certain illnesses cheaper and with outcomes as good, if not better, than the Big Pharma drugs being patented by the FDA.
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The Bipartisan Budget Deal and the Economy: The Beatings Continue
By Robert Borosage
The bipartisan budget agreement released late Tuesday is being celebrated, largely for showing that a deal is possible….
The deal was reached by give and take. Democrats defended Social Security and Medicare from cuts Republicans wanted. Republicans defended billionaires and multinationals from taxes that Democrats wanted. Democrats got some relief from short-term sequester cuts; Republicans got increased long-term deficit reductions. Democrats saved domestic programs from deeper cuts; Republicans saved military programs.
But what is the actual effect on the economy?
…Somehow Washington has failed to get the message. This deal doesn’t end the cutting; it only reduces its severity. It doesn’t generate jobs; it only cuts fewer of them. It doesn’t help the economy; it only reduces the harm to it.
Surely we can do better than that.
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Lament of the Plutocrats
Why Wall Street is fed up with the White House—and Republicans too.
By BEN WHITE and MAGGIE HABERMAN
…Still, some say fears that Clinton will end up alienating financial sector donors the way Obama has, even if she tacks left, are overblown. “Wall Street folks are so happy about [having Clinton run] that they won’t care what she says,” says one well-placed Democrat….
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Iran’s Hard-Liners Keep Their Criticism of Nuclear Pact to Themselves
By THOMAS ERDBRINK
For over a decade, Iran’s hard-line clerics and Revolutionary Guards … grew richer and more powerful, even as the country was increasingly impoverished by the sanctions….But if they do receive such a signal, the hard-liners have the money and means to mobilize a formidable opposition….
