Coming February 6, 2024 . . .
MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE
by Michael Wolraich
Pre-order at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop
Coming February 6, 2024 . . . MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE by Michael Wolraich Pre-order at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop |
By Matthew Yglesias @ Vox.com, Dec. 3
The US military budget is such a bloated monstrosity that it contains accounting errors that could finance two-thirds of the cost of a government-run single-payer health insurance system. All Americans could visit an unlimited array of doctors at no out of pocket cost. At least that’s a notion spreading on left-wing Twitter and endorsed and amplified by newly elected Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, one of Democrats’ biggest 2018 sensations and an undeniable master at the fine art of staying in the public eye.
Unfortunately, it’s not true. The idea spread like a game of telephone from a Nation article to the US Congress while losing a crucial point of detail: The Pentagon’s accounting errors are genuinely enormous, but they’re also just accounting errors — they don’t represent actual money that can be spent on something else [....]
U.S. citizens show deference to the armed forces regardless of their political persuasion. Their willingness to let the generals decide is a threat to the democratic tradition of civilian oversight.
The much-publicized dispute between Louisiana landowners and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was about a lot more than one endangered species.
By George Will @ NationalReview.com, Dec. 2
Unanimity is elusive in today’s America but the Supreme Court achieved it last week. Although the dusky gopher frog is endangered, so are property rights and accountable governance. Both would have been further jeopardized if the frog’s partisans in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) had gotten away with designating 1,544 privately owned Louisiana acres as a “critical habitat” for the three-inch amphibian, which currently lives only in Mississippi and could not live in the Louisiana acres as they are now. The eight justices (the case was argued before Brett Kavanaugh joined the court) rejected both the government’s justification for its designation, and the government’s argument that its action should have received judicial deference, not judicial review [....]
Donald Trump likes to pit elite and non-elite white people against each other. Why do white liberals play into his trap?
By Joan C. Williams @ TheAtlantic.com, for the Dec. print issue (Williams is a professor and the director of the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California’s Hastings College of the Law. She is the author of White Working Class and the co-author, with Rachel Dempsey, of What Works for Women at Work)
"I want them to talk about racism every day,” Steve Bannon, President Donald Trump’s former strategist, told The American Prospect last year. “If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.”
Bannon was tapping into an old American tradition. As early as the 1680s, powerful white people were serving up racism to assuage the injuries of class, elevating the status of white indentured servants over that of enslaved black people. Some two centuries later, W. E. B. Du Bois observed that poor white people were compensated partly by a “public and psychological wage”—the “wages of whiteness,” as the historian David Roediger memorably put it. These wages pit people of different races against one another, averting a coalition based on shared economic interests.
And so it is with Trump’s carefully timed injections of racism: [....]
By Michael Sainato @ TheGuardian.com, Dec. 1
[....] Sheila Brewer worked at the same Kmart in Rockford for 17 years as a full-time employee. Four weeks into receiving severance pay, a bankruptcy court stopped the rest of the payments. In the meantime, Sears executives have petitioned to receive up to $25m in bonuses.
Brewer said: “It was a big toll emotionally and financially. It’s a big slap in the face, them telling me I can’t get the rest of my severance because of bankruptcy.
“Yet they’re petitioning in court to get bonuses for the executives when that money could go into a plan or some kind of package deal for full and part-time employees to receive some sort of package. [It would help] to pay bills to help us get back on our feet.”
Since their store closed, Patrick and Brewer have joined Rise Up Retail, a coalition of retail workers campaigning for better pay and conditions that has been gaining strength amid brutal layoffs for workers at Toys R Us and other retailers this year. Retail layoffs come even as the unemployment rate has fallen to its lowest level since 1969 [....]
Dangerous pop psychology fun, decided I just gotta post it:
By Eric Knowles and Sarah DiMuccio @ WashingtonPost.com, November 29
[....] For example, sociologist Robb Willer has shown that men whose sense of masculinity was threatened increased their support for aggressive foreign policy [....]
[....] We could not simply do a poll of men, who might not honestly answer questions about their deepest insecurities. Instead we relied on Google Trends, which measures the popularity of Google search terms [....] We began by selecting a set of search topics that we believed might be especially common among men concerned about living up to the ideals of manhood: “erectile dysfunction,” “hair loss,” “how to get girls,” “penis enlargement,” “penis size,” “steroids,” “testosterone” and “Viagra.” [....]
[....] How fragile masculinity was related to voting behavior
We measured the popularity of these search topics in every media market in the country during the years preceding the past three presidential elections. In the map below, darker colors show where these searches were most prevalent in 2016.
[MAP ILLUSTRATION]
We found that support for Trump in the 2016 election was higher in areas that had more searches for topics such as “erectile dysfunction.” Moreover, this relationship persisted after accounting for demographic attributes in media markets, such as education levels and racial composition, as well as searches for topics unrelated to fragile masculinity, such as “breast augmentation” and “menopause.”
In contrast, fragile masculinity was not associated with support for Mitt Romney in 2012 or support for John McCain in 2008 — suggesting that the correlation of fragile masculinity and voting in presidential elections was distinctively stronger in 2016.
The same finding emerged in 2018. We estimated levels of fragile masculinity in every U.S. congressional district based on levels in the media markets with which districts overlap. Before the election, we preregisteredour expectations, including the other factors that we would account for.
In the more than 390 House elections pitting a Republican candidate against a Democratic candidate [....]
By Ahiza Garcia @ CNN.com Business, Nov. 29
San Francisco - Music producer DJ Khaled and boxer Floyd Mayweather Jr. were charged by the Securities and Exchange Commission Thursday with promoting investments in initial cryptocurrency coin offerings without revealing that they'd been paid.
The SEC has said that cryptocurrency coins sold in initial coin offerings may be considered securities and subject to federal securities laws.
Both Khaled and Mayweather settled with the SEC and agreed not to promote any securities, even digital ones, for two years and three years, respectively. They also agreed to give back the money they'd received to the SEC and pay penalties with interest.
Mayweather failed to disclose that he'd received $300,000 from three different ICO issuers, including $100,000 from Centra Tech. Khaled failed to disclose a payment of $50,000 from the same company [....]