Tom Roche2nd segment (of 3, excepting the headlines) is good, rest very skippable
Tom RocheNote Steven Swig is son of Melvin Swig: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melvin_Swig
The drive to persuade President Joe Biden to cancel student debt took a major hit last week when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi stunned Congress with a surprise statement in opposition. The move may put her at odds with much of the public and the Democratic Party, but it aligns her with Democratic megadonors Steven and Mary Swig, the billionaire scions of the Bay Area’s oldest real estate dynasty who have deep ties to the California representative. Steven Swig has also long served as a treasurer for Pelosi in her fundraising efforts.
In November, after Biden’s election, and amid increased pressure to cancel student debt, the Swigs quietly circulated a memo among key Capitol Hill figures, making the dubious case that debt cancellation at the executive level is illegal. The argument in the memo gets much of its weight by virtue of the wealthy couple who produced it, as the Swigs are not just major funders of progressive nonprofits, but also have significantly bankrolled Pelosi and her House Democratic caucus.
The memo, obtained by The Intercept, was distributed to members of Congress by Freedom to Prosper, an organization founded by and for the Swigs. The couple has in the past directly lobbied Pelosi, according to two sources with knowledge of the meetings, in which the Swigs would suggest rhetoric or policy proposals that Pelosi would agree to adopt in some form. The source, like several others interviewed by The Intercept for this story, would only speak on condition of anonymity, citing the Swigs’ financial sway in progressive circles. (They have also contributed millions of dollars to the Democratic Party over the years.)
The couple have for many years given the maximum amount permitted in campaign contributions to Pelosi, who represents California’s 12th District which encompasses San Francisco, and Steven Swig has served as treasurer for Pelosi’s reelection campaigns since 2012. The Swigs also enjoy extended family ties to the Pelosis. Their niece worked for Pelosi from 2018 until March of this year, serving as a staff assistant, legislative correspondent, and policy associate. (The Swigs, according to a report in Mother Jones, even own mugs with a photograph of Pelosi on them, which they said they had gotten from a nephew who worked for her.)
The memo, which was designated for “INTERESTED PARTIES” and wasn’t disseminated to the general public, asserts that student debt cancellation via executive order is unlawful. “No, the President Cannot Cancel Student Loan Debt with a Pen Stroke,” a boldface title reads. The memo continues: “Recently, there has been heightened fervor around Senators Warren and Schumer’s proposal that President-elect Joe Biden could cancel student debt ‘with the pen as opposed to legislation.’ Unfortunately, that cannot happen. Attorneys on Capitol Hill say that the Executive Branch does not have congressional authority to cancel student debt.”
Despite the memo’s certainty, it’s far from clear that such an executive order is unlawful, experts say. When asked about the debate over the executive order, Marshall Steinbaum, a senior fellow of higher education finance at the Jain Family Institute and economics professor at the University of Utah, said via email, “The executive absolutely has the power to cancel student debt and there’s no excuse for not exercising it. A generation or more of students and workers have had their lives ruined by the failed experiment shifting the cost of higher ed onto individuals while corralling more and more students into the system. The failure is in the false assumption that a college degree or a masters would automatically cause earnings to increase more than sufficiently to pay off the debt. That hasn’t happened, and now it’s the victims of the policy failure who are carrying the burden while every year the government and higher ed institutions originate $100 billion more in student loans that everyone knows won’t be repaid.”
A student debt cancellation advocate who works closely with Congress added that their concession amounts to a cop-out given the near impossibility of a bill passing in the evenly split Senate. Why not, the advocate asked, just try an executive order and see what happens?
The idea of simply passing the executive order and letting the Supreme Court decide is hardly an abstraction; Biden did just that with his recent executive order imposing a moratorium on evictions. And the current pause in student debt collection at the federal level suggests that the executive has significant authority. Biden issued the eviction moratorium order following pressure from progressive members of Congress, led by Rep. Cori Bush, who chose not to return home on vacation and instead took to protesting outside the Capitol in hopes of addressing the looming eviction crisis.
Though Pelosi says she supports student debt cancellation via congressional legislation — a position shared by the Swigs — her statement last week represents a departure from her previous silence on the issue. “The president can’t do it — so that’s not even a discussion,” Pelosi said during a news conference, referring to a presidential executive order to cancel student debt. She continued: “Suppose … your child just decided they, at this time, [do] not want to go to college, but you’re paying taxes to forgive somebody else’s obligations. You may not be happy about that.”
Pelosi’s statement came as a shock to many in Congress, with some wondering if perhaps she had misspoken, as one staffer told The Intercept. But student debt relief advocates are more cynical. “The only reason she was for it [legislatively] was because Steve and Mary asked her to,” said one prominent member of the student debt cancellation activist community with direct knowledge of discussions between Pelosi and the Swigs on the subject. (A second source confirmed the discussions.)
Drew Hammill, deputy chief of staff for Pelosi, said in an email, “The Swigs have been family friends for decades” — but denied that the Swigs directed her position on student debt cancellation. “The statement the Speaker made was in response to a question from a reporter, not a proactive announcement.” He also stressed that Pelosi’s policy staff has not corresponded with the Swigs on this issue but did not comment on whether Pelosi herself had. “Our policy staff that work on this issue have had no conversations or correspondence with the Swigs on this issue.”
“The Speaker’s response to a reporter’s question was based on her staff’s analysis of the President’s authorities,” Hammill said. “We understand that the Department of Justice is reviewing what authorities the President may have in this regard and the Speaker would support the President using any authority he believes he has to address the crisis of student debt in our country. The Speaker very much wants to have as much forgiveness as possible because she believes it is holding back so many in our country. It must, however, be done in a way that is upheld in the courts.”
Political operatives familiar with the Swigs describe an often well-meaning couple who have donated to worthy causes but are rendered almost comically out of touch by their extraordinary wealth. A source pointed to the Swigs’ own account, published in Salon in 2018, of how they only ever learned that student debt existed recently, after their daughter told them about the plight of an artist friend saddled with crushing debt: “It began with a story. It wasn’t an unusual one. … But it was new to two of us when we first heard it from our daughter, four years ago. It was the story of a gifted young artist, a single mother who was forced to set aside her dreams and her gifts to work a retail job so that she could pay back her student loans.”
Steven and Mary Swig did not respond to a request for comment.
The post Nancy Pelosi’s Surprise Flip on Student Debt Cancellation Came After Urging From Billionaire Power Couple appeared first on The Intercept.
Tom Rochedon't waste your time
Morgan Lewin and Tyler Alderson discuss the popular urban legend that classical music composer Ludwig van Beethoven was actually Black. While the answer is a definitive "no," the reasons for this myth's enduring popularity say a lot about race, class, and the prestige attached to classical music. 39 mins.
Tom RocheVERY EXCELLENT: includes information about early efforts at detente by Kissinger et al, and how Cuba's efforts in Africa were not only successful and world-historically moral, but have led to great costs to Cuba by inciting the undying wrath of the US foreign-military-policy Deep State.
Tom RocheVERY EXCELLENT: and not just as information--Hutton "speaks in prose," almost as if scripted. Truly astonishing.
Historian Ronald Hutton discusses Oliver Cromwell’s early life and career, exploring the brilliance and cruelty of the future Lord Protector and explaining how he rose from obscurity to become one of the dominant figures of the age.
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Tom Rochethe FOS are Mike Lindell and Chasten Buttigieg: the Anne Appelbaum attack on Lindell esp gets the CTH treatment
Tom RocheVERY EXCELLENT, detailed, see the Rootclaim study linked above
Tom Rochejust dull, bailed after ~5 min of ~15 min episode
Tom Rocheexcellent
Long Reads is joined by Peter Shirlow, director of the Institute of Irish Studies at the University of Liverpool, and the author of several books on politics and society in Northern Ireland. Long Reads is a Jacobin podcast looking in-depth at political topics and thinkers, both contemporary and historical, with the magazine’s longform writers. Hosted by Features Editor Daniel Finn.
Find Peter's perspectives as well as the Civic Space project at this website https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/irish-studies/civic-space/
Produced by Conor Gillies, music by Knxwledge.
Tom Roche> effective use of Org-roam as a Zettelkasten
David Wilson over at the YouTube System Crafters channel has a new video up on getting started with Org-roam and building a second brain. It’s the best introductory video I’ve seen on Org-roam and, of course, Wilson is promising more.
The video covers Org-roam V2 and except for mentioning how to get rid of the warning message for V1 users, doesn’t mention V1 at all. By the end of the video you’ll know how to set up a working Org-roam installation and start taking notes. Later videos will cover more advanced topics but this one will end with you being productive with the package.
The video shows you how to create new nodes and link one node to another. The heart of a Zettelkasten is the idea that you can not only follow forward links from a parent node to a child but also back links from a child to its parents. The plural “parents” is important: the whole point of the Zettelkasten method is to discover hidden relationships between the individual notes so the backlinks buffer will show every reference to the current note. This is a realization of the idea that the Zettelkasten method produces a graph of the notes and their connections rather than just a hierarchy.
The video covers a couple of other topics like creating aliases for nodes and linking to a subtree of a note. These are interesting but not really that important to the effective use of Org-roam as a Zettelkasten.
If you’ve been wanting to try out the Zettelkasten method, this video will get you up and running with a minimum of fuss. The video is 34 minutes, 18 seconds so you’ll need to schedule some time but it moves quickly and is easy to get through.
Tom RocheGood episode, but Buller (near end) misses a major point: "pension-fund socialism" did not happen in the US *because it was outlawed* by Taft-Hartley et al. See, e.g., p4-5 of Fogdall 2001 @ https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1104&context=jbl (University of Pennsylvania Journal of Business Law).
This week, Grace speaks to Adrienne Buller and Ben Braun. Adrienne is a senior research fellow at the think tank Common Wealth, and Ben is a political scientist at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies. They recently co-authored a paper entitled ‘Under new management: Share ownership and the rise of UK asset manager capitalism‘.
With Grace, Adrienne and Ben discuss the rise of the big three asset managers, who really makes the big decisions in today’s corporations, and whether workers can ever hope to use their power as shareholders to change capitalism.
You can support our work on the show by becoming a Patron. Thanks to our producer Conor Gillies and the Lipman-Miliband Trust for making this episode possible.
Tom RocheUnfortunately this episode is one of the weakest UIs I can remember. I've never been fond of the banter (4 Food Groups of News, et al) but this weak's (pun intended) was uniformly dull. And while I very much support Nina Turner over Shontel Brown, the Turner surrogate interviewed (Jennifer R. Farmer) was similarly uninteresting--Farmer basically just did standard surrogate shpiel.
Even just days before the election in Ohio’s 11th district, Nina Turner is pulling voters to her side. Just this week, an influential city councilman announced he switched his support from opponent Shontel Brown to Turner because on one side he saw angry attack ads, while on the other he saw policy.
And this race is centered on policy: Brown, backed by corporate dems like Hillary Clinton and Right Wing “pro-Israel” PACs, represents the moderate side of democrats, while Turner, supported by Bernie Sanders and AOC, is part of the progressive swing led by the Squad.
Jennifer R. Farmer, a social publicist and campaign surrogate for Turner, joins the Useful Idiots to share what Nina believes in:
This is Medicare for all and “ensuring that a health event does not derail a person’s future.” This is affordable college and equal pay for equal work. This is creating “a future that we’re leaving behind for future generations that ensures climate justice.”
And on Tuesday, we have an election. Will Nina Turner use her #UsefulIdiotsBump to become the next member of the Squad? Or does the national Democratic Party still have power to reach voters? Watch along with us.
Plus, we watch Biden yell at reporters, Republicans pretend America isn’t racist, and Brian Stelter lose his pants.
It’s all this, and more, on this week’s episode of Useful Idiots. Check it out.
Tom Rochethis is the kinda piece that makes me wish TOR had NOT named the button 'Like' but instead, e.g., 'Recommend'
Enlarge / A pathologist examines brain tissue of a diseased deer. The white circular shapes are the sponge-like holes found with prion-related diseases called transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs). (credit: Getty | Star Tribune)
Five public research institutions in France announced a three-month moratorium on prion research this week, following a newly identified case of prion disease in a retired lab worker.
If the case is found to be linked to a laboratory exposure, it would be the second such case identified in France. In 2019, another lab worker in the country died of a prion disease at the age of 33. Her death came around nine years after she accidentally jabbed herself in the thumb with forceps used to handle frozen slices of humanized mouse brains infected with prions.
Prions are misfolded, misshapen forms of normal proteins, called prion proteins, that are commonly found in human and other animal cells. What prion proteins do normally is still unclear, but they're readily found in the human brain. When a misfolded prion enters the mix, it can corrupt the normal prion proteins around them, prompting them to misfold as well, clump together, and corrupt others. As the corruption ripples through the brain, it leads to brain tissue damage, eventually causing little holes to form. This gives the brain a sponge-like appearance and is the reason prion diseases are also called transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs).
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Tom RocheVERY EXCELLENT, mostly about US financialization after c1980 (less about working class and labor markets)
Umass Lowell Economics professor William Lazonick, outlines the history of how government policy and economic conditions contributed to the rise and fall of a Black blue-collar middle class. Part 2 takes a closer look at the role of finance and stock buybacks and what can be done to reverse the trend towards growing inequality.
Tom RocheVERY EXCELLENT, lots about US labor markets and economics c1945-c2021
Umass Lowell Economics professor William Lazonick, outlines the history of how government and economic conditions favored the rise of a Black blue-collar middle class from the 1960''s to the 1970's, and how shifts in policy and in the economy caused its unmaking from the 1980's onwards.
Tom Roche3rd of 4
Tom RocheNyxt is a Lisp-programmable browser: see https://nyxt.atlas.engineer/ . This enables driving Nyxt with Emacs: see https://github.com/ag91/emacs-with-nyxt . However there are Emacs-Nyxt-communication configuration issues on Linux (at least as of Jun 2021): see https://ag91.github.io/blog/2021/05/30/browsing-in-common-lisp-nyxt-and-emacs/ , and in any case this is probably of most use to serious *Lisp hackers.
Tom Rochealternatively, see code @ https://protesilaos.com/codelog/2021-07-24-emacs-misc-custom-commands/ --this is some major Elisp hacking.
Protesilaos Stavrou (Prot) has another video up in which he discusses a few of the commands he’s implemented to make his workflow easier. There’s no overriding theme, just some functions he’s written that ease his work in various ways.
For example, his first command deals with inserting comments. It puts the comment in the proper place using a heuristic based on where the point is but also adds a prefix consisting of a keyword and the date or a keyword and a date/time stamp. It is, as Stavrou says, not a big deal but it does make it easier to add comments as you code.
Next he considers diffing the current buffer. If the buffer has been modified, it diffs the buffer with the underlying file. If the current buffer is clean (has not been modified) it diffs it with the version in version control (if any). Again, this is pretty simple but very useful. When called with the universal argument, the function will highlight word-wise changes.
His next bit of Elisp is concerned with narrowing. Stavrou says it’s a simplification of some code by Bozhidar Batsov but I find Artur Malabarba’s code more useful.
The next bit of code involves escaping URLs and email address for Markdown. They’re nice but we Org mode users probably won’t find much use for them.
Finally, he presents some code to ease grepping. It uses the built-in grep function but puts a wrapper around it so that you don’t have to input all the information the standard implementation requires.
He has a sort of coda to the video that mentions a few things that he doesn’t discuss at length but that he finds useful.
There’s a lot of material in the video but it’s only 31 minutes, 27 seconds long. That short enough that you can probably fit it in easily but long enough that you’ll still have to schedule some time for it.
Tom RocheVERY EXCELLENT
Just added to my radio archive (click on date for link):
July 22, 2021 Robert Fatton, author of The Guise of Exceptionalism, on the assassination of Haiti’s president and the long history that led to this sorry pass
Tom RocheVERY EXCELLENT
Doug speaks with Robert Fatton, author of The Guise of Exceptionalism, on the assassination of Haiti’s president and the long history that led to this sorry pass.
Behind the News, hosted by Doug Henwood, covers the worlds of economics and politics and their complex interactions, from the local to the global. Find the archive here: https://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Radio.html
Tom RocheEXCELLENT
Tom RocheVERY EXCELLENT
Tom Rochenote this audio does not currently include the Tucker Carlson segment, instead repeats Krystal's radar
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Tom Rochesee session='dotfile managers'
Yadm’s an amazing dotfile manager that’s basically a thin wrapper around git and a bare repo. With it being a bare repo, you’ll not be able to manage it directly with Magit so here’s a really smart tip I found that will let you access it via Tramp:
(use-package tramp
:config
(add-to-list 'tramp-methods
'("yadm"
(tramp-login-program "yadm")
(tramp-login-args (("enter")))
(tramp-login-env (("SHELL") ("/bin/sh")))
(tramp-remote-shell "/bin/sh")
(tramp-remote-shell-args ("-c")))))
(defun yadm ()
(interactive)
(magit-status "/yadm::"))
Tom RocheMiles Jupp is always great, but here *all* the characters work and the writing 's great too. Rest of the show to come (hopefully including outside the UK) @ https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000y1g9
Tom RocheVERY EXCELLENT
Tom Rocheunfortunately this is the sort of history-podcast episode in which the conversants discuss not the history but its writing, its implications, and most regrettably the virtue of focusing on persons of the particularly valorized identity
Tyler Alderson talks with the authors of the book We Are The Land: A History of Native California about the struggles and triumphs of indigenous people, and what lies ahead. Also discussed is the process of writing a wide-ranging history, and how to approach commonly-told narratives from a different perspective, upending stereotypes and generalizations. 49 min.
Tom RocheVERY EXCELLENT deep-dive, not just on Yemen since 2011, but Arabian geopolitics since ~WW2
Long Reads is joined by Helen Lackner, author of Yemen in Crisis: The Road to War and a leading expert on modern Yemen who spent years living in the country. Long Reads is a Jacobin podcast looking in-depth at political topics and thinkers, both contemporary and historical, with the magazine’s longform writers. Hosted by Features Editor Daniel Finn.
Read Helen's piece "How Yemen's Old Order Snuffed Out the Country's Hopes for a New Dawn" here: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/03/yemen-war-2011-protests-arab-spring
Plus other articles here: https://www.jacobinmag.com/author/helen-lackner
Produced by Conor Gillies, music by Knxwledge.
Tom RocheGood audio, bad description. Actually, this episode is mostly a spirited debunking of a recent piece by liberal-imperial überacademics Deudney and Ikenberry in Foreign Policy[1] which makes empirically indefensible claims about "Rooseveltian foreign policy" (Deudney and Ikenberry's rebranding of US post-WW2 interventions) and normatively indefensible calls for New Cold War with the PRC.
[1] long article @ https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/07/02/biden-revolution-roosevelt-tradition-us-foreign-policy-school-international-relations-interdependence/ . Note that link (and its archive @ https://web.archive.org/web/20210712073055/https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/07/02/biden-revolution-roosevelt-tradition-us-foreign-policy-school-international-relations-interdependence/ ) appears paywalled, but its text (and links to images) is readable via 'View Source'.
Tom Rochewaaay too much on Caitlyn Jenner, and Saagar especially (but increasingly Krystal) are talking like COVID-19 is almost over (and Americans can ignore vaccine refuseniks), but otherwise good
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