Enuf said - Bernie Sanders on the midterm elections (10/10/22)

Reprinted below is an article by Bernie Sanders that appeared in The Guardian. Are the Democrats making the same mistake they made in 2016? Will they continue to shed working class voters (Black and Latino, as well as white), because they can't see (or should I say, won't see) beyond the suburbs and their corporate donors? Isn't "doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, the definition of insanity"? You don't have to be a clinical psychiatrist to make that diagnosis.

Democrats shouldn’t focus only on abortion in the midterms. That’s a mistake - Bernie Sanders 10/10/22

America has long faced structural economic crises. Democrats must win on the economy and present a pro-worker agenda.

As someone who has a lifetime 100% pro-choice voting record, and is outraged by the Supreme Court’s horrific decision to overturn Roe v Wade, there is no question that Democrats must continue to focus on the right of women to control their own bodies. This is a fight that most Americans want us to wage and, given the Republicans’ extremist position on the issue, makes them genuinely vulnerable.

But, as we enter the final weeks of the 2022 midterm elections, I am alarmed to hear the advice that many Democratic candidates are getting from establishment consultants and directors of well-funded super PACs that the closing argument of Democrats should focus only on abortion. Cut the 30-second abortion ads and coast to victory.

I disagree. In my view, while the abortion issue must remain on the front burner, it would be political malpractice for Democrats to ignore the state of the economy and allow Republican lies and distortions to go unanswered.

This country has, for decades, faced structural economic crises that have caused the decline of the American middle class. Now is the time for Democrats to take the fight to the reactionary Republican Party and expose their anti-worker views on the most important issues facing ordinary Americans. That is both the right thing to do from a policy perspective and good politics.

We have more income and wealth inequality than at any time in the modern history of this country, with three people owning more wealth than the bottom half of our nation. Is there one Republican prepared to raise taxes on billionaires, or do they want to make a bad situation worse by extending Trump’s tax breaks for the rich and repealing the estate tax?

Today, 60% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, and millions work for starvation wages. Is there one Republican in Congress who is prepared to raise the federal minimum wage to at least $15 an hour?

The United States pays, by far, the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs. Is there one Republican prepared to allow Medicare to immediately begin negotiating prescription drug prices with the pharmaceutical industry and cut the cost of medicine by half?

We have a dysfunctional healthcare system which, despite being the most expensive in the world, allows 85 million Americans to be uninsured or underinsured. Is there one Republican who believes that healthcare is a human right and supports universal coverage?

We remain the only major country on earth not to guarantee time off for moms who have babies or need to take care of sick children.

Is there one Republican who supports at least 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave?

The list goes on: childcare, housing, home health care, college affordability. On every one of these enormously important issues the Republican Party has virtually nothing to say to address the desperate needs of low and moderate income Americans. And what they do propose will most often make a bad situation worse.

Nevertheless, in poll after poll Republicans are more trusted than Democrats to handle the economy – the issue of most importance to people. I believe that if Democrats do not fight back on economic issues and present a strong pro-worker agenda, they could well be in the minority in both the House and the Senate next year.

And it’s not only the long-term structural crises that Democrats must address. It is the outrageous level of corporate greed that we now see every day that is fueling the inflation hurting so many people.

While the price of gas has soared over the last year, the five big oil companies made $59 billion in profits during the 2nd quarter of this year alone, and are spending $88 billion on stock buybacks and dividends to benefit their wealthy shareholders.

While global food prices soared by over 33% last year and are expected to go up another 23% this year, billionaires in the global food and agri-business industry became $382 billion richer during the pandemic.

While we continue to pay, by far, the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs, 3 of the largest pharmaceutical companies in America – Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, and AbbVie – increased their profits by 90% last year to $54 billion.

While 46% of Americans either skipped or delayed the healthcare they need because they could not afford it, the six largest health insurance companies in America last year made over $60 billion in profits.

What do Republicans have to say about corporations that are charging Americans outrageously high prices, while enjoying record breaking profits? They talk a lot about inflation. But what are they going to do about it? Does one of them have the courage to consider a windfall, profits tax? Absolutely not.

You can’t win elections unless you have the support of the working class of this country. But you’re not going to have that support unless you make it clear that you’re prepared to take on powerful special interests – and fight for the millions of Americans who are struggling economically. Whether it is extending the $300 a month child tax credit that expired in December that slashed the child poverty rate by over 40%, or increasing Social Security benefits, or expanding Medicare to cover dental, hearing and vision or making childcare affordable, the Democrats must stand with the working class of this country and expose the Republicans for the phonies that they are.

None of what I am suggesting here is “radical”. It is, in fact, extremely popular. It is what the American people want. If we close this critical midterm campaign with a clear, unified vision to meet the needs of working families, to take on corporate greed, and protect a woman’s right to choose, we will begin to rebuild the trust between Democrats in Washington and the working families of this country.

And we’ll win the election.

 

¡Cuba Sí!

Below is an article about Cuba from the Washington Post (reprinted without any editing, although there are some facts and interpretations that I would argue are not accurate). What is important to note is that it describes a system for political and social change that has been a fundamental part of the genuine socialist democracy in Cuba since the triumph of the revolution in 1959. It’s called twice down, twice up.

Basically, it works like this. The national government makes a proposal for a new “law” and sends it to various social and political groups (labor unions, farmer’s co-ops, community associations, etc.) at the local level. These groups discuss the proposed legislation in open meetings and offer suggestions and critiques, which are communicated back to the national government, which uses them to amend the legislation. They then submit the amended legislation to be voted on by the entire adult population.

When I was in Cuba in 1972, I saw just such a process being enacted over what was termed the “loafer law”. The law would require that every adult Cuban, who was able to work, have a job that contributed to the society. It was a result of the fact that a relatively small number of Cubans, who had accumulated significant wealth before the revolution, were not employed and were living off that wealth. Hence the title. The process was in its second stage, having been sent down for debate, and there was lots of debate while I was there. Interestingly, the most vigorous debate was whether the law was strong enough; many Cubans want to seize the wealth that was allowing the “loafers” to live without working; others wanted the “loafers” to be sent to labor camps.

The fact that this process is still in operation tells us a lot about what truly democratic socialism is all about, particularly when we note the various crises that the Cuban Revolution has faced over the past 60+ years, almost all of which have been a product of the US embargo and sanctions. But perhaps the most telling part of the Post article is the final comment by a researcher from the US based Human Rights Watch, attacking the process because the Cuban government is “asking people what they think about the rights of a minority”. Much better in his eyes to pass legislation to “guarantee” rights of a minority (or not, depending on whether Joe Manchin or the Supreme Court will go along) and then allow opposition to those rights free reign to deny them. That's the definition of rights in a liberal democracy. Given the choice, I opt for the Cuban's definition of rights in a socialist democracy.

Cuba sent gay men to work camps. Now it’s voting on same-sex marriage. 

by Mary Beth Sheridan

After 79,000 neighborhood meetings, months of discussion and an outpouring of more than 300,000 suggestions from citizens, Cubans will vote in a referendum Sunday that could redefine family rights — including legalizing same-sex marriage.

The proposed new Family Code would be among the most progressive in Latin America, defying a long tradition of machismo in Cuba. In addition to approving same-sex marriage, it would allow gay couples to adopt, and increase the rights of women, the elderly, and children.

Supporters call it a sign of the progress on LGBTQ+ issues under Cuba’s Communist government, which was once so hostile to gay men that it sent them to forced labor camps for “reeducation.” Yet leaders of the influential Roman Catholic Church and the island’s growing evangelical movement have expressed unusually vocal dissent.

“It reminds me very much of the debate we had in Canada and the U.S. 10 or 20 years ago, about the role of the family, the role of gay rights,” said John Kirk, a Cuba scholar at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia.

What makes Cuba different is the political context. Gay rights activism has been channeled largely through the single-party system, rather than independent civil-society groups, which are restricted. The government has promoted the new law on billboards, at rallies and in official media. President Miguel Díaz-Canel on Thursday urged Cubans in a televised address to vote for the code, tying the balloting to support for the political system.

“Voting ‘yes’ is saying yes to unity, to the Revolution, to socialism,” he said.

That rankled government critics, who noted that Cubans were rarely given the opportunity to vote freely on other matters — such as choosing their leaders.

The vote comes at a time of widespread anger over food and electricity shortages. The economy is still hobbled by the effects of the coronavirus pandemic and extra U.S. sanctions imposed by the Trump administration and partially maintained by the Biden administration. The dissatisfaction raises the possibility that some Cubans could cast a protest vote.

“I understand that the rejection of the dictatorship will prompt many people to want to vote no, reflexively, so that the regime suffers a symbolic defeat,” independent journalist Mario Luis Reyes told the news site 14ymedio, run by the Cuban dissident Yoani Sánchez. “But if the ‘no’ wins, those who will really be defeated are us.”

The 100-page proposal reflects a sea change in official attitudes toward gay rights in Cuba.

In the 1960s, after the triumph of Fidel Castro’s revolution, the Communist government exalted the “new socialist man” and repressed dissidents of all kinds. Gay citizens were fired from jobs and even sent to labor camps.

A leading figure in transforming such homophobic attitudes was sexologist Mariela Castro, the daughter of Fidel’s brother and fellow revolutionary, Raúl. She runs a government sex education institute and is a prominent advocate of gay rights.

Today, workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation is outlawed, and the public health system provides gender-reassignment surgery free of charge.

The new family law would expand not just gay rights but also protections for women, children and the elderly. It urges couples to share housework equally, condemns family violence and insists that kids have a voice in family decisions.

“So this goes against the traditional paterfamilias [model], with the Latin father being in charge,” Kirk said.

Cuba’s Catholic bishops and other Christian religious leaders have spoken out strongly against the proposal. It could also get a thumbs-down from other social conservatives.

“The proposal is permeated by what is known as ‘gender ideology,’ which, as often happens with ideologies, is a construction of ideas that people want to impose by force onto reality, and wind up distorting it,” the Cuban Conference of Catholic Bishops said in a statement.

The new measure, which would replace a 1975 family code, was discussed in more than 79,000 community meetings between February and April, and amended based on citizens’ suggestions. Cuba’s National Assembly passed it in July. It needs more than 50 percent of the votes cast in Sunday’s referendum to take effect. Typically, measures put to a referendum in Cuba receive overwhelming support, but the outcome this time is not as clear.

While the government has billed the referendum as an exercise in democracy, some critics say the rights of gay people shouldn’t be subject to a vote.

“The fact they are asking people what they think about the rights of a minority shows they don’t really understand how democracies work,” said Juan Pappier, senior Americas researcher for Human Rights Watch.

 

"They'd just as soon kill you as look at you.”

My previous post on August 28 was prescient. Less than 24 hours after I posted it, I was in the emergency room of the hospital described in the article I had written about. I saw for myself exactly what had happened to medical care as a result of the sale of what had been a very good community hospital. 

I was lucky because I went to an urgent care facility, where my condition was quickly diagnosed and was then sent to the hospital, bypassing the emergency room intake. I felt a bit guilty being rolled passed hallway after hallway of patients on gurneys waiting to be seen by someone from the understaffed ER, although I did end up in a tiny room, not much larger than a closet, in the ER for 2 days before being sent to surgery. Fortunately the staff, although overworked and sometimes lacking basic supplies, were wonderful. Most were young and had worked in the hospital less than 3 months. One has to wonder how long they are going to last, given the conditions they are working under.

I was also lucky when I came home. I didn't have to worry about a bill in the mail that would "break the bank". I have a "cadillac" health insurance plan, between Medicare and the secondary insurance from my former job as a teacher in Maryland. The latter is the result of a strong union, which negotiated both good wages and excellent benefits.

So, when I read the article from Absolute Zero: A Newsletter by Richard (RJ) Eskow that I have reproduced below, it struck me as a very cogent analysis which describes our medical system. It makes reference to a city, Baltimore, where I lived and worked for 12 years and which is undoubtedly a "poster child" for the extreme racial inequities of our society, but even I was shocked by the evidence of those inequities presented by the author.

It all begins with a graph.

Richard (RJ) Eskow

When I was growing up in the Rust Belt, there was a phrase people would use to describe an unusually vicious or cold-blooded kid in the neighborhood (and there were a few). “He’d just as soon kill you as look at you,” they would say.

I thought of that phrase when a graph went around recently on left-leaning social media comparing life expectancy and health care costs in the United States with those in other industrialized countries. It went viral, even though the information it contained has been widely discussed for years. That’s the power of a well-crafted image.

Why are our costs so much higher and our health care outcomes so much worse? There are a number of reasons, but the most important one is: our health financing system is sociopathic. That’s not hyperbole. Ours is a system that would, quite literally, “just as soon kill you as look at you.”

The graph can be seen above. Some things to note about it:

• It doesn’t include the disabilities, loss of productivity, economic stagnation, and poor quality of life created our inferior health system.

• It doesn’t break out the vast disparities in American healthcare outcomes by race or class.

• It ends in 2018, so it doesn’t include the more than one million people who have died so far from Covid-19 in this country, much less those who died elsewhere.

• Nor does it include the billions of dollars the government directed to private pharmaceutical companies and other vendors during the pandemic, only to have them overcharge us for the products they then developed at public expense.

And remember: when we talk about longevity, we’re not just talking about people losing the last few years of life,. That’s tragic enough. But infant and child mortality bring down the curve, too, as does premature death at all ages.

Racial Disparities

During the decades covered by this graph, Black infant mortality rates were 2.5 times that of Whites. Race is a longtime predictor of health outcomes.  These statistics, which I prepared for Bernie Sanders before a Baltimore speech in 2016, are all too representative of Black America’s experience:

• If you're born in Baltimore's poorest neighborhood, your life expectancy is almost 20 years shorter than if you're born in its richest neighborhood.

• 15 Baltimore neighborhoods have lower life expectancies than North Korea. Two of them have higher infant mortality than Palestine’s West Bank.

• Baltimore teenagers between the ages of 15 and 19 face poorer health conditions and a worse economic outlook than those in economically distressed cities in Nigeria, India, China, and South Africa, according to a 2015 report from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Here's another statistic: Black children are seven to ten times more likely to die of asthma than white children. That’s one I take personally, since I nearly died of asthma myself as a child (despite being white) and it’s a terrible way to go.

I could muster more facts and figures, but you get the idea. The racialized nature of the American healthcare system – which is instrumentalized through economic discrimination – both disables and kills. That’s why, since the arrival of Covid-19, age-adjusted statistics show that Black Americans have been especially hard hit, with death rates that are approximately 67% higher than those of Whites and approximately 2.2 times higher than those of the group with the lowest adjusted death rates (Asian Americans).

Class Kills

White America is catching up, at least its poorer neighborhoods.  “Deaths of despair” – suicide, opioid addiction, and alcoholism – were ravaging lower-income White American men even before the pandemic, contributing to the USA’s declining life expectancy (as seen in the graph above).

A paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) showed that living in an area with high economic inequality was, like race, a strong predictor of Covid deaths.  In 2020, nearly 46,000 people in the United States killed themselves. White men, who make up 30 percent of the population, committed 70 percent of the suicides.

Class is a killer.

Indifferent to Suffering

Our healthcare system is the most direct killer of all. It is designed to be indifferent to human suffering, to life and death. To this system, it doesn’t matter whether a person lives or dies as long as it gets paid. That’s why our healthcare costs are so high, even though our life expectancy is so low.

Medical providers and institutions get paid for the services they provide, whether you live or die. The more services they provide, the more money they make. Health insurers operate under an even more perverse set of incentives. Their rates are based on the overall volume of services expected, which they then mark up. Their business practices are designed to shift as much cost as possible to the patient, while at the same time restricting the patient’s freedom to choose. They drive patients to providers who accept the insurance company’s low rates and agree to its restrictive rules about medical care.

That system is designed to be expensive. Let’s say you’re paying for a plan with a $5,000 deductible. As Sarah Kliff and Josh Katz documented for the New York Times, a colonoscopy at the University of Mississippi Medical Center will cost you $1,463 with a Cigna plan and $2,144 with an Aetna plan. If, on the other hand, you have no insurance at all, that colonoscopy will cost you “only” $782.

Kliff also reported on the case of a couple whose baby died while in the hospital. Although they had insurance through Cigna, the couple subsequently received a bill for $257,000 in what was described as “a dispute between a large hospital and a large insurer, with the patient stuck in the middle.”  This system is indifferent to the trauma it inflicts on patients or their survivors.

It's About the Incentives

Outcomes are also a matter of indifference. People are billed, no matter what happens. One study found that the average cost of treating accidents in the United States with fatal outcomes is $6,880 if the patient dies in the emergency room and $41,570 if they die in the hospital.

Some historians claim that ancient court physicians in Asia were paid for every month their patients remained healthy. That may or may not be a myth. What is definitely not a myth is that, in many publicly-funded health systems worldwide, health professionals are paid by salary and not by volume, while hospitals are given a fixed (or “global”) budget to provide care. That creates less of an incentive for “churning” patients and more of an incentive to focus on patient care.

That’s the kind of system we should have. Instead, we have a system where they charge $2,144 for a colonoscopy and $41,570 for an unsuccessful treatment. That’s a system where they’d just as soon kill you as look at you. It doesn’t matter. They make money either way.

A Cautionary Tale: Privatization and Its Toll

Ever wonder what happens when huge, allegedly non-profit corporations gobble up community based medical facilities in the name of increasing efficiency and providing better care? Wonder no more. In case after case (as is true in many other areas) these corporations promised that they would better serve the community because of the resources they have available, and in case after case those promises proved to be lies. 

A few years ago, Novant Health (a "not for profit" conglomerate with 15 hospitals & more than 350 physician practices in North Carolina) offered to buy the New Hanover Regional Medical Center, a large and excellent facility owned by the citizens of New Hanover County, North Carolina. After a glitzy campaign featuring the head administrators of the hospital (who probably stood to benefit from an huge increase in pay when Novant took over) and a number of local politicians (one can only speculate their motivation), the NHC Board of Commissioners "sold" the hospital for $1.5 billion, with a promise that Novant would provide $3.1 billion more to upgrade the facility. The sale was completed in March of 2021, despite considerable community opposition.

Almost all of the $1.5 billion was put in an endowment, which is controlled by Novant and not the citizens of the county. As far as I can tell, not $1 has been used to benefit the community in the year since the "sale", although I recently saw a notice that a 5 person board had been created to "study" how the money should be used. The article did not say how much these board members will be paid out of the endowment.

Now comes the kicker. In one year since the sale, the quality of care in the hospital has plummeted, primarily because of lack of adequate staffing. Note that during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, while the hospital was still owned by the county, nothing like the issues now surfacing ever occurred. 

Those opposed to the "sale" of the hospital predicted that it would be a disaster for our community. We pointed to what had happened in other communities when Novant "bought" their hospitals, but to no avail. And now, as the article from the Port City Daily below demonstrates, our community is paying the price. As if to add insult to injury, the County Commissioners are pushing a deal, known as Project Grace, to replace our main library and the Cape Fear Museum with a public-private project, which will cost hundreds of millions in taxpayer money, far more than it would cost to upgrade these spaces and keep them under public control.

Those who fail to learn from history, condemn all of us to repeat it.

Read and weep for our community.

https://portcitydaily.com/deep-dives/2022/08/26/fed-report-confirms-novants-insufficient-staffing-nurses-detail-problem-extends-beyond-er/

Big brother is coming and its NOT the government.

In 1967, sociologist William Domhoff published a best selling work, Who Rules America. It was based on extensive research and on previous works, such as C. Wright Mills The Power Elite. It concluded that there was a dangerous concentration of power and wealth in the American upper class. More recent editions have brought the discussion up to date and include the rise of Donald Trump, and the trend toward overt appeals to white supremacy by the Republican Party. 

The book was widely read by adherents of the New Left, and helped many to understand that capitalism inevitably led to the concentration of wealth, and therefore power, in the hands of fewer and fewer very rich white men. I imagine that it was also read by corporate CEOs, bank presidents and their flunkies in academia. They saw the need to counter these ideas in order to crush the left and preserve the benefits (to them, that is) of their economic and political system.

The Powell Memo, written in 1971 by Lewis Powell to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, was a blueprint for maintaining corporate domination of American democracy in response to the modest working class gains of the New Deal and Great Society. Linking up with the continuing resistance to school desegregation and revived white supremacy, it laid the basis for what has come to be known as neoliberalism.

The very rich, led by the Koch brothers, began funding all kinds of "academic" institutions to promote their economic, political and social perspective and change the narrative on issues from government regulation, anti-poverty programs, taxes, etc. They revived some of the core ideas from 19th century liberalism (often taken out of context), fell back on red baiting from the 1950s (in slightly more nuanced ways) and promoted the idea that the unfettered market should rule. They attacked unions as a major source of political opposition to their plans and moved to "privatize everything". And in the late 1970s they found the perfect shill for their neoliberal program in a grade B movie actor, Ronald Reagan.

Neoliberalism refers to market-oriented reform policies such as "eliminating prince controls, deregulating capital markets and lowering trade barriers, and reducing, especially through privatization and austerity, government influence in the economy. It was put forward as the solution of the economic problem of the 1970s, stagflation (the persistence of high inflation during a period of economic stagnation). 

Neoliberalism came to dominate US politics after 1980 as the Democrats joined with Republicans in accepting its basic premises. Neoliberals talked about "freeing" individuals from the yoke of government and how this would allow from massive productivity growth with the benefits "trickling down" to the working class.

The truth is that exactly the opposite has occurred over the past 40+ years. Productivity continued to grow at approximate the same relatively slow rate as it had in the 1960s and 70s (for reasons that I hope to write about soon) and the working class reaped none of the benefits of this meager growth. Instead the rich got richer and richer (runaway inequality) and the poor got mass incarceration and deaths of despair. And, as if it was throwing a finger at the neoliberals, the economy began experiencing deeper recessions (or depressions) primarily as a result of speculative growth in the now dominant financial sector. 

It's getting worse day by day. The "leadership" of the Democratic Party (local, state and national) has declared war on the progressives, despite the fact that it is the rightwing which is doing everything to thwart even modest reforms that the Party leadership supposedly wants. This war, combined with the failure to implement campaign promises (cancelling all student loan debt, for example) is leading to more and more young people and people of color to leave the party. The leadership seems to think that taking a stance on abortion rights will be enough to win in November. I'm afraid they are in for another surprise, just like in 2016.

All this as a lead to the article below. On my Facebook post I titled it "Danger Will Robinson, Danger" but since I already used that title twice for blog posts, I left it off this time.

From the Wilmington StarNews (with minor edits for brevity)

From what you buy online, to how you remember tasks, to when you monitor your doorstep, Amazon is seemingly everywhere. And it appears the company doesn’t want to halt its reach anytime soon.

In recent weeks, Amazon has said it will spend billions of dollars in two gigantic acquisitions that, if approved, will broaden its ever growing presence in the lives of consumers.

This time, the company is targeting two areas: health care, through its $3.9 billion buyout of the primary care company One Medical, and the “smart home,” where it plans to expand its already mighty presence through a $1.7 billion merger with iRobot, the maker of the popular robotic Roomba vacuum.

Perhaps unsurprisingly for a company known for its vast collection of consumer information, both mergers have heightened enduring privacy concerns about how Amazon gathers data and what it does with it. The latest line of Roombas, for example, employ sensors that map and remember a home’s floor plan. “It’s acquiring this vast set of data that Roomba collects about people’s homes,” said Ron Knox, an Amazon critic who works for the anti-monopoly
group Institute for Local Self-Reliance.

“Its obvious intent, through all the other products that it sells to consumers, is to be in your home. (And) along with the privacy issues come the antitrust issues, because it’s buying market
share.”

Amazon’s reach goes well beyond that. Some estimates show the retail giant controls roughly 38% of the U.S. ecommerce market, allowing it to gather granular data about the shopping preferences of millions of Americans and more worldwide. Meanwhile, its Echo
devices, which house the voice assistant Alexa, have dominated the U.S. smart speaker market, accounting for roughly 70% of sales, according to estimates by Consumer Intelligence Research Partners.

Ring, which Amazon purchased in 2018 for $1 billion, monitors doorsteps and helps police track down crime – even when users might not be aware. And at select Amazon stores and Whole Foods, the company is testing a palm-scanning technology that allows customers to pay for items by storing biometric data in the cloud, sparking concerns about risks of a data breach...

Even consumers who actively avoid Amazon are still likely to have little say about how their employers power their computer networks, which Amazon – along with Google – has long dominated through its cloud-computing service AWS.

And Amazon – like any company – aims to grow. In the past few years, the company has purchased the Wi-Fi startup Eero and partnered with the construction company Lennar to offer techpowered houses. With iRobot, it would gain one more building block for the ultimate smart home – and, of course, more
data....

For companies like Amazon, data collection is for more than just data’s sake, noted Kristen Martin, a professor of technology ethics at the University of Notre Dame. “You can almost see them just trying to paint a broader picture of an individual,” Martin said. “It’s about the inferences that they’re able to draw about you
specifically, and then you compared to other people.”

Amazon’s One Medical deal, for instance, has sparked questions about how the company would handle personal health data that would fall into its lap. Lucia Savage, a chief privacy officer at the chronic care provider Omada Health, said that (could allow) One Medical to be able to get data from other arms of Amazon’s business that could help it better profile its patients.

Unlike Meta and Google, whose focus is mainly on selling ads, Amazon might benefit more from collecting data because its primary goal is to sell products, said Alex Harman, director of competition policy at the anti-monopoly group Economic Security Project. “For them, data is all about getting you to buy more and be locked into their stuff."

Why the Democrats will lose in November, unless ...

The Problem

The 2022 midterm election is shaping up to be one of the most critical elections in our history given the multiple crises the US and the world face. Note that many commentators said that of the 2016 and 2020 elections. How can each one be more critical than the one before it? Easy. What has happened is that after each of these earlier elections little was done to resolve the crises we face, and often new layers were added to our problems. We are “waist deep in the big muddy” and we are told that “all we need is a little determination” and to “just push on”. (Pete Seeger)

The November election comes at a time when the country is more ideologically divided than it has been since 1860 and in the midst of several crises, any one or combination of which could lead to disastrous consequences and even the end of society as we know it.

We have a proxy war being fought between the two largest nuclear powers that is slowly, inexorably escalating. That proxy war is part of a broader political and economic struggle between the dominant imperial power (the US’s Empire of Liberty and its NATO partners) and the rising economic power of China, with the support of its junior partner, Russia. The Chinese are responsible for the economic challenge, the Russian, with their nuclear capabilities, the threat of military muscle. Is it coincidental that, at the same time as the US is sending massive amounts of military equipment to Ukraine, it is conducting naval maneuvers of unpresented scope in the Pacific and challenging China? And you thought that Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan was the problem.

Besides the threat of nuclear war, the proxy war in Ukraine is threatening the world’s food supply, particularly that of many Global South nations, which are already dealing with various effects of climate change. Wide spread famines in these countries will result in political destabilization; Sri Lanka is undoubtedly the first of many such destabilizations. (As I write we are already hearing about others.)

Global climate warming is threatening to reach a tipping point, yet the US is failing to meet even its modest goals and instead is pouring hundreds of billions into the war machine, one of the key sources driving the climate crisis, with its massive production of greenhouse gases.

I could go on, but I imagine my readers are familiar with much of what is happening. In this context, if the Democratic Party loses control of Congress, we will face 2 years in which the national government will be totally dysfunctional, that is, even more dysfunctional than it is right now. Manchin and Sinema will be yesterday’s news. The Republican party, which is fundamentally opposed to government period, will be able to prevent any advances designed to meet the challenges we face. And, to quote an old Chinese saying, “Where the broom doesn’t sweep, the dirt won’t go away by itself.”

Will the Democrats lose in November?

It’s no surprise that Democrats are up against it this fall, both in terms of history and economic conditions. The president’s party generally loses ground in midterm elections, which in this case will mean losing both the House and the Senate. Inflation is at a 40-year high, crime is up. And the centerpiece of President Biden’s domestic agenda has been torpedoed by united Republican obstruction — and a West Virginia Democrat, although at this point it appears that a very watered-down version may pass before the November election (but not in time to have any real effect, other than to give the Democrats a talking point – see, “we are trying”).

But a critical factor was revealed in a recent New York Times-Siena College poll: Though they enjoy a huge 20-point advantage over Republicans among white college-educated voters, the Democrats have a working-class problem, and it is not just a white working-class problem (Note that I am using that term, white-working class, because it is in common usage, but in reality, it is not accurate. The working class is probably the most integrated aspect of American society.) The GOP leads the Dems by a 12% margin among ALL non-college educated voters. Despite its racist and anti-immigrant platforms, the GOP is in the process of consolidating a multiracial working-class base, as is evidenced by the defection from the Democratic Party of a significant portion of Hispanic and even Black voters in 2020 and 2021. This does not take into account traditional Democratic voters, particularly young people, who stay home rather than vote for what they see as the lesser of two evils. A bit harsh, but in my experience, an accurate assessment.

Who or what is to blame? The party establishment trains its guns on the left. The gerontocracy that runs the Democratic Party (says someone who will be 80 years old in less than a month), the centrist thinktanks, and the big money donors all agree that, as Ruy Teixeira argues, problem is that the left has poisoned the “party brand”. “Wokeness,” according to James Carville, “is a problem and we all know it” or, as a local party official here in Wilmington put it, the problem is those damn “Bernie bros”. Their solution to overcoming the ominous clouds of defeat in November is to focus on campaigning for more gun control and against the assault on abortion and Donald Trump’s “big lie” about a stolen election as the way to save Democrats this fall.

Now it is true that the Republican party seems to be doing its best to hand the election back to the Democrats, and I’m certainly not advocating looking this gift horse in the mouth. But by limiting their appeals to the social issues that garner support from suburban whites and their big corporate donors, the Party will continue to bleed. Add to that the attacks on the left, which alienate many younger voters (and even old farts like me), the Party is doing a poor job of incorporating into its ranks the 4 million young people who turn 18 each year. Democrats ought to be concerned that the activists of their base — the young, African Americans, climate activists, Hispanics — are demoralized by what the Party is doing and not doing.

It's not that the party has moved to the right, it’s that the voting age population has moved to the left, in part because of the looming crises, in part because of the work of the progressives and in part because of the influx of young voters. Just check out the support for issues the left is advocating – universal healthcare, taxing the rich, the Green New Deal, cancelling student debt, establishing tuition free college and so on.

Add to that the continuing assault on working Americans standard of living, particularly in rural areas and in the Rust Belt states of the Midwest, which has alienated the working class (and not just white workers) and provided a fertile ground for the extreme right to organize. It doesn’t help when centrist Dems (yes Hillary, I’m talking about you, but also the rest of the crowd) refer to Trump supporters as “deplorable” and (yes, Barack, you too) when you talk about those who “cling to guns and religion”. It’s little wonder that many working-class Americans view the Democratic Party as a party of the economic and social elites – because in many respects that’s what it’s become.

What needs to happen between now and November?

·         The Democrats, starting with the top leadership, need to STOP trashing the left and STOP supporting DINOs against progressive challengers (although, since the primary season is about over, there won’t be much opportunity to do the latter).

·         Joe Biden needs to mount the bully pulpit and demand that Congress act on his agenda right away. I’m sure it won’t have any immediate effect, but it will play well on TV and the internet and change his image. No more milk-toast Joe.

·         He needs to pressure the various agencies of the government (and even those like the Fed, that are not directly under his control) to support his agenda or do everything in his power to remove the people who are creating roadblocks.

·         Biden needs to do EVERYTHING that he can to implement the campaign promises he and the Dems ran on in 2020 that don’t require the do-nothing Congress to act. For starters he could declare a climate emergency and cancel student debt.

·         The Democratic Party needs to put forth and run on bold proposals that address working class issues – economic issues like the child tax credit, invigorating the labor laws and their enforcement, raising the minimum wage to at least $15 an hour, rural development – I could go on, but I think you should have gotten my point by now.

·         And Biden and the corporate Dems need to STOP feeding the Pentagon and its military-industrial complex, resources that Americans and others around the world need to survive the crises we are all facing. The bloated war machine does not make us safer; the truth is that it makes us less safe.

Will this be enough to reverse the Party’s declining support among the working class. No, but it might be enough to guarantee the Democrats 2 more years in power. After that, it will take a lot more to begin remaking the Democratic Party as the party of the working class, For now, it may be all we can hope for.