Is it just a coincidence that the five-hundredth anniversary of the Reformation falls on the same year that Britain is trying to 'Brexit'?

It is common for economists to assert that the trade deficit is equal to the gap between national savings and national investment. If the United States invests more than it saves (combining private savings and government savings) then it is running a trade deficit. This is true by definition.

Intro Econ fans may remember that we have the basic accounting identity saying that output is equal to income:

C+I+G+(X-M)=Y

...where C is consumption,

...I is investment,

...G is government spending,

...X-M is net exports (exports minus imports),

and Y is income.

We also can say that Y=S+C+T,

...where S is savings,

...C is consumption,

...and T is taxes.

The basic story is that the government taxes away some of our income and the rest is either saved or consumed (saved means it is not consumed).

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“Corporate education agenda” gets thrown around a lot. But what does it really mean? In the latest episode of the Have You Heard podcast, we talk to economist Gordon Lafer, whose book The One Percent Solution, offers a comprehensive account comprehensive account of legislation promoted by the nation’s biggest corporate lobbies across all fifty state legislatures. The top topic of all of that legislation? Education. Lafer explains why major corporations – household names like Kraft Foods or United Airlines – have become active players in the realm of education policy. Warning: #29 may be our bleakest episode yet! And here’s the full transcript if you prefer to consume your podcast in readable format.

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The Third Coast: When Chicago Built the American Dream, by Thomas L. Dyja. PART 1 of 2.

Booklist*Starred Review* “Dyja contends that “Understanding America requires understanding Chicago,” and he shows why in this robust, outspoken, zestfully knowledgeable, and seductively told synthesis of biography, culture, politics, and history. Writing with velocity, wry wit, and tough lyricism in sync with Chicago’s “ballsy” spirit, Dyja focuses on the years between the Great Depression and 1960, dissecting the city’s “three most powerful ­institutions––the Cook County Democratic Party, the Catholic Church, and the Mob.” As vibrant and clarifying as his overarching vision is, what makes this such a thrilling read are Dyja’s fresh and dynamic portraits not only of the first Mayor Daley and his machine but also of key artists and innovators who embodied or amplified Chicago’s earthiness, grit, audacity, and beauty, including writers Nelson Algren and Gwendolyn Brooks, the multitalented Studs Terkel, singer Mahalia Jackson, architect Mies van der Rohe, jazz visionary Sun Ra, and Playboy founder Hugh Hefner. Dyja pieces it all together, from the city’s epic political corruption, vicious racism, and ethnic enclaves to the ferment that gave rise to world-changing architecture, urban blues and gospel, McDonald’s, improv comedy, and the “birth of television.” Here is the frenetic simultaneity of an evolving city torn between its tragic crimes and failings and tensile strength and creativity.” --Donna Seaman --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

http://www.amazon.com/Third-Coast-Chicago-Built-American/dp/0143125095

For decades, tech companies promised to make the world better. As that dream falls apart, disillusioned insiders are trying to take back control • Read the text version here

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(Photo: ... Museum of Papermaking in Duszniki Zdrój, Poland / Muzeum Papiernictwa w Dusznikach Zdroju | by.)

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The Paper Trail: An Unexpected History of a Revolutionary Invention by Alexander Monro. Part 4 of 4.

“Page-turningly readable... Exceedingly well informed... The chronological narrative, beginning with prehistoric charcoal scribbling on cave walls and ending with e-paper, is laden with research carried admirably lightly... A terrific read -- John Sutherland Literary Review Monro's expertise as a European historian and scholar of Chinese gives this book a uniquely broad perspective, which would mean less if he were not also a picturesque writer with an eye for a good story and an ear for a readable style -- Iain Finlayson The Times Detailed, scholarly, yet beautifully written, Monro's history is a sweeping account of the astonishing impact of paper on human culture -- Tristram Hunt Fascinating... Insights abound... Alexander Monro is a perceptive and insightful guide Quadrapheme Paper may be derided as a waste of trees, and as dead as the dodo in our digitized world. But, as Alexander Monro reminds us in this erudite history, it has been the base layer of world culture... From Islamic scientific tracts to Copernicus's 1543 De Revolutionibus, paper, as Monro eloquently shows, has filled the supremely important role of placing "truth in the reader's hands" Nature Monro...has left no archival material unexamined, no relevant histories unread, no avenue unexplored, no lead allowed to go cold, in short, no stone unturned... his brilliantly articulated chapter on the Prophet, the Revelations and the Koran is worth a re-read. Equally fine and, by the way quite prescient, is his writing on the proscribing and licensing of all written material in the pre-revolutionary France of the 1680's and, as was expected, the world's first taste of organized book piracy...The Paper Trail is a book that had to be written, and must be read. Telegraph India Elegantly presented Economist [Monro] highlights the role of the thing that is so easily overlooked because of its very ubiquity... This intricate history also emphasises the role of writing...while also holding out hope for the future of the book in the digital age Sydney Morning Herald Formidably learned...Monro is a Sinophile...who follows the trail westwards, emphasising paper's place in the circulation of the Qur'an and in the "great crescendo of learning" under the Abbasids...before print finally allowed paper to achieve its destiny -- Jason Scott-Warren Times Literary Supplement --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0307271668?_encoding=UTF8&isInIframe=1&n=283155&ref_=dp_proddesc_0&s=books&showDetailProductDesc=1#iframe-wrapper

In the week that Panorama uncovered the Paradise Papers, Punt and Dennis present a mix of topical stand-up and sketches which aims to explain the news. David Quantick looks at the Christmas ads, Grainne Maguire looks at the disparity in access to abortion across the UK, and Vikki Stone recaps a year of Donald Trump. Catherine Mayer discusses women's rights since Trump's election a year ago, and Luke Kempner supplies voices to make it all come to life. Produced by Victoria Lloyd A BBC Studios Production

The main claim of proponents of the Republican tax bill is that lowering corporate taxes will lead to a surge in corporate investment. This is supposed to lead to more rapid productivity growth and therefore higher wages.

As those of us who are fond of data have pointed out, the world doesn't seem to work this way. There is very little relationship between after-tax profit rates and investment. In fact, the period of strongest investment was the late 1970s and early 1980s when after-tax profits were at their post-World War II low, while the current period of very high profits has been associated with lackluster investment. This leaves little reason to believe that cutting the corporate tax rate will have much impact on investment. (Of course, we also tried this trick in 1986, also with little impact on investment.) 

But there is another aspect to this story that folks in the reality-based universe should be thinking about. Productivity growth has been dismal in recent years, in spite of all the talk about robots taking our jobs. (Pundits aren't paid to know anything about the world.) Over the last five years, productivity growth has averaged less than 0.7 percent annually. That compares to rates of close to 3.0 percent from 1995 to 2005 and also during the long golden age from 1947 to 1973.

However this may be changing. Last quarter, productivity rose at a 3.0 percent annual rate. As everyone familiar with productivity data knows, the best thing to do with quarterly number is to ignore it. Nonetheless, a faster trend has to start somewhere and what is striking is that we seem to be on a path for another strong number for the fourth quarter.

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Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the context and impact of Pablo Picasso's iconic work, created soon after the bombing on 26th April 1937 that obliterated much of the Basque town of Guernica, and its people. The attack was carried out by warplanes of the German Condor Legion, joined by the Italian air force, on behalf of Franco's Nationalists. At first the Nationalists denied responsibility, blaming their opponents for creating the destruction themselves for propaganda purposes, but the accounts of journalists such as George Steer, and the prominence of Picasso's work, kept the events of that day under close scrutiny. Picasso's painting has gone on to become a symbol warning against the devastation of war. With Mary Vincent Professor of Modern European History at the University of Sheffield Gijs van Hensbergen Historian of Spanish Art and Fellow of the LSE Cañada Blanch Centre for Contemporary Spanish Studies and Dacia Viejo Rose Lecturer in Heritage in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge Fellow of Selwyn College Producer: Simon Tillotson.

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The Paper Trail: An Unexpected History of a Revolutionary Invention by Alexander Monro. Part 2 of 4.

“Page-turningly readable... Exceedingly well informed... The chronological narrative, beginning with prehistoric charcoal scribbling on cave walls and ending with e-paper, is laden with research carried admirably lightly... A terrific read -- John Sutherland Literary Review Monro's expertise as a European historian and scholar of Chinese gives this book a uniquely broad perspective, which would mean less if he were not also a picturesque writer with an eye for a good story and an ear for a readable style -- Iain Finlayson The Times Detailed, scholarly, yet beautifully written, Monro's history is a sweeping account of the astonishing impact of paper on human culture -- Tristram Hunt Fascinating... Insights abound... Alexander Monro is a perceptive and insightful guide Quadrapheme Paper may be derided as a waste of trees, and as dead as the dodo in our digitized world. But, as Alexander Monro reminds us in this erudite history, it has been the base layer of world culture... From Islamic scientific tracts to Copernicus's 1543 De Revolutionibus, paper, as Monro eloquently shows, has filled the supremely important role of placing "truth in the reader's hands" Nature Monro...has left no archival material unexamined, no relevant histories unread, no avenue unexplored, no lead allowed to go cold, in short, no stone unturned... his brilliantly articulated chapter on the Prophet, the Revelations and the Koran is worth a re-read. Equally fine and, by the way quite prescient, is his writing on the proscribing and licensing of all written material in the pre-revolutionary France of the 1680's and, as was expected, the world's first taste of organized book piracy...The Paper Trail is a book that had to be written, and must be read. Telegraph India Elegantly presented Economist [Monro] highlights the role of the thing that is so easily overlooked because of its very ubiquity... This intricate history also emphasises the role of writing...while also holding out hope for the future of the book in the digital age Sydney Morning Herald Formidably learned...Monro is a Sinophile...who follows the trail westwards, emphasising paper's place in the circulation of the Qur'an and in the "great crescendo of learning" under the Abbasids...before print finally allowed paper to achieve its destiny -- Jason Scott-Warren Times Literary Supplement --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0307271668?_encoding=UTF8&isInIframe=1&n=283155&ref_=dp_proddesc_0&s=books&showDetailProductDesc=1#iframe-wrapper

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(Photo:Italiano: Pappagalli che si abbeverano ad un bacino di porfido (qui il particolare del gatto in agguato) è un mosaico (cm 58 x 50) rinvenuto a Santa Maria Capua Vetere, che oggi si trova a Napoli nel Museo Archeologico Nazionale (inv. nr. 9992).

English: Cat and parrots mosaic (detail), found in Category:Santa Maria Capua Vetere, now in the National Archaeological Museum of Naples (inv. nr. 9992).

Date

Source Own work

Author Massimo Finizio )

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Cat Sense: How the New Feline Science Can Make You a Better Friend to Your Pet by John Bradshaw. PART 1 of 2.

Cats have been popular household pets for thousands of years, and their numbers only continue to rise. Today there are three cats for every dog on the planet, and yet cats remain more mysterious, even to their most adoring owners. Unlike dogs, cats evolved as solitary hunters, and, while many have learned to live alongside humans and even feel affection for us, they still don't quite "get us" the way dogs do, and perhaps they never will. But cats have rich emotional lives that we need to respect and understand if they are to thrive in our company.

In Cat Sense, renowned anthrozoologist John Bradshaw takes us further into the mind of the domestic cat than ever before, using cutting-edge scientific research to dispel the myths and explain the true nature of our feline friends. Tracing the cat's evolution from lone predator to domesticated companion, Bradshaw shows that although cats and humans have been living together for at least eight thousand years, cats remain independent, predatory, and wary of contact with their own kind, qualities that often clash with our modern lifestyles. Cats still have three out of four paws firmly planted in the wild, and within only a few generations can easily revert back to the independent way of life that was the exclusive preserve of their predecessors some 10,000 years ago. Cats are astonishingly flexible, and given the right environment they can adapt to a life of domesticity with their owners-but to continue do so, they will increasingly need our help. If we're to live in harmony with our cats, Bradshaw explains, we first need to understand their inherited quirks: understanding their body language, keeping their environments-however small-sufficiently interesting, and becoming more proactive in managing both their natural hunting instincts and their relationships with other cats.

A must-read for any cat lover, Cat Sense offers humane, penetrating insights about the domestic cat that challenge our most basic assumptions and promise to dramatically improve our pets' lives-and ours.

https://www.amazon.com/Cat-Sense-Feline-Science-Better/dp/0465064965/ref=la_B072BMH1BF_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1510188806&sr=1-2

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The Paper Trail: An Unexpected History of a Revolutionary Invention by Alexander Monro. Part 1 of 4.

“Page-turningly readable... Exceedingly well informed... The chronological narrative, beginning with prehistoric charcoal scribbling on cave walls and ending with e-paper, is laden with research carried admirably lightly... A terrific read -- John Sutherland Literary Review Monro's expertise as a European historian and scholar of Chinese gives this book a uniquely broad perspective, which would mean less if he were not also a picturesque writer with an eye for a good story and an ear for a readable style -- Iain Finlayson The Times Detailed, scholarly, yet beautifully written, Monro's history is a sweeping account of the astonishing impact of paper on human culture -- Tristram Hunt Fascinating... Insights abound... Alexander Monro is a perceptive and insightful guide Quadrapheme Paper may be derided as a waste of trees, and as dead as the dodo in our digitized world. But, as Alexander Monro reminds us in this erudite history, it has been the base layer of world culture... From Islamic scientific tracts to Copernicus's 1543 De Revolutionibus, paper, as Monro eloquently shows, has filled the supremely important role of placing "truth in the reader's hands" Nature Monro...has left no archival material unexamined, no relevant histories unread, no avenue unexplored, no lead allowed to go cold, in short, no stone unturned... his brilliantly articulated chapter on the Prophet, the Revelations and the Koran is worth a re-read. Equally fine and, by the way quite prescient, is his writing on the proscribing and licensing of all written material in the pre-revolutionary France of the 1680's and, as was expected, the world's first taste of organized book piracy...The Paper Trail is a book that had to be written, and must be read. Telegraph India Elegantly presented Economist [Monro] highlights the role of the thing that is so easily overlooked because of its very ubiquity... This intricate history also emphasises the role of writing...while also holding out hope for the future of the book in the digital age Sydney Morning Herald Formidably learned...Monro is a Sinophile...who follows the trail westwards, emphasising paper's place in the circulation of the Qur'an and in the "great crescendo of learning" under the Abbasids...before print finally allowed paper to achieve its destiny -- Jason Scott-Warren Times Literary Supplement --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0307271668?_encoding=UTF8&isInIframe=1&n=283155&ref_=dp_proddesc_0&s=books&showDetailProductDesc=1#iframe-wrapper

Why have the size of American police departments grown so dramatically in recent decades, even as crime rates have fallen? One factor may have been the growing centrality of real estate for urban economies, according to a new article published in the journal Social Forces by Adam Goldstein, a professor of sociology at Princeton, and Brenden Beck, a PhD student in sociology at CUNY. Thanks to our sponsors at Verso Books. Check out The End of Policing by Alex Vitale versobooks.com/books/2426-the-end-of-policing Support us with $ at patreon.com/TheDig

03-19-2016

(Photo: ‪Lauren Bacall, Humphrey Bogart, and Henry Fonda in the 1955 live televised version

The original uploader was Tillman at English Wikipedia - Los Angeles Times photographic archive, UCLA Library (http://digital2.library.ucla.edu/viewItem.do?ark=21198/zz0002t3wt); transferred from en.wikipedia; transferred to Commons by User:Zzyzx11 using CommonsHelper.

Actors Lauren Bacall, Humphrey Bogart and Henry Fonda in scene from television broadcast play "Petrified Forest"; publication date: May 29, 1955. Petrified Forest was broadcasted on May 30, 1955.)

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Tough Without a Gun: The Life and Extraordinary Afterlife of Humphrey Bogart, by Stefan Kanfer.

Booklist: “Humphrey Bogart was 42 before in 1941 he broke through as an A-list star in The Maltese Falcon and High Sierra. He was dead of lung cancer a mere 16 years later. Yet, as Kanfer points out in his revealing account of Bogart’s life and legacy, Bogie, in those few short years, established a cinematic identity that lives on across generations. Kanfer thoroughly covers the relatively familiar ground of Bogart’s upbringing as the rebellious child of blue-blood parents; his long apprenticeships, first in the theater and then playing bad guys in the movies; and, finally, his brief but iconic years of stardom. Beyond that, though, what separates Kanfer’s book from other Bogart bios by David Thomson, Jeffrey Meyers, and Richard Schickel is the emphasis on the actor’s “afterlife,” the way that somehow his persona—“integrity, stoicism, sexual charisma accompanied by a cool indifference to women”—has never gone out of style. Bogart divided the world into “professionals and bums,” and Kanfer makes a convincing case that, with so many bums surrounding us today, the real pros never grow stale.” --Bill Ott

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0307271005?ie=UTF8&isInIframe=1&n=283155&redirect=true&ref_=dp_proddesc_0&s=books&showDetailProductDesc=1#iframe-wrapper

11-04-2017

(Photo: Atlanta's rail yard and roundhouse in ruins shortly after the end of the Civil War)

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Global autonomous zones, aka, the end of the Union. Michael Vlahos @jhuworldcrisis

Behind the News, 11/2/17 - guests: Kate Wagner on McMansions, Donna Minkowitz on genteel Nazis - Doug Henwood

Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis re-cap the week via topical stand-up and sketches with guests Sindhu Vee, Tez Ilyas, Pippa Evans and Luke Kempner. Producer...Victoria Lloyd A BBC Studios Production

Is France’s new president a political miracle, or a mirage that is already fading away? • Read the text version here

by Jim Naureckas

Reviewing The Family, a history of the owners of the New York Times, veteran Times reporter John L. Hess (Extra!, 1–2/00) summarized the book’s account of how dynasty founder Adolph Ochs was able to purchase the paper in 1896:

How did Ochs, a virtual bankrupt from Chattanooga, persuade Wall Street to set him up with the moribund New York Times? Answer: The financiers were anxious to keep the paper alive as a Democratic voice against the populist Democratic candidate for president, William Jennings Bryan, who was stirring the masses with that speech about the Cross of Gold. Ochs bought a fine new suit, set up a fake bank account as reference, and persuaded J.P. Morgan and others to bankroll the purchase. His paper promptly pilloried Bryan, and Ochs marched with his staff in a businessmen’s parade against him.

It’s striking how more than a century later, the Times still plays the same role in Democratic politics—defending the party’s Big Money wing against populist encroachments. (See, e.g., FAIR.org, 7/29/13, 11/27/16, 6/23/17, 7/6/17.) But rarely has the paper’s pleading on behalf of elite interests in the Democratic Party been as frenetic as it has lately.

Last week, the paper published an op-ed by Douglas Schoen, “Why Democrats Need Wall Street” (10/18/17). Who is Douglas Schoen, you might ask? He’s billed by the Times as having been “a pollster and senior political adviser to President Bill Clinton from 1994 to 2000.” More relevantly to the current century, he’s a corporate PR consultant who works for the likes of Walmart, AT&T, Time Warner, Procter & Gamble and GlaxoSmithKline.

He has a side career as a commentator for mostly right-wing outlets like Fox News,  Forbes and Newsmax, where his nominal relationship to the Democrats mostly serves to bolster his credibility when he attacks them—as in a series of columns he co-wrote in 2010–11 urging Barack Obama to step aside in favor of Hillary Clinton, only to declare in 2016 (The Hill, 10/31/16) that “I am not able, under the circumstances we are now facing, to vote for Secretary Clinton” (the circumstances being that “emails potentially pertinent to the Clinton probe had been found on Anthony Weiner’s computer”).

Nevertheless, with no warning label, the Times presented Schoen’s advice to Democratic Party:

If the party is going to have any chance of returning to its position of influence and appeal, Democrats need to work with Wall Street to push policies that create jobs, heal divisions and stimulate the American economy.

Aside from making the obvious point that Wall Street has a lot of money and will give the Democrats some if they make themselves useful, Schoen’s argument is dubious. “Despite what the Democratic left says, America is a center-right, pro-capitalist nation,” he declares, citing polling that 60 percent in the US still have a positive view of capitalism, with socialism viewed favorably by only 35 percent—as if only socialists want politicians to stand up to Wall Street. He ignores polls showing that up to 76 percent want the rich to pay higher taxes.

Schoen credits his one-time boss Bill Clinton with having “balanced the budget, acknowledged the limits of government” and “moving the party away from a reflexive anti–Wall Street posture.”  Following that, he notes that “as the party has left behind that version of liberalism, it has also found its way to its weakest electoral position — nationally and at the state level — since the 1920s.”

Schoen prefaces this contrast with “memories in politics are short.” He must be counting on that, actually, because the point makes no sense if you remember that Clinton’s shift to the right also devastated the Democrats electorally—barely less of  a disaster than the Obama era:

Presenting one of these eras as a golden age and the other as a time of torment is disingenuous, to say the least. But the bigger problem is the premise that Obama (and Hillary Clinton) represent a break from Bill Clinton’s Wall Street–friendly liberalism.  Was it the failure to prosecute anyone for the massive fraud that brought down the US economy that demonstrated Obama’s hostility to Wall Street? Or his allowing a CitiGroup executive to vet his Cabinet picks? Perhaps it was when he swiftly pocketed a $400,000 honorarium from Cantor Fitzgerald upon leaving office.

But there’s a conspicuous up-is-down quality to Schoen’s plea for maintaining the Democratic Party’s ties to Wall Street. He even goes so far as to credit Bill Clinton with “adding wealth to the retirement accounts and other investment portfolios of millions of middle-class Americans” by signing the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999—better known as the repeal of Glass-Steagall, a deregulatory move that is justly blamed for setting the stage for the financial collapse of 2008 (In These Times, 10/9/15).

But Schoen wasn’t the only one using the New York Times to try to chase Democrats away from progressive ideas. There was also “Why ‘Medicare for All’ Will Sink the Democrats” by Steven Rattner (10/25/17), an investment banker who contributes regularly to the Times op-ed page despite having personally paid $16 million to settle charges that he took part in a kickback scheme involving New York state pension funds.

Rattner accuses Sen. Bernie Sanders of being “a senatorial pied piper for Democrats,” enticing the party “into positions that are both bad politics and dubious policy.” While it may seem like “sweeping progressive ideas — however unrealistic they may be — might capture the public imagination,” what you really want are “carefully constructed proposals of centrists”—what Rattner calls “people-centric initiatives like improving education, providing more training and retraining and increasing worker mobility.” This is the “better shoes for musical chairs players” platform—policies that don’t offer any benefits to the working class, but promise that some will have a chance to escape it (New York, 6/30/16).

Like Schoen, Rattner suffers from historical amnesia—or hopes you do. As evidence that Medicare for All is “an idea that has historically been a political graveyard,” he offers, “Remember Hillarycare?” I do—I remember that it was an idea cooked up by the biggest insurance companies to maintain for-profit health insurance, in explicit rejection of a single-payer system  (Extra!, 1–2/94). As an example of how “the Sanders approach” of “sweeping progressive ideas — however unrealistic they may be” has historically failed, Rattner points to “Michael Dukakis in 1988″—despite Dukakis having been the Platonic ideal of “carefully constructed proposals of centrists” (Extra!, 9/92). (“This election is not about ideology,” the technocrat Dukakis told the 1988 Democratic convention, “it’s about competence.”)

Also like Schoen, Rattner provides a heavy dose of redbaiting, insisting:

Our model of democratic capitalism has stood us well for more than two centuries; now is not the time to embrace the kinds of ideas, often involving deep government economic intervention, that have often fallen short elsewhere, notably in much of Europe.

“In much of Europe” is a great phrase, evoking the Iron Curtain while at the same time insinuating that progressive Democrats threaten to emulate the nightmare of Scandinavia.

The Times‘ regular columnists have been beating the move-to-the-right drum at the Democrats lately as well. Putative liberal Frank Bruni (9/30/17) claims that the prospects of Democrats embracing single-payer healthcare and free public college tuition “make some GOP leaders’ hearts go pitter-patter,” presenting this potential shift as a reason “for Republicans not to tremble in the face of the pendulum’s potential swing” in the 2018 midterms.

“I think Democrats are making a huge, huge, huge mistake,” Bruni quotes one Republican leader, who presumably adds the two extra adjectives to emphasize just how bad it would be for his party if Democrats took his not-at-all disingenuous advice and failed to “move too far left.”

Speaking of disingenuous, one of the Times‘ bounty of #NeverTrump conservative columnists, Ross Douthat (10/21/17), suggested (after urging the Democrats to move right on social issues) that the party should “choose Bill-Clintonian economics over single-payer flirtations, to expand their recent gains among the culturally libertarian and fiscally conservative.”

Here’s the graph—one I’ve talked about before (FAIR.org, 6/20/17)—that explains why you don’t want to be taking advice from Ross Douthat on Democratic Party politics:

 

These are 2016 voters—blue dots represents Hillary Clinton voters, red dots Trump—plotted by how socially (up/down) and economically (right/left) progressive they are. Most Clinton voters (the blue lower left) were socially and economically progressive; most Trump voters (the red upper right) were conservative on both dimensions.

See the largely empty quarter, where there’s hardly any voters at all? That’s the “culturally libertarian and fiscally conservative” electorate for whom Douthat suggests Democrats should reject Medicare for All. Also, you should throw Brer Rabbit in the briar patch—he’d hate that.

In fact, elections are won and lost in the upper left corner—where you see a mix of Clinton and Trump voters. These are people with conservative cultural instincts but progressive economic sympathies. Republicans can’t reach them by playing down their conservative economic policies, because that would turn off their conservative base—but they can attract them by stressing their socially conservative values, as Trump successfully did in 2016, with his attacks on immigration, reproductive freedom and gun control. Contrariwise, Democrats can’t win them over by becoming more conservative on social issues, as that would alienate their base—but they can appeal to them by moving to the left on economic issues.

The political logic is obvious—which is why the New York Times feels compelled, over and over again, to deny it.

---

You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com(Twitter: @NYTimes). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.

Democracy Now! 2017-11-03 Friday

• Headlines for November 03, 2017
• In Puerto Rico's Highlands, Hurricane Maria Has Exploded Fault Lines of Poverty & Austerity
• Economist Yanis Varoufakis: Puerto Ricans Deserve an Escape from "Permanent Debt Prison"
• Yanis Varoufakis on Global Capitalism & How Trump's Tax Plan is Class War Against the Poor
• Greek Economist Yanis Varoufakis on Nazi Resurgence in Europe & Why "ISIS Loves Donald Trump"

Download this show

Corey Robin points to a tension that has defined conservatism from the get-go, between two competing conceptions of virtue and nobility: one defined by political and military distinction and another by entrepreneurial  acumen and accumulated wealth. Robin parses how Trump fits into this dynamic history, in part by taking a look back to seminal conservative thinkers like Edmund Burke and Friedrich Hayek. Support us with $ at patreon.com/TheDig Listen to Dan's first interview with Corey: blubrry.com/thedig/22226639/corey-robin-on-the-reactionaries-minds-under-trump/

This week on Intercepted: Investigative journalist Jane Mayer exposes the Koch Brother puppet masters behind Vice President Mike Pence’s rise to power and the ruthless pursuit of corporate profits that put Pence a heartbeat from the presidency.We speak to Chinese dissident and renown artist Ai Weiwei about the humanitarian catastrophe of the 65 million globally displaced migrants and his new documentary, Human Flow. And we end with Deerhoof's Greg Saunier on the songs of “Mountain Moves.”

After thousands of years of failure, some scientists believe a breakthrough might finally be in sight • Read the text version here

Roger Altman, an investment banker and deputy treasury secretary under President Clinton, warned about the effect of growing inequality on national politics in a Washington Post column. He implies that this increase in inequality has been a natural outcome of the market:

"A series of powerful, entrenched factors have brought the American Dream to an end. Economists generally cite globalization, accelerating technology, increased income inequality and the decline of unions. What’s noteworthy is that these are long-term pressures that show no signs of abating."

The "powerful entrenched factors" are all the result of deliberate policy choices that Mr. Altman apparently doesn't want to see altered. In the case of globalization, we have made a deliberate decision to put our manufacturing workers in direct competition with low-paid workers in the developing world, while largely protecting our most highly paid workers like doctors and dentists. This has the predicted and actual effect of shifting income upward.

"Accelerating technology" (actually it has been decelerating as productivity growth has slowed to a crawl in the last decade) does not lead to upward redistribution; laws determining ownership of technology, such as patent and copyright monopolies redistribute income upward. There is a huge amount of money at stake with these government-granted monopolies. In the case of prescription drugs alone, patents and related protections add close to $370 billion a year (almost $3,000 per household) to what we pay for drugs in the United States. Bill Gates, the world's richest person, would probably still be working for a living without patent and copyright monopolies for Microsoft software.

And, the drop in unionization rates in the United States has also been the result of deliberate policy to make it more difficult to organize unions and to weaken the unions that do exist. Canada, which has a very similar culture and economy, has seen no comparable decline in unionization rates over the last four decades.

Someone seriously interested in reversing the upward redistribution of income would look to reverse these policies, but Altman seems to want us to believe that they are unalterable and instead focus on band-aid solutions. But, what do you expect from Jeff Bezos' Washington Post? (Yes, this is the point of my [free] book Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer.) 

Earlier this week I had a column in Politico pointing out that doctors in the United States get paid roughly twice as much as their counterparts in other wealthy countries and that we could save almost $100 billion a year ($700 per family) if we got doctors pay in line with their pay elsewhere by opening up the market. This made many folks (most identifying themselves as doctors) angry, as they let me know with e-mails, tweets, facebook comments and various other outlets. My response to these criticisms is below.

Folks also may be interested in picking up the discussion with a segment next Monday (10-30) on Wisconsin Public Radio at 7:00 A.M. EDT.

 

Response to Critics

The criticisms of my piece took a variety of directions but the vast majority noted the large debt that many doctors incur in med school. This is a serious issue, but I would raise a couple of points here. First, a debt burden of $250,000 comes to less than $9,000 a year over a 30-year career. That’s less than 4 percent of the average doctors’ pay. Even if you add in one-third for interest costs, it is still less than 5 percent of the average doctors’ pay and only around 10 percent of the difference between the average doctors’ pay in the U.S. and their pay in other wealthy countries.

I would agree that we should alter the way med school is financed and instead have it covered by the government, as is largely the story elsewhere. (The same applies to college.) However, it is interesting to note how when we talk about opening up the market for doctors to more international and domestic competition we get this huge outcry over the fate of doctors with high debt. I don’t recall similar outcries about the risk to the continued employment and pensions and retiree health care benefits of autoworkers and steelworkers when these sectors were opened to international competition. Nor do we hear these complaints expressed as vocally in reference to efforts to restrict Amazon and other internet retailers when it means the loss of hundreds of thousands or even millions of jobs in traditional retail stores.

Many complained that I had no evidence for what I argued in the piece. The links in the piece provide pretty solid evidence that U.S. doctors are paid substantially more than their counterparts in other wealthy countries. Here’s another source that readers may find useful.

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When President Donald Trump decertified the Iran nuclear deal last week, the push among Washington’s Iran hawks to scuttle the agreement entirely was already well underway. In their latest maneuver, right-wing hawks have turned to drumming up public support for effectively ditching the accord — or at least creating the impression that there is public support for it.

Over the last week, stories reported by media outlets such as The Hill, Breitbart, Conservative Review, and The Tower purported to show that a strong majority of Americans supported renegotiating the deal. Citing a Harvard-Harris poll — part of a project co-directed by Mark Penn, a pollster and political strategist — the reports said that 70 percent of respondents believed the U.S. should renegotiate the accord, including 85 percent of Republicans and 57 percent of Democrats. Although the story briefly went viral on right-wing media outlets and among opponents of the deal, a closer examination of the poll question on which these findings are based raises credibility questions about the results.

“This is a blatantly biased question. It is about as bad as it gets.”

Experts on political polling expressed shock at the framing of the Harvard-Harris poll questions underlying the reports of public opinion. “This is a blatantly biased question,” said Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory University. “It is about as bad as it gets — whoever designed this survey was clearly aiming to produce a finding that the public wants to renegotiate the deal.”

Per the published details of the Harvard-Harris poll, the question on which the results were based was:

Some people say that the Iran nuclear deal is not perfect and the Iranians are building up their nuclear capability secretly, but we should not rock the boat now and just let it all slide along. Others say if Iranians are not compliant we have to call them out on it and push to renegotiate the deal with real verification. What would be your preferred course of action?

1) Push to renegotiate the deal now requesting improved verification mechanisms or

2) Keep the current deal in place and leave the issue alone for now?

This is troubling because it posits a strange choice between two narratives with the same dubious premise. One of the options reads that “some people” are claiming that the Iranian government is building a secret nuclear capability — which would be a brazen violation of the nuclear deal — but suggests keeping the deal anyway. The other option also suggests Iran is not compliant with the deal, and that the accord should be renegotiated to get “real verification.” That is, both courses are based on the assumption that Iran is out of compliance with the deal.

The reality is that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which officially monitors compliance, has repeatedly verified that Iran is adhering to the terms of the deal — a position reportedly supported by U.S. intelligence agencies, American military officials, the European Union, and Israel’s defense and intelligence establishment. Trump’s own Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has gone so far as to begrudgingly admit that Iran is in “technical compliance,” and advocated behind the scenes for Trump to certify the deal, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The nuclear accord, which was struck in July 2015 by Iran and a group of world powers led by the U.S., put strict limits and monitoring on Iran’s uranium enrichment capacity. The deal was widely considered the top foreign policy achievement of President Barack Obama’s tenure in the White House, the result of years of sustained negotiations amid decades of enmity between Iran and the U.S. Trump had promised during his campaign to overturn the deal, but waffled on doing so, instead belatedly decertifying the accord and leaving the decision to Congress.

Dritan Nesho, a co-director of the poll who spoke with The Intercept by phone, said that the question about renegotiating the deal was intended as a hypothetical, and that including information about IAEA or U.S. intelligence community verification in the question would have been leading the respondents. In an email earlier in the day, Nesho had written that other questions in the poll asking respondents their opinion about Iran showed that they had generally negative views about the country and that the response to the question about the deal was thus in line with their general distrust of the Iranian regime. “Two thirds believe that in fact Iran is violating the deal, and that is their belief not based on us giving them any information whatsoever,” Nesho wrote. “The responses to this battery of questions is consistent with a deal they think is bad, a regime they do not trust, and a regime they believe is violating it.”

After the initial call, Nesho phoned again to say that he had misspoken. The poll question did not, he now said, address a hypothetical scenario. Instead, Nesho said, despite the IAEA and intelligence community verification that Iran’s was adhering to the technical requirements of the deal, there was a “marketplace of opinions” about Iranian compliance. He cited New York Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer as an example of someone who had spoken out about Iranian non-compliance. After it was clarified during the call that Schumer had actually not accused Iran of violating the deal — the senator said this month that the deal should be given “time to work,” adding, “The worst things Iran is doing now are not within the nuclear deal but outside of it” — Nesho reverted back to his original stance that the question was indeed hypothetical.

“We know from dozens of reputable polls that Americans believe the deal is working and that they don’t want to see us back on a path to war with Iran.”

Although the poll differed from the results of recent polls by CNN and Morning Consult/Politico showing continued support from a majority of Americans for remaining in the deal, Nesho said that a Quinnipiac University poll of voters this month also showed a majority of Americans opposing the deal.

A former State Department chief of staff under the Obama administration, David Wade, said that the question in the Harvard-Harris poll was geared to sway public opinion on the issue, rather than providing an accurate reading of public sentiment based on the facts of the deal.

“We know from dozens of reputable polls that Americans believe the deal is working and that they don’t want to see us back on a path to war with Iran. Given all the misinformation and partisan attacks on the agreement, its durability in public opinion has been pretty impressive. Penn’s poll is an outlier, and it’s surprising coming from someone who has been at work at the highest levels of his trade,” Wade said. “The survey language itself influences the outcome dramatically.”

“No respondent in their right mind could ever respond favorably about any agreement described that way, detached from the facts,” Wade added. “A pollster of Penn’s caliber knows better.”

Top photo: Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry meet with a small group of veterans and Gold Star Mothers to discuss the Iran nuclear deal in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, on September 10, 2015.

The post Harvard Poll On Renegotiating Iran Nuclear Deal Used “Blatantly Biased Question” appeared first on The Intercept.