Tom Roche

How technology is making our minds redundant • Read the text version here

Behind the News, 10/5/17 - guests: Joel Schalit on the right in Germany, Marisol LeBron on debt, austerity and hurricanes in Puerto Rico, and Shawna Potter on feminist punk rock - Doug Henwood

When a snap election was called, a divided Labour sprang into action to defy predictions of a wipeout and upturn the political consensus. The key players reveal how it all happened • Read the text version here

William Taubman won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Khrushchev: The Man and His Era, a portrait of the Soviet leader ''unlikely to be surpassed any time soon in either richness or complexity'' (New York Times Book Review). The Bertrand Snell Professor of Political Science Emeritus at Amherst College, he is the author of several other works detailing 20th-century Russian politics. Drawing from international archival documents, interviews with foreign leaders, Kremlin contemporaries, and Gorbachev himself, Taubman's new biography is a nuanced look at the transformational leader. Yuri Slezkine is best known as the author of The Jewish Century, a boldly interpretive treatise about Jews' role in modernity. Jane K. Sather Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley and a W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, he is also the author of several other books about the Soviet state, including In the Shadow of Revolution, Arctic Mirrors, and Between Heaven and Hell. In House of Government, Slezkine tells the epic of the massive apartment building occupied by high-ranking Communists until their annihilation during Stalin's purges. (recorded 9/26/2017)

In Stephen Pimpare‘s new book, Ghettos, Tramps, and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford University Press, 2017), the reader is encouraged to think about how we portray poverty and people in poverty in…

Great Britain’s victory in the First World War brought with it the competing challenges of defending an expanded empire while reducing military expenditures. In The Royal Navy in the Age of Austerity, 1919-22: Naval and Foreign Policy under Lloyd George…

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You don’t have to dig deep to find out what can go wrong with open data initiatives. Just look back to 2014, when the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission released hundreds of millions of records on taxi trips in the city, with data anonymized to protect identifiable details—at least in theory. In reality, the data was recorded in a format that allowed a software engineer to re-identify the license numbers of the taxis and drivers. A Gawker journalist then linked this to celebrities taking cab rides across the city months after the initial release, speculating on the routes they had taken and even how much they tipped.

It’s certainly not the most sensitive data to ever be leaked or hacked, but it is an important illustration of the risks cities face in releasing data from their many constituent agencies; the implications aren’t always apparent until long after the information is out in the public domain.

In recent years, as the Seattle metro area has grown into a thriving tech hub, the city has been pioneering a progressive, carefully considered approach to releasing public data. Slowly but surely, city authorities are crafting what they hope can serve as a model for “smart cities” around the world. One key part of this plan came in 2016, when the city adopted a resolution that all civic data would be “open by preference,” rather “open by default.” As David Doyle, Open Data Program Manager for Seattle Information Technology, explains, this extra layer of caution aims to make the city more deliberate about its data practices from the start.

“Policies were first developed with ‘open by default’ in mind, but that isn't really feasible when you consider factors like privacy,” he says. “Seattle took a more nuanced approach of being open by preference: This means we can be open [with data] once we mitigate for privacy risks, release of personally identifying information, and other kinds of harm.”

Essentially, an open by default policy would mean “publish first, ask questions later”: datasets collected by all city government agencies—police department, housing authority, department of transportation, etc.—would be released online unless and until there was a clear reason not to. Open by preference speaks to a more measured approach: Civic datasets are evaluated proactively with a view to releasing them wherever possible, but only after they’ve been reviewed by city officials.

In one example, Doyle explains that data from the city’s Aging and Disability Service was released to support a hackathon focused on solving accessibility challenges. Since the data on disability, income, ethnicity, and exact location were extremely sensitive, teams from multiple departments worked together to group it into neighborhood segments and age brackets, reducing the identifiability while still providing a useful resource to participants in the event.

As part of the 2016 resolution on open data, Seattle also committed to an annual, publicly released risk assessment of its open data program. This year the privacy-focused nonprofit Future of Privacy Forum (FPF) was commissioned to undertake the task, which culminated in the release of a draft report in August that is currently open to public input.

The report aims not only to analyze the city’s progress with data release, but also to develop a framework for evaluating the risks of open data initiatives overall. The idea is to lay out clear criteria for judging the benefits and drawbacks of publishing a certain dataset, leading to a score that can inform a decision on how to proceed.

Still, correctly gauging the risks of a privacy breach is a difficult task: Some personal data is easy to classify as too sensitive for public release—Social Security numbers are one example, or at least should be. But other data fall into a gray area. Making some medical information public is important for epidemiological research, for example, but details on specific medical conditions should not be traceable back to individual patients.

In order to reap the potential benefits of the sensitive-but-not-secret category, data is usually anonymized before being released—but truly guaranteeing anonymity is much easier said than done. In a widely cited study from 2000, Harvard professor Latanya Sweeney (then at Carnegie Mellon) found that 87 percent of Americans could be uniquely identified in a dataset by only gender, date of birth, and ZIP code. That can then be cross-referenced with voter records to identify each individual by name.

This is the central problem that cities like Seattle face when trying to release anonymized data: Details that are non-identifying when isolated can easily become unique in combination.

Given the abundant need for privacy controls in the digital age, it might come as a surprise to learn that legal definitions of personally identifying information have not been updated for decades. In the U.S., “Personally Identifying Information” is a legal term with specific meaning in the Privacy Act of 1974; but the law draws the line between identifying and non-identifying information in a way that ignores the realities of modern information security.

“The problem is, as an actual technical matter, this is a distinction without meaning,” says Joseph Jerome, a policy counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology. “When you look at open data policy, there's a question over how many different indirect identifiers can be put into data before you have something that completely identifies someone. So in some respects, this is a legal policy debate, but it's also a technical debate... and the answer isn't clear.”

The debate is complicated by the need to release information that will be useful for analysis while also being protective of user privacy, two factors that are often in direct opposition. Technically data is at its least identifying if every individual in the group has exactly the same score for every variable—but then the data is effectively meaningless. By definition, useful data must be identifying to some degree, and a judgement must be made over where to draw the line between the two.

As a guideline, statistical de-identification expert Khaled El Emam has suggested that no more than six to eight indirect identifiers should be included in any dataset, which should also be modified so as to ensure a certain threshold of “k-anonymity:” A term meaning that even by combining the indirect identifiers, a minimum number of individuals will always share the same values, so that no one record is completely unique.

All of these technical and legal constraints can make it difficult for cities to know when data has been processed well enough to be safely released. It can be even harder for citizens to know whether they could be identified from a given dataset. Compounding this problem is the fact that municipal governments, unlike private corporations, can also be compelled to disclose information under public records laws.

It was exactly this situation that led New York’s Taxi and Limousine Commission to release the insufficiently anonymized data on taxi trips. Had it not been for a request from a freedom of information activist, would not have been publicly disclosed in the first place.

***

Dan Bevarly is executive director of the National Freedom of Information Coalition (NFOIC), an alliance of civil society groups advocating for open government. Though his organization lobbies for greater transparency, he is also conscious of the need for caution, and suggests that budgeting more time and resources for public record requests could help strike that balance without limiting access to information.

“We see an area that requires more specialization, and that's the public records steward,” Bevarly says. “We think that much more formal training has to be provided, mainly because of the changing legislation and the increasing use of technology to manage information and communicate.”

He also believes public institutions could be more proactive in releasing properly sanitized information ahead of time, reducing the risk of a badly handled disclosure in response to a public records request. But while Bevarly and other experts have a key role in shaping the debate on open data, it's also crucial to solicit input from the largest party involved: the general public.

The public release and consultation period for FPF's evaluation in Seattle is one step toward this, and in practice, is paired with in-person outreach, too. Program Manager David Doyle often makes speaking appearances at conferences and other events, like the Seattle Public Library's open data literacy series. Nonetheless, he concedes, “It’s a difficult topic to explain to the public, for sure.”

And according to policy counsel Joseph Jerome, if we want to promote openness, we should also respect the choice of those who do not want to participate.

“I think we need to facilitate the ability not of individuals, but of communities, to opt out of this type of thing: I think that's the level where an opt-out would work,” he says.

Still, Jerome says that the practicalities of this are unclear; there has not yet been any large-scale opt-out of open data, perhaps an indication of the difficulties involved in doing so.

With the open data movement gathering momentum, it's important that debates around the pros and cons can take place with a transparency appropriate to the topic. Not all city governments will have the financial resources or technical know-how of a city like Seattle, but smaller governments across the country may yet learn from the successes and failures of the bigger players.

Luxembourg has shown how far a tiny country can go by serving the needs of global capitalism. Now it has set its sights on outer space • Read the text version here

My review of Hillary’s What Happened has just been posted on Washington Babylon.

Few issues in urban tech today are as controversial as the impact of short-term rental startups like AirBnB and VRBO on neighborhood housing. The battle lines are clear: Do these startups help residents earn much-needed extra dollars on the side, or are they so constricting housing supply and raising rents so high that locals are forced to move out? Billions of dollars—and the livelihoods of vibrant communities—are at stake in this debate, and regulatory battles royale have already been waged in cities like Washington, D.C., and Austin. Of course, urban housing isn’t the only bedrock element of city life undergoing rapid and controversial change: Public officials have wrestled for years with how to handle ride-hailing’s destabilizing effect on taxi service, and potentially on public transit as well.

If you live in a place like San Francisco or New York where urban tech startups (and, ahem, national media) are concentrated, these conflicts seem to be reshaping cities throughout the country. But if you dig a little deeper, it’s clear that’s hardly the case. With fewer than twenty new homes built in a city of 200,000 last year, Akron recently abated property taxes for new housing as a way to prop up the construction market. Many of Akron’s leaders would love to have the problem of excessive housing demand that Airbnb has allegedly created.

And although Uber and Lyft are available in almost all American cities at this point, their use is concentrated in big, dense regions.  It’s extremely unlikely that the ride-hailing industry’s piece of the mobility pie in a place like Topeka or Louisville comes close to the 20% of vehicle miles seen in San Francisco.

In fact, urban tech innovations—as well as the narrative surrounding the field—disproportionately focus on a handful of cities that are already winning the competition for mobile workers and tourists. Urban tech’s relevance and impact are much more limited in the many mid-sized cities that are spread across the country. Why is that?

Well, for one thing, urban tech startups are often launched by the well-educated young people clustered in thriving “unicorn cities” like New York, Boston, San Francisco, and Austin. They also happen to be the places where venture capital firms concentrate, ready to finance growth (such firms tend to fund startups near their headquarters to keep a close eye on investments and minimize travel).

It’s natural that these entrepreneurs would draw ideas from their own experiences. Tired of lugging around your laundry through the Mission in San Francisco? Enter Rinse. Tough to find a parking spot in Manhattan? SpotHero can help with that. Inconveniences like these are most felt in growing, dense cities chock full of affluent people willing to open their wallets to make their lives a little easier. But they are just that—inconveniences.

As a counterexample, look at Tyrone Poole, the founder of NoAppFee who was profiled in CityLab earlier this year. Several years ago Poole found himself living in a homeless shelter as a result of an incapacitating leg injury. He spent days walking the streets of Portland, Oregon, his hometown, trying to find an apartment building with a vacancy that would accept someone with his financial profile. It took him months of fruitless searching before he found a place to live.

Poole turned his frustration into a business opportunity, launching NoAppFee in Portland as a software platform that instantly gives prospective tenants a list of available apartments where they will be approved based on their finances. The platform is now deployed in three states.

NoAppFee addresses the need for affordable housing—a fundamental urban need—in a way that will resonate most in mid-sized cities. This is because the software’s ability to match prospective tenants with available homes relies on a steady stock of available apartments at the lower end of the market, a rare situation in unicorn cities like San Francisco or New York that have very low vacancy rates.

NoAppFee has found one challenge of mid-sized city life that is ripe for an innovative solution. There are many others. Consider the opioid crisis, which was the focus of a recent startup gathering in Portland, Maine, where opioid deaths have spiked. But entrepreneurs in places like Portland, Maine, (or Portland Oregon, for that matter) struggle to get growth capital from venture capital firms that increasingly direct funding to Bay Area startups.

And so we end up with an urban tech sector creating innovations that are not just relevant for a certain class of city residents; they are also relevant for only a small subset of American cities. Airbnb has more than 8,000 listings in tech and tourist mecca Austin, but only a few hundred in El Paso, which has almost as many residents. Rinse’s promise for dry cleaning delivery or SpotHero’s ability to reserve a parking space have limited appeal in cities like El Paso. But an easier way for a homeless person to find an affordable apartment? That would be get people’s attention. So would a technology solution to the opioid crisis.

There is no single culprit for urban tech’s myopic focus on the unicorn cities. Regional wealth, labor force migration, venture capital preferences, and media biases all play a part. And there is unlikely to be a silver bullet to fix it. But the 21st to 100th largest metro areas in the United States are collectively home to 92 million people, no small market. An enterprising venture capital firm or community fund could finance solutions specifically developed for cities of that scale. Or a collective of mid-sized city leaders could commit to ensuring a technology solution that proves to be effective in one such city can scale easily to the others.

But until something changes, those of us working in urban tech should harbor no false illusions that our innovations are helping urban America writ large. They’re not. In fact, they’re focused on a subset of places that are already magnets for talent. Urban tech has much less to offer mid-sized cities that have their own urgent challenges to cope with.

This week on Intercepted, physicist David Wright from the Union of Concerned Scientists explains how easy it would be for Trump to launch a nuclear strike. Professor James Fernandez of NYU talks about the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, the 3,000 Americans who tried to stop fascism before it spread in Europe. We speak with the directors of a haunting new film about a terror attack in an Israeli bus station that leads to the brutal mob killing of an innocent Eritrean immigrant. And Donald Trump gets a visit from the two Bobs in his Office Space.

Miles Jupp is joined by Holly Walsh, Andrew Maxwell, Fern Brady and Isabel Hardman to discuss the Labour Party Conference, Germany's election results & Donald Trump's feud with the NFL. Written by Sarah Campbell, Jon Hunter and James Kettle with additional material from Athena Kugblenu and Jenny Lavillie. The producer was Joe Nunnery and it was a BBC Studios Production.

In the wake of wars in Syria and Iraq, Iran has grown in power and influence across the Middle East. Is that a cause for worry?

Author (Photo: Nelson wounded during the battle of Santa Cruz de Tenerife; 1806 painting by Richard Westall) http://JohnBatchelorShow.com/contact http://JohnBatchelorShow.com/schedules http://johnbatchelorshow.com/blog Twitter: @BatchelorShow In the Hour of Victory: The Royal Navy at War in the Age of Nelson by Sam Willis. PART 1 of 2. "...Sam Willis, one of Britain's finest naval historians, stumbled on this collection by chance in the British Library in 2010 and soon found that only a handful of people knew of its existence. Willis here shapes that material into wonderful character portraits of the commanders on both sides, assessing their strengths and weaknesses. He also provides concise and illuminating explanations of the convoluted political circumstances surrounding each battle as he expertly reinterprets these key engagements in extraordinary and revelatory detail. "A beautifully dramatic narrative, In the Hour of Victory tells the story of these naval triumphs as never before and allows us to hear once more the officer's voices as they describe the battles that made Britain great." ©2013 Sam Willis. Appendix II. Copyright 2013 by Nicholas Blake. First American edition 2014. (P)2014 Audible Inc https://www.amazon.com/Hour-Victory-Royal-Navy-Nelson/dp/0393243141/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1506302307&sr=1-5&refinements=p_27%3ASam+Willis

Author (Photo: The Battle of the Nile, depicted in an 1801 painting by Thomas Luny) http://JohnBatchelorShow.com/contact http://JohnBatchelorShow.com/schedules http://johnbatchelorshow.com/blog Twitter: @BatchelorShow In the Hour of Victory: The Royal Navy at War in the Age of Nelson by Sam Willis. PART 2 of 2. "...Sam Willis, one of Britain's finest naval historians, stumbled on this collection by chance in the British Library in 2010 and soon found that only a handful of people knew of its existence. Willis here shapes that material into wonderful character portraits of the commanders on both sides, assessing their strengths and weaknesses. He also provides concise and illuminating explanations of the convoluted political circumstances surrounding each battle as he expertly reinterprets these key engagements in extraordinary and revelatory detail. "A beautifully dramatic narrative, In the Hour of Victory tells the story of these naval triumphs as never before and allows us to hear once more the officer's voices as they describe the battles that made Britain great." ©2013 Sam Willis. Appendix II. Copyright 2013 by Nicholas Blake. First American edition 2014. (P)2014 Audible Inc https://www.amazon.com/Hour-Victory-Royal-Navy-Nelson/dp/0393243141/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1506302307&sr=1-5&refinements=p_27%3ASam+Willis

AUTHOR (PHOTO: Humboldt as a boy with his widowed mother, Maria Elisabeth (Colomb) von Humboldt) HTTP://JOHNBATCHELORSHOW.COM/CONTACT HTTP://JOHNBATCHELORSHOW.COM/SCHEDULES HTTP://JOHNBATCHELORSHOW.COM/BLOG TWITTER: @BATCHELORSHOW The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World by Andrea Wulf. PART 1 OF 4. The acclaimed author of Founding Gardeners reveals the forgotten life of Alexander von Humboldt, the visionary German naturalist whose ideas changed the way we see the natural world—and in the process created modern environmentalism. NATIONAL BEST SELLER One of the New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, The James Wright Award for Nature Writing, the Costa Biography Award, the Royal Geographic Society's Ness Award, the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award Finalist for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, the Royal Society Science Book Prize, the Kirkus Prize Prize for Nonfiction, the Independent Bookshop Week Book Award A Best Book of the Year: The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Economist, Nature, Jezebel, Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, New Scientist, The Independent, The Telegraph, The Sunday Times, The Evening Standard, The Spectator Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) was the most famous scientist of his age, a visionary German naturalist and polymath whose discoveries forever changed the way we understand the natural world. Among his most revolutionary ideas was a radical conception of nature as a complex and interconnected global force that does not exist for the use of humankind alone. In North America, Humboldt’s name still graces towns, counties, parks, bays, lakes, mountains, and a river. And yet the man has been all but forgotten. In this illuminating biography, Andrea Wulf brings Humboldt’s extraordinary life back into focus: his prediction of human-induced climate change; his daring expeditions to the highest peaks of South America and to the anthrax-infected steppes of Siberia; his relationships with iconic figures, including Simón Bolívar and Thomas Jefferson; and the lasting influence of his writings on Darwin, Wordsworth, Goethe, Muir, Thoreau, and many others. Brilliantly researched and stunningly written, The Invention of Nature reveals the myriad ways in which Humboldt’s ideas form the foundation of modern environmentalism—and reminds us why they are as prescient and vital as ever. https://www.amazon.com/Invention-Nature-Alexander-Humboldts-World/dp/0345806298/ref=la_B001HOE9U0_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1506128249&sr=1-1

AUTHOR (PHOTO: Schiller, Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt with Goethe in Jena) HTTP://JOHNBATCHELORSHOW.COM/CONTACT HTTP://JOHNBATCHELORSHOW.COM/SCHEDULES HTTP://JOHNBATCHELORSHOW.COM/BLOG TWITTER: @BATCHELORSHOW The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World by Andrea Wulf. PART 2 OF 4. The acclaimed author of Founding Gardeners reveals the forgotten life of Alexander von Humboldt, the visionary German naturalist whose ideas changed the way we see the natural world—and in the process created modern environmentalism. NATIONAL BEST SELLER One of the New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, The James Wright Award for Nature Writing, the Costa Biography Award, the Royal Geographic Society's Ness Award, the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award Finalist for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, the Royal Society Science Book Prize, the Kirkus Prize Prize for Nonfiction, the Independent Bookshop Week Book Award A Best Book of the Year: The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Economist, Nature, Jezebel, Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, New Scientist, The Independent, The Telegraph, The Sunday Times, The Evening Standard, The Spectator Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) was the most famous scientist of his age, a visionary German naturalist and polymath whose discoveries forever changed the way we understand the natural world. Among his most revolutionary ideas was a radical conception of nature as a complex and interconnected global force that does not exist for the use of humankind alone. In North America, Humboldt’s name still graces towns, counties, parks, bays, lakes, mountains, and a river. And yet the man has been all but forgotten. In this illuminating biography, Andrea Wulf brings Humboldt’s extraordinary life back into focus: his prediction of human-induced climate change; his daring expeditions to the highest peaks of South America and to the anthrax-infected steppes of Siberia; his relationships with iconic figures, including Simón Bolívar and Thomas Jefferson; and the lasting influence of his writings on Darwin, Wordsworth, Goethe, Muir, Thoreau, and many others. Brilliantly researched and stunningly written, The Invention of Nature reveals the myriad ways in which Humboldt’s ideas form the foundation of modern environmentalism—and reminds us why they are as prescient and vital as ever. https://www.amazon.com/Invention-Nature-Alexander-Humboldts-World/dp/0345806298/ref=la_B001HOE9U0_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1506128249&sr=1-1

In June, as the fight over the repeal of the Affordable Care Act reached its climax, then-White House spokesperson Sean Spicer delivered a warning. “It’s not a question of Obamacare versus the AHCA,” he said, referring to the GOP alternative, the since-failed American Health Care Act. The question, Spicer said, was between repealing Obamacare and moving to single payer.

History may prove him right. The battle over the ACA is over. The fight for what comes next will begin in earnest on Wednesday with the introduction of Sen. Bernie Sanders’s bill to create a universal Medicare program, the most fleshed-out single-payer proposal ever introduced in Congress.

The campaign for the Vermont independent’s bill will start with the backing of at least 15 Democratic co-sponsors and 24 progressive and health care advocacy groups, numbers that will only grow in the coming days and weeks.

Read a chapter-by-chapter summary here or the executive summary here. See the funding options here.

The bill starts by sweetening the pot for seniors who may be wary about welcoming the rest of the country into their warm pool. It eliminates copays and deductions, except for name-brand drugs when generics are available, and adds dental, vision, and hearing aid coverage to Medicare — huge benefits that have long been a goal of public health advocates.

At the same time, people up to age 18 would be eligible for coverage in the first year. In year two, the eligibility age of 65 would be lowered to 45. The next year, it would drop again to 35. In year four, the age restrictions would be eliminated.

Importantly, Sanders’s bill repeals the Hyde Amendment, which restricts federal funding for abortions, as it relates to universal Medicare. That means that those covered would have full access to the entire suite of reproductive health care services, including abortions. His is the only single-payer legislation currently on the table that moves so strongly in the direction of reproductive freedom.

The history of the New Deal expansion shows that once benefits have been enacted, they are difficult to take away. Opponents of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid have been working to cut or privatize all three since the day each was enacted, but instead all have grown over time. (The major exception was Aid to Families with Dependent Children, better known as welfare, which was repealed in 1996.)

By phasing in coverage, Sanders makes universal Medicare harder to repeal and easier for the public to understand. Everyone gets that transitioning to Medicare when one turns 65 is a relatively painless process. Under Sanders’s plan, people would begin transitioning after the first year, at age 45 instead of 65. That’s not complicated.

The coverage for dental care will also be life-changing for millions of people who live in pain — some of whom, unable to afford proper dental care, are even forced to change their diets.

The new Medicare bill leaves the Veterans Administration in place and allows tribal health care systems to continue operations. It would allow doctors and providers to opt out of the system on an annual basis, meaning that a private system would exist alongside the public system.

The bill does not include an explicit funding mechanism. However, on Wednesday afternoon, Sanders’s office released a document laying out several options for financing the plan. The document is more or less a menu of various revenue mechanisms for the federal government to choose from. As the bill is debated in committee, Sanders said, senators can debate the various funding ideas.

The list includes, for instance, both household and employer-based premiums. The document proposes a 7.5 percent income-based premium on employers and a 4 percent income-based premium on households. Together, it estimates these two proposals would raise $7.4 trillion over ten years.

The document also notes that Medicare for All would eliminate various tax breaks that currently subsidize our current health financing system. This would raise $4.2 trillion over a decade.

Then there’s a large list of non-health care related taxes: everything from making the estate tax more progressive to taxing large financial institutions to establishing a wealth tax on the top 0.1 percent.

Sanders’s bill already has the backing of Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Kamala Harris of California, Cory Booker of New Jersey, Al Franken of Minnesota, and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, suggesting that the Democratic nominee for president — if they come from the ranks of politicians rather than Hollywood (Oprah, The Rock, etc.) — will more than likely back Sanders’s bill.

Presuming the Senate won’t move on the bill, its first real legislative debate would come if Democrats take the House of Representatives in 2018. Democratic members would face pressure in 2019 to study the bill in House committees and pass a version of it as something of a dry run. If Democrats follow a midterm wave by taking the White House in 2020, they’ll be positioned to move early on health care.

In 1993 and again in 2009, taking on health care at the front end of a Democratic administration turned out badly from an electoral perspective, but Democrats, if Wednesday is any indication, may believe the third time is a charm.

Update: September 13, 2017

This story was updated to include Sanders’s financing plan.

Top photo: Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., speaks during a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington on Dec. 7, 2016.

The post The Obamacare Fight Is Over — Now It’s Onto Universal Medicare appeared first on The Intercept.

I have a hot tip for Washington Post reporters: politicians aren't always honest. As a result when they say they believe something, it doesn't mean they really believe it.

This means that the Washington Post likely misled its readers in a discussion of Republican tax cut proposals when it told them:

"Republicans believe the corporate rate cut and other incentives will stimulate economic growth, offsetting the revenue loss."

The reality is the Washington Post's reporters have no clue what the Republicans pushing tax cuts really believe about the impact of tax cuts on growth. If these Republicans were at all familiar with with the evidence, they would not expect their tax cuts to have much, if any, positive impact on growth.

So while it is possible that Republicans believe in something that is not true, it is possible that they are deliberately deceiving the public. It is also possible that they have no clue whatsoever about the impact of tax cuts on the economy, just as they have no clue about the impact of their health care proposals. They are simply voting as their funders are telling them to.

Newspapers are supposed to report the facts, not make them up, as the Post is doing here.

This event was recorded live at The RSA on Tuesday 20th September 2017 Glenn Greenwald is the Pulitzer prize-winning journalist who worked with Edward Snowden to uncover secret global surveillance programmes undertaken by the US and the UK. His partner, David Miranda, is a journalist and the first LGBTQ member of the Rio City Council. In this special RSA event, Greenwald and Miranda discuss power and accountability, surveillance and privacy, Trump and fake news, and the role of journalism in giving a voice to perspectives and events that are ignored and silenced by large media outlets. Discover more about this event here: https://www.thersa.org/events/2017/09/an-evening-with-glenn-greenwald-and-david-miranda

09-23-2017 (Photo: File:Angela Merkel 2008 Rust.JPG) http://JohnBatchelorShow.com/contact http://JohnBatchelorShow.com/schedules Twitter: @BatchelorShow Order-obsessed Germany aims to overtake liberty-obsessed US as the world's leading democracy. Russell Berman @HooverInst In these brief comments, I am likely to err on the side of excessive schematization: the positions I want to tease out of several texts deserve more nuance and differentiation than I can provide in this short text. Yet the binary character of the analysis is also a reflection of the highly polarized public debate, certainly in the United States but also in Western Europe, in the wake of various political developments, above all the 2016 election that led to the Donald Trump presidency. A good piece of the transatlantic sniping between Washington and Berlin is, of course, just a function of electoral politics. Merkel faces the Bundestag elections in September, and she can secure her by now likely victory by displaying her distance from Trump. But something deeper is going on, beyond the personalities of Trump and Merkel: alternative traditions and expectations regarding government. The United States and Germany do indeed represent different political cultures, and these differences are reflected in contrasting constitutional languages, as we will see below. In terms of political culture, from a German point of view, Americans are excessively individualistic: one could document this with accounts such as Thomas Mann’s in his 1922 speech on “the German Republic,” a foundational statement for the Weimar era, but also in surveys of political values. Meanwhile from an American point of view, Germans are excessively conformist, authoritarian, and obedient. Undersocialized loners on the one hand, pliable crowds on the other, Americans versus Germans: this is the stuff regrettable stereotypes are made of, but these images are also pertinent to constitutional structures—liberty versus fraternity—as the following high-velocity itinerary will suggest, from foundational eighteenth-century documents to recent political speech. http://www.telospress.com/who-leads-the-west-and-why-trump-or-merkel-constitutional-cultures-in-the-united-states-and-germany/

Author (Photo: Portrait of General John Burgoyne, c.1766 | Sir Joshua Reynolds | Fine Art Painting Reproduction at TOPofART.com) http://JohnBatchelorShow.com/contact http://JohnBatchelorShow.com/schedules http://johnbatchelorshow.com/blog Twitter: @BatchelorShow An Empire on the Edge: How Britain Came to Fight America by Nick Bunker. PART 5 of 6. Finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in History Winner of the 2015 George Washington Prize Winner of the 2015 Fraunces Tavern Museum Book Award “[A] bracing gallop through the three years leading up to the ‘shot heard round the world.’. . . A broad and telling portrait.” —The Wall Street Journal “Absorbing and detailed. . . . Bunker’s narrative is human and even-handed; and from the Boston harbourside to the salons of London, a complex and epic tale is told with colour and enthusiasm.” —The Sunday Telegraph (London) “Bunker’s tightly argued and deeply researched book shows how a broader perspective can shed new light on even the most familiar events.” —Foreign Affairs “A joy. . . . An exciting backstage look at the events that caused the American Revolution. . . . [and] an excellent analysis of the situation in the American colonies and Great Britain in the 18th century.” —New York Journal of Books “Nearly two and a half centuries after the fact, it would seem all but impossible to shed fresh light and insight into the origins of the American Revolution. And yet, this is precisely what journalist-turned-financial analyst-turned-historian Nick Bunker has accomplished in a majestic new study of the events leading up to shots being fired at Lexington and Concord in 1775.” —The Manchester Journal “Highly recommended.” —Andrew Lambert, BBC History Magazine “A nuanced global analysis of Britain’s failure to hold onto its American colonies. . . . riveting. . . . With a sharp eye for economic realities, Bunker persuasively demonstrates why the American Revolution had to happen.” —Publishers Weekly (boxed review) “An eye-opening study of the British view of the American Revolution and why they were crazy to fight it. . . . the failure of British leadership to recognize the warning signs will astonish readers who thought the Revolution was just about tea. A scholarly yet page-turning, superbly written history.” —Kirkus (starred review) “[An] enthralling examination of the three years leading up to the American Revolution. . . . Bunker sets the story in its global context. However, he is also good at zeroing in on the local and unfamiliar.” —The Times (London) “Utterly absorbing and full of colour, we learn afresh what a mess Britain made of leaving America and, crucially and importantly, how that mess shaped the American psyche.” —Justin Webb, presenter, BBC Today Programme “Bunker’s is a fascinating historical account, with implications that go beyond its subject matter into the question of how empire-building works—or doesn’t.” —The Columbus Dispatch “Nick Bunker dazzles the reader with a deeply researched and clear-eyed accounting of the dissolution of the mighty—but woefully overextended—British Empire, and in particular its 13 colonies in North America. Bunker’s mellifluous prose fairly jumps off the page, drawing the reader deeper and deeper into this intricate and fascinating tale.” —William D. Cohan About the Author Nick Bunker is the author of Making Haste from Babylon, a history of the Mayflower Pilgrims, described by The Washington Post as “a remarkable success.” Educated at King’s College, Cambridge, and Columbia University, he was a journalist for the Liverpool Echo and the Financial Times, and then an investment banker, chiefly with the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation. During his careers in journalism and finance, he traveled widely in China, India, the former Soviet bloc, and the United States. He now lives in Lincolnshire, England. https://www.amazon.com/Empire-Edge-Britain-Fight-Amer...

Classicist and journalist Catherine Nixey talks about her new book The Darkening Age with Professor Edith Hall. Their discussion explores the momentous changes that occurred when Christianity became the dominant faith of the Roman empire

On Wednesday, Senator Bernie Sanders presented his “Medicare for All” bill to promote single-payer health care. We’ll discuss Sanders’ bill, the arguments for and against the single-payer system and the plausibility of it ever coming to fruition in the United States. We’ll also discuss the larger topic of health care markets with medical doctor and Kaiser Health News editor Elisabeth Rosenthal.

Guest:

Elisabeth Rosenthal, medical doctor and editor-in-chief, Kaiser Health News; author of “An American Sickness: How Healthcare became Big Business and How You Can Take it Back”

More Information:

Here’s What’s in Bernie Sanders’ ‘Medicare For All’ Bill (NPR)

Analyzing land policy, labor, and legal history, Masterless Men: Poor Whites in the Antebellum South (Cambridge University Press, 2017) reveals what happens to excess workers when a capitalist system is predicated on slave labor. With the rising global…

The year 2010 marked the sixtieth anniversary of the start of the Korean War. Called a "sobering corrective" by a reviewer for the New York Times, Bruce Cumings's book takes a fresh look at the often unjustly ignored conflict. Characterizing its beginning as a civil war in which America should not have intervened, Cumings exposes the atrocities committed by all sides during combat. He is chair of the history department at the University of Chicago, author of The Origins of the Korean War, and winner of the Kim Dae Jung Prize for Scholarly Contributions to Democracy, Human Rights, and Peace. Native Speaker, Chang-rae Lee's widely acclaimed debut novel, explored the alienation that modern-day immigrants face-from both American culture and the cultures they leave behind. The book won several awards, including the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for first fiction. Lee went on to write the novel A Gesture Life and the bestseller Aloft. In his new book, "Lee writes with such intimate knowledge of his characters' inner lives and such an understanding of the echoing fallout of war that most readers... will be swept up in the power of The Surrendered and its characters' aching and indelible stories." (New York Times)   (recorded 3/29/2011)

Hillary Clinton has every right to be infuriated by the performance of the press during the 2016 election. In her new book “What Happened,” Clinton mainly indicts television news for abandoning coverage of any actual public policy issues in favor of its berserk obsession with her use of a private email server. Subsidiary malefactors include Matt Lauer, for asking her about almost nothing else at NBC’s September 2016 Commander-in-Chief Forum on national security, and the New York Times, for its spasmodic freakout when FBI Director James Comey declared he was re-opening the bureau’s investigation into her emails just before the election.

But here’s where Clinton and I part ways:

In an interview Tuesday, she said, “I don’t think the press did their job in this election, with very few exceptions.” She believes the problem is something new, and the fault of bad individuals.

Clinton’s problem is obvious: At 69 years old and after a lifetime in politics, she somehow still doesn’t understand what the corporate media’s job is.

Generally speaking, when people fail to do their jobs in a spectacular way, they get fired. When they do their jobs, they’re not.

Who exactly in the corporate media has been fired for failing to provide the United States with in-depth, sober, fair-minded coverage of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran and the minutia of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act?

No one.

Which suggests that the media did do its job. Moreover, I think the media performed incredibly well.

The New York Times, CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, et al., are gigantic corporations — in most cases owned by even larger ones. And the job of giant corporations is not to inform American citizens about reality. It’s not to play a hallowed role in the history of a self-governing republic. It’s to make as much profit as possible. That in turn means the corporate media will never, ever be “liberal” in any genuine sense and will be hostile to all politicians who feint in that direction.

From that perspective, the media’s performance in 2016 was a shining, glorious success. As Les Moonves effused just as the primaries were starting, Donald Trump’s campaign was “good for us economically. … Go Donald! Keep getting out there!” The entire Hieronymus Bosch-like nightmare, said Moonves, “may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.” CNN made $1 billion in profits during the election year, far more than ever before.

With that in mind, read this passage from Clinton’s book about her experience with Lauer, who asked her five questions in a row about her private email server:

Finally, after learning absolutely nothing new or interesting, Lauer turned to a question from one of the veterans NBC had picked to be in the audience. He was a self-described Republican, a former Navy lieutenant who had served in the first Gulf War, and he promptly repeated the right-wing talking point about how my email use would have landed anyone else in prison. Then he asked how could he trust me as President “when you clearly corrupted our national security?”

NBC knew exactly what it was doing here. The network was treating this like an episode of The Apprentice, in which Trump stars and ratings soar. Lauer had turned what should have been a serious discussion into a pointless ambush.

That’s Clinton’s problem right there. Of course NBC “knew exactly what it was doing.” What Lauer and his co-workers were doing was their job: to make as much money as humanly possible for NBC.

By contrast, fostering “serious discussion” is not part of their job. Serious discussion about politics is time-consuming and expensive. Serious discussion makes advertisers, executives, and shareholders angry. It’s unprofitable.

Getting angry at the corporate media for not telling America the truth is like getting angry at chainsaws for doing a terrible job brushing your teeth. Sure, the chainsaw company may run lots of promotional ads about how its latest model, the Scytherate 9000, is essential for your dental health. And maybe you have the right to get mad at the manufacturer the first time you jam it in your mouth and turn it on. But if you keep doing it, at a certain point that’s on you. You should be able to figure out that getting your teeth minty fresh is in fact not what chainsaws are designed to do.

Clinton’s inability to grasp this fundamental point is the central mystery of her condemnation of the media. No American politician has been personally brutalized for longer by the press’s relentless garbage tornado. Yet she somehow was surprised when it happened again in 2016 and came through that painful experience still believing the corporate media’s propaganda about itself.

For instance, Clinton makes a big deal out of a study that found the nightly news on CBS, NBC, and ABC devoted just 32 minutes to real issues in the presidential race during the first 10 months of 2016. By contrast, she points out, “In 2008, the major networks’ nightly newscasts spent a total of 220 minutes on policy. In 2012, it was 114 minutes.”

Okay, 220 minutes on policy is better than 32 minutes. But 220 minutes of policy coverage is still just seven minutes per network per month. That’s not a golden era to look back upon with great nostalgia. Moreover, Clinton doesn’t mention election years like 1996, when the networks devoted just 96 minutes to issues.

Likewise, Clinton claims that the media’s disinclination to pin Trump down on any of his endless lies in real time, particularly during their debates, “was not just a slight shift; this was a ground-shaking shift.” But no one who lived through Ronald Reagan’s constant excursions to a fantasy world, and the media acquiescence to it, could believe that Trump is qualitatively new. Indeed, then-Vice President George H.W. Bush’s Press Secretary Peter Teeley told the New York Times in 1984 that campaign operatives knew they could get away with lying during debates. “You can say anything you want during a debate and 80 million people hear it,” Teeley explained, and if the media later documents that what the candidate said was false, “So what? … Maybe 200 people read it or 2,000 or 20,000.”

Then there’s Clinton’s peculiar affection for the New York Times. Yes, she says, it has often viewed her “with hostility and skepticism,” but “I’ve read the Times for more than 40 years and still look forward to it every day. I appreciate much of the paper’s terrific non-Clinton reporting.” She doesn’t mention the paper’s terrific assistance to the George W. Bush administration’s campaign of deceit about Iraq, which might suggest the paper has some baked-in flaws.

Since Clinton has no structural critique of the press, why does she believe she was so badly mauled in 2016? The only explanation she presents is that the rules are different for her personally:

I don’t think I’m held to the same standard as anybody else. I believed that if I were to say … “Let’s do single-payer tomorrow” … unlike either my primary opponent or my general election opponent, I would’ve been hammered all the time. “OK, how are you going to do that? How are you going to pay for it? Where’s the money going to come from?”

If Clinton’s right, no one would be asking those questions this week about Bernie Sanders’s Medicare for All bill. But if she’s wrong, if the corporate media is fundamentally hostile not to her specifically but to progressive policies in general, reporters will in fact demand answers on this from Sanders repeatedly. All you need to do is open your computer browser to see it’s going to be the latter.

In the end, Clinton’s ideas about the media demonstrate that, more than anything, she badly needed to watch the Noam Chomsky documentary “Manufacturing Consent” or get a subscription to the Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting newsletter. Then she could have approached her campaign with fewer illusions and with a much greater chance of winning.

Instead, she’s left with the bitter observation that the press “want me to stop talking. If it’s all my fault, then the media doesn’t need to do any soul searching.” But that’s the whole point: The corporate media doesn’t have a soul. It just has a balance sheet.

The post Hillary Clinton Doesn’t Understand Why the Corporate Media Is So Bad appeared first on The Intercept.