October 31, 2023

Debunking the Latest Attack on Social Security

https://prospect.org/economy/2023-10-31-debunking-latest-attack-social-security/



For decades, the right wing has been warning that Social Security is on the verge of going broke and that old people are taking too large a share of the national income and wealth at the expense of the young. The grand old man of this fable was Peter G. Peterson, an investment-banker billionaire and former Nixon Cabinet official, who spent more than half a billion dollars of his fortune to create the Peter G. Peterson Foundation to propagate the myth. One of Peterson’s most insidious tactics was to try to persuade the young that Social Security would not be there for them when they retired.

Therefore, Congress should make it possible for younger people to take the money and run, by moving their Social Security taxes to fund private accounts (that would profit Peterson’s investment-banker chums). Bill Clinton was on the verge of opening the door to this caper when the Lewinsky scandal intruded. House Democrats, who held their noses and stood by their randy president, warned Clinton not to mess with Social Security. Clinton backed off. (Thank you, Monica.) By focusing on trumped-up generational conflict, Peterson and his billionaire allies could divert attention from the true divisions in America—divisions of class.



Lately, with Social Security heading for a deficit, we have been getting echoes of the same claims about the old doing too well at the expense of the young. The New York Times recently published a piece by Eugene Steuerle and co-author Glenn Kramon explaining how much richer the old are than the young (on average) and arguing that the remedy is for old people to work longer and to take less from Social Security. Steuerle’s ID says that he co-founded the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. That’s true as far as it goes, but he was the longtime vice president of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation and one of its prime propagandists.

The Times then doubled down on these arguments with a piece by regular columnist Peter Coy, praising the Steuerle article and adding some misleading data of his own. Coy provides charts from a number of sources, showing that consumption increases with age. He concludes that “postwar policy has taken from the young and given to the old.” This is nonsense, but it is influential nonsense at a time when Congress will have to decide how to address the projected shortfalls in Social Security and Medicare, and House Speaker Mike Johnson wants to destroy both. For starters, one needs to look beneath the averages.

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related flashback to November 1996:

October 31, 2023

Nitzer Ebb - Lightning Man (Motor Remix) 2006 re-work of the 1990 single

Label: NovaMute – NOMU166LP, NovaMute – 0094636770710
Format: 2 x Vinyl, LP, Compilation
Country: UK
Released: Jul 2006
Genre: Electronic
Style: EBM, Techno, Tech House

October 31, 2023

Tesla's first strike: US electric-car maker faces Swedish union shock

Tesla faces its first ever strike after refusing to negotiate with the Swedish trade union IF Metall.

https://www.socialeurope.eu/us-electric-car-maker-faces-swedish-union-shock



A strike has erupted at Tesla, the notoriously anti-union car manufacturer. Perhaps not surprisingly, the strike is in Sweden, one of the most unionised countries. According to the confederation IndustriALL, it is the first formal labour industrial action against Tesla anywhere in the world. The strike was initiated by the trade union IF Metall. For five years Tesla’s Swedish subsidiary, TM Sweden, had refused to negotiate a collective agreement for its employees in repair shops across the country. The first strike notice was limited to union members among Tesla’s own employees, about 120 mechanics and service technicians (there are no Tesla factories in Sweden). But, after a meeting between TM Sweden and IF Metall, summoned by the National Mediation Office last Tuesday, the company’s representatives withdrew from further negotiations, citing corporate policy not to sign collective agreements in any country.

In response, IF Metall immediately expanded its strike notice to all repair shops servicing Tesla vehicles in Sweden—not only Tesla’s own. An additional 470 workers at 16 work sites will be affected in this next phase of the strike, starting on Friday. No union members in the targeted shops will be allowed to do any work on Tesla vehicles—including servicing, repairs or preparing new cars for shipping to the thousands of customers waiting for their brand-new Teslas (Sweden’s top-selling car). More could be in store for Elon Musk’s company, unless it heeds union demands. When employers refuse to engage in collective bargaining, Swedish unions can resort to strikes and other forms of industrial action. Options include bans on new hires or overtime work and even solidarity strikes by other unions.

Labour-market model

A precedent hinting at what Tesla could be up against stems from 1995, when Toys’R’Us entered the Swedish market and initially refused to sign a collective agreement with the retail union, Handelsanställdas Förbund. The company eventually conceded after three months of strife, including solidarity strikes when other unions blocked all deliveries, refuse collection, postal services, bank payments and other vital parts of the firm’s operations. The action was even supported by unions in many other countries, which encouraged their members to boycott Toys’R’Us products. Although the IF Metall strike as yet concerns relatively few workers, it is of prime importance for Swedish unions, which see it as necessary to safeguard the country’s recognised labour-market model. One of its institutional pillars is agreements, usually at the sectoral level, which cover 90 per cent of all employees.

Cutting labour costs by refusing to negotiate collective agreements is generally considered unfair competition in Sweden, by unions and employers alike. Unions also see it as a potential downward pressure on wages and working conditions in other companies, in the long run undermining the model itself. In the Swedish model not only workers are organised—employers are also organised in employer associations, bound by those collective agreements. This means that Tesla could simply offer its employees the sectoral collective agreement by joining the Swedish Confederation of Transport Enterprises. The employer confederation has indeed informed Tesla of this option but to no avail. In other words, the pressure on Tesla to adapt to the Swedish model does not only come from unions but from the employer side as well. Another reason why the conflict is of such significance for the unions is that Tesla is emblematic of the rapidly growing electric-vehicle market. Securing collective agreements for jobs created in the industrial transition is one of the most reliable ways to make sure that green jobs will also be good jobs—a vital union concern.

Symbolic significance...........

snip

October 31, 2023

The United Nations has reported that at least 42 per cent of homes in Gaza have been destroyed or damaged

My add: this report is already almost a week old, so it is perhaps approaching 50 per cent by now



https://www.dezeen.com/2023/10/26/gaza-housing-damaged-un-report/



The United Nations has reported that at least 42 per cent of homes in Gaza have been destroyed or damaged during the Israel-Hamas conflict. In a release earlier this week, the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) stated that 164,756 housing units in the region had been damaged. The homes have been damaged by Israeli military action focused on Gaza following a major assault on Israel on 7 October by Hamas militants. In the weeks following the attack by Hamas, which governs Gaza and is designated as a terrorist organisation by many Western governments, the Israeli military has struck over 7,000 targets in Gaza.

According to the UN OCHA report, which quoted figures from the Gaza Ministry of Public Works, 15,100 housing units in Gaza had been destroyed, 10,656 were rendered uninhabitable, and 139,000 units had suffered minor to moderate damage. It also stated that the damage of the Israeli strikes has resulted in the destruction of whole neighbourhoods, including Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahia in the north, Shuja'iyeh and around the Shati' Refugee Camp in Gaza City, and Abbassan Kabeera in the south. Before and after aerial images have been released by space technology company Maxar depicting the scale of the destruction in cities across the Gaza Strip.

World's third-oldest church struck

Along with homes, numerous other structures have been damaged including a church that is reportedly the third oldest in the world. A strike on 19 October in Gaza City hit the historic Greek Orthodox Church of Saint Porphyrius, reportedly killing 18 of the approximately 100 Christian and Muslim Palestinians taking shelter in the building. On its website, the Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem expressed its "strongest condemnation" of the attack on the church as well as other churches, schools and social institutions.

"The Patriarchate emphasises that targeting churches and their institutions, along with the shelters they provide to protect innocent citizens, especially children and women who have lost their homes due to Israeli airstrikes on residential areas over the past thirteen days," it said. The Israel-Hamas conflict has led to widespread destruction and loss of life. At least 1,400 people were reportedly killed in the attack by Hamas militants that began on 7 October. According to the Hamas-run Gazan health ministry, nearly 5,800 people have been killed in Gaza in the weeks that followed.

snip

October 31, 2023

The Secretive Industry Devouring the U.S. Economy

Private equity has made one-fifth of the market effectively invisible to investors, the media, and regulators.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/10/private-equity-publicly-traded-companies/675788/

https://archive.ph/tewjm



The publicly traded company is disappearing. In 1996, about 8,000 firms were listed in the U.S. stock market. Since then, the national economy has grown by nearly $20 trillion. The population has increased by 70 million people. And yet, today, the number of American public companies stands at fewer than 4,000. How can that be?

One answer is that the private-equity industry is devouring them. When a private-equity fund buys a publicly traded company, it takes the company private—hence the name. (If the company has not yet gone public, the acquisition keeps that from happening.) This gives the fund total control, which in theory allows it to find ways to boost profits so that it can sell the company for a big payday a few years later. In practice, going private can have more troubling consequences. The thing about public companies is that they’re, well, public. By law, they have to disclose information about their finances, operations, business risks, and legal liabilities. Taking a company private exempts it from those requirements.

That may not have been such a big deal when private equity was a niche industry. Today, however, it’s anything but. In 2000, private-equity firms managed about 4 percent of total U.S. corporate equity. By 2021, that number was closer to 20 percent. In other words, private equity has been growing nearly five times faster than the U.S. economy as a whole. Elisabeth de Fontenay, a law professor at Duke University who studies corporate finance, told me that if current trends continue, “we could end up with a completely opaque economy.”

This should alarm you even if you’ve never bought a stock in your life. One-fifth of the market has been made effectively invisible to investors, the media, and regulators. Information as basic as who actually owns a company, how it makes its money, or whether it is profitable is “disappearing indefinitely into private equity darkness,” as the Harvard Law professor John Coates writes in his book The Problem of Twelve. This is not a recipe for corporate responsibility or economic stability. A private economy is one in which companies can more easily get away with wrongdoing and an economic crisis can take everyone by surprise. And to a startling degree, a private economy is what we already have.

snip

October 31, 2023

Candace Owens interviewed by Bill Maher, goes horribly wrong

full show:

October 30, 2023

Siouxxie - Ketamine

October 30, 2023

Sick and Tired of the News?

You’re not alone.

https://www.liberalpatriot.com/p/sick-and-tired-of-the-news

According to a new analysis from the Pew Research Center, fewer Americans than ever are paying regular attention to news and current affairs. Although the current wave of research is part of a panel study conducted in 2022, and things may have changed somewhat given recent events, these data raise a simple fact often overlooked by political analysts: Most Americans are fed up with the news media itself or simply don’t care enough to tune into the regular bad news, violence, corruption, and political divisions that constitute most media coverage these days.

Professional politics and many actions by the government—as covered endlessly by the media—are essentially of little to no interest to large percentages of Americans. Consider this: From March 2016 to August 2022, the percentage of American adults who reported following the news “all or most of the time” dropped from 51 percent to 38 percent, according to the Pew study. One-third of U.S. adults in 2022 said they follow the news at least “some of the time” while just under three in ten said they pay attention to the news “only now and then” or “hardly at all”.

Declining attention to news spans all age groups but age differences remain stark. As seen in the chart below, around two-thirds of those ages 65 or older say they follow the news “all or most of the time” (down from a high of 81 percent in 2018) compared to less than one-fifth of those ages 18 to 29. The largest declines in news attention over this period were found among working-age and pre-retirement Americans—for example, more than six in ten Americans ages 50-64 paid close attention to the news in 2016 compared to less than half in 2022.



Pew doesn’t go into elaborate detail about why these declines in news attention are so pronounced but they do mention that it occurs in conjunction with shifts in media consumption towards digital devices, overall declining trust in the media and other institutions, and “high levels of news fatigue” across demographic groups. It appears people are just worn out by news and politics these days and don’t really know who or what to trust. These feelings are particularly pronounced among Republicans, who had one of the sharpest declines (20 points) in regular attention to the news reported by any demographic or partisan group.

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October 30, 2023

WARGASM - Do It So Good (Official Music Video) 2023 🖤🖤🖤🖤🖤☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️

Wargasm ( stylised as 𝐖𝐀𝐑𝐆𝐀𝐒𝐌 ) are a British electronic rock duo from London. Formed in 2018 by musician Sam Matlock and model Milkie Way, they have released 11 solo singles including "Spit." which has gained 5 million streams on Spotify, and over 400 thousand views on YouTube. Alternative Press listed them as a defining part of the 2020s wave of nu metal, and NME listed them as one of 2021's essential emerging artists. The pair also took home "Best UK Breakthrough" at The Heavy Music Awards in 2021 and have received widespread acclaim from Kerrang! and Revolver. Their debut EP, Explicit: The Mixxxtape, was released on 9 September 2022.

Label: Slowplay – none
Format: Vinyl, LP, Album, Special Edition, Stereo, Neon Pink
Country: UK
Released: 27 Oct 2023
Genre: Electronic, Rock
Style: Heavy Metal, Punk, Nu Metal

October 30, 2023

Cannons - Hurricane (Official Video) 2023

Label: Columbia – 19658781751
Format: Vinyl, LP, Album, Limited Edition, Stereo, Red
Country: US
Released: 2023
Genre: Electronic
Style: Synth-pop